Watching Porn With Strangers

It was an extremely unusual experience.

You’d think the act of watching a movie— where two women passionately yet carefully undressed each other— in the presence of people that I had never met before and may never meet again, would be uncomfortable or awkward.

But it was so much more than that.

As someone who has often found herself in uncomfortable and mildly unsafe group scenarios, this entire process terrified me. And maybe that’s exactly why I signed up for an event where I knew I’d be watching sensual, erotic cinema with a group of absolute strangers.

The concept of the event was simple

— you, along with a small number of other strangers, were welcome to a private venue where all of you could watch erotic cinema together and discuss the good and bad tropes, the impact of cultural context and the influence of identity on sex and cinema. 

As someone with a vested interest in how the world perceives sex and how my own biases affect my views, I knew I had to be there. Yet, the image of engaging with anything explicitly erotic around people was terrifying. 

How would people respond to queer intimacy and sensuality on screen? How would transness be perceived in any of the movies we watched together? Would I be rejected or shunned for any of my views on sexuality?

The event consisted of clips on a variety of subjects— from polyamory to oral play, and shibari to real life dungeon parties. 

I breezed through them all without missing a beat. But my real trouble began when the film featuring two queer women began to play. With a subject so close to home, I felt thoroughly exposed and vulnerable.

Would I have to watch the people around me objectify or fetishise the women on screen, much like I had been in my real life circles in the past? Or would people dismiss it as foreplay and ‘not real sex’?

My heart began to race. As the two women began to engage in a visibly sexual conversation, I began to panic about the people around me. I felt perverse. For having lived the life of a queer person, for having had sex with women, for having talked to some of them exactly like this, and for watching ‘porn’ with other people.

But what makes a piece of cinema turn into porn?

Is it in the degree of nudity?

Is it my decision to get off when I watch it?

Is it only porn when I watch it alone or with a partner, with most of my clothes off?

This may sound like a tangent from the original theme of this piece, but bear with me.

As I sat there controlling a panic attack and trying to play it cool, I slowly began to realise where the anxiety came from.

I had gotten so used to the existence of bad queer porn, with queer femme individuals existing solely for the consumption of cishet men, I was ashamed of my own sexual history and was convinced that I was about to watch more bad sex while cishet folks around me lapped it all up and objectified it.

The shame and anxiety had almost completely hijacked my system, when something happened. One of the characters called the other woman a dirty, playful nickname, and the women went along with it at first. She then turned around and immediately asked her partner to not use that word because she didn’t actually like it.

They giggled, her partner accepted it, and they continued having sex.

A giggle.

And not the high-pitched, child-like kawaii giggle that performers put on because that’s what their producers or audiences push them to sound like. A messy, soft, adult human giggle.

And that’s when it hit me. I wasn’t watching just any old porn around strangers. I was watching an ethically made, exceptionally human clip of two people having a safe and consensual sexual encounter. And the people around me? They weren’t enjoying some badly produced fetish piece that barely treated the actors as people.

They were watching two humans enjoy each other, and communicate their boundaries, and in doing so, they had indirectly shown me their acceptance for the kind of sex I had with the women in my life too.

Being queer in India isn’t easy. I once had a man tell me and my then girlfriend that she and I had ‘ruined lesbians’ for him. Because we weren’t the stereotype of skinny, luscious, giggly maidens who were dying for him to join us in our bed, I guess.

You’re told you can’t be gay, but you’re also made to feel like you better put on a show and open up your life to be consumed without consent because all you are is a tiny little plaything— here to give men their orgasms, not really have any of your own.

But as I felt my anxiety climb down, as the women in the video grabbed gloves and lube and communicated during sex without creating any illusion of being giggly virgins, I felt the energy of the room change.

I felt people breathe deeper, I heard some sigh, I caught some shift in their seat with desire and anticipation, and it moved me.

I was no pervert, and neither were the women on screen.

I was just a person who had sex with women, and in hearing my peers fawn over the women on screen, I found the space to finally accept the way I had sex too.

That’s what porn should be like. That’s the impact it needs to have.

To showcase human experiences of sexuality in ways that not everyone gets to witness firsthand. To normalise sex, giggles, lube spills, falling off the bed, getting your hair stuck in your partner’s piercings, all of it.

Ethical porn is the exploration of sex in ways that humanise you and allow you to see the humanity in the actors, filmmakers, the characters, and your own friends or family members who may have relationships or identities that look like the ones you see on screen.

Porn is not education. Nor should it be a replacement for sex ed by any means.

But it is an opportunity to build compassion and empathy among its viewers, and I wish we had more spaces to find that kind of love, acceptance and respect. We should have more visual references of mistakes in bed. Like accidentally calling your partner by a name they hate, having them set a boundary, and you learning to remember that and move on from the moment without making it tense or awkward. Or worse, making a scene to resist accountability and learning.

I wish we could all watch good porn together, just a little more.

I wish I knew the parts of your sex life that scared you too, so I could show you how completely normal and beautiful it truly is.