In my continuing attempt to keep this sex-writer’s blog at least marginally focused on sex, here’s another smut review I wrote for Adult Friend Finder magazine — my review of “Dirty Found” magazine. I do have a couple of rants-in-progress that I was hoping to finish this weekend, but with three parties plus picking up my mother-in-law at the airport, somehow having a life got in the way of writing about it. I promise to be out in the next few days with my rant about people who disrespect science while drooling over exciting techy toys. In the meantime, you’ll just have to settle for porn reviews. Enjoy!

Hide and Seek
by Greta Christina

Dirty Found Magazine, issue #1
Davy Rothbart & Jason Bitner, editors
http://www.foundmagazine.com/
$10.00

I can tell you this for certain: it’s not like any other dirty magazine you’ve seen.

Here’s what it is. Have you ever heard of Found Magazine? It’s a magazine of “found” art and writing: love letters, to-do lists, snapshots, doodles, diaries, etc. People find stuff on buses, in garage sales, at cafe tables, even just on the street or in the trash — and they send them in to the magazine, which publishes them. It’s a cool thing, a fascinating glimpse into other people’s secret hearts and minds.

Dirty Found is the same thing, but… well, dirty. The letters, the photos, the drawings, the to-do lists, the email printouts… all of them have to do with sex. The photos found tucked into used books show people proudly displaying their naked or half-naked bodies. The drawings found on the street depict naked people, explicit sex, bizarre erotic scenarios. The journal found in the trash pile gives meticulously explicit details about the journal writer’s wildly kinky sex life — and the extreme sex fantasies that even she’s scared of.

In a way, it’s like a magazine of amateur porn: like letters written to dirty magazines, or photos published with adult personal ads. But unlike amateur porn, the stuff in Dirty Found wasn’t meant for public consumption. It’s not about what writers or artists or photographers think their audience will find hot. It’s about what ordinary people personally and privately think is hot. It doesn’t show the sex lives people deliberately show to the public — it shows the sex lives people meant to keep to themselves and their lovers. (There’s arguably an ethical problem with making this material public; but the magazine does make an effort to conceal people’s identities, with names blacked out in the writing and bars over the eyes in the photos. Anyway, if people wanted this stuff kept private, they probably shouldn’t have left it lying around.)

So like I said, this is definitely not your grandfather’s porno mag. It’s much more personal than that, more intimate. Dirty Found is like a secret spy camera in a motel room, like being a fly on the wall in dozens of bedrooms at once. It’s a peek through a keyhole at the dirty freaky things people do but never tell anyone about; it’s the naughty, nasty, voyeuristic thrill of seeing things you aren’t supposed to see.

At the same time, it’s unbelievably sweet and touching. The photos especially: the people in them look so pleased with themselves, so proud of their bare asses or their sexy underwear or just their cocks and cunts. And it’s so ferociously personal. Seeing these pictures and reading these notes, you almost feel like you’re the one they were meant for. It’s as if you’re the naughty secret lover these folks were thinking of when they scribbled their fantasies in a notebook, like you’re the giggling, dirty-minded boyfriend or girlfriend who snapped the picture when they took off their clothes and spread their legs for the camera.

And the variety is staggering. There are love notes about sexy moonlit walks, and love notes about vibrators and jacking off. There’s a carefully typed story about watching a neighbor girl undress, and hastily scrawled notes about doing meth and getting gang-banged. There are drawings of women being pissed on, and of medieval gay orgies, and of schoolgirls fucking themselves with high-voltage vibrators. And there are photos. Oh, my God, are there photos. There are photos of naked girls with their legs spread, and of guys in bondage getting enemas; girls on all fours and guys with their hands in their pants; close-ups of hard-ons and close-ups of feet; women in lingerie and men in lingerie; and photo after photo of plain old ordinary happy naked people, in beds or on sofas or God knows where.

My personal favorite is the journal. Several pages of this one journal are reproduced in Dirty Found, the journal of a writer/performance artist/dirty dirty girl that someone found in some New York trash. The journal describes this woman’s kinky sexual adventures with her lover and her fantasies about him, adventures and fantasies that would put many a smut writer to shame. She writes about ordered to dress up like a slut and display her ass, being ordered to lick his asshole and beg to get fucked. She writes about pissing on her lover, and getting pissed on by him, and fucking him with an enema nozzle before she delivers the enema. She writes about the freaky shit fantasies they talk about while they’re fucking, and the even more freaky shit fantasies that she thinks about when she masturbates. (She draws, too, so some of these stories come with illustrations.)

But this is a journal, not a smutty novel… so not everything in it goes right. For instance: She describes a moment where her lover began to beat her bare ass with a belt; but he hit her too high, it was unpleasant and un-erotic, and she made him stop. Now, in a smutty story, this could be jarring, the sort of thing that jolts you out of the fantasy and back into the yucky real world. But here, the real world is the whole point, and the mis-strokes and awkward bits just make the image even more real, more immediate — and therefore, a whole lot more hot. I love what a shameless pervert this woman is, how intense she is about her dirtiness and how much she enjoys it. And I like her style — her journal is unpolished but quite well-written, probably the best-written thing in the whole magazine.

Which leads me to my next point, and a bit of fair warning. The smut in Dirty Found isn’t professional, and as a result… well, it isn’t professional. The writing is badly spelled and often rather trite; most of the drawings are kind of cheesy; the photos are poorly lit, and the people in them are pretty average-looking for the most part, and their sexy poses are often awkward and less than entirely flattering. I’m not saying this as a criticism — if it were all super-professional and well-made, the magazine wouldn’t be what it is. I just want you to know what to expect. Don’t get Dirty Found expecting slick stories of perfect fantasies, or beautifully lit photos of exquisite models. Get it expecting a sweet, sloppy, vivid, unsettling, funny, tacky, and utterly true picture of what’s going on inside other people’s libidos.