There are feminists out there who reject pornography altogether. I’m not one of them. I know it can provide a great gateway and path to explore our sexuality and open up new horizons in the kind of pleasure we all need.
My problem with pornography is not that it exists. It’s that it has become education. It’s become sex education, arbitrarily and out of necessity, because sex education in schools, in most parts of the world, is non-existent or inadequate or downright damaging.
It’s become sex education because parents who could provide their children with information, don’t dare to, refuse to, aren’t well informed themselves, or are overwhelmed with shame.
So, pornography is the easy solution. I’m talking about the widely available free online pornography. Mainstream pornography. Which is designed for men who are already having sex. Unfortunately, though, it often is all the sexual education teenage boys and girls receive, who are initially exposed to it at a pre-adolescent age, usually without their consent. It’s an unsettling, frightening and often traumatic experience. This is the beginning. And then they grow up believing this is what attractive human bodies look like and this is what sex is.
The thing is, pornography isn’t sex.
The long fake nails, the huge overfilled lips, the siliconed round breasts, the Brazilian lifted butts, the total hairlessness, the bleached, pink labias, looking dainty, delicate and child-like, who have increased rates of labiaplasties to unprecedented numbers worldwide, they’re all beauty standards of porn culture. And for men, the gigantic penises, which believe me, very few women want. They’re there for men to see, it’s a male power fantasy thing, muscles and a huge cock. They’re not for us.
Mainstream pornography never existed to take on such a responsibility. It was never designed to have an educational role, and at the same time, it was never sufficiently defined and regulated so that it did not run the risk of becoming a danger to the public.
I mean, I remember watching MTV when I was a kid, and in the videos where teenagers were jumping off rooftops and flipping in the air and seemed to never get hurt, there would be a “don’t try this at home” warning. It seems unbelievable we don’t have anything similar in pornography, since if you try what you see at home with another human being, it can be both dangerous and criminal.
We have warnings on cigarette packs and alcohol ads and absolutely no warnings on porn, which, if not consumed and re-enacted responsibly, can harm us and our sexual partners, both physically and emotionally. There isn’t even any statement of consent from participants to begin with. It would be so simple, it would make such a big difference.
The only argument against the demand to sanitise pornography is “not all porn”. Granted, it’s not all pornography. There is what’s called ethical pornography and it’s amazing. But again, it may not be all porn but it’s almost all readily available and, most importantly, free porn. And that’s a problem.
The reason no such regulations have been put in place, even though a huge percentage of the population consumes pornography, is that it’s still considered taboo (and no scientist wants to be known as “the porn guy”) so it’s allowed to exist relatively undisturbed on the fringes of society, even though it’s an integral part of pop culture. The legal framework that has been created to define it, mainly concerns the production and distribution of films.
The content and messaging of these films are not subjected to the same criticism as other cultural products such as cinema, theatre and television. Because no one has decided to take pornography seriously enough and conduct research —even though Professor Scott Galloway has identified it as “the largest unsupervised experiment on young men”. It’s taken seriously only by those who want to wipe it out. Except, pornography seems to be here to stay. It’s art and entertainment. And given the lack of sex education in schools, it’s also an education, which sadly consolidates some of the worst stereotypes of society.
Teenagers watch videos and learn that this is what sex is. That this is how it should be done. There’s no other comprehensive way to get contemporary and relevant sex information, and porn tubes are just a click away, with everything you can imagine. And a lot more than you could ever imagine or would even want to imagine. Especially if you’re a woman.
These portals work with clicks, and to get more clicks, you need content that’s increasingly shocking. Not necessarily because it arouses people or helps them reach orgasm, but because it draws attention, even in a negative way. Gradually, the viewer gets used to the content and desensitised, they get bored, so they click on something more and more extreme, even out of morbid curiosity.
The sex women want, and therefore pornography made by women for women, is far from what you can find for free on porn tubes.
If it’s not revenge porn illegally uploaded and distributed, mainstream pornography is performance. It’s a sex circus, of the kind that still showcases poor animals and makes them jump through flaming hoops. I’m not shaming sex workers, sex work is valuable. What we see in front of us is stunt work, dangerous and often painful.
Apart from the fact it takes a lot of effort and work to create what you see on the screen, a crew behind the cameras, tons of prep required, props, practice, drugs and lubricants, the most important thing is that the pleasure is not real. Even men’s pleasure is uncertain. But female pleasure is fake and female desire is irrelevant. Everything is done for the male gaze. Even sex between women is solely for the enjoyment of men.
The way women are portrayed is problematic. The way they are treated, terrifying. Teens learn that the absence of consent and the degradation and violence towards women are expected in sex, and don’t need to be discussed and agreed upon before the act.
It’s normalisation of women’s violence and abuse. The sexual activities presented as behavioural models, glorify stereotypical gender roles, male dominance and female submission, and leave out any expression of tenderness and affection.
Even worse, the female performer has to appear to thoroughly enjoy this treatment, because she’s a woman and that’s what she deserves, and of course she moans and groans and climaxes as soon as the man is on screen, regardless of whether his touch could ever make any woman cum. This is none of our business, it doesn’t concern us.
The woman is nothing more than the willing slave or the untamed virgin who resists to a degree, but finally succumbs because she doesn’t seem to have a choice, and then moans with supposed pleasure, to convince us that the horrible non-consensual sex we just saw, was so good that the she loves it even though at the beginning, she said no.
Jameela Jamil, British actress, show host and activist, has said on her podcast, I Weigh, that during the production of a BBC documentary on the effect of pornography on children, a high school student asked if a girl would eventually enjoy it if he raped her. It was not aired in order to protect the child.
What we see on porn tubes has nothing to do with women’s rape fantasies, or with women’s kinks. This type of pornography is not produced with the BDSM community in mind, and is not targeted to a female audience.
In BDSM, consent and boundaries are the beginning and end of every sexual encounter, whereas in conventional pornography, they are completely absent. In fact, women’s reluctance is preferable, and there are loopholes so that people actually feel like they’re watching a rape scene. Consent is irrelevant. It’s not BDSM, it’s violence, abuse and degradation without it being BDSM[1]. That’s the problem.
I wonder how you imagined sex before you came into contact with any pornographic material. And I’m not talking about sex in within romantic love, don’t get me wrong. Of course love and sex can coexist, but sex is something special in itself and it can be wonderful and magical and enjoyable in its own right. You don’t have to be in love with the woman you’re having sex with. But you do need to like her. You do need to want her to have fun. To feel okay. It can’t be hate-fucking or sex as a punishment because “she’s a slut and deserves to be treated as such”.
Meanwhile, the “slut who was asking for it” seems to be in the title of maybe half the clips on porn tubes. It’s pretty obvious where this leads. But that’s exactly what pornography teaches men.
Up until the 90s, in the before the internet times, everyone’s dream was to finish inside. Since 2009, there has been a steady decline in unintended teenage pregnancies, even though teenagers have been probably having more sex, and one of the reasons is that no one wanted to cum inside anymore. External ejaculation has been one of the most prevalent trends in pornography. The man ejaculates on the woman, on her face, chest or butt. This happens because the viewer needs to have some visual proof the male star has indeed climaxed, but when people see an act over and over and over, their brain adapts and they begin to think it’s what they want and like[2].
Pornography plays a big part in shaping what we want in sex,[3] especially if we start consuming it before we know what we want.[4] This renders healthy teen sexual exploration nearly impossible. And it’s not just the boys. Girls too learn how sex should be through pornography.
Australian research[5] on girls aged 14-19 points that those who consume pornographic videos were much more likely to be victims of sexual assault and abuse. Because they consider it “normal”.
A 2012 study[6] titled “The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents” found that adolescent pornography viewing was associated with behavioural changes such as accepting male dominance and female submission as the primary sexual role models, with women being viewed as willing sex toys to satisfy men’s sexual needs. It was also found that teenagers who watched violent porn had six times more aggressive sexual behaviour than those who were not exposed to it.
In the Australian research report “Don’t send me that pic” schoolgirls describe boys pressuring them into acts inspired by pornography. They are pressured to offer their bodies for boys to enjoy, because boys’ enjoyment is the only thing that counts in sex. Pleasing girls doesn’t even exist as a concept. The only indication of quality for sex is whether the boy had a good time.
Girls are under constant pressure to give boys what they want, adopting roles and behaviours that neither express nor satisfy them. Girls learn that they’re at the service of male satisfaction, and their role is limited to that of a plastic doll.
The report continues with a young girl saying she knows when a boy likes her, if he still talks to her after she has given him a blowjob. A boy is reported to have said to a girl that if she gives him a blowjob, he’ll give her a kiss. And all female students in the study mention the constant pressure they’re under from boys to send them nude photos, so that they (the boys) give them attention. Photos which they will then share with their friends to humiliate them.
Overall, girls report that boys act as if they have a right to their bodies, and that they’re there just to please them, in an air of resignation. “It is what it is”. They internalise the submissive pattern and tolerate humiliating, insulting and abusive behaviour they don’t want, because they think this is their only option if they want to have sexual relations with boys.
We say it’s about time we talked about the orgasm gap and it’s funny, because the gap is so much bigger, the gap is bigger than the Grand Canyon and it can’t be bridged by any finger. To say that porn culture reinforces rape culture is an understatement.
And let’s say you’re a woman and you happen to feel frisky, because women can get frisky too, even though that’s still considered shocking, so you’re feeling hot and bothered and you go on a porn tube (better to pay a subscription for ethical porn), and so often the horniness gets tangled with disgust, sadness and anger. It’s one of the reasons why many women prefer hentai or gay porn, because we can’t bear to identify with the female performer, to be disturbed by what she’s going through, to feel that she’s in pain.
Pornography is stories. Stories, because even a plain picture tells a story. Through stories in our heads we get aroused, through stories we learn how to get aroused. It’s how we learn to want sex. The question is, what kind of sex do we want?
[1] Vera-Gray, F., McGlynn, C., Kureshi, I. & Butterby, K. (2021). Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography.
[2] Osterman, M. J. K., Hamilton, B. E., Martin, J. A., Driscoll, A. K., & Valenzuela, C.P. (2022). Births: Final data for 2020 (National Vital Statistics Reports Volume 70, Number 17). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
[3] Kühn, S. & Gallinat, J. (2014). Brain structure and functional connectivity associated with pornography consumption: the brain on porn.
[4] Pace, S. (2014). Acquiring Tastes through Online Activity: Neuroplasticity and the Flow Experiences of Web Users.
[5] Don’t send me that pic, 2016 Report by Plan International Australia and Our Watch.
[6] Eric W. Owens, Richard J. Behun, Jill C. Manning & Rory C. Reid (2012). The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.