The Death of Scrambled Porn (And What You Can Do To Save It!)

Technology is certainly a-hustlin’ and a-bustlin’, providing us with all sorts of unprecedented access to media: broke college students can watch full movies for free at the click of a button; Wall Street execs can figure out the optimal time to jump just by looking at their Blackberry updates; both of the world’s Amazon Kindle owners can pay to read books they could have gotten at the library for free; and stoners can try to figure out their DVR so they can watch the Nannerpuss commercial over and over again.

That being said, technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Let’s not forget about all those media that are rapidly going the way of pogs and the dodo. I’ve seen minidiscs come and, thankfully, go. I’m a bit more concerned about the waning popularity of newspapers, since a good stack helps the diminutive Sax see over the steering wheel. Most importantly, though, it seems that with the advent of digital cable, scrambled porn has completely died off.

For my female, Mormon and six-year-old readers who may not be familiar, scrambled porn was what adolescent boys had to settle for back in my day, unless they were the son of the town’s token Cool Dad who actually had the Playboy channel. Y’see, back in the days of analog cable, if you didn’t get a porn channel, it would just appear as lots of blurry, scrambled static stuff. With some luck, tenacity, and tin foil, however, that blur would sometimes take the form of a boob! Rumor has it that a kid down Back Harlow Road once even spotted half a vagina, the lucky fuck.

Now I know what you’re thinking: But Sax, isn’t life better when we can get all sorts of crazy, kinky, non-scrambled porn at the click of a button? Don’t get me wrong, I love that I can think up something that would have been absolutely unheard of just a few years ago, and be able to find a video of it online within seconds, like say, three midgets, Orrin Hatch and a paraplegic sloth….

…okay, I’m back. Sorry for the delay, I got, um… distracted. Anyway, scrambled porn had so many great qualities that can’t possibly be replaced by all the girls and cups in the world. For one thing, it’s the only porn this side of Erotic Photo Hunt that is its own little game. Like the Blue’s Clues of sex, horny twelve-year-olds had to search around and try to piece everything together in their Spanking Chair until it all comes together in the form of a Goo Skidoo. It’s not just vigorous masturbation; it’s a learning experience!

Keeping on the subject of children’s shows, I think it’s also worth noting that Barney, Mister Rogers and (obviously) Pee Wee Herman would appreciate the value of scrambled porn. This is because it gives all viewers an opportunity to exercise their imaginations, as countless shows from our youth have encouraged us to do (Or maybe kids’ shows are just an elaborate ruse to get people to watch scrambled porn, which would be fine by me). If you take scrambled porn at face value, it’s really not that sexy. But if you let yourself try to read between the blurry lines, you can see yourself being slapped on the ass with a spatula by your elementary school lunch lady, right there on the TV, which kicks the crap out of anything I’ve found on RedTube (and believe me, I’ve seen it all… several times).

That’s not all that’s great about scrambled porn! Unlike other pornography (except for stumbling across the ol’ mid-orgasm Tranny Surprise) scrambled porn forced viewers to explore all ends of their sexuality, and not just because it usually took place in a room full of guys during sleepovers. They would squint just right and tell themselves that they were staring at a nice luscious pair of breasts, only to find out as the focus changed that they’ve been wanking it to the back of some dude’s scrotum. (As an aside, such is the Murphy’s Law of scrambled porn: If the image becomes clear, it’s balls). In our world of taboo and lacking sexual education, Kinsey would be damn proud that scrambled porn has filled some gaps.

So what do we do? Can we let scrambled pornography become a relic of the past, reserved in a museum alongside cuneiform tablets and Gutenberg’s printing press? Should we accept that pornography will never again be able to stir our imaginations along with our loins? To this I shout a hearty, resounding “NO”, hoping that my cries will serve as a beacon to my scrambled porn-loving brethren across the far reaches the Internet!

But how can we save this medium from extinction? I propose the creation of a charitable organization that aims to focus all of its resources on the preservation of scrambled pornography: a blurry, shaky, negatively-colored Sierra Club of ephemeral, inaudible sex, if I may. I’ve even gone through the trouble of thinking up a name for such an organization: the Scrambled Pornography Continuation Association, or SPCA for short.

So how can you do your part? Start your own local SPCA chapter! Local chapters may try to raise money through old-fashioned scrambled porn bake sales, or they could get a bit more inventive, such as by playing Scrambled Porn I-Spy:

1) Have community members each pay a $20 entry fee

2) Set up a projector in a large public space (or in your parents’ basement, if you’d like to simulate most real scrambled porn experiences)

3) Play a clip of scrambled pornography

4) Award prizes to the first people to correctly identify a nipple, a dildo, a feather duster, a Rubik’s Cube, and so forth.

All proceeds will be pooled together until there is enough money to purchase a cable television channel. Just like how some rich guy bought a video of Marilyn Monroe fellating a man just so it would go unviewed, keeping her legacy untainted, the SPCA will buy space its own channel in order to protect it from the clutches of unscrambled pornography. In fact, it will be an improvement on scrambled porn, since it will feature 24 hours of constant blurry-blurry; no more boring-ass horseracing before dark!

The SPCA will even try to use new media to benefit scrambled porn: Watch it on the go with your iPod Touch; get automatic vibrating alerts on your cell phone every time the Scrambled Porn Channel shows what may or may not be insertion; or use DVR to watch your favorite scenes over and over again, allowing you to impress your friends with lines like, “See? I told you they were balls!" With such advances in scrambled porn at our fingertips, we can be sure to keep it thriving for millennia to come.

Oh, and all surplus SPCA money will go toward trying to purchase the aforementioned Marilyn Monroe video, of course.