(I made this on September 16th of 2019, it was originally an essay that I made in my freshman year of college. My english professor loved this essay so much that she wanted me to publish it, and I guess that now is the time to.)
Watching meaningless sex at the age of ten took a toll on me. The sight of nude intimacy,caressed bodies, and the emotional communion between two humans sparked my sheer curiosity about sex. The broadcast of mutual arousing is known as pornography, or porn for short. There’s soft porn, rough porn, racial porn, cosplay porn, cartoon porn, weird porn, and literary porn. Primarily, there’s a genre for almost anything. What these genres share in common is their source of accessibility. Of course, you wouldn’t typically find a child buying a sex tape off the street. However, a human with basic knowledge of navigating the world wide web is able to access infinite free sites of eroticism. My mother tried her best in explaining the complex aspect, but the internet shaped my confusion of the facet, sex, even greater.
Concupiscence was my guilty pleasure. Being hypersexual was something I couldn’t let anybody know. Even the fact that I never had sex would not save me from being ridiculed by my family and peers. The slandering words fast, thot, whore, hoe, slut are thrown at any woman, of any age, due to any signs of what society deems as “provocative”. Especially, during the rise of the social media era. In school, exposing each other was the latest trend. Then it turned into parents exposing their children. Humiliation is the go-to response in regards of anything sexual. World-star hip hop, and Facebook were the leading informants of such diminishment, mostly for women. Degrading someone to that extent as if they are meaningless was enough to induce fear in myself, and the need to abscond into concealment. I had to externally blend in but consequently it ended up controlling my way of thinking. I joined in on the simple-minded shunning of others. I didn’t dare question why something so desired and natural can turn into inhumane persecution. I shared the same cognitive dissonance as people who didn’t even question what could’ve possibly intrigued a young girl’s interest in having sex.
My mother once told me that people turn excessively religious when they’re trying to run away from their past. I don’t consider myself a Christian at all, however, that is what others assume about me whenever I state that I’m celibate. New research surfaced about the effects of porn on the human brain. Porn creates a superficial mindset, lower libido, and dysfunction in your sexual organs. It all made sense. The constant viewing of obscene skits, different partners, and distorted perception can brainwash an adult, so just imagine how much it can affect the mind of a child. I then noticed the fact that there wasn’t any passion, that I was basically watching robots performing sexual acts to fulfill someone else’s fantasy. Again, the sight of nude intimacy, caressed bodies, and intimate communion are what made me curious about sex. Moreover, observing the connection and personal bond between two people, not two people performing the act to fulfill other people’s satisfaction. In my opinion, that is meaningless sex. Sensuality with passion was my own sexual fantasy, that put me into the category with those psychologically effected by porn. Porn isn’t real. Porn is an illusion that can conform to anyone’s taste, no matter how unrealistic or absurd. There’s no need to physically experience something when you can have it in front you at anytime with just a click of a mouse. This is when I acknowledged my porn addiction, and most importantly how unhealthy it was. Porn fills in such a void, because we as a society don’t completely know what the purpose of sex is. The new research also stated that pornographic videos can garner up to 100,000,000 views. That isn’t much compared to the world population, but I live in America, which in this case is an alarming number. How is it that porn inordinately restructured society’s beauty standards and influenced horrific sex crimes yet is only viewed 100,000,000 times? That number is clearly inevitable, which makes the matter even more sinister of not knowing who is walking around with a malformed mind. I gave up on watching porn and turned to celibacy to escape from that past.
As I grew up, the internet did too. More social platforms emerged and became popular. Twitter was the newest phenomenon. Twitter is a forum where users, internationally, are able to share their perspectives. There’s black twitter, white twitter, stan twitter, political twitter, and the latest one, sexually liberated twitter. Sexual liberation isn’t anything new, it’s practically a revolution that reincarnates every now and then. Furthermore, the point is to challenge the societal standards regarding sexuality. In the roaring 20’s, it was about gender roles. In the late 1900’s, it was about homosexuality and normalizing non-committal sex. Now, it’s about being able to sexually express yourself without being slandered or seen as an invocation for sexual harassment. Sexual expression is more prevalent now, thanks to twitter and its me too and slut walk movement. We must consider the fact that people will have different motives for creating these threads on twitter. Some do it help others, many do it for their own personal gain, and most just want to share their experiences. Regardless of the motive, it allows us to have the opportunity for the discussion to be made.
Sex is fluid. Sex is weird. Sex is normal. Sex is emotional. Sex is spiritual. Sex is bold. Sex is love. Sex is intimate. Sex is casual. Sex is addictive. Sex is an escape. Sex is a relief. Sex is inappropriate. Sex is dangerous. Sex is persuasive. Sex is responsible for the population. Sex is dominating. It takes power, and it gives power. Sex is confusing. Sex, to me, is human. Sex is so complex that it’s used for just about anything the individual specifically wants out of it. The internet is robotic. It cannot explain to us what sex is. These pornographic videos are made without an actual explanation other than for visualization. That is why forums like twitter are more effective in helping us convey what the purpose of sex is. These discussions are made between human contact besides the fact that it’s through the internet. Without human interaction, the internet is just the internet. Trying to gain an understanding or feel of something so emotional with a device is senseless. Therefore, it explains why porn creates bodily defects, psychological issues, or social and physical dysfunction in interacting with other humans. This realization taught me the importance of an emotional connection and saved my brain from any further damage. Moreover, this made me more aware of not just my own thought process but how the human brain is so easily dismayed due to the internet.
