Learning to learn

In gay porn too.

What makes a 17 year old boy different from an 18 year old boy? Legality. Not morality.

(Also let’s be very clear, a lot of fucking pornography is child pornography. NCMEC estimated that more than 26 million sexual abuse images and videos were reviewed by their analysts in 2015.)

Why does an 18 year old gay “new adult” boyman go into pornography? It isn’t difficult to make the connection to LGBTQ homelessness. It isn’t difficult to make the connection to the fact that homeless LGBTQ youth often go into sexwork, not from a place of sex positivity or ownership of sexual self, but from a place of desperation.

You’re watching that desperation. And for free too. And complaining that you can’t watch it for free anymore, when you know damn well that even 8 year olds can find porn on the internet, and they do.

And it fucks with your brain too. These videos and images create dopamine as a reward but to maintain that high you need more; more images and videos, harder, more explicit, more deviant content. It also shifts your perceptions of sex, perceptions of the people you have sex with, and your perception of self. Have body image issues and watch porn? It gets worse! Because of porn consumption you view yourself from a lens of desirability. You measure yourself against constructed images.

And amateur porn is a replication of the dynamic of constructed images. Images designed to arouse, designed to be addicting. And amateur porn doesn’t come with a consenting adults disclaimer. It definitely doesn’t come with a consenting minors disclaimer.

And a consenting adults disclaimer in studio porn doesn’t mean there was nothing fucked up that led to the actors selecting porn as their source of income, that there was nothing fucked up that happened on set. A consenting adults disclaimer doesn’t even mean the actors were consenting, rape happens on porn sets and it gets filmed, and it gets watched.

And when you support one part of a system, you help fuel that entire system. There shouldn’t be any shame attached to being sensitive to those images. We are human beings and those images are designed to make us want more, to deliberately shift our perceptions, to make money and fuel the system. And porn does make money. A lot of money.

Globally, porn is a $97 billion industry, according to Kassia Wosick, assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University.

And that anger/frustration being expressed online about tumblr nsfw content is a symptom. We’re perpetrators and we’re victims. But we can either evolve or stay stagnant. Stay continuing doing the same shit, turning a blind eye in being complicit in harming people on a global scale.

You’re complicit. I’m complicit.