Is Your Porn Aging with You?

Is Your Porn Aging with You? It’s a fascinating question and I personally feel it’s an important one.

A personal disclaimer

Before we dive into this subject, I’d like to preface this article by saying there are much more important voices to listen to regarding this subject. I’m not a pornography scholar, I’m not a sex worker, and I am not directly involved in the industry.

Don’t confuse me for being some sort of smut scientist or penis professor. I’m examining this question from the point of view of regular guy who enjoys and consumes adult content. So, let’s all sit down and have a very personal yet equally important conversation.

I heard this question mid doom scroll on TikTok and it stopped me in my tracks. Despite being in the sex positive community, I’ve never really heard this being asked openly from man to man.

Pornography is entertainment. It’s make believe and scenarios are scripted regardless of how they might be promoted. If you believe porn is real life then I imagine you think all Marvel movies are non-fiction.

We get off to seeing fantasies being played out by consenting adults who put these pieces of media together.

Ask yourself this question, has your lens changed? Have your tastes evolved or are you stuck somewhere that can unfortunately make your reality problematic? Fellas, I’m looking at you again. 

Teen me was just trying to get off

When I was a teenager and discovered online porn, I didn’t have anyone tell me what I was watching was scripted and purely entertainment. My mind truly believed there was a Wet Pussy College out there and I wondered what the admissions process was like. Did I have the grades to get accepted?

I wasn’t one of the people who was exposed to very extreme practices too soon. My wanking mission was simple and it was big butts. At 34 years old, all asses are amazing and little butts are cupcakes and cake is cake and I have a sweet tooth.

Reflecting on what I was watching, it was never anything in proximity to my real life meaning I didn’t search or look up scenes that felt like they could happen to me personally. It got me hard and there were no follow up questions.

Sure, I would love to have been a pool boy for some lonely milfs as a summer job, but my tastes, desires with partners, and practices didn’t crossover right away with the porn I was watching. 

Preparing to write this piece, I asked some of the guy friends what they were watching when they first discovered the vast world of pornography. From my limited group of cis male friends, we seemed to all have a thing for the slightly older woman who knew more than we did.

The fantasy of being with a “cougar” who knows what she wants and we’d all be revved up ready to go to rock her world. Even as an 18-year-old, I wasn’t looking for performers who resembled my age. Let’s not forget these are actors and scripts can make them any character for the scene.

That’s not to say this didn’t skew my perception of the real world. I took it in at face value. I wish I had more access to articles and educators to help me understand this was all fantasy.

Porn’s not the problem, lack of education is

The issues that I exhibited were believing what I was seeing had to be real like not having any pubes or hair on a woman’s body or a certain physique was the characteristic of a “real woman”. 

A problem formed not because pornography was bad, but there was no information or education to help me understand it. Almost like a natural reflex, the ingrained misogyny in my mind at the time used the media I was consuming to justify itself. 

As much as it negatively impacted my romantic relationships early on in my life, I never had the full regression of watching porn to justify my real-world views when it came to those who I was intimate with.

I consider myself lucky to have been exposed to more feminist content in my 20’s and be in an environment that included people from different background in university.

My lack of understanding that performers shave or have a specific body type didn’t make me stay in a certain genre porn to comfort my ego regarding people’s bodies.

Is it a preference or are you trying to find a roundabout way to dictate how people should look for you? You might have a specific taste, but that doesn’t give you the green light to be fatphobic.

The more open I became with my partners, the more my library of adult entertainment expanded.

Show and tell (but make it spicy)

An experience that allowed me to verbalize what I enjoyed happened with one of my partners because we would share porn with each other. Call it spicy show and tell.

It was a long-distance relationship at times, so we’d send clips of what we were watching. We wouldn’t just drop the video and send an emoji. It was the first time I would explain what I found hot onscreen and vice versa.

She was into more BDSM and it was still foreign to me as a practice, so it allowed me comfortably to ask questions. I began to see pornography outside of what I would usually watch with a different interpretation that didn’t center around myself.

If you had to show someone what you get off to, could you explain it and why you enjoy it so much? Can you thoroughly describe what arouses you and if/how you’d like to try it?

I’m not going to lie, it felt odd at first to express what got me turned on, but it quickly became such an enjoyable thing to do with partners. As a man, I never really learnt to express what I’m actually into outside of a quick prompt or limiting it to only penetration.

I could just say “ass” and everyone grunts in unison. Communication is hot to begin with and it only improved when I felt excited to describe a certain scene, point out little moments that made me bite my lip, and wanted to discover new types of adult content beyond just video.

By the time I was 23 my tastes had already changed for the better. I saw more female-led productions and noticed differences between what I was watching at 18.

Critical isn’t the word I’d use, but I was more attentive to what was on screen while also more engaged in my own pleasure by being more honest with my own desires. 

From then on, I felt there was a liberating journey regarding my relationship with pornography. I understood it as entertainment, listening to sex workers, understanding where my porn was coming from, and allowing myself to explore my own sexuality in an honest way that didn’t result in negative projections on the communities I wanted to belong to.

Younger me would sigh in disdain if there was anything gay or queer happening as if I had to justify my sexuality to a non-existent audience while I sat in front of my computer. As time went on, I realized this is about me and why does it matter if I enjoy non-heterosexual porn.

It opened the door to having a dialogue with myself regarding my own sexuality. Being surrounded by such an open community as my life went on, I was able to really accept myself and not feel shame for who I was attracted to and wanted relationships with. Porn didn’t make me queer, but it did put the question forward.

Let’s not blame the porn

“Is your porn aging with you?” is interesting because of the context regarding men’s problematic views and behaviours and how, a story as old as time, sex workers become villains and scapegoats for it.

If I watched action movies and began going out at night beating up people and delivering justice based on my own views, you’d most likely think I’m a maniac. Especially if I said “this is how it is” I wouldn’t hear the argument that it’s Batman’s fault and the films I watched would be properly referred to as entertainment.

We wouldn’t call to deplatform Robert Downey Jr because I was wearing a makeshift iron suit when I was committing these actions. There would be calls to examine my behaviour and put elements in context that led me to act like this.

So why is it when we have grown men who groom 18 year olds and exhibit sexual violence everyone is so quick to blame pornography and sex workers as opposed to examining the men in question along with the existing systems that enable this?

Times have changed since I began watching porn, but men of all ages are making the same mistake I made and taking it further. All these homophobic remarks and aggressive calls to erase LGBTQ+ individuals are coming from people who 9 times out of 10 are not straight but don’t want to admit it.

It’s not porn’s fault you’re gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc but you’re letting that internalized shame and suppressed curiosity make you blame it like an asshole. Calling to eliminate all queer media and people is not going to take those feelings away.

You’re an adult and can stop watching it or you can open yourself up to hearing other people’s stories and navigate your own journey with the help of their experiences.  

As a creator on Pornhub, I like to see what’s happening on the homepage. Seeing what the people are wanking to like I’m strolling through a horny town square.

Like every social media platform, there are certain buzzwords and tags that get a lot more traction than others. One that makes me question the audience is the “barely legal” titles and “virgin” captions.

I’m a grown man and I can’t recall a time in my life typing those phrases specifically into the search bar or even fantasizing about it. Not even as a teenager was I drawn to these categories. It’s not my thing, but it makes me wonder why is it your thing?

There’s a difference between an age gap in a relationship versus being Leonardo DiCaprio when it comes to your porn. Saying you only enjoy 18 year olds is odd.

It makes me believe that if you find one type of teen attractive, what’s stopping you from finding younger ones attractive? Ask yourself the question and if your rebuttal is “Well the age of consent differs from place to place” you’re really creepy. 

“She’s posting it and sex workers like her are reason this problem exists” Firstly, you understand consent. Congratulations and I never want to hear any more bizarre misdirected arguments around its definition.

It’s their choice to do what they want as an adult with their body. The main point comes back to sex workers being portrayed as the villains for men being weird.

Quick history lesson about a post-impressionist artist named Gaugin. His work is praised and that man was an absolutely terror. His art and himself included played a significant role in colonialism and he had many sexual relationships with underage girls who contracted syphilis from him.

Gaugin abandoned almost all of his kids making him a deadbeat dad and fueled racial fantasies on canvas, but I don’t remember there being some young Onlyfans creator that made him like this in the late 1800s. 

Society has made it normal to blame sex workers who make immense amounts of money off of creepy men rather than question intentions the guys who eagerly wait for girls to turn 18.

No, sex workers aren’t trying to entice children into the industry. It’s the manosphere influencers who are targeting young boys to believe in power over others makes you a man and women expire after a certain age.

That’s how adult entertainment without sex education gets wrongfully turned into a belief system that is designed to harm others. Is she really a virgin in the 30+ videos with the same title?

Her virginity just grows back every full moon and the moment we see a stretchmark or cellulite, she’ll graduate from step sister to step mom? That’s how families work, right? God forbid a woman should age. 

Your search bar deserves to grow up

As I’ve gotten older, I find myself looking for more sensual content. Some might say I’ve turn into that meme of typing in “real love” in the search bar, but it’s my choice and taste at the end of the day.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my campy narratives and ridiculous acting. It’s fun and a great kind of escape. Looking at where I’m currently at, I enjoy porn that is more on the tender side. There’s nothing wrong with getting a bullet train to pound town, but my knees pop when I go down on someone.

Putting your partner in a full nelson can be great, but I know I’d need to stretch first. I like seeing scenarios that aren’t a bridge too far from my reality.

Not all the men are super ripped, tanned, and completely shaved. Having great make out sessions and actual foreplay is wonderful. I enjoy build ups and scenarios that I can relate to more in my everyday life. 

I don’t project myself in every scene or fantasy and as a result I don’t get angry with the world because I can’t relate. That’s unfair and this is all just entertainment at the end of the day.

Different strokes for different folks. I don’t move the same way they move on screen and pleasure takes on many different forms.

There’s nothing wrong with having preferences, but when your tastes limit your pleasure and negatively impact your interpersonal relationships along with outlooks on life, it’s time to ask yourself if your porn is aging with you. 

Porn is entertainment and not sex education. As real as it can feel, it’s all scripted and everyone has to consent no matter what the production level is. We don’t have sex the way we see on screen and you don’t have to feel like you have to either.

That’s all okay. I don’t paint the same way I do when I film. I’m still creating when the camera is rolling, but it’s different from how I am in the studio.

We need more in-depth sex education, we need to listen to sex workers, we need to hear the experiences from people with different sexual practices. Most importantly, we need to be more honest with ourselves. 

Featured artwork by Armando Cabba.

Read: Paying for your porn and why men should stop yelling

Armando Cabba

Author

Armando Cabba is an artist originally from Montreal. His body of work primarily consist of the duality of portraiture and abstraction along with everything in between. Armando’s work is held in private collections in North America and Europe. After a few years working independently in Italy, he moved to Paris where he currently continues to create.