My Accidental Education

Porn Isn’t Sex Ed but Here’s Some of What I’ve Learned from It

It’s easy to scoff at porn. After all, we spend a good portion of our lives feeling bad about how we look and are encouraged to remain “innocent,” yet be competitive based in large part on our appearance and ability to attract a mate. Perhaps because it violates these and other social norms, sex work has long been a career path accompanied by ridicule by the very people who enjoy the benefits of its services.

The very word, “pornography,” literally means “writing about prostitutes.” Not in itself an offensive concept, depending on how you view prostitutes. Alas, even in the best of times, a prostitute has been an outsider merely for walking their own path. In a world that has long worshipped social conformity, sex work is a reminder that even within a collective, we are individuals. That’s a threatening idea to an insecure power structure.

Viewing pornography as having educational value is dismissed out of hand even by those who work within its various modern industries. It’s purely for entertainment purposes, we’re assured. Nobody takes that shit seriously, they insist. There are far more important things to worry about than sex, after all. Everyone is born knowing all that needs to be known and anything that isn’t known doesn’t need to be.

Yeah, I believed that bullshit for a while, too.

Yet porn is precisely where many of us have and continue to learn about sex, sexuality, the human body, and how to do that thing with our tongue. My very first experience with what can be called pornography was in written form. A book of fiction. I would often escape from my family by hanging out in my father’s bedroom and watching his black and white television. My parents, for all their many faults, were voracious readers and instilled a love for words in me that you have hopefully noticed. They largely wasted their time and energy on pseudo-science and religious fluff, but one day I found that amazing, eye-opening, ever-so-educational work of fantastic fiction on my father’s bedside table. Those early phonics classes really paid off because I was able to tear through that potboiler in no time flat.

I remember the plot to this day: a young man is set to inherit a large fortune, but there are strings attached. He must travel in his now-dead benefactor’s youthful and internationally carnal path, which takes him to some very exotic locales. After checking off all the boxes, he gets to cash in his experience points for big cash and prizes. My favorite sexual encounter was when he traveled to a pygmy village where the girls sharpened their teeth and they had sex in baskets. Given that I was receiving Catholic indoctrination at church, during CCD, and even semi-regularly at my secular school, this book changed my life.

Suddenly I had words for body parts, I understood how things fit into each other, I had assurances that sex could be enjoyable and creative, I learned what a diaphragm and a menstrual cycle were. None of this information was likely to have been gained at home, which is not to say that I didn’t pick up some spicy language from my Sgt. First Class father. I just didn’t know what I was saying. Given that my parents didn’t sleep in the same room and, instead, I shared a room with my mother, my younger brother, and my toddler sister, I didn’t know much about anything except that Santa did not exist. I learned that at four.

What I didn’t have was wisdom, perspective, or a micro or macro-culture that supported my gaining these things in regard to sexuality. Pleasures of the flesh, I was assured by my church, my mother, and my fruitless quest for respectability, were inappropriate for a female-bodied person to ponder, let alone engage in! I was familiar with the inside of a confessional before I had anything interesting to say or realized they made great gloryholes. I learned the latter thanks to porn.

Actually, by the time I was old enough to have anything interesting to say to the priest and therefore no longer went to confession, the thought had occurred to me. Porn just confirmed it.

And that is one of the most powerful and potentially educational aspects of pornography; its ability to confirm that we’re not alone. That we aren’t the only person who masturbates. That we aren’t the only person who wants to be tied up. That we aren’t the only person who craves the touch of a same-sex partner. That we aren’t the only person who likes to dress up like a fox and get laid by someone dressed up like a skunk. And believe it or not, if we pay attention, we learn that we aren’t the only person with stretch marks, a bad dye job, tragic tattoos, breasts that don’t hover perfectly in mid-air, cocks that don’t always cooperate, tummies that don’t lie flat, or, in a word, bodies that are imperfect.

By the time I reached university level, my attitudes as a feminist and as a humanist were forming for reals. I’d been having sex with varying degrees of consent for about five years, and I was struggling with body image issues, general recovery from my family of origin, and a personality so big it intimidated a surprising number of men. One day, on a whim, I attended an on-campus workshop about print pornography hosted by a feminist organization. I was warned that porn was filled with unrealistic beauty standards, dead woman poses, misogyny, exploitation, and violence. Naturally, I went out and subscribed to Playboy for a year “for my boyfriend.”

Anything for science.

It was an interesting year because I found myself feeling both aroused and insecure due to the photos. Some of what I’d heard at the presentation had merit, much of it did not. The rest I wanted to find out. Want to find out.

That’s when I started learning how to truly own my own shit. To determine what things bother me because it is a personal issue versus a greater social issue to be addressed on a larger scale. It’s also about the same time I became involved in the size acceptance movement, which was a loosely organized collection of body-positive social and activist-focused people during the mid-1980s. Just like in the world at large, I found myself resented, objectified, envied, and admired by other participants depending on the situation and the person.

My body, which had previously been deemed “too big,” was now just “mid-sized.” Eating a simple meal around the wrong person was an erotic experience for them and an awkward one for me. Being deemed beautiful by people who see larger bodies as preferable or at least on the spectrum of desirability fed my ever-growing socio-sexual understanding of desire as well as forced me to confront, deal with, and improve my shitty self-image.

In the many years since, I have seen aspects of my increasingly colorful life and the increasingly colorful people who populate it reflected in an increasing amount of pornography, whether it be written, audio, still image, or moving picture. The method of distributing the material has changed over the years, just as it has over millennia, and in spite of opposition from those who are invested in repressing the potential individual and social growth that explicit sexually oriented materials can promote, pornography has become more inclusive, responsive, and supportive of diversity.

Is it perfect? Hell, no. Can it be better? Absolutely! Can we learn from it? I’m living proof. Can it learn from us? Let’s find out.