Lately I’ve been sitting around thinking, do people date? How do people meet? And it got me thinking about my sexcapades, back when I was hooking up with guys, and their heavy interest in porn. I realized the guys I hooked up with who were into porn didn’t really appeal to me sexually. It’s odd.
And I will say, I’m very weird. When I watch porn, I think of bills. Don’t ask me why, but I think about paying bills.
I don’t think porn shows you what real sex and intimacy look like, especially for gay men. It doesn’t show what really goes down when we’re hooking up. I don’t want to talk about positions, and I’m not one who needs to prep. But for those who have to prep, porn gives that no context. When you think about it, porn shows you the act. Getting into it, getting busy, dropping it like it’s hot. It doesn’t show you what happens before. There are so many elements to sex, and you’re with someone you barely know, someone you chatted with for five minutes, and now you’re hooking up with them. You chose them by an aesthetic.
Here’s what fascinates me. I don’t like porn. I don’t watch it. When I hooked up with guys, they were so enamored and relieved that I didn’t watch porn. I find that so intriguing. And I’m curious, why do you go to these guys’ houses, watch porn and let them do something you’re not really into? I don’t know the statistics, but I really believe a lot of gay men aren’t into porn when they’re hooking up. Well, the ones I hooked up with.
And the guys who are into it ignore everything you say. Tell them you’re not into porn, and guess what they’ll do. Flip through a goddamn list, excuse my cursing. It frustrates me. We’ll sit there for an hour looking for the best part while I’m wasting my time. The funny part is, while I’m sitting there looking at porn, I’m thinking, why am I wasting my time with you? You don’t look like that.
Then I told a guy I was hooking up with, “Have you ever noticed in porn, they’re not watching porn?” He sat there for 30 minutes like I blew his mind. He had an epiphany right then, because we weren’t having sex. I’m yelling this as I write it. We were spending more time looking at the dudes on the screen than having sex.
I realized we get conditioned. I’ll be honest. I used to have sex on crystal meth, and for a very long time I couldn’t have sex without it. I conditioned myself into thinking that’s what I needed to get off or get excited.
So when someone’s watching porn, they’re not thinking about me. They’re not even spending time with me. They’re watching hours and hours of porn. So I wonder, what does porn do for you? Are you watching porn with someone? Are you noticing? Are you having a lot of sex with them? Are you just talking? I always say porn is for an individual.
I’m not a porn fan, and I don’t really want to get into why, but I guess I have to, because I’m writing this. I don’t like how they depict Black men in porn. They make us aggressive. It’s very stereotypical. And sometimes it’s odd, because when you sleep with white men, the image they’ve seen in porn is all they know of a Black man. When they meet an intelligent Black man, it’s almost like their brain goes haywire. They can’t compute that a Black man isn’t just the BBC, that he can be multifaceted, just like his counterpart.
Porn also doesn’t show the truth of certain situations. I wrote about one in my book, Behind the Mask: The Hidden Struggles of a Functional Addict. It was a nightmare. Somebody falsely accused me. Unfortunately, there are racist men in the world. Not all, but I found one. It’s in my book, but I’ll tell you the situation. We were on substances. He might have been psycho, I don’t know, or racist. He accused me of assaulting him, which I did not do. I still had to turn myself in. The case got dropped.
Then he called me and said he didn’t care how much money I made, where I lived, who I knew or what I did for a living. He was going to remind me that I was Black. My mother says to this day that my mouth got me in trouble when I told him, “You’re an embarrassment to white men in America. You live in the ghetto with Black people, and you should be ashamed of yourself.” That must have hit, because two weeks later he had a detective calling me. I had to pay a lawyer $5,000 to defend me against someone who was out to racially profile me, based on his hatred for me, for whatever reason. Then I went through three months of court. But that’s a long story.
The reason I’m sharing it is this. Before the hookup, Black men who sleep with Caucasian men run through a thousand scenarios of what could go wrong and how we’d get out of it. I don’t want to debate it, because I know a lot of Black men out here have to struggle. Then the tension is there, and guys wonder why we can’t perform. They want this Mandingo. They want this aggressive guy. That’s all stereotypes. I always wonder why the Caucasian guy wants an aggressive Black man when he doesn’t want him to be aggressive toward him in public. That’s why I say porn is a disaster. It’s not the truth of it all.
How do you feel about porn? I want to hear what you have to say. Share your thoughts with me. Put your comments below and let’s have a dialogue about it. An honest dialogue, not a bullshit one. And you know who you are. Please, no bullshit comments. LOL
Sources: Behind the Mask: The Hidden Struggles of a Functional Addict by Corey Wesley, on Amazon (source).
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