Girl on the Net

This week’s guest blogger, Kelvin, is a sex blogger – he writes at KelvinSparks.com and tweets @ksparksreviews. He got in touch recently with an idea for a guest blog about his relationship with VR porn, as a trans man who experiences gender dysphoria. I’m obsessed with virtual reality porn mainly because it does something that standard porn can’t: it allows the viewer to get closer to inhabiting different bodies. Find out how VR porn has helped Kelvin and his trans girlfriend experience something totally new…

Watching VR porn as a trans man

While not all transgender people (those who identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth) experience gender dysphoria, I do. It’s hard to describe as anything other than a feeling of wrongness, a disconnect from the physicality of my body. I have near constant anxiety about my body, and sometimes I can’t event stand to look at myself unclothed. It gets in the way when navigating sex- none of my partners have ever seen me shirtless, I frequently have to masturbate with clothes on because otherwise I can’t stand to do it. But I’ve found something that helps, at least enough to make masturbation more easily navigable- VR porn.

I first got the idea to try VR porn in a quite drunk post-tech-conference conversation with another trans friend. The topic of conversation was not actually porn, but how our younger selves, unable to transition, had found outlets for gender expression through technology- Second Life and The Sims were mentioned. Then the topic turned to future possibilities and my friend, spilling her glass of wine slightly on the sofa, talked about a VR game she’d played that allowed her to look down and see a female body.

I’m a horny drunk, and my mind immediately went to porn. I’d heard of VR porn, mostly through gossip and slightly outraged exposés, some claiming it was incredible, others that it was disappointing.  I’m also a sleepy drunk, so I went back to my room for the night, fell asleep, and promptly forgot that whole conversation.

I remembered it a few weeks later when I found a VR headset I forgot I owned. It wasn’t a great headset- it worked through holding my phone in place, had no onboard hardware of its own, and had, until then, mostly been used for testing terrible webVR games. I paused, thought about it for a few minutes, and then decided to try and find some VR porn.

To this day, I still maintain that was the best wank session I ever had. Doxy pressed up hard against my cock as a freckled blonde with a beaming smile hovering over me, tits bouncing as she rode a cock that I knew was definitely not mine, but fuck it felt closer than anything else ever has. I came short and hard, mouth wide open and moaning loud.

With VR porn I’m no longer a voyeur to kinds of sex I’ll likely never be able to have. It’s not the same as 2D point-of-view porn, and it doesn’t feel the same way. I’m the protagonist with both POV and VR porn, but with 2D POV I’m always aware the penis on screen isn’t mine- the dissonance between the penises on screen and my own makes things worse. I become hyperaware of my anatomy and how it doesn’t match, how I can’t use it in the same way, how disconnected I feel from how male bodies are expected to be. That doesn’t happen with VR porn. It also doesn’t hurt that I can’t actually look at my anatomy when I’m watching VR porn.

The cool down after can be a bit much. The first few times I took the headset off after use, I cried, partly because coming back to reality can be a bit of shock, and partly because I became so aware of how liberating the experience actually was. I have less of a reaction now, but that relief and alleviation from pain, that’s all still there.

I don’t think most people consider VR porn in the context of sex between couples, but it’s actually where I’ve found it to have most value. My girlfriend is trans too, and although our experiences differ, we both have difficulties navigating sex because of physical dysphoria. She likes it when I go down on her, but hates the visuals, so having something else to look at, something that resembles the type of anatomy that she wants to have, that helps. My motions don’t match up with what she’s watching, but they don’t have to. She can look down and see somebody eating her vulva out, while I muff her with fingers or a bullet vibe, tongue teasing the head of her clit.

Going down on her when she’s wearing the headset is hotter than it has any right to be, even with all the annoying fiddling to prepare everything. If she’s doming me, the fact she could be thinking about somebody else, that I’m interchangeable and only there because I’m good at going down on her, that’s filthy and wonderful. And when our dynamic is more vanilla, the fact I know she’s thinking about me, even though she could be thinking about anything, the fact I know she’s able to – even just for a few minutes – feel comfortable in her body, that’s the most liberating and sexy thing I think I ever experience.

VR porn isn’t perfect- it’s still clumsy in places, and the vast majority of content is intended for pretty vanilla straight men. It was much harder to find female point-of-view content for my girlfriend than it was to find male point-of-view content for me, but it is out there, as is m/m content. We aren’t the intended audience or customer base for these technologies or products, but, however unintentional, it’s given us an option for relief that we never expected to have. Sometimes learning to love your body means finding a way to engage with it that hurts you least.