When I was a kid around 1980 me and my buddies used to play in small tracts of woodland around where we lived. There we sometimes found woods porn, Sw. skogsporr: damp and fragmented pornographic magazines. We learned quite a lot from them that stood us in good stead later in life.
Back then, before porn went digital, woods porn was ubiquitous. Woodland deposition in fact seems to have been a major culturally sanctioned way to get rid of unwanted porn. It's easy to imagine scenarios that would have given rise to the custom: you need to (use and?) get rid of something discreetly, you can't leave it anywhere near your home or workplace, and you can't draw attention to it by burning it. But though almost everybody I've talked to about woods porn has found some once, I have never heard any rumour from a person who deposited woods porn. Who were they? All I know is that they must have been older than us kids in order to be that interested in porn and to be able to afford it. And they probably weren't comfortable talking about porn.
I knew some grown-up porn buyers: my friend's big brother, their dad, another friend's mom & dad. They all kept their porn in their nightstand drawers, quite unabashedly. I can't really see why they would have hidden some of it in the woods. They were probably not woods porn depositors.
Do you, Dear Reader, have any tales to tell of woods porn deposition?
Image from Martin Nilsson's blog.
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Woods porn is not so woodsy, I came across loads of it as a kid in West London dumped in alleyways and in parks during the eighties of course. I remember me and my sister's bringing some home and the horrific look on my nans face when she saw it. She said we'd brought the devil in the house. She was a strict Catholic, and we were females.
My ex had a thing about porn mags and he used to hide them around the house. I would find these stuffed under washing machines, in the shed, under carpets, between clothes etc. I remember going out one evening with the girls, forgetting my purse and returning to the house to be confronted by a massive collection of mags fanned out in a row across the landing. I'd been gone two minutes. He never did tell me why he hid this, I never asked. I guess he either thought I would go to nuts or he felt dirty and liked the excitement of these hidden things.
I guess these may be those kinds of people that dump porn.
Haha, wonderful to think that some of these guys (?) may in reality have had quite permissive wives but still felt they needed to be sneaky about it.
Catholics are a blessing for the porn industry. Likewise, the Bible Belt states consume more porn per capita than ungodly places like California.
I have no idea if there is a wood outside the record studio, but here is a Xmas song by The New Pornographers "Joseph, Who Understood" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nOm81MqeCI
Maybe you should adapt this tradition to modern times and start up "Adult Geocaching".
I invented geoshagging back in 2005!
To BJ, How do you know the Bible Belt states consume more porn per capita than California? Don't get me wrong, I have no agenda to defend religion, I'm just interested in what evidence there is to support your statement. Incidentally I do think you have the making of a hypothesis that would be interesting to investigate.
When I was young and a completely closeted gay guy, a long long time ago, I bought some muscle mags and after ogling them, deposited them in the woods maybe a kilometer from my parents’ house.
Excellent Jon! Did you ever check back with the mags afterwards?
They aren't putting "new" porn in the woods, only "used" porn. So here's a hypothesis for you: They want to grow offspring in the forest by putting their "seed" in the soil.
Otherwise, why not just put their "used" porn in the dustbin?, or are they afraid their refuse collectors will find it and gossip? Perhaps they just don't want their offspring to sprout in a landfill.
(Re. Sweden: you've had "enclosed" or "dustless" refuse collection there since the late 1930s (keyword search "Norba system"), so clearly there's no risk of your refuse collectors finding your "used" porn when they empty your bins. Therefore it must have something to do with fertilizing the forest! Am I right?)
G, I like the way you're thinking! Reminds me of this Swedish comic where used condoms and used tampons meet in the sewers and breed underground monstrosities together.
I grew up in Gällivare in the north of sweden. The summer when i was around 9-10 me and my friends found the motherload of porn, a dumpster almost filled.
So we started to deposit woods porn in the forests all around town.
Close to our treehouse we buried the biggest cache of them all. A big plastic bag, almost full, inside a wooden box.
Later that autumn out little patch of trees (and treehouse) got leveled and turned into a parkinglot.
I love the thought of all that porn still being there, intact, under that parkinglot.
A huge load of early eighties porn.
this would be the location
https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?mid=z-XcLJxZXeFE.kS_NTtnNT-II
Urban, that's beautiful! Hope the mags aren't deteriorating too quickly down there. Maybe permafrost!
Urban, when the aliens arrive long after we are gone and start digging they will be very confusedd about our culture.
Steve, here we go: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023578352
And http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservativ…
Offhand, I suspect cultures that are neurotic about sex will consume lots of porn.
G, Maybe I should try to stuff my used beer bottles in the ground in the hope more will grow. And I want a whisky tree!
"they just don’t want their offspring to sprout in a landfill. "
See Zelazny 's old book "Jack of Shadows". the place where they get reborn is not pleasant.
This stuff occupies many ecological niches.
Doing survey & assessments in advance of (something or other, I forget, trees, phone masts, pylons, long time ago), on top of a horribly cold, exposed and windblasted fell in Scotland. By a sheep-sized erratic boulder, expertly packaged and weatherproofed, a few kilos (sort of ATX-box size) of what were, for the time, very recherché German magazines.
I mean what? Who the .. ? How the .. ? Just getting up there with the theodolite each day half-killed me, never mind getting it up for a ham-shank, out on the freezing shelterless tundra.
We were actually seriously worried it might be some sort of Provo munitions cache (all that was in full swing at the time, big military bases down below), so Mr Silly here decided to have a shaky-handed look (you never know who might be watching; down a scope).
Oh, the hysterical relief! Thank christ! It's OK people, it's smut, not semtex! (mass outbreak of hilarity and hugs all round).
The landscape archaeology of fringe 80s porn deposition! Clearly something to do with Spartan manly rituals involving erections in -2 Celsius and gale-force winds.
Dustbubble, that takes me back to the Cold War days, when any unusual phenomenon might have something to do with the Russkies.
I suppose the images could contain some kind of logic bomb, transmitting into the brain through the optic nerve and making the system crash....
Now then Birger, even I could see that those trim, tanned Teutons were very definitely not transmitting things via the eyes. Quite the reverse ...
And forgotten bags in pubs and the like still scare the crap out of me, and I tend to leave. Without saying anything, because I know it's a bit mad.
And if you find heroic warriors of Middle-Earth suspiciously homoerotic:
"Cloudy, with a Chance of Nazgûl: Climate Maps of Middle-Earth" http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/634-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-nazgul-cli…
I have found many porn magazines in the forests of the years. When I was a youngster, it was it was amazing to find it. I haven't come across any in over 15 years though.