Jumping right into today’s Manly Monday topic, I’ll ask: Is porn is ruining mens’ sex lives? First, a bit of backstory. Jérôme is in town, visiting from Paris. Last week, we grabbed dinner at a tiny Chinatown eatery — tucked away from Canal Street’s tourists — where the door’s signage was completely written in Chinese and the patrons didn’t speak English. Good food, and the conversation with Jérôme was even better.
[Best when read with a French accent.] “It is very weird, you know … what the internet is doing to sex.” The 25-year-old blond-haired, blue-eyed guy forks rice in his mouth and continues explaining he thinks there’s a difference mid-20somethings who grew up on the internet’s cusp and early 20-somethings (and teens) who’ve never really experienced a Firefox-free life. “When you sleep with these younger people, it is like porn. They have sex like they’re in a movie.” He describes a tryst with a chick who was 19. (SIDENOTE: At 25, Jérôme can still sleep with people that age without getting frustrated by the gap in sexual experience.) Anyway, so, he explains the chick rode him hard, let out a shrill and started screeching: “FUCK ME, BABY!!! OOOH, YEEEAAAAH. Like that! Fuck me deeper!!!!” As he’s talking, I start laughing. I really get a kick out of hearing people imitate others’ sex noises.
“So, I threw her off me,” Jérôme continues, “and I tell her, ‘Look, there are no cameras here. We’re not making a porno.’” He goes on to explain, when he was growing up, it was hard to find places to watch people having sex. “You had to work for it back then. You couldn’t just click and have access to porn. Now, younger people go on the internet when they are horny at 8 years old, and they have everything they want.”
I pause as “The Internet Is for Porn” from Avenue Q runs through my brain. “Actually,” I tell him, “when you think about it, that’s pretty deep. It’s possible to watch tons of ‘real’ sexual experiences before you’ve actually done it. I have to believe that shapes what people think sex actually is and how they perform it.”
Jérôme agrees. We crawl deeper in the discussion, though I’m still not convinced porn spoils sex — for men or women. For example, in bed, I’ve had guys do porn-like positions and say things like “I want you to cum on my face” and “I want to fuck that sexy body” and other things that sound very, well, “porny.” Is that inherently bad (or good), I don’t necessarily think so. I’ve got antiporn activist Gail Dines’ new book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality on my coffee table at home, and I’ll read it soon. However, generally speaking, I think porn — like most media — is simply a tool. It can be helpful when it arouses, stimulates and inspires sexual creativity. It can have the opposite affect if it diminishes sexual pleasure by reducing our ideas about what’s “really” sex and how it’s supposed to be enjoyed. But, those are just my thoughts. How about you? Do you think porn ruins mens’ sex lives or does it make their experiences even better?
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I think that porn is just like any other media’s skewing of sex. It’s just much more graphic. Especially if you haven’t had sex before, when you watch a romance movie and they show a guy and a girl going at it and then cut right to the post-coital cuddle, it doesn’t give you any better depiction of what sex really is. It makes it flowery and smooth without explaining the thousand awkward bumps that could happen in between. Porn, I think, does the same thing but doesn’t leave anything for the imagination. So then people, both men and women, internalize that as the “right” way or the “best” way to have sex. In any case, I don’t think that porn is ruining peoples’ sex lives, it just changes their expectations of the actual act.
First of all I often leave comments on this site, but have selected that this comment be anonymous. When you google my name everything I do on the internet pops up! Not always cool… Anyway— I think that he has a valid point porn– rules and its not unlikely that young folks get tips from watching it. But isn’t sex supposed to be natural? Great post.
The porn experiences that shaped me as a teen were definitely very different than what’s available for kids today. In the late 1980s, porn came on VHS, not the Internet. This made access to porn much more restricted; in comparison, the amount of free porn available online is ridiculous, and a lot of it is very, very bad stuff. However, there are also a lot more high quality and niche porn sites that are highly available today. So yes, there is a lot more bad porn out there, but there’s also a lot more good porn out there as well, and it’s more a failure on the part of the person looking for porn if they can’t find the good stuff – I’m not saying that’s necessarily their fault, just that people will need to learn how to discriminate better and determine what’s good and what’s not, and that’s a different cultural problem entirely.
So my counter to the example of the “tainted” 19 year old is that 15 or 20 years ago, that girl would actually have had NO exposure to porn and not even have a guess at how to even be riding the French dude. She wouldn’t have a clue; she probably just would have laid there confused, and maybe would be seeing a penis for the first time ever. Having some exposure, even if it’s just to bad porn, gives her a leg up (pun intended) that 19 year olds in the past wouldn’t ever have had at all. It’s like CPR – even if you’re doing it wrong, just knowing to press on a person’s chest actually helps anyway.
J said exactly what I was going to. I think the only thing I would really add is that there will always be people who are very “monkey see, monkey do” and will never break away to think on their own.
As a het man in my early 20′s, I agree that porn seems to have fundamentally altered sexual relations for our generation. I would speculate that there are few men indeed who did are/were not exposed to pornography at by the time they entered teens. (Anyone who hasn’t viewed porn by their teens did not abstain for lack of access — though perhaps means if they didn’t have a computer.)
What that means is that men first learn about sex from porn, rather than any awkward first-time experiences or glimpses of dirty magazines (which are softcore by today’s standards), as I suppose people must have in the past.
As people perhaps soon find out when they begin being sexually active, “porn-sex” and “real-sex” are different things. Porn-sex is designed with camera angles in mind, can cut scenes, unrealistic body types, etc., etc. But, perhaps most importantly, it is able to appeal to market niches (fetishes) much more readily than it ever could in the past, with the Internet as a means of distribution.
That means that a boy who discovers porn at a young age, rather than having to desperately search local communities to find fetish porn, can find it very easily. That leads to a very distorted idea of what the average partner (and I’m going to say “woman” from now, since I assume in your post we’re talking about het men; sorry for continuing the heteronormative patriarchy) wants.
Porn fundamentally requires people to “up” the ante. I think the average male porn watcher’s experience as a young man proceeds in a positive feedback loop thusly: beginning with porn X (softcore stuff), becoming disenchanted with X, requiring more hardcore stimulation, and moving to porn X+1, becoming disenchanted, and so on and so forth. That means that if a kid starts watching at 13 (beats me when most kids start, but I would bet around there), they’ve got five years of porn watching under their belts (pun intended) by the time they’ve graduated high school. And, by the time they graduate college and enter a more “real” world of serious relations, they’ve been watching porn for a decade.
Is a man who began watching softcore porn at 13 still watching X+0 at 23? I’d say no, they’re way beyond that.
So if one follows that men are watching more and more nichy/fetish/hardcore porn as they age, that means their images of sexual relations (derived from “porn-sex”) become increasingly divorced from “real-sex. ” Now, there’s an assumption there, and that’s real-sex has remained static as internet porn has developed, and I think that’s a false assumption. Ten or twenty years ago, people with off-the-beaten-track fetishes might have suppressed their sexuality out of shame, or simply not expressed it for lack of being able to find like-minded partners, but now can find communities of like-minded people on the Internet, so I would guess that real-sex has “advanced” (advancement being moving from a more conservative sexuality to a more open/liberal/fetishized/whatever-one-calls-it or moving from X+0 to X+some number) due to porn-sex, but there remains a large gap in the het male consciousness in the perceptions of porn-sex and what real-sex really is.
Het men’s expectations of sex are radically different than they were twenty or even ten years ago. With broadband internet, men learn about sex from porn, watching porn-sex that is increasingly fetishized and divorced from real-sex. There’s been analyses of porn from a feminist perspective (I’d point to anti-porn advocate Robert Jensen’s Getting Off) that demonstrate that pornography gives men views about sex that are wildly misogynist and indeed violent. If men take from porn-sex that real-sex should be like porn-sex, then, yes, “ruining” is perhaps not the correct term so much as “damaging,” damaging to men and women’s sexuality and men’s humanity.
I have mixed views on the subject. On one hand, I think it is great that people with less common desires (which still fall within the range of consensual sex) are able to find material which demonstrates to them that they are not alone in their desires. At the same time, I worry that the constant bombardment of sexual material in everyday life is shaping desires as opposed to merely catering to existing desires.
I don’t, however, think that porn necessarily escalates. I know plenty of people who used to watch it, but got bored by it as they grew older. But of course there are some people who are influenced, or who have addictive personalities, so it is a real problem.
I really couldn’t say what the right balance is, but I think society is too far on the ‘porn’ side at the moment.
I heard on one show (maybe L&O:SVU) that there is a clinical condition where men are so overly exposed to pornography that it is the only way they CAN be aroused, they no longer get turned on by real women and actual bodies but need images of no attachment sex with women with surgically enhanced (hence, unrealistic) body proportions.
I think it’s porn is fine, especially when used by a couple but it’s sad if it becomes a replacement for actual contact with another human being. Life is not a porn movie and I guess that is still crushingly disappointing for some people.
I would also suggest that porn in any form is at least partially beneficial because it helps people to visualize sex – and visualization improves performance, as shown in studies like the one where people were told to visualize sinking a hoop on a basketball court over and over again, and the people who visualized performed better than the ones who didn’t (without anyone practicing).
I haven’t read other people’s comments, but I’ve learned that porn has helped me visualize the possibilities of carnal fun. I have certainly learned and created goals for my own bedroom (or more outside the bedroom) olympics via porn and what others have documents, and I thank the industry for the broadening of my horizons and allowing me to be comfortable with my own body. Conversely, it has also helped ignore and escape my issues with intimacy. While I can orgasm quite easily going into the fantasy with porn, it become more and more difficult to even become erect with someone I truly have feelings for. A question I pose frequently – does the overabundance of porn allow me to suppress my own intimacy issues – like a drug, is it merely a distraction of what my actual issues are? Hmmmm…
I don’t think porn is “ruining” sex, as it has always been quite ruined (in mainstream America).
I think porn is a good thing in that it has broken us out of our Puritanical sexual dysfunction. At this point, it’s all right to be slutty, even for women–it just means you like sex. Porn has gotten us to the point where it is okay to like sex.
However, we are still a long ways away from seeing healthy relationships with healthy sex acts. I don’t know how that will ever be portrayed in the media; healthy relationships aren’t a very exciting spectator sport.
Ultimately, I think you can’t have really good sex until you have good communication, and that’s not going to happen until you have good relationships. (But sex is like pizza, it can be pretty bad, but even then, it’s still good.)
I love this post. I feel that the porn industry more or less targets a certain demographic in terms of age. Yet, now a days search engines and parents for a matter of fact don’t do much to regulate what children are viewing on the internet. Its so easy to type something in a search engine that has nothing to do with sex/porn and still get links. I remember doing a report on MLK Jr. and I typed in Dr. King. You would not believe how many likes referenced “king dong” and what not. Anyway, I think porn is for the viewing pleasure of adults both males and females that have some identification with their own sexuality no matter how complex it may be. My generation is so sexualized yet desensitized at the same time. I think about sex in the old days and some folks were so “free”. Now a days, sexual acts are coveted yet their nothing to covet lol. Look at the music industry. Children have access to VH1, BET and so forth. They are some very explicit videos out there. And what about film ya know? Young people have access to sexual imagery everywhere just about!!!
I live in a very open house hold where my parents were blunt and honest with me at a very young age about sexual behaviors and sexuality. That discussion early on made it so that I was not so curious to do it but I was able to “explore my sexuality” with the opposite sex without the use of porn because I wasn’t so curious about it. I already knew all about it via my parents! I also knew how to protect myself.
Kids are being exposed to so much and parents need to decide when its appropriate to discuss sexual behaviors and sexuality with their child. Honesty really does help because when you hold back…the curious side of the adolescent human brain becomes active lol. Some young people are so misguided about how to express their that they simply model what they see. I was lucky to discover my own sexuality via personal experiences and human intuition. Now I watch porn with my mate and sometimes solo because it’s entertaining as an adult.
This article appeared in New York magazine back in 2003 but I remembered this quote from an otherwise provocative article: ‘But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.’ Naomi Wolf seem to basically be saying that porn is too much of a good thing…that it deadens the senses to what is real and available and that it ‘cheapens’ the sensation of sexual feelings. http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/
I do believe a lot of people abuse porn and that it does lead to a certain amount of dysfunctional behavior BUT not necessary ‘the Andrea Dworkin every man is a rapist’ kind of dysfunctional.
I’m with you on this one.
Porn is just a tool, and if your sex partner is doing something that you’re not comfortable with, just tell them. This is where communication comes in. I LOVE Porn, I mean L-O-V-E it and I use it as a tool to “grease up” so to speak. But if I’m with a man who I believe is doing some bad porn imitations in bed, I kindly tell him to stop, then explain how I like to be pleased.
I’m not going to let porn ruin my sexual experience, no way!
Porn ain’t always grand for women either. Ever have a guy do the snake lick when he’s going down on you (flicking his tongue at you at high speed)? Such a porn move and rarely successful. Makes you wanna ram against his mouth and say, “just sink in and savor it, baby!”
The only time porn ruined my sexlife, was when my 2 year old broke my 400 disc dvd player.. =0
The thought of having to get up to change the disc…..how do you store 300 porn dvd’s?! All of this thinking gave me a headache….. I got over it in a few days. And went back to boinking my wife. Needless to say, any piece of high end value is elevated to atleast 4 feet off the ground.
I think porn just gives us access to things we might want to explore, but never get the chance to. I mean ” bukakke” would be totally unfathomable without internet porn. Not to mention how dangerous it would be to actually travel to Tijuana to see a donkey show!!
I think the other thing to look at with Jerome’s encounter is just because he doesn’t like to be riden like a mechanical bull, doesn’t mean that others don’t. Also maybe she liked to try it this way ( being more vocal and aggressive). Now jerome might have totally fucked it up for the next guy. I blame Jerome the frenchy guy for turning that poor unsuspecting American lass into a sexual dead hump…. DAMN YOU JEROME!!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!
I think you have to be a little careful, at least that is what I found. I do believe people tend to escalate when it comes to porn to the point that “regular ol’ sex” with a flesh and blood person can seem mundane. I’ve experienced it a little bit first-hand.
I found myself not as attracted to my wife and expecting her to be more and do more to keep up with the images and videos I had seen. That was not fair to her and I realized that I had to stop what was taking her place. It truly was numbing me to sex with her. Once I distanced myself from porn, I became much more interested in down and dirty sex again.
I love my wife and we have a very happy, healthy sex life. We are both extremely satisfied and enjoy it to the fullest, even after 15 years of being together…but, I know that a few years ago, porn jeopardized that a little bit for me, and I never want that.
For me, I likened it a little to a drug or drinking, etc….maybe more a drug. It starts out just being a supplement or a compliment to something that is good, but then becomes a little bit of a replacement. It’s addictive and can take over and take the place of more “healthy” things.
That is my experience, I know others with a less addictive personality are able to use it in a more “responsible” manner.
I’d just like to chime in on the side of porn here. I’m in favor of porn. I enjoy it thoroughly, both by myself and with Mrs. Doodlius. I credit porn with the modern mainstream acceptance, nay, *embrace* (pun intended) of hot girl-girl lovin’, which is quite possibly the sexiest thing that has ever existed.
Porn has never been anything but good to me. It’s like an old friend – with boobies. So be nice to porn. And if anybody were to try to take away my porn, they might lose both arms – one to me and the other to Mrs. Doodlius.