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Health

The New Porn That's Better for Your Health

Can more realistic LGBTQ sex scenes boost body image?
Image: Igor Madjinca / Stocksy

When it comes to watching mainstream pornography as a queer woman, there are visual landmines threatening to blow my fairly healthy body image to bits: long French-manicured fingernails that would slash a woman's downstairs into two. Non-existent pubic hair that's seemingly been singed off with a blowtorch. The eyes of a woman going down on another woman that say, "I guess this beats doing laundry."

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For a while I'd given up on trying to find real queer women with close-cut nails to watch because the depictions were unrealistic, so I went for real yet not exactly what I wanted to watch: A Tumblr site where young, randy men submit videos of themselves giving each other hand jobs in public restrooms. It wasn't the bag of candy I wanted to eat, but at least it was candy.

Thankfully there's been an emergence of queer female porn directors and people filming and sending in their own real sex videos. This has led to a shift in body image and perception for people in the LGBTQ community, giving queer people a voice not only by showing actual queer folks making love, but empowering them to have more control over how they are viewed.

The value of these films hinge on how they are curated, guiding the queer viewer through genuine, realistic content. Jiz Lee, a performer and marketing director at Pink & White Productions (the production company behind the queer porn series CrashPad) works on films that represent a wide spectrum of queer sex workers and amateur adult film performers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lee, who has appeared on the Emmy-award winning series Transparent as Sarah Pfefferman's genderqueer dom, values how Pink & White Productions hires a variety of queer performers while not policing people's genders via category, or grouping performers by age, race or ability and keeps a lot of the more mundane aspects of sex (communication about consent, negotiation, applications of lubricants and safe sex supplies) in the final product. Laughter and shared exploration, which are a universal elements of the sexual experience, stay in the films too.

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"CrashPad members have come to expect the unexpected: They value our open casting and documentary-style approach to filming sex because it more closely mirrors their own communities," Lee says. "We are told from queer/trans folks in more isolated areas of the country (and elsewhere in the world) that they see themselves represented, and it makes them 'hopeful for a queer future.'"

Queer porn with more awareness may help counteract LGBTQ people's disconnect from mainstream queer porn, which can have negative health effects on their own bodies. Morgan Ray, a certified sex therapist practicing in Charlotte, North Carolina, who's worked with the LGBTQ community, has noticed while her clients are able to find plenty of gay porn to watch, they're unable to find porn with actors whose bodies look like their own. Gay men and couples are especially affected by these unrealistically "perfect" physiques on screen, as well as how insincere the on-screen connections feel.

"The gay porn they watch [makes them feel] inferior in terms of their bodies and feel there's a certain standard they need to meet in terms of what their bodies look like: [being] in good shape, [having] large penises," says Ray. "So unless it's a specific genre they are looking at, they feel inadequate because of the images of very chiseled, model-like bodies."

Gay men have also told Ray they feel inadequate about not being as masculine or aggressive as gay men portrayed in porn.These insecurities sparked by mainstream porn can manifest themselves as erectile dysfunction, inability to have an orgasm, and while being physically present during sex, they mentally check out.

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Queer women are also at risk of developing body insecurities from not seeing themselves authentically represented onscreen. While these women in Ray's practice haven't expressed the need to have a perfect physique, they feel the sting of women being hypersexualized in film. Transgender women are often fetishized in mainstream porn — they are depicted as the objects of sexual gratification and don't see themselves on film having loving, everyday sexual acts that feel familiar and relatable.

These images can have long-term effects, including people choosing to hide their bodies and feeling worthless when they are dating. "If we're talking specifically about the LGBTQ community, [people think], 'If I looked better, they would come back for more,'" says Ray.

While queer porn production companies are beginning to include a wider variety of queer performers into their films, one website is trying to change the paradigm entirely. Make Love Not Porn, launched in 2009, encourages real people to upload their sex videos—meaning they're not performing, but instead are having real-life sex with their real-life partners on camera. Founder and CEO Cindy Gallop is developing a new category called "social sex," where people from around the world can take ownership of their own bodies and sex lives by creating videos people can rent (not buy). These are called "social sex submissions," and for now the ratio of queer to straight people submitting to this site is small but growing, since the site works to include gender diversity, including transgender people.

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Make Love Not Porn's Madam Curator (curator and community manager) Sarah Beall, who's in charge of curation and community management, would like to see more LGBTQ people submitting their videos.

"Transsexuality is very fetishized in mainstream porn, so [we are] certainly creating a space and allowing people to be themselves without fetishizing their identity or trying to fit into some kind of niche," she says. "We don't ask people to define themselves. We want people to be able to come to Make Love Not Porn and feel comfortable exploring different kinds of sexuality."

One of their "Make Love Not Porn Stars" includes Von Bettie, a 27-year-old self-professed alternative femme and queer porn performer who submits videos of herself in real, everyday sex acts with her partner, Ember. Under the "Romantic" and "Joyful" category, I found this aqua and purple-haired woman embracing her body and being both hard and soft with her partner, at once rolling with her on a bed of rose petals before inserting a ball gag into her mouth and going to town on her with a strap-on.

All of this was punctuated by real sex life moments: accidentally dropping the bottle of Sliquid lube twice, laughing as they take off each other's clothes and the pauses when they talk to each other about what to do next. Ray agrees that it's healthier for people to watch more realistic sexual behaviors. "It normalizes people and normalizes bodies," she says.

Watching queer women have real sex on film was better than I had imagined; I felt like I was cheering them on and getting tips I could apply in my own sex life with my girlfriend. I mentally bid farewell to those men in public restrooms I used to rely on for a quick thrill on Tumblr. I had found something that gave me a visceral reflection of my own sex life.