My first exposure to "dirty books" was those old men's magazines from the 50s & 60s, you know the ones that had the black censor bars all over them. I was about 11 or 12 and had found my uncle's mostly forgotten stash while hunting for some comic books he said I could borrow. Never knew what all the fuss was about from the bits I could see. But they had some very good short stories in them and that summer I got hooked on hard boiled detective fiction. All because of porn.

Playgirl? Yeah, I bought one of those too, sometime in the 90's. Needed some nude male art references and it was the only thing available at the time. We used to buy a lot of porn back in art school. It was a community college with emphasis on commercial art not fine but some of us were into comics and our professor didn't see anything wrong with us using Playboy and Playgirl since live models were not available. Not to mention probably not in the budget. My strict Catholic high school teachers, many of whom were nuns, would have been horrified. My old classmates, on the other hand, would have died from envy that I got to see all that hot, sweaty naked flesh while they went on to secretarial or nursing or business degrees or got married right after prom. So yeah, I'm kinda fond of what the Puritans label smut.