History Main / PoorMansPorn

* The first description of the female orgasm in literature was written by the 9th-century nun and polymath Hildegard of Bingen, in a description of the religious rapture she experiences with a recurring fantasy of an angel with a beautiful face who penetrates her through the heart with a flaming spear. Needless to say, there was little else available in a convent.

* Older television sets had a focus knob which the especially persistent masturbator could turn to bring more focus to the scramble -- you never got a perfect picture, but could see more than a regular scramble.[[note]]Cue many tropers saying to themselves "I thought I was the only one who thought of that!"[[/note]] Unfortunately this required ''constant'' attention to keep up with the constantly changing screen -- and usually using your dominant hand, too.
** It was also possible in some cases to get a clearer picture by turning the channel-change dial halfway between the designated channel and the next one up.[[note]]Cue more tropers saying to themselves "I thought I was the only one who thought of that!"[[/note]] Like the focus knob, this required attention, and like the focus knob, the channel dial went the way of the dodo eventually.

* In ''The Devil's Playground'', schoolboys are seen ogle lingerie ads in a newspaper. The film takes place at a very strict high school seminary where the boys aren't even allowed to bathe naked. One of the monks who teaches says that with all the rules, they've turned the dictionary and ''Readers Digest'' into dirty books.

* The titular character in ''Meeting Daddy'' is a strict Baptist who disapproves of premarital sex, so he makes his daughter and the man she is engaged to sleep in separate rooms when the man comes to visit the family home in Georgia. The man becomes seriously sex-starved and starts fantasizing about all the things that turn him on; he mentions at one point to his fiancée that he's always had a fetish for old-fashioned bullet bras, and used to masturbate to pictures of women wearing them. As it happens, the fiancee's mother used to wear a bullet bra, and the girl slips it on under her blouse in the hopes that her boyfriend will notice. He does.

[[AC:Live-Action TV]]

* Taken to the extremes in ''Webcomic/JoeVsElanSchool''. Amongst all the other ways being kept at the titular BoardingSchoolOfHorrors damaged his psyche, Joe mentions in an aside that being a hormonal teenager cooped up in a place where every expression of sexuality were strictly forbidden and would be met with punishment, including merely looking at someone of the opposite sex in the "wrong" way, made him rather desperate for any kind of way to release the tension. He remember that he frequently would flip through the math textbooks he was handed, to see if there were any female stock-photo models in them and if they had any kind of exposed skin, noting that even the sight of a female ankle would be enough to make him feel hot and bothered.

There are some things that all humans need from time to time. Apart from food, shelter and love...they need sex, or failing that, at least MediaNotes/{{porn|ography}}. Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to come by, even as an adult -- maybe it's a more straitlaced era where pornography is uncommon or hard to come by even for the most resourceful people (or maybe you can come by it, but you can't talk about it on television!) Or maybe the urge, shall we say, has only just set in and there's no actual pornography nearby. What to do?

There are some things that all humans need from time to time. Apart from food, shelter and love...they need sex, or failing that, at least UsefulNotes/{{porn|ography}}. Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to come by, even as an adult -- maybe it's a more straitlaced era where pornography is uncommon or hard to come by even for the most resourceful people (or maybe you can come by it, but you can't talk about it on television!) Or maybe the urge, shall we say, has only just set in and there's no actual pornography nearby. What to do?

* Creator/BobChipman has argued that this was one of the leading reasons why Hollywood made so many Biblical {{epic|Movie}}s during [[UsefulNotes/FallOfTheStudioSystem the 1950s and early '60s]]. With UsefulNotes/TheHaysCode still in effect yet social mores having moved on from the time in which it was implemented, the major studios turned to Scripture for source material that would satisfy audience demands for more sex and violence yet would be difficult for MoralGuardians or the MPAA to criticize, lest they be framed as trying to censor Literature/TheBible. He believes that the downfall of the Code in [[UsefulNotes/NewHollywood the late '60s]] killed off these sorts of films, as now filmmakers no longer needed the figleaf of accurately telling Bible stories to depict more graphic content on screen.

'''Scrambled Porn''': Mostly seen in shows from the 80's and 90's, as [[TechnologyMarchesOn newer technology has made it obsolete]], a character will try to make out a pay-per-view television program--porn in this case--that has been scrambled by the cable provider because the character hasn't paid for it. Every so often they might claim to see a nipple...wait no those are her eyes. This particular variant died out in the late 90's with the rise of satellite TV and digital cable. Nowadays you'll simply get a blank screen if you turn to a channel you're not subscribed to or a pay-per-view program you haven't bought. If scrambled porn was before your time, you can get an idea of what it looked like with this [[NotSafeForWork Safe For Work]] Website/YouTube video of scrambled Discovery Channel here: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjTLF1wn2xs Scrambled Cable Channel]]. You can see how the occasional recognizable object would come into sight.

* For anyone with surfing behind a filter, Website/DeviantART may also fit the bill. Why else would the "artistic nude" pieces get so much attention?

* In a ''Comicstrip/BigNate'' strip, Nate tries to teach Spitsy to attack cats by showing him Ellen's cat calendar. [[IllBeInMyBunk Spitsy immediately runs off with it and starts drooling over it like Nate's showed him porn.]]