Action: A Book About Sex (20 page)

I love porn when it helps me alleviate sexual frustration or engage with a fantasy that I am either uncomfortable with or unable to share with any of the sexual partners I’ve got going at the moment. If I rely on it for my main interactions with sex and masturbation, I find myself looking for new extremes in terms of how out there it can be, which impedes my sex life because I feel dull for having uncomplicated sex, which I also usually love. Porn can be a resource, but it shouldn’t be your only sexual point of reference.

I was also, for a long period, unnerved by pornography because I thought I was competing with it. It was like I was looking at a still life of some apples and being all, “DANG, guess I’m never eating real fruit again, now that I’ve seen that painted produce can do THAT; guess I don’t have the right… seeds…” What I was forgetting: Porn does not have hands, a mouth, and so forth—most notably, it lacks actual consciousness, so it’s ridiculous to envy it. I’d rather pay attention to how I can make the sex I have, be that by myself or with someone else, feel unique and right without the specter of some remembered camgirl looming over it.

There’s no need to feel as though I have to live up to porn when I think about what draws me to it in the most basic senses. I watch porn whose actors frequently look nothing like my partners because I am happy with what my partners are all about and would like to see thoroughly contrapuntal acts and bodies that aren’t already a part of my sex life. I also watch it, generally, because it gives me inspiration for things I can do with the people I have sex with.

Even if people in your life treat porn like an immoral cesspool
in which sinners are drowning their deficient souls, it’s more of a sizzlin’ cabana party, from what I’ve seen on my computer screen. Much like a coconut rum–infused fuck-a-thon, it’s pretty unbeatable in moderation: a nice diversion from real life, but not what you expect it to be like around-the-clock.

THE ETHICAL SMUT

Taking in a rude motion picture is the same as any other consumer choice—you can decide how to do it ethically. If you’re concerned that the pornography you like to watch is disadventageous to either the individual actors in it or our
twisted society-culture on the whole, man
, let’s talk about how to make sure you’re watching videos that you don’t feel go against your moral code.

Are you mad at what you like because it doesn’t square with your personal gender, race, class, or sexual orientation–based politics? I try to take a look at the way I conduct myself in the world, and reexamine what my
actual feelings and behaviors
about social justice, equal rights, and respecting people of all stripes are.
Yeah, yeah—they’re pristine.
Except they’re not, of course! Few people can be convinced of their bigotry, even when it’s obvious that we live in a white supremacist patriarchy that imbues us with it. Look, I get that you’re not currently guffawing heartily at a homeless person on your office flat-screen TV and smacking your secretary’s ass while clad in a KKK uniform. However: If you were born white, male, straight, or cisgender, you were given a book of get-out-of-jail-free cards that was withheld from others, and if you’re not trying to redistribute them in
all
things, including pornography, that’s kind of a boner-killer for the rest of us.

In your broader life, do you make a concerted effort to lift up and listen to others in order not to bulldoze them? Great! Let’s take a look at how that extends to your skinematic taste. Are you able to recognize, if you’re watching porn that isn’t a perfect
representation of your politics (aka, 97 percent of porn), what and where the flaws are? Okay, then go ahead and watch it if you want to.

In many cases, in getting off to polemically tricky porno, it seems like people are exorcising its presence in the life they know outside their internet browsers—as a form of relief. I like some porn that is rough or intentionally derogatory toward women, just as I do sex that plays similar power games. If I ever experienced anything like the plots listed by my search history, or of previously agreed-upon and mutually respectful rough sex, when I hadn’t agreed to it, the experience would be horrifying/traumatic. By taking pleasure in porn that embraces the horror-trauma plots that others might foist upon me and/or people with bodies like mine, I feel like I’m in control of and subverting the rape-culture-borne reality that I am a target. That’s sexy to me. Porn can be a depressurized expression of all that is ridiculous and wrong in reality—a safe place to exercise sexual inclinations that you would shudder, panic, and feel hatred toward should they show up in earnest in your true-blue bedroom or life.

Shame, fear, displeasure, and anger, unlikely as it may or should seem, can interweave into the network of what a person finds desirable. This is not to say that those who like offbeat sex are damaged or flawed—finding a private, self-directed way to morph those feelings into something that feels good and self-determined means you are the opposite, because it’s incredibly healthy. When you choose to let the nightmarish cartoon of hard porn play out before your eyes and you’re able to feel pleasure and power instead of pain from making it your entertainment, you claim victory over it.

I have limitations within this. I would never be able to get off to porn if I were aware that the actors in it were being disenfranchised or forced or otherwise hurt by what they were doing. The majority of porn actors in “produced” porn movies, aka those videos that look like they were shot on a tripod and not the Droid of some guy named Mike, have willfully signed contracts to appear
in their star vehicles. I love an autonomous adult-film impresario. Find actors who seem to take genuine joy in what they do.

Outside of that directive: Porn comes in all different categorizatons and search-bar terminologies. What you’re looking for can be surmised from what you otherwise fantasize about when you masturbate. Distill it into one to three words, turn on private browsing, and go find it. I promise you that it is there.

I always worry that the videos I find on more generic porno search engines and amateur sites were leaked out of retribution without one of the parties’ knowledge. I like to stick to “sex-positive” porn sites, even though, as I mentioned upfront, I feel word-negative about the hippie-dippie hey-man-it’s-the-’90s-ish designation of that term. For amateur porn heads of my same ilk, here is the best way to find it: A few years back, the entrepreneur Cindy Gallop masterminded a blissful website called MakeLoveNotPorn. It collates the “Mike’s Droid” style of cinematography, except the encounters are blemished, realistic, and taken by their own willing, loving actors (including couples, friends, one-offs, and more). Everyone in the videos is stoked to participate.

Think doubly hard about whether that’s the case for the porn actors in videos of people who, identity-wise, maybe have a harder time with sex work. (This is a fraught topic; I’m scared that by advocating for a reduction in demand for income these people have is also a detriment to them.) People in the sex industry, especially marginalized ones, deserve support, your agitating politically and spreading the word for their protection, and pragmatic and social resources in areas that extend beyond your laptop. If a person is willing to get off to the employees of a field that cannot yet legally provide sufficient working conditions for all of those involved in it, then that same person turns off their computer and scoffs at or blithely rebukes these people, that person is a jerk-off in EVERY sense of the word. Do not let your reluctance to seem like a free-spirited tree-nerd override and inhibit your ethical decency, will ya? After all, man, it’s the ’90s. We know better these days.

GRAPHIC PHOTO-REALISM

Failing the whole internet: Make
your own
porn, whether you’re doing so by means of still or moving images! Just smile for the camera, please, as we consider how to create fine works of art in both mediums.

Taking skin photos is likely going to involve some self-scrutiny regardless of whether you’re trying to embody the very portrait of aesthetic grace or simply be arranged into a passably fuckable assortment of pixels. Don’t beat yourself up if you spend an hour agonizing over the perfect lighting and angles, but please know you can also take a blurry shot of your butt that will be attractive in its own right. Do what feels good. When in doubt, take your picture from slightly above you in order to fit more of you in it (as seen from a universally flattering viewpoint!), make sure your posture is long and strong, and see if you can muster a smile if your face is in the frame.

When it comes to photos that include your whole torso, some people I know swear by the “S Curve,” which some of my pals say they copped from the proto-edgy soft-porn site Suicide Girls, but which originated with the artist William Hogarth in 1753. It’s universally venerated! The “line of beauty,” as it’s known most democratically among camgirls and eighteenth-century artists alike, is the shape of the letter its other nickname represents. What you do, to get that scurve on: Stand stationary. Choose a shoulder. If you favor your right, cock and shove it in the direction of the wall behind you. Tilt your neck heavenward toward your left shoulder—imagine you are uncoiling springs in it that allow it to stretch languidly. Point the nexus of your jawline and the side of your face on that same left side high-up, too, and push your left shoulder and hip in front of the rest of your entire self. Take a sip of something. Okay. Back to it: Align the right butt cheek/hip region with your right shoulder as far opposite the left side of your body as it will go. Sip. Snap the picture.

Or you could always do like me, say fuck it, and
cover yourself in value-menu cheeseburgers in the heart-shaped hot tub of a New Jersey love motel
. (See photo, below).

This photo is titled, “Twenty-two years of age, thrilled with herself, and makin’ some choices.”

Credit: Nate “Igor” Smith

If your face is a central part of your picture, either point your chin into your chest and fire your eyes directly at the lens, or float it toward the ceiling and do a heavy-lidded “god DAMN can you believe that you aren’t here making love to my body?” face. Or cross your eyes and squeeze your chest together real hard and rest complacently in the knowledge that you are a hilarious person (all genders).

The most pressing part of deciding how to include thine visage in your photo: Imagine whether you’d be straight with it being seen by everyone you know—Your siblings. Your elementary school teachers. Your colleagues. That probably—almost definitely—will not happen, but what if it did? Would you keep your S-curve intact as you strutted forth into the world, or would
you feel more resolutely that your life was OVER? KAPUT? OH MY GOD, I NEVER WANT THEM TO SEE MY MOUTH IN PERSON AGAIN, LEST THEY RECALL ITS SENSUOUS PURSED-LIPNESS.

If you are in a position where you’d like to be extra-cautious with your photos, not because you are
afraid of sex
, but because you’d rather keep them private: Sorry, but consider not taking them, because there’s no such thing as totally secure data anymore, even if the other person guards your attachments as closely as they can.