Day 2

Day 2, Wed 10/3/10
It takes an effort to be in the headspace of being critical of my sexism. Wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, most of the time I'm open to sexualising some woman's body when I see her. I notice myself doing it but it's not the same as being critical, analysing what I'm doing and challenging it.

There are lots of things to write about what's wrong with porn and with ogling women but there's a fundamental thing that I don't think about much. That is the basic practice of getting my sexual pleasure from all those random women (without even their consent). In a way, it's really just getting sexual pleasure from my own fantasies but it's using those women as the fuel for my fantasies. (Sometimes the fantasy is not obvious and it can seem like the situation is sexual inherently but that can just be a widely held fantasy that I've been taught in my culture.) So there's the idea of using all these women to fuel my sexual fantasies, and there's the selfish practice of just going around grabbing sexual gratification from everyone I fancy.

There is also the betrayal of my real relationship. Our relationship is monogamous, so the rule is pretty simple: we only have sex with each other. But even without that total restriction, say in a polyamorous relationship, it would still be unacceptable to get lots of sexual gratification form random people all the time. I don't see it the way some people seem to, where every instance is like a crime committed against my partner. It's more that the attitude is not in keeping with the relationship we've got. An analogy might be living in a share house where we all share the cooking and all eat together. If that's the relationship the household has but one perosn keeps eating junk food and not wanting a meal and not wanting to cook either, it makes it hard for everyone. So this is like that, only sex is more fraught with emotional upsets, so we need to be even more careful to behave well with it.

I can't believe that I can keep doing what I do - looking at porn, perving on women, etc. - while knowing that this is what I'm doing. It horrifies me, but I do it. And every time I do that, I'm practising my ability to keep doing it depsite knowing how bad it is.