Found Porn In Hedges And Tree Forts
In my younger teen years, my most reliable source of porn was raiding the “tree fort” stashes of older boys in the rural woods around where I grew up. I never knew that sharing porn by leaving it hidden in the woods was a general phenomenon, but apparently, it was! According to Dr. Kate Lister, the behavior was widespread among my generation. In the UK they call it “hedge porn” and Dr. Lister has data:
Of the 2,254 people who filled out the survey, 1,944 (86.2 per cent) confirmed they had found pornographic material in an outdoor location. 1,519 of the respondents were male, 619 were female, 100 were non-binary, and 16 identified as “other” or preferred not to say. So, this was by no means an exclusively male experience.
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By far the biggest age demographic to report finding hedge porn are the Gen X, 1970s babies. Coming in at a whopping 41.8 per cent of the sample, that’s almost double the amount of the second closest group, the “elder millennials”, 1980s babies, who accounted for 22.6 per cent. As to be expected, the decline in hedge porn sightings correlates with the rise of the internet and online pornography. Of those born after the year 2000, just 1.04 per cent had found porn in a hedge.
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The size of the stash varied considerably, from a few torn pages, through to whole boxes, carrier bags, and in one case, a suitcase stuffed full of pornographic magazines. What’s more, while most of the respondents reported finding porn under hedges or dumped in the woods, scrubland, riverbeds, carparks, and abandoned warehouses also seem to have also been prime sites for finding second-hand porn.
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So, to the big question. Who was leaving pornography out in the wild? 181 respondents to the survey reported leaving porn in an outdoor location. 176 of those were men, 3 were women, and 2 identified as non-binary. The youngest reported being 7 at the time and the oldest was 62, but there is a significant spike between the ages of 13 and 21 years old. The most common reason given for dumping a porn stash outdoors is the need to get rid of it but being too embarrassed to just put it in the bin where it could be seen by others.
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But still, why outside? Why so often in the woods or stuffed under a hedge? The answer to that seems to be, at least in part, because the dumper wanted someone else would find it, a kind of “feedforward” for porn.
As one person wrote, “It was an unspoken rule that everything was left for others to find, I never added but never took either.” Another explanation was, “it felt natural to return it. I kept it intact. Like lost and found.” The idea of dumping porn in order to replenish the wild stocks is an interesting and unexpected one, and it repeats throughout the answers.
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