What does your porn say about you?

For a brief moment jizz was everywhere. Well, to be less baiting, Youjizz – a badly named porn site – got Twitter tongues punning furiously for about 10 minutes (‘Jizz you wait and see’).

The site got its airtime at the Oscar Pistorius trial when the state decided to present the accused’s internet history in their case. While they didn’t draw any direct connection between his character and his naughty searching, they left the screen up during recess so that good, moral South Africans could pick up what they were putting down: Bad people look at porn.

It underlined The Sunday Times’ headline a few weeks back that ‘Oscar surfed porn on the fatal night’ and that it ‘contradicted his claim that he had a loving relationship with Reeva’. If this were a valid deduction, there’d be very, very few people in the world in a loving relationship. Chris McEvoy wrote a great piece about this spurious connection, so there’s no reason to repeat it here.

But what I was wondering about, was how we draw these value judgments between porn-watching and people’s characters.

Not that long ago, ‘porn’ would’ve equated to the sex scenes in your daily TV series or your average Miley Cyrus music video. Hell, in the Victorian era people were so repressed, porn could’ve been a woman showing a little too much arm.

Now we simply have access to a wider variety of naked bodies doing a wider variety of crazy things. What used to be the sight of a saucy nipple in Ye Olden Times, is now True Blood on HBO or ‘hot blonde likes to suck bananas’ on Youjizz. No big deal. We’re still enjoying healthy relationships and being kind to small animals.

Watching and getting off to people having sex is much like watching and getting off to people shopping and living fantasy lives in Top Billing and rom-coms. In and of itself, porn is hardly a value marker on the Person of Good Character list.

But what if we started fine-tuning our criticisms on skin flicks to look more closely at the kind of porn that a person chooses – and how much of it they consume.

I am a supporter of the adult industry and its audience. Everyone has the right to choose how they get off. But does that mean I’ll be cool with a lover enjoying bestiality or kiddie porn? What about truly violent porn? Can we legitimately make character assessments based on a person’s choice of eroticism? Where is an acceptable ‘normality’ line? Gang bangs and bukake are cool, but rough sex with octopus ladies isn’t?

I believe that your sexual expression and your erotic hotspots play a huge role in how you define yourself in the world or process your ‘issues’ – or what you consider ‘normal’ or healthy. But, I gotta be honest, my professional curiosity would eclipse my attraction if the guy I was dating revealed a penchant for avian porn (yes, I Googled this, this cartoonified thing exists… with extra egg-laying sauciness).

I’m not saying that there has to be shaming or judgment involved. Just that there be a curiosity about ‘why’ this or that particular brand of porn appeals. For example, why would you be turned on by domination or medical porn? Why would a rape fantasy appeal? Or ‘a visit to the principle’s office’?

What would you find out about yourself if you really starting looking at the why of what turns you on? We question everything else about our existence, why not this?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Porn is not a homogenous, one-X-rated-label-fits-all genre. If we could get over the bias that limits sexual expression and wipes out nuance, we might be able to see how our taste in porn might say more about us than the mere fact that we watch it.

The Youjizz site has the potential to say a lot more about Pistorius’ character than the myopic take on the ‘porn is for bad, unloving people’ stance the state seems to have tried to slip in there.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Lord knows if anyone checked my browser history I’d be burnt at the stake. But it’s all for work purposes, promise. Scouts honour.

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