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In all our years of watching porn we have never properly resolved what we think about how, why and whether it is degrading to women. We suspect that it might be. We suspect that pornography might be degrading to everybody.
The untruths it taught me on top of this disappointment - that women are always available, that sex is about what a man can do to a woman - I am only now, more than two decades on, finally succeeding in unlearning.
The problem with pornography beings when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full time place of residence.
The more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in, This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else'.
In pornography, unlike in real life, there is no criticism, real or imagined, of male performance.
The pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants. The illusion is created that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority. In this light, the patently ridiculous scenario of the pretty female flat-hunter (or hitch-hiker, driver with broken down car, or any number of similar such vulnerable roles) who is happy to let herself be gang-banged by a group of overweight, hair-shouldered couch potatoes makes perfect psychological sense.
My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don't care much for women and want to see the men in the industry getting even with the women they couldn't have when they were growing up. So we come on a woman's face or brutalise her sexually: we're getting even for lost dreams.
Pornography answers men's fetishistic need for visual proof of phallic potency.
Men's specific fears of impotence, feeding of infantile castration anxiety, generate hostility towards women. Through pornography, real women can be avoided, male anxiety soothed and delusions of phallic prowess indulged, by intimations of the rock-hard, larger than life male organ.
I've even seen pictures of men being buggered by a pig. But once you start going down that slope, you get very quickly jaded.
You can easily get to much of it . It's deadening, nullifying, gratuitous, unsatisfying. At one point I was single for three years and I used a lot of porn then. After a while, it made me feel worse.
There have been too many times when I have guiltily resorted to impersonal fantasy because the genuine love I felt for a woman wasn't enough to convert feelings into performance. And in those sorry secret moments, I have resented deeply my lifelong indoctrination into the aesthetic of the centrefold.
People who use pornography feel dead inside, and they are trying to avoid being aware of that pain. There is a sense of liberation, which is temporary: that's why pornography is so repetitive - you have to go back again and again.
The thing about it is that, unlike real life, it is incredibly safe. I'm frightened of real sex, which is unscripted and unpredictable. And so I engage in pornography, which is totally under my control. But, of course, it also brings intense disappointment, precisely because it is not what I'm really searching for. It's rather like a hungry person standing outside the window of a restaurant, thinking that they're going to get fed.
Even my fantasies about 'real' people, I am really transforming them into pieces of walking pornography. It is not the reality of who they are that I focus on, but the fantasy I project on to them.
The very least pornography does is make sexism sexy.
What do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you'd spent more time wanking on the internet?
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