The Pornographer Diaries

4. Are the letters real?

‘Charles... pulled... his... cock... out... of... my... dripping... hole...’ I muttered to myself as I typed, ‘and... splashed... his... sticky...’ no, ‘hot... and... sticky... fat... in... my... ’

My what?

I stared at the screen and chewed one of my fingernails as I considered the possibilities.

Face? Hmm, I’d done that one to death just lately. Mouth? No, that was how the last story I’d wrote ended. Tits? Maybe. I decided to have a think about it.

I twiddled my thumbs and looked around the room for inspiration. Jackie was glaring at Paddy who was leaning right back in his reclining chair and seemed to be asleep; Mary was joining all her paper clips together in a big chain; fat Paul was looking around shiftily and unwrapping sweets in his drawer (I couldn’t actually see this but he’d been doing it all week so I knew the look by now); Monty was behind me getting Roger to redesign the official Froth t-shirt again; Susie (Editor on Bangers!) and Hazel (designer on Bangers!) were both burning up Moonlight Publishing’s phone bill while Don hadn’t finished brooding over the bollocking Susie had given him for lateness in front of everyone this morning. Nobody else was in.

No inspiration.

I stared at the space right after ‘my’ then typed ‘pocket’ and giggled to myself. I then went on to replace ‘pocket’ with ‘handbag’, ‘hair’, ‘eyes’, ‘dinner’, ‘granny’s purse’, and finally ‘homework’, stopping to giggle at it each time before deleting the last word to leave the cliff-hanger unresolved. ‘Tits’ finally got the nod simply because I couldn’t be bothered to think of anything else.

God I was bored.

For two months now I’d been working on Bling and in all that time, all I’d done was either type in letters or write sex stories or girl blurbs. Now, you might think this sounds like a laugh, writing smut for a job, but it’s not. Writing smut for an afternoon is a laugh, but doing it for eight hours a day, five days a week (alright, four, we were all in the pub all day almost every Friday – and sometimes Thursdays too) was soul-sapping.

It wasn’t that I found them difficult or anything, quite the opposite, it had become tedium beyond tears, but somebody had to do it and that was what I’d been taken on to do.

Out of all the questions I was asked while I worked in porn, ‘are the letters real?’ was by far and away the most common, so pardon me while I take a few moments here to elaborate.

Bling, and all the other mags, got sent in letters every day, probably half a dozen or so and they always fell into four main categories: the enquiry, where the reader wanted a model’s address so that he could write to (stalk & murder) her; the editorial comment, where the reader wanted to compliment or complain about the state of the girls in the last issue and tell us how we should do our jobs; the application, where the reader asked if there were any vacancies (sex) going; and finally, the sex confession, where the reader pretended he’d recently had sex with one, two or three stunners and wanted to see it in print.

The first of these is fairly self-explanatory. Here’s a quick example:

‘Dear Tanya,

I am aged late 30s and I have never been married. I have over the years bought a fair few magazines but honestly yours are the sexiest pictures I’ve ever seen. I once had a pretty girlfriend who “borrowed” money off me whilst shagging with someone else.

I am quite good looking – not that bad.

Perhaps you might feel sorry for me and ring me on XXXX XXXX XXXX one evening.

I am currently looking at your lovely tanned body with a sexy wet look. I look forward to hearing from you and I am sure I could love you.

Love from XXXXXXX, Doncaster’

Obviously, I’m not going to give out the poor bloke’s name or telephone number out here you’d all be ringing him up with marriage proposals. But this letter was remarkable in only one way – he didn’t make a single spelling or punctuation mistake. Quite astonishing. We should’ve got him in to read through my letters because I was fucking hopeless at it. Anyway the point is, how tempted do you suppose Tanya, an utter sex goddess, would be by this letter? This was the thing I never got and still don’t to this day, how guys, who in all probability were not that successful with women, could believe that any of the knockout 10s in our magazines would need to respond to their pleading letters in order to have sex. I don’t know that much about women but I’d bet most of the models in Bling and Ace couldn’t go into a pub or a bar or a club anywhere in the world without having to take a big stick along with them to beat off all the blokes who tried it on; how women like this, who have the pick of the cream of the blokes, would even think twice about replying to desperate of Doncaster?

This was optimism on a scale I just couldn’t get my head around.

The power of suggestion our magazines held over men was quite incredible though. Do you suppose for one moment if this same guy saw a stunner like Tanya in his local, he’d have the balls to go over and talk to her? I doubt it. Stick her in a mag with her pants down though and he assumes that her standards must include bearded men from local model railway societies.

I guess the only way I can explain this phenomenon is this; in the magazines we tried to portray all our girls as single. Nothing puts a crimp in your cock quite like some old bird banging on about the wonderfully cosy sex her and her boyfriend get up while you’re having to make do with a hundred stapled-pages and an oiled boxing glove. So what we did was have the models talk about how they were so hungry for cock that they pulled some complete stranger in the pub the other day and sucked him off out back by the bins. The readers reads this and, hey presto, he suddenly believes the country really is crawling with sex-starved girls who are not that bothered about looks, money or body odour, they’re just up for a passing poke. Of course, this is just a passing fantasy, and the moment our reader blows his load and spoils the page, reality comes flooding back. But then, that’s what fantasies are all about, the willing suspension of disbelief (as I think Blackadder once said). Women fantasise about film stars, blokes dream about easy good-looking girls who crave cock so badly that they’re willing to drop their standards to even our levels. Blokes like sluts. Easy dirty sluts who are up for it and accessible. Fantasy girls like this press most guys’ buttons, so this was how we portrayed ours.

The trouble was, some guys believed it for real. We’d put a quote next to a girl saying something like: ‘I just love to suck cock. I could suck cocks all night and never get bored. And I always swallow’ and suddenly get three dozen letters from guys saying: ‘You like to suck cock? I like to have my cock sucked. We should get together. Give me a call on... etc’. It would never occur to them that a) she could probably have blokes flopping them out at her in Sainsbury’s if she so wished so she wasn’t likely to be going short, and b) that their letter was likely to be competing against three dozen other naïvoes who’d also written in.

Oh, and c) their letter was destined for the bin before they’d even finished writing it. And not a bin anywhere near Tanya either. Besides, if Tanya was up for it, didn’t they think we’d have first dibs on her?

Just quickly, while we’re on this type of letter, there was a sub-category here. In Bling, as in many other mags, we had a readers’ wives section. Now, you would’ve thought that people would’ve understood what this meant, that readers sent in pictures of their wives for publication in our magazine. Not much area for confusion, but no.

‘Dear readers wifes [sic],

I am writing this letter to tell you that I am very much interested to have a wife to come and live with me in my flat. I like blonde ladies like Gemma and am very good at fucking. Please could you kindly get me a wife.

Thank you on your understanding and I look forward to hearing from you really soon

XXXXXX’

The second type of letter was the editorial comment. This was usually just a quick note saying something like: ‘Loved the last issue. Jackie looked fabulous. I’d eat her arse out for breakfast. More of the same,’ or ‘I’d love to see Sophie Raithworth (BBC newsreader) in your magazine, butt-naked with an assortment of fruit up her chuff.’ I didn’t pick Sophie at random by the way, for some reason she was far and away the most popular celebrity fantasy figure we received letters about. Hundreds and hundreds I saw on her, some with crudely drawn pictures of her wearing her ankles as ear-muffs and some featuring her doing a hell of a lot worse. Perhaps this is something Sophie might consider if she ever gets bored of reading the news. Whatever she decides, I always found it quite reassuring that so many blokes in this country took an interest in current affairs.

However, sometimes the requests were a bit more specific, if badly worded:

‘Dear editor,

This is where I have to flatter your mag to bits – and it is a true fact that Bling is the best mag... so other mags kneel to Bling – The master.

I have risen to enough courage to write this letter to you! When you come to read this letter I’ll be 21 (and single!) and I thought... what can make my birthday special? I know... I’ll write to Bling and propose a sexual challenge to all those gorgeous girls!

I like women with long hair (any colour). I feel it makes them more feminine and it brings out their beauty more (especially when their face retorts with pleasure – oooohhh!) Okay! The challenge is where these gorgeous girls get shagged by their racquet (tennis racquet) while shagging another woman with their racquets... If only I could draw!

They must own their own racquet... tennis skirt and the rest of the outfit... Not only are they going to get shagged by their own tennis racquet... by the others too. Not only that! One woman must be, say, the leader... who is the only one to touch me – unless she says otherwise!

To decide who’ll be the leader...

1) Each women will suck my knob – the more times they do it... The more chance they’ll become the leader... OR...

2) I’ll go round-tasting each woman’s pussy... The one I like the most will become the leader...

Okay! I think I got everything covered? Oh! How would you women – part of the challenge – be shagged by more than one racquet? (Or is it... tennis racket? – never mind!)

I hope everything is clear...

Write to me for more info.

I’ll leave it to you.

XXXXX

p.s. The women need to wear the tennis gear for the challenge – if they’re interested!’

Again, there’s a level of optimism here not seen since England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich. However, I think he shot himself in the foot somewhat with his overcomplicated rules and regulations. He should’ve just asked if he could’ve shagged a couple of our models for his 21st. The answer would’ve still been the same but at least he would’ve saved himself some ink.

We also got really moaning letters complaining that Abigail was wearing black knickers instead of white and that we hadn’t had any white knickers for three issues now and stuff like that. Sometimes, they’d compile statistics and have charts showing a complete count of all the white knickers, full-frontal shots, bum shots, big boobs, shaven fannies, blonde girls and Chinese birds we’d had in the mag over the last five years (I kid you not) as proof that we were prejudiced against white knickers. The time and effort that must’ve gone into compiling all these stats is awesome. Again, these got to see how the rest of the world looked from the bin.

The insanest guy however, was probably the bloke up in Liverpool who’d rip all his favourite pages out of the magazine every month, write on them ‘I like this picture, more pictures like this,’ then send them back to us. Sometimes he’d rip girls out of catalogues or newspapers and demand that we got the enclosed girl in our magazine. We could tell he liked them because he’d write ‘lick lick’ next to their privates. Occasionally he’d send back pictures from Bling that he didn’t like with, ‘She’s not naked you stupid cunts!!! Get it right you fucking idiots!!!’ if the girl still had stockings or a hat on or something. A genuinely scary fellow, but then nothing really surprises me about Scousers any more.

The third type of letter I mentioned was very common. Guys, and occasionally girls, would write in and ask if they could be in a photoshoot shagging the girls, or sometimes even just by themselves, oblivious to the fact that there were no blokes in Bling.

‘Dear Bling,

My name is XXX XXXXXXX I’m 19 and have a great ambition to be a part of a porno film/mag I believe my naked body is not disappointing and would be happy to send pictures of my nob or any other area you wish to see. My great ambition is to have people take photos of me naked: please could you help me with my ambition (info on what my next move is would be great)! if you need pictures or more info on this matter please please contact me on XXXX XXXX XXXX.

(I will work for free)

p.s. this is no joke ring the mobile no and speak to me to prove this.

please please please ring me if you can help me.’

or the slightly more simplistic:

‘Dear Editor,

Do you take Male Photo’s Yes or No?

£10 Bum

£20 Front

Details in a Letter Please. Can come at Soho May 11th or 25th 2,00 Night Time because i will be Travelling on Bus to London Plus have to find Bed & Breadfest in a Hotel about £30 or £40.

Mr X. XXXXX

Do you know any Guess House’s it’s more cheeperer’

Of course, there’s a chance that the first of these letters could’ve been a joke simply because he kept claiming it wasn’t and asking us to give him a call, probably one of his mates trying to set him up or something, but the second letter you feel is absolutely genuine. Some geezer wanted us to take pictures of his back and front and pay him £10 and £20 a pop for them like they were in demand or something.

As I said, we got a lot of these, and in fact, we got an even greater number of guys who’d actually send in pictures of their fronts. We had in so many that the female editorial assistants started pinning them up on the wall over their desks as a sort of cock collage. It grew so much that within six months it measured five feet high by ten feet wide and started encroaching on the wall space over Matt’s desk – which he was having none of.

I guess the guys used to send them in because posting them off was almost like a sexual act in itself, the thought of one of the models (because the whole place was staffed with models, right) would open their letter and see their cock and get off on it just as the reader had got off looking at their body. And if that happened there was a chance, just the slightest possibility, that she might decide to visit the cock and its fat, hairy, house-bound owner for a bit of ultimate fantasy.

This is just my interpretation and, again, I don’t know a lot about how women’s minds work but from what girls have told me, they don’t get turned-on in the same visual way that blokes do. Sure they might froth and foam a bit if they see James Bond, the Chippendales or Blue Watch putting out a blaze at a thong factory, but pictures of cocks apparently didn’t press the same buttons in women as pictures of women did for us blokes. Sure, there are always going to be exceptions and some women will moan how there’s no decent porn for women and so on but by and large they’re in the minority. There’s no decent porn for women because there’s no market for it.

That’s not to say that women don’t fantasise as much as us men because they do. What they seemed to love though, generally speaking, was the dirty stories. Women have better imaginations than men and it’s this they seemed to need stimulating more than their eyes. What was it Marilyn Monroe replied when some reporter asked her what she thought the sexiest part of her body was? ‘My Mind,’ she told him. Personally, I would’ve said it was her tits, but then, that just goes to prove what I’m talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, blokes like to use their imaginations too, but where we’re lying back wondering how many tennis bats we can fit up a bird’s arse, they’re fleshing out their fantasies and creating all sorts of sexy scenarios in their minds that result in a night of passion.

Which brings us neatly around to our last category: the sex confession. Now, I’ve probably set you all off in the wrong direction talking about women and what they like because that’s not really my business. Bling and Froth and the like were aimed at blokes and hence catered for their tastes. Sometimes there was an overlap and sometimes there wasn’t. A lot of women bought our dirty mags, surprisingly enough, but again it seemed more for the confessions than anything else. Blokes liked reading the confessions too but primarily they got off on the pictures.

‘Yeah but are they real or do you just make them all up?’

Bling genuinely got dozens of confessions through the post every week but before they got anywhere near the page they almost always had to be heavily rewritten because they were such a load of old unbelievable bollocks.

An example:

‘Dear Bling,

The train home from work is usually a dull affair for me, until the other week when I had to work late. On this occasion my carriage was empty apart from a stunning brunette in typical office gear. Not usually shy I sat opposite her and we exchanged smiles. A few minutes later the woman leant over to me and said “want to make the journey more interesting?” whilst resting her hand on my knee. Looking down her loose blouse to see her bronzed cleavage I was quick to say yes. Instantly she thrust her hand onto my cock, rubbing it feverishly until it was hard. We snogged briefly before she grabbed my hand and a bag full of shopping and heading towards the toilet. “What’s that for?” I asked. “You’ll see,” she said, with a gleaming, yet dirty smile. As soon as I’d locked the door I pinned her to the wall, lifted her skirt and yanked down her tights and black knickers. My hand felt amongst her soaking black bush and caressed her pink lips. With the other I ripped open her blouse and lifted her bra, revealing pert tits with massive dark nipples. I sucked on these as she pulled my cock out of my trousers and wanked it mercilessly. “Let’s fuck,” I said, sweating in anticipation. “My way,” she replied, reaching for her shopping. She pulled out a small cucumber and poured some shampoo onto my hand. “You’re going to be needing this,” she said and that’s when I knew she wanted it up the arse. I turned her to face the wall and began to lather up her with shampoo. I couldn’t resist her plump bum-hole much longer, and threaded my meat all the way up inside her, which was met with a groan of contentment. As I began to stroke in and out of her arse, she inserted the cucumber up her cunt, stretching it as wide as I’ve ever seen a cunt open. As my excitement grew, I pummelled her faster and faster, gripping onto her curvy hips. Soon my motions matched the rhythm of the train rattling along the rails. At the same time the woman thrust the cucumber up her cunt quicker and quicker, and her slurping becoming as loud as the train. We both got closer and closer to cumming until, as she let out a squeal of orgasm, her arse clenched tight around my swollen cock forcing me to shoot wads of cum up her arse and I groaned with delight. I quickly realised that my stop was approaching, so I pulled my cock out of the now rosy-cheeked girl, kissed her on the lips and dashed off, trying to make myself look presentable. I’ve not seen the girl since, but if I see her again I hope she will have done her shopping.

Signed etc etc

This is a perfect example of the ‘genuine’ sex confessions we received. At least in the stories that appeared in the mag there was usually an element of ‘Well, it could’ve happened’ but with something like this we know for a fact – and that’s a fact – that this never took place. How? Oh come on, in the history of sex, do you really think any woman, never mind a stunning brunette, has ever turned around to a total stranger on a train and asked him to stick his cock and half a bottle of Head & Shoulders up her arse without so much as a ‘nice day isn’t it’? Sure strangers have sex all the time, but never bang bang bang like that, out of the blue with no prompting and for no reason. Women just don’t work this way. I wish the fuck they did, but they don’t.

Okay, it’s a story, and that’s all it is, but knowing it’s just a story, doesn’t that lessen its appeal? Wouldn’t it be sexier to read a confession that you could actually believe in? Wouldn’t it be nice to think that there really was a rampant brunette running around screwing guys at will? And this is why we ended up rewriting most of them. Just to make them a little bit plausible and therefore more interesting.

Yeah sure, nobody wants to have to plough through six chapters of ‘How are you? I like your hat’ before someone’s getting pummelled against a cistern but still, a few sentences just to set up the story, that’s all it takes, but people are lazy. What’s the common phrase? Oh yeah, ‘To cut a long story short.’

‘Dear Bling,

I was walking in this pub with my mates when the tall, absolutely stunning blonde walks in with a couple of her friends. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we were soon getting undressed in the back of a cab on the way back to her place while her friend was down between my legs with my balls on her face... etc’

You see what I’m getting at? Lazy. Set the scene a little and it makes it so much more interesting. Take our mate on the train, for example. Now the way I ended up rewriting this one was I made him a ticket inspector and her a fare dodger with a string of convictions behind her. One more time and it’s the Big House for you, darling. See? It gives it a little bit of edge and makes it a little bit more exciting already. At least, it did in my mind.

‘There I was, standing over her with my notebook in my hand when suddenly she starts hitching up her skirt. “Please,” she said, pleading with me. “I’m really sorry. Don’t put my name in the book. I’ll do anything.” I looked down at her shopping. “Anything? Is that a bottle of Wash & Go?” I asked, and a thought suddenly occurred to me.’

So, I ended up rewriting the ones I could and binning the ones I couldn’t.

After a while, I started to realise that writing letters from scratch was actually a lot quicker and easier than typing in the genuine ones. Also, confessions sent in by women were at a bit of a premium so quite often I had to write these ones myself. And this was a bit of a shame really because these were the ones that most of us blokes wanted to read. Maybe it’s the natural homophobe in me coming out but most blokes I know would rather listen to a bird talking dirty than another bloke. Think about it, really. It’s like those 0898 sex-lines you get advertised in the back of our mags, you don’t go phoning up them at £1.49 a minute to listen to some geezer banging on about how he pulled a nice bit of stuff on the train last night, do you? No, you want to listen to a good old dirty bird and hear about what she’s been up to with the plumber while her old man’s been at work. And then, after 25 minutes you can put down the phone, pull up your trousers, go downstairs and thank your Gran for letting you use the phone.

At the end of the day, the secret of a good sex confession, in my mind, was plausibility and a bit of a twist: the goody-goody-two-shoes girlie fresher who’s so besotted with the senior lecturer that she lets him do her up the arse, only to find out that he’s actually the janitor. The irate woman who discovers her boyfriend’s been cheating on her so she makes a porno video with three squaddies plastering her from head to foot and leaves it behind after packing her bags and scarpering. The female journalist who’s never swallowed a load in her life but has to write an article all about it for Cosmopolitan in order to get her dream job there. Aren’t these a bit more interesting than ‘to cut a long story short’?

The overnight conference, the female boss, the recent divorce and the connecting doors...

... the missing stripper, the desperate club owner, the skint barmaid and the impatient stag party of rowdy firemen...

... the stranded female driver, the AA man, the lapsed breakdown cover and the roadside service...

... the dashing young cat-burglar, the female dormitory, the citizen’s arrest and the on-the-spot penal punishment...

... the outrageous bet, the football team’s showers, the manager’s wife and the whole team pulled off at half-time...

... the Ann Summer’s party, the new girl to the neighbourhood, the suitcase full of products and the tube of lube...

... the odious boss, his naive secretary, her pay review and an unfortunate case for the tribunal...

... the middle-aged former beauty, the dried-out complexion, the bob-a-job Adventure Scouts and the interesting new moisturiser...

... the bored housewife, her insatiable lust for rough, the Parcel Force driver and the large packet leant up against her back door...

... the girls’ night in, Basic Instinct on the telly, three bottles of wine too many and the itch neither friend can ignore...

... the unworldly shop girl, the teasing co-workers, the quest to find out what she’s been missing and the rubber ring on the checkout seat the next day...

... the train home, the stunning brunette, the bag full of shopping and... oh, hang on a minute.

Well, anyway, I could bang on about this all night but I can’t be bothered. I guess what I’m trying to say is yes, most of the letters were real, it’s just what happened in them was a load of old bollocks.

But then, you probably knew that already.