Some Unsolicited Reflections

*this is ripped straight from my rebooting journal. Hopefully someone benefits from it*

My "date" today went great. Who am I kidding? It wasn't really a date. We just drove around town, enjoyed the nice weather, endured mild awkwardness. It was hilarious to see how I had let all this quasi-sexual tension build up in me the past couple days and then the actual experience turned out to be.... completely mellow.

Somehow, this reminds me of the plot lines of pornos. Absurd, right? Porn plot lines are so completely detached from reality that they would be laughable if they weren't arousing. When's the last time you watched a porno that actually accounted for the awkwardness which arises in normal sexual experience? What would a porno be like if it reflected real life, real sex? It wouldn't be much of a porno, right? There would be hours and hours of awkward hanging out, missed cues, sexual tension, tangential dialogue... in other words, normal human stuff.

Porn is self-defeating, because all it shows is sex. Anything non-sexual in a porn flick is just meaningless prelude to the main stuff, which is sex. But this doesn't correspond to reality. In real life, all the stuff that comes before sex isn't just meaningless prelude; it's vitally important. In real life, there are some important precursors to two people having sex, not least of which include 1) some form of an already-existing relationship between individuals involved and 2) consent. In real life, if a sexual encounter lacks either of these two basic things, it is a cause for serious concern. And yet when have pornos ever realistically captured relationships or consent? Probably never, and still people insist that looking at porn is natural, commonplace, even healthy.

I've never had sex, but I have this gut feeling that context is one of the main ingredients which makes real-life sex so good. And yet porn is sex without context. How could it possibly be good? As motivation for us to quit porn, some of us need to hear that porn is deadly + dangerous + scary. But what if porn's biggest crime is not what it includes, but what it leaves out? My most effective mantra for when I feel tempted is simply, "porn is a dead-end street." More than I need to know that porn is deadly + dangerous + scary, I need to know that porn is pointless + absurd + leads nowhere. I need to know that porn is a parody of itself. I need to know that porn is just bad copies of what life offers when it comes to our sexuality.

It should be self-evident, but our sexuality is about so much more than just sex. And for this very reason, I want awkward. By leaving out all the situational baggage that informs our sexuality + sexual experiences, porn films are leaving out some of the most basic components of human life.

Naomi Wolf says that by today's standards, "real naked women are just bad porn," but if that's the case, give me bad porn. It may be years before I lose my virginity, but I'm still living out my sexuality every single day. It's part of who I am as a person. If my life were a porn film, all this stuff I'm living-- parts of which are sexual and parts of which aren't-- all that stuff is just a rambling, meaningless prologue to a finely polished sex act. But that's not a reality I choose to subscribe to. I choose the reality in which this stuff matters. It's called life, y'all. And porn can't take it away from us.

urban_pilgrim