Peter Acworth On The Value of Kinky Porn
Here’s Kink.com’s Peter Acworth, writing about the current anti-porn tomfoolery coming out of Great Britain:
I grew up in England, and am the product of a family dynamic where sex was not a topic of conversation. Any form of sexual information — be it pornographic or otherwise — was unavailable to me. I graduated Cambridge University, in a college consisting of 80 percent men, primarily focused on academia. I consider my sexuality to have been repressed until adulthood. My first understandings of my sexuality came — aged 18 — from purchasing bondage and kink themed magazines and videos from seedy london sex shops. I say ‘seedy’ because these establishments had to be prepared to break UK law by selling this material — and still do to this day. It was upon acquisition of this material that I started to understand that BDSM was part of my sexuality and that I was not alone. From there, I identified communities of people with similar sexual tastes. For me, access to pornography was healthy.
Sure, this falls into the “but he would say that” category, but it resonates with me nonetheless. Until I got my hands on some old H.O.M and Bondage Life magazines (which didn’t happen until after I graduated from college) my kinky fantasies were just one more source of confusion and shame about sexuality, and an impediment to me figuring out the whole “women and how to relate to them” mystery. Kinky porn (and especially the relentless kink acceptance propaganda in the Bondage Life mags) was vitally important to the process by which I came to “own” my kink and be unashamed of it.
Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:
Well see, if you never find out that there are others who share your kinks and you can act them out in a safe, sane and consensual manner, then you’ll probably end up going all Ariel Castro on some women, thus demonstrating that the bad opinion the bluenoses had of you for having such fantasies was completely accurate! Porn destroys all that. You can see why the bluenoses hate it.