Porn kills love?

There are these huge billboards around the Bay right now that read "PORN KILLS LOVE. FIGHT FOR LOVE" and a website. I, of course, looked it up. The design is good and it avoids any political or religious reference, so the articles it posts look more reliable. These articles tell you all the horrible things porn is going to do to you, with citations.

But some of those citations are more than twenty years old, and since these articles frame it largely as internet porn, it's dubious to use sources from a time when the internet was not a given in people's lives. A little more digging shows that the mostly white, mostly male employees and leaders of this organization are also mostly members of LDS. In other words, white Mormon guys are putting up signs all over telling us that porn is going to ruin our relationships and cause rape and other awful things.

I mention this because when I looked at the website, I had a moment of worrying that all these well-done articles were correct. I wondered if maybe this was real, this was science, and perhaps images of sexuality were bad for you. I don't typically look at porn, largely because I don't want awful free stuff that doesn't pay performers and don't feel motivated with my limited finances to pay for better things like CrashPad, but also because my introduction to porn was all the awful stuff and I typically found it unappealing. (Though I loved On Our Backs after I found that). But I still thought, "Oh no, I've ruined my brain with porn." Not to mention all the erotica I read (and write).

Of course, a minute later my skepticism kicked in, thank goodness. The guys making these billboards and writing these articles aren't thinking about queer people really, and their analysis comes from their perspective which is very different from mine. As a queer woman, I've seen my sexuality erased, twisted to make entertaining to men, ridiculed and condemned. For me finding images and stories that affirm my sexuality and my relationships is a relief. Good porn and even more than that good erotica has been incredibly valuable to me.

Sometimes you read a thinkpiece saying everything is completely sexualized, and while that's often true, we also live in a time and place when "PORN KILLS LOVE" is plastered in public spaces and its well-designed site lures readers into fear, making no distinction between exploitative pornography and that created with equity. It was a reminder to me that writing queer sex and love is not frivolous. We have to fight for space to exist, and we have to imagine ourselves in a world that does not imagine us.