Everything the Internet Has, and Why You Still Miss the Winking Brunette on Late-Night Cable

The internet has given us everything. You want it, it exists, it’s indexed, it’s three clicks away and usually free. Women doing things to each other that require consultation of a physics textbook. Men with anatomically improbable equipment doing things that require an entirely different textbook. Every conceivable variation on every conceivable act, in every conceivable combination, available at any hour without friction or shame or the need to explain yourself to anyone.

And yet there’s something about having access to all of it that makes you nostalgic for the one thing you had to wait for. Staying up past midnight on a Friday, volume low, lying on the floor in front of a television, hoping some late-night cable channel would show something worth watching. Softcore films with titles like Emmanuelle, Schoolgirl Report, Tender Cousins—films where the sex was more suggestion than demonstration, where a few bouncing breasts and a generous expanse of body hair generated more genuine heat than anything the modern internet serves by the terabyte. The context mattered. The anticipation mattered. The sense that you were getting away with something mattered enormously.

The Instagram account Retro Fucking gets this completely. It’s a curated archive of erotic cinema from the sixties, seventies, and eighties—actresses like Abigail Clayton, Marianne Dupont, and Sylvia Kristel in films like Six Swedes on Ibiza and Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, from a time when sex onscreen was treated as something slightly forbidden and therefore genuinely interesting, rather than something to be catalogued and optimized. From the Instagram you can find your way to the full archive without much effort. For anyone over eighteen who finds the current state of online pornography as exhausting as I do—this is where to start.