My friend has a movie projector that only plays porn. Not Netflix. Not Criterion Collection films. Just footage of him and whoever he’s sleeping with that week. “We turn it on while we’re having sex outside,” he said, like he was describing his irrigation system.
Maybe not everyone has a porn projector, but my friend’s propensity for filming his flings is increasingly common. Every man I’ve slept with in the last two years (except one) has either filmed us, asked to film us, or shown me footage of himself with other women. Not as revenge porn. As foreplay.
One guy kept his laptop open on the dresser while we fucked, playing footage of us from the night before. I watched myself take him while taking him. My face on the screen, mouth open, eyes rolled back, while my actual face was doing the same thing in real-time. It was obscene. A loop of evidence that I’d been here before, that I’d look like this again, that this moment was already a memory being made.
Another showed me his entire archive before we’d even started. Organized by partner, by position, by location. He scrolled through like he was showing vacation photos. “This was Joshua Tree. This one’s Tokyo.” Faceless women, endless footage of him mid-thrust. I watched myself become the next exhibit while he was still scrolling.
The weirdest worked. Making out on his couch, he pulled out his phone and just started playing a video. Him fucking someone, her face off-camera, his face very much on it. Watching him watch himself fuck someone else while I was kissing him. It shouldn’t have worked. It did. Something about seeing proof of his capacity, of what he looked like when he wasn’t performing for me but for a camera, for himself, for nobody. I was turned on. I’m still trying to figure out why.
That’s the whole thing of it: why, exactly, does this work? And why are we getting comfortable with it. We went from “delete that immediately” to “let me see the angle” in about five minutes of cultural evolution. Now, we’re full on living in a ’90s sex thriller about the future. People fucking while watching themselves live fucking or past fucking. Sliver meets Black Mirror meets your bedroom on a Tuesday.
Estimates suggest a lot of Americans have filmed themselves having sex. Not professionally. Just people turning their phones around mid-orgasm to see what they look like when they leave their bodies. Some have posited that the allure of filming sex lies in subverting the taboo. Others think it’s simply the narcissism in each of us. There’s something to that.
There’s a moment when you catch yourself on camera mid-fuck and your brain splits. Half of you is arching your back, making sounds you didn’t know you could make, feeling his hands on your hips, his mouth on your neck. The other half is watching. Does that angle work, do I look desperate, is my stomach doing that thing. You’re Narcissus and the pool. You’re the performer and the critic and the audience.
I tried it with someone who positioned his phone perfectly on the nightstand. I couldn’t stop glancing over. My own face while he was inside me, mouth open, eyes half-closed, completely gone. Watching myself surrender while surrendering. The feedback loop made me come harder. Seeing what he saw, that I looked like someone capable of pleasure, someone worth filming, fed back into the pleasure itself.
The camera creates a closed circuit. You see yourself being desired, which makes you feel desirable, which makes you fuck harder, which looks better on camera, which makes you feel more desired. You can’t tell where the vanity ends and the genuine heat begins. Maybe they’re the same thing now.
As with anything in the bedroom, there’s wrong way to go about filming yourself having sex. Let’s talk ethics.
How to Film Without Being a Creep
Ask when you’re both dressed. “I’d like to film us sometime” works over coffee, not mid-thrust. Asking during sex isn’t consent, it’s pressure with better lighting. Give someone the chance to say no without killing momentum.
Establish the policy before you press record. Where does it live? Does it get deleted after you watch it once? What happens when you stop sleeping together? Decide the rules together, then follow them. Each video represents a specific moment of trust someone gave you.
Keep faces out of frame unless explicitly agreed otherwise. Bodies are hot. Faces are evidence that lives forever on phones that get hacked and relationships that end badly. Shoot angles that could be anyone. And when someone asks you to delete it, delete it immediately. Right then. In front of them. Their comfort matters more than your collection.