I’m not a perpetually horny creature (not like men are, anyway) but when the moment is right my thoughts can definitely take a long tumble down the steep, snowy mountain of depravity. Stop by Sbarro for a slice after shopping all afternoon and the two people behind the counter happen to be a couple of friendly dudes? Why hello there, fantastically elaborate plotline in which over the course of a pizza transaction the three of us discover a shared favorite bar, decide to meet up for drinks later, and inevitably succumb to sexual hijinks. Cause you know, if there’s drinks I’ll be too intoxicated to drive, so we’ll have to hang out in the parking lot at 2AM so I can sober up, but really what will happen is I’ll end up hanging out the back seat of the car, choking on the cock of guy A — I think his name tag said Joe when he was plating that slice of margherita — while guy B awkwardly fucks me from behind, banging the shit out of his shins on the car door frame but too drunk and horny to care. And when that passing car gives B the shakes, we’ll obviously elect to pile into one car and head over to B’s place where I’ll spend the rest of the night swallowing cum and getting my ass plowed. I’ll think in my head at the time that I shouldn’t let them go ass to mouth, but of course I’m going to anyway. “Holy shit, this girl is a freak,” they’ll say.
The slutty reality in the fantasy
Anyway, the point is my brain (and sometimes my body, though not nearly as much as my brain) goes to some really slutty places when I’m inspired. For me, the inspiration often comes from something in my day-to-day. I’ve found when you pay attention to the nuance the world is packed full of opportunity, and the slightest change in inflection on a word can make the difference between going about my day or spending 3 hours edging. For me just seeing the hot guy (or girl) is not enough. I need to catch them eyeing me up and down, or hear that hint of lust in their voice to get excited.
Things aren’t too much different for me when it comes to porn. There has to be a scenario, and it has to be rooted in a coherent reality… Otherwise all I see are blobs of flesh moving on a screen. Basically I need verisimilitude to get off. A 20-second gif of raw fucking on Tumblr is nothing to me without a caption or a story already playing in my head. And because I’m never going to try and convince the hot pizza guy ringing my doorbell to have sex with me, my pussy is never going to get wet watching porn with lazy setups like that. On the other hand, if the pizza guy were to deliver my pizza, refuse to leave because I didn’t throw myself at him, get into an argument with me about it, then eventually force his way into my home, wrestle me down onto the floor, and then ravage me while the pizza got cold… Then okay, I’m on board.
It’s not sex, it’s porn
The Dude: Your sexual fantasies seem to be a lot about self-insertion. You are center to your own sexual imagination. For me, it’s never been like that. One thing that all my porn consumption has in common is that it strives toward a certain aesthetic ideal. And then if it gets nastier past vanilla sex, that’s even better. But at the core of it stand women you just don’t meet on your average day out.
In order for me to get excited about erotica, that erotica has to be removed from the real world. The mundane is what undercuts erotic value, which is obviously not an issue for someone to whom self-insertion is the prime erotic drive. After all, we live in a mundane world.
Here’s a good way to show what I mean. If you know my work, you know I’ve got a very defined visual style. It’s a style that I obviously draw from my own tastes, but another large part of it comes from places like Instagram. And as anyone who has spent more than two seconds on the internet knows, Instagram has no shortage of teasing sluts with millions of followers. And those teasing sluts believe in something that I also believe in: the power of fantasy.
When Abigail Ratchford posts a shot of her and her girlfriends dressing up in cute lingerie together, my mind goes places. What are they doing when the cameras are off? What are they doing when the cameras are on, actually, that isn’t even allowed to be posted on Instagram? Surely they’re engaged in all sorts of amazing all-girl orgies. Surely these girls have a degree of unleashed sexuality that they apply to each other because, well… why wouldn’t they? Straight, lesbian, maybe those words don’t even mean anything to them. They’re hedonists. They believe in pleasuring each other. They have sex because they owe it to themselves and human sexuality as a whole to apply the gifts they’ve been given.
That’s how I choose to fill in the image they’re selling.
From where I stand, as a male porn consumer, nothing’s a more powerful pornographic experience than that. To take something that you rationally know probably isn’t happening, but which you really wish did. To connect to that, and to make you believe that it actually does. And what if you had the chance to look in? You have world class girls doing things to each other beyond imagination. In the case of 3DX, add a few dickgirls and the picture is complete!
The hottest woman vs the hottest sex
Marie: So when you’re rubbing one out later, the cute girl smiling at you on the bus has no chance against the Instagram girls you’ll never meet?
The Dude: The cute girl on the bus isn’t competing with the Instagram models for erotic value. The cute girl on the bus is a real person that I could get to know so obviously the entire endgame there is different. Isn’t the thing we always say about porn that it’s not supposed to be real? It’s just supposed to be hot. The real difference between the Instagirls and the real life cute girl is that for pornographic, erotic value, the former are a lot closer to an aesthetic ideal. I want my porn to reflect what I think is the hottest possible woman. You want your porn to take you, in your mind, to what you think is the hottest possible sex you could have. The self-insertion thing — it’s much more visceral.
Marie: Yeah, that sounds about right. I’ve had sex with all sorts: hot guys, average guys, ugly, jacked, skinny, fat, young, and old. The hotter guys did offer objectively better feeling sex (just cause fit guys have way more strength and stamina to utilize) but the best sex isn’t all about the physical feeling. For me the best sex is just as fantastic as your glam babes, but it’s the action that’s fantastic. When I get double teamed by a couple friends, or picked up and literally used like a Fleshlight, it’s not amazing sex because it feels amazing (though it often is). For me, the hottest sex is exactly that because you’re getting picked up and tossed around like a porn star… And what is a porn star, if not a pure sexual being? It is mind-numbingly, debilitatingly hot to become that. To hear yourself gag on a cock like a girl out of a Kink.com shoot, or catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror with mascara and cum all down your face like Sasha Grey? It’s insane how charged and excited you become when that happens. You can touch your clit and in 10-seconds you’re coming, and then four minutes later you’re coming again. So yes, a lot of my fantasy is transporting myself into the state of that singularly sexual creature and letting it take over, which is why whenever I catch some hint of it in my daily life my brain goes off a cliff.
Perspective in porn
The Dude: Aha! So here’s the kicker: that’s an exclusively female experience. Actually, gay men or transwomen might feel the same way too since they are also the focus of attention in porn. But straight men are not. The only way to be like Johnny Sins is to have a cock the size of the Empire State Building and to fuck loads of porn stars. That’s two-for-nothing as far as most dudes go. So when you look at yourself in the mirror with a girl on your dick, you don’t think of yourself as that super hot porn star. You think about how hot she looks. How great it feels. How lucky you are, if she’s exceptionally good looking or you’re really into her for other reasons. There’s no self-insertion fantasy for men in porn because by and large, men are supposed to be invisible in porn. Even if they’re fully on camera, they’re usually out of focus.
I think in the end what we understand to be pornographic is simply the result of how our brains are wired. Hot girls like you want to fulfill that role. You project sexuality onto yourselves. As men, we project sexuality onto others: girls we want to fuck, places we want to fuck at. It’s only about ourselves insofar as we are the ones experiencing it. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m also speaking too much from my own experience. I certainly can’t pretend to speak for all men. So maybe this is something for the readers to chime in on. At its core, for you, is porn about the sexualization of others or the sexualization of yourself?
This article was originally published under the title “Fantasy in reality vs glamorous lesbians.”
hehe
June 17, 2018good
Franaus
August 6, 2017obviously this is a subjective conversation, no matter how you approach it. So my (uninvited but fuck it haha) response will also be purely from a personal approach. As a straight(ish) male I tend to actually lean towards Marie’s outlook. I don’t get turned on by the instagram babes. Sure they’re hot, and if I were to actually see one in the street and she were to smile, my mind would begin racing. Just like Marie I’d construct an entire scenario that would entail me bumping into her somehow and not obviously (or even better her into me) and us ending up on my sofa half an hour later.
And likewise, porn without a scenario or at least the hint of an intrigue, just doesn’t do anything for me. If it’s two people banging on a photocopier in an office under the sole pretext that, well, it’s there and it’s slightly unconventional, big deal – I don’t care and it won’t get me hard. But if it’s an associate and an intern getting intimate because she’s been stealing information from the firm and the only way he won’t fire her (yeah I know, a tad mysoginistic but hey it’s porn) – then I’m all in.
I have a theory – you (The Dude) are a visually driven guy (with immense talent 🙂 ) and Marie always, in my opinion, produces some of the best narrative and written content I’ve seen on this site. Personally, whilst I love producing visual content, I really get off on writing. No seriously, writing erotica and reading has always turned me on way more than porn. Perhaps that’s an indication of how we think and how our desires work? If I see myself in a mirror fucking a girl – no matter who, I’m gonna be turned on by the scene (and by the girl of course but that’s secondary). I don’t mean I’ll be turned on by myself, that’d be weird, but by the context, the sound of our skin slapping, the smell etc. If she’s ridiculously hot, then great. But that’s not the main drive.
alejandra
August 3, 2017It would be great to take more videos Girlfriends 4 Ever [Affect3D would be very interesting in baristas esenarios at a party or at the beach
Degenernate
July 25, 2017Fascinating (and hot) read, but hardly surprising. Statistically speaking, it’s a safe bet women engage in more of what we would call ‘fantasizing’ than men do, cf. context-heavy ‘porn for women’, parody porn, fan-fiction, and romance novels that require more mental internalization to enjoy than the purely visual gonzo genre marketed toward men, and with that internalization a greater potential for self-insertion. For many men, I think the experience of watching porn shares some features with watching sports – if there’s any mental monologue running when I’m watching porn, it’s more frequently along the lines of, ‘Yes, Mr. Stunt Cock, well done! Fuck her exactly like that!’ or, ‘Harder, you mopes! She can take a better pounding than this!’, and less frequently, ‘I wish that was me fucking her ass!’ Do many men fantasize about actually being the quarterback throwing the game-winning pass, or is jubilation over your team winning the entirety of what the experience is about?
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but certain evolutionary and social pressures may even be at work here, i.e., when the star spearman lands the killshot on a mammoth, his fellow tribesmen don’t feel envy at his skill but rather joy and shared pride (they get to eat for a week, after all), and when he fathers a child with the prettiest tribeswoman, some part of them knows the long-term benefit to the tribe is a cause for celebration. Anthropologically speaking, being a successful man requires being surrounded by other men whose successes enrich your own life, and human beings are arguably where they are today because our protohominid forebears stopped murdering the guy getting lucky with the pretty girl and learned to say, ‘Nice technique, bro. I’m up next.’ Simple sexual dynamics account for far more of our unconscious lives than we realize – a woman can have sex with multiple men simultaneously, but only get pregnant by one of them, meaning a strong motivation to capture the best genes (or at least imagine ways to do it) is an evolutionary advantage; a man can only ever penetrate one hole at a time, but he can run around doing it endlessly the entire time she’s knocked up, with a fair shot at passing on his genes even if he walked in near the end of the gangbang.
For women, the gender tasked with tending home and hearth instead of expeditionary hunting and warfare, there is only inter-tribal competition, i.e., when the star spearman takes the pretty tribeswoman as his mate, his superior genes effectively become hers and not yours; when a female rival’s man claims the mammoth kill, you care less about how it helps the tribe and more about how it affects her relative social esteem and the standing of your household, because that’s your entire responsibility in pretty much any society that existed prior to our own. This is all pure speculation, and it’s probably entirely politically incorrect to say any of this, but men are generally capable of following a just king with nothing but true loyalty in their hearts, while women frequently wish they were the queen; a guy will generally react to another guy getting laid with a high-five instead of a punch – does a woman will fight the urge to slap the dick out of another girl’s mouth to suck on it herself?
In any event, my debilitating addiction to camgirls goes against this larger theory, because that is frequently a relationship centered around wanting to be socially and romantically involved rather than purely sexually involved, heavy on the ‘if you were my girl’ fantasies. I’m probably the wrong person to be speculating about the realm of sexual fantasies anyway – among other reasons, I have the condition coming to be known as ‘aphantasia’, a near-complete inability to mentally picture anything that isn’t the blackness inside my eyelids. Imagining myself fucking someone isn’t exactly impossible, but it is accompanied by absolutely nothing I would call a mental ‘image’, and yes, this does make masturbating complicated. Thank goodness for porn!
Degenernate
July 25, 2017And one other argument I just realized: Out in the bush, a daydreaming companion is a liability; faced with a life of drudgery around the hut, a strong fantasy life sounds like the only way to stay sane. A few billion years of evolution and a few millennia of divergent social roles and it’s somewhat remarkable the sexes are still so similar.
Christian
August 9, 2017I suspect that prehistoric social roles were a whole lot less divergent than we tend to think, at least when we think in terms of the popular but wildly inaccurate, Victorian-Era mighty-beast-slaying ‘boy’s own’ fantasies of prehistoric life. When I hear respectable behavior scientists say things like ‘men go for flight or flight, but women tend and befriend instead’ I just cringe and laugh at them, because it is so silly and wrong; any decent psychologist or therapist would tell you it’s insane to just generalize like that. Give the world’s most experienced neuroscientist a dozen random brain scans and it would be practically impossible for them to spot which brains are male and which are female; there are literally no constant, distinctive differences (not even size or mass) between male and female brains.
Humans have the capacity to produce extremely ‘feminine’ men and extremely ‘masculine’ women, and we wouldn’t have evolved like this without having fluid, frequently-changeable gender roles through our history. For species’ where there are strongly-defined, radically different roles for each gender over a long part of their development, lions are a pretty good example of how that shakes out; or, even more so, most species of birds. Compared to many animals gender of very little importance to humans, and I personally think we should celebrate this fact as a good thing instead of obsessing over ‘men are from mars, women from venus’ stuff as though it were a cherished religion.
Christian
July 20, 2017An intriguing read; in particular, Dude, I completely relate to your analysis of self-insertion vs the self-less exploration of abstract fantasies. I have definitely always been in the latter camp, even in non-sexual ways; I greatly enjoy writing fiction, particularly delving into character and world building, and I almost never try to imagine my actual self in the settings I invent. I never make characters based on myself in customisable-character video games; somehow I would find the experience ‘creepy’. I almost always prefer experiencing the typical video game adventure (ala Mass Effect or Fallout, say) when played with an excessively (sometimes cheat-ishly) powerful female protagonist. I’ve never tried to play games like Dungeons and Dragons as characters that are ‘like’ myself; it would be crushingly difficult to get my head around the idea, like pulling myself into the air by my own shoelaces.
The entire idea of ‘self-insert’ has been alien to my way of fantasizing about practically everything for as long as I can remember, even long before I recall having anything resembling real ‘sexual fantasies’. Perhaps this is not usual. Perhaps it would not even be judged ‘healthy’ by many in our self-confidence-obsessed society. I know I don’t ‘get out’ much in the usual sense, and I’m only slightly more sexually active than the average house-brick. In that vein, and relevant to what Marie discussed, ‘normal’ porn, i.e. hetero-sex, I do not watch if I can possibly avoid it, and find it increasingly disgusting as I get older, particularly this ‘rough stuff’ and the crude/degrading genre that seems to become more popular all the time. Sometimes it worries me that I find the sight of any men at all in porn (but especially in the ‘dominant’ role) so viscerally, utterly revolting; it does make it hard to relate to ‘normal’ people sexually because I stumble at the thought of what I think they might ‘expect’ from me. With all that said, though, I’ve never been short of friends of either gender, and almost never in my life feel particularly ‘lonely’, ‘left out’, or in need of sex.
I hope, in a way, that a tendency to self-insertion, or not, isn’t just limited to being a ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ trait; I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of social behavior-regulation at work that potentially is more ‘fundamental’ than being male or female. I think, Dude, that you have put your finger right on the cultural-social underpinnings of it when you say that some kinds of people more than others are presented with opportunities to be the center of attention, and one of the biggest divides as far as sexual attention goes is, traditionally, gender. Even still, I would say there are plenty of women who completely remove themselves from their fantasies, and probably more men than we might expect put themselves at the center of their imaginations. As to the broader concept of exploring fantasy scenarios based on a complete absence of ‘self’, I think, or at least I hope, that women and men can be equally inclined to this way of thinking. I don’t know if it’s much evidence, but there’s certainly no shortage of good female sci-fi and fantasy writers, many of them writing all sorts of diverse protagonists entirely unlike themselves.
Jamel
July 20, 2017I certainly enjoyed the views you both have. It reminds me of the similar conversations I’ve had with various male and female friends over the months on how sexual behavior and viewing pornography are viewed between genders. From all that I gathered from them, it seems the female friends enjoyed the image of an erotic/passion fantasy more, where they retreat to their imaginations in mind where they are made love to by their ideal partner. Thoughts of those love books catered to women readers came to my mind – the ones that usually have some story synopsis of a rich, beefy guy taking an interest in the main female character and ending the same way.
On the other side of the coin, what I gathered from my male friends is that they mainly enjoy the rough/raw/hardcore side of sex, with one of them clearly saying “We don’t ‘screw’ or ‘make love’. We >fuck<." We all agreed on that our turn-ons don't come from the feeling of sexual contact, but rather how our female partners look and how we physically handle them.
Personally, I love the series of videos of Jmac handling those 4'8", 90-pound women, or general domination themes of a bigger partner/smaller partner, large penetration, or mini-gts women.
jack pinder
July 19, 2017So good to hear you two undressing your personal selves. Brave thoughts tumbling forward.