..for the obligatory "Why are you reporting this story?" post.

Due to the relaxing of laws regarding what's available on the top shelf it was inevitable that the softcore smut magazines sales would decline due to the threat from the harder stuff.

Mags like Escort, Fiesta (Raymond must really like Ford) and Razzle bring back fond memories of my mid to late teens. Youth of today have it far too easy these days not having to brave the newsagents hoping that the retailer was lax in who he'd sell them too in my opinion.

Have to agree with you, the 'net' has made porn far too easy to access.

It used to be part of every teen's right of passage buying his first porno mag, choosing carefully to get one with a car picture on the front so if confronted when paying you either swore blind you thought it was a car mag, or you were just buying it for the car pictures, honest.....

Or was that just me, better post anonymous..........

mumbles some thing unintelligible.........

...by the time I was old enough o legally buy porn, I'd sort of out-grown it.

And why can you legally (not necessarily actually ;-P) get a root at 16 in Australia but can't look at pics of it until 18? ;-)

I still vividly recall my first porn mag...

It was Christmas 1977.

The Stranglers had just upset the BBC with a song called "Peasant in the big shitty". Tee-hee...

I was 10.

Walking along the South Bank of Westminster Bridge, past the roasted-chestnut sellers, I was walking past a garbage bin when I noticed in the bin a magazine, which seemed to be displaying an awful lot of pink flesh-tones...

Having retrieved this marvel, I spent a few minutes revelling in the previously undreamed-of (but destined to remain no more than dreams for what seemed like long, interminable years to come) delights contained within.

But, all-too-quickly, the dream ended - (and this is where it gets weird) a big black car pulled up right alongside me and a man jumped out. He snatched the magazine from my, by-now febrile, grasp and said some words I don't recall. He jumped back in the car, WITH the precious magazine and drove off.

THAT was my introduction to porn. Fantastic!

Time was, when I was a youth, that you could barely stumble through a park or hedgerow without coming across (ahem) some discarded wrist-pamphlets. Where are they now? Admittedly, I don't tend to frequent the hedgerow or even the park as much as I once did, but blimey - you could even see an occasional discarded page blowing across the street i you were lucky. Wherefore the spare skin-art now ?

Was there some sort of decision taken by people to hang on to their smut or otherwise properly dispose of it, and I wasn't informed or something ?

Frequently very much the worse for wear, largely due to the inclement weather one would hope, they required all the skill of a forensic scientist to tease the pages apart lest they disintegrate in your hands before getting a look at the goods.

I bet there's many a kid gone onto a successfully skilled career after that first scientific endeavour. Probably not as many as those whose eyesight isn't what it once was though..

I say we start a campaign to bring back the rural jazz mag - and who knows, it may even re-instill that level of care, dedication and patience so sadly missing in the youth of today.

Just a thought. I'm sure society would benefit greatly as a result.

Yours, be-spectacled

Magazines like this have declining sales due to the fact that most 16 year old boys now have a computer (and box if tissues) in the privacy of their own bedroom and nothing to do with the content of the magazines.

I dunno who to blame, the anglosaxon puritans or Andrea Dworkin and her 'feminist' Dworks who sidelined the womens' movement into a witch hunt against any erotica which offends to the slightest degree. (By my definition, porn is 'erotica that the mainstream doesn't approve of').

I've been living in Denmark for over a decade. I'm not a consumer of porn, but hardcore is readily available from most corner shops. You can't even get soft porn here, and there's a good reason for that: It's juvenile and idiotic.

Hardcore, on the other hand, shows women AND men (and other species and other objects) doing what comes naturally and unnaturally. There's no pretense, no hypocrisy and if the women are objectified, the men are too.

Conversely British soft porn typically shows women only, stretching out their labia and pretending to have a Meg Ryan-style fake orgasm for no apparent reason. Not really my idea of a good time.

IIRC Britain also has some absurd law about not showing the erect phallus, which means softcore porn has only women showing their bits. Ergo, softcore is more sexist (and to me, more offensive) than hardcore. The sooner Men Only and their ilk become niche products the better.