The Conflicted Existence Of A Female Porn Writer

[el_victorino]

C O L U M N 10

The Smut Smorgasbord and Surreptitious
Sex Habits.
BY LYNSEY G.
- - - -

When I first started out writing for the porn industry, my contact with the world of adult entertainment was pretty limited in capacity. There had been the softcore video my roommate swore was sent to him "accidentally" by Amazon, the Playboy channel we all pitched in for in college to annoy one of our roommates, and a few VHS tapes my friends and I had snuck out of one of their parents' bedrooms to watch when we were 14. That, and... well... OK, I'll admit it. As much as I now loathe the free, pirated content on the Internet for what it's done to the porn industry, there were also the volumes of online porn I'd viewed over the years. I didn't really think of it as contact with the porn world, since nobody out there knew I was looking at it, and I'd never really discussed it with anyone. I didn't buy it, I just looked at it. So it wasn't really contact with porn... not really. I wasn't exactly proud of my online porn use, but I refused to be ashamed of it, either. It was just a habit, and a very common one; I just needed some satisfaction now and then. No big deal.

...Well. OK, that's not entirely true. Well, it's true. But it's not honest. The whole story is more complicated. I'm not prepared to go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that I'm one of those women who has trouble going "over the edge" into orgasm, particularly with anyone else in the room. I'm sure a psychoanalyst would say it's some anal-retentive control thing, but what it boiled down to from day to day was that it was much easier for me to park my ass in front of a computer on a free porn website than to labor in vain with someone else, thus inspiring guilt in myself and feelings of inadequacy in my partner.

No sweat, right? A private thing; nobody knows, everybody's having orgasms. It's all good.

But, as anti-porn crusaders warn will happen and I'm loath to admit, I found myself getting inured to certain things, and branching out into others. I was looking for more, and often more hardcore material to make things go more quickly for me. I didn't like this downward spiral, and although looking back I can see there's nothing wrong with it?it's only natural?at the time I was freaked out by my own freakiness. I didn't want to meet someone new and have to tell them I couldn't get off unless they were willing to do some weird thing I'd seen online, thus scaring them off forever. I was afraid I'd go too far down the rabbit hole and come out as a total degenerate, so deep in the morass of my own moral decline that I'd never be able to get off from anything less than electric shocks to my genitals... Oh god.

I told myself I had to stop. And I tried. I'd periodically go cold turkey, but find myself slipping up after a week or so, back on my favorite websites. Then I'd tell myself that I'd only look at porn online once a week. Wean myself off, or at least prevent calluses from building up on my libido.

But it wasn't just that I had a hard time reaching orgasm with someone trying to do it for me. It was difficult when I was by myself, too, and it took a lot longer when there was no "visual aid." At one time, I was living in a small, thin-walled, two bedroom apartment with a roommate who had very little respect for personal space. We were dirt poor and I had nothing in my bedroom except my bed and a computer with a very shoddy, stolen internet connection. If I'd spent more than a half hour in there by myself, he'd have gotten bored and burst in to find me in the midst of a frantic masturbation session using all kinds of bizarre devices to speed things along without porn. It would have been awkward.

So I ended up sliding back into the porn habit to avoid sexual frustration, prolonged, torturous masturbation sessions, and tension with my roommate. I'd watch maybe ten minutes of free clips at a time, but they did the trick, and I could watch as many different types of porn as I wanted in that short span. It was a smut smorgasbord, it wasn't hurting anybody, and nobody had to know about it.

I knew then that I wasn't alone in my surreptitious sex habits, but once I started working in the porn industry I realized just many of us were secretly stroking it online. A recent talk during a consultation on the subject at The Witherspoon Institute (a conservative think tank that I'm rather dubious about, but nevertheless) revealed that as of late 2009, a full eleven percent of online searches are for pornography. That's a whole lot of one-handed typing. In recent years, it's been suggested that the "creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography" in our culture (as Cindy Gallop put in her TED Talk, which I highly recommend) has made porn a more acceptable indulgence because so many more of us use it now than back when getting porn meant a walk of shame home with a black plastic bag. Not that many of us were willing to walk that route. But now that it's easy to access porn from the comfort of our wheelie computer chairs, we've all seen it. It's not that big of a deal anymore. I think that as far as the numbers go, this is true. Online porn is used so prevalently that it has led fairly directly to a rise not only in the numbers, but also in the public's acceptance of porn and sex addiction as real, troublesome, and treatable conditions. For a while I have to admit that I was falling victim to this "silent epidemic" (as it's called by Chris Tuell, a professor of addiction studies at the University of Cincinnati) myself. I couldn't keep away.

When I moved back to New York and began sharing a bedroom with my long-time long-distance love, I found my online porn habit curtailed. I couldn't admit to him what I'd been up to, and since he was always around, I couldn't covertly keep doing it. I entered into what we'll call a dark period, when orgasms were not a part of my daily experience. I was not used to sharing my personal space, which made my already difficult climax more of an Everest prospect than the Mt. Fuji situation it had been before.

Then I got the porn writing gig. I had to start watching porn?and lots of it?at home, rather publicly on the TV rather than my little computer screen, and not be embarrassed about it. After all, it was a job. It wasn't my personal problem. Before I committed to the job, however, I had to have The Porn Talk with my boyfriend. Would he be comfortable with this? Was it intimidating to him? Exciting? What was his personal relationship with porn like? And, more frighteningly, what was mine like?

I played the innocent card. "Yeah, I've watched some porn online." He played the same. Suddenly we found ourselves sitting there on the bed, looking at each other and wondering. What, I was thinking, does he look at? What puts him over the edge? Part of me wanted to ask him, but the other part was scared to. What if it was brutal gangbangs? Would he ask me what my fantasies were? What kind of porn I watched? How often I used it? If I told him the truth, what would he think of me?

Strange, really: here I was with the person who knew me better than anybody, with whom I shared my most intimate self. But it was turning out that I didn't share my most intimate self with him. Some of that was reserved for long evenings with my laptop.

Here's the thing: despite the aforementioned ubiquity of smut in our society via the interwebs, I would argue from personal experience the nature of our relationship with porn may have changed along with our access to it. Our tendency now, or at least my tendency, is to wait until I'm completely alone, close the curtains, lock the door, and proceed pantsless with the laptop as my only light. It's a shameful, frightened act, a surreptitious relationship to my most intimate parts. These days, without that walk of shame from the video store and the disapproving faces of the people we pass, we are alone with our perversions from start to finish. It's beyond private; it's embarrassing, and all the more so because we can pretend to the rest of the world that we don't do it.

My boyfriend and I were both feeling the glaring light of someone else's intrusion into a habit we'd kept firmly planted in the dark, moldy corners of our most shameful secrets. We were blinking at each other, wondering if maybe we'd be able to see each other's childhood nose picking, as well, if we squinted hard enough.

Over the next few years, as we became more comfortable with the constant presence of hardcore porn DVDs littering the entertainment center and he got accustomed to coming home to find me taking notes on double penetration performances, some of the details began to surface. Now that we were used to discussing the finer points of deep throating and our sexual repertoire had opened up from viewing positions we'd never dreamed of, none of our private porn-watching details seemed that terrible. So he'd seen a few tentacle hentai scenes; well, sometimes you stumble across weird stuff when it's too late to turn back. And so I'd gotten off to a bunch of orgies; well, it could be a lot worse. I guess you could call this desensitization, but I prefer to consider it the opening up of our minds. At its base, porn is about fulfilling fantasies, and particularly when it's online a lot of it is accessed in the heat of a very intense moment, when it would take a whole lotta weird to kill the libido.

With the increasing prevalence of porn on mobile devices as they continue to stretch and expand into new incarnations, it appears the ubiquity of hardcore porn in America is only due to creep further into our homes and public spaces. With the promise of 3D technology, porn may be brought back to theaters if it's done right (Tinto Brass, director of 1979's Caligula recently vowed to make the world's "first ever 3D pornographic feature," which would only be half mind blowing, since a 3D feature porno was made in 1969, but that's beside the point), as well, the public sphere may soon be porn's new horizon, and our relationship to graphic sexual material may have to do backbends around it. Maybe we'll be forced once again to admit our private perverted proclivities to the world, or at least a few people, and maybe, just maybe, along with the ubiquity, a bit of understanding and acceptance might creep in.

[el_victorino]

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Awww, a kitty cat . . .

Can we get come Coles Notes up in this biatch? that's a lot of reading

[salumeria]

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It's a lot of reading, but it was quite enjoyable. Are there any more columns?

[Pobs]

Too. many. words.

[mr.brownfella]

keep on writing..

[el_victorino]

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There were only ten at McSweeney's. I've got it bookmarked and will check back once in a while. A lot of reading, but it was interesting to see her opinion and philosophy change the longer she did it.