So, a while back there was some kind of “scandal” in which a starlet’s racy nudes got hacked off her phone and released to the general public. The particulars of this do not matter, but in defence of herself, the actress said something that I felt the need to respond to. Such is my process.
To be clear, personally, I don’t give a tinker’s fuck why she took the photos, and neither should anyone else. It’s no one’s business. She did not owe an explanation in any way, shape, or form. However, I suppose that speaking up about it was a good way to keep getting attention from it, and that’s her call.
The wherefores of the talented young woman’s explanation are not my topic here. Rather I’m interested in exploring the substance of it. If I recall correctly, she said she took the nudes because she was in a long-distance relationship and your man will either “look at” (jerk off to) pictures of you, or he’ll look at porn.
Those gifts to her lover were, I’m sure, very well appreciated. But, I’m afraid to say, she used the wrong conjunction in explaining the sentiment behind her giving them. It’s not an “or” situation in the slightest. It’s an “and.” Give your lover nudes of yourself so that he’ll jerk off to pictures of you and the porn he’s jerking off to anyway. The porn doesn’t go away. If you think that it does, young women, then you are either delusional, or are a very credulous victim of your man’s bullshit.
The porn never goes away. It may take short vacations, or go on the lam to escape the attention of female authority in a monogamous police state, but it will return. This has nothing to do with long-distance relationships, either. In all relationships it will return sooner or later.
At this point I should take a moment to clarify that I am speaking in generalities for the sake of ease. I am in no way saying this is totally universal. I’m sure there’s a solid 1% of men who never, ever consume smut of any kind, and only ever masturbate under the direct supervision of their wise and benevolent masters. I am sure they are deeply fulfilled too. As well, when I say “porn” here, I certainly am generalizing. It may be hardcore suck and fuck vids he’s using, it could be artsy nudes, or it could be your lingerie catalogue. Whatever is being used, it is always for the same purpose: masturbation.
Many young women might be saying to themselves: “Not my man! I make sure he’s satisfied, he doesn’t need to jerk off, I make sure he gets everything he needs.”
To answer these young women, I first say that your man must indeed be blessed. Good for you and him! I’m sure it’s all kinds of fun. If your relationship is less than a year old and you have serviced your man in exactly the way that he wants every single day then you may well be right. There is a possibility that he has not jerked off since he’s been with you. However, even so, the chances are that he’s checked out some stash of his to find those particular photos of a woman that looks like your best friend or sister. Maybe your mom. Certainly his coworker. And then there was that week where you had flu and couldn’t blow him even just the minimal once a day that he needs to manage his insatiable need to drain his balls of semen whenever possible.
I may be some kind of mutant weirdo, but when I was eighteen, I required a minimum of three ejaculations a day to keep even remotely sane. Depending on my mood, I could get up to eight or nine at the extreme. I worked with some doods that couldn’t make it through an eight hour shift without heading to the bathroom with their backpack for a fifteen minute constitutional. So let’s not confuse the physical realities of the need we are dealing with here.
Within long term relationships, times will vary, but after about a year your odds of keeping the porn at bay are even worse. The good news here is that your man is not cheating on you. He’s masturbating to the fantasy of cheating on you. Or, if he’s still really in love with you, to some hypothetical world where you somehow don’t exist. He may even be feeling guilty about it, depending on his religious upbringing and how much virulently anti-male “feminist” ideology he’s swallowed. Whatever his feeling about it and his rationalizations for it, he still is doing it. He is jerking off and if it aint to porn then he still sure as shit aint thinking of you.
And that needs to be okay.
I’m not trying to generalize here, and I certainly don’t want to straw-man feminism either, but I will say that my interactions with many women who call themselves feminists have not left a good impression with me about their perceptions of male sexuality. Boner shamers, I call them, and the movement seems to be rife with them. I am aware that these notions are not representative of the movement entire, and I am in no way qualified to comment on the percentage of boner shamers within organized feminism. All I am saying is that it only takes one hard-core boner shamer to really fuck up how a young man regards feminists for the rest of his life. “How dare you consume pornography, you dirty, shameful, wretched, sex pervert! Sexual predator!” Well, okay then, I guess I’m not welcome in your reality. If only men who are willing to lie about their needs are allowed here, I’ll show myself out.
If you are not sexually attracted to men and don’t like them, then I suppose whatever you choose to think about them isn’t going to do you any harm. But if you are attracted to them and hope to be in a happy, committed relationship with one (or many), then it might be helpful to your future happiness to perceive them as they are, rather than how you wish they were. And what we are, until about the age of forty, is a hyper-sexual semen pump.
I am perfectly willing to accept that this is kinda gross. Semen is basically gross. But if we can start regarding its production as a physiological function beyond our control, such as menstruation, rather than a willful act of perversion, then we can all start to get along better. Boner shaming is body shaming and it is as basic a psychological manipulation as they come. Make someone feel guilty for something they have no control over and you can control them with their shame.
Go ahead and ask any man about their masturbation habits and the overwhealming majority of them will respond with some manner of lie. They do this because, to their very marrow, they are filled with shame about it. The sources of this shame are many and varied; it is no one thing. Even so, I’m sure we’ll be able to figure out a way to blame The Patriarchy for it. Go right ahead, but I’d prefer it if you left me out of it.
So here’s the big news flash, people: on an animal level, men are down to fuck 80% of the people of genders they are attracted to 80% of the time. We don’t do so because we have been socialized out of that behavior and we recognize that to do so would fuck up our life. But the impulse is there. To contain it, we need to trick our feral animal brain into believing that it is getting all the new and strange fucking it wants. Enter porn, the most expedient way to manage that difficulty.
Now, you can argue about the evils of the porn industry as it exists all you want, and you would be mostly right. But it isn’t going to change things any more than showing videos of animal cruelty is going to put McDonald’s out of business. What you will do is alienate the consumer and, at best, cause them to hide that part of their life from you. Hence all these women that believe their men don’t consume porn. They think this because their men have learned they must not admit to it if they want to keep having sex. They tell their woman what they want to hear.
Well, I’m telling you what you might not want to hear because I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m off the fucking reservation. I do not accept your definition of guilt so I feel no shame. My dirty thoughts are my own and what I do with them and my body is no one’s fucking business. Not even my wife’s. And if you can accept that, then you are ready to get down and dirty with a man who is not afraid to be real. One who will not lie to get into your pants. And isn’t that what you’ve always said you wanted?
Muse Vassal 