My boss is a good twenty years younger than I am. He thinks I’m the perfect person to write an article about vintage/retro porn. Cause I’m old. Cute.

Age cracks aside, I dig vintage and retro porn. I probably like it better than most porn. Of course, what’s retro to an old bat like me might be considered vintage by a young wise-ass like my boss. I’ll try to define the two in this first of this two-part article, Retro Smut Lovin!

Kids today know a lot more about porn than they ever did before. Thanks to pop culture and the Internet, porn is everywhere and they’re learning this fact at a younger and younger age. I feel sad for them because there are so many of us who never knew such things existed until we happened across the dirty magazines hidden under our Dad’s mattress. I’m 43. The first time I saw one of my Dad’s Playboys was about 1971. By then, porn was a more predominant industry than it had been in the decades and millennia before. The early seventies included the sexual revolution and boogied right into the advent of the home video player.

"In the adult Internet, there's vintage porn and then there's retro porn."

In case you don’t know this, there’s always been porn. Some of the very first carvings and drawings were of highly sexual earth goddesses. Archeologists recently uncovered a whole section in ancient Pompeii, full of graphic hardcore paintings and murals. Every century, age and time produced some kind of smut. As the technology to mass-produce the smut got better, there was more smut to save and/or sell. Buy the turn of the twentieth century mankind had photography -which only added to the library of available porn in the world. Then came magazines and home video and cable and now, digital porn online.

When it comes to older porn, I’m not talking about images of models who are over 40. I’m talking about photos and film that were created at least ten years ago. Better yet, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago. I’m talking vintage or retro porn.

What’s the difference?

It’s kind of like appraising antique furniture. A true antique has to be at least a hundred years old. Vintage was a term they made up for items created less than 100 years ago. Retro is stuff 60-20 years old. In the adult Internet, there’s vintage porn and then there’s retro porn.

Vintage Porn

George Eastman introduced the first box camera in 1886. Even before this, there were amateur photographers all over the world taking dirty pictures. Sadly, most of those early photos literally disintegrated over time. Naturally, many were destroyed intentionally or through neglect. However, many remain and there are magic elves out there who took the time to preserve them and convert them into digital format.

In 1923, Kodak released first 16 mm CINE-KODAK Motion Picture Camera and the KODASCOPE Projector and by the early 1940’s the men’s magazine industry was in full swing. Smut took an upswing in both acceptance and production. It was still a major societal taboo but it was a taboo any adult could find if they tried. Towards the end of the nineteen 40’s and the beginning of the rocket age, the pin-up calendar, the strip bar and those dirty playing cards were part of the culture. I guess technically, porn created from 1930-1950 might fall into the vintage category.

But in the 1950’s things got very kinky. Sure, the fifties were the age of Frankie and Annette and Ozzie and Harriet. But that decade was also the age of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, missile bras and garter belts, stocking hose and high heel pumps. It was also the age of the burlesque queen and Bettie Page. Quite a few guys got rich from selling stag films and dirty books. Some even opened camera clubs where photographers paid a fee to take pictures of scantily clad/naked models. There was quite a bit of retro porn emanating from the fifties and even more from the sixties, seventies and eighties.

When it comes to the oldest vintage porn, chances are, it’s public domain. That doesn’t mean you’re going to find stacks of images of Gibson girls and flappers and not expect to pay money for them. Somebody owns them. If the photographer is named on the picture, it’s possible his/her family might want a cut of the resale royalties. If they came from an established publication, the publisher probably has rights to their ownership. If you go to a garage sale and walk away with a collection of dirty postcards from 1887-1920, you might get away with scanning the images and using them for content. When it comes to images, publications and film from the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or nineties, somebody probably owns the distribution rights.

Now that you’re somewhat familiar with vintage/retro porn, stayed tuned to Cozy Frog for the conclusion of this two-part article. I’ll cover the ways you can make money by selling old porn to new customers on the World Wide Web!

** Click Here For: Retro Smut Lovin'! - Part #2