When I was about 10, my friend Kris Henry and I (and others, though I don’t recall who) were playing in a construction site, throwing rocks at a phone book in a trench. Eventually, we tired of the rocks and climbed down to assess the damage. We discovered that the book was not, in fact, a telephone directory, but a thick issue of Penthouse.
At 10, I was more puzzled than titilated by our find. After a thorough, bewildering perusal, Kris buried in it the compost pile in his backyard. I never saw it again–maybe he still has it.
Ironically, my only clear memory from that magazine is not a photo, but a bad pun in the text of a foot fetish pictorial. For the rest of my days, the phrase “admit defeat” will hold special meaning for me.
This childhood anecdote is brought to you by Ask Metafilter. Somebody recently raised the spectre of finding pornography in the woods, and the floodgates opened.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I never went that far. There was plenty of porn in my parents bedroom. Under the bed. In the briefcase. Locked. But the combination was my step-fathers birthday. Mraw.
There were some other magazines and videos in my moms nightstand, too. 🙂
I swear, I found them when I was looking for christmas presents…
I can hardly wait to see the next entry in Darren’s blog’s sudden descent into work-unsafeness.
Like Donna, I didn’t need to go to the woods…my Dad was trying to put Star Wars on the Betamax for me and I guess he grabbed the wrong tape.
I never found any in the woods, but one day walking home from school I found four giant bundles of Playboys that had been tied up and left for the garbage/recycling truck to pick up.
I had to make two trips to get those things home (which involved going through the woods…does that count?).
Oh, so YOU’RE the ones that found it. I’ve been looking for my lost magazine for 20 years!
Hilarious. I can’t believe how many people found porn in the woods as children! I did too. In fact, it was also a Penthouse. I remember feeling both repelled by and attracted to what I saw. It was strange. I remember that day vividly.
I found a Hustler when I was 11 or so, in the woods of course.
Didn’t all neighbourhoods have porn in the woods? It was almost communal. You could almost imagine an alternate Stand By Me universe where kids go on a long walk in the woods to find porn. When I moved to Vancouver, I wondered where city kids kept such things. I don’t just mean porn, but other forbidden items, treeforts, and space for alone time. And I wondered where people went to make out (NOT as kids!), since there are always people everywhere.
BTW, this is a really funny MeFi post:
That must have been a scary-ass Penthouse for you to mistake it for a phonebook.
When I was 9 I found my father’s porn stash (90% of all childhood porn discoveries come in the pursuit of presents) to which I proceeded to charge other kids in the neighbourhood fifty cents to view. Girls got to see them for free though.
Mad playa even as shorty.
I found porn down at a place we called Turtle Rock because the turtles used to come up there to sun themselves. Someone had stuffed skin mags into a hole underneath the rock.
Some lines from the recent Smog cd fit here:
“Skin mags in the brambles
for the first part of my life I thought all women had orange skin”
from “Drinking At The Dam”
I don’t know if you are still doing this, but I, too found some porn in the woods one time. It had a picture of a woman with hole through her mouth. I was baffled then and am still a little confused. No idea who published that gem.
There is a funny short film just doing festivals that deals with this exact subject. It’s called ‘Love Does Grow on Trees’ – check it out if you can!
Here is a video I made about this subject.