I was just thinking the other day when I went to visit my girlfriend how much I enjoy sitting back and enjoying a good show now and then. I had come by to visit and was lying face to face with her on the couch. In the course of this affectionate moment, she unzipped my pants and pulled me out and started stroking me.
As I was mostly losing myself in this happy moment, I looked down to the glass door at the far end of the room that looked into the kitchen. I saw my girlfriend’s roommate standing there. The spot is right by the kitchen sink, so ostensibly she was washing a dish, quite meticulously as she casually glanced over and watched the fingers curled around my erection in the dim room beyond.
Rather than feeling like this was an invasion of privacy, I felt more turned on. I wanted her to take the scene in and enjoy it, to not feel shy about looking.
This is not an easy thing. Because of the way my life is, I often find myself at events where people are taking their clothes off, purposefully, and exposing their bodies to the raw oxygen that blows around the Earth. Some of these people are rightfully gorgeous, and I would love to study their bodies as one might, sitting before a Rembrandt at a museum, appreciating every detail.
Yet I find myself in these moments consumed by some kind of strange impulse not to look, not to take the scene in too deeply, as though the act of looking at a naked body in public is some kind of perversion. Is it, or is it not? I don’t know.
I think of the scenes I saw at places like Burning Man, where college bros showed up on the last night with hand-held cameras and phones, garrulously filming naked breasts, shoving cameras right into the faces of naked people, shamelessly filming whatever sexual content they could. It just seemed so tasteless to me, so inappropriate and exploitative. Now that I realize that a lot of this film footage was for real-girls-doing-porn-clips, I feel even more gross about it.
That said, I don’t know where the line is, and I’d like to look at people and appreciate their bodies, and express my sexuality in a natural way without feeling like a pervert about it. The obvious answer is in getting consent; in saying it is okay for you to watch me get a handjob right now. I think it’s hot, you think it’s hot—let’s explore that.
Consent can be a drag, though. Particularly when it comes to voyeurism. Being unseen, or experiencing a thing one should not is a big part of the thrill. That’s fucked up, I know, but that’s what makes it sexy.
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