Looking at Naked Women in Real Life

There was a time not so long ago when attempting to look at naked women was always somewhere on my list of daily goals. It was in the 90s when internet access was paved with dial-up. A time for curiosity, imagination, and the occasional scrambled, soft-core film on cable.

In my case, it involved searching for Health Science books and flipping through the illustrations. If that didn’t work there were European magazines like Le Monde and Bazaar. Most boys eventually find their way to the library. My methods were just less obvious than sitting down with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in front of my classmates during lunch.

By the time I did see a naked woman in real life, in the summer before my senior year of high school, I had already seen a plethora of images: topless women in magazines, more topless women in Caddyshack, an issue of Hustler buried near a camp cabin in Colorado and that scene where Jamie Lee Curtis dances for Arnold Schwarzenegger in her lingerie in True Lies. In a twist I didn’t see coming, viewing these images — the awesome, explicit, god-like female available for only seconds at time — quickly outpaced the amount of real-time sex I was experiencing with anyone else.

I graduated high school with a hand job and a pair of breasts up close. How could they compare to the Scandinavian pornography I watched in my host family’s basement on a fine arts trip to Norway?

Despite jumping into sex as best I knew how in my early twenties, despite experiencing a sporadic array of naked women from seconds at a time to hours at length, despite nose-diving into casual sex in my thirties when all my friends had long ago ejected into the sunset of exclusive relationships, parachuting down softly into a field of stable monogamy, I feared I would never experience the profound, visceral reaction to the images I had seen as a teenager, let alone experience sex the way it was depicted online.

And that’s when my commitment to 90s porn really said “I do.” Granted I was watching it in the late 2000s, but the plots held up. It was comforting yet progressive, a hidden way to imitate the thrill of an actual encounter. From the comfort of my couch, in a thatched-roof bungalow apartment, I could experience a roller-coaster of increasing abandon, just without the emotional clean-up afterward. Something to be turned on and repeated endlessly. Something to aspire to until I lost my internet connection or got bored and switched to watching television.

It was a dream within a laptop, I realize now. Either that or a waking nightmare and if pressed, I’d choose the latter.

At some point, my Macbook began to merge with my infrequent, real-time sexual experiences. Was the bounce of a date’s breasts like something I’d seen online and bookmarked? Did I try out a certain position with a woman because of my favorite ’90s, compilation video?

To put it more succinctly, was I banging my way toward a relationship or was I hooking up to entertain myself in-between porn sessions? Surely I was smarter than my privates gave me credit for. Surely I knew, within the folds of my Cro-Magnon brow, that nudity serve a purpose greater than my own.

During this time, after I broke up with a girlfriend and moved to a new apartment, a former neighbor of mine — let’s call her Nadine — helped push me toward an answer when she told me she wanted to have sex with me while watering her plants. A few days later, she showed up at my door in the summer twilight and I went down on her next to a table I had purchased at an Episcopalian thrift store. There, attempting to pleasure her and and realizing I wasn’t hard enough for penetration, spinning, pirouetting into a seated, couch embrace like two vacationing, Italian lovers, finally jamming myself into a chair while she attempted to perform orally and I, in a pool of sweat, tried desperately not to push down on the wooden lever lest I catapult the footrest into her abdominal cavity, we danced the dance of the nude swans together.

It’s strange to be naked with someone while wanting to cover yourself, isn’t it? I did not find her attractive. Why was I attempting to have sex with her against the broad side of an easy chair?

Nadine and I didn’t speak much after our encounter and I think it’s probably because we felt like we lived through a tornado of a porn scene with prison yard lighting. It was crude and unsatisfying, like getting a check in the mail before being hired for the job.

Sex isn’t war or the Olympics, but it is an irreversible action. Didn’t I owe it to my partner to approach it that way? Instead, she became a fantasy, something inhuman I’d assembled from bad habits. She was a conquest, not my equal. She was disposable. I had reduced her to parts.

Maybe that’s why, years later, porn is still so confusing. We know nothing of its players. Who are these people? Why do they behave the way they do? One minute they’re meeting each other, the next they’re stripping for the camera. In our hearts, we cannot trust them because we know sex is not that black and white.

And that’s when it hit me: sex should require effort. Like a caveman hunting a rhino, getting naked should require work.

If anywhere, that’s where I’ve landed today. That’s my spot within the sexual employment line that wraps around longer than a Los Angeles DMV. Thanks to porn, I’ve realized there’s something much more thrilling than watching people have sex. It’s allowing myself to become the kind of man that can handle the gift of a naked woman before she takes her clothes off. More capable of accepting my victories and defeats. More willing to enter her nuance and mystery, two words that — make no mistake — still lie at the heart of the feminine core.

This isn’t to say I’m anti-porn or anti-hook-up. My record suggests otherwise. As long as it’s consensual, a fling or one-night stand can be worthwhile in the moment. It’s just that if a woman undresses when I’m around, I like knowing my behavior might’ve had something to do with it. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, so if she’s waiving me in, I’m proud I put something on display that made her separate me from the crowd.

Being authentically masculine comes from being active, not passive. It’s an honest conversation, a birthed struggle. What it’s not is typing a porn address into a web browser and calling it “sex.” It’s not scared or unwilling to face the greatness I might be running from by immersing myself in fantasy.

Somewhere, in an unscheduled stand-up set of mine, there’s some older material that feels appropriate on the topic of having great sex no matter the scenario: If you find yourself inside a vagina, give thanks. You didn’t have to be there, but you are — show some respect!

The best way I know to do that is to not look at naked women anymore, if they’re pixels anyway. If they’re in front of me, ready to work, build up and destroy, then I’m right there with them where I know I should be.