“Tell me what happens the first time you see a woman naked.”

I was really moved by this piece of…you know I’m not even sure what to call it – potery?  prose?  vignette? – written by a blogger on Tumblr called The Clumsy Human.

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“Tell me what happens the first time you see a woman naked.”

“The first time you see a woman naked will not be like you imagined. There will be no love, no trust, no intimacy. You won’t even be in the same room as her.

You won’t get to smile as she undresses you and you undress her. You won’t get to calm her nerves with nerves of your own. You won’t get to kiss her, feeling her lips and the edge of her tongue. You won’t get to brush your fingers over the lace of her bra or count her ribs or feel her heartbeat.

The first time you see a woman naked you will be sitting in front of a computer screen watching someone play at intimacy and perform at sex. She will contort her body to please everyone in the room but her. You will watch this woman who is not a woman, pixelated and filtered and customized. She will come ready-made, like an order at a restaurant. The man on the screen will be bigger than you, rougher than you. He will teach you how to talk to her. He will teach you where to put your hands and he will teach you what you’re supposed to like. He will teach you to take what is yours.

You must unlearn this. You must unlearn this twisted sense of love. You must unlearn the definition of pleasure and intimacy you are being taught. Kill this idea of love, this idea of entitlement, this way of scarring one another.”

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What was it like the first time you saw someone naked? The first time you saw porn?  Tell your story here.

Here’s a link to the original Tumblr post.

Does porn make you happy?

Not “does it make you feel good (for a time)” or “does it turn you on” – does it make you happy?

I gave up watching porn two years ago and it was REALLY hard to do.  I had been trying for about 20 years, since I was a teenager.  Around high school I started to suspect that porn was messing with my head.  But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t kick it.

Have you had a similar experience?  Did you start watching porn and find that you couldn’t stop?  That it was starting to affect your life?  That you were looking at women differently, that day in and day out you couldn’t take your mind off of sex (and specifically porn sex)?

The porn industry would have us believe that pornography is “harmless entertainment”, a sort of ‘boys will be boys’ attitude.  Some part of me would like to believe that…but I don’t.  Not anymore.  Not one bit.

Many people will say that if you are anti-porn, you are anti-sex.  I think the opposite is true.  I think porn is anti-sex.  Pornography is made by men (almost exclusively), who’s only, single, specific, explicit, unmistakable goal is to make money.  They don’t care one shred about our sexual health, our relationships or even what is good about sex.  The content of most porn on the internet, full of violence, male domination and emotionless sex acts, is designed to hook us.  Every year we get more desensitized to what they’ve been showing us and they ramp it up, going to laughably great lengths to make porn more ‘extreme’.

The culture of pornography permeates our society – we are getting to the point that if you say “I watch porn”, people respond “of course you do – everybody watches porn.  It’s totally normal”.  As a man who doesn’t watch porn, or maybe is just thinking there might be something wrong with the whole porn situation, you run the risk of seeming prudish, or getting accused of being somehow less of a man.  For not wanting to fill your head with the objectification and violent sexualization of women and girls.  Well I don’t know about you but that’s not what I think a man should be.  I have higher hopes for us.

I wanted to have a place on the internet where men and boys could talk about these issues, to share our struggles and successes, to learn from each other and to be a part of building an alternative to our pornographic culture.

I love sex and I want to live and love and laugh and grow my sexuality to its full potential.  At this point I’m not even really sure what that means or what it could be.  I’m not sure anyone knows quite yet.  But I’d like to find out and I’d like to have a community of men to do it with.

I’m really inspired by this video, a talk by an Israeli man named Ran Gavrieli about why he gave up watching porn.

I’d like to hear your story or your thoughts.  You can fill out my questionnaire, leave it in a comment or send me an email.