Pain and Shame Made Me a MakeLoveNotPornstar
By MakeLoveNotPornstar hiyamaia aka Maia Leggott.
I’m having such a hard time writing this piece.
How do I accurately represent the pain-and-shame-riddled path that led me to sharing videos of myself masturbating on the internet and feeling more like myself than ever before?
How do I convey what a huge, enormous deal this is while also feeling like the most natural thing I could possibly do?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been curious about bodies and sex. With two librarian parents I had a book for just about anything I could think of: how babies are made, what bare naked bodies look like, what love is, what sex is, how to deal with puberty and periods, you name it. Granted it was the late 80’s and early 90’s so they were all very heteronormative, but it’s what I had to work with.
When I was three or four I was best friends with the kids across the street. She and I would play house and make play dough penises and mime sex, get pregnant and give birth to stuffed bunnies and dolls and whatever else fulfilled the fantasy that day. Her brother and I would play doctor and inspect each other’s penis and vulva to make sure everything was “normal” (based on my books). It was all very curious and innocent.
In elementary school when I got together with my friends we’d watch movies like Now and Then and pause at the moment where Devon Sawa leaps over the log into the lake and you can definitely see his penis.
As I got older, I would educate kids on the playground about sex and love and babies. At some point, I became The Horny One and would always make jokes about being “horny” with my index fingers pointing up beside my ears. I’m not sure I fully knew what it meant, but I embraced it.
I knew that I wanted to have sex because it felt good and it’s what two people did when they loved each other (and wanted to make a baby) but I didn’t have a large frame of reference outside of that.
I grew up Catholic, and went to a Catholic all-girls high school for six years. Whenever I tell people that they’re all “Ah, that explains a lot,” like ALL Repressed Catholic School Kids became sexual “deviants” who didn’t get married or have babies. One look at my graduating class will tell you I am the exception, not the rule.
The thing about growing up Catholic with fairly progressive parents who also taught us all of the proper names for body parts (there were no pee-pees or wee-wees or hoo-has in my house), is that you get a lot of conflicting messages about shame and sex and bodies and desires.
I can remember being so confused that I could talk freely and be inquisitive about bodies at home, but that I had to keep these things private everywhere else. Contradicting messages of “use the proper name for that!” and “don’t talk about it in public” were the subtle building blocks for shame I’ve been working to dismantle as an adult.
The first time I masturbated, I sat spread eagle on my floor in front of that curvy four-piece full-length IKEA mirror that everyone had and fumbled around trying to stick the handle of my blue hairbrush inside my vagina. I didn’t get it. I didn’t properly figure out how to get something inside of me until I started using tampons a year later. I learned that sitting backwards on my blue and white desk chair and rotating my pelvis in circles felt REALLY good like I-didn’t-want-it-to-stop good but also it’s-maybe-almost-too-much good and that was how I had my first orgasm.
As a teen, erotica was my drug of choice. From the moment I discovered an anthology hidden among my mother’s sweaters when I was hunting for Christmas presents to the website I still visit sometimes when I’m feeling nostalgic, I knew this is what I wanted my life to be. I didn’t want to just write these stories, I wanted to live them.
Once camera phones and then smartphones came on the scene, forget about it. I became a sexting master. I would take nudes for myself, for whoever I was dating or teasing at the time, and it changed the way I looked at my body. For the better. For a while.
Somewhere along the way, something else changed the way I looked at my body.
Endometriosis.
I was diagnosed in 2011 at 24 with this chronic disease that occurs when inflammatory tissue grows throughout the body where it doesn’t belong. It affects over 200 million cis women and girls and unmeasured numbers of trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse folks across the globe. It’s most common in the pelvic cavity but has been found in every system and organ in the body. It can cause chronic pain, sexual pain, depression, infertility, nausea, digestive issues, and more. I dealt with all of that while trying to manage it with hormones and diet and exercise for many years.
For a long time, it took everything from me — jobs, friends, romantic relationships, self-confidence, my sense of self — and sexuality was the biggest casualty.
I almost didn’t notice it at first, that I was shying away from intimacy with my then-partner the more endo took its toll on my body and mind.
It’s subtle, the way chronic pain slowly turns you into someone you don’t recognize. Someone who doesn’t find pleasure in the same things they used to, who doesn’t see a point in living if living means being in pain. It’s hard to connect to your sexuality when it feels nonexistent and your every move is punctuated by pain and the slightest wrong move is enough to set off a cascade of agony.
Forget about being intimate with others — masturbation is barely on the menu when you feel this way. Either orgasms are painful, or the aftermath is.
This past couple of years, my relationship with my body changed again.
I started taking naked photos of myself again and posting them on the internet after I won a boudoir photoshoot on Facebook and it opened my eyes to what a healthier relationship with my body could look like. And it felt good. Not because I wanted compliments, but because I was sick of being sick and letting shame and illness control my relationship with my body and it felt good to do whatever I wanted.
We all have a body. That relationship is ever-changing.
When I discovered MakeLoveNotPorn through an internet rabbit hole during the pandemic, I knew that eventually I’d share something on there, I just didn’t know how.
I could do this, I thought as I scrolled through pages of homemade videos. I really wanted to do this.
I played mental ping pong with the idea for months; yes I can absolutely do this and embrace it! No fucking way, what would your family think?! How will you get a job?
I toyed with the idea of being a headless figure and keeping my identity a secret, but that just goes against all of the shame I’ve spent years unpacking, repacking, unpacking some more and leaving behind. I knew if I was going to do this I’d have to embrace it fully.
As myself.
As the chronically ill, depressed, anxious human that I am, the human with ADHD and heart issues and butt issues and so much more.
As a freelance writer who writes on sickness, sexuality and shame, I’d be going against my very ethos of being loud, vulnerable and shameless about the shit we’re taught to keep quiet if I stayed anonymous.
A partner joked that I should record myself doing naked yoga and post it on MakeLoveNotPorn. To see how it felt.
So I did.
And it felt good.
I was in physical pain, doing something that brought me pleasure, and I had it on video.
It was the most freedom I’d ever felt in thirty-four years.
Then I did it again and I went a little further in my exploration of self-love.
And it felt real good.
It’s helped me embrace my body for what it is. It’s helped me see that I am worthy of pleasure.
Sure, I didn’t share anything for almost a year because I let fear and shame get bigger than vulnerability and curiosity.
But eventually I did it again, and I remembered how it feels to have power over my own body, my own desires, my own pleasure. My own pain.
People say I’m brave for posting my sex on the internet, and maybe I am. But they think that because we’ve grown up in a world that shames anyone for daring to embrace their sexuality.
Thank you, MakeLoveNotPorn for creating a space for people to be whoever they want to be.
