Let’s dive in with something that is like so like not at all controversial.
Porn!
Yeah, let’s talk about porn.
So I got a question from one of my patrons and I’ve already responded to them briefly about this.
But I wanted to do a more in-depth response for this Q and A.
The person wrote, “I saw an Instagram post recently that basically condemned porn. As I am someone who occasionally watches porn, I was conflicted and wanted your take on the idea of watching porn particularly for men.”
So the post they were talking about is one that basically says that – let me pull it up.
Kind of porn ruins your masculinity or “Ways That Porn Destroys Men” is the title.
It encourages social isolation, destroys motivation, encourages self-gratification, can cause erectile dysfunction.
Slowly kills you.
This post says that porn kills you slowly.
Pornography is a killer, whether it is being sporadically or our indulgences are a daily or hourly occurrence.
It well within time proved to be the death of all that is good.
So OK.
Here’s the thing.
No, porn does not give you erectile dysfunction.
No, porn is not killing people.
No, porn is not the reason you don’t have motivation.
It can encourage self-gratification and that’s not a bad thing.
Like there’s nothing wrong with learning how to please yourself, soothe yourself.
You know, use ways to be in touch with your body in order to feel better.
Like there’s nothing wrong with that.
The vast majority of the time, folks who have this take on porn come from one of two camps.
One is the very like SWERF-y, which is sex work exclusionary feminist take of like all sex work is rape.
There is no ethical porn.
So you cannot consume porn without being unethical and without you essentially sexually assaulting the participants of the porn.
The other camp that says all porn is bad tends to be fascists and in fact, things like No Fat November are a prime recruiting tool for a lot of fascist groups.
A lot of white supremacist groups love to tell dudes that they shouldn’t be using porn.
They shouldn’t be masturbating because then for a lot of these already isolated dudes who are struggling a lot, they’re feeling even more vulnerable.
They’re feeling even less pleased and gratified in the world and it’s a really great way for them to get in touch with those dudes and start telling them about like real masculinity and white replacement and so on and so forth.
Anytime I see something that says like porn kills, my dears, since humans have made visual media, we have made porn.
I’ve been to the ruins of Pompei.
Do you know what is in the ruins of Pompei?
A brothel.
There are paintings of sex acts on the walls of the brothel in Pompei.
So porn is literally thousands of years old.
If porn killed, we wouldn’t have humans anymore.
Now some people will argue that our access to pornography is much more common now because of the internet and I would say that we have access to a greater variety of pornography that we can access a whole lot of different kinds of porn very quickly and easily.
But I don’t think it was the case that back in the oldy days, nobody had access to naughty drawings.
Like that’s just not how humans are.
We are fucking perverts.
Two oh one, like every single one of us tends to be pretty perverted.
So most folks have had access to nudity for a long time.
Plus like the ways that we think about nudity and naked bodies are very recent ideas about nudity and naked bodies including being around sex.
Like up until 50 to 100 years ago, a lot of folks lived in one-room houses.
If you think that there weren’t people around sex, that they were not personally having, if you think that there weren’t kids around their parents having sex, then you have no idea what history was like.
So, so many of these arguments for porn fall apart if you take even the briefest historical lens to them.
But again the biggest risk here is the ways in which these things against pornography particularly say that it makes you less manly.
It’s going to make you less good of a man.
It’s going to make you less able to relate to actual people in the real world.
Like those arguments are the ones that tend to be used primarily by white supremacist groups who are looking to target vulnerable dudes.
Now sometimes they’re not fully fascist.
Sometimes they’re just incels or big toes.
Men going their own way, right?
None of those groups are good either.
In fact most of them are recruiting grounds for white supremacists.
So not a good argument.
Now there are ways to be more and less ethical in your consumption of porn.
If you are concerned about the ethics of porn use and about the porn that you are consuming, the easiest way to make sure that you are consuming ethically-made porn that treats the people who performed in it well, that pays them well for what they did, the best way to guarantee that is to pay for your porn.
If you are cruising Pornhub a ton and that’s where you get most of your porn, it is a far lower chance that that porn is ethically made than if you’re paying the sometimes high fees to access the porn of performers who are either putting their own stuff out on sites like OnlyFans or who are performing for studios that then charge you money for that porn.
Some great places to look for ethical porn, particularly queer and feminist porn, Pink and White Studios are fantastic.
I have the Pink Label subscription.
I love them.
They do a Crash Pad series.
There’s also Bonus Hole Boys, a lot of great stuff there.
Four Chambered Heart is fantastic.
If you liked the orgies in Sense8, you will love the porn by Four Chambered Heart.
They do actual fucking but it’s shot and edited in that very like Sense8 orgy kind of fashion.
Strongly recommend those and again OnlyFans.
Websites like that are a great place to go to directly support porn performers.
If what you want to do is make sure that the people doing your porn are getting paid for it, you can pay them directly now.
We don’t even have to go through a studio.
You can just go to their OnlyFans and pay them all the money that you want to be spending.
So again, porn is not ruining men.
If you want to know more about ethical porn consumption, David Ley wrote a book “Ethical Porn for Dicks” that’s targeted particularly towards cismen about how to consume porn more ethically.
It also debunks a lot of the very sex-negative, SWERF-y, fascist takes on pornography and masturbation.
So strongly recommend that book.
Porn is not going to kill you.
A lot of the things that people attribute as porn-causing are actually things that people are using porn to cope with.
So when we talk about like compulsive sexual behavior or out-of-control sexual behavior, which we don’t call sex addiction because it’s not an addiction, a lot of times what is happening is people are using sex masturbation porn as a way to self-soothe emotions that are too hard for them to cope with otherwise.
Now why might people these days have a lot of stuff they have to self-soothe around?
Maybe because we’re in two pandemics.
Global climate change is creating huge problems everywhere all the time.
A lot of us are broke.
The stratification of wealth in our societies is getting greater.
Huge amounts of racism.
A huge surge in transphobia, resurgences in homophobia and the overturn of Roe versus Wade, plus the potential overturn of our entire electoral system with the case that the Supreme Court is looking here in 2024.
So like we’re all fucking stressed right now and that means that if we had used up all of our best coping strategies and we still have more strong negative emotions that we can deal with, we’re going to start turning to the less adaptive, less healthy, less productive coping strategies including things like masturbating a lot.
I mean I will let you all know. I also have been masturbating a lot lately because, you know, I’m spending a lot of time alone and sometimes I just need to like get myself off to feel good for a little while in the middle of all this drama and crisis.
So again, porn is not hurting you and porn does not kill.
Pay for your porn if you want it to be ethical.
Particularly pay the performers directly or go to companies and studios that are known for being good in the way that they treat their performers and that treat their people well, pay them well and make sure that those people are having a good time in the work that they’re doing.
