transretrogurl

I have been trying to write this damn blog post for two years. Two years. I start it, then I give up and go hide somewhere, then start it again, then lose my bottle, then start it again.

And why is it so hard? Because I want to talk about pornography.

But before I start, a little warning – I’m going to be frank and honest in this post and it may offend some readers with delicate sensibilities. I know that comes off like an old-school American ring-master at some decaying circus talking about ‘don’t see the freaks, they will drive you INSANE’ but I’d like to give fair warning. Hell, I’m British and just thinking about some of the stuff I’m going to put down in this blog makes us combust in uncomfortable shame, but I promise to battle on through.

Again, a warning – if you’re not comfortable with the concepts of erotica, pornography and, well, pleasuring oneself (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the most British phrase you’ll ever read) then I would kindly suggest you pick another one of the posts. I may even write a Frock Tale after to cleanse my own palate.

You have been warned. Here be Dragons. And a lot of them are wearing very little and entertaining each other in ways that would make their mothers blush.

Pictured – the prostitute and her tools. Yeah, a lot of these pictures are going to Japanified if you understand my pr0n meaning 😉

So why talk about it? Because we don’t. Even now, in the 21st century, with the Internet where even an innocent search on Google can instantly return imagery that doesn’t look physically possible, there’s a real stigma about the whole erotica/pornography side of our natures.

I grew up in the seventies but mostly the eighties, and we were on the cusp of a revolution, not only in terms of technology, but also in terms of sexuality and the ability to express it.

I’m going to be honest, I suffer from a painful degree of shyness which is not at all apparent in any of my social media presences, partly because I can hide behind Sarah’s layers of makeup, and partly because the internet gives us a (false) sense of distance and safety. As I sit here typing I’m relatively sure no-one is watching me, or judging me, whereas in real life I’m a mess if anyone even looks at me.

Pictured – fruit is so wonderfully innocent. Nothing suggestive about this photo and what she is doing at all. Nope. Nothing.

So growing up, and especially going through puberty as a gender-confused very-much-closeted boy in the late seventies and early eighties was a tough time. I could barely talk to people I’d known all my life; the idea of striking up a conversation, especially with people of the, you know, feminine gender who were growing in ways that I found strangely alluring was just plain terrifying.

And as most kids did, I found an outlet for getting those thrills I seemed to need. Back then it was called the Sunday Sport, a terrible newspaper printed on a Sunday (well duh) that had dubious choice in stories, mostly about sexual mis-behaviour, but more importantly had a section at the back for, well, ‘personals’.

Between that, and believe me *every* week there would be an article such as ‘man poses as woman in marriage to get benefits’ and ‘boyfriend is stunned to find his girlfriend of two years is a man’ which, to be honest, means you weren’t looking that hard mate, and pinching cards from telephone boxes (don’t ask – the cheapest way to get a selection of, to put it bluntly, one-handed reading material was to strip the ‘adverts’ from public phoneboxes – believe me, before the internet the options for finding erotica for anyone under 18 in the UK were few and far between) I had me a stack of material I could peruse whenever the dreaded swollen underpants event occurred.

Pictured – do you know how bad spermicide tastes? It’s like licking a used squash-ball. Also her expression in this picture is priceless because she had actually breath the rest of the condom in. Cue a little moment of panic and much coughing, and everything else that day, beer, pizza, tasting of durex…..

And remember, I grew up in the UK in the 70s and 80s which, ironically given the sheer amount of sexual perversion and silliness that was going on nigh on everywhere, was an almost evangelical place to grow up in terms of, well, the idea of pleasuring yourself.

‘You’ll go blind’. I believed that bloody myth for years, terrified that my almost obsessive need to get that little endorphin rush, the ‘little death’ as the French call it, was making my eyes go cloudy. I was never told anything about masterbation other than it was terribly bad for you and that only deviants did it.

Pictured – yeah, the mussed hair and smeared lipstick tell a little story all of their own….

Yeah, they might have had a point. Well, no, actually, but let’s have a quick look at what it does for you. It’s pleasant. It gives you a rush. It’s something you can do by yourself. It’s hurting literally no-one (unless you’re a little too over-enthusiastic – having to go to the doctor because you’ve worn it raw and bloody is a little indication that you’re overdoing it. Or aren’t using lubrication). But still it was vehemently frowned upon when I was growing up.

And of course, because I was also dealing with the internalised and wonderful fetish I seem to have developed (see previous blog post for details on that) the two inevitably grew together. I would get aroused and thrilled at the idea of cross-dressing period and eventually built myself a hard-copy library of images from various newspapers and, gasp, the occasional poor TV magazine (and not the Radio Times) that I would get from mail-order or from building myself up to, again gasp, going into a sex shop and buying.

And that was fine, apart from the fact it was getting harder and harder to hide my stash. And I knew if it was discovered I was effectively dead (yeah, going through puberty gives you a case of the hyperboles as well as hyper-balls).

I actually, and it is really amusing because I was far more ashamed of this act than of pleasuring myself to the photos in it, stole a book from a library. I have literally stolen two things in my life, this book, called ‘Drag’ which was a history of drag performers up until 1978, and a statue of a Seal from a Seal Sanctuary in Cornwall. I actually sent an anonymous donation of £300 to the sanctuary later in life but still feel like a sh*tty human being for doing it when I was ten.

Pictured – fast-forward 40 years and I’m dressed for a 1970s sex/car-key swinger’s party, promising the owner of an Audi a good time. Ahh, an interesting life.

And as for the book, it was one of those old style ones that had small-print writing and, gasp, some black and white photo inserts. And those photos just drove me mad. 1940’s drag performers, stage shows of Shakespeare done with all men, just the simple idea of adopting a convincing, to a point, look of a woman just blew my mind.

Anyway, hard copy was never going to last, especially because I was going through those ‘I’m evil, I’m wretched’ phases where you’d purge and burn, quite literally. My entire stash of erotica was burnt one quiet night when I sneaked to the local park and set it all on fire.

So, Pornography. I came to pornography, proper, later in life. Yeah, I attended those inevitable grubby showings when your friend manages to get a very worn copy of a VHS and a load of you, barely older than 15, huddle around the telly with the sound turned right down staring at the static and pretending to be excited about it. But it wasn’t until I was alone in Germany that I really discovered just how open and accessible the pornography industry is. If you’re old enough. And German.

See, in Germany in the late eighties and early nineties they had, and still have, a surprisingly open attitude to sex, especially given the nature of their culture. Every major city has, well, that kind of quarter or district you can go to which feels like someone planted an erotica bomb in Soho – literally every shop is a sex-shop, and when you go in they had/have categories you didn’t even know existed.

Pictured – ‘the CEO’s pubes’…. Sometimes you just have to imply she did something…

So imagine me, 22 years old, away from my partner who continued to live in our shared flat in England, with nothing to do after work except drink and, well, entertain myself. Within a couple of weeks in Germany I’d discovered the sex quarter (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) and, with a good deal of hands in pockets, collar-pulled up semi-stupid sneaking, had bought a number of extremely hardcore magazines and video-tapes.

Oh dear me. It was a new world.

A quick interjection here that is going to make me sound like somewhat of a romantic, but I never bought the porn for, well, the porn. I bought it for the costumes. I bought it for the clothes, the mannerisms. It was all about the cross-dressing fetish and the adoption of the roles. Given I could barely speak German and a lot of the purchases were point and run I got a lot of bad porn, but still, it was a completely different experience to the button-down British lifestyle I’d grown up with.

And then came the Internet.

For a while after the internet really took off I started to think I was having a bit of a problem. In reality this was during my dark period when I subconsciously decided I wasn’t a cross-dresser, it was all just a silly phase etc etc, but that philosophy was kinda derailed by the fact that literally every spare second I had I was surfing, then, the newsgroups for imagery of cross-dressing.

I actually found a disk a couple of months ago, one of those first external disks that didn’t even have a USB (I had to buy a connector to re-read it). And on that disk I found tens of thousands of images of cross-dressers, some dressed tidily, a lot of 80s styles, and some doing, well, things that fall under the category of pornography. That disk was basically my way to be part of the cross-dressing scene without cross-dressing and with the tainted luxury of pretending not to be a cross-dresser.

Pictured – and then sometimes you just want to paint her face like a cat and put a collar on her. Wait, just me?

And, and I hate to sound like the old fart that I am, this was tens of thousands of images downloaded over dial-up. See, today you surfers of the erotica-web have it pretty easy. Back then you’d click on a link in a newsgroup that would say ‘stunning tranny satisfies boyfriend orally’ and wait five minutes to get a picture of a tree in front of a brick wall. Yeah, trolling was much crueler back then.

As connections got faster and people understood the mechanisms of the internet, porn just exploded. And it was a good thing. To a certain extent it mainstreamed the idea of erotica – granted, it’s still seen by many as a dirty and naughty thing but it isn’t. Consensual pornography is healthy, as is watching it one-handed, and no-one should tell you otherwise.

But I get ahead of myself, if you’ll pardon the pun. I grew up finding ways to engage in a scene without being able to be in a scene, and the internet now allows me to satisfy the needs I have, when they surface, whenever I want.

But I don’t do it any more. And this is where it gets fun. I discovered, when Sarah came back out of here hibernation, that I could create the erotica *I* wanted.

Pictured – granted, sometimes the erotica I want is the rampant sexism of the 1970s and the demeaning outfit of a bunny girl, but in my defence it’s me so call it self-abuse rather than sexism 🙂

Yeah, sounds wrong when I put it like that, so let me rephrase – I make my own porn for myself. No wait, that sounds worse.

I do some photos that show Sarah in situations (by herself) that give me a serious sexual thrill. It’s partly because it’s me (and because it’s me I can be as sexist as I like – call it self-abuse) and partly because I can get the kind of imagery that gives me a thrill without any of the emotional baggage or bad feeling I used to have when hunting down erotica on the web. If the idea of something turns me on, I’ll stage it with Sarah.

And it’s wonderfully fun. I make the kind of erotica that appeals to my own personal fetishes. And as such it makes me happy to see the outcomes. Yeah, it’s a bit narcissistical but who am I hurting?

Heres an example – I did a lingerie shoot where Sarah, in her alter-ego ‘Kitty Klaws’ which is where she goes when she wants to do something that is a little more, say, risque, wore a leopard skin bodice, stockings, ample boobage showing, then posed seductively lying on a sofa. It’s a lovely erotic image of a woman exuding sexuality, designed to make a man’s blood stir. And I did it to stir mine. And when I put it up on Flickr it seemed to stir others – it is currently, easily, the most viewed picture on my Flickr. 128608 views. 401 favourites.

Pictured – for evidence, this very picture….

Yeah, not much compared to others but that’s huge. And it’s erotica.

I’ve explored some other situations, using toys and a wonderfully fun lube called ‘Cum4Boys’. Yeah, it looks like, and behaves like, seminal fluid. Doesn’t taste like it. It tastes like petrol mixed with body odour, which is why pictures of Sarah with a mouthful have that authentic face women pull as the stuff tastes like literal arse, but that’s part of the fun.

Pictured – probably one of my favourite erotica pictures, because all I see is a glamorous middle aged housewife who is really regretting saying yes to her drunken husband. Or a fifty year-old crossdresser who is wondering just how much of this lube (s)he has swallowed and whether it is actually toxic…. 😉

I put these photos up occasionally with little stories which amplify the erotic nature. I’m trying to get a rise, if you’ll pardon the pun, and the combination of being able to create and see this kind of erotica is something I never thought I’d be able to do.

It’s a thrill, simply put. And that’s the point. It’s not exploiting anyone, I choose to do these pictures, I pay for the services to make me over, I suggest the poses and the props. There’s no shame – in fact doing these kind of photos that appeal to the person inside me ticks a box I didn’t even know I had.

It’s another aspect of Sarah, the sexual aspect, and it surfaces as good old fashioned risque erotica.

And if I could go back and tell that desperately lonely and confused boy that some day he could have all the photos he needed of the girls he craved, and those girls would be him, I’m pretty sure he’d have had to go to the doctor far more often to deal with friction burns.

Stay beautiful and stay true to yourself. Don’t let the bigoted opinions of others stop you from finding the real you, however erotica or non-erotica that person is.

Pictured – let’s finish on this one, absolutely nothing erotic about it…..