OPINION: I have a lot of opinions on porn. I think it's sexist, degrading, misleading for men and harmful for women - and not just because it popularised Brazilians.

Last week, I was espousing the above views to a friend when it suddenly struck me - I'd never actually seen a porno.

Stunned, I stepped gingerly down from my soapbox. "Self," I said to myself, "You've been a fool. How dare you criticise something you've never even experienced?"

Moreover, how did it take me so long to notice this massive, glaring flaw in my anti-porn argument?

The thing is, like most citizens of 2012, I thought I had seen porn...kind of. I'd seen non-pornos in which people watched porn; I'd seen non-pornos that outraged moralists claimed were porn; I'd seen reality TV shows about porn stars.

I'd read articles, even books (well, chapters in books) about porn and its damaging effect on my gender and my generation as a whole.

Yet I'd never actually bothered to see what all the fuss was about.

Now, before I go any further, a confession: I haven't always been so staunch in this opposition.

In 2005, when I was in my first year of uni, my (female) flatmates and I kept a stack of Penthouse magazines on our coffee table. I can't remember where we got them, or even if I looked at them properly - that wasn't the point.

The point was that, when boys visited our flat, they'd see the magazines and think we were that type of girl: daring, sexy, cool. Liberated.

I read Cosmo articles suggesting I surprise my guy by renting a naughty DVD this Valentine's Day, and I took them as gospel.

I learned that other girls threw hissy fits when their boyfriends went to strip clubs. Well, not me! Hell, I'd even go to a strip club with him, that's how cool I was!

Sure, there was a niggling sense that something wasn't quite right - that I didn't actually want to go to a strip club and stare at another girl like she was a zoo animal - but I tried to convince myself that it was fine.

Maybe I wouldn't enjoy it, but at least people would know that I wasn't that most undesirable type of woman: a prude.

Then, before I actually got around to renting any DVDs or visiting any strip clubs, I read something that forced me to step up and own my strident, porn-hating feminism, even if it made me look uptight.

It was a book by British writer Caitlin Moran called How to Be a Woman. In it, Moran put forward such a strong argument against the porn industry that I could no longer stay perched uncomfortably on the fence - I had to choose a side.

The huge majority of female imagery on the internet, she said, is porn, most of which shows women being objectified in horrible, demeaning, graphic, sometimes violent ways. Imagine, she said, if the majority of male imagery online showed men being brutally murdered.

What kind of attitudes to men would that breed? Is it any wonder that disrespectful, chauvinistic, hateful attitudes to women are so rife when young men learn about sex by watching porn?

I realised what must be glaringly obvious to you all - that my so-called liberation was nothing of the sort. Just like my oppressed forebears, I was acting the way the patriarchy wanted me to act with no consideration of my own desires. Fifty years ago women were expected to be completely asexual; now we were expected to be overtly sexual - but still on somebody else's terms.

So I chose the stance that felt right, even though it went against everything society (and Cosmo) had taught me.

Which brings me back to last week's dilemma, wherein I realised I had never seen a porno and therefore had no right to judge them.

My mission was clear.

I headed down to Civic Video and, with a shifty glance in both directions, ducked into the adult section (I realise I could have downloaded something, but somehow my friendly local video store seemed less intimidating).

I was immediately assaulted by hundreds of images of hardcore porn. I don't know why, but I'd expected the DVD covers to leave a bit more to the imagination - maybe by way of some strategically placed props or something. Au contraire.

I realised I'd been kidding myself by thinking I'd seen porn, "more or less". My Californication box set hadn't prepared me for this.

Those covers shook me up more than I'd care to admit. It wasn't the sex itself that shocked me; it was the women in the pictures. They bore no resemblance to anything I'd come to understand about women after 24 years of being one. The fact that men - boys - based any of their ideas about us on these plastic, hollow-eyed, emotionless shells of women scared the hell out of me.

A few years ago, I read a quote from comedian Tina Fey about strip clubs.

"I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that," she said.

"Oho!" I thought at the time. "That's a bit judgemental, Tina! I liked you on 30 Rock, but you can't go around saying you're better than other people!"

But now I kind of agree with her. There's a version of me that wants to be provocative, to watch porn, to be one of the guys, to give them what they want.

And there's a version of me that thinks porn is abhorrent - the enemy of everything that's actually sexy about sex.

I've still never watched porn, and maybe it means I have no right to criticise it. But when I walked out of that video store empty-handed, I was choosing the version of myself that felt - I'm going to say it - better.

Where do you stand on porn? Do you watch it? Why or why not?

- © Fairfax NZ News

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