As a forty-something, still sexually-charged orgasmic woman, I have a long love-hate relationship with porn.

My first experience with watching porn was on the big movie screen when I used to sneak into the movie theaters with my then sixteen-year-old boyfriend. Although we were not the required eighteen years plus to be admitted, the small town theater was happy to collect our five dollars and look the other way.

Did I know I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing? Hell, yes, and it made it all the more thrilling.

My fifteen-year-old hormones exploded like fireworks while sitting in the dark theater watching real cocks in action. I was goggle-eyed as I watched, for the first time, couples fucking doggie style, women sucking cocks and threesomes.

I left the theater with my boyfriend–hot, horny, wet and not knowing what to do about it. Sex before marriage was taboo in my family of three sisters and sex in my parents marriage was as extinct as the dodo bird. These Friday night movies were usually followed up in my boyfriend’s bedroom with kissing and the grinding of hips while his divorced mother listened to Conway Twitty, singing his broken-hearted blues.

Porn reared its head again when it became a third partner in my marriage and competition for my having a mind-blowing orgasm.

Why do I say this?

Now that I am more experienced, I now know my ex-husband had what I classify as an addiction to porn. But back then, I started to wonder what was wrong with me? What wasn’t I doing that the women on the porn videos could do?

Because it was my first sexual relationship, I didn’t know what was wrong. While I lay in bed at night, horny and hoping tonight would be the night, my husband would be jacking off in the other room while watching rented DVD porn movies.

This was the era of rented porn, and I can only now imagine what it would have been like if the internet sex was just a click away. I remember sneaking down the hall on hands and knees watching him jacking off, feeling confused, angry and turned on at the same time.

Angry that I once again would be going without sex and confused as to why he would not want to have sex with my fit, toned body. A turn on, because I now knew he could actually get excited and watching him appealed to my voyeuristic self.

Not surprisingly, I became a pro at self pleasure, discovering I could make myself have multiple, gushing orgasms which left my bed sheets drenched. His porn watching continued and I was too inexperienced to know how to approach the subject with him.

I was probably the first pregnant woman ever to bring the brown paper covered movie box to the counter to rent along with a tub of rocky road ice cream. Of course I had to buy an unwanted newspaper just to try to cover up the obviously weird situation of a seven-month pregnant woman renting a porn movie. As my belly grew, my sex drive rocketed and I too became a porn seeking addict.

My husband’s use of porn had become a replacement for our sex, leaving me unfulfilled and feeling undesirable. The more he watched porn, the more insecure I became about my own desirability.

The problem wasn’t that he watched porn, heck we could have watched it together as long as I ended up getting what I needed. This pattern of unfulfilled needs—predictably—led to my having an explosive affair with an older man who made my heart race and my panties wet. This, in stark contrast to marriage to a man for whom sex had become stale, mechanical and virtually non-existent.

Katie Perry could not have said it better, “I kissed another man and I liked it.”

A dozen red roses on our living room table, I explained away as a gift from my boss for a job well done. A new gold bracelet suddenly adorning my slender wrist, went unnoticed by my husband.

This other man was not a porn watcher, but a player. I was not his first extra-marital affair, and I knew I would not be his last.

I had gone from a man who was addicted to porn to a man who was addicted to sex.

My guilt triumphed over my pleasure and I ended the affair. Soon after my husband ended our marriage.

Twenty years later, I sometimes wonder if the solution was obvious, that perhaps I should have demanded my needs get met. I could have provocatively entered the room and stroked his cock for him. Or perhaps we could have watched the porn together and then had wild sex.

Or was the problem really his and therefore his to fix? It is easier to see things more clearly when your insecurities are not involved.

In my forties, I found myself divorced and having the best sex of my life.

Porn is now an occasional curiosity for myself and my partner. We even have our own homemade collection of it where, of course, we are the porn stars. We often joke that for a Christmas present, we will send my ex a copy of our porn video, just for old times sake.

No longer is porn the flame of my teens or the catalyst for ending a marriage. Instead, it has now become an occasional playmate, only present when invited into the bedroom.

(This is the fourth in a seven-part series over seven days, in colloboration with the Good Men Project, addressing the question: Is Porn a Good Thing? For GMP’s most recent posts in the series, check out The History of Porn and Fear the Towel.)

Cindy Lee is a writer, mother and lover of life who has learned that her twenty year dance with the disease MS, has given her Multiple Strengths. She writes about love, laughter, healing and hope, from her home in Ontario, Canada. You can find her inspiring missives at her Still Sexy After MS blog and FB page.

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Editor: Lori Lothian

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