Some things must be done alone. (An edited excerpt from my show ‘Unladylike: The Pitfalls of Propriety’).
One fine night after dinner as I wrestled a large Pyrex dish into the dishwasher my husband turned to me and cheerfully asked,
“Do you want to watch some porn before we do it?”
His suggestion did not surprise me, clearly he had run out of imaginary sexual situations with which to fantasize, but it did make me a little uncomfortable.
Don’t get me wrong, I like porn, but I am old school in my consumption of it. I prefer to be alone in a partially lit room with my pants around my ankles and a hot-water bottle between my knees. The last time I watched porn with other people I was as a 16 year old, the other people were my girlfriends and afterwards we didn’t have to have sex with one another, we went back to our respective parents homes and locked ourselves in the bathroom for several hours, so naturally I had a few of questions.
How was this going to work exactly? Would we start fooling around during the movie? Was I expected to watch the movie while I was doing it? Or would we wait until the very end? And most important of all, it was now 9.30pm how long was all this nonsense going to take?
“So are you up for it or what?”
You see, the thing with married sex is that at some point both parties give up on ambiance. We happily sacrifice sexual panic for sexual convenience. It’s like ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ – it’s always going to be there so you can catch it anytime. We get complacent. And it was precisely this complacency that my husband was trying to shake up with his pornographic proposal.
And so, in an effort to appear like a person open to experiment and not a stick-in-the-mud who wanted to go to bed already I decided that for once in my life I would approach a situation from a place of YES instead of my usual place of I-would-rather-stick-a-shrimp-fork-up-my-bottom’.
“Yes my love I am up for it.”
On completing my nightly ablutions I found his Lordship sitting in bed hunched over my MacBook Pro. This should have been the first sign of disaster. Wouldn’t anyone remotely serious about porn be watching it on a screen larger than 13 inches? But I was in a positive state of mind, and so I let it pass.
“Sanjay told me Youporn is the best.”
Sanjay is my husband’s friend and the only person I know who is at least as frugal as my dear husband. When Snajay and my husband agree that something is the best what they actually mean is that it is free. But I was in a positive state of mind, and decided against judging a website by it’s fans.
“So, what do you want to watch?”
The one thing I will say for Youporn is that there are plenty of options. You can watch the tried and ture ‘Horny professor gives young student the lesson of her life’, or for a twist on an old fave ‘Hot MILF seduces her son’s girlfriend’, or if you are the unconventional type there is always ‘Sexy blonde shoves a tangerine up her twat’. We skimmed past thumbnail image after thumbnail image trying to figure out what would be best, and we finally settled on ‘Husband bangs wife and sister-in-law’. It was a short film about two girls who were clearly not sisters shagging a man who was clearly neither ones husband. It was three minutes long and it was over before it started.
This was inefficient at best and so I grabbed the computer and decided to lead the exploration myself.
I prioritized my search based on length of clip – 10 minutes or longer – with subject matter as a secondary concern. Big mistake. Youporn clearly caters to an audience looking for a very quick fix so while I was able to locate two clips that conformed to my search criteria, the titles were less than inspiring: ‘A real couple making love passionately’ and ‘Love and lust of a happily married couple’. In my humble opinion watching two people in a committed relationship having sex, is about as appealing as accidentally seeing my parents do it doggie-style.
The search continued when we chanced upon ‘Middle aged woman gets gang banged in every orifice’. 12 minutes and 47 seconds of it. Now here was something I was willing to sink my teeth in to but suddenly I was self-conscious! How was I to say out loud that my idea of a good time was one woman, six repairmen and a supposedly broken washing machine? These were my private thoughts that would now be exposed. But this was my husband, my best-friend, my soul-mate (or so I had been assured by Cosmopolitan magazine), and this was supposed to be a ‘safe place’ so I took a chance.
“How about that?” I suggested in a tone that I prayed would convey intellectual interest rather than carnal curiosity.
“Gang-banging? Really?” came the horrified response.
I should have trusted my instincts and not trusted him! Damn. Now what was I supposed to do?
“Sasha Grey’s in it” I added, grasping for straws and hoping he would think that the only reason I wanted to watch this type of filth was for a celebrity porn star sighting.
We finally did watch the lovely Ms. Grey submit herself to all manner of degradation, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had been made to feel like a pervert. And that is why I like to watch porn on my lonesome.