One of the most simple and powerful things we can do to confront our cultural shame around sexuality is this: share the porn we like with people we trust.

20% of mobile searches are for porn. 30% of internet content is porn. Yet we rarely talk about this part of our lives, even with the people most intimate with us.

Maybe you don’t like porn. Perhaps you feel it’s too mechanical a way to get aroused or that it’s unhealthy or degrading to women, men or trans-people. Nonetheless, we can almost guarantee you that there’s someone in your life—someone close to you—who regularly watches porn.

We can learn a great deal about them and also relieve them of their sexual shame (and perhaps ours also) if we take the time to explore with them what they like and why they like it.

We’ll learn a lot more about them. They’ll also learn more about themselves if they dare to tell not only what they like, but also try to explain why they like it.

To view the video below, enter the password: EROTICLIVING

What it is about this particular scenario that does it for us?

It might be:

• the quality of the connection between the actors

• the face of one of the actors

• what the scene represents to us: connection, authenticity, power, masculinity, femininity, polarity, submission, experience versus innocence, corruption, excess, extremity, madness, humiliation

What porn do you like? And why do you like it?

Peter and Lauren, Erotic Living

PS. Once of the most beautiful experiences I ever had with a friend - a woman who I will never have sex with because she’s 100% lesbian - was when one night we started to share and discuss with one another the porn that we liked. We were both in our early 30s at that time. Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly), what we liked was very similar. Because we were both trained in philosophy and close reading, we got stuck into a political analysis of which images did it for us and which didn’t, and why.

I remember she said that even images of women together that were very clearly produced for men still for her expressed something of the truth of lesbian sex, and that for her it was still powerful. Sitting with her watching the same porn I had watched myself alone countless times changed the way that I saw the porn. It also built up an enormous degree of intimacy and trust between us. She’s still my friend to this day (20 years later) and now as a famous professor of sociology she has asked me for advice about which texts about sex I would recommend for her reading lists to put on courses for her students. - Peter