Pornicate Yourself: Using Porn to Unlock Erotic Potential
The majority of gay guys use porn as a healthy, regular part of their sex lives. Porn is readily available whenever we want, or when can’t find what we are looking for in other people. It transports us into the vaults of our subconscious minds and provides opportunities for erotic expression. To many, it represents a kind of freedom to do what we want when we want. Paradoxically, I work with a number of men who share that, in masturbating to porn by themselves, they are able to easily reach peak arousal, but while participating in partnered sex they struggle to experience that same level of excitement and freedom. To me, this disparity is less of a problem and more of an opportunity to increase our personal erotic potentials—by offering valuable insights about how to create the exact conditions needed to enjoy hotter, more fulfilling sex.
In our Puritanical culture, an erroneous argument persists about whether or not porn is harmful to viewers. Clearly, contemporary research concludes that porn itself is not a problem for most people. So why the disparity in arousal between private and partnered sex? The answer lies not in a gluttonous consumption of porn, but in the lack of connection with our own bodies, desires, and ways of expressing them.
When we watch porn, we may acknowledge that something is hot to us, but we likely don’t possess a nuanced vocabulary to describe those specific desires vicariously enjoyed through the visual medium. Our limited language has everything to do with whether or not we can use our bodies to creatively express arousal. A great many guys feel bodily or psychologically inhibited with sex partners and want to express more freely, but they don’t know how to bridge their experiences of private and partnered eroticism.
To be fair, the vast majority of men have grown up in desperate need of helpful—or even valid—information about sex. Embarrassingly, only 18 states require that sex education (if offered) be verifiably medically accurate; public schools widely emphasize fear-mongering tactics concerned with STIs and unwanted pregnancies in place of more comprehensive, sex-positive guidance during our vulnerable self-development. At its core, sex-positivity includes far more than risk calculation. Additionally, we should have learned about cultivating erotic awareness, body sovereignty, practices of consent, honestly shared values, and how to increase pleasure.
Furthermore, our home environments have largely discouraged or actively prevented us from embodying our desires—driving them into the darkened corners of our psyches to be freed in secret moments. In the absence of support and helpful information, many of us have turned to porn in order to discover and express our deepest longings. Porn is readily available, non-judgmental, and it offers us what we want on our own terms; however, unlike human-to-human connection, porn is a route to pleasure that circumvents a necessary confrontation with our inhibitions, avoidances, and existential fears. Considering the surrounding forces of collective repression and denial, is it any surprise that we easily reach peak arousal when nobody else is around to catch us?
Even if we consider ourselves to be sex-positive, we can increase our capacities for pleasure and play when we intentionally work to overturn our ingrained, formative prohibitions against erotic pleasure. Upon confronting these tender places, we are then able to begin integrating our impulses into a set of embodied sexual skills.
If you think I’m about to get moralistic on you—fuck that! I’m not advocating that we put away the porn. Actually, I write erotic content for an increasingly respected, ethical porn company: Himeros.tv. Instead, I am suggesting that we shift from consumption of imagery into active participation with it. It’s not just the objects that we seek—what we really crave is to viscerally feel the dynamics contained within our projections.
You can use your favorite porn to uncover the skills needed to create more dynamic sex. Typically, while masturbating to porn, your body remains at rest even as your mind sails through scene after scene. In this scenario, you are a passive subject engaging with the illusion of an active object: you perceive the action but are not really doing it. You are subconsciously identifying with the characters and their implied feelings, though you can only see the physical action. As a result, you will not likely realize which feelings within you are being accessed beneath the thrill of desire.
A quick way to gain tremendous insight from your porn is to discover and work with your personal projections that are evoked while watching. Then, you can incorporate what you discover into your sexual practices. Here is a process that can lead you toward deeper self-awareness.
Initially, ask yourself questions like:
Who fascinates me? Why?
What attitudes do the characters exude, and how do these attitudes relate to my own personality?
Who repulses me? Why?
What do idealized bodies and attitudes represent to me?
What characterizes the interpersonal interactions between models?
What do I imagine they are thinking, feeling, wanting next, hoping to avoid, etc?
With whom do I identify in this scene?
What, specifically, am I tuning into: a sound, an action, an attitude, a visual, an assumption of some kind?
Is there an exchange of power, a breaking of a boundary, a longing that is fulfilled, an implied process undergone by the characters?
Journal your reflections. Then, locate the most thrilling moment in the film—you know, that section that you replay again and again to get you off. (For this exercise, this moment will be referred to as the image.) In your journal, describe in granular detail what most enlivens you about that specific moment; avoid any impulse to edit your language or excitement. The image that excites you does so for various reasons: it directly relates to your underlying emotional needs.
Next, make a list of all the free associations that come to mind relating to your chosen image. For example:
Cock = power, hungry, give up everything, finally filled, greedy, get what I want, all for me, etc.
Notice the above associations: they suggest that the viewer is teetering between maintaining control and diving into surrender. This person wants to feel permission to enjoy sex for his own selfish pleasure, but he is likely plagued by people-pleasing or deferring to the desire of others. To more wholly embody this dynamic, he might benefit from exploring new contexts that augment his sense of permission to enjoy selfish pleasure, asking for what he wants, allowing himself to feel less guilt about raw desire, etc.
Further contextualize these associations into a meaningful inquiry about your overall life. Do any of the dynamics also surface in your professional life, friendships, partnerships, or relationship with yourself? How do you relate to the characters and what you imagine they are expressing? Journal your responses.
Finally, reflect on the actual sex that you have in your life—identify any skills you may need to bolster in order to embody your biggest turn-ons. Maybe you need to learn to make yourself “bigger” or “smaller” by playing with physical force, speed of touch, quality of presence, position, or volume. Perhaps you need to exert more control over your partners or learn to let go of control by asking them to take over. Possibly, you would benefit from making space in sex for more challenging feelings: anger, the desire to compete, or a drive to be better than or less than your partner. After all, the best sex is not civilized.
Think of new ways that you can use your body to communicate these emotional dynamics. How might this visualization differ from the sex you have? Optimally, enroll a sex partner to intentionally play and experiment with new techniques and personas—cultivate the authentic circumstances that bring your body alive with pleasure as well as the confidence in yourself to joyfully share it with others.