day 7

It’s weird, since giving up sex, it’s like it’s all my friends want to talk to me about. As if they think I’ve suddenly gained this weird sense of wisdom because I’m abstaining. When in reality, any conversation / attractive Netflix couple / vaguely arousing fiction or even some strangely intense eye contact with a shop clerk over a jar of pickles makes me feel less and less like I want to stick to 40 days and 40 nights, and just have a wank and be done with it. Yet…. we continue.

“Boys want nice porn too”

This is what a friend of mine said, when I told him about all the new “feminist” porn sites cropping up on the interweb supposedly made with “female sexuality'“ in mind. Bellessa, Cheex to name a couple, all offer supposedly more intimate less male gazey sex, focused on female pleasure and often featuring real life couples, who have really taken one for the team here and filmed a classy sex tape. They tend to be couples called things like Xavier and Athena, who live in Berlin and give off the energy of being performance artists who are “working on a couple projects right now” involving door handles, tiny chiwawas and a man playing the harpsichord, but still haven’t really figured out what performance art is. You know the vibe.

I don’t know why I was surprised that my friend had made this admission… I suppose because porn is so dominated by BDSM/ gang bangs/ incest and other more, shall we say, intense genres, that I thought supply was just fulfilling demand, and the current stats are that 3 /4 of men watch porn, women only 20% or so. In conversation with another friend, he spoke about how porn had really impacted what he thought good sex was. I fondly remember giving my uni housemates an anatomy lesson on the female body and blowing their minds on the way in which most girls masturbate. Because only 18% of women are able to orgasm from penetrative sex, remember? So if you’re someone who has sex with women and not getting all up in the clit, it’s basically the equivalent of attending a festival and going to the portaloo for a poop just as Beyonce gets up on stage. You’re really missing the show. 

I fondly remember giving my housemates an anatomy lesson on the female body and blowing their minds on the way in which most girls masturbate.

It seems to all come down to where we go to initially be educated about sex, for most womxn it’s probably more likely to be popular culture, as it’s often not something readily spoken about between friends, and for a lot of men, maybe it is pornography with a little misdirected locker room chat thrown in?

Pornography is a performance, everything about it is heightened or exaggerated. And don’t even get me started on the way in which female bodies are fetishised for the male gaze in lesbian content, to an almost laughable degree. The weird dialogue (why), the clinical bedroom that feels very much “we rented this air bnb for the day, no one break anything or breathe anywhere apart from the artists”, and the strangely forced scenario in an office / pool room/ spa room etc. 

There’s definitely a place for just, well, better pornography frankly for men and womxn, of all sexual orientations. Pornography companies making gendered assumptions on what will turn people on, is bizarre. It’s like asking someone “tell me what your favourite smell will be next Tuesday, keeping in mind that it’s also a full moon?” It’s fluid, ever evolving and all depends on how you’re feeling about your body, that day, in that moment. 

making gendered assumptions on what will turn people on is bizarre

The efforts to bridge the gap between softcore Bridgerton energy (g’bless my lord) and Pornhub should be lauded by sites like Cheex and Bellessa. However, I can’t help but feel that they’re somewhat missing the point. In the same way that “boys want nice porn too”, sometimes it’s also true that womxn don’t. It’s all a matter of preference and what you’re in the mood for. The limited window of pornographic content, will never be able to truly capture the intricacies of attraction, or sexual exploration but could the genre as a whole do more to more authentically depict sexual experience, regardless of the gender of the audience in mind? For sure.