Porn

On Need and Fantasy

The short piece below is a (slightly) edited version of a monologue read at The Love Tank’s Second Tuesday Monologues. The theme of the evening was “Porn”. This was one of four pieces read that night. After all of the speakers had read, the room opened to a generative and beautiful discussion about porn, desire, and politics. I was very moved by the conversation - being the first time I had ever really put words to some of my experiences and the first time I had ever really been given space to share them.

As a disclaimer, and by way of axiology, it is important that I preface the piece below by saying that these are my experiences and my experiences alone. There is no universal experience of sex work(ing). Like all work, everyone brings something different to the job. Some of us have an easier time. Some of us a harder time. And these experiences are often refracted and shaped by things like: our genders, our ethnicities, our income background, our place of birth, our body types, our migration status, our HIV status, and so on.

Much (but not all) of what makes sex working difficult for anyone is a product of its criminalisation and the stigma that surrounds it; both of which erode structures of support and care for people engaged in sex work. If you live in the UK, you can help support the decriminalisation of sex work by following and supporting the work of Decrim Now. You can also support sex workers, in general, by paying them for their work - e.g. the porn they produce, the music they make, their writing, and so on.

---

I started making porn for two reasons. The first was because of a need that I had.

The need was that I needed the money. A few months into COVID lockdown, the body that administrated my PhD stipend told me that they would not be extending my funding any longer. I wrote back to them, pleading, that I was living with somebody who was clinically vulnerable and that I couldn’t leave the house. Most work – or at least work as I knew it – therefore wasn’t an option and I was also, frankly, unemployable, since I didn’t have my PhD yet and my CV mostly consisted of different ways I had taught students about Michel Foucault. Unsurprisingly, they wrote back quite indifferent to my plight. In some sense, then, all the porn I ever made was thanks to the ungenerous support of [redacted].

Though I didn’t have a CV, what I did have was a Twitter account – one with ten or so thousand supportive followers who, I noticed, were more supportive when I wore less. Before COVID, I had been fairly shy about showing my body – which, I know, for some of you, will be quite a shocking revelation. But my body – or, better put, the way that I looked at my body – had always been the natural plinth upon which I placed almost all my psychic wounds. The best way I had learned to manage the self-loathing and disgust my own body could extract from me was, simply, to hide it – to deny it was there. No sex, no nudity, no photographs, no mirrors, no reflections; so my shame made a vampire of me.

The hermetic seal of lockdown, though, happened to be a controlled environment for me to experiment with a new relationship to my body – shielded not just from the physical presence of others but also, crucially, the possibility of their opprobrium. In lockdown, it was safe to test the response to a picture of my new jockstrap without the fear of bumping into someone the following week that I knew had now seen me (pretty much) naked. And, quite unlike public life, I found that getting naked online was not frowned upon but actually rewarded. Naturally, this became a way of printing an endless supply of dopamine, which, if you don’t know, is what shame vampires drink instead of blood. It is how we micro-dose love.

So, when things changed, it was only logical to see if getting naked could nurture me in other, fundamental ways – like paying my rent. But I never stopped looking for love while I did it.

Which leads me to the second reason I started making porn, which was because of a fantasy that I had.

It is, by now, trite to say that porn is a fantasy. That worries some people. Porn doesn’t depict real sex. We know. It’s too violent. Too easy. Too perfect. Too loud. Too pleasurable. Too long. Too passionate. Too extreme. Too weird. Everyone in it is always enjoying themselves, even when they shouldn’t be. The cheater never goes through a messy divorce. The delivery guy doesn’t get fired for slacking. The teacher doesn’t end up in jail. But we know this. Everyone knows this. Which is why most people who make porn expect people to masturbate to it, not take notes. Porn is not supposed to be instructional any more than The Talented Mr Ripley is. If it becomes instructional, it’s only because there are so few instructions available to people elsewhere.

Fantasies are important. They are horizons that we tend to and they sustain us. Real sex is full of fantasies too; things we want to have done or to do, things we pretend to be, things we can only be sometimes. If we didn’t have fantasies, we would never have sex. In fact, I think, we would never do anything at all. So many of the things we do are about tending to a horizon line; about fulfilling a fantasy.

But I understand, too, that fantasies can be dangerous. If they are horizons that we tend to, this is also what makes them destructive. Compared to a fantasy, reality can be very disappointing. Maybe that thing I want doesn’t feel as good when it is happening to me as it did in my head. Maybe I feel silly in the shoes I bought. Maybe my white picket life is scuppered by the fact I have to work for a living and I’m tired, so dinner is late or ruined and somehow this is all my husband’s fault. So, fantasies can be dangerous – or maybe we just need to use them responsibly. They can get us off or they can be the reason we quarrel with our partners. Knowing the proper place for a fantasy is harm reduction.

Because fantasy and reality are sometimes at odds, to talk about porn – or the people behind it – is to spoil the fantasy, a little. Making it with Kristen Bjorn is a 2001 documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes of the GAYVN award-winning movies: Wet Dreams 1 and Wet Dreams 2. The documentary features exclusive footage of the making of Wet Dreams, as well as interviews with the cast and crew. The documentary is described as a “no holes barred” opportunity to see “25 hot men caught off guard before, during and after the cameras roll” and the film comes with a disclaimer: “WARNING: After watching this, you will never view a porno video the same way again!” There’s a reason more studios aren’t making documentaries: they spoil the fantasy.

Well, I am going to spoil the fantasy a little when I say I started doing porn because I had a fantasy. That fantasy, I suppose, was that porn would make me feel desired; that it would make me feel seen; that it would make me feel loved.

I started watching porn – specifically gay porn – at the same moment that I discovered that I had a body – and that I hated it. My body made itself known to me with an itch we might call sexual desire that needed to be scratched. With sexual desire came an awareness of my own body – of its itches that needed to be scratched – and of other bodies too; ones I now looked covetously, longingly at. And ones that I could look enviously at, too, and find my own body wanting and undesirable – because I already felt I was wanting and undesirable in so many other ways, because I already felt I was a failed boy. Funny how the dream logic of shame can sound like a bad joke: I hated my body because I was a disappointment to my mother.

Porn, then – but more specifically, the men in it – became a fertile breeding ground for my fantasies about bodies and about sex and about desire. When I watched men fucking, I watched perfect bodies. And these bodies were perfect not only – or really at all – because of the way they looked but precisely because they were fucking. Because if they were fucking, this meant they were desired. In this way, I – or my libido – formed a teleological loop – from desire to bodies to sex and back again – around the men in these videos. To me, these porn stars were the apotheosis of sexual desire. And I, a lonely teenager, sat outside this loop, wondering how I might, one day, halo it around myself. How I might feel perfect.

The reality is that being in porn didn’t make me feel perfect. Far from it. Porn stars, as it turns out, are humans and not heavenly bodies. I never found my halo – and my fantasies both hurt and sustained me. But perhaps the reality, in the end, was more interesting than the fantasy. Because it was full and it was fleshy, it was high and it was low, it was the pretence of endless pleasure and the graft of actual work, the affair and the divorce, the before and the after, the nadir and the climax. It was need and it was fantasy.