What Does Porn Have to do With Me?

“Thank heavens porn doesn’t affect my life!”
I think as adults, that is what many women tend to say to themselves…especially if they see another girlfriend experience the betrayal of porn.
The unfortunate reality and truth is that porn is affecting everyone. It affects you, me, your son or daughter, your son or daughters friends, your spouse. Porn does not necessarily have to be ‘hard core’ to be considered actual pornography. Porn is any form of media in which the objective is to arouse the viewer. When porn is looked at through this new focal point, it’s no wonder that some advertisements that people see on a daily basis could be considered pornography.

Growing up as a little girl or boy in this society, comparisons hit you at every turn. This isn’t just about body image, but also how to recognize and accept healthy love. When I was 13, I took my first sexually natured photos for my boyfriend. We were not even sexually active although we had visited first and second base. Why did I do this? He did not ask me to. He did not give me any inclination that he wanted me to. He did not even expect me to. It was his birthday and I wanted to do something that showed him I cared for him. So my best friend, who was also 13, took pictures of me that I put behind a framed picture of us that I gave him as his present. Of course he was very pleasantly surprised. The bottom line is something throughout my childhood communicated to me that taking sexual photos is okay and acceptable in order to show someone that I loved them.

It’d be no surprise to you at this point to tell you I went on to live a very promiscuous teen life. I had sex for the first time with a different boyfriend when I was 14. My first real exposure to porn (besides catching it on HBO growing up as a kid), was through my serious boyfriend during my sophomore year of high school. He did not try to hide the many illegally downloaded porn videos on his computer program. When I decided to talk to him about it, he explained to me that ‘this is what 18 year old boys did’ and without saying much more, communicated to me that I’d just have to deal with it. It wasn’t long before I’d also found the DVDs in his dresser drawers.
Now, I wanted to be a good girlfriend, just like I was in 7th grade. I wanted my boyfriend to know that I loved and accepted him. So what seemed like a logical answer? Watch porn with him. So, we started to watch porn together. We even filmed some videos of our own and our sex life took a drastic turn in the area of experimentation. We wanted to try the new poses we were learning from porn and I’m sure my boyfriend was completely ecstatic that he was living out some of his sexual fantasies. Porn influenced the way I viewed myself in that relationship, the way I viewed my boyfriend, the way he viewed me; it encouraged unsafe sexual experimentation as well as me going outside of my comfort zone to please him, such as dressing up as a bunny in lingerie.

Again, these weren’t ideas that I was getting from my parents (obviously!), or even girlfriends of mine. These were ideas I was receiving from TV shows such as E! Entertainment, movies such as “The Girl Next Door”, Cosmopolitan Magazine, porn itself, as well as wishful desires communicated by my boyfriend or his friends. How are they really to blame when they’ve been no less affected by porn, probably even more so due to the frequency and longevity of use?

We weren’t some ‘lost’ and rebellious teenagers who had no hope in life. We were like most of the people we came into contact with. We were straight A students who studied for bright futures. We were in what we thought was a loving and healthy relationship and only wanted to communicate that love. It didn’t seem wrong at all.

A big problem today is that mentality is accepted overall by society and overwhelmingly by young adolescents and teens. The young men who grew up with me that viewed porn all the time and received sexual pictures of their girlfriends are now husbands and fathers. The young girls that I grew up with, myself included, were taught a very skewed and tacky version of love and self-worth and are now expected to ‘understand’ when our husband looks at porn and are now responsible for raising our own children to know what true love looks like in order to respect their self-worth.

Unless we’ve become enlightened along the way, how are we to know how to do that? Do we really know what it looks like ourselves? Or have we trusted what’s been in front of our faces and affecting us since we can remember?