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Voices
Before I was having my own screaming orgasms and spent a lot of time watching porn, I really believed every female orgasm looked the same. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t personally having them. The scenes I was viewing sure looked a lot like what I was experiencing in bed when I was having sex. Getting jackrabbitted by a dude, no concern at all about my body, paying little to no attention to my breasts except to maybe tweak a nipple here or there, maybe a bit of oral (for him, of course), some grunting and groaning, thrusting his cock deep inside, and the inevitable squealing from the female performer that signaled she had an orgasm.
Well, that part was missing from my bedroom because I definitely was not having an orgasm. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong? Was I not making enough noise?
At my core, I’m a researcher. I may have gone a little overboard, but I’ll be honest and tell you, I have watched a lot of porn in my life. All for the sake of pleasure, of course! I wish I could say I watched a lot of good porn, but that would be a big lie. Back when I began watching porn in the early 90s my choices were homemade amateur porn, whatever was available on pay-per-view through my satellite provider, the backroom at my local video store, and the strange video stores/jack-shacks off the highways.
I wasn’t old enough to visit the last two places yet, so I had to settle for what I could get through the first two.
The amateur porn showed what appeared to be more realistic sex than what I found in the glossier pay-per-view stuff I was watching late at night when I occasionally rented a movie from television. This has been my experience with the modern availability of porn as well, though thankfully, what we have available at our fingertips is a much wider variety than what the 90s had to offer.
Sadly, big porn is what seems to be more readily available, and due to it being free it’s what more people use as their go-to source for pornography and sex education.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to pay for your porn. The performers, producers, writers, and studios who work hard deserve to get paid for everything they put into making the films you’re enjoying. It also affords them the ability to continue to make better movies, showcasing the kinds of plots that can aid in helping you not only enjoy your solo and partnered play, but also potentially educate you in your own pleasure--and ways to aid in how to pleasure a partner.
The purpose of porn isn’t necessarily to educate, but considering sex education in our schools is almost non-existent, people are still turning to pornography to learn about sex. While that’s still the way things are, it’s important these films showcase real world sex and most of all, orgasms.
When I was first watching porn, it would have been great to see the partners of women giving them oral or paying any sort of attention to their pleasure. Instead, the focus was all on getting to the man’s orgasm, however that looked. Thanks to more feminist and real-world sex being showcased online now, what people see when they pay for their porn looks like what’s actually happening in bedrooms around the world. Even in what could be considered the fantasy realm, we’re seeing pleasure as the central plot-point, and less focus being placed on penis-in-vagina (PIV) penetration as the focal point of the storyline.
Not everyone benefits from PIV penetration--studies show as many as 4 in 5 women can’t orgasm from penetration alone, so it tracks that engaging in other forms of play before we get to that point, if we do at all, is beneficial to achieving pleasure. While orgasms are wonderful and feel good, they don’t have to be the end goal and should never bring us anxiety to reach them. The point of sex is to feel good, not some list of items to check off.
While puritanical society would have us believe people with vulvas don’t desire pleasure, those of us who actually possess them know better and want more for ourselves and our bodies. Continuing to create porn that showcases different bodies, various forms of pleasure surrounding those bodies, and all the ways we can receive it just goes to show how important it is to educate ourselves further in the real world when it comes to our own pleasure. This education needs to begin within ourselves and expand outward, by having open, vulnerable, and honest conversations with our partners about what we desire. And if that means sitting down and watching porn that helps us express those desires, let it be the kind that showcases what that really looks like, not the type that hides what pleasure truly can be.
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