So after a long chain of events I won't trouble you with, I ended up the other day watching what I can only describe as some online pornography, and I have to say, it left me feeling a little bit sad. Not sad for myself so much, nor even for the participants, the various innocent teens and busty milves to whose degradations I bore grim witness on that afternoon. While it did seem, yes, as if one or two of them may have been using sex, in some crucial transaction with the camera, to try and numb the pain of childhood trauma, I did also get the clear sense it was working.

No, I ended up feeling sad for the Young Generation: those just now coming of age with this limitless supply of vivid, high-grade material at their fingertips. Because you know what we had (I refuse to say used) when I was a lad? Before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye? Before the first step had been taken on the Asian Amateur's Journey, when the virtual timbers of Dr. Wankenstein's House of Spooge were still waiting to be raised?

We had books, my young friend. That's right, books—like you still have today, only not bright yellow and without C++ for Dummies written down the side.

And crazy as this must surely sound, I'm here to tell you they were better.

There did exist filmed pornography, back in the day. Where I grew up—England—you would see policemen posing beside great confiscated stacks of the stuff on the evening news. I'm told that porn was easier to get hold of here in America, but that for practical reasons it was usually only viewed at bachelor parties and oilmen's poker nights—the kind of events you don't get invited to when you're 12. There were dirty magazines, of course, but when you're trying to imagine yourself participating in a vigorous activity with which you as yet have no experience, an unmoving image, however lurid, has limitations up the wazoo.

Which is why when I was a lad, every young man did at some point creep down the stairs to see what he could find on the shelves of the family home. Nonfiction was a bust, unless you struck gold in The Sensuous Couple or The Joy of Sex. Browsing the fiction, you wanted to stay alert for spines with cursive typescript and/or female author names. Anything with Naked or Virgin or even Lover in the title was worth a closer look—not so much in explicit hope of naked virgins making love but because you didn't get to use words like that until about 1950, and when it came to dirty passages, no matter what some people still like to claim about Chaucer, later was always better.