Watching Porn Made My Sex Life Performative

Written by Àwòdi

Trigger Warning: Mention of sexual abuse

The first time I saw people having sex, it was in a porn video I watched at the back of my terrazzo-floored classroom in secondary school. Two classmates were huddled at the back of the class, watching a video on a small Tecno smartphone. As I walked to my seat a few meters away, I glanced at the phone to see what they were watching. I can never forget what I saw; a dark-skinned woman lying face down on a table, her skirt hiked up above her stomach and her naked breasts dropping out of her unbuttoned blouse, a naked white man thrusting clumsily into her. 

‘’Is that blue film?’’ I asked, pretending not to know what it was.

‘’Yes, there’s nothing there. I watch blue films sometimes; my house help used to send them to me.’’ The girl who owned the phone said to me.

‘There’s nothing there’’ the other girl answered. 

I stepped closer to the phone and watched the muted videos with them. One of the girls commented that the man looked foolish, and I chuckled and agreed.

Those videos would be the first of hundreds of porn videos I would watch over a 6-year addiction. At thirteen, I had already started touching myself. But I vowed never to watch porn in my life a year before I watched those videos in my class. The thing I had sworn myself off entirely became a prominent and foundational part of my self-pleasure and spilt into my sex life. 

The first time I had sex, I was 15, and I didn’t know that I did even after watching much pornographic material. A boy I liked deceived me into it. He told me I was still a virgin even after I saw his penis buried deep inside me. He said as long as there was no blood, my hymen was still intact, and I was still a virgin. I believed him because I learned how sex worked from porn and the notions of friends in school, which left me with little knowledge of how my first time was supposed to go. I only found out he lied to me after telling a friend’s cousin I had befriended from secondary school, that I was still a virgin since there was no blood. He corrected me, and I was distraught to know that I had been deceived into giving my virginity to someone I didn’t want to. After this incident, I spiraled, and something in me snapped. I didn’t realize it then, but it made me hypersexual. I would binge-watch porn videos and masturbate to feel safe in my body. 

I would be abused many times by older men till I was 18, and the porn would always be there to cushion my trauma. It was my coping mechanism; my self-induced orgasms would release the stress of living with five other girls who gossiped about me and made fun of me at University. I knew it was a foul and unhealthy habit, but the alternative was sex. And after a pregnancy scare that almost ruined my reputation in school, I vowed never to have sex until I was 18; until I had found a way to claim my body from sexual trauma. I consider that the first time I had sex because I was actually in control of what happened. I succeeded, and when I did, it was terrific. I felt free. It wasn’t perfect, but for some reason, I felt free. I wasn’t guilty and tense like I had been in the past. But even after that, my dependence on porn persisted and even increased. The need to watch it became more urgent. I began to seek help and started X-rated content fast in 2020. I went months without watching porn during the lockdown, spiraling into panic attacks; coping mechanisms were gone. When I came out of lockdown with several months of being porn-free under my belt, I had sex for the first time. It was with the same person I had sex with after I turned 18, and it was terrible. He was awful at it. I was confused; how could it be possible that this person I felt free with would be this bad at sex? What perplexed me more was that I kept moaning, arching my back and curling my toes even when I wasn’t wet enough for him to penetrate me. 

The person I had sex with was better at it. He knew what he was doing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The performance I put up didn’t need much effort; I still fake moaned when he gave me my head while using an ice cube on my clit. It was slightly uncomfortable, but I still sighed with pleasure and put my fingers in his hair as I squirmed from the awkward sensation of ice on my clit. He must have thought I did so because the pleasure was too much, as with many things in my sex life that I typically dissociate from. 

I didn’t notice I was performing until two occasions when it hit me at once. Once, when I was mutually masturbating over a call with a friend with benefits. I was struggling to hold in a moan when he asked me if it felt good, and I said yes even though I didn’t enjoy it very much. The second time was with an ex-boyfriend when we were making out in his room in the boy’s quarters of his brother’s apartment. He started gently kissing my neck and ears and squeezing my breasts before he slipped his hands into my underwear to rub my clit. He was very rough, and it hurt, but I moaned like it was amazing. He later relaxed, and I ended up squirting on his fingers. But when I went home, I asked myself why I was moaning when I was in pain. By then, I had gone a whole year without watching porn, so I did not consider my dependence on porn as a cause of my pleasure performance.

One day, after making a conscious effort to unlearn this performance, I saw an excerpt from an interview with Billie Eilish where she talked about having nightmares when she had a porn addiction after being exposed to porn at a young age. It was the first time I acknowledged that the porn addiction I had might have shaped my sex life and how I viewed sex. As I do with everything else, I am confused. I googled ‘how do porn and porn addiction affect women’’ and scrolled through the results. Many were books. I found an article and started reading it. I was disappointed but not shocked when I saw that there wasn’t much research done on women and the effects of pornography on us because more Men watched porn, and analysis confirmed it. 

I kept reading and found what I was looking for: the effects of porn on women.

“The excessive use of pornography can affect a woman’s relationships with herself, as well as with other people. Frequently viewing a lot of pornography can influence a woman’s attitudes and beliefs toward sex, and this is associated with several adverse effects, such as:

1. Unrealistic expectations around sexual behaviours and performance. 

2. Reduced intimacy with real-life partners.

3 . A personal sense of inadequacy

4. Lowered self-esteem.’’

I was hoping to see my problem written. But after thinking about why I was so performative while having sex, I had to ask why I thought what I was doing was okay. I did it because hearing women moan turned me on. I assumed it turned men on as well; otherwise, they wouldn’t watch the porn stars. I copied their movements because they were my and many men’s standards of what was sexy. Hence the personal sense of inadequacy mentioned in the article. It wasn’t enough to be myself. I had to be a Mia Khalifa or an Angela White when I was having sex so the other person would enjoy it. I wasn’t even thinking about how I would feel. I cried when the realization dawned on me. I recalled how I would doubt myself when I started to take my clothes off before sex. I would wonder how I looked as I came. Was I as pretty as I was before that time? I would wonder. 

I made a resolve when I calmed down. I decided never to watch porn again. There was no need to watch content that damaged my sex life; something that was responsible for exploiting and objectifying women’s bodies. A friend recommended ethical porn once, but I did not check it out because of the fear of relapsing to my addiction. I am now exploring alternatives to self-pleasure and exploring my sexuality without the hinges of performative sex and a feeling of inadequacy.