Reality Porn: British Phone Box Cards

Please note: This post contains fairly explicit descriptions of my personal sex life and my personal sexual practices and proclivities. Family members and others who don’t want to read about that, now would be a good time to stop reading.

No, really.

Spank_me_cane_me
I recently came across a lovely set of dirty web pages (the site has several pages , but they won’t all let you link directly) devoted to British phone box cards — those cards printed up and placed in phone booths by British prostitutes, dommes, and submissives to advertise their services. (Thanks to Spanking Blog for the tip!)

Lucy_needs_a_firm_hand
I’ve always been fascinated with these phone box cards, and have always found them very hot and very sexually compelling. More so in a lot of ways than regular porny porn. So when I had a chance to look over this sizable collection of them — a collection full of examples that happen to push my particular sexual buttons, collected by someone who clearly shares those buttons — it gave me a perfect opportunity to, shall we say, meditate, on what it is about these cards that’s so mesmerizing.

I think it has to do with reality.

Innocent_college_student
I’ve always found real sex, and realistic sex fantasies, much hotter than impossible or implausible ones. Maybe it’s because I have such a literal mind. But there’s an immediacy to real-life sex depictions and realistic porn that I find very compelling. It makes me feel like I’m right there — in the picture, in the story, in the movie. (I write about this a little more in A Sex Writer’s Defense of Visual Porn.) Even when I’m making up sex fantasies for myself, I have a weird compulsion to come up with a plausible back-story before I get to the good parts.

Which brings me back to the phone box cards.

The_strap
See, these aren’t just sexy photos and drawings of pretty girls getting spanked. They’re sexy photos and drawings of pretty girls who want you to spank them for money. The cards don’t just give you a fantasy for you to whack off to. The cards represent real women for you to potentially get off with. Who are, in fact, actively encouraging you to get off with them.

Punishment_at_its_best
Obviously, dirty photos and videos depict real women, too. But the fact that these cards are the advertising cards of professional women means that the women are, in theory, available — in a way that, for the overwhelming majority of us, porn actors and models aren’t.

School_leaver_needs_firm_strappin_2
And that gives the fantasy an impact, an immediacy, that regular porn just doesn’t have. It’s so much easier to imagine taking one of these phone-box girls over my knee and spanking her hard — because I could. In real life. (Or if not that exact girl — who knows how old these cards are, and if any of these women are still working — then another one not unlike her.) It could happen. And not just in a “Yeah, sure, theoretically anything could happen,” way, but in an “I could make this happen” way. If I were visiting London, and had a decent amount of extra cash in my pocket, I could find one of these cards, and call one of these girls, and do things with her that I will never in my entire life do with a porn star or a fetish model.

(Or I could do it here in San Francisco, on the Web. But that’s a subject for another post.)

Naughty_schoolgirl_emily_jane
All of which gives these cards a weirdly intense impact on my libido — one that definitely outstrips the erotic power of the images just by themselves.

Neat.

P.S. I was talking with my friend Tim about this today, and he told me that the Loud Family song “Self Righteous Boy Reduced to Tears” was inspired by one of these phone box cards. (A more dommy one than the ones I’m showing here, I assume.) And I say yet again: Neat. I had no idea.

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Reality Porn: British Phone Box Cards
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9 thoughts on “Reality Porn: British Phone Box Cards

  1. 1

    What I don’t understand is… how can these so blatantly exist? I thought that the UK had the Spanner Law which made all S&M (even consensual) illegal? Not only that, but isn’t prostitution illegal in the UK? Wouldn’t advertising this service for a real encounter (instead of just phone sex) be a way too easy way to get yourself shut down and in jail? I mean, all they’d have to do is pick up a card, call the number, book an appointment, show up, and slap cuffs on the working gal. Oh… in a real, you’re-actually-getting-your-ass-hauled-off-to-jail way, not in the sexy role play way.

  2. M
    2

    It has been a few years since I was in London, but when I was there they were all over the phone booths. It may be illegal but you could not avoid them if you tried. I grabbed a whole bunch of them and was using them for notecards for maybe a year afterwards.

  3. 3

    There is no “Spanner law”; the Spanner folks were charged with “assault occasioning actual bodily harm”, as they played fairly heavy. In UK law, there’s a threshold of lasting injury which a person is not allowed to consent to. (Exactly how invasive medical procedures are legal is a subtlety I don’t currently understand.)
    Anyway, spanking doesn’t reach that threshold. You are allowed to consent to common assault, which causes no significant injury.
    As for prostitution, many jurisdictions have a very narrow definition of what constitutes “sex” for the purposes of prostitution. Selling titilation is fine as long as tab A doesn’t go into slot B. Thus, professional S/M is completely legal.
    Finally, if you read the spannertrust.org web site, it’s mentioned repeatedly that the prosecution was only possible because the participants videotaped the activity and admitted it when questioned (they thought it was all completely legal). If you want to do heavy SM in the UK, the subtext goes, keep your mouth shut and the police won’t have the evidence to prosecute even if they want to.
    So, now that people know the precautions to take, there’s no serious barrier to whatever SM you like in the UK. Indeed, the original prosecution only started because the police thought they were watching a murder(!) and did a huge investigation. There was pressure to justify the expenditure by charging someone. Most cops don’t care in the first place.

  4. 5

    Wow. This is a perfect example of why I read this blog. frequently witty and past edgy, all the way into totally raunchy. I agree Greta. those are masterfully made ads. I want to whack somebody on the butt just looking at them. and like you said, I guess I could!

  5. Tim
    6

    Hey didn’t I give you a set of these when I came back from England a while ago too? The saddest thing is that they were so appropriately placed in the old red phone boxes of which very few are left. Sigh.

  6. 8

    Is it okay to comment on such an old post?
    This part made me laugh:
    “Even when I’m making up sex fantasies for myself, I have a weird compulsion to come up with a plausible back-story before I get to the good parts.”
    That is so me. I always make up elaborate back-stories to frame my weird, kinky fantasies… 😉

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