What’s In Your Sock Drawer?

So earlier in the week, I was feeling quite sentimental. My plan was to hijack your Saturday with a weepy post, designed to make you leave comments speculating on my lack of hormonal balance. Luckily for you, all that has changed and it has veered itself down a very different path. One that involves closing the shutters, making sure no one is home and adjusting the volume on the speakers. That’s right kids; I’m talking about the PORN.

How did I go from thinking deeply to Deep Penetrations Volume II? Well, you can thank the 50 something self-described ‘Cougar’ I met at my local digs for this one.

She was swilling booze and flirting endlessly with the 21 year old bartender she kept calling ‘Eli’ (his name is Keith?); despite the fact she kept raving about how she had the ‘best boyfriend in the world’. Turns out she and her fellow feline companion had a bone to pick, so to speak, about the evils of Pornography. Which surprised me, considering how sexually enlightened she was pretending to be.

Mama Horny

Her position, and the only one I want to ever find her in, is that Porn is a replacement for intimacy. You cannot be truly intimate with your partner if you engage in viewing any sort of Pornography. Not only can it destroy, or rather ‘decimate’, (her word) a relationship, it takes away all sense of trust. She does not discriminate in terms of time spent viewing, hard core v. soft core, whether it’s a magazine, movie or online. It is all so repulsive to her that she ended her rant with, ahem…

‘I would never date a man who looked at Porn, and I never will!’

First of all, I recognize there are varying degrees of Porn consumption. I’m not talking about an individual with some sort of Porn Addiction here…that’s different, and like any other compulsive behavior it could absolutely ruin a relationship.

Let me tell you a little something about my Porn collection…I don’t have one. I did own a Porno once, but it was a 23^rd Birthday present from a male roommate. He told me he was going out for milk, and came back with an Amateur Video wrapped in cartoon dick and balls wrapping paper. True story and Best.Roommate.Ever!!

While I don’t have a secret compartment in my closet, it doesn’t mean I live Porn free. Just like when someone tries to swear they don’t masturbate (pffft!), I have a hard time believing anyone who tells me they aren’t watching some Porn, sometime, somewhere. I have even more difficulty with the notion that this ‘Superman’, Cougar calls her boyfriend has a clean slate. After all, he isn’t dating an aging schoolmarm who sits at home playing Solitare. He’s paired with a woman holding herself up by the bar, throwing back 3 bottles of red wine on a Monday night and wearing hussy boots. Have I painted an accurate picture?

Secondly, Porn is NOT a replacement for intimacy. The words sex and intimacy always get thrown into the same Relationship Bucket and I don’t like it. There is of course sexual or physical intimacy with your partner, but true emotional intimacy has nothing to do with outside forces, and has even less to do with sex. It’s about the way you have developed your relationship with one another, what makes you both vulnerable and strong. Knowing someone through enough shared experiences to guess their next step, and then guiding them there.

It certainly has nothing to do with a magazine my boyfriend might have stuffed in his sock drawer.

Which by the way, I could care less about. We are visual creatures by nature. I said ‘we’, not ‘men’ because I consider myself to be just as visually minded as the next guy. It isn’t simply a hazardous male trait to want to look at something pleasing to the eye in order to satisfy the genitals. If you’ve ever watched bad porn, you know damn well you rolled up your sleeves and went on a hunt for a better one. Just me?

I don’t need Porn in my life, but I’m not ashamed to look at it. She might be a Cougar, but I’m no Kitty Cat. I have a little thing called the Internet and I’m not afraid to use it, people.

Now you…care to share your Porn consumption? Would you give it up cold turkey for your partner, or be appalled if you found it in your lover’s den? Do you think the Cougar just hasn’t gotten properly throttled?