Porn and My Sexual Self Identity

When I was much younger, and had no real sense of my kinkiness, I had very little interest in porn because I was caught up on the idea that one’s tastes in pornography and sexual self identity must match. The things I imagined I would want to watch didn’t seem to jive with my self-perception, so I ignored the existence of porn for a long time. Now, allowing myself to discover porn with new, more open eyes, has been an exciting revelation in my sexuality.

What’s “Normal” Anyway?

Before I was even a newbie-baby-kinkster I knew that the things I was into weren’t necessarily common and that some of them were a bit ‘out there’ compared to what I understood “normal” to be. As I was coming of age and beginning to look at my sexuality in earnest, it seemed to be a time and place where the culture around me was very limited in terms of porn, access to porn, and ideas about who watched porn. (This was pre-internet and the first few scary years where porn links had merciless pop ups and infected computers with deadly viruses). Frankly, the 90s was a decade where girls still “didn’t” watch porn because that was “for boys” and if you watched porn with a guy, even your partner, you’d be considered a ‘nymphomaniac’ – 90s lingo was big on ‘nympho’ as a way to police womens’ sexuality – and watching porn alone was kind of unthinkable.

Porn in My 20s

As I got older and my kinks became more prevalent, I began to learn how to embrace and explore them. Suddenly, a whole new world of sex opened up to me, but it still didn’t feel like pornography was a valid part of it. I assumed that the things I liked to do behind closed doors were in some kind of pornography, somewhere out there (how naive! if you can dream it, there’s a porno of it!) but I didn’t pursue it. Porn was a term that brought to mind painfully bad ‘acting’ and unrealistic bodies, and over the top female orgasms. Nothing about it seemed sexy, and nothing about porn, as I knew it, was aligned with what I found sexy. It wasn’t the sex I wanted to see and because I was only at the beginning of my personal sexual odyssey (still a WIP) there was no way for me to reconcile all those moving parts.

Fast forward fifteen years or so …

The idea that to get into watching pornography, your porn and sexual self identity have to match seems wildly bizarre to me now. I’m not a huge consumer of porn, and I use it very tactically: only ever as a means to an end, and only ever alone. What has become evident is that the porn that I want to watch, the porn I do watch, has nothing to do with my own sexuality or my sexual self identity. I identify as a polyamorous cis bisexual Dominant femme , which is rather specific and not exactly a perfect search term when you’re combing the internet for something to wank to. And what do I watch, almost exclusively? Hyper masculine gay men. Sometimes there’s a power exchange element, maybe a bit of bondage if I really want to branch out, but mostly just stocky, hairy, bearded dudes kissing and fucking and being sexy. Don’t ask me why – I literally have no idea.

Where to now?

It was strange (and wonderful) to discover that I was as kinky as I am, and stranger still to learn that there were people out there making movies about the ways I like to fuck and be fucked, but strangest of all was realizing that as kinky as I am, I don’t need kink or BDSM in the porn that I consume. Even more interesting: nor do I need it to mirror my sexuality back to me. It took me awhile to understand that those things were not as incongruous as I thought they were, and that they could both exist at once. I suppose I could try to expand my porn horizons and incorporate more of the kinks, fetishes and BDSM tid-bits that define my sexuality, but I also feel like if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.