Porn

Physique Pictorial: a classic

(You wouldn't believe the trouble this post has given me in the writing, so here is redaction 34.3.7 of this post and don't be surprised if it lacks a certain finesse).
Rather than introduce you to my aunt, one of the more psychopathic members of my dysfunctional family, I am instead going to come clean and write about my use of porn.
This post was inspired by a comment on Inexplicable Device's blog which referred to buying a wank mag (Here). This chimed with the way I have been reflecting recently that in reality the 'respectable' face of controlled sexuality in our society is undergirded by a burgeoning sex industry which suggests that the respectable face of sex is not all there is to it. The fact that the police found an 'incredible' 999 men visiting the Libra brothel in a week (Source) in their sting operation suggests that actually the less respectable face of the world of sex may be very common.
And so it is with porn. I was brought up in a milieu which disapproved of porn. Of course orthodox Catholic teaching still disapproves of both porn and masturbation - of course they also disapprove of contraception but they are fighting a losing battle on all these fronts even among their own followers.
Because you see the thing is I love masturbating with porn.
There, said it. It's out there in the real world. The fact that that is also true of loads of other men is neither here nor there, because it's not really ever talked of publicly. It is one of those things which tends to be kept for when you get a lot of men together without women or is talked about anonymously.

I'm not sure it is even possible to say what is porn and what isn't. Personally I found Lady Chatterly's lover a hilarious read, and as a teenager I could see that it was not exactly great literature. But I'm sure there are men who have found it arousing and it has acted as a sort of porn. While at school I stole a book from the library called Bench Weight Training: Its Theory and Practice, which now that I Google it, I see was written by a Greek chap called Petros Elia. To the teen homosexual, the depiction of fit boys in little shorts exercising away was very arousing. The copy I stole from the school library had been extensively annotated with pictures of erect penises and suggestions of intercourse between the boys, so obviously I wasn't the only one it had that effect on!
As a student I came into contact with the classical feminist argument that porn commodifies women and promotes rape. At the time I disconnected myself from that argument by means of being gay and thus not oppressing women. An easy duck out of the issue, and with hindsight I am not sure that porn necessarily creates a rape culture, but of course it does in the mind of  a man who thinks every woman wants it. My personal spin on this is that the issues here are not those of porn as such, but rather of ownership and power. While humans rarely act without any external influence, and many a person keeps turning up to an unpleasant or demeaning employment because they need the income, I am not of course referring to situations where compulsion is used to get people into the sex industry.
There was a further disconnection in my student days because at the same time I was sitting in my feminist theology classes, I was out cruising around the area of the city which is now called Southside, although at the time it was largely a post-industrial wasteland. Actually buying porn was somewhat limited by the fact I lived with other people, had a lack of funds at the time and didn't want to have an accident on the way home with it. Nonetheless in the days when Clone Zone was on Bristol Street and Reader's World (Obituary) was on Hurst Street, I would go in and regularly flick through the mags. I bought some on and off but I think I rarely kept them for very long. I believed it to be wrong and I think as a result my behaviour around porn became rather addictive so that I wasn't really consciously using porn, it became an urge which controlled me. To me this fact reinforces the reflections I have been making recently on the simple fact that society's 'respectable' version of sexuality does not indicate the full extent of the major force in human life which is sexuality.
Because the use of porn does actually seem to be very common. I am not sure that outside of the mentality of denial I was afflicted with, that it is actually more addictive than any other human activity, although that was another argument I was fed in my youth. Personally my own addictive substance of choice is tobacco. I have an addiction to it and simply cannot use it in a controlled way because of the bizarre relationship I have with it. On the other hand, I can have a little drink in the evening, and wank with porn, but can have days off without missing either of them. I do not believe that I am addicted. I also don't believe the argument that you keep on requiring more and more explicit porn: I find that I have some favourite images which never fail to create the desired end, and believe that to be a common experience.
However my commitment to living intentionally means that I am now in a place where I am 'allowed' to have porn. I don't have any magazines now, although I have done in the past. I find a magazine a cumbersome medium for masturbation material. I have (I've just totted them up) 13,781 images saved on my hard drive which I would personally use as porn. I'm actually rather surprised I've got so many, although I have been making efforts to save fewer pictures recently. I see I also have 185 porn videos saved on my hard drive, most of them sample videos from sites catering to some of my tastes. I also have eight Triga DVDs on the bookshelf in full view among other DVDs. I said to myself that I would be honest in this piece and so I am.
I also don't believe that my use of porn has caused me to 'objectify' other people. I am a very boundaried person, with a strong sense of identity and clear awareness of where I end and others begin, and a very clear sense of right and wrong, and this aspect of my personality is not likely to be eroded anytime soon. Of course I cannot speak for those with a less developed sense of sense or of right and wrong. I would however say that it is important to retain a sense of what is fantasy and what isn't. My personal experience has been that on the one occasion when a sexual fantasy actually happened in reality, it immediately ceased to have any erotic power as a fantasy.
The world of porn has itself changed since I was flicking through the mags in the early 1990s. In those days being in porn meant an actual photo shoot using film (I saw the opening shots of such a shoot in Soho when I was living in London, and was still surprised to see the rest of the film in the TV room of a gay sauna years later and realise what I had seen). To buy porn meant going to a shop or buying it by mail order. The commercial world of porn initially moved onto the internet pretty much functioning the same as it always had, but that world has now changed beyond recognition with the advent of social media. Nowadays anyone can upload any images they like of themselves. The wonder is that there is still a commercial porn industry at all! To me this is something which can only have far-reaching implications for the future of what is considered decent and indecent, and for the future ownership of people's images. My own hard drive is the witness that it only takes someone to click save for the image to move into a different ownership, and people are ridiculously read to let nude images of themselves get out online. From a world where only sex workers or the desperate had sexy images of themselves out there in the public domain, we are moving into a world where a *lot* of people are in exactly that position.
What does all this have to do with witchcraft? Well of course in the world outside the craft witchcraft is almost synonymous with sex. Even in the world inside the craft catty remarks are made about Gardner and nudity. The point is this: the witch seeks to live with integrity. The witch seeks to live her true humanity and not to deny essential aspects of it as the cultures surrounding us do, and of course this includes sex. This is the reason that if the witch figure ever becomes truly acceptable in society, we are doing it wrong. If this means fessing up to the fact that I enjoy wrestling the one-eyed monster over a jazz mag, then so be it. The author of this blog is a wanker, but an upfront one.