When I was twenty years old I worked for a company that did short-run manual labor contracts like brush clearing, pressure washing and picking up trash on the side of the road. The job paid $50 per day, cash under the table. 99% of the workers were either felons with outstanding warrants or illegal immigrants, because those were the only people who would do the disgusting, dangerous, monotonous, back breaking work we did for so little money. I was there because my brothers were there, and it was better than my last job washing dishes at [Bennigans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCd04rpRp0).

We did a lot of work on long, lonely stretches of Texas country roads and found a lot of strange things motorists had thrown out their windows. Mostly we found old, sun-scorched, water-stained trucker porn magazines. These were all nasty, skanky, degrading, depressing smut rags that made Hustler look like Vanity Fair. The kind of magazines that published pictures of homeless guys dressed as Santa gangbanging a haggard woman with missing teeth. Until I worked at this job I didn’t even realize magazines like that existed.

In case you’re wondering, and you need it spelled out, the reason there’s so much trucker porn on the side of the road is because truckers masturbate to it while they’re driving, and when they’re bored with a magazine, they just throw it out the window.

Half the people who worked for that company either lived or partied at my apartment. So when members of our work crews would find these magazines, they’d keep them and put them in the magazine racks in my/our bathrooms. The house also had a subscription to Playboy and Maxim. So we had a range of toilet reading material, but mostly there was just old, cover-less, sun-dried, wrinkled trucker smut.

One day I was sitting on the toilet flipping through the magazines looking for a Playboy with an article I hadn’t read yet, but all I could find was soul-crushing trucker smut. Fed up, I threw away all of the road porn so all that was left was the classy stuff.

A few days later me, my two brothers and four or five other guys from our crew came home and started our nightly ritual of drinking to congratulate ourselves for pushing the limits of human endurance at work that day and to forget how hopeless our lives were. A few beers into the evening someone shouted from one of the bathrooms, “HEY! WHERE’D ALL THE GOOD PORN GO!?!” I chuckled to myself nonchalantly, but literally everyone else in house jumped up in a panic and ran to the bathrooms shouting, “What!? Is the good porn missing?” “Hey, where’d all the good porn go!?” “Who the fuck took all the good porn!?”

Casually, I remarked, “You mean all that trucker porn? Man, I threw that nasty stuff out.”

Then pandemonium erupted. Everyone was furious. They were seriously offended. It got tense, and for a second I feared for my safety. I tried to explain that I was doing us a favor by getting rid of all the riff raff, but everyone responded that they hated the vanilla classy stuff. It was like looking at a photograph of a fruit bowl to them. They needed something far, far, far more raw and primal to feel alive.

I looked at my roommates and coworkers with new eyes that day. I didn’t want to know what depraved life experiences made them feel a connection with gutter skank erotica, and it frightened me that I was the only one in the room (or on the highway) who enjoyed glamour porn.

A few months later the lease on our apartment ran out, and we all went our separate ways. I went on to become a computer help desk technician and network administrator. I’ve found porn on many many people’s computers, and I have never once found a folder full of glamour porn. Every jpg and video file has been self-loathing degradation smut. I challenge you to go into any sex store and look at their magazine and video selections. Most of it is far from classy.

I hate to burst your bubble, but most of the men you know are turned on by scarier stuff than you’d be comfortable knowing. Statistically speaking, trucker smut is the good porn.

This essay was originally posted on my main site, [thewisesloth.com](https://thewisesloth.com/2015/10/03/tales-from-the-wise-sloth-the-good-porn-story/) on October 3, 2015.