Written By Brutally Candid
I’m 21 years old; I have never had sex. I have never been in a romantic relationship, and I have never kissed or been kissed. If you are in the same age bracket as me, I can tell you just gasped, and if you are older, I am certain you are counting back to the very first day you had your first kiss. But you need not worry; I do have a sexual life. One that consists of me pleasuring myself from time to time. One that is healthy, void of comparison, and definitely one without a cheating man around. But this wasn’t easy to achieve; masturbating used to feel like what I needed to expunge from my life, like a parasitic host that would kill me if I did not find the right poison for it. It took killing my industry porn addiction to finally have a healthy auto-sexual life.
I was 14 and curious the first time I discovered a porn website. I had been intentionally looking for it, meandering through the web, feeding my inquisitive mind, and I finally landed on the right website. I loved it. I loved the way it made me feel. Learning to masturbate was just a natural inclination from watching porn, from the feeling I got when I watched it—a desire to ease the aching between my legs.
Oscillating my fingers and following the rhythm of the woman on my screen was all I needed to hit the best feeling in the world. It was a messy surprise to a teenager who didn’t know the idea of sex beyond procreation. Chasing orgasms became my melatonin until I realised it was an addiction. I wasn’t addicted to the extent I couldn’t live without it, but I needed it to stimulate sleep; I needed at least one porn video a day before I could lay my head to rest. The urge became more irresistible into the night.
The more I watched, the more I wanted something different to feed my brain. “White chicks fighting for dominance”, my search bar would read. If I was into lesbian porn on Monday, on Friday I am definitely seeing something different. The constant exposure to pornography made me a different character in incognito mode. I started to approach sex like it had to be violent to be appealing.
I cannot explain how much I felt so seen during Billie Eilish’s appearance on Howard Stern’s Show. She explained the same thing I went through. She had started watching porn at 11. Consistent consumption made her desensitised to sexual violence. She would consume a lot of BDSM content and she ended up having nightmares that terrified her.
Those who have read this far must be wondering, “What is industry pornography? Why is it even different?” Industry Pornography is the commercial production and distribution of sexually explicit material, including films, websites, and other media. It encompasses a wide range of actors, from performers and producers to distributors and consumers. Think Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn, and the entire porn companies that have been acquired by Mindgeek in the past. Simply, pornography that involves industry players—capitalists. If there is one thing everybody understands about capitalism, it’s that its major goal is to maximise profit against all odds, ensuring the biggest audience is fed to keep them glued to their screens, and spending time building an image instead of focusing on ethical production and distribution.
Like Billie Eilish, I did get the nightmares but it wasn’t my biggest motivation to quit watching industry porn and find a healthy balance with self-pleasure; feminism was. I discovered porn at 14. However, I discovered feminism at 16. I have always believed in the idea of women’s equality in society and a movement that put it into perspective was all I needed.
Shelley Lubben, an ex-porn star and the Founder and President of The Pink Cross Foundation from 2008 to 2016, writes about how the pornography industry is a destructive, drug-infested, abusive, and sexually diseased industry that causes severe negative secondary effects on female and male adult industry workers as well as the general public.
It didn’t make sense to chant my belief in feminism online and still participate in holding the foundation of companies that have proven to be deeply offensive to the feminist cause. These platforms make money off leaked videos of 14-year-old girls, revenge porn, violent depictions of rape, and, in a broader sense, racist and sexist content. It might seem inconsequential, but I strongly believe that with every click we applaud and encourage the madness.
Another reason for which I was adamant about ending industry porn consumption was the way it distorted my view of my body and the portrayal of women’s bodies. I have an outie clit, so watching dozens of mainstream pornography and never seeing a vagina that looked like mine gave me intense anxiety. Slowly, porn shaped the idea of what a woman’s body should look like to me. The porn stars with their boobs touching their chin and dainty vaginas dominated. It took curiosity and inputting specific keywords in the search bar to see women with vaginas like mine. It was a fetish, and this gave me sleepless nights. How will my future partner feel about this? Because let’s face it, a good amount of Gen Zs learnt about sex from the visual sex industry.
It has also heavily impacted my sexual language. I have adopted their animated moans, but I have no way to find out if that is true or not, so I will just have to wait and hear myself in the future; wish me luck.
I am proud of myself. I am proud that I did not throw away the baby with the dirty water. Battling the addiction, I would read essays that had a religious background that would condemn masturbation more than they would speak about the atrocious porn industry. But I am here to say anybody can find a healthy balance. Masturbation is not the problem. Something that acts as a guide map to our bodies can never be the problem.
If you are reading this and wondering, is she anti-porn now? No, I don’t believe I have earned that yet. However, I am definitely anti-industry pornography. The most ethical option in porn consumption is buying directly from the workers. If anybody must watch pornography, then they must support the workers with true autonomy.
