Porn was everywhere even before internet
There's a lot of talk going on about protecting children online because porn proliferates there. Maybe. But as I walked further down memory lane, triggered by yesterday's post, I realized there was a lot of porn floating around even before the internet.
I was 7 years old, talking to a classmate about Street Fighter anime after school. Another classmate jumped into the conversation and said, "You've never seen the real Street Fighter anime!" The next day he handed each of us a VCD and said, "Don't watch it around your parents." I did as he told me.
It was not Street Fighter. It had a lot of fight scenes, car crashes, gunshots, and naked men and women. I remember a naked woman with a snake tattoo lying on top of a naked man with a dragon tattoo. I remember a naked woman with a tiger tattoo holding a katana. It was not as fun to watch as Street Fighter. I handed it back to that classmate and told him what I thought. He wasn't pleased with my review.
And it occurred to me last night that it might be hentai, so I hesitantly did another search with the keywords "ova hentai dragon snake tiger tattoo" and got flooded (luckily) with tattoo art of dragons, snakes, and tigers (but no hentai, contrary to my expectations). But among all of those, there was one anime: Crying Freeman (γ―γ©γ€γ³γ° γγͺγΌγγ³). I spent another few hours tracking down this anime (see how fun the archaeological work of memory is!) and confirmed that it was EP05. And there are a lot more sex scenes in that episode than I remembered.
How the hell did my classmate, when we were 7 years old, get his hands on such a thing? I have no idea.
Six years later, when I was 13, I attended a boarding school. The only entertainment available there, besides sports, was reading. And somehow some smart-ass found out that there were quite a few works of erotica in the school library (!), and suddenly all the boys became avid readers and frequented the library.
I still remember one of those books, titled "ζ·ε₯³ηει’ε ·" (The False Face of a Lady), authored by some obviously fake South Korean (it was a time when Korean literature was popular in China, and many not-so-legit publishers tried to fake it to increase sales). With a few searches, one can still find the book in some university library databases.
I won't go so far as to credit erotica with turning me into a reader, but the next thing I read after those was Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, which is, admittedly, borderline pornographic. I've read it more than ten times and every single piece of Murakami writing I can find since then. I am still a Harukist to this day.