There's nothing wrong with sexually explicit material, but here is my beef with most porn. It's entertainment, not sex education because what you are seeing on the screen isn't real sex. It's too often women contorted into painful positions over several hours of filming, having things done to them that aren't actually pleasurable for her. Quite often men in hetero porn look bored, like they are doing the woman some kind of fucking favor and she's sqealing in delight at something that doesn't actually feel all that great. And what that is teaching is bad sex. It's teaching that having a huge dick is the most important thing to a woman which couldn't be further from the truth. Porn stars like Jenna Jamison have written some pretty scathing stuff about the pain and humiliation they too often suffered while filming.
Maybe you are watching more ethically produced porn (of which there is more and more out there) but the mainstream stuff is pretty misogynistic and clearly contributing to not only bad sex, but also normalizing the degradation of women as sexy. I can't tell you how many women have told me that a new lover slapped them or choked them during sex without ever asking if that was acceptable because the guy had learned that from porn and thought that was what he was supposed to do. That's a problem.
Lesbian porn does tend to be a lot better, and I've heard that gay male porn can be pretty good as well, but although I think most people do watch porn these days, I also think it contributes to bad sex and transactional relationships. The lovers I've had who are in their 30s don't really spend more than 3 minutes on foreplay because that's what they've learned from porn which was their primary sex education. Older lovers don't behave that way because they grew up with different sexual expectations. That's the clearest example to me of how porn has degraded good sex.
And, I'm not meaning to shame you around this. You should totally do what works for you and that you enjoy, but I did just want to put my two cents in, particularly about the education part. If people were able to view it purely as entertainment, and not take on and absorb the things they see as "normal sex" I'd be a lot happier with it, but that isn't the case because it's not how our brains work. I don't know if you read Ena's story on how the German government just produced a porno under the theory that if porn is going to be everywhere, let's at least model ethical, inclusive, consent-oriented behavior. I'd love to see more of that out there.
