“When I started taking guilt and shame away from my feelings of self pleasure, I understood how important masturbation really was,” Armaan says, who now works as a content creator in New York City and enjoy watching amateur videos, especially ones featuring men of color kissing one another.
Charlie
Charlie* holds a distinct “must-have” pertaining to the appearance of the actors, rather than the specific acts they perform, for a porn to spark joy: She needs the men to look “sweet.”
“If they are too strong, too aggressive, I find it is so unattractive to me,” says Charlie, a 41-year-old therapist living in Las Vegas.
Charlie’s porn-watching adventures began in college, when she found her imagination no longer served her during masturbation. “Nowadays, I like the female-friendly ones, but before they were around, I only enjoyed the LGBTQIA+ content,” she explains. “I usually search for ‘female real orgasms,’ and whatever comes from that search, I usually enjoy.”
A sad reality for many young people is that there is a huge lack of safe spaces to explore one’s sexuality as they’re growing up. This is especially true for queer people of color, who face unique challenges and compounding biases as a result of multilevel marginalization. What started off as shame had somehow along the way evolved into a heightened understanding of sex, body autonomy and pleasure.
Cristina
Cristina*, a 34-year old-lawyer, is rewriting her relationship with porn as she reflects on whether her sexual preferences are based on what she truly likes or if these preferences are simply internalized from what she’s seen depicted in porn.
“90% of porn out there is created by a small group of people from a narrow perspective, and I personally don’t want to get too influenced by that,” says Cristina.
In an effort to avoid common tropes in porn videos, Cristina opts to engage in subversion erotic content, relying exclusively on music and erotic stories that focus on feminism, storytelling, and narratives that challenge mainstream pornography.
Where to go for (good) porn
If you’re interested in exploring the world of pornography but feel overwhelmed even trying to navigate it, that’s understandable; it is truly massive and practically endless, and for every genre you like, there may be a half-dozen that don’t appeal to you whatsoever. Not sure where to start? Allure writer Sophie St. Thomas vetted and compiled a list of 22 feminist-friendly porn sites.