Ask Beastly: Why Porn Is Good

My name is Alexander Cheves. My nickname is Beastly. I write about sex. I wrote a book.

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Hi Alexander – I need advice and since I can’t ask any of my friends/family I thought I’d ask you. I will send you a tip on your Love Beastly site if that’s an appropriate way to say thanks.

So I am a relatively normal rich married (to a woman) lesbian and I have a huge crush on my sex worker. You know lesbian bed death is a real thing and I’ve been partnered and then married a heinously long time. The relationship and other family-centric stuff is great but the sex is non-existent. So I started seeing a sex worker (without my spouse’s knowledge but that’s a whole different issue). My SW is lovely – attractive, thoughtful, and good in bed.

This is my issue: I understand that she is not my girlfriend (and I don’t want her to be. much) but I really want her to continue to see me. And I also want her to think positively about me. I want a list of 5 or 25 things I can do that are not creepy but will make her think well of me as a client. Yes, I know I can begin by tipping generously. I’m in great shape for my age but I left 30 in the rear view mirror about 30 years ago.

So, any ideas?

Hello friend,

Congrats on your long marriage — there’s nothing heinous about that. That’s a beautiful thing. (And thanks for the tip, if you send one. Tips help me keep this place running.)

I’ll tell you what I’ve told others in your shoes: If your partner is unwilling to give you the sex you need while simultaneously barring you from sex with others, that’s not a healthy or sustainable situation. That situation can easily erode an otherwise happy relationship (and often does). I believe you should do what you need to do, including hiring a sex worker. But you must understand that hiring someone is a band-aid solution. At some point, you will need to address the real problem with your partner. Your wife has put you in an unfair situation to spare her ego.

Let’s move on to this great new gal in your life. Lucky for you, you don’t need a list of 25 things to do to be a good client. In an industry rife with bad clients — in a job in which many people feel they have access to your body because of work — the clients who are nice and respectful stand out.

I’m a sex worker too, as I imagine you know. Tipping is something I can take or leave. It’s nice, but I do not count on it (that is why my rate is what it is). In my job, some guys tip, some don’t. The ones I remember fondly are the ones who treat me with kindness and respect, who ask permission to touch — who do not assume that hiring amounts to automatic consent for all things. I appreciate the clients who ask questions, respect boundaries, don’t push drugs on me (a rarity), agree to my stated rate, and don’t try to sneak extra time out of me or ask for discounts.

Be like those clients. That’s it.

Respect starts at the beginning of a client-escort interaction. If someone tries to haggle my rate, I instantly want to tell them to hire someone else. No one likes to talk about money, so I’d rather not discuss it: my rate is fixed and you can put the cash on the table. A pair of jeans costs what is on the sticker — you’d not go to the cashier and ask for less. The same applies to service jobs, including sexual service jobs: pay the provider’s rate or shop elsewhere. If you agree to her rate as it is stated and treat her with respect, you’re a great client. Period.

By just reading your question, I don’t think you don’t need to be told any of this. You don’t sound like you would haggle her rate or treat her disrespectfully. By just asking this question, I imagine you’re a pretty good client for her. So keep doing what you’re doing.

A word of caution, though: you also sound like a smitten kitten — a client with a crush. That’s precarious territory. I’ll reiterate what I told someone in my last post: this is her job, nothing more or less, and it’s good to keep that in mind. The feelings she inspires in you prove she’s good at what she does. She’s giving you what you want and you enjoy it. That’s a great relationship to have, so long as you keep in mind that it is, in fact, a business relationship, not a personal one. The easiest way to ruin such a relationship is to forget its terms. I’d caution against asking her if she “really feels this” or if she wants to see you in a non-work capacity. She’ll likely have to let you down gently, which is awkward for any sex worker, least of all because it risks losing a client.

Best not to put this great person in that hot spot. Enjoy her as the wonderful working girl she is.

Love, Beastly

Hi Beastly (or Alex lol)

My Pronouns are He/him/his 

I’m a 22-year-old Gay POC College grad. For some time now I’ve been really into scat porn/porn in general and lately, I’ve watched it more often than I care to admit; but porn has become somewhat triggering for me at times after some memories of childhood trauma resurfaced and I’ve run into some crazy things online that I’ve had to report. I’ve been seeing a therapist now and things have been much better. Now I still watch porn but sometimes I get so worried that I’m gonna be triggered by something and spiral from that. At the same time though I want to enjoy porn more because currently, my life circumstances don’t allow me to connect with my sexuality at all (Recent college grad, living at home with parents in the middle of a racist homophobic nowhere town). I haven’t had that many sexual or emotional connections with other guys that I’ve really been interested in and it really hurts sometimes so porn has kind of been an outlet for me to feel good and have some connection to my sexuality. Do you have any sort of advice? I really want to move forward in a more balanced way and feel good about myself, my sexuality, my kinkier side, and start getting actual connections and experiences somehow and become a well-rounded gay guy. 

Sincerely, Marcus 

Hi Marcus,

I’m not certain if scat porn is what’s triggering you, or if it’s something else. There’s nothing wrong with liking scat porn — more and more people seem to be getting into it as its taboo (and the taboos of other fetishes) wanes in our internet age of total access to everything.

Your question doesn’t specify what things in porn trigger your trauma responses. I’m glad you have a therapist to work through your trauma with, and I hope you can talk to your therapist about this as well. You need a therapist who you can share the truth of your sexuality with — porn too.

The porn industry gets trashed in public discourse, especially in mental health discourse. For various reasons (thanks to smear campaigns and moralistic sex panics) people everywhere seem to think porn is mostly filled with underage, trafficked minors. This is false — most of the industry is regulated and most production companies in the U.S. are official businesses that verify performer ages. Many people see porn as an exploitative and harmful industry for women, which is also wrong. Porn gives many performers, women included, the ability to control their finances, set their schedules, raise children, and live good lives. Porn gets hashed up in talk of porn addiction and blamed for all sorts of social ills. Few see porn as something healthy, vital, or beautiful. The industry does have problems, but I think those problems are exaggerated and over-reported to feed a growing anti-sex crusade happening across American politics.

Porn can be beautiful. More importantly, it’s here to stay, regardless of its ills and irrespective of what laws get passed to eliminate it, so we must do our best to support performers and make porn the best and safest industry it can be. Porn has always been a haven for queers. The same is true now as in the past: minority folks who struggle to find work elsewhere — who have lost their family’s support and have to support themselves at young ages — have often found steady work and financial security in the porn industry. We did this in the ’80s and still do now. Platforms like JustFor.Fans and OnlyFans have democratized the industry and given more people a way in.

Porn still is, for better or worse, how people all over the world discover, explore, and connect with their sexualities. Yes, some data shows that porn can lead to sexual compulsion and addiction, but since we still don’t know all there is to know about the science of addiction, it’s hard to lay the blame squarely at porn’s feet: those who become addicted may be genetically predisposed in ways we don’t understand yet. Using the prevalence of legitimate porn addiction to ban porn would be the same as using the prevalence of alcoholism to ban alcohol (which history proved is disastrous).

Personally, I think all talk of sex and porn addiction is inflated. It’s hard to make an objective call on porn addiction since sex is not a neutral topic in the belief systems of most cultures; every therapist and doctor has a cultural, moral, and religious background that includes beliefs about sex and nudity, beliefs that are deeply ingrained in how we view truth, and these beliefs undermine so-called “objective” estimations of sexual behavior. You’ll find higher rates of “porn addiction” in the U.S. than, say, Germany, as the U.S. is a highly religious country with widely negative views of sex. German culture, in contrast, is fairly secular and has more progressive views of sex — it’s a cultural climate in which fewer people are likely to pathologize certain sexual behaviors as harmful.

I won’t say more about “porn addiction” because — being honest here — I don’t think most diagnoses of porn addiction are real. I think they are efforts to self-pathologize founded on cultural shame rather than real mental illness. There’s no need to warn you against porn addiction, especially since you have a therapist who is more able than I to estimate whether or not your porn consumption is tantamount to compulsion. Nothing in your question suggests it is.

I want you to enjoy porn and have a good life with it, and I understand that can be hard if you sometimes see things in porn that elicit a painful response (again, I don’t know what those are). Since searching for porn online is precarious for anyone who doesn’t want to see certain things (as it is for, say, people who struggle with meth and want to avoid seeing it), your best course is to accrue a private collection of porn that is filtered carefully. This might be many things: a folder of downloads on your computer; a hidden photo album on your phone; a collection of video files (or saved URLs for specific videos); a stash of dirty books, magazines, art, and other print media; and so on. I know many folks who curate private porn stashes over time, a “spank bank” of eroticism. It’s a great hobby, and it will make you appreciate the wonderful world of erotic media out there.

There’s so much art, naughty comics, illustrations, and dirty cartoons you can find and collect. Vintage gay porn magazines are so hot — I collect them. Instead of scrolling through video sites — with search algorithms that always seem to deliver exactly what you’re not looking for — I suggest exploring print porn. If you like videos, subscribe to performers on OnlyFans and/or JustFor.Fans, and enjoy their content. This would require you to seek out performers who don’t do whatever it is that you don’t like seeing, which of course risks seeing whatever that is, but that’s the game.

You have options! If you curate your porn life and explore avenues of porn offline, I think your relationship with porn would get better. There are so many great photographers, beautiful art books, vintage VHS tapes and DVDs, and so much to explore. Happy hunting.

Love, Beastly

Hi Beastly,

Love your sex positive attitude to helping others.
After many years of guilt free exploration I’ve indulged in most things I’ve wanted to experience from role play and pain to the downright piggy.
There aren’t many things left on my sexual bucket list but piss-fucking/enemas is something I’ve always wanted to try.
There’s a couple of guys I trust who I know would be willing sources as I’ve talked to them before. I’m vers, on PreP and a confident bottom, but douching deep has always been an issue as I’m vegetarian and I find the outer chamber is all I can ever seem to get clean. In the past this reservation has stopped me from letting guys felch me. But it feels like this would become a big issue for piss-fucks.
Any advice or tips from your experience?
Thanks, M

Hi M,

Piss fucking and enemas aren’t really on my list of fetishes, so I don’t have much experience with them. But I am an experienced ass pig for toys and fists, so I can tell you this: If you’re able to get the first chamber (your rectum) clean, that’s enough for most kinds of butt play, 97% of the time.

Unless you’re going deep with arms or depth toys, you don’t need to clean deep. Deep cleaning is, in most cases, totally unnecessary. It can also be more harmful to the body than shallow douching, especially over time. All douching affects your gut health, and over-douching can interrupt the natural GI processes that keep your body healthy and your internal machinations running well. So why clean deeper when you don’t have to — and when it’s not good for you?

Most folks over-douche and clean too deep, and for sex that doesn’t require it. I suggest meeting these guys, cleaning as you normally do (first chamber), and trying some piss fucking. See how it goes. I don’t know how enemas play into your fantasy, but an enema is a deep anal irrigation, a deep cleanse of the colons, so using an enema — in a sexual capacity or otherwise — involves some chance of flushing poop out of your bowels, as that is what enemas are made to do. It’s not sensible to play with enemas and be afraid of poop; that’s like being a cocksucker afraid of cum.

If these guys have any experience with this kind of play, they’re probably not too squeamish about poop and can enjoy this sex with full awareness of its risks. If they can’t do that, they’re idiots, and you can find better playmates. Poop is an inevitable feature of most kinds of ass play; if you play in the backyard, at some point you’ll get muddy. When I meet fisters who freak out over some poop, I honestly want to tell them to find another fetish to get into, because fisting isn’t for them.

Final bit: If you’re vegetarian, you should have an easier time than most folks with douching, regardless if you choose to clean deep or shallow. A high-fiber vegetarian diet is easiest on the bowels and the vegetarians I know are notorious for having the best, cleanest bowel movements and being ready to fuck with minimal (or no) douching. If you find this is not so, consider taking a fiber supplement or, if the issue persists, visit a good gastroenterologist to see if something else is going on. In douching, being vegetarian is usually a boon, not a hurdle.

Love, Beastly