Why watching porn might be making you a better lover

By WIll Gray

IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK at night and I’ve just snapped my laptop shut and I’m feeling a little… weird.

For the last twenty minutes I’ve been watching a video on YouPornGay that… well, maybe it’s just best I leave that to myself.

But is indulging that fantasy in front of a computer screen necessarily a bad thing?

Is the conventional wisdom true? Will watching eight midgets dressed as Oompa Loompers have an orgy with three sets of triplets while a masked muscle-man gets pegged by an incredibly beautiful six-foot-tall fashion model damage my own performance in bed?

According to a recent study published at Researchgate.net titled Viewing Sexual Stimuli Associated with Greater Sexual Responsiveness, Not Erectile Dysfunction, my three-day-a-week porn habit might, in fact, be making me better in bed.

“More hours viewing [porn] was related to stronger experienced sexual responses [and] was unrelated to erectile functioning with a partner,” the study concluded.

It’s primary researchers, Nicole Prause and James Pfaus of the University of California, also said that watching more porn “was related to stronger desire for sex with a partner.”

Essentially, the study concluded that (to a certain extent) the more porn you watched, the better you were in bed. And this works for all types of couples – gay, lesbian, straight and poly.

Maybe I should be watching more porn.

THERE IS A LONG-HELD, widespread view that watching porn is psychologically damaging. And without a doubt, if you’re a single man wearing nothing but a stained white singlet and boxer shorts, spending hours crouched in front of your laptop jerking off to endless videos of gang-bangs is not a healthy way to spend your day.

You need some sun, dude.

But watching porn can shake off the feeling everybody has that they’re a freak and that their kinks and perversions need to be hidden away.

The only way to live a fulfilled sexual existence is to talk about the fact that you want to have a petit Japanese girl pound your ass with a strap-on (maybe). Keeping that shit to yourself is what turns you into a pervert, and porn provides an opening (!!!) to discussions about what turns you on.

It makes you more comfortable with your own, weird sexual desires.

My personal preference is for group-sex, and in my experience, porn has been a way to start discussions around that particular kink that have ended very, very well for me.

My first threesome began after myself and two guys from college got stoned and started watching random videos on the internet. Eventually we got to some porn sites with the intention of viewing the weirdest shit we could find, and stumbled upon a video of a threesome. We all sat there entranced for a while, until I had the courage to say “that looks kind of awesome”.

The guys agreed, and the next few hours were very, very enjoyable.

Thanks, internet porn!

SOME WEBSITES have cottoned on to the fact that playing out real-life kinks (as opposed to creating videos of “teens” getting pounded) is a lucrative gap in the XXX market. Heaps Gay recently interviewed Erika Lust, whose site XConfessions is dedicated to making films out of fantasies the porn-viewing public have emailed in.

“I am creating films people can relate to, showing sex that is diverse, interesting, sexy, smart, sweet or rough. Where both women and men are satisfied,” Lust said.

XConfessions’s films are kinky, cinematic, dirty and beautiful. There’s a sense of fantasy, but it’s a healthy fantasy – you could watch one of Lust’s films with a new partner and be assured that the next time you fuck its’ going to be really, really good.

CARTER CRUISE is an adult-film actress and writer. If anybody has an insight into the way pornography might influence and intergrate into everyday sex lives, it’s her.

“If anything, I think it comes down to balance,” she told me.

“Of course [there are] negative and positive outcomes from watching porn, because both possibilities exist.”

Cruise believes that porn can be a positive avenue for helping an individual realise their own sexual fantasies, but says the it should in no way be used as an educational tool.

“If somebody is using porn to learn about sex before they have any real sexual experience, that could definitely skew future personal relationships. However, I definitely think porn has meed me a much better, more confident and definitely more creative sexual partner.”

“I [don’t] use porn to learn about sex, but rather to explore and enhance what I already know”.

THE FACT IS THAT with the ubiquity of internet porn, there’s no doubt that using pornography as an educational tool is absolutely ridiculous. Telling kids and teenagers about sex is a job for parents and schools, and blaming porn on creating a generation of perverts who develop sex addictions is a shirking of responsibility.

Like any addictive substance – alcohol, drugs, religion – porn is harmful in large doses. But taken in reasonable amounts, it’s insightful, entertaining, and can open your mind to really fun new possibilities.