Before I get back on topic... I just noticed the pain and chronic pain near your avatar. I've had chronic pain since 2003 which was multiplied by a factor of 10 after I sustained surgical nerve damage in 2006. I've been through one outpatient pain management regimen and two inpatient. My mental health team told me that I had to choose between being treated for chronic pain or my mental disorders. I go to see a new pdoc on the 28th and can't wait.

"Graphic and visual." That's true... I guess that's what I found so exciting about it that first time and in the years to follow. I sent Sue a msg last night to ask where she'd come up with the idea, but she usually only responds on weekends.

There must be some scholarly psychological studies about what people find erotic in visual pornography. I'm going to Google that in a moment.

But that brings up more questions, more things that I don't 'get.' Getting back to the "visual." I admit being very visually involved with my lovers... one of the reasons, I think, that my memories are enhanced by visual cues. But those are cues of my lover and me: not movies of strangers. I know what goes on in my head when I masturbate – memories. Where does the excitement come from when watching a movie of a girl (that you might not even find very attractive) doing things to a man that you've always considered highly personal and private?

And then there are all of those behind-the-counter men's magazines that feature "hot lesbian action!" I've never asked for one of them to see exactly what this action on a magazines pages might look like (the same sort of action seen on a fake battlefield with toy soldiers re-enacting Waterloo?) but I can hope that the art director hired professional advisor's before shooting.

When Susan and I started doing things that we would only find later had a name and that others did – the 'facial' being a very good example – we were just messing around with things that felt good or that we thought would feel good to the other. We knew about birth control from church and her mom had her on bc pills by the time she was 12, I guess. Anyway, the point that I seem to be dancing around is that we didn't have any kind of sexual instruction. We didn't look at porn movies and say, "let's try that." Sue would occasionally ask her much older sister a question (I can't even think of an example now) but I don't recall either of us thinking that anything was taboo or 'nasty.' It wasn't like some "Blue Lagoon," no one else around naïveté, exactly. We knew how babies were made and were lucky that Onan's method of birth control worked until the pills came through.

I don't think that we were weird, though, in thinking that the feelings that we had for one another and the physical way that we expressed those feelings were personal and private, though. I'm not a prude or anything; when the portion of Black's was 'clothing optional,' that's how we visited; opting for no clothes. We took photos of one another naked; I remember how giggly she would get in my darkroom. My God, but she was wonderful! I don't know if she ever showed the photos to anyone else, I know that I didn't. I wasn't bothered, at all, when I was older, to think that nude photos of me might have been shown around... and now I've come round to my topic, I think.

How can a pornographic photo or movie, of strangers, be arousing? To me, it takes arousal of all of the senses (well, most of the time) to be sensual. Does that make sense? I mean visual, touch, smell, taste and hearing.

Finally, and this may sound prudish, I don't understand why anyone would want to witness private sex acts. I know that there are disorders such as voyeurism or exhibitionism that can make an individual less culpable, but I can't believe that every person who watches porn is a voyeur or that every 'actor' is an exhibitionist. But, really, I'm not so prudish as to even suggest that "private sex acts" means sex between only two partners! It could be three or four!

I need to read the original post again. I've never been able to openly discuss my confusion about pornography with other guys; only with a handful of close female (and mainly lesbian or trans) friends. I'm afraid that I took the ball and ran and forgot all about the OP!