Porn Choices

I'm guessing many couples have been here at some/many points during the pandemic. Another night at home, feeling kind of sexy but not super energetic. So, as a kind of low-effort way to have a sexy evening, one of you suggests putting on a little porn to get you both in the mood.

Last week, I think it was Thursday night; my wife and I found ourselves wanting a porn and chill night. It had been a pretty intense workday; both our kids were out, and we had a couple of hours of the house to ourselves.. such a rare occurrence these days. So, we decided to indulge in some porn. What an ordeal!!

There are three places we usually go to for porn —(i) Pornhub, of course; (ii) a paid adult movie site that I bought movies on a while ago when I was having an ethical dilemma about Pornhub and the exploitation of adult entertainers and the allegations of the non-consensual use of videos; and (iii) the Playboy Channel, which I bought a lifetime membership to a while ago for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time — they were going broke, it was a fantastic deal, I kind of liked how Hef's daughter was trying to redefine the Playboy brand.

So, we had choices. But way, way, WAY too many options. We started on PornHub because it was easy, and someone had recently recommended a type of porn we might like, and we figured we could find it easily on Pornhub. But, we lasted maybe 7 minutes there. It's just too much — too many ads, too many squirting vaginas, too many cocks in asses, too many million videos of every sex act you could ever imagine. It was kind of a novelty to see everything there, but it felt less sexy and more of a research exercise. It was not meeting our need for an easy, low-grade turn-on.

Next up — Playboy TV. We had always liked Playboy TV. Not too hardcore, attractive men and women actors. Decent shows with high production value. I would still say it is solidly not bad, but everything looked pretty much the same in our little look around last Thursday. Short videos of attractive random European couples having the same type of sex. I shouldn't complain, and maybe we were just hard to please, but it was boring us a bit.

So we tried the subscription movie site. This site has virtually every porn movie made in the last 60 years. It's endless — the good, the bad, the ugly, and the very good. We were saving this for later, as we figured we could easily find something we were in the mood for here. But then it happened. We were crushed under the weight of choices. Everything I chose was not exactly right and gave rise to the expectation that the next click would be better. We spent about 30 minutes on the site, always looking for something that would scratch our itch just a little more thoroughly.

After about an hour of surfing around looking for just the right thing, we got kind of frustrated and turned it off. There was a silver lining, of course. We had really nice sex with no video accompaniment. But it also led to a challenge from my wife. She asked me to curate a very short sampling of sexy movies and videos I knew she would like and to bring those out — and only those — next time we had a porn night. She found the infinite choices very frustrating and not sexy. In her words, "when I have a porn night, it's because I don't want to think. I just want easy pleasure". That made a lot of sense to me, and I can see how all of these sites may feel, simply, like too much.