Wednesday, March 14, 2012

You must own a ton of porn…


When people learn that I work at an adult bookstore, one of the most common comments is, “You must have a ton of porn at your house…” The funny thing about this assumption is that I don’t. (Begin your “sure you don’t comments” now.)

But with so much free pornography on the internet (in every conceivable genre, I’m looking your way fans of My Little Pony Dress-Up Fisting Parties), I’m surprised anyone spends much money buying pornography. But the bigger point is that watching porn at home is like taking work home with me.

As employees, we’re allowed to rent movies for free. The owners recently cracked down on the number of movies we can take out at a time and we’re now limited to one per person. It used to be that there was no defined limit, so everyone had at least five movies out at a time. I’ll admit that most of these rentals ended up being crazy fetish videos to freak out my roommates, but now I don’t take anything home. Given that I don’t have a TV in my room and that I see porn as mainly a masturbatory aid, any videos I rent now are focused on freaky things that I can weird people out with at parties.

I’m a voracious reader and during the downtime at the store, I’ve gotten to know all of the magazines we carry in incredible detail. Nudie pictures get really old, really fast, so I’m on the search for something of merit to read. Playboy as a porn mag is completely worthless and I don’t understand why people buy it from the store. They have some great, well-written articles, but each issue is limited to just three, heavily airbrushed pictorials. Penthouse is pretty much the same, but with more explicit photos. Hustler has lots of naughty photos and some entertaining political rants, but it’s disgusting. (Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t get turned on by a woman pulling apart her genitalia like she’s ready to be stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey.)

Furthermore, even with my 50% employee discount, I haven’t purchased any sexual devices from the store.  It’s not that I’m against the idea of fucking a synthetic vagina. I’m sure it feels great, but what turns me off is the fact that I’ll have to clean it afterwards. Considering my general aversion to cleaning, I expect I’ll put off washing it out after each use and my spent semen will eventually start to attract bugs. At that point, I’ll be embarrassed to throw it away, so I’ll end up throwing it out the window, some dark, lonely night on a stretch of barren highway.

Hey, at least I’m honest.

I won’t even buy condoms at the store after I went through our stock and found that more than half of them were expired. When I mentioned this to the warehouse and suggested we throw away the expired prophylactics, they told me to keep them and that everything we sell is intended for “Novelty Use Only.” With our gigantic mark-up, even with my half-off discount, it’s still cheaper to purchase condoms at a drug store.

So far, the only items I’ve purchased from the store were a few movies for single, male friend’s birthdays, a box of nitrous cartridges and a cracker for a friend who wanted to try it out and a lot of greeting cards. (Cards are one of the few things I like going into adult bookstores for. You simply can’t find cards this hilariously offensive at Hallmark.) It’s not that I feel I’m above porn, it’s just that I haven’t found anything that I actually want.

Anyone have any recommendations?

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