Inside the Weirdest Porn Book I've Ever Seen
It's completely safe for work!
Take your mind back to the late 90s. I know some of you weren’t born yet, but this was the colour scheme of the entire decade:
We loved our cassette tapes almost as much as we loved our fuckin’ triangles. Everything looked like a clown’s final brain damaged vision before succumbing to being pummelled to death by the concept of geometry. And this was before the internet was a big thing, so porn was difficult to come by. The living envied the dead, is what I’m saying.
I was in my mid-teens and all good and horned up, but the 90s made you work for your porn. It wasn’t as simple as finding the nearest electronic device and hitting the “P” key so that the web algorithm that tracks every second of your waking life can pre-fill the word “Pornhub” because it knows you better than your grandmother does, bless her mercifully ignorant heart.
No, porn in those days was like a scavenger hunt. It was an easter egg. It was a page torn out of a hardcore magazine you found crumpled up in the woods and took home to hide in the bottom of your sock drawer like the rodents that are our common ancestors. It was the softcore film from the adult section of the video rental store, the one you carefully selected because it could most easily pass on casual inspection for a normal movie, and you borrowed it alongside five other tapes you didn’t even want. It was the unmarked VHS tape that you used to record a selection of key scenes from late night movies on SBS.
That was the thrill of porn in the 90s. You had a collection pieced carefully together after years of random discoveries. Every piece had a story. Let me tell you about the gem of my collection. My Arkenstone. The World Traveller’s Guide to Adult Movies.
I found this item in a random pile of books at a huge annual second-hand book sale called the Lifeline Bookfest. I honestly do not know what I expected. The cover was water-stained, it looked like it had spent two decades on the concrete floor of a Bob Jane’s T-Mart men’s room. It was vintage, it was horny, and it was mine. Without even looking inside it, I threw it into my wheel trolley along with ten bullshit Dean Koontz paperbacks I never read and got it home. Once I got alone with it, I cracked it open to encounter the absolute last thing I would have imagined.
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The World Traveller’s Guide to Adult Movies is a book of movie reviews, not unlike the ones Leonard Maltin used to put out, but for porn. Specifically, porn movies produced up to and including 1982, which is when this was published. However you define “pornography,” this is its exact opposite. This cannot exist in the same room as porn, because the two will cancel each other upon contact in a burst of neither horn nor anti-horn – weapons grade sexual neutrality. Like Tilda Swinton.
I’m not saying that this book merely fails to be sexy. It is not trying to be sexy. It is a flat-out, completely earnest, utterly neuter collection of reviews, alphabetically arranged, that places the high-brow artistry of Fellini’s City of Women on a completely even playing field with Debbie Does Dallas, purely because they both meet the criteria of spending some amount of screen time in pound town.
To get a sense of what you can expect, imagine Margaret Pomeranz admiring in soft upper-crust dulcet tones the sophisticated cinematography of a film’s portrayal of “Greek coupling” and “water sports.” Somebody who knows the meaning of both mise en scene and ménage à trois and is equally passionate about both.
There is a star rating system, which misses the golden opportunity to use the more obvious thumbs up if you know what I fucking mean. Bizarrely, the lowest possible ranking of one star is still watchable. Because of course it’s all watchable, it’s porn. You would watch a goat headbutt a park bench all day long if that’s what got you off.
The back of the book says it takes the mystery out of choosing adult movies. I wish it could take the mystery out of why it was written.
This book has no audience. Astonishingly, at no point does it describe sexual activity in any sense other than in passing, matter-of-fact, like story beats, almost like they’re distractions. This book is almost for the type of person who fast-forwards through the sex to learn more about the pool boy’s inner turmoil. It’s not for people looking to get off, nor is it for serious film buffs. This book should not exist.
It's not just movie reviews, oh no. It wouldn’t be a complete compendium of utterly hornless miscellanea without assorted spotlights on some of the biggest porn stars of the 1970s—you guessed it, completely clothed, the men proudly sporting their best O-face.
Of all the porny objects I collected as a lad, this singular artifact is the only one still with me. I’m hypnotised by its sheer implausible existence. It’s basically a horcrux at this point, or the final physical remnant of the pre-internet bone zone. This is part of our legacy. This is how we used to be.
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