Savage Love

I'm a twenty-year-old girl. Should I feel bad about watching porn?

By Dan Savage

I am a sixteen-year-old female. I have been in a monogamous relationship with a boy for seven months. My first, his too. A couple of months in, we began to explore masturbating each other and oral sex. He has gone down on me three times, but I have never given him a blowjob. I'm scared to because I'm scared he will be disappointed. We fight sometimes because he feels it's unfair that he goes down on me and I don't go down on him.

On top of this, he started doing something when we are in the midst of being sexual that I don't understand. He will stick the tip of his hard penis just inside the opening to my vagina, again and again. I guess you could call it "probing." I know enough to know that there's a slight risk of pregnancy, as pre-come can get a woman pregnant and he doesn't wear a condom when he does this. We are planning on having complete vaginal intercourse in the next few months, with condoms and birth control, but this is happening now and it worries me.

This is what I need advice about: I know that there is a very small risk of pregnancy even if we use condoms and birth control. I couldn't handle a child at my age or the humiliation of being pregnant at sixteen and having to walk around town with the evidence out for all to see. I would have an abortion. He disagrees strongly with abortion, but he's not the one who would have to go through it all! So I would probably end up having an abortion without telling him, which seems completely unfair.

— No Clue What To Do

I'm going to take your problems one at a time, NCWTD, in ascending order of importance/assholery.

1. A disappointing blowjob is always less disappointing than no blowjob at all, NCWTD, particularly for teenage boys. So it's always better to err on the side of blowjobs.

Yes, you'll probably be pretty inept at first. Take things slowly and only take him as far into your mouth as you feel comfortable with. (Feel free to wrap a fist or two around the base of his cock so you can control how fast and far his dick goes into your mouth.) Don't let your boyfriend rush or guilt you into blowing him until he comes by pointing to all the times — all the three times! — that he went down on you. Sucking cock is physically trickier and more taxing than eating pussy. That may seem crazy unfair — hasa diga eebowai — but on the bright side, it frees you from having to get him off with your mouth the first few dozen times you attempt to blow him.

2. Probing is low-risk for pregnancy, NCWTD, but there's still some risk. What worries me is that this activity makes you uncomfortable and either you haven't said anything to your boyfriend or you have said something and he's doing it anyway. Tell him no more probing, if you haven't already, and if he initiates probing after you've made it clear that you're not comfortable with it, break the fuck up with him. Which brings us to...

3. You're going to have to go Bitch Puddin' on his ass, NCWTD. Memorize this, say it to him, and mean it: "If I let you stick your dick in my vagina and I get pregnant, I am getting an abortion. If you can't live with that — if you aren't willing to shoulder the psychic risk of knowing that your girlfriend would get or actually got an abortion, while she shoulders the actual physical risk of an unplanned pregnancy — then I am never going to let you stick your dick in my vagina. You're free to disagree with my choice, of course, but you can't prevent me from making that choice. So what's it going to be?"

I'm a twenty-five-year-old gay male with a foot fetish. I have a wonderful boyfriend who lets me indulge by rubbing his feet. When I brought him home to meet the folks, at one point he took his shoes off and casually rested his feet in my lap while sitting in the living room with my parents. I felt really weird about rubbing his feet with my parents looking on. My boyfriend thinks I shouldn't worry because my parents don't know about my kink and a foot rub looks innocent enough. Am I right to feel weird about this?

— Bear Foot Fetishist

Let's say your parents ran across shitloads of gay foot-fetish porn on your computer when you were still a teenager. Are your mom and dad the kind of open-minded, sexually progressive parents who would ruin your sex life forever by initiating a mortifying conversation about what they found? Or are they kind of closed-minded, sexually inhibited parents who would do the right thing and never, ever mention what they found? Hopefully the latter.

So it's entirely possible that your parents do know about your kink, BFF, and that they were deeply weirded out when your new boyfriend went out of his way to give you a boner while they were sitting there. For all you know, your parents are at home right now questioning your judgment and wondering how they can get out of inviting your boyfriend for Thanksgiving without seeming like homophobes.

And speaking of questionable judgment: I've watched a lot of hot boys from small towns wash up in my urban hellhole over the years. These boys typically leverage their good looks to get jobs making coffee/burritos/drinks/whatever, and then, over the course of a year or two, throw their good looks away with the assistance of booze, cigarettes, tattoo artists, and professional piercers. I get it: nothing stays the same, all things die, and these guys aren't trying to earn social or sexual currency with the old fags in the hood.

But there's this one waiter/barista/bartender/whatever who works in a place near my office — I'm not going to say exactly what he does — who, having already gone in for full tattoo sleeves on both arms, recently stuck a pair of plugs in his earlobes. His plugs are moderately sized, but I worry that they're going to get bigger and bigger until this boy — who's just so damn lovely — turns his earlobes into earlabia. (That's what they look like when people walk around without the plugs in.)

They're not my ears, I realize, and this boy, like all the other hipster boys, can do what he likes with his own earlobes. But earlabia don't look good on anybody. Please make a note of it, hipster boys.

I'm a twenty-year-old female girl. I'm sure you've addressed this qualm many times: I'm wondering if it's bad that I use porn to masturbate. I can pleasure myself without porn, but I enjoy it more when I do. I feel bad after I do it. Is it bad? Should I stop?

— Worried Porn Girl

Not bad, WPG, don't stop.

You should, however, be a conscientious female girl porn consumer. Superstar sex writer Violet Blue does an amazing job covering and uncovering porn that's nonexploitative and female-girl-positive/female-girl-created, WPG, and reading Violet will help cure you of that niggling case of postorgasmic porn shame you've got. (For the record: straight porn created by and for men can be female-girl-positive, too.) Read Violet at www.tinynibbles.com.

Website of the Week: www.gayhomophobe.com.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.