7 Things I Wish I'd Been Taught about the P-Word

Dear Friends:

Mindful of spam filters and work email accounts, the P-word in this week’s newsletter I’d originally meant to spell poorne. Like something Geoffrey Chaucer would’ve beat off to. But I don’t know how these filters work, and as will soon become clear, I’m not on board for this general silence we agree on re porn.

I wish we could talk more plainly about porn, without polarized porn is good / evil agendas. And yet, as I’m finding in this current book chapter I’m working on, plain talk about porn is—for anyone over the age of 13—mostly boring.

That’s a good thing. Once any subject becomes more boring than salacious, truth will out. This is the lesson every memoirist must learn: your story will eventually bore the shit out of you, and you’ll want to quit because Who else could ever care? That question really means to suggest another: Why do you care, still, after all this time? The answer is the lighthouse in the fog of your thinking.

Incidentally, I’m writing this not 1 mile from what I’m told is Maine’s most photographed lighthouse head light. Here’s the one I took of it:

It’s probably porn for somebody.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Reminding People It’s the Twenties
Every now and then, the Golden Girls argue at each other that women’s fashion is no longer conservative and that it’s okay to ask a man out, and they do it by saying, ‘It’s the Eighties!’ The implication: you’re living in the past, holding onto old values. This call-out got harder to do at the millennium, if anything for want of a good name. It’s time once again to give each other a shared vision of the present as progressed from the past. For instance, someone named Daniel Lurie, a son of billionaires who’s never held public office, wants to be mayor of San Francisco. (Mom’s donated $1 million of her own money to help elect him.) Are you kidding? It’s the Twenties! We don’t elect rich white businessmen just because they want to be president mayor anymore. That’s so Teens! The Twenties are about the rise of labor unions, about home pages over social media feeds, about once again trusting and reconnecting with our fellow humans we steered clear of for three years. The Twenties! I’m using this as a corrective against narratives that assert we’re returning to old ideas, to 2016’s election results, to being tough on crime, trusting algorithms to do the news well, etc. etc. There are too many old ideas still in circulation, and it’s time we shamed them to the past where they belong. It’s the Twenties for God’s sake!

2. Taking Summers Off
Both a perk of the job of being a teacher and likely, for many bad thinkers, a reason not to pay them well, summers ‘off’ are a vital part of my life. Also, as any tenured/tenure-line faculty will tell you, you take summers off at your peril. This is the time for catching up on all the writing and research you’ve dropped during the semester, when you had papers to grade all the time, or campus police to meet with after a student reported they feared for their safety because of what someone said in class. Christians have Lent to sacrifice things they love as a way to get God—who always already loves them unconditionally—to love them even more; I’m proposing we secular folks¹ take summers off from a thing we don’t love. That same cocktail we always order. Amazon.com. Zooms instead of phonecalls. The NY Times. I love Shenny, truly, and yet I need to love my book-in-progress more for a while, so this newsletter’s going on a little hiatus until the fall.

7 Things I Wish I’d Been Taught about the P-Word

When I was a child, I found porn on my own, exploring. No adult showed it to me, no older brother or group of boys. I thought about where I might find porn, and I looked, and there it was. And without even thinking about it, I looked from the get-go for men, at men. I was, I knew, straight, like all my friends and family were, but I wanted to look at naked men, and what men did to make sex happen.

And what did I see, exactly? Whatever porn was I learned from porn itself, which as far as sex ed goes is like learning class consciousness by watching Downton Abbey. I was happy at the time to have any kind of teacher, but now that I am a teacher, and an adult, and a happy homosexual, I wish I’d had an actual person, wise and experienced, to tell me a thing or two about pornography.

But we don’t believe adults should talk to kids about porn, so instead kids learn about porn online. If I could go back in time and sit my horny / confused self down, here are 7 things I’d say to him:

1. Porn doesn’t depict sex, but sex entertainment
Like how the WWE doesn’t show sports but sports entertainment. This distinction I got from Kelsy Burke’s very good The Pornography Wars, which quotes a pro-porn sex worker about how nobody, much less a teenager, should get in a car and expect to drive the way they do in Fast and Furious movies. That’s not real driving. Those are professionals, and if you get in a car and try to drive like that, you are going to do it wrong, and you are going to hurt yourself (and likely others). Most of all: nobody’s expecting you to drive like that. Ditto with the sex you see in porn.

2. And yet, porn is informative
Whatever porn you like to look at is not only fine to look at, but it can also tell you something about yourself and your sexuality you might not otherwise want to admit. This took me a decade to learn. I knew that porn wasn’t real, and because nobody I knew talked about porn, I didn’t see that my routine enjoyment of gay porn meant I might myself be gay. Porn was instead this bad habit that I believed didn’t affect my sexuality. Your rational brain might want to explain away whatever’s unsavory about the porn you return to, but that will mess with your mental health. So give yourself the space and privacy to explore porn openly, remembering #1 above.

3. Porn, like sports or treehouses or buffet restaurants, is neither good nor bad
Many things we make or do aren’t for everyone, but there are people (maybe people you love) who believe porn is for no one. They are wrong, their position informed only by their feelings against porn and/or what Pastor says. If you like watching porn, that’s great. Porn is about sex, and sex is a good thing we give each other. So you never need to feel ashamed or guilty about looking at it. But like food, porn’s not always good. Yes, we need food and have whole happy cultures we share (with family!) around it, but overeating and junk food aren’t great for your health. You will likely never share your porn enjoyment with family or friends, but don’t in that isolation feel there’s anything wrong about liking it. You’re not alone, and you’re not in any trouble.

4. Don’t let porn overwrite your fantasies
Some days, when you’ve spent too long playing a video game, or bingeing a TV show, you’ll often dream that night about the show or game. Your dreams on such a night aren’t really your own, whereas on a day when you get outside, do various things, talk to people, etc., your mind that night does amazing things with that material. Porn is another form of entertainment, but unlike video games or TV, you have (or want one day) a sex life. Porn, per #2 above, can help inform that sex life, but for that sex life to be yours, it’s important to hold onto and start from your fantasies, your dreams. If you find you can’t masturbate without porn, you’re not ‘addicted to porn’, you’re just out of touch with your fantasies, and maybe your body’s pleasure responses.² Give yourself some alone time, and be patient.

5. Porn will ‘rewire your brain’ but that’s true of everything
If you’re named ‘female’ at birth and raised in a culture that codes ‘female’ as passive, weaker, subservient, social, domestic, etc., then your brain will ‘wire itself’ accordingly. ‘Brains reflect the lives that they have lived, not just the sex of their owners,’ neuroscientist Gina Rippon argues. So yes, if you watch a couple hours of choking porn each day,³ you might be in for some frustrating sex (should you ever have some). See #2 above about what your porn choices might be telling you: Do you wish violence on your sex partner, and/or get pleasure from that violence? Do you want to be choked while coming? Do you feel less assertive or in control of your general circumstances than you wish you were? Do you just not know what else to do with your hands during sex? It could be none of these, but the point here is that porn itself won’t affect you more or differently than any other media you consume, which leads me to…

6. Don’t listen to straight people talk about porn
If they talk, that is. Nearly every adult you know can’t talk about porn without jokey irony or self-righteousness, and yet many of these adults have long ago taken strong positions against porn, and particularly against teenagers looking at it. You’ll also likely not hear about porn in any sex ed class you take (if you get to take one; only 18 states require sex ed to be medically accurate), and if you’re queer, or think you might be, you’ll just about never get a public education about what sex is for you. Is porn the best teacher about queer sex? No, but in a vacuum, porn saves queer lives by showing us we’re not alone in our ‘deviant’ desires, and by showing us what’s possible when we come physically together. Heterosex is affirmed in every story ever told; those folks don’t need porn the ways we do. As (USF colleague and friend) Josh Gamson has shown in his and Rosanna Hertz’s study of how teens learn about sex, queer kids don’t necessarily search for sex online more or less than straight kids do, but they search more for information on sexual identities and safe sex practices. Until heteros want to talk in school about queer sex, porn is an important part of this searching.

7. If you want to better understand porn, think of it like a puzzle
So many websites and influencers out there (particularly for young men; e.g. NoFap or YourBrainOnPorn) start from an antiporn stance and then defend it with junk science, and it’s like, if you wanted to learn about abortion safety or preventing child sexual abuse, would you ask the Catholic church?

You would not. Instead search the phrase “porn literacy” (use those quote marks please), because learning how to interpret the porn you watch is as important as learning to read a book on your own. Otherwise, all you can do is sit while someone tells you a story in their own words. That sort of thing is for babies.

‘Adolescents like to question things,’ Emily Rothman says in her TED talk about the porn literacy curriculum she developed (somewhat inadvertently). ‘And they like to be invited to think for themselves.’ And I know, teen version of myself I’m writing to today, that this idea hits home. You like science and puzzles and being smart, that’s like your whole deal.

Porn is a puzzle and the science behind its consumption is complex. I’m sorry that no adult in your life was able to frame porn in this way, and I’m sorry that in such silence you had to figure so much of this out on your own, without an answer key to turn to. This list doesn’t have all the answers, and time travel isn’t real, but today it’s what I have to give.

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this book that could’ve saved me a whole Shenny post:

1. While I guess I talk in prayer to Jesus more than most people I know, I’ll never call myself ‘A Christian’ because that term has been rotted out by the rotten folks who use it, most of them failing over and over to evince Christ’s message. (For example, even if you decide to believe that while God may have created a spectrum between day and night or creatures of the sea and the sky and the land, he refused to assign such a spectrum to gender, you can’t abide Jesus’s love for all [i.e. the ‘sinner’ but not their ‘sin’] by denying such ‘sinners’ the health care they’re asking for.) Anyway, I’ve got a little hobby of collecting terms, like ‘Christian’, where the person who identifies in such a way instantly reveals themselves not to be such a way; others in this set include ‘patriot’, ‘hoi polloi’, and ‘alpha male’. Share yours in the comments!

2. Or, as William Simon and John H. Gagnon show in ‘Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change’ (cited extensively in Gamson & Hertz’s ‘“But Everything Else, I Learned Online”: School-Based and Internet-Based Sexual Learning Experiences of Heterosexual and LGBQ + Youth’), the ‘cultural scripts’ of porn, when consumed repeatedly, have affected the ‘intrapsychic scripts’ you tell yourself that informs you of your deepest desires. Cultural scripts of any kind, Simon and Gagnon argue, inform intrapsychic scripts (e.g., like how Goldilocks teaches us moderation and casual theft), but only once they’ve been played out in interpersonal scripts (i.e., storytelling hour), wherein we learn to apply cultural-script behaviors in specific contexts. Without interpersonal play (e.g., sex encounters), it’s hard to distinguish whether we deep-down want something, or porn has informed us to want something.

3. Contrary to SO MANY antiporn arguments, porn doesn’t work like heroin, where the user needs more / ‘more extreme’ (a word antiporn folks never define) doses to ‘get high’ or come or whatever. When porn researchers actually interview and survey porn users, particularly straight men, they find (as David Loftus did in his Watching Sex: How [Straight] Men Really Respond to Pornography) that the majority of them don’t enjoy depictions of domination or aggression toward women, and rather respond more to porn about women’s pleasure and assertiveness and power.