sex & relationships
More Female Pleasure, Please: Why I Pay for My Porn BY T I L LY R O B E RTS P H OTO G R A P H Y BY E R I K A LU ST P R E S S O F F I C E
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confess that I love adult films, but it hasn’t always been that way. A few months ago, I discovered the work of Erika Lust, an erotic filmmaker, via an ad on Instagram (I had recently decided to remove the content restrictions). I began watching the trailers for Lust’s films; I could tell this was something extraordinary. So, I decided to pay for a year’s subscription to XConfessions and began watching the films in the evenings with my partner. My excitement and relief were overwhelming. For the first time, I felt included in the discourse, and I enjoyed (I mean, truly enjoyed) porn. However, the joy of finding XConfessions was overshadowed by a strong sense of sadness for my younger self. I keenly felt the resentment at the ease with which something so unnatural – the depiction of female pleasure and form in mainstream porn – had become idealised and untouched for so long. Porn has always been a part of our culture. Porn can and should be a medium of expression that is healthy and normal. But it wasn’t just porn I grew up with. It was highspeed internet porn with more videos than you could watch in your lifetime. Compared to the playboy magazines, erotica, sketches and sculptures of days gone by, highspeed internet porn carved out a whole new addiction that soon swept the world. Porn’s level of saturation into society’s unconscious was at an all-time high when I became aware of it as an impressionable teenager.
At age sixteen, I started my first relationship. Not long after, I found out that my partner and lots of my male friends had been watching porn and masturbating. So, I watched a few videos online to try it out. I hated it; I didn’t understand why you would want to watch the type of videos I found. Needless to say, I didn’t ‘finish’. After, I argued with my boyfriend about the whole thing. I felt jealous – not because my partner was getting off to other people, but because they had a comfortable and loyal connection to something I was both curious about and repulsed by. From my limited point of view, those boys had more sexual knowledge and experience than I did because of the porn they watched. As I didn’t enjoy this porn and wasn’t climaxing, I felt like I wasn’t masturbating ‘properly’. Of course, in truth, I wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do; I hadn’t been taught about my anatomy or how to enjoy my own body. With no way to pick up what was missing from my own understanding, I thought that porn was the answer. Looking back at when I was a child exploring my body, porn played a huge role in the ideas I formulated. In an ideal sex-positive world, there would be many different conversations, sources of information and positive representations in the media for me to learn from. But because of the lack of an alternative discourse and the history of silence and shame surrounding female sexuality and anatomy, porn was in a privileged position to affect me.
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