porn

Why You Should Pay For Your Porn (At Least Sometimes)

Kate Sloan

One of my personal pet peeves as a creator is when people brag about refusing to pay for the art they enjoy, as if it’s something to be proud of. If you like art, it’s important to pay for it – at least some of the time!

Now, don’t get me wrong – obviously financial difficulties can make this hard or impossible, and I see art as a basic human necessity, which is why I think it’s so great that plenty of art (including porn) is legitimately available for free.

But if you can afford to pay for artistic works that matter to you, I think you should, at least some of the time. I’ve partnered with Bunny Agency for this post, in which I’ll tell you a few key reasons your favorite porno babes deserve your cash…

 

Money allows art to continue to exist!

This is really the crux of the thing. Art can’t be made (at least not consistently and well) without money, because artists are people, and people require money to survive. It’s as simple as that.

It’s hard as fuck to be a creator these days, especially in the adult industry. Social media algorithms deboost us, search engines derank us, payment processors ban us… As a result of all this, many of us are barely scraping by. But the more money we make from our actual art, the more time we can spend making that art – since we won’t have to spend as much time stressing about money and working other jobs to make ends meet.

It drives me completely nuts when I see people complaining about paywalls on news articles, and in the same breath, complaining about news publications’ incomplete coverage of certain issues, or lackluster factchecking. Consumers paying for their news is what enables newsrooms to hire more/better journalists and factcheckers! And just like the news, porn cannot continue to exist if no one pays for it, because creators gotta have food, shelter, and the tools of their trade in order to create.

 

Get exactly what you want!

For those of us with very particular erotic tastes, we may have trouble finding porn that lines up with our desires. But many porn performers offer custom clips, so you can lay out your fantasy and receive bespoke porn that fulfills it.

In talking to friends of mine who’ve created and/or purchased custom clips, I’ve come to think of customs as being almost like tattoos, in that you should pick an artist who’s well-versed in the style and content you’re looking for, tell them what you want, and let them put their own spin on it. They will often surprise you in ways that your own limited imagination cannot!

 

Own, not stream!

Often (although not always), if you pay for a porn video, you can download it and keep it on your own hard drive, rather than being beholden to fickle hosting sites and inconsistent streaming speeds.

Ever gone to watch a porn clip you bookmarked online, and found yourself on a 404 error page instead? Ever gotten horny while stuck in a no-cell-service zone? It’s in these situations that I’m most grateful for the videos I have bought and saved!

 

Support artists!

Despite whorephobic rumors to the contrary, Onlyfans modeling (& similar) is not an easy gig! Creators often act as their own photographer/cinematographer, editor, marketing director, and business manager. They endure sexual harassment, malicious credit card chargebacks, and sex work stigma. They go through a lot, and they deserve to get paid for their hard work, same as anybody else does!

Just as Bandcamp sales are wildly more lucrative than Spotify streams for musicians, porn performers get way more money when you actually buy their content than when you just stream it for free (which earns them about 69 cents per thousand views). So, if you like your favorite porn stars and want them to be able to stay in the biz, support them when you can!

 

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

Making VR Porn With My Partner Was Hot, Cool, & Weird…

Kate Sloan
Playing the ukulele with an Apple Vision Pro on for some reason

“Would you fuck your clone?”

This is one of the many questions that us sex nerds tend to debate with each other. It’ll come up in the blogger lounge at the sex conference, or in the back row of the sexual psychology lecture, or in the aftercare cuddle puddle at the play party. No matter the answers amongst the group, it’s sure to be an interesting conversation.

There are some standard sub-questions that arise as a result of this bigger, broader question, like: Is fucking your clone closer to incest, or masturbation? Are you sexually compatible with yourself, or would you run into some classic top4top or bottom4bottom difficulties in trying to fuck yourself? Are you attracted to yourself, and if not, does that even affect your answer?

That last one is really the clincher for me, and is the main reason I would not fuck my clone: I’m just not that into me. Granted, you don’t have to be attracted to someone to fuck them, and I certainly haven’t been super attracted to every person I’ve ever hooked up with – but I think, in this case, I would find that hurdle tough to overcome.

I bring this up because making VR blowjob porn with my partner, and subsequently watching said porn on my partner’s VR headset, is probably the closest I’ll ever come to fucking my clone – and it was both very weird and very cool.

A quick rundown on VR porn for those unacquainted: Virtual-reality headsets, while commonly used for video games, can also be used to watch hyperrealistic, three-dimensional media, including porn. Websites such as Virtual Real Porn offer VR videos, for instance, as do some early-adopter independent creators. Some sex toys can even be synced up with VR porn for an extra-realistic experience – for example, a stroker might slide up and down on your dick to the exact rhythm and depth depicted in the 3D clip you’re watching. The future is here, and it is sexy!

When my partner got an Apple Vision Pro headset shortly after its launch, she let me try it out, and showed me various cool features on it – and because we’re both perverts, she also asked me if I wanted to watch and/or make porn on it. Naturally, I said yes!

One of my all-time favorite porn genres is POV blowjobs, so we decided to start with one of those. The Vision Pro can take 3D video, so my partner strapped hers on and hit ‘record,’ and I got to work. Giving head to someone who’s wearing an enormous VR headset is pretty hilarious, I have to admit – but there were also times when it felt hot in a deeply perverse way, like I was being coolly surveilled by a bug-eyed alien, or blowing a disinterested gamer during a LoL raid.

It wasn’t my first rodeo (or, uh, blow-deo) – I’ve starred in BJ porn a handful of other times before – but something still felt new and fresh about it, I think because I was aware that people other than my partner might watch the video one day, and might therefore feel like I’m blowing them, and so I felt a certain responsibility to ‘play all the hits,’ as it were – to be a crowd-pleaser, all the way through. (The video isn’t currently available for purchase, although another (non-VR) POV blowjob of mine is.)

The most surreal part for me was watching the video later on, while wearing the headset myself. It was nothing like the times before when I’d watched my own 2D blowjob videos in a QuickTime window on my laptop screen – now, the image filled my entire field of view, and appeared so three-dimensional that I almost thought I could reach down and brush my own hair out of my face.

I got to observe a blowjob I’d already experienced, but from a different angle. In essence, I got to receive a BJ from my clone… and it was weeeeeird! Despite POV blowjobs being a go-to search term for me on any porn site, I just couldn’t get into this one. I was too consumed with self-criticism, too zoomed in on my flaws, my awkwardness, and the sheer fact of me being me.

So, no – I don’t think I would fuck my clone. But would I watch her suck off my partner in 3D, just to revel in the frisson of charged discomfort it conjures? Abso-fuckin-lutely. I have, and I would do it again.

 

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

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.