photo by TheNaughtyAmerican.com
Our contributor, who wishes to remain anonymous, has a confession to make (in response to the recent confession by another contributor, “Porn Makes My Heart Grow Fonder“).
I don’t like porn. Which strikes me as strange since not only do I love sex, I study it. But there’s just something about porn that turns me off. Okay, a lot of somethings.
Porn makes me feel awkward. Maybe it’s because our puritanical society has succeeded in convincing me that porn is the root of all evil. Or maybe it’s because of that time in middle school when I was watching a rated-R movie on TV with my parents and a sex scene came on. But porn makes me feel like a creepy voyeur sitting in the corner of a room while a couple has sex on the bed. To me, sex is something private and sacred (even though I admit I enjoy sex in public).
Porn scares me. When I was in high school I clicked the wrong link on a website and landed in a barnyard of bestiality. It was absolutely horrifying.
Porn bores me. In college, after I purchased my first dildo, I took a leap of faith and got a membership to an obscure porn website that featured role-playing (one of my favorite sexual indulgences). I masturbated furiously for a good three nights, but come the fourth I just couldn’t climax anymore. I suppose the novelty of it all wore off and the disenchantment set in. I got pretty freaked out that I was masturbating to a guy my dad’s age hooking up with a girl my age. That pretty much killed it for me.
Porn gives me second-hand embarrassment. I feel like I’m watching a high school play, the kind that sucks so bad you leave before intermission. The acting is so terrible you can’t help but cringe watching it. You sit there hoping it will get better, but it just gets worse. My boyfriend has shown me plenty of this kind of porn (he loves it) and I can’t help but poke fun at how overemphatic the couples’ screams are or how cheesy the dirty talk is.
Porn lies to me…and everyone else. It tells us female orgasms are easily achieved and anal never, ever hurts. It slyly suggests that women, by nature, are all secret lesbians (or at least bisexuals) who enjoy being taken — and taken advantage of. It convinces us that we don’t need to worry about the risk of silly things such as sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy because they simply don’t exist in that world. Not only does it get off on getting us off, it gets off on letting us off the hook of sexual responsibility. It has the power to influence our real sex lives and reinforce archaic gender stereotypes — and that’s dangerous.
Porn can’t fake me out. I know how contrived it is. My boyfriend worked as an actor in the porn industry before we started dating and the more I learned about his experiences the less attractive it all became. Stopping and starting constantly to reshoot scenes or adjust lighting or try different positions. He would often come home with a sore member thanks to “perfectionist “producers. The producers were demanding and disrespectful, not only to women, but to men, too. He explained how he was treated more like an object than a person. Plus he was paid to have sex — that didn’t sit well with me.
Porn makes my boyfriend annoying. I love him, but I can’t stand the constant questions like, What do you think about a threesome? Can I come on your face? Can we do double penetration? Can I use all five of our sex toys on you at once? Can we have sex while wearing masks? Now who’s treating whom like an object? It’s not that I’m flat against doing any of these things, I just want to do them on my own terms, when I’m ready. It gets tiring telling him this.
I can hear it now: Not ALL porn is bad; I just need to seek out better porn that works for me. But why? I’m happy with the sex I have. I don’t need to watch someone else having it…or faking it.
