PORN

I have spent many hours trying to figure out how to approach this, or even if I should approach this. I will go forward with the post, hoping it will somehow cleanse these old wounds I carry. If it doesn’t then maybe I can reach out and help you heal yours in someway. You would think after all I had posted here and how vulnerable I am to you, my readers, but I am finding myself peeling back layer after layer, hoping to let the wounds breathe. So again I offer you another secret.

I have been married too many times. I have this habit of finding people in pain and trying to fix them, help them, heal them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but I think I have done it partly because I was so lost as a person in and of myself as it were. I did not know how to be a person, I am still working on it honestly. But I have taken on the pain of everyone else, partly because I have always been in pain and I do not want anyone else to feel the way I do, and partly because I do not know how to care for myself. I was never shown. I was not shown love as a child, or really in most of my adult life, not love in a way that I understood love, but I knew when someone wanted me, wanted something from me. I have never been in a relationship where I have not been screamed at, cheated on, hit, or ignored. Never. I have not had a relationship with someone who was not an addict, a recovering addict or an addict to be. I was close once to having that relationship, but timing was off I suppose. I have always taken care of my partner, put their needs above my own and completely neglected myself and my needs. For all of them really. I have found that I made myself into whatever version of a person that they needed. For one, it was a nurse.

You see, he was always sick. Cronhes disease. He refused to take care of himself, his disease. So I did. I held down three jobs to take care of us, his medications, the bills. None of my needs were met, and I was shamed for having them. I gave up so much, and so many people to care for him, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Just to have to rush him to hospital for surgery after surgery because he would not quit smoking, or take his meds, or a million other things he could have been doing. He left it all to me. We would go years without having sex. He chose porn over me it would seem. And so after scrubbing vomit and bloody stool out of the carpet I looked under the couch and found porn, and thousand and thousands of hits on the computer once I dumped the history. So. Much. Porn. This not only ruined any shred of self esteem I had, it made me feel sick and dirty. He was staying home all day, no job, sick and medicating himself with weed and opiates and alcohol and porn. I started looking closer at the milage on the car and found out he was going to Wyoming to purchase porn because you can’t buy it in Utah. The day I found it all changed me as a women forever. I was not at all like anything he looked at, anything that turned him on. I was not for him it seemed. I had given my all to be replaced by the click of a mouse.

But, he was not the only one. My daughters father would stay late after work, missing the bus and train to stare at porn. He would go into magazine shops and spend hours and hundreds of dollars on porn. This is when we were so poor I was selling c.d’s for grocery money. Because, well…he could not keep a job. Notice a pattern here? And he also began ignoring me sexually as I provided for both of us. We also went years without sex. My self esteem was at at an all time low. When I could no longer stand to be screamed at, ignored, hit and bullied, all the blame fell to me. I had failed. I had not done enough. Perhaps this is true. I kept repeating the same patterns with people who promised to protect me. Really, when I look back on this now, all that really sticks out to me is his addiction to porn. I would catch him masterbating all the time, using pics, pleasuring himself, and never me. Here is a big old vulnerable secret for you. I never once had an orgasm with him. We were together 5 years. Seriously not once.

I have woken up to partners next to me looking at porn first thing in the morning. Not the best way to start your day. I am not talking about nude women, I am talking full on porn, oral, anal, orgy, and more.

Now, I am not saying porn is bad, or that it should not exist, or that it should never be looked at. I think it might be helpful to some in many ways. It is not my business who watches it and when, except when they choose it over me. It is not my business who wants to “act” in it, or who wants to direct it or anything else. It is not my place to draw a line in the sand and say “This is okay, but this isn’t”. Not at all. It is all about free will. Consent and free will. With everything really.

But what I wanted to really put out there, is that I watched hours of porn, just to see what was so much better than me. I watched all the history I found on my computer, all the movies I found hidden around my house, looked at all the magazines. Not for a turn on, but for an understanding, a reason, a comparison. And I found overall is that I am not them.

I am not tall, or thin, or blonde, or have fake nails, or fake boobs. I am covered in scars, top to bottom. I am heavily tattooed…although this has become more acceptable now in western standards of beauty. I don’t go down on women and I really don’t want to. Like ever. No thank you. I am not big into rubbing my own breasts, or licking my teeth, but mostly I have noticed that I have never fit in. Never. Perhaps this is why they have chosen an illusion over a person, me to be exact. Perhaps this is why my husbands do not want to have sex with me. I mean, I am not hideous or anything…but its gotta be something right? Maybe I am just not sexy enough? Hell, I danced burlesque (stripping), and belly dance for 25 years, so is it really that? What in my soul, my personality is so wrong I wonder? Is it that I keep choosing the same pain because I am used to it? The devil you know right? Or is it just because it is so easy to find? I know I am not well, I get that, but I am still a woman. Still a person.

Yes, there has been tons of sexual trauma in my life. But should that mean that I am no longer worthy of being wanted because I was hurt? Or maybe there is something deep within me that makes me unlovable. I guess I will never know. But now you do. What that means, I am not sure. Does it even really matter? I do not know that either.

I probably never will.