Continuing our now misnamed “favorites” exchange, Marina asked me, “How do you think porn affects you and your sex life?”
I’m interested in the answer to this question, and surprisingly, I haven’t, actually, thought a lot about it.
It affects me, obviously. And it affects my sex life, obviously. In myriad ways. First, and probably most powerfully, I suppose, at the societal level. Much porn is – I do believe – a symptom, and a reinforcer, of patriarchal, objectifying attitudes toward women. So porn has all sorts of effects, all around me – in male, and female, standards of beauty, in the ways we all think about beauty and sex, and so on. I can’t even, really, begin to parse all of those effects it has, but surely, they are manifold.
More personally?
The question is interesting – it’s “how porn affects [me] and [my] sex life.” I think I would propose a slight recasting of the question, to “How does your use of porn affect you? And how does it affect your sex life?” Because I don’t imagine that the effects [my use of] porn has on me are universal, or inevitable. And they vary, depending on how I’m using it.
Sometimes, I use porn to feel alive. Sometimes, I use it to escape some undesirable feeling. Sometimes, to rev myself up. Sometimes, to jerk off. Some of my uses of porn are benign; others, not so much.
Lately (in the last, say, year), I’ve used porn, mostly, to feel alive – and sometimes, to distract me from tasks that I fear. The former feels to me unfortunate, but not terrible. The latter seems to me not so healthy.
As far as how porn affects my sex life, I would say, it’s slightly additive. I’ve written before about how people often think they turn to porn to relieve horniness, but in fact, I think, we generally do it (I generally do it) to increase horniness. That’s how it works for me. It makes my cock hard, and I value that. And, sometimes, but not all that often, I like having sex with porn playing. In which case, again, it’s additive. It doesn’t pull me away from the moment; it increases the hotness of the moment.
Porn doesn’t affect my desires. I’ve never seen something in porn and thought, “Oh that looks cool, I want that.” Instead, my reaction to porn is more along the lines of, “I like that!” or “I don’t like that!”
Lots of porn tropes do nothing for me. I don’t like coming on a woman’s face, in her hair, on her tits. I don’t prefer to come outside of a woman, ever. Porn didn’t instill that preference. And it hasn’t displaced it.
I don’t like fake tits, or degrading talk. I don’t crave anal sex. I’ve never had the conscious experience of my tastes or desires being shaped by what I see in porn. But then again, go back to how I started this: porn is a part of the patriarchal landscape, whose effects are ubiquitous, pernicious, and invisible lots of the time. So who the fuck knows?