porn

Your Partner is Allowed to Watch Porn

Kate Sloan
A frame from the movie Infinity Baby, which is not a porn film but does have a premature ejaculation scene starring Kieran Culkin, so there’s that

Every single day on the /r/sex subreddit, people post about their porno woes. Sometimes these relate to their own porn tastes or habits, but often they relate instead to a partner’s viewership of porn.

A common manifestation of this might be something like:

A while ago, I walked in on my partner masturbating to porn. I got really upset, and told them I have a personal boundary that my partners aren’t allowed to watch porn because I find it so upsetting. Then, later, I snooped in their phone and found out they’re still watching porn, even after I told them to stop! Clearly they’re a porn addict who doesn’t love me or respect me. How do I get them to stop?

Even setting aside some of the more glaring issues (like, for the love of all things holy and good, do NOT look through someone’s phone without their permission!), I have a few issues with this type of thinking, and I want to break those down today.

 

1. Your partner is allowed to masturbate.

Period. Full stop.

If you’d prefer a relationship style where your partner is not allowed to masturbate – and, crucially, if that is also what your partner would prefer – then I’d suggest looking into the consensual chastity community, and carefully negotiating the limits of your dynamic, including safewords. Exploring sexual fantasies together can be super fun!

However, outside the realm of consensually-negotiated orgasm-control dynamics, your partner is allowed to masturbate, regardless of how you may feel about it. They have the right to bodily autonomy, as do you, and relationship status has no effect on that inalienable right. If this makes you uncomfortable, point #4 on this list may be especially useful to you.

 

2. Porn is part of masturbation for many people, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Porn boosts arousal, helps engage our brains so we can focus more on pleasure (which can be extra useful when life/the world is stressful), expands our erotic imaginations, and is just simply fun to watch. People who jerk off to porn are no different from people who jerk off to erotica, fantasies, memories, photos of partners/hot celebrities/etc., steamy TV shows like Bridgerton, spicy romance novels, or any other arousal-boosting mental stimulation of any kind. And there are porn categories that stretch far beyond how porn is often depicted and thought about: it’s not all horrific, chauvinistic or unrealistic (besides which, it’s totally possible for a kinky porn scene to embody some or all of these qualities and to have been made with the full, informed consent of everyone involved – Tristan Taormino’s Rough Sex series is a good example).

Plus, porn is a really wonderful thing for a lot of people, both on the viewing side of things and on the production side of things. It’s how many kinky people first mentally explore their burgeoning desires; it’s how some trans and non-binary people first see themselves represented as sexy and desirable; it’s a source of income and a creative outlet for many marginalized creators.

As for “porn addiction,” it’s a moralizing, pathologizing term that’s been applied to a wide range of behaviors, ranging from totally normal levels of porn usage to more extreme/compulsive usage. In any case, it’s not really a useful label and also not a true addiction in the clinical sense. I’m not an expert on this side of things, but would recommend you check out Kris Taylor’s work on this subject if you’re curious about it. There are definitely plenty of people who use porn to a compulsive or unhealthy extent – in which case it might be seriously affecting their employment, relationships, mental health, and so on – but I think most accusations of “porn addiction” (even self-inflicted accusations) are largely based on puritanical moralization, not reality.

 

3. Boundaries are rules you set for yourself, not for other people.

You’re the only one whose behavior you can control, so you’re the only one you get to set boundaries for.

Here’s an example of a boundary:

I find it triggering when I find out that a partner of mine has watched porn, so until I’m able to work through that issue, I choose not to date people who watch porn because I find it too destabilizing at the moment. When I find out that someone I am dating watches porn, I respectfully end the relationship.

Here’s an example of something that is not a valid boundary, because it focuses on controlling someone else’s behavior instead of your own:

I find it triggering when I find out that a partner of mine has watched porn, so anyone who is partnered with me is not allowed to watch porn. When I find out my partner has watched porn, I won’t necessarily end the relationship, but I will get angry or upset with them for having violated this rule I set, even if they didn’t agree to it or didn’t even know about it.

Own your boundaries. Understand that boundaries are about you and your actions.

 

4. You will be happier when you work through this shit

This is really the most important point I always try to convey to people who are uncomfortable with their partners’ porn usage. While it’s never made me uncomfortable for my partners to watch porn, there have been some other, totally normal-and-fine things that have sometimes triggered jealousy, anxiety, or insecurity in me when partners do them – and the healing work I’ve done in therapy, in order to work through these issues, has revolutionized not just my romantic relationships, but my entire life. I am a much, much happier and more stable person for it, and my relationships have improved as a result.

I’m definitely not saying that therapy is easy, or that everyone can access it. I really wish everyone could, or everyone who wanted to, anyway. There are methods of self-reflection that may be useful even if therapy is inaccessible for you, like journaling about the roots of your anxieties or even using therapeutic techniques from Internal Family Systems (Jay Earley has a book called Self-Therapy about this).

I’m also not saying that therapy is the solution to all ills in a relationship. If your partner is abusing you, mistreating you, ignoring you, deprioritizing you, etc., you’re allowed to be upset about that, you’re allowed to communicate about it, and you’re always allowed to end the relationship. When I have trouble discerning between a thing I actually should be mad about, and a thing that’s actually totally fine but that I’m mad about because of my own issues, sometimes I’ll ask a friend or another outside observer what they think.

As ever, these are all just my opinions; you can take ’em or leave ’em, ’cause it’s your life. But when I see someone fretting over their partner’s totally normal porn-viewing habits, I see someone who has the potential to be happier someday, if they view that anxiety as a thread to pull, a road to follow to its fraught source. It’s not easy, it’s not fun, but it is freeing as hell. And it means you can watch porn together, which is hot. Seems like a win-win to me.

 

This post contains sponsored links. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Pay For Your Porn, Please!

Kate Sloan
Me on a shoot day in 2016

One of the many ways I’ve seen porn performers get insulted and degraded online is by dudes (yes, it is almost always dudes) yelling, “Why would I pay for your OnlyFans (or whatever) when I can get any porn I want for free?!”

Besides being super mean-spirited and unnecessary (not to mention reeking of whorephobia), this argument – if one can even call it that – is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the porn industry works, and how art in general gets made. And yes, I would consider porn to be an art form!

See, as the world is learning in real-time right now from the Writers Guild of America strike, the art you love doesn’t just magically appear out of thin air – actual people make it (I’m not talking about AI art here, because it kinda sucks, both morally and artistically), and those people deserve to be paid fairly for their time, work, and expertise. This is true whether the art in question is something we generally understand to be expensive, like an oil painting, or something we generally understand to be cheap or free, like online porn.

As with any kind of art, if we want porn to keep being made, we need to ensure that its creators are able to sustain themselves financially so they can continue making it. I’m no porn-industry expert, but it seems to me that the emphasis has shifted massively from big porn studios to smaller creators and collectives over the last decade or so, and I imagine a lot of that has to do with how often people torrent porn, stream it on sites that have pirated it, and so on. Big studio productions are expensive to make, and can’t be continually cranked out if no one is paying for them. I love indie porn stars as much as the next hyper-online gal, but I can’t deny that I also sometimes appreciate the spectacle of a huge-scale porn production like Pirates (2005), which supposedly had a $1 million budget (!!), or Alice in Wonderland (1976), which had a budget of $500,000 (about $2.5 million in today’s money if we account for inflation!).

That’s not to say it’s impossible to watch free porn in an ethical way. Creators on YouTube and PornHub alike, for instance, can make ad revenue from people who watch their videos, at no additional cost to viewers. Many independent creators offer some free content as part of their overall marketing strategy, though of course the hope is that a substantial portion of their free viewers will become paid viewers over time.

It’s also definitely possible to pay for your porn even if you’re on a budget. Sites like Clips4Sale and ManyVids are chock full of videos priced at $5 or less, which you can then watch and re-watch to your heart’s content. Many performers offer sales to mark certain holidays or just when they need to drum up some extra cash, so follow your faves on social media if you want to be informed when/if that happens. You can even click here for a Naughty America discount. There is a TON of cheap porn out there, and every time you buy someone’s porn, or subscribe to their OnlyFans feed or similar, you’re helping them out and letting them know with your dollars that you want them to keep making wank material for you to enjoy.

I’m happy to pay for romance novels, because they make me giggle and blush; thriller movies, because they make me gasp and scream; and action video games, because they make my heart speed up and engage my brain. The other reason I’m happy to pay for these things (when I have the cash to do so) is that I want them to keep being made. By that token, it makes complete sense that I’d also want to pay for my porn – because it entertains me, inspires me, teaches me new things about my sexuality, and (of course) turns me on and gets me off. I hope you’ll pay for your porn too, at least some of the time, because a future without porn (or with porn created by soulless AIs) sounds pretty fuckin’ bleak, if you ask me.

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Why “Amateur Porn” is My Fave Kind of Porn

Kate Sloan
An Instax photo taken of me in my twenties. BTW, if you want more like this, click here, here, and here. 😇

It took me a long time to start enjoying porn. I had already been masturbating and reading erotica (especially erotic fanfiction) for several years before porn became a regular part of my solo sex routine.

Up until then, it just… hadn’t really interested me. What little I’d seen of it, online or while flipping through TV channels late at night, had seemed ridiculous to me: over-the-top, unrealistic, melodramatically acted. I’d never had sex, so I didn’t know what sex was “really like,” but I knew that the images in those videos didn’t resonate with me (or my vagina) anywhere near as much as the flirty banter in a great fanfic story, or the frisson I felt when talking to a crush at school. If devising fantasies and replaying memories felt more exciting than watching porn, why bother watching it?

There were a few exceptions; I liked the punk-rock pinup pics on the website SuicideGirls, and I had watched that one notorious Nina Hartley cunnilingus tutorial so many times that it had eventually earned a place of honor on my iPod Video. (Now there’s a throwback!) But most porn, especially most straight porn, was off-putting to me. I just didn’t get it.

 

Eventually, though, I discovered amateur porn. In comparison to the slick overproduction of mainstream studio porn, these amateurs making sexy videos from their bedrooms or basements felt like a revelation. Their work turned me on, not just because their bodies and lives looked closer to my own, but because – what with so many amateur porn makers being real-life couples – they showed me a vision of what a future sex life could look like for me: intimate, fun, sometimes a little silly, and hot. Very hot.

I was always the type of anxious kid who would Google things like “how to know if someone wants to kiss you” and “what do dicks taste like?” so there was something calming about watching real couples have the kinds of sex they apparently regularly had, even when the cameras were off. They showed me that you didn’t have to be an industry professional to be “good at sex” and to be thought of as sexy. That comforted me.

I’ve also always been turned on by the idea of someone knowing your body so well that they can get you off easily and consistently; I eroticized the thought of being known that deeply. And there’s no better place to watch that fantasy unfold than in amateur porn, where performers are often intimately familiar with one another’s bodies and know all the right buttons to press. This seemed romantic to me, and helped me dream about the sexual futures I wanted for myself.

 

While “amateur porn” is still an extremely popular porn category, the term itself has evolved over time. Its popularity prompted many mainstream porn studios to adopt an “amateur” aesthetic in some of their work, hoping to draw in some viewers who (like me) had previously been unimpressed with big-studio porn.

Meanwhile, the internet continued evolving, eventually empowering some performers to attract bigger and bigger audiences and to use more powerful platforms to reach new people. Both then and now, it almost feels disingenuous to call some of these people “amateurs” when they may have as much industry knowledge as, if not more than, many performers for mainstream companies because they’ve always been responsible for doing their own lighting, filming, editing, etc.

Some purists might argue that the well-lit and well-marketed independent performers on OnlyFans, ManyVids, etc. aren’t amateurs in the true sense of the word, because their production values are too high or their videos are too pre-planned and performative. While it’s fine if you prefer the low-res, low-lit amateur videos of yore, I actually think it’s wonderful that video technology has become accessible enough that you don’t have to have big studio bucks to make porn that looks great. And I also know – particularly from talking to friends of mine in the industry – that just because something is “performed” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inauthentic. Some people find exhibitionism exciting, and so, in their videos, you may see performativity and authenticity blended together seamlessly into something gorgeous and hot.

 

Still to this day, it’s incredibly rare that I watch porn made by mainstream studios. Most of it just doesn’t interest me and doesn’t turn me on. I can’t relax and enjoy myself if I don’t feel that the performers on-screen are also relaxed and enjoying themselves, ideally with someone they like to fuck off-camera as well. And sure, that kind of thing can be found in some mainstream porn, but it’s much more readily available (and more believable to me) in the “amateur” category.

I want to feel like what I’m watching could plausibly happen in my bedroom, or my friends’ bedrooms. I want to feel the performers’ real flirtation and attraction and deep knowledge of one another’s bodies. I want real orgasms, real squirting, real giggles and real romance. And I want to pay creators directly (or as directly as possible) for what they’ve made, with no bigwig middle-man standing between us. I want to feel connected to the porn I watch, and to the people in it, almost as much as I feel connected to my actual sexual partners and my friends.

And so, I still love amateur porn, and probably always will – although I hope it’s eventually given a name more befitting of the immense work and expertise that can go into making real-life sex look real damn beautiful.

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Can Demisexuals Enjoy Porn?

Kate Sloan
A blurry still from a porn scene I once performed in for Spit

One of the most striking changes in my sexuality as I’ve grown older is how much more demisexual I’ve gotten. I went from being a horny, flirty 23-year-old who could spot my next fuck from across a crowded swimming pool, to being a grizzled, grumpy 30-year-old who needs to have a 3-hour conversation with someone before deciding whether she wants to hold their hand. (That’s a slight exaggeration… maybe…)

I’ve seen the question of demisexuals’ porn consumption come up in a few of the online sex discussion spaces I participate in, and I think it’s an interesting one. If the primary purpose of pornography is to arouse the viewer, and the viewer is someone who is far more aroused by brains than bodies, and far more interested in intimacy than insertions, can porn really do its job? I have a few points I’d like to make in response to this question.

Quick refresher before we hop in: Demisexuality is an identity on the asexuality spectrum. Demisexuals find it difficult or impossible to experience sexual attraction until and unless they’ve developed an emotional connection to, or at least an emotional familiarity with, the subject of that attraction.

 

Point 1: Sexual attraction and sexual arousal are not the same thing.

Sexual attraction, generally speaking, is the visceral pull you feel toward someone you want to kiss, touch, and/or fuck. It is aimed at particular people; if someone said to me, “Do you feel like having sex right now?” my answer would be rather different than if someone said to me, “Do you feel like having sex with James Dean circa 1955 right now?” (My answers at the moment, respectively, are “Ehh, not really, ask me again after I’ve had my coffee” and “OMG, yes, give me 10 minutes to throw on some red lipstick for him to mess up.”)

Sexual arousal, on the other hand, is the physical (and, arguably, also mental) state of being horny. It can involve noticeable changes in your physiology, like engorged genital tissue and a quickening heartbeat, as well as more psychological effects, like the pressing desire to be imminently touched by yourself and/or by someone else.

These two things are different. Certainly one can facilitate the other – and for many demisexuals, sexual attraction precedes sexual arousal and is itself preceded by emotional attraction – but fundamentally, they are separate, and don’t always occur at the same time, in the same situations.

Without trying to speak for other demisexuals on this matter, I’ll say that I can become sexually aroused by porn without feeling sexually attracted to the people in it. It certainly helps if I’m attracted to the people in it (more on that below), but just witnessing certain sexual acts can rev me up, especially if they’re acts I’m already intimately familiar with and/or acts I already fetishize to some extent. And so, yes, I can jerk off to porn, and often find that it adds measurably to my arousal and pleasure, just as it does for many allosexual people (i.e. people who are not on the asexual spectrum).

 

Point 2: Porn can become familiar.

In an age of OnlyFans feeds and live sex cams, it’s easier than ever to follow the careers of porn performers you enjoy. Whether you become a fan of theirs because you think they’re cute, because they remind you of someone you used to date, or because your favorite sex acts and kinks are fairly aligned with theirs (or all three!), you can definitely develop an “emotional connection” – albeit a one-sided, parasocial one – to certain performers over time.

This noticeably increases my enjoyment of porn, as a demisexual person. Of the porn performers whose work I follow closely, what they all have in common is that there’s a lot of personality infused into their work, so that I get a sense of who they are (or at least, who their porn persona is) on a deeper level than I would if I’d just watched them get fucked once. This creates a sense of heightened connection and therefore generates heightened sexual attraction on my end.

I’ve noticed that this effect can also occur even if I’ve just seen a particular porn clip several times. It’s like the raunchier version of how I feel more attracted to Jennifer Beals every time I re-watch one of her sex scenes from The L Word…

If you’re not sure where to even find porn performers you might develop a fondness for, I’d suggest scrolling through clip sites like ManyVids, or flipping through the pages of free adult webcams listings, and clicking on anyone whose aesthetic or vibe provokes a positive response in you. Follow that little glimmer of potential attraction and see where it leads you.

 

Point 3: You can make porn that’s familiar.

Now, granted, not everyone wants to set up a camera to film themselves while fucking. You may have concerns about this related to cybersecurity, future employment, etc. and that’s fine.

But if you are willing to make your own porn, I think this can be one of the best solutions for demisexuals who want wank fodder but don’t connect with much/any of the porn they see online. After all, what could be more demisexual than jerking off to the sight of a person you know IRL and already have a deep connection with?

I’ve made amateur porn with a few partners over the years, and it’s always served me well when incorporated into my spank bank. It reminds me of hot sex I’ve had, because it depicts… hot sex I’ve actually had! And it’s therefore a lot easier for me to get turned on by it and get off to it.

 

Fellow demisexuals, what’s your experience with porn? Does it turn you on? Bore you? Or does it depend?

 

This post contains sponsored links. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

3 Porn Clips I Wish Existed

Kate Sloan
What my computer sees when I’m watching porn

I don’t know, maybe these already do exist. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough. It can take hours to stumble across the right search string to locate what you’re looking for, or to search for the perfect webcam performer who can fulfill one’s exact fantasies. Usually I end up just jerking off to whatever I find in the meantime, if it’s any good, even if it’s not the highly specific image I had in my head before my search began.

I know, too, that if I really wanted clips made exactly to my specifications, the best way to do that would be to commission custom clips from porn performers who specialize in whatever fantasies I had in mind. I wish I had the budget to do that more often. But for now, let’s imagine I’m the God of Porn and I can conjure whatever clips I’m craving out of thin air, like a pervy holodeck. What would I want to see?

 

1. Gag-free, facial-free deepthroat blowjob porn

You would think this would be easier to find, but as a longtime BJ porn connoisseur, I can tell you, I often have a tough time sleuthing out these types of clips. So I tend to watch the same reliable performers over and over again – mostly Heather Harmon and Little Oral Andie.

I don’t like gagging. I’ve got nothing against people who are into it, and can even understand why someone might be into it, but it just squicks me out and stops my arousal cold.

I also don’t like facials – not because I have an issue with cum on faces, but because I strongly prefer when oral sex ends with someone orgasming in someone’s mouth, whether I’m the giver, receiver, or spectator in that interaction. I get that facials are popular because they’re demonstrative; they make the cum visible to the viewer, plus many people consider them a hot visual for various kinky reasons. But I just always feel disappointed when a stellar BJ ends in this way; to me, it’s, ironically, anticlimactic.

 

2. Story-driven porn that takes place backstage after opening night

One fantasy my spouse and I share, having been lifelong “theatre kids,” is hooking up on a stage, or near a stage, or behind a stage, or… well, you get the idea.

I don’t think it’s really an exhibitionistic fantasy, at least not for me. In my head, the theatre is always empty except for us. Maybe it’s late one night after a dress rehearsal, or maybe it’s the morning of opening night before anyone else arrives. Maybe I’m the star and I’m fucking the director for clout and bragging rights. Maybe we’re co-stars who kiss on stage every night during our romantic duet but are just beginning to consummate our off-stage chemistry. Maybe I met a hot fan at the stage door one night and invited them in out of the cold. Who knows.

I’d love to see this fantasy played out in porn, though frankly my hopes for its production value and the depth of its plot and characters are probably such that this would be a better notion in my head than on screen. Think, like, Glee if it was about grown-ups doing professional theatre and then also fucking each other. I mean, how great would that be?!

 

3. Sleuthing out a new sweetheart’s hot spots

One of the things that most drew me to Brooklyn Nine-Nine fanfiction, back in the days when I was reading and writing it voraciously, was the fact that most of its main characters are detectives – and I’m suuuuper turned on by someone solving the mystery of my body, hunting for clues about my sexuality, fitting puzzle pieces together to understand my pleasure more deeply.

I’m not saying I want to see detectives in porn, necessarily – ACAB, baby! – but I would like to see an attitude of exploratory curiosity more often. There’s an instructional porn video that Tristan Taormino shot of performers Dylan Ryan and Danny Wylde for the Smitten Kitten once, in which we see Danny and Dylan negotiating what they’re going to do, giving each other feedback on technique in the moment, and locating each other’s erogenous zones through trial and error. I’d love to see more of that kind of thing in porn.

As much as I love and appreciate porn, I think a lot of it presents sex as something that everyone already knows how to do, even with people they’ve never fucked before. That just isn’t the case – even if you’ve had a ton of sex, a new person’s body is still always gonna be a learning experience when you first start trying to please them. I think a lot more people would relish this process if it were represented positively in porn more often!

 

What types of porn would you love to see, that don’t yet exist as far as you’re aware?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.