Three Zero Eight: Lessons

 I'd thought that I might be writing tonight about sex in hotels, but I decided in the end to write about what I'd learned in my life from porn. I suppose we can include written erotica in that.

I've been reading things on line about people's sexual problems, and one of the recurring themes in the comments is that people--- meaning of course cis straight white males ---have to stop learning about sex from porn. That immediately sent me to PornHub to do a random tour of categories. I spent a while looking through PornHub clips and trying to recall what I'd learned from porn.

I know that I learned some things. Though in my long-ago youth, it was harder to do. That was before the web, of course, long before there was anything like PornHub or its sister sites. To see porn in my youth I had to sneak into actual backstreet cinemas to watch movies. I was probably in my twenties before I saw porn on satellite channels, and I never had much of a porn collection on either videotape or DVD.  But I did learn things from porn. 

That makes sense for me, of course. I learned about so much in my life from books and films.  Novels and films shaped who I am. I read books to learn about what to wear, which wines to drink, how to behave at dinner parties. So why not porn?

I learned from porn (yes, from a book first, from "Story of O") that there were beautiful girls who didn't wear underwear. I learned that there were girls there in the ordinary world who were deliciously bare under skirts or shorts. I learned that I could suggest to lovers that they be panty-free. I learned that I could whisper to a lovely girl and tell her to wear nothing at all beneath a sundress while she walked with me down a beach or a city street--- learned that this could be an adventure. And it has become a signature thing for me--- asking girls with whom I'm involved to give up underwear, at least while out with me.

I learned that there were beautiful girls who slept naked.  I may--- may ---have learned that first from the early James Bond films, but certainly it was porn where I found that sleeping naked was something beautiful girls seemed to do everywhere. I watched that and knew--- even in my early teens ---that this was something I'd be asking lovers to do lifelong. 

Porn showed me new positions to try. Porn showed me new places for risky and thrilling encounters. Porn showed me that, yes, oral and anal did happen...and showed me how to do both. And the same is true for various kinds of s/m. Until I read about something, until I see it on a screen, it isn't real. 

Porn gave me an incentive to try things, to think that certain kinds of adventures were possible. It gave me the courage to offer up ideas and suggestions to lovers. Were the things that I asked about or found fascinating "unrealistic"?  Maybe. Or even probably. But "realistic" has never been what I was after. 

Porn offered me raw material that I could shape into things I could share, things that I use as guides to adventures and to creating stories for myself and a lover. Porn showed me what I could like, showed me things that I didn't know I'd like. 

I never thought that porn was a guide to what a girl looked or sounded like while having orgasms. I never thought that porn showed how large or how hard a male was supposed to be, or how often a male could perform. But then I wasn't interested in those things anyway.  I did think that porn showed me how sex should be lit, and how bodies can be posed for maximum visual effect. Porn taught me how sex could look. And I'll always be grateful to certain porn directors (e.g., Andrew Blake) for that.