There’s a scene in the first episode of season two of Broad City where Ilana tells Abbi about the  Colin Farrell sex tape, loudly, in a packed dressing room. Specifically, she refers to the moment at 8:58, where Farrell eats out Playboy bunny Nicole Narain’s pussy like an ice-cream sundae. “You’re going to like what you see,” Ilana says. “I guarantee it.”

As soon as this scene plays out, I press pause on my laptop screening so I can search for the Colin Farrell sex tape. The moment at 8:58 does not disappoint. But before I head back to Abbi and Ilana, I cruise around the web for a while in a dark trenchcoat, and end up reading that Farrell actually sued Narain for releasing the video without his consent. Suddenly, I feel like a total jerk. Pornography can be a deeply ambivalent experience for women; for me it is the source of both pleasure and concern, shame and ingenuity. And to top it off, I have now technically sexually harassed Colin Farrell.

The first time I saw a pornographic film, I was 10 years old. My neighbourhood friend Karen (name changed for privacy), the tiny, plump-cheeked daughter of a towering, alcoholic policeman, had discovered her dad’s stash. By the time she invited me to watch them in secret, she’d already gone through them several times. We sat in her living room, which was always dim and airless and smelt like something I wasn’t old enough to identify, and watched several large pink men with large pink cocks recline on their backs while a harem of much smaller, younger, lither pink and tan women tended to them. I was horrified. I felt sick. I made an excuse and went home.

Images: Rick Legal

Karen was jealous of my school shoes because they were made of real leather. Her mum never really left the house, never did anything, it seemed, and they had a bulldog named Brandy. Poverty, I learned later, is something you can touch, see and smell. And so the way I remember this whole event, witnessing porn for the first time, is tethered to how I saw Karen’s life, specifically how this life, this funk of poverty, was governed by her tyrant father. He played out a grotesque parody of masculinity: he was a bellowing drunk whose presence put everyone at the edge of themselves. Karen’s dad was also cruel and violent, and his eruptions of an evening would see his daughter wandering the dim streets for hours with Brandy.

Even kids can recognise a man’s obvious need for the submission of his wife and children, and the inexorable power he demands through the fact of his masculinity. Her dad’s choice in porn reflected that need.

My family moved interstate before Facebook and before anyone had an email address, so my knowledge of what happened to who faded quickly. One girl sent me letters occasionally, updating me on the gossip of people whose names I was forgetting. That’s how I discovered Karen’s plight: she’d been attributed the reputation of a ‘slut’. It was year 7, maybe year 8, and her reputation was drawn from a school disco where she’d supposedly fucked a bunch of different guys, and, shock, horror, some of them had girlfriends. The gossip centred only on Karen’s ostensible sluttiness, of course, not on the boys who had girlfriends.

I’m not a sex alarmist; I’m not about to attribute the fact that Karen was humiliated sexually and socially to the porn she watched that time when we were kids. But there’s something to the brutally gendered nature of her family life that echoed through the tenor of her dad’s porn, and, later, to Karen’s humiliation in the schoolyard. She’d learnt her gender roles at home, and those are the same gender roles that play out in other spheres – at school, in the workplace, in relationships and in porn. Sex takes power from women and gives it to men, and humiliation is an ingrained part of female sexuality. We learn, somehow, that, although sex is desirable – no, it’s the drive behind everything – it’s also punishable in the hands of a young woman.

We all watch porn, but we don’t want our daughters or lovers or mothers or sisters to be in it.

Despite the non-consensual nature of it, the Colin Farrell sex tape is hot, because Farrell and Narain are smoking babes. But the sex itself is slightly awkward. Farrell is so horny he’s losing his shit, while Narain is enthusiastic but noticeably cooler. There’s some discord between what you want when you watch it, and what it actually delivers. I mean, this is probably true of all pornographic films.

If you’ve ever made a home video like Farrell’s, you will understand this dissonance: what feels like possibly the hottest thing ever, ends up looking average, a little frumpy, when you watch it back. Your heart sinks when you first see that your face doesn’t even vaguely resemble a perfume ad when you come, and the noises emanating from your mouth sit embarrassingly between porno-fake and mating season at the zoo.

The revelation that sex is, from the outside, this quite awkward thing, that is only really hot due to the trickery of hormones, is wildly disappointing.

There are many reasons why porn remains so contentious, and this is one of them: it neither looks nor sounds like real sex, the kind of sex we have before work in the morning with the people we love who have morning breath, who don’t work out enough, whose assholes aren’t bleached.

Images: Rick Legal

The fact that mainstream hardcore porn tends to be so cartoonishly exaggerated is concerning for paternal types, and anti-porn activists such as Gail Dines, because they believe that watching fake sex will make real sex impossible. “Pornography is to sex what McDonald’s is to food,” writes Dines. “A plasticised, generic version of the real thing.”

The trouble with this line of objection is that although it correctly names the media’s inclination to glorify a false version of sex (a version of sex in which women do not, by and large, direct the gaze), it spares porn’s viewers no agency. Porn didn’t invent male domination: porn is a medium that expresses already existing cultural attitudes. And ‘fixing’ porn can’t be about making it ‘intimate’ for the ladies.

I have seen certain feminist pornography that makes me cringe; just because I am a feminist woman does not mean I watch porn to see people stare into each other’s eyes and fall in love while fucking. I can hold strong eye contact with my real-life lover; that’s something I have at my disposal. What I might not have, the reason I may seek out porn in the first place, are the dark and depraved fantasies you wouldn’t expect a lover to perform. In other words, porn isn’t about sex, it’s about masturbation.

Laurence O’Toole, in his book Pornucopia, writes, “You watch it, you get off, watch it again and get off; again, get off. What if, after all the bickering, it’s as simple as that?” Here we are, all comprised of conflicting, tender and messed-up sexual and romantic desires, and sometimes porn is the only place where twisted fantasies can live. And so we must be careful to not conflate viewing non-intimate, unrealistic sex via Redtube with perpetuating violence against women.

There is a material difference between the two, and it begins with informed and empowered consent.

In an interview I once did with pioneering journalist and feminist Lydia Cacho, she said that we must “see that sex is not a personal or individual choice, but a political issue, and a human rights issue”. This is a rejigging of the adage ‘the personal is political’, a pillar of feminist inquiry that feels like it is part of my constitution, but when she said it, I was struck in the guts.

What we desire, what we acquiesce to, what we spend our money on, how we treat our parents – all these private things reflect the political cultures we live in, from which we can’t ever extract ourselves. That fuck before work with your lover says something about your priorities, your health, maybe even your class or geography. Did one person come, or both? Was fucking prioritised over getting to work on time?

The problem with McDonald’s is not that people enjoy consuming shitty food. The problem is ideological: the big-business mode of fast-food threatens the environment, obscures democracy, and reduces poor people’s access to affordable nutritional food. Objections to McDonald’s are usually really objections to capitalism – burgers just stand in as symbols of the broader debate. And so the comparison between porn and fast food stands, but perhaps not in the way Gail Dines might mean it to – sexism exists before pornography, and patriarchy dominates the mainstream media. There is nothing inherent to pornography that makes it misogynistic, but that may not be the case with capitalism.

And so, what for me? Does one eat Macca’s anyway, because it tastes so damn good when one is hungover? Does one seek out alternative burger joints that are less destructive but based on the same premise? Or does one only cook using ingredients from the soil in one’s own backyard? Of course we aspire to eat from the Earth, and to make love while looking deeply into the eyes of a lover. But, come on. One, also has to live. And sometimes living involves wristies in public toilets, wanking to digitised gang-bangs, pints of cola and large fries. Porn and Macca’s – two of the simplest, yet least sustaining, comforts available.

Guilty pleasure doesn’t entirely sum up my relationship to porn. Ambivalence, the deep type that derives love and hate from the same source, maybe better describes it. When I make myself come to Colin Farrell’s tongue, and then later learn that he is humiliated by my non-consensual gaze, I am reminded of the vulnerability of humans in relation to their sexualities, even when they are dirty bastards. And at the same time I am also reminded that I am a slave to desire, intellectually, anyway. The pervert in me usually wins, because however dubious I feel about my choices, there is always a tiny Ilana sitting on my shoulder, whispering, “You’re going to like what you see. I guarantee it.”

Ellena Savage is an essayist and critic interested in gender, politics, and literature. She is editor at The Lifted Brow, a columnist at Eureka Street, and a postgraduate student at Monash University. Follow her on Twitter: @RarrSavage

This article was first published in Archer Magazine #4. Subscribe to Archer here.