The defining experience of Gen-X is woods porn.

You know, waterlogged stashes of porno mags you found in a rain-sodden cardboard box behind the propane tanks as a pre-teen.

(You don't know? Ha ha how old are you?)

Pulling apart the pages was a delicate operation -- the core of the paper had broken down and the ink on facing pages ofent stuck together better than the page itself.

One false move and a the image would tear free, tearing a white swath over what might be CRITICAL DETAILS.

I've talked to Boomers and Millennials and they seem to have no idea what I am talking about.

Who was hiding all this porn in the interstitial woods of suburban America? Like, grown ass men?

My theory: it was teens, stealing them from their parents or from stores and then caching them outside the house safe from parental contraband raids.

We kids were finding them and were just like 😳

We were like, 8. Did Boomers' parents even have porn to steal? I mean, they must have. But Playboy launched in, like the mid 50s, so maybe it wasn't a mass market thing?

And Millennials had a perfectly good Internet -- they didn't need to hide paper outdoors.

So there was theis weird Gen-X window left open.

Woods porn. There's something faerie about it, discovering this magnetic, alien beauty with your friends in the liminal forest at the edge of town. Pull tabs and broken beer bottles. The dreaded white swath.