Porn

From Sweet Emotion on CalifMichele:

Men that I had important relationships to tended to want a live person meeting their needs. They typically weren't interested in porn.

I eventually concluded these were men for whom the emotional piece was extremely important and my experience was these were generally nicer men who treated women better than average by quite a lot. They saw a sexual relationship as primarily a social and emotional relationship and they treated women like whole human beings both in ways other men didn't typically treat me and also to a much greater degree.

I used to say on Hacker News that I was for porn because studies suggested that you saw lower incidence of sexual assault where porn was available. Most such observations are extremely heteronormative where porn stars or sex workers are female and consumers are male and the implication is that a factor driving sexual assault is physical or emotional need and people don't generally want to entertain any such ideas or tolerate discussion of such.

Tom Fejeran was Guamanian and my understanding is that's a culture that views porn negatively as objectifying women. Navarre was Middle Eastern and from a predominantly Islamic country and Islam is more strongly judgemental of any idolatry -- in other words images of people -- being harmful to society and individuals.

Both of those relationships were helpful to me in healing from being treated as a sex object and sexually assaulted. I didn't really understand the corrosive nature of the idea of being a sex object until after my relationship to Navarre restored something emotionally for me that had been gone so long I didn't know I was missing anything.

This is another quote from the same piece quoted above:

I think porn addiction is a problem in part because of what it does to twist people emotionally. Porn ACTIVELY promotes focusing on looks over an emotional connection to a person and actively encourages people to see other people as sex objects, not human beings, and porn frequently relies on "breaking taboos" to get a rise out of people.

I've never much consumed porn. But in my teens prior to getting involved with my future husband, I sought out sexy photos and the like which are quite easily found in American media without having access to "explicit" materials and I masturbated.

And it was an awful experience where trying to reach orgasm became steadily more challenging and I became steadily more emotionally numb or something and I got involved with the future ex and chose to stop all that and had no orgasm for ten long miserable months before reaching orgasm with him and then PROMPTLY told myself "I must be in LOVE!!!!!" because, wow, was I a ditz as a teen.

And because that is the kind of BULLSHIT we promote culturally.

Years ago, I read that in the highly religious Deep South -- where I grew up -- you saw high teen pregnancy rates because girls typically believed that if you planned to have sex, you were a cheap immoral little hussie, but if you were swept away with emotion, it was LOVE! And that made it okay!

So that boils down to "Only bad girls use birth control. Good Girls (TM) only do it for BIG FEELS they had no way to predict would happen."

I no longer quite know what to think of porn. I have had positive experiences with men I was involved with long distance sending me the occasional clip to communicate something to me, but these were men who valued an emotional bond.

This piece is being written to make a point:

If you see yourself as addicted to porn and hate it and you FEEL like it's RUINING your life and making you miserable and causing you to have a dysfunctional relationship to your sexuality, my opinion is that you have made the mistake of relating to feelings like it's an emotional thrill ride instead of meaningful important information about your life and your experiences.

Sex has a substantial emotional component and looking at pictures of strangers is like empty calories, emotionally speaking. 

How you fix that, I don't know. But more porn with stronger taboos only deepens the problem.

I fixed it by getting involved with actual human beings who cared about my actual welfare. Granted that's extremely tough to come by in the world today.