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.