Your new discovery does have an unusual job but no one should be judged only by their employment. Every profession has aspects of it that those who work in it don’t enjoy. For example, when practising medicine some of the duties that doctors need to perform are far from pleasurable, but it is the human contact that makes even these procedures worthwhile for most of us.
As with doctors, so with photographers; your potential girlfriend may be an excellent photographer but it could be that, in order to earn a living, she has drifted into taking pornographic pictures rather than, say, studio portraits of politicians. She may find that many of the people with whom she is dealing and photographing are unappealing, or even repellent.
Contrary to popular belief, exposure to pornography doesn’t necessarily turn someone into a sex addict. The truth is very different. There is a saying that pornography is in the eye of the beholder for, if it is to be erotically exciting to those who are seeing it, they must already have an interest in what is being portrayed or written. Only occasionally does pornography uncover some hitherto unacknowledged sexual desire. Even then it doesn’t create it, it merely reveals it.
Therefore, if your new friend is turned on by whatever photographs she needs to take to earn a living she will have already have had a sexual predilection for whatever subject or action that she has recorded. Once you get to know her you will discover if she does have any sexual peccadilloes and then you can decide whether or not you can go along with them.
If your potential partner has no unusual sexual tendencies, her natural curiosity in this field will soon evaporate. Research has shown that this interest in other people’s unusual sexual behaviour has what is called a lifetime’s half life of only four hours. That is to say that after four hours of watching porn, which involves behaviour that someone wouldn’t normally indulge in, half the fascination for it will have evaporated. Over the next four hours, whenever this may be, the person will lose another 50 per cent of their natural curiosity and so on. After a week or two’s work, your friend’s wonder, or even excitement, at the peculiarities of other people’s sexual behaviour (which she photographs) will have virtually disappeared.
If pornography is to remain exciting to someone, it needs to display or suggest features of sexual activities that the person watching has previously found erotic. For instance, most people if persuaded to look at gerontophilia (sex between grandparents) do so without being turned on or even interested.
How is this going to affect your future relationship? What will your friends and mother and father think about it? Even though you musn’t judge your girlfriend before you know her, it might be wise not to be too specific about what type of photography she specialises in with your friends and family until they, too, can get to know her.
You must also be aware that some men dislike the women they fancy watching pornography because they have an unacknowledged fear that critical anatomical comparisons will be made. If this is the case, take heart: it is almost certainly true that it is you who are physically normal, and the porno actor or model who is physically abnormal.
Porn photography is a dirty job but someone’s got to do it and, hey, at least she’s behind the lens. Every year Britain’s art schools release thousands of photography graduates into an overcrowded market and they all want to be the next Annie Leibowitz or Mario Testino, but it’s a pipe dream for most of them.
Photography’s tiny glamorous peak is supported by a triangular bulk of decreasingly interesting, increasingly depressing job opportunities, and when your career options include producing shots of frozen-food packs for the Asda website or portraits of pressure washers for the ScrewFix building catalogue, shooting girl-on-girl-on-boy action seems like a much more exciting way to make a living.
Because fewer photographers are prepared to deal with the inevitable controversy that working in the industry generates, porn is significantly better paid than commercial work or editorial, so she probably earns more than you, and if she is tough enough to hold her own in an industry that is not renowned for its sensitivity to the fairer sex, then she probably has more balls than you, too.
Although your apprehension about what she does and the things that she sees during her working day is understandable, you ought to bear in mind that when a person does something day in and day out they become immune to the stuff that makes people outside their profession hyperventilate. Repeated exposure to anything causes a degree of desensitisation; however, for most people, that insensitivity is confined to the workplace. Gynaecologists don’t medicalise their sex lives, and coroners don’t do post mortem examinations on those they love.
It’s exactly the same for people who work in the sex industry. Exposure to porn demystifies professional sex but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on the domestic variety. Though I don’t have much personal experience in the field, when my friend Mel Agace and I wrote The Sex Book we had to set up a porn shoot for the illustrator to draw his images from. We hired two gay guys, two lesbian women and a straight couple and they turned up at Mel’s flat and hung around smoking fags and chatting while they were waiting to be photographed. I was fascinated by the ordinariness of their conversations: the heterosexual girl was getting married soon; one of the lesbians was having problems with her girlfriend; and one of the two gay guys was trying to get a mortgage. And yet although none of them had ever met before, as soon as they were called, they got on to the bed and began to have sex with each other. Real sex. I was left with the feeling that all of them had created an absolute disconnection between their personal and their professional lives.
The woman you like probably realises that her chosen field presents problems for potential partners, but she is not prepared to hide what she does for a living and, quite rightly, expects the men in her life to find their own ways of dealing with that issue. If you shut down romantic opportunities before you give them a chance, you risk missing out on the relationship that might change your life.
It would be dumb of you to judge her by what she does, rather than who she is, because careers are not a particularly reliable constant anyway. J. K. Rowling used to work for the Inland Revenue, Sting was a teacher and John Prescott was a ship’s steward. Now look at them.
OVER TO YOU
Do you have a sexual dilemma for Suzi Godson and Dr Thomas Stuttaford? Send your e-mails to body&soul@thetimes.co.uk or write to Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. The authors regret that, although your letters are much appreciated, they cannot respond personally.
