The Inexplicably Ubiquitous Phenomenon of 'Woods Porn'

November 14, 2016 9:21 AM

I’ve had to wonder if there was some sort of Johnny Appleseed of porn who traveled the country distributing perverse periodicals for the most inquisitive children to find on their explorations. Some have speculated about nasty gnomes or porn-faeries littering the woodlands with titillating treats.
posted by porn in the woods (91 comments total)

None more eponysterical. NONE.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:30 AM on November 14, 2016 [152 favorites]

Played the long game well there.
posted by Artw at 9:32 AM on November 14, 2016 [125 favorites]

If porn in the woods ever needs a sock puppet, "Johnny Appleseed of Porn" seems the clear choice.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:36 AM on November 14, 2016 [20 favorites]

It's not often I regret having grown up in the city.
posted by ejs at 9:36 AM on November 14, 2016 [5 favorites]

After I moved into my house last year, as I was going through and organizing my shed I happened to be looking up at a huge old wasp nest in the rafters and I saw a folded up piece of paper stuck between the rafter and the roof panel. It was three sheets of some magazine that apparently specialized in women with much larger than average butts. I guess my shed was previously someone's "sanctuary." Still not sure exactly how to feel about it, but I did pin them up on the wall and told my fiance that it we should respect it as it was an archeological find.
posted by dudemanlives at 9:38 AM on November 14, 2016 [27 favorites]

In my freshman year of highschool, 25 years ago, I was a hilariously uncomfortable new kid that had been a pretty much off-the-grid homeschooler for the prior 3 years. I found a nice tree surrounded by brush in the corner of campus that made for a completely hidden and private lunch experience. It was perfect. A few months in, a Playgirl showed up there. I abandoned my lunch spot just out of fear of association with all those side-lit pink boners.

Also, years earlier, we were living in a furnished rental house that had a Playboy stash. One time a friend and I took 5 or so out into the woods to pour over on a day when we were home alone. We lost track of time and my parents came home. So we had to ditch them and walk back in empty handed. We let a few friends in on this and thus a woods porn stash was born. I guess I am a porn faerie.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 9:39 AM on November 14, 2016 [19 favorites]

The term "porn" gets appended to so much these days (e.g. food porn, ruin porn, etc.) that I had to click through to determine that the article was not about amateur nature photography, but about actual pornographic material being found in wooded areas.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:40 AM on November 14, 2016 [75 favorites]

Not sure it was really improved by the 'hur hur homeless people amirite?' bits.
posted by howfar at 9:43 AM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Louche mustachio on David Attenborough and woods porn.
posted by taz at 9:44 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hiking around New England/NY as a teen boy scout, I'd find all sorts of porn out on the trail, often in latrines or shelters. I'd sometimes wonder who was it that was carrying porn all the way out into the woods, often miles from the nearest road, only to leave it behind.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:47 AM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Suburban Michigan, 1984 or so. Riding my bicycle down the street to notice a milk-crate-sized cardboard box full of Playboy and Penthouse sitting next to someone's trash cans at the curb.

You bet your ass I took it.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 9:50 AM on November 14, 2016 [15 favorites]

I'd sometimes wonder who was it that was carrying porn all the way out into the woods, often miles from the nearest road, only to leave it behind.

If you don't take it out far enough it'll find its way back.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:51 AM on November 14, 2016 [45 favorites]

The biggest reason for porn in the woods?

Nobody knows you like the garbage man knows you.
posted by jamjam at 9:53 AM on November 14, 2016 [16 favorites]

Hiking around New England/NY as a teen boy scout, I'd find all sorts of porn out on the trail, often in latrines or shelters. I'd sometimes wonder who was it that was carrying porn all the way out into the woods, often miles from the nearest road, only to leave it behind.

I believe there's a bit of a backwoods custom of leaving behind shelters and emergency supply stashes for other folks to use in case they pass through on a hunting trip and the weather turns. It's a life-and-death matter, not dissimilar to the conditions that gave rise to strict hospitality rules (often enshrined in myth) in pre-feudal cultures.

Not much of a stretch to extend the idea to needs beyond mere survival.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:55 AM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's not often I regret having grown up in the city.

I grew up in the city and we had this, but it was 'Hedge Porn.'

I think the article overestimates the amount of onanism the woods actually saw. This phenomenon was primarily one of disposal: I didn't trust my mum not to find any porn stash I might create, and since she was not only my mum but also a hardcore 70s feminist the consequences were literally unfathomable. In those days there came a time when you were in the possession of porn that just had to be gone somehow, somewhere. That was Hedge Porn.
posted by Coda Tronca at 9:57 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sadly yet another age-old phenomenon likely to be killed off by the internet. I've always assumed the root (pun partially intended) cause is schoolboys old/brave enough to get away with buying it from a less-than-attentive newsagent, but not to take it home with them.

In the U.K. the usual term, I believe, is "hedge grumble" but I haven't seen any in years (thank goodness).

(On review, x-post with Coda Tronca)
posted by A Robot Ninja at 9:59 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was about 12 years old, delivering papers, when I saw something about 50 feet into the woods from the road. I instinctively knew it was a dirty magazine just by the pink cover. I ran and grabbed it and hid it in my newspaper bag and snuck it in my house.

It was a magazine called Nugget, which I've never seen before or since. It had the usual pictorials, including one with an up and coming porn star named Hypathia Lee. It also had sort of a fetish angle (it was the first time I'd ever heard the word fetish) and included, among other things, a picture of some guy with a gas mask on.

It also had an article about frottage, which started out explaining what it was and then told the adventures of a practitioner of it in the NYC subway system, eventually turning into a Penthouse Forum-type story of the time it went very, very right. This is the first time I've thought of that article in decades and now that I type this out I realize... holy shit that whole article was pro-sexual assault! Fucking 1970s, man.

There was a pictorial of a man and women weightlifting together, another dirty story that introduced me to the idea that some duded like fingers stuck up their butts, and a bunch of articles that were way beyond what my young brain could understand.

I would love to find that exact issue today, but I'm not about to go searching for it.

*it's very possible I'm consolidating my early porn magazines, so some of these things might have been in other magazines I obtained shortly after.
posted by bondcliff at 10:01 AM on November 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

A few weeks before the old man across the street from me died from cancer, an envelope full of Dutch porn magazines from the 1960s appeared in my mailbox. I guess he didn't want his wife to find them and didn't want to throw them away (I bet they were expensive). They were black and white and pretty hard core, especially for their time.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:04 AM on November 14, 2016 [12 favorites]

Ahhhh! Woods porn. My theory about finding litter like that in the woods is that the farther you go in the woods the cheaper the empty beer cans are and the more likely the porn mags are going to be Hustler. They are always Hustler! I'm glad to see corroborating evidence.

My favorite woods porn story is a stash I found carefully wrapped in plastic bags behind a log in Yellowstone not far from a parking lot near one of the entrances, and I just had this image of an Iowa dad in their family's rented camper carefully hiding his stash in the tool box because he needed to throw it away without getting caught, driving it all the way to Yellowstone National Park, and then heaving the bag of porn into the woods at the first good opportunity. "Be right back, dear, I thought I saw an elk!"

But this article made me kind of sad. The idea that the internet is driving wood porn to extinction made me laugh, and they're right - I don't find woods porn like I used to - but instead of being an object of fascination as it was when I was a teen like they talked about, which it totally was, now it gives me the creeps, because it's unsettling to find a stash of porn in the forest when you're a woman by yourself, even if you hope it's just someone's trash.

It also makes me sad in a societal kind of way, thinking about the guys I knew who had found and kept those kind of wrinkled, weather warped pages you'd find out there, and hell as a teenage girl I kept one I had found, because WTF was going on!? - around ideas of sex education and moral relativism and repression in our society. I have such a different attitude now then I did back then - the weight of why is what makes me sad.
posted by barchan at 10:12 AM on November 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

Hedge Porn and Woods Porn were things in my Southern soon-to-revert-to-town-status city. I found Woods Porn while walking on the by-then-ruined property where my grandfather had been born, which was a little strange.

In the spring of my fourth grade year, I had the opportunity over several weeks to visit several houses staged for sale with my boyhood chum and his mother, who was I believe looking at purchasing a house. Anyhoo, many of these houses were staged with vintage sleaze paperbacks hidden in plain sight among the shiny cookbooks and whatever else people pretended to read in the late 80s.

Looking back, I was disturbingly skilled in rationalization; of course, these novels shouldn't be where potential customers could see them, so they needed to be removed. Under my sweater or in my backpack they went, to be puzzled over furtively and fruitlessly until I had to discard them in a neighbor's hedge to make room for more.

Let me be clear: there was definitely something wrong about these books, something that I knew shouldn't be shared with friends, so I never did. One had an opening scene that still disturbs me a bit to this day—I sure as hell won't describe it here.

In fact, the more I write this comment, the more I feel like I'm one of those old folks defending the indefensible, saying things "a little slap won't hurt 'em" and "in my day they knew their place." So I think I'll come down on the side of Vintage Weathered Porn = Bad.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:21 AM on November 14, 2016

I'm almost positive there was an AskMe about this, but no way am I searching for it while at work.
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:22 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

side-lit pink boners

...is the name of my Frankie Goes To Hollywood tribute band.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 10:30 AM on November 14, 2016 [32 favorites]

There is of course no mystery.

You have a stash of porn to throw away, but you can't be 100 percent sure -- and you need to be 100 percent sure -- that it won't be found by anyone else in the family, or the trash collectors, or the local garbage pickers, or the local trash-scattering animals (porn all over the yard and street!). Even if you made a mad dash out to the trash just before it was being picked up, you'd risk the trash collectors discovering exactly what was in the urgent mystery bag and who in the family was a faithful reader of Hind Quarterly. As if they couldn't have guessed.

So you put it in a bag or pack and smuggle it out to the woods. Casually. When no one is looking. Maybe after dark. At the new moon. And then it takes on a life of its own.

Someone else finds it and takes it to a tree house or campfire or basement. And discovers your name and address on an envelope you accidentally slipped into the pile.
posted by pracowity at 10:31 AM on November 14, 2016 [10 favorites]

porn all over the yard and street!

new sockpuppet name
posted by thelonius at 10:34 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

an envelope full of Dutch porn magazines

Pjorn.
posted by pracowity at 10:38 AM on November 14, 2016 [30 favorites]

I think Pijn would be more orthographically correct.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:42 AM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

I found woods porn. It was all lactating pregnant women. I was confused.
posted by broken wheelchair at 10:49 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can you leave a browser history in the woods? Asking for a friend.
posted by praemunire at 10:50 AM on November 14, 2016 [31 favorites]

Nobody knows you like the garbage man knows you.

So, my city introduced curbside recycling some years back. And the basic premise is that everything that can be recycled just gets chucked into the bin, and it gets sorted into the respective aluminum/glass/paper/plastic bins at the recycling plant via technology and some human involvement.

And I'm left to wonder if we have some environmental conscious porn consumers (I may or may not know some) who are putting their magazines into the recycling, and what happens to them at the plant. I further wonder if some enterprising teens have figured out that beyond cans/bottles that can be returned for deposit sometimes showing up in the bins (we have people come around every week looking for that), that they might also score some porn that way.

And then I remember we have the internet, and wonder how much of an issue this really is in the 21st C.
posted by nubs at 10:51 AM on November 14, 2016

I further wonder if some enterprising teens have figured out that beyond cans/bottles that can be returned for deposit sometimes showing up in the bins (we have people come around every week looking for that), that they might also score some porn that way.

You know every single teen in the developed world has a machine that fits in their pocket that can bring up an unlimited supply of any kind of porn they can imagine, and even more of which they can't, right?

I bet if I asked my 14 year old he'd have no idea that you could even buy porn in magazine form.

Edit: ok now I see your last line. Still though.
posted by bondcliff at 10:56 AM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I never found woods porn, but I did find under-a-bridge porn. which clearly was distributed by trolls, not faeries
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:56 AM on November 14, 2016 [15 favorites]

Tiny town in Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana. Edge of the woods near the grain elevator. That's where we used to find it. Walk to the Conoco, buy a bag of candy and a 50 cent corncob pipe to chew on, stop in the woods on the way home to look in strange fascination at the weird pictures of naked women. Then giggle nervously and go back to running through the woods like an elementary school age kid should.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:58 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Edit: ok now I see your last line. Still though

I'm in that strange generation that remembers life before the internet. A distant, dim age, to be sure, but sometimes it influences me while I'm thinking about things and then I go "oh yeah, we have the internet now" and it changes everything.

So just forgive the old in his musings and meanderings on a Monday morning.
posted by nubs at 11:10 AM on November 14, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is the main "IN MY DAY" story I like to tell the young people. About how we had to walk uphill barefoot ten miles in the snow just to look at a moldy stack of Hustlers.

There was a particularly large and nasty cache in this old rotted log when I was a kid. It was also the 70s, and I had this idea that the mafia was much much more powerful than it was, so I--I shit you not--assumed that it belonged to them.

I still looked at it with my friends, of course, but I imagined that we might be caught and murdered by mafia henchmen for doing so. I look back on that and wonder why I thought it was worth it. I have never had anything more than an academic interest in sexualized images of women, and yet, I was perfectly willing to risk my life to look at a few waterlogged porn magazines.
posted by ernielundquist at 11:10 AM on November 14, 2016 [13 favorites]

We used to build forts, just chunks of used plywood tacked together when I was ten or eleven. These things were far enough away from any houses so they we could mess around (double entendre intended) without parents or adults nearby.

Without fail, within a few days of building a fort some porn would show up in it. Sometimes with Kleenex and hand lotion, too. Never knew where it came from, didn't really care, just enjoyed it in the traditional way.
posted by disclaimer at 11:11 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I first found porn in the woods on a cub scout trip. It was a revelation. I have fond memories.

Much later, when I went to university, I started dating an activist feminist artist. She had a number of projects on the go about the male gaze and such. After a night of hanky panky (which I wasn't particularly good at since I was relying on expectations built upon what I saw in my porn in the woods), I discovered that one of her projects involved slicing and dicing a copy of exactly one of those Penthouses I found years earlier. I was struck by the coincidence, and took it as a sign that we belonged together. The sign proved to be exactly the opposite of that.

In summary, porn in the woods is a land of contrasts.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:21 AM on November 14, 2016 [29 favorites]

Just to be contrarian, I'll mention the time as a teenager I found parking-lot porn. It was in the middle of a large parking lot for a strip mall. It's origin wasn't exactly mysterious though, since they were still in their store bag for the comic-book/magazine/porn store in that mall. (For nostalgic Twin Citians, it was a Shinder's.)
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:23 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Favorited purely for laughing so hard as to induce a coughing fit when I saw who had posted this. A+ eponysteria.
posted by byanyothername at 11:31 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I actually think I grew up too far in the country to find woods porn. The uninhabited land-to-human ratio was way too high. But when I was about 13, I did run across roadside hardcore porn--which I turned into my own woods porn. Some tosser tossed it out the window before he reached home (see what I did there?). I was reflecting a couple of years ago that that was the only penetrative sex I saw before I was an adult. Man, times have changed.
posted by tippiedog at 11:34 AM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I am reminded of this great Ask Me from years ago.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 11:36 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Venus of Willendorf.

30000 year old porn in the woods. We've always done this.
posted by adept256 at 11:45 AM on November 14, 2016 [8 favorites]

When I was about 13 I left a stack of magazines in the woods as I was getting nervous my parents would find it.

When I was older I had a summer job with the city road work crew, and occasionally I was assigned to spend the day driving around in a pick-up truck loading abandoned trash and furniture in the truck and taking it to the dump. (Our particular crew was based out of a facility that was on the outskirts of the city, so we had a lot of rural countryside within our designated work area).

There was so much porn out there, and toys occasionally. Sometimes I found it in a salt shed or secluded area where it may have been stored and used. More commonly it was wrapped in trash bags and tossed in the ditch.

There was a middle aged lady who became known for dropping of a neatly tied bundle of magazines in the ditch on occasion while out for a countryside stroll.
posted by skinnydipp at 11:47 AM on November 14, 2016

Now I have Lana Del Rey's "High by the Beach" stuck in my head, but with "porn in the woods" replacing the title phrase.
posted by mogget at 11:50 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can confirm that the phenomenon goes back at least to the 1960s.

The original "Gee! Oh!" caching.

Along with the usual Playboys and more explicit adult book store stuff, we used to occasionally find B&W 1950s nudist mags, often with important bits censored, which seemed even weirder.

On the other hand -- so to speak -- we also found a full keg of beer out there one time, cooling in the creek. Some teenagers' party was much less festive that night, I suspect.

"Them as hides can finds, and them as finds can hides, says I!"
 
posted by Herodios at 11:52 AM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I never found woods porn, but I did find under-a-bridge porn.

+1
posted by thelonius at 11:58 AM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh hey an interview with my old acquaintance Robin Bougie! I think I still have a picture he drew for us somewhere. In anycase, if you like this sort of thing check out his Cinema Sewer. Very entertaining and charmingly sleazy.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:10 PM on November 14, 2016

Indeed, there was an AskMe on the subject.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have an old 486dx2 with a VGA CRT monitor plugged into a solar-powered UPS that I left in a local grove of trees along with several 3.5" floppies full of low-rez nudie photos so that kids today can get the full porn-in-the-woods experience of my youth.
posted by GuyZero at 12:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [19 favorites]

And now... Kids find old iPads stuck in the electronic recycling bin with a bookmark folder named "porn".
posted by HuronBob at 12:17 PM on November 14, 2016

Really, GuyZero...really?
posted by HuronBob at 12:17 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wonder if Porn In The Woods Guy and Highway Shoe Guy know each other. Maybe they do? Do they periodically pass each other on the way to their next respective destinations? Maybe they don't realize just who that other person is, though they quietly wonder about this stranger they seem to bump into more often than you'd expect. Maybe they do; their eyes meet, they exchange a silent nod and go on their way.
posted by mhoye at 12:23 PM on November 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

My brother and I discovered numerous stashes back in the late 70s and early 80s, usually when in other towns visiting relatives. Ravenna, South Haven, Pawpaw, and somewhere up near Tahquamenon Falls. And during any visit to the city dump back in the day the porn would be blowing around in the wind, chased by seagulls. The 80s were weird.
posted by JohnFromGR at 12:28 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

And now... Kids find old iPads stuck in the electronic recycling bin with a bookmark folder named "porn" "Tax stuff 2012".

FTFY
posted by dudemanlives at 12:29 PM on November 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

Yes, yes I did find porn in the woods. I went to an elementary school that had an upper and lower campus that were connected by a path through the woods. We weren't allowed to use the path, but had to walk up a paved road instead to get to gym class. In fourth grade I was that nerd who spent recess investigating moss and tree bark and making little fairy forts wherever they'd fit, and one day I found myself a few steps down the path in the woods and nobody was looking for me. I went a few more steps in and found a giant fallen log covered with weird moss and cool fungus as well as a little green sprout growing out of a small chunk of ice. Right behind the log was the a pile of porn mags, there were about 5 of them, they were rained on and probably half-buried so the garish colors of the models' lingerie had a marbled look and I spent the rest of recess looking through all of them.
posted by lakersfan1222 at 12:30 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Onion: March '74 Oui Passed Down To Next Generation In Special Ceremony
posted by PlusDistance at 12:42 PM on November 14, 2016 [10 favorites]

You live in a crowded house, the woods are place for sexy times - have been since time immemorial. I recall reading a book about rural Victorian England that suggested some very high % of preindustrial Britons were conceived in the woods, for example.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:44 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Blackanvil: I'd sometimes wonder who was it that was carrying porn all the way out into the woods, often miles from the nearest road, only to leave it behind.

It's the old Boy Scout camping motto: "take only photographs, leave behind only pornography"
posted by dr_dank at 12:47 PM on November 14, 2016 [34 favorites]

Call me a cynic but the sort of woods porn that's placed rather than disposed sounds like it was there so someone could get their lulz or kicks when it was found.
posted by comealongpole at 12:52 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have found porn in the woods on numerous occasions and also been the very conscientious porn recycler. That must have been an interesting afternoon at the Burbank, CA Recycling Center.

It had the usual pictorials, including one with an up and coming porn star named Hypathia Lee.

Her ex-husband Bud Lee was the best boss I ever had.
posted by davros42 at 1:03 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

The porn in the woods near my house growing up was all undoubtably left there by earlier adolescents, as the sites also invariably featured half-built forts, generally with a quasi-suicidal zip line. Because Michigan is secretly swamp, most years, the flat place where a fort had been built in previous years ended up either flooded or surrounded by an impenetrable field of boot-sucking muck, thus ensuring that many stashes were more work to retrieve than they were worth.

Especially once one realized that the local Websters stocked American porn and foreign porn — including Heavy Metal — on different shelves, and the foreign stuff was easy to shoplift. From there, you literally had to walk through the woods to get back to our neighborhood.

At some point, the Websters (previously, a Community News Stand) failed and was replaced by a Blockbuster, which had no porn at all. Maybe kids steal porn from the gas station now?
posted by klangklangston at 1:05 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

reading this, i'm like: wow, some other people remember pre-internet days! So used to youtube comments 'reminds me of my childhood - 2004 i miss you!'
posted by maiamaia at 1:06 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

porn that's placed rather than disposed sounds like it was there so someone could get their lulz or kicks when it was found

Dark side: near my school there was once an incidence of Wall Porn, which was some porn left on top of a low wall. When I approached the porn I was greeted from the shadows by what seemed at the time to be simply a roving porn connoisseur who'd just happened to find it at the same time as me.
posted by Coda Tronca at 1:09 PM on November 14, 2016

The worst porn is truck stop porn. When I worked at a stop on the Mass. Pike one of my Burger King coworkers had been out emptying trash in the parking lot. He returned triumphantly with a six inch stack of various Hustler and Chic magazines, began rifling through them only to discover they had been... used.

Without saying a word he tossed them in the trash, washed his hands, and none of us ever spoke of it again.
posted by bondcliff at 1:21 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

None more eponysterical. NONE.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:30 PM on November 14 [69 favorites +] [!] [Emphasis mine]

Noted without comment. (I assume that the town in question is the one in which it's $20.)
posted by Len at 1:49 PM on November 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

And suddenly I flashed on that "Carlton is lowest!" cigarette ad that I think was on the back cover of Playboy and Penthouse and whatever else of the time...
posted by straw at 1:52 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Based on my own personal experience, woods porn was due to two factors, with a possible third:

1) Getting your hands on porn was not that easy, back in the day. The vast majority of newsstand vendors would not sell it to you, and even if you had older brothers, they would usually take it with them to college. Your main source was that one kid whose divorced dad gave him as much porn as he wanted to gain favor and/or get back at his mom.

2) Even if you had to get rid of your own supply, how could you simply destroy that which had given you so much pleasure? Best to pass it on to what you'd imagine would be a very appreciative stranger.

3) (theoretical) Some guys who had to share bedrooms with their brothers had no other place to jack it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:14 PM on November 14, 2016

One summer, at a Christian camp, we were split into teams for one of those defend your flag games in the woods (this was in Forres, where Shakespeare 3 witches did their thing). Me and another kid were crawling through the brambles and nettles when we stumbled across a hideout type den place which was fully stocked with grumble mags.

Oh Happy Day
posted by gnuhavenpier at 2:17 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hind Quarterly should be the name of a chamber ensemble that records soundtracks for porn movies.
posted by catlet at 2:54 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

Your main source was that one kid whose divorced dad gave him as much porn as he wanted to gain favor and/or get back at his mom.

I would laugh, but in retrospect it wasn't funny at all. I had one friend whose father worked as a manager at Sears. He and his brother had everything. Everything. The Millenium Falcon (hard to get back in those days), all the Star Wars figures, Colecovision, boxes of comics they kept in little plastic bags, Space Lego, Castle Lego, hamsters, motocross-style bikes, and, then later, Factory Kuwahara BMXs (I had an Apollo Kuwahara).

Their mom was active in the Salvation Army. She wore a uniform and went to church on Sundays. Sometimes I went with them.

The father did not. Instead he left porno mags all over their house. In the magazine rack in the living room, in the spare bedroom, in the garage.

Something weird going on in that house.
posted by My Dad at 2:56 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

The internet is like The Woods Between Worlds in Narnia, I guess.
posted by MuppetNavy at 3:46 PM on November 14, 2016

Amazing that this is still a thing. I caught my first woods porn way back in 1975.

/damn I'm old
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 3:47 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I never knew that the origin of woods porn was ever considered such a mystery. When I was a young'un, my friends and I were a regular source of the stuff.

Say you borrowed magazines from under your parents' bed while they were at work and took said magazines out to show your friends. But upon heading home to sneak them back - oh no! There's a car in the driveway! There's no way to sneak the magazines back in, so they go into the woods where you hope you can stash them for a day or two without someone else stealing them or your parents noticing the absence. Same goes for those magazines you shoplifted from the convenience store, which aren't safe in your room because your mom occasionally cleans it, so you bundle them up in a plastic bag that becomes your x-rated greenbelt library.

I would have thought the internet had killed this tradition, but just a couple of years ago I lived kitty-corner from a middle school and was out in the yard one day when I saw a pair of boys anxiously shoving a stack of magazines at each other. "My mom came home early! You take them!" "My sister's home! I can't!" "Oh man, my brother's going to kill me!" Unfortunately, due to urban sprawl and general deforestation, they had no woodsy option. They looked around in a panic, then dropped the whole stack on the hood of my roommate's car and ran for it.
posted by northernish at 4:20 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I was a kid we found porn in our back paddock. There's a particular smell to mouldy old porn that kids these days wanking to pornhub will just never get to experience (lucky them!)

With that memory in mind, when I was a bit older (about 16) I was driving around with some friends in the country and we saw an old bag on the side of the road. Thinking it might be the elusive old-porn-in-a-bag my friend jumped out to grab it and it was attached to a rope and some other kids yanked it away just as she was about to grab the handle and laughter rang out from all sides. She jumped back in the car, cheeks burning and we all laughed about it for oh, 30 something years now.
posted by h00py at 4:25 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

While I hope we always have porn in the woods stories, perhaps in another 5-10 years they will become stories of kids finding the "porn stash in the system folder", or the "porn in the browser history."
posted by nubs at 4:30 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

My small town's Boy Scout troop had its own chunk of land, which was used by the scouts for monthly camp-outs, and on at least one occasion used by parties unknown for stashing porn. I'll never forget the one kid who was unfortunate enough to be flipping through a soggy, faded magazine when the Assistant Scoutmaster walked into my patrol's camp site - thinking fast on his feet (but not fooling anyone) he cried "Burn this filth!" and tossed it onto the campfire.
posted by usonian at 5:27 PM on November 14, 2016 [11 favorites]

No no, Hind Quarterly is the periodical of choice for discerning helicopter enthusiasts.
posted by clorox at 5:38 PM on November 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

It is almost searingly painful to me that I have stories to tell on this subject that I am histrionically eager to share on MetaFilter, but as I've just discovered this FPP whilst I'm all snuggly under a duvet with the most handsome gentleman in the world and we have removed our drawers, the prospect of trying to actually convey these stories using the microscopic keyboard of a smart telephone is unappealing to say the least.

Long story short—the woods, drainage culverts, road salt boxes, and abandoned farmhouses of Scaggsville, Maryland in the 1970s were packed with Swedish marriage manuals and I was the happiest little boy in all the world.
posted by sonascope at 6:50 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

My childhood BFF's house backed up to some woods, and we used to play there all the time. Never found any porn there, though.
posted by SisterHavana at 7:02 PM on November 14, 2016

Yeah, I found porn in the woods and elsewhere, but this reminds me of a true story that always makes me laugh: in the 60's, my girlfriend's little brother, 14, probably, endowed with chutzpah galore, would go to a St. Louis porn shop dressed up in a suit and tie and try to buy dirty magazines. When asked about his age, he would get very offended, and say, "Are you trying to make fun of my height?" It worked, sometimes. He'd get his copy of Penthouse or Big Boobs or whatever he was into. The swinging 60's/70's were a little less paranoid about law enforcement in general.
posted by kozad at 7:30 PM on November 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

Woods Porn/Internet Porn is the real Gen-X/Millennial dividing line.
posted by modernserf at 8:14 PM on November 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

Friend of a friend's security through obscurity folder name on a campus accommodation network share was 'Compiler Documentation'.
posted by kersplunk at 8:37 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I would have put money on Metafilter being the website this guy first read about woods porn on, but search tells me it wasn't mentioned here until 2002.
posted by MsMolly at 9:39 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was alerted to this thread when someone told me "I was reading about woods porn on Metafilter - you were shouted out."

I am touched that people think of me when they think of woods porn.

I love this thread.
posted by louche mustachio at 10:49 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Never heard of this phenomenon until tonight. Of course I, like tippiedog, may have just been too far out in the country.

However, I would like to submit the name "Johnny Priapleseed.'
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:07 PM on November 14, 2016 [11 favorites]

Woods Porn/Internet Porn is the real Gen-X/Millennial dividing line.

I was born in 1979, so I'm right in the middle of this generation gap (I remember when the media started referring to us as Generation Y, then eventually came to subsume us as Millennials. Whatever). So I have a lot of porn in the woods AND internet porn stories in my arsenal of cringey memories that my brain uses to flagellate itself at 3 a.m. when I wake up for no reason. There was the rotting shack that contained waterlogged biker porn that my friends and I found when we were 10 where I learned that it was possible to tattoo your perineum. There was the porn that a friend excitedly told us he'd stashed in a sweet secret location which turned out to be a public park in full view of a giant federal office building. Nothing like having to dodge a bunch of Fed office workers while trying to check out porn. That kid. There was the wrecked cabin that contained a HUGE porn stash, but also a semi-mummified dead owl with staring eyes. And at the same time, all of a sudden there were caches of JPEGs of dubious provenance. That one might be a mildly racy pin-up shot, the next one might be bestiality. You never knew. Bizarrely tracking down porn leads via AOL chat rooms. Hidden subfolders within subfolders within subfolders, all disguised as system config files to throw parents off the track. I was at my friend's house once while his mom was using their computer. "What are all these files?" we heard her say and, glancing across the living room, saw her open one of his nastiest collections. Frozen in place, we watched her click on a JPEG at random and then make a dying parrot sound that I still hear in my head sometimes when something goes abruptly wrong and my friend and I ran ran ran ran ran outside and into the woods where we probably should have just let the porn be.
posted by otolith at 11:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [23 favorites]

I posted a comment over at "DMs" so I'll copy it here:

I also found a large stash of woods porn, but along with the pictorial mags were paper back naughty novels, mostly gay themed. At 9/10 yo (this was early 60's) I had no effing idea anything like this existed, let alone abandoned in a large city park. My cousin and I scooped up all of the porn and stuffed it into our book bags and headed home. I hid all of it in the back of my closet. This was late March. Know what happens in early April? Spring cleaning. My Grandmother found the whole lot. When confronted, I turned so white all you could see were freckles and my ultra red hair. The Grandparents laughed about it to their dying day. All they said to me was I wasn't old enough for that kind of literature.
posted by james33 at 6:17 AM on November 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

My "woods" were a beat up old suitcase under my parent's bed.
When I was 10 or 11, it disgusted the hell out of me. When I was 14 or 15, it, uhh, did not.
posted by DigDoug at 7:46 AM on November 15, 2016

Anyone I know who ever manned the semi trailer for a Boy Scout paper drive (it's a 70's thing) spot-checked every incoming bale or bag for pron magazines nested between the newsprint. On a good Saturday, you were bound to hit gold at least once and were obligated to share the wealth.
posted by klarck at 10:36 AM on November 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

klarck: we did the same thing!
posted by persona au gratin at 2:44 AM on November 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm hopeful that this thread and the poignant memories are helping along the post-election healing process a little bit.
posted by porn in the woods at 6:47 PM on November 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

"I actually got a paper cut on my penis a few weeks ago.
It's true, I was turning the pages of a magazine too quickly and I nicked my bag.
And that's my new name in Vegas: Nick bag." - Bob Saget
posted by porn in the woods at 7:22 PM on November 18, 2016 [1 favorite]