Hello Everyone, Ive had this problem for the last 5-6 years where I can only be satisfied with male orientated porn. I dont consider myself gay/bi yet as I have really thought about it and ultimately it really is not what I want. Ive spoken to other guys online but it only turns into friendship as nothing entices me to take the next step, whereas talking to girls online entices me to talk & meet them etc. However i dont know if i am sexually attracted to girls right now due to the porn. Anyone have any advice? :icon_sad:
Porn doesn't alter sexual attraction or orientation, nor is porn a good indicator of sexual orientation. If you're trying to figure out your orientation, the best way to do that is to give up porn for a couple of weeks and masturbate using fantasies you create in your mind. Aiternate between fantasies about men in one session, and fantasies about women in another session, and then let your mind wander and see what fantasies it naturally comes up with. You will likely find that one or the other will create stronger arousal and more intense experiences than the other. Whichever creates the stronger arousal is likely where your orientation lies. If I were to guess, based on what you have said, I'd guess there's attraction to guys, and you're just beginning to come to terms with it. As we process any loss (in this case, loss of being strsight) there are stages we go through: denial-anger-bargaining-grief-acceptance. Give yourself time to explore and see where you are, and know that whatever your orientation is, that's what it is. It wasn't changed by porn, and can't be changed by anything else. Simply give the process some time and it will become clearer for you.
Chip, you wrote that many times already as if it would be a proven fact. But i am still not sure if this is true. Do you have some studies you can mention? I'm not sure that a guy who watch gay-porn more than just out of curiousity but again and again, is completely straight. Of course it isn't a good indicator of his identity but i think that it is an indicator of fantasies that at least shows some homosexual tendencies, even if they are small.
I have to agree with Chip. I tried masterbating to gay porn because I wanted to test myself. I wanted to know how my body reacted and what it was that I felt. I didn't understand what my body was feeling until I found out that I was just over thinking and out too much emphasis on a sexual attraction that was not there. No matter if my body did react to me touching my self vigorously, my mind was wishing and hoping that I stop and look at naked women. Why am I going to do so.ething I don't like? Now that I came to that realization, and even during my questioning, I would normally go flaccid. I am sharing my experience and my conclusion to perhaps help. Honestly man, if you don't like to thinking about homosexual encounters in real life then I suggest you should stop masterbating to gay porn. If you actually enjoy gay porn. I am not going to say that you are gay or bi or in somewhere in a spectrum but suggest that you look into and come back to us to let us know what you found out. Good luck.
Yeah, the thing about porn is that it doesn't help clarify issues. It only complicates them further. Porn is by its very nature designed to be hyper-erotic, so getting an arousal from watching gay porn doesn't necessarily indicate that you are gay. Just as watching straight porn doesn't indicate you're straight. You need to remove the porn from your reasoning process in order to get at the truth.
Yeah but being "addicted" to gay-porn is a sign that the guy is at least a little bit bi. It doesn't make sense otherwise. You won't be addicted to something you dont like.
I've got to agree with hunter8 - there are lots of reasons why individuals get hooked into porn that doesn't match their orientation. Lots of straight guys watch lesbian porn for example and that's not because they are secretly gender-conflicted and actually lesbian. It doesn't mean they want to have sex with lesbians either. Who knows exactly what it means. Perhaps a lot of people are deeply and subconsciously ashamed of/negative about their urges. They find fantasy, whether it be porn or masturbation, to be a safe way of exciting the self while keeping the sex wish fulfilment for their actual life separate and "pure". They actively fantasise about a naughty "other" sexuality because naughty is a turn on and it's so different from what they want and their true identity and orientation that it can be compartmentalised as an abberation. Actually there are a lot of men who have sex with men for the same reason and are not closeted gay.
If porn had any effect on sexual orientation, that would have been reflected in some of the 60+ studies that the APA reviewed in the largest meta study/ lit review ever undertaken of attempts to alter sexual orientation. Among the studies examined were ones that looked at using porn (in this case, hetero porn) as a means of attempting to alter sexual arousal/attraction/orientation. It simply didn't work. I can certainly agree with that. At the same time, there's an enormous difference between saying "most people who watch gay porn have some attraction to guys" and saying "gay porn influences orientation" or "gay porn is a reliable predictor of sexual orientation." Also, I note that you say "being gay is not what I want." That's a statement that pretty much every gay guy said during the early part of their coming out process. But what we want, and what we are... are completely different things. Not wanting to be gay does not make one straight. The truth is... no one can tell you what your orientation is. Only you can know that. What we do know is that people who continually masturbate to gay porn and cannot get off to straight porn are more likely to be gay than straight, but as was discussed earlier, porn isn't a reliable predictor; masturbatory fantasies without porn are a lot more reliable. If you aren't sexually attracted to girls... it has nothing to do with the porn. It's because you're sexually attracted to guys, which means you're gay, or on the gay end of the spectrum.
The words used in this sentence offer a bit of insight. Did you use these words deliberately or was it directly how you felt as you wrote it? Saying "yet" suggests that you anticipate a change in your own interpretation or acceptance of your sexuality. Do you feel that it is inevitable that you will identity gay/bi in the future? When you say being gay/bi is "not what I want", why is that? Could it be more about being something that you feel/know others around you do not want? I only make the distinction because it can be very hard with these sort of private, internalised parts in our lives to see things in any other way than from the outside looking in. I.e. We judge ourselves based on what we think others want and feel, because we have so little experience and confidence in our own opinions and values. If there wasn't a part of you interested to explore the possibility that you may "want" this, then would you ever have started watching gay porn and ended up here questioning? (I don't say that as an accusation, just to clear the point because the steps you have taken so far will have required a huge amount of courage) Maybe it would help to ask here, the kind of questions that you would ask yourself if you were another person.
- any kind of porn can be addicting. It can exaggerate or warp our sexual interests. Our eyes, head & energy body get hooked a highly charged visual yet anonymous sexual encounter. The addiction is that we return to the porn, & it can subtly alter our preferences. We start looking for the acts we saw on porn, in the real world, which may be hard to find. Or even a waste of time - as they may not reflect what usually happens in human relationships. - the main ? is who r u attracted to in real life, who do u feel naturally drawn to: girls or boys? - as to "gay/bi being "not what u want" … this has to be respected. Perhaps you're more comfortable in a straight community than a gay community - this is a hugh factor, that can trump some sexual urges. If that's the case, your same sex desires will likely be as a bisexual, or on the DL.
The above is really deceptive. We can't change who we're attracted to, so no, what we want doesn't affect who we are attracted to. If it did, then people who are gay and don't want to be could simply be straight. And one only need read the Later in Life section of EC to see what happens when people try to do that. Not wanting to be gay, but only being aroused thinking about guys doesn't make you bisexual. It makes you miserable, because you're denying who you are.
Lots of lesbians watch straight porn. Does that make them bi? What about guys who watch lesbian porn? And yes you can get addicted to something you don't like. Some of it is related to taboo breaking, and like drugs, they need more and more unusual porn to get the same 'high'.
Yes, so we both agree that porn is not a good indicator of someone's identity but shows some tendencies on persons who watch it again and again and get turned on by it. I personnaly could not imagine watching something more than out of curiousity if i would not wanted it at least as a fantasy. And it doesn't make sense. Just a little remark: it was not me who wrote "being gay is not what i want", it was the thread-opener ;-)
Just some other thoughts on porn... I have periods when I spend way too much time with porn (mostly gay and bi), and I have worried that I might be addicted to it. I've always found straight porn hot only because of all the hard male organs on display. I dislike the way women are generally treated in straight porn. It turns me off, though oddly in gay porn, I find the same kind of objectification hot because it's man to man. (I guess because I enjoy being objectified by another man). And finally, many years ago I dated a woman who got really hot watching gay male porn while the 2 of us masturbated to it. I imagine a lot of women are curious about gay porn, just as a lot of men enjoy lesbian porn. So, in the end, I just think that porn is used and understood in many different ways. I watch gay porn because I'm attracted to men. I'm NOT attracted to men because I've watched too much gay porn!
Chip, I disagree. I agree w u that wanting to change who you're attracted to doesn't work. However I think your stm tries to make something black & white, that is many shades of gray. In trying to understand my own attraction to women & men, I go back to my experience living in San Francisco in the 90s, & feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the gay community. I missed women, notwithstanding the few lesbians around. I was aggravated with the relentless focus on the hottest young guys …the repressive sex, drugs & rock & roll of the Castro. I moved to the country, and a heterosexual community, that has a more diverse culture. I read Fritz Klein's book on bisexuality, where he starts w the Kinsey 0-6 scale of sexual attraction, but added other 0-6 scales of emotional & social compatibility … resulting in the notion that sexual attraction is not the only factor at work. I'm not an expert here … yet when i try to understand attraction, factors such as family of origin, early influences, heriditary make up, etc, are key. Early influences can give one a disposition of attraction to the same or opposite sex. I have never seen any convincing evidence of a gay gene. Humans are flexible & multi dimensional. We can change our behaviors. What we want matters.
There's no disagreement with the above. Sexuality isn't a binary or even a trinary; it is on a spectrum. My main point, with regard to the OP, is that orientation as far as we know, pretty fixed in that porn doesn't alter the sexual orientation that appears to be pretty strongly fixed early in life. It may be fixed in the middle of the spectrum (meaning, someone could be a Kinsey 3 and be smack in the middle between straight and gay, and have partners of both sexes throughout the lifetime.) But there isn't any evidence that orientation itself is changeable from whatever it is. How that orientation expresses may change, and there may be some fluidity or range within any given person's orientation (hence the Kinsey scale and the other factors that influence attraction), but the orientation itself remains, as far as we now seem to know, pretty fixed, and is not, as far as the voluminous evidence we now have, altered by watching porn or any other behavior or activity.
I've never liked gay porn or porn in general, my first major indicator was when a girl I had a non romantic relationship with talked me into a threesome (with her and her freind who turned out to be a guy when I arrived at her house) and I discovered that I enjoyed the company of other guys
