More Female Pleasure, Please: Why I Pay for My Porn

BY TILLY ROBERTS PHOTOGRAPHY BY ERIKA LUST PRESS OFFICE

Tconfess 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.

Unsolicited comparisons to porn from sexual partners have affected me deeply. And it wasn’t until I saw the range of sexualities and bodies represented in XConfessions that I started realising how mainstream porn’s aesthetics had curated my body image. Of course, I knew that I compared myself to unrealistic representations of beauty in the media. Still, I had no idea that something I wasn’t consciously consuming was profoundly altering my self-image.

‘You fuck like a pornstar’ was one of the more memorable comments from an ex. Apparently, it was meant as a compliment on how I sounded, looked and my overall enthusiasm for sex. I was in my late teens, and my reaction was to think that porn actresses must enjoy sex as I do. But then I became self-conscious and ashamed about my enjoyment of sex because porn was fake in my eyes and derogatory towards women. It was a compliment I was reluctant to take.

I started to wonder: was porn copying my desire? Or was I copying porn? My joy and pleasure had been labelled as not necessarily my own. It made me feel like I was playing a part in a movie that I had just wandered into; I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t subconsciously following a script in my head. However, a positive came out of these comparisons: I began to criticise my own behaviour and thoughts around sex.

At college, I started watching feature films recommended by my male friends, classics mostly, but one of them was A Serbian Film. It is a snuff film about a struggling porn star who gets roped into doing a project that turns out to be a violent porn film displaying necrophilia and paedophilia.

I was horrified, but not in the way I am now because ignorance is bliss until it moulds your understanding of sexual relationships. When I accosted my male friends, they laughed and told me it was a joke they played on each other. I was not laughing – but I wasn’t crying either.

The Sadean representation of violence in that film probably would have made many people switch it off. So why didn’t I? I was used to watching recommended films like American History X, Seven, American Psycho, and Django Unchained. These classics were the topic of our discussions at college, and I enjoyed praising and dissecting them with friends. The interconnection of violence and sex within the media had completed its hazing rites on me; I was primed to accept my own sexual repression without question or fear.

I felt like my sexuality was a spectacle. I became more aware of other differences by critically analysing my interactions with partners. Slowly, I discovered the parts of my sexuality that directly conflicted with porn’s and society’s representation of gendered binaries, mainly that male sexuality is active and female sexuality passive. My own female sexuality was definitely active: I would take the initiative and have one-night stands, confident in my desire for sex. It was surprising and novel to most partners, not unattractive, but definitely different. ‘You’re not like other girls,’ was their response, and ‘You make everything so easy.’

My confidence suffered. I didn’t change, but I questioned why this was unusual. Although I didn’t care what other people said, acting outside of typical behaviour made me feel vulnerable. I needed a sex-positive community. In the library at my university, I found that community in books by Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Chris Kraus, Margaret Attwood, Virginia Woolf, Julia Kristeva, and Clarrisa Pinkola Estés.

When I encountered Erika Lust’s platform, I was well on the way to understanding what sexual representations and a sex-positive society could be. I was privileged to be sure because I was prepared to have my vision confirmed. I can see now that without my background in critical gender theory and my own varied experiences, I might not have chosen to click on Erika’s advert. Potentially, my Instagram feed might not have included it at all because the algorithm would have been very different.

We Are the Fucking World was the first film I watched on XConfessions, directed by Olympe de G in 2017, and it was beyond what I could have imagined. It revolutionised my previous conceptions of what porn could be. The actors start by discussing what they are comfortable with within a group, what kind of sex they enjoy, and how they feel that day. Then, they connected with pleasure and consent on all sides. It was sexy, respectful, educational, inclusive, and representative. I could see women taking the initiative, asking for what they wanted, and receiving and giving pleasure. It felt alien to begin with: I had never seen it before. It brought me to tears.

Female pleasure matters. When I discovered my clitoris for the first time, I thought it was a small penis. Only recently have I understood the tragic irony of this situation. As a child, I had so little knowledge of my own anatomy that I assumed I had a penis because that’s all that I was aware of. At twenty-three years old, I now know that the clitoris is made of the same erectile tissue as the penis. They are the same but different. The biggest difference, though, is visibility.

The clitoris has been invisible, some would even say mythical, for many, many years. Its purpose has been guessed at and has changed throughout history. Recently, I went on holiday with my partner. We were digging a large hole in the sand – the usual holiday activity. I decided to turn it into a giant anatomically correct vulva. It took us a while, but we got there. Soon, people were watching us and smiling. It felt good and oddly daring, as if sculpting a vulva in public was a form of protest. It was art. The really cool part of that was that I saw children turn to their parents and ask them what we were making.

When I say women’s pleasure matters, I am not saying men’s pleasure does not. I say it because women’s pleasure has not mattered for so long. More recently, it has been seen as an extra to the heteronormative main course of the ‘penis in vagina’ sex.

No matter what, you deserve pleasure on your terms! Whether that’s sexual pleasure or not. You deserve it. It is your human right. As a writer, feminist, responsible porn consumer, and human being, I am working to support the new wave of adult films so that the value of porn is recognised. So that these platforms can continue to grow and produce responsible, representative, and educational porn inspired by real-life fantasies from real people. That is why I decided to pay for adult films – and why I will continue to do so. ✦