It’s not meant to be but in the absence of any other meaningful sex education, this is where young people are learning about it. And it does negatively impact the way that sex takes place in the real world. When I was first dating (30 years ago) no man expected to come in your face or to choke you or to jam his fingers in your mouth. Now those are all common expectations, and not only do men expect to do that because they’ve seen it in porn, but women expect that they are supposed to like that, even if they don’t. It’s a huge problem, particularly since there is so much violence against women in porn these days.
“According to a 2010 study that analyzed 304 scenes from best-selling pornography videos, almost 90% of scenes contained physical aggression, while nearly 50% contained verbal aggression, primarily in the form of name-calling. Targets of these displays of aggression were overwhelmingly women and either showed pleasure or neutrality in response to the aggression.”
The orgasm gap is a real thing and 30 years of the internet hasn’t changed that because the sex that is shown in porn depicts women experiencing ecstatic pleasure from the magic donkey dick alone, rather than from the things that actually make most women come.
“The key point is that when we talk to young people about sex, the lack of focus on sexual pleasure often impacts women more than men. Our very definitions of ‘sex’ are usually skewed towards penis-in-vagina sex with male orgasm as the end goal, so most young children grow up thinking that sex begins with an erection and ends in ejaculation. That narrative has little room for female pleasure during heterosexual sex.”
So although I have no moral qualms with porn, I do take issue with the fact that it’s teaching generations of young people bad, transactional sex and normalizing sexual violence against women. There’s no real political bent to that because as a practical matter, it’s a problem. You can say that it’s entertainment and it shouldn’t influence the culture, but that’s just wishful thinking. It does influence the culture and so speaking up about the realities of that is a good thing for responsible citizens to do.
