Being tall was an asset for the British pornography enthusiast in the 1980s. Being tall granted access to the ‘top-shelfers’, those unobtainable objects of desire kept on the top shelves of every newsagent in Britain.
They remained out of sight of children and most teenagers, but well within range of older men, who popped into the corner shop periodically to buy a newspaper, a packet of breath mints and anything else that might obscure that lurid publication buried inside the brown paper bag.
The magazines had daft names like Big and Bouncy and Wet and Wild. At least, I think they did. The memory blurs, so I’m not entirely sure if they were the actual titles or an ad campaign for Wild Wild Wet in Pasir Ris.
But Big and Bouncy was beyond the reach of regular- sized teenagers, stacked discreetly with the other ‘top- shelfers’, away from prying eyes and hormonal groins. And then there was the alarm system, which came in the shape of a jovial, but no-nonsense shopkeeper, who watched a prepubescent arm stretch for the top shelf and shouted: “Piss off, you pervert. I know your mother.”
But puberty proved to be my gateway to the top shelf and its previously forbidden fruits. Parts of my body dropped, namely my arms, which grew so quickly that passers-by often expected a quick chorus of King Louie’s I Wanna Be Like You.
I could now reach the top shelf. The orang-utan physique, which repelled teenage girls, became a desirable asset among teenage boys, who had a freakish friend with access to Big and Bouncy material.
In truth, the content was a bit of an anti-climax, with photo spreads typically involving women with no bras washing cars. (They used far too much detergent. They had no chance of getting those soapy streaks off the car’s bodywork.)
The scenes were silly and chaste, but obscene in comparison to the material found on Singaporean shelves in the late 1990s. The only thing vaguely sexual in a local minimart back then was a slightly misshapen goreng pisang.
In Singapore, pornography and censorship went together like Stormy Daniels and the American president; an uneasy relationship that made most people feel uncomfortable while the rest of the world laughed at us. The only Singaporeans with access to anything hardcore were civil servants, who were paid to watch so much porn, it was a wonder they didn’t all lose their eyesight (you never see a civil servant without spectacles, just saying.).
On one famous occasion, a British friend sent me a VHS copy of an old gangster movie and SingPost kindly rerouted the package to the Film Censors Board, where an elderly Chinese gentleman gleefully pointed out that his myopic team members would gladly watch my movie in search of sexual content.
They cut two scenes from the movie. One involved a bare-breasted woman dancing on a stage. The other scene involved a bare-breasted woman behind the stage—on a poster.
Singapore’s society was saved the day a civil servant excised that poster scene from my VHS tape.
But pornography’s unavailability, for the most part, almost gave it a quirky sense of titillation. Every adult was aware of its existence and its obvious dangers to people of a certain age, disposition and mental capacity (yes, I’m still looking at the civil servants). But its negative impact, while never negligible, was just about manageable.
Every generation comes with pornography, as it were. In the 1970s, there were the ‘bodice rippers’, those romance novels that got the elderly women on my housing estate all hot and bothered at the local library, as they enjoyed heaving bosoms and burning loins over a cup of cocoa.
Pornography has been depicted, in every artistic form, since prehistoric times. But the erotic cave paintings of the Palaeolithic period were harder to come by than a Pornhub clip shared among teenagers on an MRT trip to Buangkok.
Pornography is omnipresent now. The arm of an orang-utan is no longer required to reach the top shelf. A thumb click on any keypad will do. Even Singapore’s relationship with illicit content and censorship has mirrored that of Daniels and the American president. It’s broken down, a lost cause.
Prominent websites are no longer blocked or hidden behind firewalls, which is both confusing and pleasing. (State censorship is seldom palatable, but I struggle with the very real possibility of my daughter stumbling across such content at the wrong age. But I also have two books with ‘sexy’ in the title that are no longer chucked behind firewalls so, you know, I’m torn.)
But the technological shifts have had a profound impact upon accessibility and content. Video games, mobile phones and laptops have ensured that the prevalence of porn—and the disturbing, competitive need to create more graphic material—has led to young men demanding harsher, more domineering content.
They are becoming desensitised to what is often depicted as the sexual subjugation of women on screen.
According to The Guardian, research found that the average age a boy encounters porn is 11—years before my Big and Bouncy escapades. A University of Alberta study found that one third of 13-year-old boys watched porn. A survey in a British magazine, Psychologies, found that a third of teenagers had first seen sexual images online when they were 10 or younger.
The more they see, the more they want.
In her book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines provides evidence of women being forced to perform uncomfortable sex acts to satisfy demanding partners. Aggressive online pornography feels like an archaic campaign for the patriarchy. Men see. Women do.
And yet, inexplicably, as porn becomes more violent and degrading online, the term itself has morphed into something benign on social media. Food porn. Car porn. Shoe porn. Porn represents a lust for material pleasures, a painless addiction to consumerism. In this context, porn is playful and harmless, when the actual industry can be anything but.
Honestly, I miss Big and Bouncy. I miss its comparative innocence and lack of sexual violence. Most of all, I miss the top shelf and the fact that no matter how hard we tried, it was always beyond the reach of children.
Related stories:
Is there no turning back after AI?
Does insomnia fuel anxiety or does the anxiety aggravate the insomnia?
Why do we find comfort in collecting pop culture kitsch?
