For the last two years I’ve been hosting porn screenings in Australia and the USA in the hope of introducing people to more indie production houses who are creating amazing porn. While I don’t work in porn, I’m a Pleasure Educator and believe that sex work and sex workers are fundamentally important to society’s health, as is exploring our range of pleasure and desire. Of course as long as they are consensual, safe, and respectful (NOTE: not all consensual acts are always safe or respectful).
To celebrate the brilliance of porn and it’s breadth, I’ve written a guide for you to explore porn with a new approach, or perhaps for the very first time.
Find porn that represents you!
Although we live in a media dominant world where most of our desires are fed to us, it’s really important to seek and define your own pleasure and desires. So representative and diverse porn is absolutely essential. But so many people don’t see themselves represented in porn. I encourage you to seek production houses that represents a diversity of bodies, aesthetics, kinks, pleasures, and sexual identities. Support the artistry and the people who work tirelessly to represent beyond the default historical “mainstream”. HINT: our upcoming interview series will help with this.
Porn isn’t for everyone!
Watching porn is a pleasure that some like, some don’t, or some don’t share the same taste in. But don’t yuck other people’s yums. To me, porn in essence is just voyeurism: watching others enjoying pleasure in infinite ways. Perhaps you haven’t found your genre, or the way you like to consume it. Perhaps you like to watch it for research, separately from masturbation, or maybe you it’s the perfect ambient soundtrack for a sensual bath. No one knows but you, so gently interrogate what feels great for you.
Always pay for your porn!
You can’t expect to find high quality porn if everyone involved isn’t paid well to do it. Porn is literally watching people at work, so fucking pay them. Instead of using major streaming sites, you can either find production houses you love and subscribe ongoing, or shop around a pay for one video or a month or two with different houses so you have time to get a feel for their work. Or perhaps you can create your own candid porn and upload to various websites where you’re paid in free access to other videos on the site. Vote with your dollars because without paying for your porn, we all get lower quality and less porn!
Invest time in browsing, exploring, and discovering new porn!
Take time to curate and discover production houses, platforms, performers, or kinks that you love and didn’t know existed until today. Just like you would with films, tv series, music, clothes. This means making space to explore, not just clicking through the front page with one hand on the keyboard, and the other already down your pants already at it. Prioritize your pleasure.
Share and suggest the porn you love!
Sexual shame is a sneaky little fucker, and can stop us from sharing or having particular conversations even with ourselves. If you’re comfortable with certain people in your life, share, suggest and request porn that y’all might love. Normalize sharing the porn you admire and appreciate, and share! SESTA FOSTA is fucking over so many people in the industry and they’re finding it harder and scarier to promote and fund their work online, so give them a helping hand!
Like any sexual exploration, mix it up!
We can all fall into habits, many of us have been masturbating in the same way since we began. Explore watching different types of porn, fantasizing without porn, watching porn with others. Reflect on if you’ve been reliant on one way of touching yourself, a particular genre or dynamic, or even a sequence of scenes. The more you diversify your pleasure with different sensations or turn ons, the greater capacity you can have for pleasure and receptive to others’ touch and desires too. Literally, the more varied pleasure you experience the greater capacity in the nerve endings for a range of sensations and stimulation. Science IS sexy eh.
Porn is entertainment and fantasy!
Usually, with the exception of a few production houses, porn isn’t education, it’s for entertainment. This can often be forgotten. It’s frustrating to see people vilify porn as misleading a generation and using it as a scapegoat instead of putting a spotlight on a broken sex-negative education system. So few people ever experienced inclusive, accurate, non-judgemental, scientific information sex education beyond the scaremongering tactics with STIs and reproduction focused topics. Where was the talk of pleasure?! Porn is a hugely valuable tool for pleasure and fantasy, but it can’t be everything. Rant never over, but paused for now.
Lift up sex workers!
We’d be nothing without the magnificence and glory of sex workers and performers. The emotional labour and work they do for society. They are the caregivers of society, and we would be nothing without them. They do so much undervalued emotional and physical labour – it requires sooo much to do what they do. Never ever doubt that sex work isn’t real work, it is incredibly important and legitimate work. It is crucial to society, tbh I think society only still exists because of the work they do and have been doing since the beginning of humanity. Yet, their work is nowhere near protected or supported enough, independent sex workers and the industry have never had a safe and stable support for their work. There are few unions, income protection, and rarely institutional support. And now, times are even darker and scarier for sex workers worldwide, particularly since the SESTA FOSTA bill passed, and diminishing safe spaces for them to congregate and support each other. Show them support and value their work by visiting them, paying them WELL, having you various sexual debuts and fantasies become realities with them, having conversations on their behalf with unsuspecting people about their importance, donating to Red Umbrella or Sex Workers’ Outreach Program in your local country, or contacting your local government representation about decriminalizing sex work in your state or country. Do you have more suggestions of how to support sex workers? I’d love to hear and add.
Use porn as a mirror for your desires!
The type of porn you watch or fantasies you have doesn’t necessarily reflect your IRL desires. The beauty of fantasies is that it is limitless, it doesn’t need to reflect your IRL desires, lifestyle, identity, or even the body you have. But watching porn can help you distinguish between what you want to remain in your fantasy scape and be enjoyed just by you, or what you might want to make a reality and share with others. You can use porn as a mirror to explore your needs, wants, and desires by asking yourself: “would I like to feel that or do that?”, “What If I did that with my lovers?”, “Is this something I want to happen in reality or just leave in my fantasy scape?” It can also be a low-impact way of exploring and probing your desires with others. Watching porn together can be a low-confrontation tool to gauge your mutual and separate interests, and be a segue into a conversation about all your desires and fantasies.
This guide is just the beginning of a series for Spectrum Boutique (thank you for hosting me team!) that will include interviews with many different production houses and people we admire. So if you appreciate this, keep an eye out for the next ones. In the meantime, find me at @sex.iwishyouknew or www.iwishyouknew.net. I’d also love to hear from you if you have suggestions for great production houses, or questions about your practical pleasure exploration.
In pleasure,
Euphemia
