visual porn
When it comes to actually buying a skin mag in a shop, I go for the ones with the words, (Penthouse Letters anyone?) and so it doesn't matter what clothes are on or off, in my imagination I can create whatever I want. I like words. Visual stimulation is the less strong trigger for me, and growing up in the lovely repressed and hypocritical society I did, I have been socialized to see female nudity as more acceptable than male, and more expected. The female form is familiar and beautiful. Nude males just look silly to me.
The point of nude people in skin mags is (in my opinion) that we, the ones buying the magazine, are going to be looking at those pictures and imagining that person as all turned on and ready to jump into bed with us. Easy to fake if you are female. Men, not so much able to fake stimulated. And this is my complaint about nudie mags geared toward women, the guys are not excited so what’s the point. Granted, I haven’t looked at a PlayGirl for a decade or more, they might be publishing pics of rampant males alla time now, but back when I was working in the newsstand and stocking the porn shelves, there was never an erection to be found in PlayGirl, a magazine supposedly for the chicks. ON THE OTHER HAND!!! The gay mags were FULL of HARD FLESH! Yay! And even better! Bear Magazine was full of hard, hairy chested, OMG YUM men who I wanted to pet in the worst fucking way. Yeah, I like me some hirsute beefcake, better if they are not skinny and don’t look like they’ll break if you get them in bed.
However, the fact remains that men look silly naked. I have been socialized to it, not having seen a lot of naked and mostly naked and suggestively clothed men on TV and other media growing up, naked men just aren‘t what I‘m used to looking at. Which is not to say that I don’t love to see naked men, I just am not as excited by pictures of them, I prefer the nekkid in person, thanks. And if I am looking at nude men in pictures, they had better be well past half mast, seriously. Otherwise it isn’t erotica or even porn, it’s just an anatomy illustration and I don’t care.
But visual stimulation is not the strongest trigger, it is stories that actually do it for me. While a nice picture is Yum, it is a well written story that actually can push me over the edge from ‘oh, nice, isn’t that pretty’ to ‘ohfuckyeah that’s where it’s at’ and actually make me pant, figuratively and every once in a while, literally. And I like description, I am a texture junkie, describe the sensations and the feel of skin under hands and the wet tongue on nipple and the feel of blood pounding in veins and the breath warm on neck and ear and inner thigh, and I am right there with you, all dressed up and nowhere to go, or come as the case may be.