Why You Should Start Watching Porn and Not Feel Ashamed of It

I don’t think I’d ruffle any feathers by saying that when it comes to porn, people have … feelings. On one end of the spectrum you have people who think porn is the work of Satan and everyone who consumes it is headed straight for the pit, and on the other end you have people who are downright obsessed with it.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle: we watch porn as part of our lives, without any radical feelings around it. The problem is that it’s those “porn = evil” naysayers that scream the loudest. They are a minority, but they know how to scare the hell out of people.

It’s pretty ironic that the people who are super against porn are also super against sex education, which has lead us to treat porn like sex education.

Here is the skinny, y’all: Porn is not inherently bad or evil. And it’s not sex education. When used in a healthy way, porn can actually be GOOD for you.

Porn is a Form of Entertainment

Porn was not designed to teach you about real life sex. Trying to learn how to be good at sex, how to be a considerate sexual partner, or what good sex practices look like from porn is like trying to learn to be a parent by watching Bad Moms. It makes no sense.

Read: Why We All Need Sex Education, Even Adults!

So, where is the disconnect? It’s actually simple: Human beings have sexuality. When there is nowhere to turn for proper education, we work with what we can find. Porn is available readily online. Ipso facto: porn is the thing we use as an educational tool to learn about sex. This isn’t porn’s fault, it’s society’s fault.

Porn is a highly stylized, scripted movie about people having sex. Most of the time the free stuff you can find online isn’t particularly high quality and it nearly never highlights female pleasure or depicts acts that would come remotely close to producing an orgasm for anyone who owns a clitoris.

We need to reframe our thinking.

If we could all get our head out of our bums and accept porn for what it is (and isn’t) and remove the shame, we could actually have the time and space to find high-quality erotic material that prioritizes female pleasure.

If we had open and honest conversations about sex, maybe we’d have better real life sexual experiences and stop wondering why getting jackhammered by some kid from our Bio class isn’t producing orgasms the way it did for that mildly-bored-looking actress on PornHub.

Raise your hand if you “accidentally” figured out what a clitoris was by fumbling around with an electric toothbrush or shower head!

Read: Things People Use to Masturbate (and Why You Shouldn't)