Listening To: Sex, Explained- episode 1 on Netflix. I think this goes along nicely with what I’m talking about here, since it does address similar topics.
Alright, so not all topics talked about here are going to be fun. But I don’t intend to really start there, at least not entirely. So today, we’re going to be talking about porn! I grew up being taught that porn is evil. In the same way that I got raised to think that masturbation was evil. Suffice it to say, this wasn’t the healthiest state of mind. Let me clear this up now: I do not think that anymore. I think that some porn is unhealthy, and most blurs the lines of consent at the very least. I think it sets up unrealistic standards. I think that porn can be done in a much better way. But I don’t think that porn, in and of itself, is a bad thing. For me, in the long term, I am finding it to be very helpful, considering my ignorance.
I got exposed to pornography for the first few times entirely by accident. The first two times were stumbling across a family member’s pornography. The first time, I had the option of just closing said laptop and walking away. The second time, I didn’t have the same luxury. I walked in on said family member watching porn in our living room. Understandably horrifying, especially considering what followed was me getting yelled at for walking into said communal space while said person was doing this. Yes, I am being intentionally vague, as I would just as soon that anyone who actually knows me read’s this and knows who I am actually talking about. This re-enforced the sense of shame that I felt around pornography, and deeply impacted how I felt about it for a long time.
Another point of exposure was a video rental place that I frequented. It happened twice courtesy of this particular place and was entirely by accident.This rental store did not have an x-rated section, at least not to my knowledge, and both of my experiences were with anime. The first time, I’d found it by accident while I was looking for new anime to watch. It was mixed in and the cover of the box was turned so it was facing out, instead of being filed away. The visuals on the front and back were depicting bondage, and left me panicked because I felt like I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. It got lodged in my brain for days and I felt extremely embarrassed and unsure how to shake what I’d seen, so I opted not to say anything. I was convinced I’d get in trouble.
The somewhere between those previous incident was another, defining moment of exposure to written porn, that definitely was an absolute accident on the part of a friend. She had bought me one of those cheap romance novels that you can get for $2-$3. At 12, I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize until I was 4-5 pages into the porn chapter of the book that I was actually reading porn. I was extremely embarrassed at the time, and ashamed of the fact that I had a positive reaction to it. I took almost a week to throw the book out as my shame slowly over road my curiosity after having re-read that particular part of the book, as I was a painfully curious 12 year old.
And then came high school, and my much less restricted access to the internet. I still had dial up until about 13 or 14 years old. But I’d come to discover two websites that would honestly change a lot of things, and broaden my horizons a bit. The first, and probably more obscure, was called Quizilla. Like FanFiction.net and Wattpad, you can find all sorts of fanfictiony goodness there. And yes that does include M rated content for all us adults, and all of us who knew how to click a button that confirmed we were 18, even if we weren’t.
During the dial up times, I would just copy and paste chapters into a word document in order to read in bed and closing the file without saving so I wouldn’t be caught. I knew not, the ways of incognito mode and clearing thy browser history! When Wi-Fi came around I didn’t have to do that anymore, but I still didn’t know how to hide my tracks, not that it mattered since everyone was convinced I would never look. I was fairly sheltered as a kid, and honestly it really showed. But I was consuming porn in small binges off Quizilla, and when all of my preferred writers on there stopped writing, I moved on to FanFiction.net for generally better quality written fanfictions. When I first started, I didn’t care what it was, as long as it was smut and generally helped to satisfy the raging hormones of my pre-pubescent self.
That said, there was a lot of shame surrounding my consumption of pornography. I raged with the part of my brain convinced that I was going to go to hell for watching and reading porn and for indulging my hormones when I should have been resisting “sin.” I felt guilty about it all the time, and more ashamed still that I didn’t feel like I could talk about it with anyone because it was a taboo subject. In retrospect, it was a good thing that I didn’t; that fear would have been reinforced heavily, based off what I know about the adults that were in my life at the time. There were a lot of toxic adults (both in my family and not in my family) that would have intensified that feeling of shame. I was pretty involved with a catholic youth group at the time and that continued for another six years before I dropped religion since it wasn’t feeling right with how I saw myself or core values.
I’m also going to admit, I did read 50 Shades of Gray. It reads like fanfiction; really poorly written, poorly conceptualization, fanfiction. I found a TikTok recently that resonated really deeply with how I felt about this particular book series. Like my experiences with the church making me feel broken for being not straight, this book makes it seem like anyone who enjoys kink enjoys it because they are damaged. That’s a shit message right there. Definitely a 0/10 on the recommend scale.
Reading it did, however, get me to do some genuine research into BDSM. There were a lot of things that just seemed wrong to me about the book, but I couldn’t pinpoint what because I didn’t know about BDSM at the time. I had a really, REALLY wrong impression of it because I sort of went in with assumptions that were reinforced by that book. I’m glad I did the research because it showed me how wrong those assumptions were, and did actually pique my interest in BDSM and kink in general. That research also lent itself to finding fanfictions that were both better written and had more accurate depictions of what a healthy kink relationship looks like. So it was a win win for me in the long run.
In the vein of fanfiction, I have written my fair share of fanfiction smut. I still do. It’s not overly great writing. I have found writing lets me explore kinks that I may be curious about, and express those fantasies. I don’t currently have the space to really extensively explore kinks, at least not to the degree I would like. So I take to writing, as a personal outlet. I don’t post it; I know how naive it will likely sound and I usually get distracted with some half-formed idea before I get back to working on something else anyway.
I prefer written porn as it is more mentally engaging for me, and also removes some of the more harmful aspects of porn videos. I also find that there is a broader range of consensual porn and porn more directed towards women in the written form than in video. I have to look longer and harder for videos that fit that description, and usually I’m not in the mood to hunt for too terribly long. I’m likely to end up going back to favorite videos and after a while those lose their flavor too. Call me a product of my generation if you will, but it’s one of those “I want it now” cases. That said: consensual, woman focused porn is out there. I actually started to have an easier time locating it after discussing some of my frustrations about the lack of content I was looking for with my therapist. I have found it, usually under tags for amateur porn. It still takes some looking at that point, but it takes less looking.
What I’m getting at here though, more than anything, is I like porn. I encourage people to find porn that they like, if that’s their thing. If it’s not, you do you. What works for me might not work for someone else and that’s cool. Every body is different. Every mind is different. But you shouldn’t feel shame or embarrassment from finding pleasure in pornography. There is nothing wrong with it. I know exactly how hard it can be to not come from a place of embarrassment or shame. Enjoy what you enjoy. Indulge your fantasies, and let it open you to new possibilities.