porn

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.

How Audio Porn Helps Me When I’m Depressed, Insecure, or Sexually Apathetic

Kate Sloan

I think I liked audio porn before I ever liked visual porn. And I don’t think this is an uncommon experience, particularly for women.

It makes sense. Much like some people prefer novels over their movie adaptations, sometimes you want to be able to visualize and fantasize inside your own head while consuming a piece of media, rather than having the visuals spelled out very literally for you.

But there are other reasons I still, to this day, often prefer audio porn over the traditional, cinematic variety. Namely:

1. Words are hot. There is not nearly enough dirty talk in most mainstream porn for my personal tastes, especially from men and masculine people, who are often nearly silent, I guess to keep from grossing out their cis-het male viewers?! As someone whose sex life has been 70%+ phone sex for the past few years, and who has spent her life writing about sex, I’m perhaps more attuned to the eroticism of words than the average porn consumer. Generally I’d rather listen to someone describing cunnilingus than watch them perform it, for example – in part because it’s a sex act where, if you’re doing it right, often nothing all that interesting will be visually apparent from the outside.

2. Sounds are hot. Moans, quickening breaths, the animalistic sound of someone desperately stroking their cock – these things are often the most exciting parts of porn to me, to the point that if a clip has been muted, or has poor sound quality, I tend to close that tab and move on to the next. In audio porn, obviously the auditory elements of eroticism are played up and focused upon, plus they tend to be rendered in higher quality because of the performers’ proximity to their (often) fancy, ASMR-quality mics.

3. It makes me less insecure and self-critical. While I reject the notion that female porn stars aren’t “real women,” because obviously they are, they tend to be a lot more conventionally gorgeous than me, which can bring up uncomfortable feelings while I’m just trying to turn myself on and get off. Some audio porn describes the characters therein, but much of it is created to be intentionally vague, so that the listener can slot themselves into any fantasy they want without having to compare themselves to the preexisting people in that fantasy.

4. It’s physically easier to consume. I didn’t always care about this, but now that I’m chronically ill, there are some days when the effort of holding up my iPad to watch porn – or orienting myself in bed so that I can comfortably see the screen – is just too much, especially if I want to have energy left over afterward for masturbation or sex. I like that with audio porn, I can put my headphones on, hit “play,” and stay perfectly still in whatever position feels comfy while I listen.

5. It’s often in the second person. I know some people hate this about audio erotica, and would be comfier if it only ever described third-person scenarios (“She took his cock into her mouth,” etc.) rather than being in the second person (“You’re going to take my cock into your mouth now, pretty girl”). But I like the second-person ones, and especially enjoyed them when I was in my early 20s and had only just admitted to myself that I might be kinky. (LOL. What an understatement.) Hearing kinky dirty talk that was from a stranger, but that still felt like it was aimed directly at me, helped me become comfortable taking on a submissive role before I ever actually acted out those fantasies with real-life partners.

6. It’s comforting. I don’t know if I’m quite an “ASMR person,” in that I don’t often experience the characteristic “brain tingles” reported by those folks upon hearing certain sounds or encountering situations that trigger them. But I do find it oddly calming to be talked through a sexy scenario by a kind-hearted stranger who requires absolutely nothing from me, in terms of participation or prettiness. It’s like the grown-up version of when you stay home sick from school and a loving parent reads aloud to you from a fantasy novel.

 

Have you listened to much audio porn? What are your thoughts on it?

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at Sofia Sins, the cool new audio-porn platform from Sofia Gray. Check ’em out if sexy audio turns you on! As always, all writing and opinions here are my own.

What is “Ethical Porn,” Anyway?

Kate Sloan

People have been debating the concepts of “ethical porn,” “feminist porn,” and “authentic porn” the entire time I’ve been in this industry. It’s a constant push-and-pull within the queer, sex-positive, and feminist communities. Is porn an oppressive force, or an avenue for change and exploration? (Depends.) Is “male-gaze” porn hot, or problematic? (Depends.) Is what happens on porn sets always fully consensual? (Sadly, no.)

The concept of “ethical porn” is somewhat elastic and subjective, but it’s always interesting to see how individual people and companies choose to define this term for themselves. Sex toy brand Bellesa recently launched Bellesa Plus, their new porn subscription service which they’re calling “the Netflix of porn.” It features not only sexy videos but also interactive sex education and 600+ written erotica stories. Since ethics is a major focus of the work they’re doing, I thought it would be cool to expand on this concept a bit, and ponder the morality of smut.

 

Here are some basic benchmarks for what I would consider ethical porn:

• Performers are treated well. I mean, of course! They should be provided with snacks and water on set, able to take breaks when they need to, and valued and respected by everyone involved in the production. To me, this also includes implementing health and safety measures that help keep performers safe, like STI screening requirements (which Bellesa Plus, like most porn studios I’ve heard of, enforces), and having lots of lube available on set.

• Performers are paid well. As a feminist, I believe in pay equity, pay transparency, and fair payment for services rendered. Porn performers work incredibly hard and deserve compensation that reflects that, for each and every scene they do.

• Performers have agency. When I’ve performed in porn for indie companies, I’ve always been encouraged to choose scene partners who I genuinely like, trust, and want to have sex with on camera – which made the experience much more comfortable for me. Bellesa Plus is doing the same thing: their performers all choose who they want to work with, so the chemistry you see on-screen is based in real desire. Their performers also have veto power vis-a-vis what kinds of storylines they will or won’t perform in, and what kinds of sex they will have, and they can call an immediate end to the scene whenever they want, should something go awry.

• Everything depicted is consensual, and anything that appears non-consensual is properly contextualized. Unfortunately, some porn producers and performers are unscrupulous, and various forms of sexual assault do sometimes happen on porn sets. Truly ethical pornographers would immediately fire and blacklist anyone known to do shit like this, and would encourage (or require) a pre-scene negotiation between performers to establish ground rules for the scene. Bellesa assures me that 100% of the sex you’ll see on Bellesa Plus is consensual, and was filmed consensually. That said, many, many people have fantasies that involve some degree of non-consent – “rape” fantasies and other kinky power-exchange scenarios remain very popular in polls about such things – and those people should be able to access that type of material if they want to, although I think it should always be paired with some indication that the performers are actually consenting to what they’re doing. I’ve mostly seen that done via pre-scene and post-scene interviews with the performers about their fantasies, expectations, and limits.

• Content warnings are provided for each scene. We have them for mainstream movies in the form of MPAA rating descriptors; why not have them for porn, too? As a porn viewer who has certain triggers and squicks (which almost everyone does, to some extent), I often get frustrated when I put on what I think is going to be a hot scene, only to find that it contains some of the things I can’t handle or just don’t want to watch. A brief list of content warnings would help enormously, especially if timecodes were provided so I could skip past the stuff I didn’t want to see.

• Diversity of performers and filmmakers is prioritized. There is, frankly, more than enough porn made by straight cis able-bodied white guys out there already. They can and will keep doing their thing, but I’m much more interested in porn made by people from marginalized groups: people of color, queer people, trans people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, etc. etc. etc. Much of the porn on Bellesa Plus is directed by Jacky St. James, a legendary female pornographer, whose gaze and approach differ substantially from those of typical mainstream porn.

 

Bellesa Plus is doing some other things I think are awesome, too:

• They offer sliding-scale pricing, so that people who want to watch porn can access it for as little as $1/month. Paying more gets you cool perks like free sex toys, but if you just want cheap smut, they’ve got you covered. This is terrific news for people who care about supporting pornographers financially but don’t have much spare cash with which to do so.

• Director Jacky St. James has a “no fake orgasms” policy. I actually think fake orgasms can sometimes be hot, in the same way that I’m not mad when Meryl Streep cries in a movie despite not really being sad because she’s so damn good that it’s affecting regardless – but the prevalence of fake female orgasms in mainstream porn does contribute to culture-wide misinformation about sex and pleasure, so it’s cool to see some companies deviating from that norm.

• Their porn focuses on storyline and chemistry, rather than being all about closeups of tits and pussy and cock and ass. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good genitalia shot, but I also hear from readers/followers of mine pretty regularly that they wish porn had more of a story arc, relationship development, real chemistry, and so on. As a demisexual person, I totally get that for some people, it can be hotter to watch sex that’s been put in context emotionally, rather than just depicting a detached fuck in an unexplained location.

 

What about you? How would you define “ethical porn”? How do your tastes in porn relate to your values and ethics, if at all?

 

This post was graciously sponsored by the folks at Bellesa Plus. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Protocol Diaries: I’ll Have What They’re Having

Kate Sloan

Wouldn’t it be great if you could order your ideal sexual experience off a menu? Well, in certain sex work contexts you can… but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here.

For a couple months or so, my partner and I have been using two shared notes in our Notes app to basically do exactly that. It’s a communication tool that has helped us both, particularly in these stressful times when it can be hard to drum up the energy for good sex, let alone good, clear, useful communication about sex. The two notes are called the Sex Menu and the Porn Menu, and I’ll talk about them both here incase any of you find this idea useful and want to “yoink” it for your own sex life. (All credit goes to Matt for inventing these innovations – I’m blessed to have a spouse just as sex-nerdy as I am, and much more tech-nerdy than I am, who comes up with inventive and sexy usages for things like the Notes app!)

 

The Sex Menu is a checklist of all the sex and kink acts that my partner and I do regularly, ranging from the tame (kissing, breast stimulation, oral sex) to the wild (watersports, electrostimulation, ruined orgasms). As I’m the more submissive/bottom-y person in our dynamic, usually I fill it out to give my partner a sense of all the things I’m up for during a particular session, so that they don’t have to individually ask me about each and every thing they’re considering doing.

However, sometimes we switch it up by having them fill it out so that I can then go through it and uncheck anything I definitely don’t want to do. I tend to have more limits and limitations than my partner does, just due to the nature of our differing brains and bodies, so this works best for us, though of course you can adapt it to suit your particular dynamic.

This tool is especially wonderful for those of us who have a hard time asserting our boundaries and/or stating our desires; it gives me a way to express those things without feeling like I’m being rude, demanding, or overbearing. It also helps remind me of all the acts and toys I tend to forget about; on a stressful day I might not remember that a wax-play scene could help reduce my anxiety, until I see wax on the list and go, “Oh yeah! That could work.”

Because I have a chronic pain disorder, we keep a spot at the top of the Sex Menu for me to fill out my pain level du jour and the locations of the pain. This gives my partner a clear picture of what my body might be capable or incapable of on a particular night. Communicating about my pain can be difficult for me, especially when I feel I’ve been complaining about it a lot lately (which is usually the case these days, tbh), so I like having a built-in spot to describe it; it takes the pressure off me to be my own proactive health advocate.

 

The Porn Menu is another document, in which one of us will prepare a set of links to 2-3 porn videos for us to watch together before having sex. I have found shared porn-viewing to be a super useful pre-sex practice for me this past year, when pandemic stress has made my already-finicky libido even tougher to coax into action. Since my desire is responsive (à la “dual-control model of sexual response” as laid out in Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are), I usually need a little help – or a lot of help – to get turned on, and porn has almost always been a big source of that help for me.

My partner and I are both not the biggest fans of mainstream porn with high production values, and tend toward buying clips from indie creators instead. (Pay for your porn if you want porn to keep existing!) Usually we’ll try to match up our porn choices to what we’ve selected on the Sex Menu, so if I said I want oral, I’ll look for cunnilingus porn, and if I said I want to be fucked with a dildo, I’ll scroll through dildo porn sites – you get the picture!

 

Used in tandem, these two “menus” help me and my partner get on the same page about the sex we want to have, and get turned on together even when our lives are stressful. They’re also a reminder that sometimes the simplest communication tools are the best ones!

 

 

This post was sponsored by the folks at MyPornAdviser – feel free to check out their Anilos review if you’re curious about MILF porn! As always, all writing and opinions in this post are my own.