In the past, I have had a bunch of pretty positive things to say about porn.
Mea culpa.
To be clear, I have pretty positive things to say about some porn. I have nothing but positive feelings about AO3, pictures of hot naked people, the Best Women’s Erotica series, the Erogamer, porn comics, caption porn Tumblrs (RIP), the work produced by many independent camgirls, and the noble person who put every sex scene from Call Me By Your Name on Pornhub. But man, guys, mainstream video porn– the thing you get if you open up the tube sites and start scrolling– that stuff is actually pretty bad!
Now, in my defense, everyone else is entirely wrong about why it is bad. Criticism of mainstream video porn usually involves listing a bunch of sex acts I’ve done and then explaining that no real human being would ever do them. It is then explained that these acts are inherently degrading and objectifying and it is impossible to do them in a way that is respectful of other people’s personhood. The statistic that 88% of porn films include violence against women is thrown around, along with the fact that the women typically respond with pleasure. Finally, the explanation is wrapped up by explaining that all of this will lead to an epidemic of violence against women and porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Taking it from last to first: It is difficult to know how common erectile dysfunction is. One review suggests a prevalence of somewhere between 3% and 76.5%. Therefore, it is very difficult to know whether erectile dysfunction is increasing beyond the expected rate of increase due to aging. More young men may be going to their doctors complaining of erectile dysfunction, but this might simply be because the treatment for ED now is a pill instead of months of therapy. Of course, there have been some positive anecdotes of people who stopped using pornography and their erectile dysfunction went away; if you struggle with ED and want to try it, there doesn’t seem to be any harm. But it is very far from certain that there is any link between erectile dysfunction and porn use in the general population.
If porn causes an epidemic of sexual violence, it is difficult to explain why rates of sexual violence continue to fall during the largest expansion of porn use in history. Of course, it is possible that some other cause, such as a decline in the acceptability of rape, is making rape rates fall, and they would have fallen even faster without porn. More careful work should be done. (It’s a pity no one convinced PornHub to roll out to a random selection of US counties for a few years first.) But I think this does put a hard cap on how large the problem could possibly be, and suggests that we should not come to overly firm conclusions from short-term laboratory studies of exactly the sort that have been falling victim to the replication crisis.
If the woman enjoys and consents to the violence against her, that is not violence, it is BDSM. Most porn videos depicting BDSM is an interesting fact but not in and of itself a sign that anything has gone wrong.
Sex acts are not inherently degrading or objectifying. Degradation and objectification are attitudes that people have to other people, and you cannot ward them off by sticking exclusively to PIV and oral. If you can’t understand how someone could facefuck someone they like, the problem is your failure of imagination, not the pornography.
I assure you that people who are not porn stars have deepthroated dick, taken it up the ass, had various body parts come on, been double-penetrated, been fisted, and nearly everything else you think real people don’t do. (I must admit, however, that as far as I can tell you are right about double anal. I too am suspicious that this sex act has only ever been performed with a camera in the room.)
So I feel I had a very reasonable conclusion here that mainstream video porn was probably fine, because all the arguments against it are terrible.
But I think, having watched more of it, actually I was quite wrong, and there are legitimate concerns I have about it.
Contrast mainstream video porn with, say, fanfiction. We make fun of Horrifying Fanfiction Lube, but the average fanfiction sex scene, in an ordinary ship, where everyone involved is human beings and not space aliens or elves or omegas, is a reasonably accurate depiction of 95th percentile sexy sex. The sex is somewhat kinkier than most sex is; communication is more seamless; no one ever farts or loses their erection at an inopportune time; people instinctively know the best ways to touch each other and no one has to figure out how to gently redirect someone else away from slobbering on their neck. And of course the sex usually has far more of a role in the narrative arc than sex in real life ever does. But overall, the acts people perform, the kinds of feelings they have, the relationships they have with other people, all seem like things real people would do.
Most of the time, to the extent that it is inaccurate, it’s inaccurate in a direction where, all things considered, you’d prefer it to be inaccurate. For example, fanfiction has an unrealistically high percentage of married gay couples who use condoms and typically depicts significantly more prep for anal sex than people usually do. But normalizing condom use is a good thing. And it’s good for people who are trying anal for the first time to be very cautious and go very slow; they can switch to a more reasonable amount of prep once they have more experience.
(One thing fanfiction is definitely inaccurate about, much to my eternal disappointment, is the percentage of men who are gay.)
And the things that are inaccurate are more clearly marked as inaccurate. No one is surprised when it turns out that human males do not typically go into heat or have self-lubricating asses. And it’s very rare to look in the Spike/Buffy ship tag for a depiction of loving, consensual sex in a healthy relationship. I know people who have gotten themselves in trouble because they’ve been misled by fanfiction, but you do have to work at it.
Mainstream video porn, on the other hand…
Most obviously, sex acts are often depicted in a way that is actively unsafe. The most obvious example is not using condoms, obviously, and I don’t need to belabor that. But think about the way mainstream porn depicts anal. Horrifying Fanfiction Lube is one thing, but at least they’re aware that you need lube. In mainstream video porn, you get guys with enormous dicks just banging away immediately without any sort of preparation or working up to it or even starting off slowly so she can relax. In real life, this is a recipe not just for painful, unpleasant sex but for anal fissures.
But even that criticism– as well as the criticisms I discussed above– miss the most important problem with mainstream video porn, which is that all of the films are apparently shot, directed, and starred in by bizarre sex aliens.
As far as I can tell, there’s very little foreplay, particularly if you require that your foreplay involve touching and caressing and exclude oral sex. There’s strikingly little kissing, and very little talking. Surprisingly often, sex begins by a woman stripping naked without a man touching her, dropping to her knees, and giving him a blowjob, without any sort of preliminaries. No one uses condoms or discusses birth control or testing. Strange and acrobatic sexual positions are depicted. At the end, he either pulls out and comes on her face, or comes inside her and then she squeezes the come out in a very unusual fashion. No one cuddles.
Now, I don’t mean to say that people don’t do those things. Obviously, people have unprotected sex without talking or kissing or touching, or where they strip naked instead of taking each other’s clothes off, engage in almost no non-genital sexual activities, use uncomfortable sex positions, and then end with a facial or the squeezy come thing and no cuddles. Some people even do all of those things. But I think the combination of all of those things is actually very very rare, while in porn it is a plurality of the videos available. It is not that any individual thing depicted is that strange, but collectively they give the impression that no one involved in creating porn has ever actually had sex with a human being.
What is worse, I think, is the absence of feelings or relationships. As far as I can tell, in video porn, sex typically consists solely of genitals being combined in various ways with orifices. It is quite difficult to work out what anyone’s opinion of the situation is, although you can extrapolate that presumably people think orgasms are nice. No one is unhappy and being comforted, or ecstatic about getting to have sex with someone so hot, or hopelessly in love, or trusting that their partner won’t hurt them when they try something new, or any of the other things that people sometimes feel about sex. In particular, it is quite hard to figure out what the people involved seem to think of each other. Rarely do the people involved seem to like each other, or dislike each other, or really have any sort of opinion of each other at all. In Bizarre Sex Alien Land, people typically have sex with people they’re completely neutral about.
This is even more appalling, in my opinion, than the first thing. Uncomfortable sex positions are a thing some people like, but it is actually extraordinarily rare to have sex where you have no emotions about the sex or the person whatsoever. Mainstream video porn leaves out a lot of what makes sex different from– and better than– masturbation. It’s a systematically inaccurate depiction of what sex is like.
Now, you might say that porn is intended as a masturbatory aid, not sex education, and sex education should be in schools. This is true as far as it goes. But I think proponents of this idea have failed to consider the sheer awkwardness of having education in middle-school health class about how most people typically kiss and touch each other extensively before they begin oral sex. This is really not the sort of lesson you want to have from your gym teacher. And while perhaps many people should read a good sex advice book before they begin having sex, most people won’t.
And, even setting that aside, I do think that watching a lot of mainstream video pornography is going to have an effect on your sexual script. How could it not? You have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours watching people do a thing. You may have few other sources of information of how it is done; you may never have done it yourself. Even if you know porn is inaccurate, where are you going to learn what sex is really like?
Of course, many people are sophisticated consumers of media, capable of separating reality from fiction. But mainstream video porn does not present itself as a ludicrous fantasy. It presents itself as a documentary of normal people having sex. And while viewers may be able to recognize that penises are not normally that large and women have pubic hair and you should use condoms, are they going to be able to recognize literally every way that porn is inaccurate?
I do not have hard data that suggests problems related to this. The generation that grew up with unlimited streaming video porn is still quite young. But I do not think it is at all unreasonable for sex-positive feminists to be concerned, and I wish that porn-critical discussions would move away from inaccurate statistics and slut-shaming and towards a more real discussion of the problems with pornography.
Tulip said:
Does it really present itself as a documentary of normal people having sex? Granted, I watch relatively little mainstream live-action video porn, because I tend to find it somewhat boring, but my impression from what I have seen is that a lot of it involves, like… sets which are blatantly engineered to be easy to film in rather than to look like normal people’s homes or other sex-having spots? Clothing which prioritizes being easy to remove on camera over being what most people actually wear? (See e.g. the frequent absence of underwear.) Camera-people sometimes straight-up talking to the characters? Et cetera. With everything surrounding the sex being so clearly unrealistic, I’m not sure what’s supposed to lead a viewer to think that the sex itself is any more realistic.
Maybe all of that is far more ignorable if one is more interested in the sex part and thus more willing to suspend disbelief. I don’t really know. But, to my mind, the format tends to display the fakeness of its trappings sufficiently blatantly that I have trouble seeing it as at all documentary-ish. Or at least, to stretch the metaphor a bit, it parses less as a wildlife documentary and more as a documentary about zoo animals? Set in a clearly artificial environment, with the documented parties clearly having very different lives and habitual activities than they likely would in a non-artificial environment.
(Which isn’t really a counter to your point, because even if it’s clearly telegraphed as Not Realistic it’s still potentially going to give its watchers a bunch of cached ideas about sex that they don’t bother to question in more realistic contexts, especially if the genre doesn’t contain a sufficient amount of more-realistic material for contrast. But it leaves me less worried than you seem to be about people not realizing it’s unrealistic.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
megaemolga said:
Noone watches porn and thinks it’s a documentary. The premise of this article is ridiculous concern trolling
LikeLike
alawisgreene said:
>What is worse, I think, is the absence of feelings or relationships. […] Rarely do the people involved seem to like each other, or dislike each other, or really have any sort of opinion of each other at all. In Bizarre Sex Alien Land, people typically have sex with people they’re completely neutral about.
I wonder if this accounts for the popularity of incest porn.
No, seriously. Look on the front page of, e.g. pornhub. Most videos are of strangers having sex. The only exception to this are the incest and cuckoldry videos.
LikeLike
renato said:
I never understood why the incest videos are so popular, but I’m not sure if the idea of having a clear(er) relationship described is what makes them so popular.
Most of them are just a non-incest video renamed as incest, and the relationships shown are as deep as in some other videos, e.g., teacher-student or some other role-playing fetishes.
I thought it was just a way to make it easier to tell something about the performers involved, for example the mention of (step-)mom[dad] would mean a older woman[man] and that the other is younger.
But, seeing it still being very popular in other forms like written porn makes me feel like it might be a more popular fetish than people would admit.
LikeLike
hf said:
Not unless the parent comment (ha) is somewhat confusingly phrased. I found girlfriend, roommate, and various others that implied a relationship.
Also – while I’d describe this less as good news and more as a mitigating factor – two of the three with ‘mom’ in the title actually said ‘step-mom’. (That was the only sign of your last type, btw, at least on a cursory inspection.)
LikeLike
Nancy Lebovitz said:
Do you have any theories about what such an impoverished version of sex is so popular?
LikeLike
Nancy Lebovitz said:
Sorry, I meant *why* such an impoverished version of sex is so popular?
LikeLike
anonymous-for-this-purpose said:
I heard from some article somewhere that the no-interaction-only-sex character of video porn came along with the rise of internet video — that empirically if someone was going to go to the effort of _renting a tape_ they would appreciate it being long and have some patience for some amount of plot, but for the video streaming audience, what sells the best is sex-right-now. I imagine this is because the typical viewer has already gotten _themselves_ horny and the next step for them is ‘add porn’.
Other unsupported-by-evidence thoughts:
• It’s harder to successfully advertise being nuanced than to advertise being extreme.
• Perhaps if you want to sell something labeled porn, you’ve got to put a high density of sex in it, or you’re not keeping up with your market competitors and the largest-and-loudest vocal audience segment.
• Perhaps the people who are looking for “feelings or relationships” will, given the choice imposed by stigma/bans, go for plots without (onscreen) sex rather than sex without plot, and thus will go for the regular movies instead of the porn, so the porn market is self-selected oppositely.
LikeLike
hf said:
Your main point easily accounts for the ‘in medias res’ porn, but does nothing to address the kind that bothers to show the beginning of sex.
LikeLike
megaemolga said:
People watch porn to masturbate. And most porn viewers don’t need emotional intimacy or realistic sex to masturbate
LikeLike
loving-not-heyting said:
i think that sex scenes in movies are supposed to largely play the role of tutoring young people about the emotional aspects of sexual encounters? so there might be a sort of division of labour: movie scenes teach everything up to the point of undressing and after climax, porn takes over the middle bit.
this is still not encouraging but not quite to the extent you seem to be envisioning.
LikeLiked by 1 person
loving-not-heyting said:
(also i like tulip lack much experience with traditional live-action porn and tend to fin d it dull the few times i’ve ever tried it, so i can’t comment too much on its actual contents and have to trust you there)
LikeLike
hf said:
“Supposed” by who? (Mild nudity.) The actual guidance they’ve hitherto gotten from self-appointed ‘society’ has been ultra-bourgeois, somewhat Roman Catholic (though less so as we move away from the Breen Code), and only reluctantly accepts sex at all.
The actual purpose, in the eyes of the Film Rating Board, is training ‘good’ people to be upper middle class.
LikeLike
themarquis said:
“If the woman enjoys and consents to the violence against her, that is not violence, it is BDSM. Most porn videos depicting BDSM is an interesting fact but not in and of itself a sign that anything has gone wrong.”
I think you’re missing something here. AFAIK (I don’t consume much porn or partake in BDSM), porn rarely depicts communication of boundaries/safewords/all the other stuff you need to do BDSM safely. To me, this seems more dangerous than depicting unsafe (lack of) use of condoms/lube, because the failure state of unsafe BDSM is rape.
LikeLike
megaemolga said:
This assumes that everyone watching porn is a complete idiot or sexually active child
LikeLike
Protagoras said:
So, I have to confess that I prefer porn with some of the features that are criticized here. I find foreplay exciting when engaged in it, but quite boring to watch. Similarly for romance and relationship stuff (I can get interested in that in entertainment if I get to know the characters involved enough to care about them, but I don’t and don’t want to watch porn long enough for that to happen). Of course, the main argument here is that these problematic features of porn may be a bad influence on the impressionable youth, which is not my demographic, but I am very suspicious of arguments based on hypothetical effects on impressionable youth. Too much nonsense has been defended on that basis. So I tend not to take such arguments seriously unless backed by robust, replicated research.
LikeLike
Ghatanathoah said:
Whenever I check Pornhub I notice that there are always some free videos that are as Ozy describes. Sometimes, however, I come across longer videos that are obviously extended versions that go into much more detail both in terms of acts and positions, but also in terms of the amount of dialogue, foreplay, and backstory given before the sex begins. They are often 3-6 times longer than the shorter video, 30-60 minutes instead of 5 or 10. The shorter videos tend to be book ended with ads promising more if you pay for it at a website. I suspect based on their rarity that the long versions are not authorized uploads.
From this I came to the conclusion that the majority of free porn is the equivalent of an extended movie trailer. Paid porn sites are where you get porn with a lot of the stuff Ozy thinks is missing. Although they seem to still have a lot of the improbable positions, which seem designed to make it easier to view the performer’s bodies while the sex act is proceeding.
Is my impression mistaken? If not, it’s still a problem that the vast majority of people who are unwilling to pay for porn only have access to condensed sex scenes, but at least we know that the producers aren’t Weird Sex Aliens.
LikeLiked by 1 person
megaemolga said:
Porn hub mostly consists of clips taken from pirated porn videos. Pornhub is the equivalent of taking all the action scenes from movies and uploading them to a single site
LikeLike
hf said:
While some of the post feels overstated, there’s a supporting point I want to add:
YouTube claims that actual research of search terms on a porn website shows ‘romantic’ at or near the top of the list in popularity. If so, this would mean that porn producers are neglecting or under-supplying a real demand. It would in fact be evidence of Mafia control of the industry, or at least of a small clique in charge who don’t want to change their behavior.
LikeLike
anonim said:
That assumes that porn works like a normal market, with consumers paying suppliers of the videos. In fact, the porn sites this post discusses are free and much of their content is either posted to advertise full videos for sale elsewhere or just pirated, so the people who upload videos aren’t incentivized to provide the things people want the most; I think these sites look more or less the way you’d expect them to look given the relevant incentives. I suspect this may also have caused people who want romantic porn enough to pay for it to look for it somewhere other than free porn sites.
LikeLike
Bobbocio said:
Clearly Ozy and I read different fanfiction. What I read never has condoms, or lube. I’m trying to think of a condom ever being mentioned in anything I’ve read, and I’m coming up blank. I remember one story having a disclaimer about it, saying in real life people should use condoms. That’s it.
LikeLike
megaemolga said:
I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed I have never scene a fanfiction that ever depicted sex in a realistically I’m not sure what fanfiction their reading
LikeLike
blacktrance said:
Also, why aren’t porn actresses more attractive? If there’s one industry where that matters, this is it, but there are surprisingly many who are below average for their age, and few look better than the 95th-percentile person on the street. Presentation is part of it, but they seem to be aiming for the platonic porn aesthetic rather than for actually looking good.
Might there be a neglected audience for attractive people in arousing scenarios having enthusiastic sex?
(Where enthusiastic does not mean “donkey braying in background”.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
loving-not-heyting said:
I doubt it matters all that much? Straight men have a reputation for “low standards” about attractiveness of partners, especially when sexually excited, so after a certain threshold of consensus attractiveness I would pretheoretically expect to see a sharply diminishing rate of returns for the porn industry, and thus a lack of incentive for more consensus attractive actresses.
You could also just have unusual tastes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
blacktrance said:
I probably do. But typically, saying that someone looks like a porn star is not meant as a compliment.
LikeLike
Anon said:
Maybe it’s lack of good filters. Perhaps a lot of porn with top 5% attractive people exists, but even more with less than top 5% attractive people exists and the attention isn’t allocated effectively.
Also if there’s other constraints, like the hardcore BDSM, humiliation etc. I prefer, maybe total supply isn’t big enough to target only top 5% attractiveness.
LikeLike
Lee Ratner said:
My guess is that despite some changes, the biggest watchers of porn are still heterosexual men. If that is where you are going to be making most of your money from, you should give your audience what they want.
LikeLike
Aceso Under Glass said:
People who are >95th percentile attractive can often get a better job than porn.
LikeLike
Baehet said:
I’m gonna extrapolate some of my own feelings on this into broader ideas.
The question is, how is it consumed? Do viewers construct an inner narrative, do they self-insert (hurhur aside, more narrative from the medium itself could then break immersion)?
Moreover, constructing an emotional narrative through text is a lot easier than on film, as porn actors aren’t recruited for those particular talents (probably also why most porn with narrative is either a daily life vignette or a cheesy parody).
Finally, might it also be a self-esteem thing? I assume the most avid porn consumers aren’t winners at life, so a rollercoaster of feelings might actually feel like a painful confrontation with lack of that IRL, or feel unrealistic (no-one could ever see me that way!), versus the basic porn plot of terminal horniness or some external motivating factor for the sex (a favour, blackmail, revenge on a cheating ex) which renders the personal qualities of the dude obsolete beyond being an available wang.
You could compare the last one as an inverse to all the bodice rippers that are in fantastic settings: a more realistic setting might also be immersion breaking.
LikeLike
megaemolga said:
“I assume the most avid porn consumers aren’t winners at life, so a rollercoaster of feelings ”
Most people watch porn It’s inaccurate to view porn as something only weirdo’s do
LikeLike
megaemolga said:
In other words the porn I like is good the porn you like is bad. Porn is held by a different standard to all forms of media. Most entertainment we consume is unrealistic to some degree. But only porn is expected to be a perfect representation of reality or else it is somehow damaging people.
“But I think proponents of this idea have failed to consider the sheer awkwardness of having education in middle-school health class about how most people typically kiss and touch each other extensively before they begin oral sex.”
Watching a porn video in class full of strangers isn’t any less awkward. Besides no other form of entertainment is expected to be educational by default neither should porn.
“And, even setting that aside, I do think that watching a lot of mainstream video pornography is going to have an effect on your sexual script. How could it not?”
If the sex in porn is unimaginatively bad why would anyone copy it? Normal human beings usually learn from trial and error. If someone watches porn copies what they see and doesn’t like it their not likely to repeat it again. If your concern is for unsafe sex practices. That’s going to happen regardless of the widespread existence of porn.
“You have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours watching people do a thing. You may have few other sources of information of how it is done; you may never have done it yourself. Even if you know porn is inaccurate, where are you going to learn what sex is really like?”
Teenagers were not sex experts before porn. Teenagers are not going to be sex experts after porn. People learn to have good sex from trial and error. You can educate people about safer sex practices but knowing how to engage in pleasurable sex is something a person can only learn from experience
“Of course, many people are sophisticated consumers of media, capable of separating reality from fiction. But mainstream video porn does not present itself as a ludicrous fantasy. It presents itself as a documentary of normal people having sex.”
What porn have you been watching? No porn presents itself as documentary. Porn performers are called performers for a reason.
“And while viewers may be able to recognize that penises are not normally that large and women have pubic hair and you should use condoms, are they going to be able to recognize literally every way that porn is inaccurate?”
Why would they need to. It’s one thing to educate people about consent and safer sex practices. It’s another thing to expect everyone to be sex experts. That is completely unnecessary and pointless
LikeLike
Donovan Carper said:
You are spot on and there is hard data in the medical literature to support you: https://dchealthtrendsandevidence.com/index.php/2020/05/24/how-porn-is-wrecking-our-sex-lives-and-more-current-evidence/
LikeLike