Remembering Scramble Porn

We have a generation and a half, perhaps two whole generations, of young males in this country who have come of age masturbating to squiggly lines. When you put it like that it sounds like madness, right?

Check it out: In the 50's, 60's, and 70's if you were a kid in need of visual stimuli there were always the issues of Playboy or whatever in your father's sock drawer, as the cliché goes. Magazines were the main medium. A little later, other options included sneaking into peep shows, porn theaters, and nudie bars, but for the most part, if you're a horny 13 year old boy in search of the hard stuff (a few steps above the bra section in the Sears catalog), you're getting hold of a magazine one way or another.

Things changed in the 80's as VHS cassettes and players became affordable. The medium changed but the images conveyed were the same. If they filmed a pretty brunette having sex with a man, that's what the viewer saw.

In the 90's, maybe a little earlier, pay-per-view porn showed up on cable. But once again if you're a 13 year old with no resources, getting a hold of a magazine or tape is doable, but paying for cable porn with a credit card or having it show up on your parents bill, was not an option. Luckily, even if you didn't have ultra-liberal parents who order Spice Network or Playboy, you could still watch it in a manner of speaking. And thank God for Scramble Porn, something I believe was more than an oversight.

I think I first discovered Scramble Porn in the early 90's when I was about 11 or 12. And in those days I would spend hours in front of the television in hopes of catching a blow job or some girl getting it doggy style. Like most people who try to control random occurrences, I picked up a lot of strange superstitions. I believed the TV's position, where I sat, what clothes I wore, the time of day, the position and operational status of other nearby electrical appliances, all affected the reception. Strangest of all was my belief, over time, that if I tried hard enough I could descramble it with my brain.

Now I realize that an eighteen year old reader might have no idea what I'm talking about. Let me explain. Watching Scramble Porn is like watching a negative of a movie. Everything is inverted. Brunettes have light hair. Blondes are dark. Everyone's teeth is black. White people have dark skin, and since Sean Michael was the only black guy you ever saw on Spice back then he was white. The picture would be inverted and unsquiggly about 25% of the time. If you were really lucky it would be consecutive. Once I saw an entire sex scene unsquiggled. The best day of my life. Usually though, you're getting a few seconds at a time. A boob here, back of her head during a blow job there. On bad days I caught what I assumed to be dialogue and plot development. My Holy Grail back then was catching at least two minutes of straight (non-inverted, minimally squiggly) black and white reception with spotty sound during a sex scene. That would happen on average, with near daily viewing, about once every few weeks, but when it did the goal was to masturbate as fast as I could.

Thinking about it has made me think two things:

1) When held up against the frightening ease of acquiring porn today, Squiggly Porn is my generation's equivalent of walking ten miles to school everyday in the snow. Just yesterday I watched more clear footage of porn than I could ever have hope do in the year I was 13. We're talking about a half hour.

The second thing is the long term effects. As with all cultural phenomenon, especially underground ones, the person participating at the time doesn't know how widespread that phenomenon is. At no time in my youth was I going to advertise what I was doing in my room for hours on end. And I'm sure that was the same for other boys. It wasn't till later, maybe when I was about 19, 20, that I found out how many guys did the same exact thing. I think just about every guy I've met within 5 years of my age, has spent a significant, if not appalling amount of his adolescence watching Scramble Porn, superstitious habits and all. If you didn't have cable you went over a friend's house. So, for the first time in the 100,000 years of human existence, in the 10,000 years of human civilization, you have a large population of young males who have been weaned sexually on images of googlygook. There has to be effects to our zeitgeist that we haven't found out about yet. Personally, I feel mild arousal when I walk through a modern art museum. Eating spaghetti has always made me feel awkward. When I'm with a woman, I need her to buzz and jiggle before I can get where I need to be. I'm joking about some of that. My point is has anyone looked into this yet? I'm sure we'll find something worth knowing.

All this reminiscing about Scramble Porn for me is about something else, something specific. Since coming of age, I found myself trying to acquire copies of the movies I used to watch, if for no other reason than to hear what they were saying. So far I've been successful. In fact so much so that I've pushed myself towards harder to get stuff.

Now, on the Spice Channel what I really loved were the commercials, the ones for phone sex (does anyone call phone sex lines anymore?). They were short, to the point, and more likely to be clear than the features. What they showed, along with the hot chick asking you to call, were vignettes, I assume from movies. And the one I used to obsess over involved a woman—she could have been a cop, but meter maid is a possibility—having sex with with a guy in what I think is a parking lot. She had short curly dark hair and was gorgeous. If you watch enough Scramble Porn, you could tell who's hot even if black is white and everything is jumbled.

I can't tell you how hard it is to find that, Holy Grail hard. If you google “cop porn” you'll get a bunch of things you really really really don't want to see. I've waded through hundreds of pictures and clips but no luck.

I've changed strategies recently and decided the best thing is to get a hold of someone who taped the movies straight off Spice, like a few dudes I knew in high school, in hopes that maybe they taped the commercials as well. So far that hasn't turned up anything either.

Some day though, I'm optimistic that I'll get what I was looking for and be happy, for about five minutes, then go obsessing about something else. Sigh.