Yesterday I met Alan McKee. He is a porn researcher and he has been doing it for a very long time. I am reading his book, The Porn report and in these pages I see myself and I see you. I see my neighbour and my colleague and the guy on the bus that is irritating me by talking too loudly. We all consume porn even if some of us do not admit it. Pornography is different things to different people. For me it is mostly trapped within the pages of literature but that is because I am a reader and I prefer to read sex most of all. I like pictures of sex too, still images and also the moving kind. I like to watch it and read it and think about it later. So do the people in Alan McKee's book, one third of the population that admit to it, a few more perhaps who do not.
Why would you not turn to porn. What kind of pressure do you put on a partner to be your soul erotic stimulous? How about marriages, like mine, that have lasted twenty years. How does it not feel like you are repeating yourself? If you close your eyes during sex there is perhaps a passing parade of images, lovers of the past, things you have read about, dreamed about, imagined. Is this not pornography? These phantom sexual experiences. Closing your eyes, touching your clitoris or your cock, seeing the people who are not your partner involved in acts that you might never do? This too is pornography, a pornography of the imagination. If this counts then I suggest we all consume it. Waking from dreams unsettled and aroused, staring out of the window at the orgy you have invented on the street corner. All of this a kind of porn and one I intend to watch for as long as I take breath.
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