Is porn warping our ideas about real-life sex?

Once upon a time, there was a porn video. It was passed from guy to guy and they watched it furtively on the VHS when nobody else was around. After a few enjoyable watches, they passed it on to a mate, or hid it under their bed for ‘special occasions’ (did they watch it together in groups? Or only if they were NRL players?).

Ah, the olden days. If you’re over 30, that’s probably the world in which you grew up, where porn was difficult to get hold of and reasonably standard. Boy meets girls. Boy has sex with girl. Some close ups. Maybe some girl-girl action. Minimal dialogue. Sparse plot. A money shot. The end.

But then the interweb came along and changed the game entirely. This cannot be understated. Now everyone could access unlimited porn, pretty much for free, any time of day or night on their computer and now on their phone. As something becomes more common and easily available, it has to evolve to remain interesting to an audience who quickly become jaded. Enter anal sex and the way ‘bottoms have become the new mouths‘ to coin a euphemism we discussed recently here.

But what affect is this having on a generation of men – adult men and young men, teenage boys and even pre-teens who are being exposed to full-on porn in all its permutations from an ever earlier age. Girls too. How is it going to impact up a generation who see all this stuff before they have sex themselves?

There was a brilliant interview in Sunday Life mag recently with feminist Naomi Wolf by Australian writer and author Emily Maguire. In part, Emily wrote…….

Pornography has long been a contentious subject for feminists, although it’s not, as stereotypes would have it, a case of anti-porn feminists screaming for censorship on one side and raunch feminists mindlessly swinging their nipple tassels on the other. In the past decade or so – a period in which we’ve seen the proliferation of free, easily accessible internet porn – feminist debate around pornography has been focused on the effects it might have, positive or negative, on the women in porn, the women who watch it and the women in relationships with men who watch it.

So when Wolf wrote an essay in New York magazine in 2003, centred on the effect of porn on young men’s sex drives, there was quite a stir. “The onslaught of porn,” she wrote, “is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women … 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.”

In the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time talking to women in their teens and early 20s about porn, sex and body image. There is a profound difference in the context in which these women have come of sexual age compared to that of my adolescence only a decade earlier. The difference is that most young people now have witnessed countless sex acts long before they even get naked with another human being.

It could be argued that such exposure is educational, but only if you’ve never seen any mainstream porn, which is, most industry insiders and observers agree, getting more and more extreme. This may be, at least in part, a reaction to the adoption of soft-porn aesthetics by mainstream popular culture. Porn needs to be nastier and more hard-core to differentiate itself from beer ads and music videos.

Anal sex, for example, is now a standard part of heterosexual porn, and although this is not necessarily a brutal act, the way it’s performed in these films usually is. A bit of spit on the woman’s orifice is all the preparation and care the men take. On visits to college campuses, Wolf learnt from health educators and counsellors that women are coming in with anal fissures caused by sex. “I’m not making a [moral] judgement about it,” Wolf says.

“But it’s an intense act and on a first date, or on a hook-up on a Saturday night with someone they don’t know, girls feel like they have to provide anal sex. This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing they’d be doing if they felt, ‘I’m 100 per cent fabulous, I’m setting the pace, taking my time.’ It seems like the kind of thing girls do when they’re trying to live up to one ideal or another.”

The other big trend in mainstream porn is to end a scene with a man ejaculating on a woman’s face. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the act in itself, but there’s something disturbing about the way it has become the norm within what has become a widely watched and imitated form of media. This is especially worrying when you realise that the context in which it’s presented is often one of deliberate humiliation. The idea seems to be that no matter how hot and confident the woman is at the outset, by the end she’ll be a sticky mess, with smudged make-up, watery eyes and no hope of getting satisfaction herself now that her partner has finished with her.

Sexually experienced adults may understand that what they’re watching is a fantasy, carefully choreographed, performed by professionals and shot for maximum visual impact rather than physical pleasure. But many teenagers don’t know this; hence the horror stories of first-time sex that begins with rough, sudden penetration and finishes with semen in the eye.

To be clear, the concerns Wolf is raising are not about the morality or otherwise of watching porn or having sex of whatever kind; they’re about the effect that early, repeated exposure to pornography is having on young people’s sexuality. “Young women do compare themselves to pornography and they do have porn running in their heads when they’re in sexual situations. I’m not a prude, but I don’t think that’s good for their sexual confidence or confidence in their bodies.”

Indeed, young women I speak to often express anxiety about the appearance of their genitals, which seem to them so much “messier” than those they see in high-definition close-up on the screen. Although no statistics are collected in Australia, surgeons specialising in labiaplasty (basically a nip and tuck of the labia) claim it’s a growing field. One Australian surgeon recently told a cosmetic surgery conference that he used to see only “the professionals – the pole dancers, the strippers” but now he was seeing a lot of “young girls who are concerned that their partners in sex may in fact be put off by the appearance of their vulvas”.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that it’s illegal in Australia to publish images of vulvas that show anything more than “a single crease”. This means that even women’s magazines aren’t allowed to show real, un-pornified, un-photoshopped female genitals for educational purposes. I’m reminded of something Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth: “We are asked to believe our culture promotes the display of female sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s bodies, so that only the official versions are visible.”

The Beauty Myth taught masses of women to question harmful media images and messages. The challenge now is to do the same for a new generation facing a new onslaught. And as we do so, we’d do well to remember that, as Wolf wrote in 1990, “Sexual explicitness is not the issue.” In fact, “We could use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing.”

You can follow Emily Maguire on Twitter here.

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I thought this was so brilliant. As a mother of boys, I am terrified about what porn will teach them about sex and how a man behaves during sex and how WOMEN behave. Real women as opposed to the ones in porn who are portrayed as liking (even demanding) things that most women definitely do not.

Do you watch porn? Do you have sex with someone who does? How does that make you feel? Insecure? And I’m super keen to hear from younger MM readers who have probably become sexually active in a world where porn is practically wallpaper. What are your experiences and do you think porn gives guys a warped view of what women want? Do you think it gives WOMEN a warped view about what they SHOULD want and how they should look and respond?