(DISCLAIMER: I’m writing from my personal experience here. If your experiences are different to mine, that’s great. I’m just offering a different perspective, and opening up the conversation. Hopefully, we can engage each other on this topic. And most importantly, if you are a consumer of porn – please consume it ethically and responsibly).
I wanna talk about porn for a minute, y’all.
I was 13 when I realised that I was romantically attracted to guys, instead of girls, as I was “expected to”. And that caused me a lot of inner turmoil. I’ve also shared the story of my grade 7 teacher having to teach us about the queer community, and using the word “moffie” instead of the word “gay” everytime she read out a passage.
In high school, it was even worse. We received no sex education. It was tailored towards heterosexual people, and even they got a raw deal. It was literally “do you want to have a baby right now? No? Then abstain from sex.” Mind you, this was in the early 2010s. That was merely a decade ago.
Queer people were rendered invisible. There was no space for us to articulate what was going on with our bodies. It was widely understood that we were going through puberty, and that our bodies were changing. But it was somehow taboo to realise that there could have been queer people in that classroom who weren’t sure about how to grapple with their sexual feelings, which were “out of the norm”. So much so that they weren’t even addressed. They weren’t even worth addressing.
And one of my first sexual experiences was being sexually abused by a family member.
That led me to have a very sad attitude towards my first few (consensual) sexual experiences. I didn’t find it pleasurable at all. It was something I did to please my partner, and to show him that I loved him. At that time, sex was something of a sacrifice rather than an act of mutual pleasure. Even when I had multiple sexual partners, I didn’t have sex because I enjoyed it. I had sex, because I was heartbroken, and sex was a way of getting male attention.
I must say that watching porn, without guilt, took me a while. I didn’t watch much of it as a teenager. I was in my 20s when I really began to regularly watch pornography. And there was an “aha” moment I couldn’t articulate then, but I can articulate it now. In porn, I saw sex as a site of pleasure.
I was able to see two men consensually enjoy each other’s bodies, and both experience pleasure. It’s one thing to intellectually know what sex is “supposed to be like” (the music we’re inundated with is very clear). It’s another thing, altogether, to see how sex can be. This will sound extremely antithetical to everything that’s been said about porn, but porn humanised sex for me. It was no longer only about giving pleasure to the other person. I could get pleasure too. I could enjoy sex. It was possible.
That coincided with me getting therapy for my experiences. And it also coincided with a relationship I had where my sexual self was really born. I began to form preferences, likes, dislikes, and I could articulate those without feeling as if that was somehow wrong. And I won’t lie, porn guided me through some of that.
I understand Catherine MacKinnon’s arguments against porn. I understand Rae Langton’s arguments against porn. I understand Andrea Dworkin’s arguments against porn. I’m not a woman. I can’t claim their experiences as my own. I understand their misgivings around porn, and I think I’d be more anti-porn if I was a woman. Fetishisation isn’t desire. It’s a disgusting form of dehumanisation that reduces the person to their body, and what it can do to induce pleasure in the observer.
But I’m a gay man. We’re dehumanised by society on a daily basis. If it’s not seeing us only by our sexual orientations, it’s shutting us out of the conversation surrounding sexual desire by not even acknowledging that we exist. For me, porn was one of the ways in which I could know & understand myself as a person who wants, and desires, sex. To be honest, was there any other way?
I’m almost 25 years old, but I still read sex ed books. I’m still figuring out the full spectrum of my desires as a sexually active person. And porn was (and still is) an important part of the toolkit that’s led me here.
And so, I guess my point is that porn isn’t all bad. People shouldn’t be ashamed to say that they consume porn. For marginalised communities in particular, porn can act as a reminder that we can find pleasure in sex, and that’s okay.
wiseMusings 
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