Dear Dan: I’m an 18-year-old cis hetero girl from Australia and I’ve been listening to your podcast and reading your column since I was 13. Thanks to you I’m pretty open minded about my sexuality and body. Having said that, I do have a few questions. I started watching porn from a youngish age with no real shame attached but I have some concerns.
1. I get off really quickly to lesbian porn but it never feels like a “good” orgasm. My guess is that subconsciously I think it’s inauthentic and therefore degrading.
2. I really enjoy and have the best orgasms to vintage gay male porn and trans FTM porn, which seems odd to me because I’m so far removed from the sexual acts that these kind of porn movies portray but I always feel satisfied after getting off to them.
3. I get off to tit slapping videos but it screws with me morally. I understand why I like these kinds of videos. I have quite large breasts and I feel resentment towards them. It seems both morally wrong towards the progress I’ve made towards accepting my body and also to the message being sent about violence towards women.
Care to weigh in?
— Concerned About Porn Preferences
Dear CAPP: 1. There are gay men who watch straight porn, lesbians who watch gay porn, and 18-year-old hetero girls in Australia who watch lesbian porn and vintage gay porn and trans FTM porn. So many people get off watching porn that isn’t supposed to be for them — so many people fantasize about, watch and sometimes do things that aren’t supposed to be for them — that we have to view these quote/unquote transgressions as a feature of human sexuality, not a bug.
2. Lesbian porn gets you off, vintage gay porn and trans FTM gets you off, but you feel conflicted after watching lesbian porn because it seems inauthentic. That’s understandable — a lot of so-called lesbian porn is inauthentic, in that it’s made by and for straight men and features non-lesbian women going through the lesbian motions (often with long and triggering-for-actual-lesbian fingernails). Some gay porn features gay-for-pay straight male actors, of course, but most gay porn features gay actors doing what they love; the same goes for most trans FTM porn, which is a small and mostly indie niche. I suspect your orgasms are just as good when you watch lesbian porn, CAPP, but the sense — suppressed when you were turned on, surfacing once you’re not — that the performers weren’t really enjoying themselves taints your lesbian-porn-enhanced orgasms in retrospect. The solution? Seek out lesbian porn featuring actual lesbians — authentic lesbian porn is out there. (I found a bunch with a quick Google search.)
3. Sometimes we overcome the negative messaging our culture sends us about our identities or bodies only after our erotic imaginations have seized on the fears or self-loathing induced by those messages and turned them into kinks. Take small-penis humiliation (SPH). Before a guy can ask a partner to indulge him in SPH, CAPP, he has to accept (and kind of dig) his small cock. So the acceptance is there, but the kink — a turn-on rooted in a resolved conflict — remains. It can be freeing to regard a kink like SPH or your thing for tit slapping as a reward — as the only good thing to come out of the shitty zap the culture put on the head of a guy with a small cock or, in your case, a young woman with large breasts. So long as we seek out other consenting adults who respect us and our bodies, we can have our kinks — even those that took root in the manure of negative cultural messaging — and our self-acceptance and self-esteem, too.
On the Lovecast—Finally! Porn that makes consent SEXY: savagelovecast.com.
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