03 - Vulnerability Is Scary and Hot

Porn will never reject you, which can be liberating and … a major crutch. It’s easier to turn to porn to get off than put yourself out there with another person. Sometimes you don’t want to be vulnerable and that’s ok. Today, we explore the difference between fantasy and desire, dabble in porn parodies, and hear from a cam model who shows us how the accessibility offered through platforms like OnlyFans creates a new opportunity for intimacy.

Featured Guests & Links:

Lilly Sparks, founder & CEO of afterglow, an ethical porn platform that's a mix of porn, sexual wellness and education. Follow: @xoaftergloww

________________________

Porn Nerds is a co-production of Squirm and BOOM Integrated, the podcast division of GRAMMY-winning audiobook leader John Marshall Media. Huge thank yous to Adrien Glover, Uri Mansion, and the team at BOOM Integrated.

Squirm is an educational platform that helps people have productive and compassionate conversations on difficult topics related to sex and relationships. We do this through approachable, inclusive offerings, including games, events, workshops, and audio originals. A lot of sex advice ends with “talk about it.” That’s where ours begins.

Sign-up: Squirm newsletter! | Follow: Instagram | Read: Men’s Health, Mashable, Best of Portland 2024

Want to invite us on your podcast? Or feature us in your publication? Or collaborate on an event? Email us at hello@getsquirmy.com

Transcript

Porn Nerds - Episode 03 – Vulnerability is Scary and Hot - Transcript

In case it wasn't obvious from the title, this show will feature adult themes and explicit language. Now that that's out of the way... 

Vulnerability? Yeah, I mean there's zero vulnerability for you in porn. While there's a lot of vulnerability in like exposing yourself, your ability to like communicate what you want, what you like really want in a sexual relationship, show your body and like skills so to speak, like there's no performance pressure in porn.

Like you're the only one that you're satisfying. 

I'm Tess. I have a master's in sexuality and have worked with indie porn producers.

And I'm Kels. I'm a director, producer, and daughter of a sex worker. And this is Porn Nerds, a podcast about porn and your sex life.

Today we're talking about porn and intimacy, fantasy versus desire, and how sites like OnlyFans change the question, is porn cheating? 

We're going to walk you through a squirmy scenario. So get comfortable, close your eyes, unless you're driving, you freak, and follow along. Are you ready? Three, two, one.

You've just started dating someone. You're in their room. They turn on indie chillout mix and it plays on invisible speakers.

A bedside table lamp emits a warm, slightly pink glow, probably a hue bulb because they're kind of bougie. You're making out on the bed, breathing hard, bodies pressed together, legs tangled, hands roaming under clothes, grabbing at backs, holding faces. You move on top of them and kiss your way down their stomach to between their legs.

You remove their underwear. You part their thighs and move your lips and tongue onto them. You keep working your mouth and hands.

You can hear them breathing, but it's kind of quiet. They're not moaning super loud or screaming your name. They're not gripping the back of your head and pressing your face harder against them.

You realize you don't really know if they're enjoying this. Suddenly you're in your head. Are they even into this? Should I keep going? If I stop, will they be mad or are they just too polite to tell me this isn't working? You try something.

You take a bite of soft flesh. They yell, ouch. You apologize and go back to doing what you were doing, hoping, praying you've just rendered them silent from so much pleasure.

But the question tugs at you. Am I just bad at this? Situations like this can make the safe, anonymous harbor of your internet browser feel a lot more appealing than navigating the real life needs and wants of a messy human being. Porn is always there for you when you're in the mood and it will never reject you.

There's a real pro to this. Sometimes we don't want to feel emotionally vulnerable. We don't always have to open ourselves up in that way.

It's okay to just close off to the outside world and enjoy a private moment. But in talking to people about their concerns of how porn can impact our relationships with others, vulnerability was a word that came up a lot. I think that we use porn as a way to completely avoid true vulnerability that's required for really deeply intimate and loving connection.

So today is all about how porn impacts our ability and even desire to be vulnerable with other people. And we can't really talk about vulnerability in porn without talking about vulnerability in sex. And we can't really talk about vulnerability at all without mentioning Brene Brown at least three times.

But no, she made it such a household word. I feel like when that TED talk came out, when we were prepping for that episode, I was reviewing stuff from her and I really like what her definition is. What is it? She says that vulnerability is a combination of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Yeah, that feels pretty spot on. Yeah, she nailed it. It feels very squirmy.

But yeah, it's like that buzzy teetering on the edge of super excited and also just nerve wracked. Yeah. And I think it's kind of outcome dependent, right? Whether you look back at that moment of vulnerability as nerve wracking or exciting, right? Because I think if you get through it and find a good resolution, it can feel like you've leveled up in this video game and you're all of a sudden in a new stratosphere of connection.

Or if it feels a little icky or raw or the outcome that you want doesn't happen, then you can feel this real comedown like vulnerability hangovers. Yeah, or at least before the resolution, being in that vulnerability hangover spot where you're still in that uncertainty, you're replaying everything. Was that message too much? Yes.

Double checking exactly the words that they use. Never, never do that. Was that out of left field sex act uncalled for? Should I not have bit that soft flesh? Well, yeah.

I mean, going back to that example at the tip top of this, sex can just be this field of landmines for really beautiful connecting points or also just really deep rooted insecurities or fears. Yeah. If I were to do a scan of my past dating life, it's so much fun and excitement and so much pleasure and also just these moments of some real learning moments and just the squirmiest moments.

Can I have an example? Well, I think something I think about a lot is how I reacted to people I was having sex with when they lost their erections or like they couldn't get hard. I wish I could just go back and handle that so differently. I think about one guy in particular.

It happened a lot with him. Every time my response was like, what's wrong? What's going on? It's so painful to go back there and be like, why did you have to say what's wrong? If it's any consolation, I've totally had that same response too. It feels awful in retrospect.

It's like these two demons just fighting with each other because it's their insecurity probably or not, whatever their intrusive thoughts are at the time. Then it's very hard to not feel like you're not hot enough or something in the moment. There's something wrong with you.

There's a genuine curiosity of like, am I defective? Am I not doing it for them? It's just this insecurity clash that plays out in this really, really cringy way. Really painful. So painful.

I'm so sorry to anybody I ever said what's wrong when you couldn't get hard. I really take it back. Well, I feel like porn has a hand in that because you don't see people often losing erections in a porn film.

I love when I see soft dicks in porn. It's just like, great, let's get a t-shirt right now. More soft dicks in porn.

More soft dicks in porn, for sure. It happens and it's also hard to see it grow and whatever. But I think that you have this expectation of what sex should be and if it's not hitting those marks, then you feel like you're failing somehow and they feel like they're failing for not being able to stay.

It's like this performance anxiety that cycles through both of you. What about you? Do you have any landmines? Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that's really striking to me about the landmines is that they tend to just morph.

There's always a new landmine. There's never a shortage of landmines. If it's an early dating, are they into this? Do they like me? Am I more into it than they are or whatever? And then I think in later versions of relationships when you do kind of know what the other person likes and there is this established rapport, I think the new face of the landmine for me in that is often, am I just kind of replicating something that we know has worked for us in the past versus actually being present in this moment? Do you feel distracted in the moment by the routine of it? Sometimes.

I mean, sometimes you're like lost. Sometimes it's just genuinely working, you know? I think with dirty talk, it happens a lot where you're like, I feel like I say this a lot. Is this starting to sound like a canned response? Right.

Like, is it like a line? Yeah, but I mean, all of this being in our heads during sex, you don't really have to do that with porn. That's why it's part of why it's so appealing. Totally.

You can just like get out of your head, you know, at least while you're watching it and getting off. Maybe all the intrusive thoughts about watching porn come later. Or at least it's only like one set of intrusive thoughts to manage.

You know, like maybe you are experiencing your own intrusive thoughts, but it's like you're not having to also navigate the waters of the entire complex nervous system of another person naked on top or underneath or beside you. I think there was like a Schoolhouse Rock episode about that. I will say this.

It's like one of the few negative associations I have with porn. I know so many people who are big porn consumers when they're younger, who have a hard time with partner sex because porn serves you, you know, it's imagery that you take in. You don't have to participate in any way, shape or form.

And you can get spoiled. Turning to porn every time we're feeling horny can become an issue if it starts affecting our partner satisfaction or dampens our drive to meet somebody in real life. But there is something to be said for cultivating a rich inner sexual world that only you can touch.

There's a difference between privacy and secrecy. And this private sexual life that only you can touch, that is not devoid of vulnerability. For example, there is a lot of vulnerability that's required to reckon with our own search terms.

The things that turn us on when no one else is watching. I have a lot of shame around the kind of porn that I like. So while it does help me get off quickly, I also feel a lot of guilt about the kind of porn that I search for and the kind of porn that I watch in terms of it's a fantasy, but it's not a situation that I actually want to happen.

It's a situation that has happened to me and been terrible. And so I feel like there's this weird interplay of shame and guilt and like eroticism that I don't know, it just makes me feel weird whenever I actually really stop and think about it. We don't always know how to make sense of our search terms.

Fortunately, they don't really have to go anywhere beyond our search bar, which is why we like to talk about the differences between fantasies and desires. There are parts of our sexuality that might really turn us on to think about or to watch in porn or to dirty talk with a partner about, but that for whatever reason you don't want to do it in real life. So maybe you want to think about public sex or consensual non-consent or like a gangbang.

Maybe that's really hot to think about, but there are a lot of logistics that would go into that. Like, are we STI screening everyone? What's the order? Like who's going first? Who's going second? Do you have a doodle poll to schedule this thing? Are there snacks? There's a lot to think about and that's just logistically, but there's also any emotional components to it. If you would feel safe, if you would feel comfortable, they all get along.

If you want to actualize a gangbang, this is not us discouraging you at all from doing that, but there is a host of people where they would never want to do it in real life or probably would never want to do it in real life. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to think about it. And porn is such a great outlet to be able to live vicariously through some of these fantasies that you may or may not want to realize.

Yeah. Or styles of sex that you just physically cannot realize in our earthbound human meat sack bodies. These little skin suits that we all walk around in.

Yeah, these little skin suits are pretty limiting. I mean, there's so much fantasy that is unattainable that's so popular. Like just cartoon porn.

Huge category. In fact, did you know, according to Pornhub's Year in Review, our favorite thing, the Pornhub Insights, in 2023, hentai was the top search term. Hentai being this very popular, obviously, style of Japanese animated porn.

Which like, you can't do that IRL. I mean, no, we're not cartoons. No, and we've seen some and it's like helicopter tits.

It's worth a watch. Anyway. Well, and cosplay is another, like you said, huge, huge, huge category.

Yeah. So same stats. 2023, number one most searched for in the cosplay category was Star Wars.

Number two, Harley Quinn. Then Game of Thrones. Then Avatar.

Yeah. In 2023, the categories of both cartoon and cosplay each grew in popularity by about 50 percent from the previous year. So they're not only big categories, but categories on the rise.

They are growing and showing. So with this in mind, we have curated a special collection of cosplay and cartoon porn for your listening delight. So your job is to listen to this compilation and guess which characters are involved.

One. We are Jedi Knights. We are supposed to be in full control of ourselves at all times. I don't think I can resist you much longer. Come on. Come spill your cum all inside me. Come make me. 

A Jedi Knight always does her best, even at sex. We're going to give some of our favorite comments from these videos, too.

I love didn't even nut to this one. I just love hearing her voice. And then the response from Master Yoda is the username. Horny you are. Ok next. 

Two. It looks sticky. That's because it's covered in semen. Semen. Why is this wall covered in semen? 

Game of Bones Two. Winter came everywhere.

I love this. Have you seen this one where it's like this guy commented and it's like timestamps for the story parts. So if people just want to, like, jump to the plot, I love that.

And someone else wrote actually watching porn for the plot now when the porn parody has better writing than the latest season. Fifty six upvotes. 

Three. I don't know why my sex life is set to single-player. I'm a catch. I don't need any princesses, no matter how good at blowjobs they may be.

The Bowsette porn parody. This was the genesis of why we wanted to read our favorite comments, because we were looking at this in the research and there's one that says not my proudest fap. 

Four.

Today we're going to perform a procedure. Rick and Morty. I'm so fascinated by the dildo that she uses in this.

Like, it's great. I think you have to read the whole name of it. Oh, I'm sorry.

And the outline is just Rick and Morty. OK, never before. Rick and Morty.

Oh, my God. OK, good. Rick and well, I wish we should have swapped Rick and Morty's synaptic dampener. Pickle Rick Femdom cosplay mesmerize slash mindfuck all caps. Goon POV. Perfect.

The pickle Rick dildo is like really something like I was actually just talking about this last night. 

Marge and Homer make a sex tape. That was amazing.

And I just want to say in this one, I really appreciate that she has blue pubic hair. I haven't watched this one. She has blue pubic hair and enormous tits.

Oh, my God. Which she apparently hides really well under her dress the rest of the time. Yeah.

Is she taping them down? Well, she's really getting it. I like that she's still wearing her necklace. Oh, my God.

She's really fingering herself. Well, she doesn't have pubic hair. Oh, yeah, she does.

She has a little landing strip. I see it. I see it.

Wow. She looks good. 

We picked out some playful, porny parodies for you.

But in all seriousness, our fantasies can be confusing. It's tempting to try and pathologize our sexuality or draw some straight line between what we fantasize about and what that means about who we are. But that doesn't really get you that far.

If you want, fantasy can just stay in fantasy. 

The funny thing is, I think my first association with porn and vulnerability is specifically feeling vulnerable about the type of porn that I watch. Oh, well, this is like a private fantasy where I don't really know how my desire relates to this thing that I'm watching.

So I would be hesitant to trust somebody else with that information. Like this is what I'm exploring or enjoying. When we're talking about this vulnerability piece of porn, the delivery method really matters.

Platforms like OnlyFans and cam sites offer a direct line between performers and their fans. There are some real pros to this. You know that performers are getting paid and they're much more in control of their scenes.

This can help mitigate some ethical concerns that a lot of us have around exploitation and other shady shit. This direct access is really exciting and hot, but can also bring up new insecurities in relationships. For a lot of people, passively watching porn on a tube site feels pretty different from requesting custom red panty videos.

We spoke with a cam model, we're going to call her Violet, and her story paints a picture of a way that engaging with porn can circumvent vulnerability. If you aren't familiar with cam modeling, here's how it works. A model logs online and will do a one-way live video stream.

Aw, Prince Charming, stop. Prince Charming, you are so sweet. Thank you, thank you.

There's a broad spectrum of programs. Yeah, guys will just sit there, face hidden, cough bulging out of jeans, girls dethroning tentacle dildos, strip teases of the Chicago soundtrack, orgies, poetry readings, watermelon sittings, everything under the sun. And side note, most performers have a specific brand of toy that interfaces with the site so that when somebody tips, the toy will vibrate for some number of seconds.

So one way to make money is by setting goals in the public show. So like, X number of tokens, you take your top off. A few more tokens, panties come off, and so on and so on.

I think we're like, no, we're 534 away, guys. The sooner, the sooner we can get those spankies in for being bad, I'm gonna go talk. 

In addition to broadcasting to a group of viewers, cam models also offer private one-on-one shows.

This is how Violet makes most of her money. The private shows range from being a sub or providing JOIs, which are jack-off instructions, masturbating with specific camera angles, vast array of dirty talk, and more. The bulk of the sessions are with the same regulars, and one of them really stuck out to her.

We gave him a fake username, DaddyEarth234. This is like the kinky mother earth. He's a climate activist, but he fucks.

DaddyEarth234 was in his mid-30s. He lived in a major metropolitan area, and he was engaged. Here's Violet's account.

We'd meet once every week or two, and it started out fairly vanilla, just some dirty talk and mutual masturbation. Over time, a friendship formed. We'd stay on the phone after our sessions and just chat.

Sometimes we didn't even masturbate. We would just talk about the things that turned us deep latent fantasies. He'd tell me that he was curious about sucking dicks or hooking up with a trans woman.

He'd divulge kinks that he wanted to try, like urine play. Throughout the sessions, we'd talk about his engagement. He always had really positive things to say about his fiancée.

She was kind-hearted. He loved her. She was sexually adventurous.

I asked him if he shared these fantasies with her, and he said no. I had asked him why. Was it that he feared judgment or that she would reject him? And again, he said no.

He really didn't have much of an answer as to why he didn't share these parts of himself with his fiancée, but that their sex life was slipping away a bit and that he felt badly because she would initiate sex, and he often wouldn't feel in the mood. I always wondered why he didn't tell his fiancée the things that he told me. It felt like a missed opportunity for them to connect on a deeper sexual level.

For the simplicity of this conversation, let's just set aside that he's engaged in engaging with a cam model regularly, because I think there's a lot of people who would regard that as cheating. There's some people who might not regard that as cheating, but just like, let's just keep it to the conversation about sharing fantasies with Violet rather than his IRL partner. And to be fair, we don't know how much his fiancée knows about his porn or cam.

We don't know that she didn't include that in the letter. Yeah. So we won't touch on that because it would be fully speculative.

Yes. But just talking about that there's like this whole side of his sexuality that he engages with, with the cam model and not his fiancée. Discuss.

What are your thoughts? Well, I mean, she says at the end, I feel like it was a missed opportunity for them to connect on a deeper sexual level. And that is true. There's always ways to connect deeper and being vulnerable and sharing your desires is like one way to get there.

But I also recognize that his relationship with Violet is this compartmentalized safe space with very low stakes. He can see how it feels to say these things out loud, like wanting to suck dicks or have somebody pee on him and just test it, like get it out. Like, how does this feel to say in front of another person where the stakes are pretty low? Because Violet is not going to ask a lot of questions in terms of what this means for their relationship, whereas his fiancée might have a lot of questions about what this means.

And it's a much higher stakes conversation to share these things with his fiancée. I totally agree with you. But I think like the thing that raises it is kind of like, to me, it signals that like his sexuality doesn't feel very integrated within his life.

Like it seems like he's really putting in this box over here, these specific things that he thinks about and locking it away and not letting somebody like his partner in on that, which might be one thing if it also wasn't affecting their sex life. But he says that it like it was affecting their sex life and he wasn't able to really go there with her a lot. Maybe there's aspects of these fantasies that he would be willing to share with her, but that doesn't have to be like an all or nothing.

Yeah. Yes. To me, it comes back to that privacy versus secrecy thing.

Like maybe this is something that he prefers to keep private to himself or at arm's length, because that's genuinely as far as he wants to take it. But I think especially because the subject matter is kink and some queer stuff, it makes me wonder if he's ashamed of these parts of himself and that he's scared to share these with his partner because it'll make them more real rather than in this virtual way where if the cam model rejects him, he can just like skip to the next and never really have to deal with it. I think it's also very hard for me to totally set aside the question of if this is okay or not in his relationship, because if it isn't allowed, and even if this is just privacy and not this shame den, it feels pretty shady to me for him to engage in this way without disclosure.

Yeah. It would be really helpful if we knew the terms of their relationship. But since we don't, setting this piece aside, maybe this is the practice that will lead him to having those conversations with his fiance.

Maybe he's getting it out in front of Violet and will realize, okay, this is valid. This other person recognizes this as something that is totally okay to play around with. And maybe that's what he needs to then take it to his relationship.

Could be a stepping stone. Yeah. We won't know because daddy earth 234 is just out there somewhere floating around in outer space.

I hope he's getting peed on if that's what he wants. I hope his ozone layer hole is getting filled. We've mostly been focused on how porn is an outlet for our internal solo sex lives, but porn can also really spice up our partnered sex.

One way is by watching it together. Me and my partner have recently started to watch porn together. We went to a bar here in Portland and they had one of those vending machines where you can buy random trinkets and shit.

One of them we got was a porn package and it came with a vibrator and a DVD of an old nineties porn. So me and my partner go home, we put it on the X-Box and we're like, let's fucking see what's up. And it was a big turn on just because it was like, you create a whole nother experience for you and your partner to enjoy sex in a different way.

Some people give us the scream face when we suggest watching porn with their partner, which we get it's vulnerable. So we reached out to Lily Sparks, the founder of Afterglow, an Austin-based porn platform, to get her advice on how to watch porn with a partner for the first time. My biggest suggestion is to make a game of it, to discuss the rules you're going to abide by while you watch it.

Is there going to be touching? Is there going to be touching after a certain point in time? Is there going to be certain kinds of touching, but not others? So really kind of set the scene, create whatever boundaries you need. And then after you watch is to also debrief with your partner and say, you know, what turned you on? What didn't turn you on? What parts did you really enjoy? And just have a good time with it. It's also, you know, let go of expectations.

It's okay. If you're not turned on watching it, it's okay. If you don't like it, you're just really trying to understand yourself better and understand your partner better.

I think a healthy relationship might look like where porn can be introduced into a situation, a romantic relationship, and it's not a threat and can be incorporated or used as foreplay or collaboratively, like looking for ideas and inspiration or something like that. I think one piece we really haven't touched on in this vulnerability episode is like what somebody's perspective is. If their partner is the one that's engaging with a lot of porn, like the mommy earth to the daddy earth, right? Like how do they feel? Right.

And we touched on this briefly last week with Patrick, who often hears these ultimatums around watching porn or not watching porn, but there's that gray area, right? Where maybe you're fine with your partner watching porn, but it still can bring up some insecurities, especially if they're watching it more often or watching it more often and also not giving you the attention that you're used to or that you want. So it's like this new question of not wanting to police your partner's masturbation or solo sex life, but also feeling a little insecure about how their attention is going elsewhere and not to you. I think you've said before, like not wanting to let those things dominate your sex life, like wanting to allow somebody to have their own experience, but then if they're kind of not saving any of it for you, then that can just feel really disconnecting, right? Like I think you have to keep these anchor lines in both your solo sex life, which is its own thing and deserves cultivation and your partner sex life.

Didn't you have a garden analogy? I did. I mean, if we get enough comments on this episode, we'll release like a 10 minute winding. You're welcome for sparing you from it.

You can have, tell me if I'm wrong. You can have pea plants and tomato plants. No, no, no.

It was tomatoes and irises. You can have tomatoes and irises and both can flourish in your garden. Right.

Both need water and attention. Right. Well, water is your sexual attention.

Do you like how I forced you into this analogy? I mean, you know what? It's kind of not good. But right. I mean, you can't, you can develop both of these things simultaneously.

And there are certain plants that are companion plants, avocados and mangoes. They expel nutrients that the other one really needs. And so they have this very symbiotic relationship.

And that's my visualization of like the perfect harmony between your solo sex and porn life and your partner relationships where they're like coexisting and kind of feeding each other. But it's a practice and it's like never a perfect thing. Right.

And it's hard to know if it feels out of balance. Like if the tomatoes are getting more of the water and the irises are feeling a little shrivelly and dry. Right.

You know, how much of it is just your own shit that you need to deal with, like your own insecurities, your own libido and hormones and just stuff that you can like work through on your own around like feeling good sexually. And how much of it is, oh, no, this is something I need to bring up with my partner that like behaviors that they could change or things that they could do to help. And there's this threshold of wanting to respect their privacy and not police, but also really advocate for yourself and what you need.

Yeah. That is a super hard line. And when there's just so much access to porn all the time, it's really hard to find that perfect balance between your internal sex life and your partner's sex life, which is what we're going to get into a lot next week, specifically looking at the instant gratification of porn and how access to so much nudie novelty can really get in our heads.

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Porn Nerds. I'm Kelsey and I'm Tess. You can find more from us at GetSquirmy.com. And please follow us on Instagram at Squirm and rate and review this show. It really, really helps. 

Here is a sneak peek at what's coming up next week. Wet and Messy.

Wet and Messy Fetishism, aka Wham, aka Sploshing, is a form of sexual fetishism consisting of a person or persons getting messy. What do they get messy with? So many things. It could be food.

It could be mud, paint, even chemicals and water. Don't you want to know? I really want to know. Fun fact, the word Sploshing originates from a defunct UK fetish magazine named Splosh! 

Porn Nerds is a co-production of BOOM Integrated, a division of John Marshall Media, and Squirm. It is an educational podcast made for your entertainment and curiosity. Any opinions shared by the hosts and guests are solely their own and not intended as therapy or medical advice. Thanks for being here and we'll see you next week.