Why are we so shocked that there are porn actors who contract STDs? Everybody does. What we should be asking ourselves is how their rate of infection compares to that of the general population. Considering the amount of sex porn actors are having, it seems to me that they get infected much less than the normal population. Is there scientific data available about this?

Another thing I’m thinking is that on television, the popularity of crime-based dramas is reaching never seen before heights. There is also an ever increasing emphasis on portraying violent and deadly acts as explicitly as possible. The same thing in movies. Yet, are we lobbying for that to stop because it shows “unsafe behaviors”? And to be sure, these dramas are shown during primetime, every night, and they are advertised and glorified. The exposure that porn has in comparison doesn’t even come close.

The point is that what’s needed is more education. People need to be educated that not everything in porn is meant to be real. Some is, some isn’t, just like there are reality shows and documentaries on TV and there are also fiction and drama shows. Teaching young people that most women don’t actually like their face covered in cum shouldn’t be much harder than teaching them that most people don’t think walking around with a gun is a good idea.

Instead of always making porn be the bad guy, it’s time we start recognizing that a lot of healthy folks do watch porn as a normal part of their sex life. Instead of pushing porn to the dark alleys of our life and make people feel bad for watching it, we should embrace it and see it for what it is: a way to entertain your sexual self and get off. It’s time we fully legalize it and allow ourselves to use it. Only then can education about it occur.

It’s that I find particularly interesting the view that, in the event of one partner being caught cheating in a monogamous relationship, that the result should automatically be a split.

There is such an importance put on monogamy that we are willing to throw away everything if it is not respected. There are without a doubt times when this is the right course of action. However it happens so often that you have to wonder why people don’t just start off with the assumption that it might occur, or at least that the thought or desire of getting involved with others during the course of a very long term relationship will eventually be felt, if not acted on.

The point is, why not be proactive about it and have an intelligent discussion considering ways to deal with it, either when it will happen, or before it happens. A non-monogamous or open relationship is kind of an umbrella term that encompasses really everything other than monogamy. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you’re not monogamous, then you’re up for grabs and you’re just careless and promiscuous. There are a lot of variations possible between the two extremes.

I like to think of it as being a relationship designer. We spend so much time personalizing our clothes and our hair and our homes and everything that surrounds us. Maybe we should consider that we can also design our relationship. Forgeting the monogamy vs non-monogamy terms, which may be too polarized for many people, I think it’s accessible to everyone to just ask themselves, if I could design the perfect, bullet-proof relationship for me, what would that be?

The interest I have in Dan publishing the letters he’s received, is to demonstrate the breath of arrangements that are possible, and to realize we can apply our imagination and our creativity to the problem of how to make our relationships more successful.

You can have your blog back now.