Many of our opponents argue that porn has little influence on behavior. The blogger GruntDoc, for example, claims “these images are harmless. No image has ever gotten up off a page and caused harm to anyone.”
Let’s check in with Jezebel on the subject. Jezebel is a busy website devoted to “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion. Without airbrushing”. It’s a Gawker property and hardly a bastion of anti-porn sentiment. Here are excerpts from a December 12 post, “How About You Don’t Ask To Come On My Face On The First Date?”, followed by selected comments from Jezebel readers.
A year or two ago a college kid I know started dating a film student. The first time they had sex, very early into the relationship, he asked if he could come on her face. Ewww! I wasn’t really surprised at this anecdote, since boys her age have, realistically, been watching internet porn since they were nine years old…
…”they don’t think sex is ‘good’ unless it’s somehow fetish-y,” explains one of the younger Jezebels…
We all know it is true: porn is doing to sex what scotch is doing to your liver…
This post generated 300+ comments. Here are a few:
Taylay: related: i’m not gonna moan while sucking your dick. i do not mind doing it, and i will even do it enthusiastically. but i am not going to moan like it is doing anything for me, because it isn’t.
“but they always moan in movies”
UGH.
Sinisterrouge: If you can come on my face can I shit on your eye? Come on my back on my ass and even on my titties is fun and welcome. But coming on my face is just insulting!
Yidvicious: Much as I hate to bust out Naomi Wolf in conversation, this has to be said: “Today, real naked women are just bad porn.” (source: some New York magazine article.) I’m happy to say I’m old enough to remember when having a full bush didn’t qualify you for the specialty section of the Adam & Eve catalog…
Rosemaryf: …I am fully convinced porn is the reason guys always try for anal. ALWAYS.
Jessiramsey: The second time I ever had sex( the first time it wasn’t painful), at one point my boyfriend at the time stopped, got up and went to his computer to watch some porn and pull up websites to see other things we could try.
Sirsnarksalot: I also blame porn for the lovely between the leg depiltory trend we are all expected to follow. It’s frigging RARE to find a man who has seen a full bush (sorry for the vulgarity) and it really makes me wonder about the fetishizing of young girls these days.
Xylo: …A couple of decades ago, when I was a “junior” in a rape crisis centre/women’s shelter, a 40-something woman came in one night in an emergency after being beaten up by her husband for not being willing to do stuff he saw in porn films. I remember thinking as I hustled back and forth with pots of tea and crackers for her and her counselor, “This can only get worse, there is no going back for us once the violent stuff REALLY starts to circulate.”
Mcemmie: A friend of mine told me a story about how she and her friend hooked up with these two guys. When my friend later complained about the bizarre grab/slap motion her guy did to her boobs, her friend was all “no way! my guy did that too.” They concluded that the men had watched the same bad porno, and thought that was what women liked…
Entonces: …the problem with the porn-sex is there’s no genuine ENTHUSIASM, just yicky I-don’t-wash-my-own-underwear-ification…
Hushnowcharlotte: …Facials are not sexy to me and they never have been. They’ve uncomfortable (because it inevitably gets into your eye, and hurts so bad for like an hour) and they’re a big hassle (because it gets into your hair, is difficult to clean off without rubbing more into your eye, etc.)…
Trixie from Toronto: Porn HAS ruined sex for the younger generations. I have been conducting my own anthropological study, talking to friends and relatives and drawing on my own recent experience, and I have found the following.
If a man is under 35, the woman is:
1. Expected to be stripped bare of all hair except on the head.
2. Expected to offer up their anus almost immediately for bum-fucking.
3. Expected to be very skinny with big tits.
4. Expected to be a filthy-dirty sex talker.
Honestly, I am sticking with men my own age and older. And I truly, truly fear for my poor 17-year-old daughter.
Lfw1031: …Everything has to be choreographed now and everything has to be porn-i-fied.
Whynotshesaid: I find it interesting that the porn lovers I’ve had sex with have all ranged from mediocre to terrible when it came to sex, but that the one guy I’ve been with (my current BF) who never watched porn is also the one who rocks my fucking world, so to speak.
I know there is a connection there. I’m sure it has something to do with what I call the Richard Christie effect (cast member from the Howard Stern show). That dude refused to have sex with real women, instead choosing to jack off to porn (because real women were gross). Yet when it came time to talk about sex, Richard Christie was all up in the conversation talking about how “women like that” because he saw it in porn.
Thinking real women are gross + thinking that porn actresses actually get off in their movies = BAD AT SEX.
Josh1701: …Taking care of business with porn was never as satisfying as doing the real thing. I could go days between the real thing and be perfectly happy. With porn, I felt like I had to take care of business twice a day…
Whynotshesaid: I consider myself to be a very sexual person, plus I’m very experimental and open-minded. (Done threeways, group sex, even tried the poly thing for a year and a half – what a fucking disaster that was!) The problem isn’t that these guys are into doing it because it feels good, they are into doing it because they saw it in porn and that’s what they think sex is all about. Now sex isn’t good unless it’s like porn, which is like saying real life isn’t good unless it’s like a movie. Both are unrealistic and childish expectations that can ruin what are perfectly good experiences.
Sarahmc: Men are so focussed on what’s happening in porn, they are no longer able to get hot over the living, breathing woman right in front of them. Porn has completely skewed men’s expectations of sex, of women, of relationships…
It scares me to realize that a lot of guys want to fuck you ’cause they hate you, not ’cause they think you’re sexy…
My ex-husband loved to talk about how he wanted to fuck his hot young female coworkers that annoyed him, like it was some sort of punishment or something.
It always made me wonder what he thought about sex with me.
Again, I think that it is no surprise that the hottest sex of my life happens with a guy who has no interest in porn.
Teapartys_over: …it creeps me out that SO MUCH porn is about the facial cum shot. It’s basically like, look at me degrading this woman. Why is that sexy to so many men? *shudder*
Kityglitr: For the record, I’m in agreement that porn has created a subsect of men who have no idea at all what real sex is and what a real woman’s body looks and feels like. I think what’s just as scary is that now young women are starting to think that in order to even be considered a sexual creature, they have to stick silicone in their chests, excise all body hair, and do/say stuff that makes them unhappy and uncomfortable. Bad. Stuff.
Yidvicious: The issue isn’t whether some women do or do not like anal, being come on, etc., and it’s not even whether those things are intrinsically fucked up or degrading. The issue is that guys now feel entitled to all these things straight off the bat — and that, undoubtedly, is the influence of porn.
Whynotshesaid: …I personally don’t care what anyone wants to or doesn’t want to do on the first date. If you want to have an orgy with strap-ons and swings and rubber mats, cool, I don’t really care. What I do care is that a) people are at least respectful, which means asking, and b) that men stop expecting that every woman they have sex with be all kinkstered-out and when they aren’t, thinking that the woman is frigid or bad in bed. I got that shit all the time
in my last relationship, despite the fact that I was up for just about anything as it was, and I think it’s fucked up that those kind of expectations are already showing up on first dates.
Whynotshesaid: …I can’t get down with people being all, oh, nonconsensual sex is fine because I was it into it when it happened to me! Any self-respecting kinko knows that consent is the most important aspect of having sex like this. If you don’t get it and you’re doing this stuff anyway, then you aren’t kinky, you are just a fucking asshole.
Sarahmc: It’s obviously affecting people’s real sex lives. Women are telling their stories right here. I know a few people who work in sex shops and they can attest to the popularity of misogynist porn/rape porn. Guys’ expectations have definitely changed, and real women are the ones who have to deal with that ish…
When men say “They do it in porn!” to try getting what they want during sex, you can assume porn has had an influence on his expectations.
Trixie from Toronto: …It is the sense of entitlement and the dismay displayed by some of the men I have heard about — including one I briefly dated — when you aren’t a ready to look and behave like a porn star right off the bat. It’s fucked up. It’s like sex as performance art…
Skinny Bone Jones: …If media exposure can be considered this vast, overwhelming factor in issues like eating disorders, weight obsession, conceptions of beauty, etc. – things we discuss here everyday – then that EXACT SAME LOGIC must apply in a unique way to porn, the volume difference with which men consume it vs. women, etc…
Belbel: …the first boyfriend I had sex with: “Why don’t your boobs stay on your chest like grapefruits when you lie down? What do you mean you’re not into cumshots? That’s what they look like in the moooovies.” We broke up. He still doesn’t understand why. To porn’s defense, he was obvs a bit dense.
Trixiebelden: …My issue with porn, or rather, the guys who watch it, is when you get downright addicted to the point where you can barely have sex at all. Not so long ago I dated that guy. We had sex to completion on the first date and he wasn’t able to keep it up for any length of time for the following three months. He refused to discuss it for any length of time and man, I was so happy to have sex again when we broke up.
Dulcinea: …I don’t want to feel like a poor substitute for porn. More importantly, I can’t get off feeling like a poor substitute for porn. The idea that porn is what sex aspires to, rather than the other way round, is deep in my head, and I think it’s deeper in the heads of most of the men I know.
Spicevicious: …i remember being made to feel like i was crazy and frumpy because i would not dress like a stripper, nor would i agree to have a threesome with an ex’s stripper crush. he even went so far as to take me to an art gallery where pictures of her pleasuring herself were on prominent display…
Sallybrown: …I recently had the displeasure of meeting and dating a Dickweed Douchewad who insisted that he would only come if he could come in my mouth. Otherwise he was NOT coming — unless he could come on my face. WTF? He insisted that other girls let him do it and that he didn’t watch a lot of porn (yeah right). I refused…so he never came.
DD also asked me during the the second time we hung out whether I “did anal.” Not that I’m pissed about someone asking me what I’m into, but the whole “do anal” part….ugh. I’m not a porn star…I don’t “do” things.
I should have run away after that, yes, yes.
This boy was 34, by the way. I think some men are just creepy. But porn just makes these creepy men think they’re within their rights to expect that women would like men spewing jizz on their faces (or mouths).
Kataroo_kangaroo: HOLY CRAP ITS NOT JUST ME. I started dating a 34 year old man, and if it’s not “dirty fucking” then, well, it’s nothing. I mean, seriously, what about, um, intimacy? I’m glad I’m not the only one experiencing this phenom.
Msmoneypenny: Can I add to the list of things that men think women like due to porn: using one’s tongue and violently shaking one’s head like you’re a wet dog drying yourself. What the hell? Please stop doing this move.
Bowleserised: The other thing about the porn-inspired fuckery – the kind of dude who thinks porn sex translates exactly into good, real-life sex is also the kind who, when you tell him it’s not working, tells you you’re wrong.
Grrrrrrrr.
See also:
Improv Resource Center: True Porn Clerk Stories (explicit language)
A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my “whatever floats your boat” policy…
I don’t understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time…
A Review of Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
Many of Paul’s interview subjects said porn use made them more judgmental of their real-life sex partners. One thrice-divorced 34-year-old subject, who had been watching porn since age 10, said that he would break up with any woman who wouldn’t give him the kind of pleasure he saw men getting in porn films. If the woman takes too long to reach orgasm, or doesn’t enjoy swallowing semen, she’s history. (pp.92-93) Other young men said they wanted their girlfriends to be “slutty” and submissive. (p.94)
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Raunch culture is particularly cruel to teen girls, who feel pressure to perform before they can even understand their own desires. The girls Levy interviewed, mainly students at elite high schools, seemed perpetually distracted by the competition to “dress the skankiest” and rack up the greatest number of conquests, in order to gain status in their female peer group. (p.152) Sex and beauty were about power, not pleasure. In fact, some sexually active girls repressed feelings of arousal in order to avoid vulnerability.
Maggie Hays of Against Pornography: My Story (explicit language)
While I was in junior high school, I could sometimes overhear the boys’ conversations when they were talking about the latest porn videos they’d been watching at home, comments such as “You seen that girl in the porn movie; she had one dick in her pussy and another in her ass.” And they were all laughing. Other times, boys were using pornographic scenarios to terrorize us as girls — and, in some cases, to “shut us up.” This went from telling us what they had seen in a porn movie — things like “Hey, I saw this film yesterday. In it, there was a girl with a cock in her cunt, one in her ass, and one in her mouth at the same time.” — to telling us pornographic stories they invented with us and them included in this stuff they were saying, like “You suck my dick,” “I take you up the ass,” etc… This was pretty degrading but, still, the only word I could think of was “dirty.”
Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn Confuses
Young Men about How to Behave
My name is Jackson Katz, and I’m the founder of a group called Real Men, which is an anti-sexist men’s group. The purpose of our group is to get men to start taking responsibility for the outrageous level of sexism and sexual harassment and sexual violence and all forms of violence against women in society. I’m also a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education…
I travel around the country and speak to college audiences, both male and female, and mixed audiences, and one thing I find over and over again, in frank discussions, is that pornography is extremely influential in the lives of young boys growing up today, and girls, but specifically I speak to guys. This blizzard of images of women in degrading and humiliating positions, guys just come to think of that as normal.
There was an article in the New York Times last week about sexual harassment in schools, how there’s a whole new area of litigation that’s opening up with young girls who are sexually harassed. If you read that article on the front page of the Times last week, you’ll find that guys are saying that they don’t know what to do, what they can do and what they can’t do, what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. As I read that, I said to myself, it’s obvious where they’re learning on one level what is and what isn’t acceptable. In other words, you could take some of the dialogue out of these kids’ mouths right out of a discussion of pornography that I’ve had on numerous occasions.
Canada: Rural Teens Even More Likely to View Porn than Urban; Parents, Sex Ed Somewhat Oblivious to Childrens’ Porn Viewing Habits
A total of 429 students aged 13 and 14 from 17 urban and rural schools across Alberta, Canada, were surveyed anonymously about if, how and how often they accessed sexually explicit media content on digital or satellite television, video and DVD and the Internet. Ninety per cent of males and 70 per cent of females reported accessing sexually explicit media content at least once. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count”, compared to eight per cent of the girls surveyed.
American Association of University Women
According to the report [“Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School (2001)”], based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students in 8th through 11th grades conducted by Harris Interactive:
- 83% of girls and 79% of boys report having ever experienced harassment.
- The number of boys reporting experiences with harassment often or occasionally has increased since 1993 (56% vs. 49%), although girls are still somewhat more likely to experience it.
- For many students sexual harassment is an ongoing experience: over 1 in 4 students experience it “often.”
Question
ok, i am 15 years old and i have a bf that is 19…in the past year or so, i have noticed that he has been watching alot of porn…every time i catch it on his computer we get into a huge argument and i really hate it. he doesnt feel bad about it at all while im makeing a huge fuss out of it because i feel as if he is looking at other women because i am not good enough. he tells me its not like that at all, that it is just a quick way to get his urge over with…should i be upset or just let him continue to do it and let myself get hurt?
Answer
…Unfortunately porn has become something that is more and more accepted in the world today. Men, and some women, think it is something to be thought of as “normal” and acceptable and even healthy! Nothing could be further from the truth… Porn is as addictive as some drugs. This is because an orgasm releases the exact same chemicals in the pleasure center of the brain that heroin does…
Young New Yorkers Talk about Porn’s Effect on their Relationships (explicit language)
Over beers recently, a 26-year-old businessman friend shocked me by casually remarking, “Dude, all of my friends are so obsessed with Internet porn that they can’t sleep with their girlfriends unless they act like porn stars.” A 20-year-old college student who bartends at a popular Soho lounge describes how an I-porn-filled adolescence shaped his perceptions of sex. “Looking at Internet porn was pretty much my sex education,” he says. “I mean, in school, it was just, ‘Here’s a gigantic wooden dildo, and now we’re putting a condom on it,’ whereas on the Internet, you had it all. I remember the first time I had sex, my first thought as it was happening was, Oh, this is pornography. It was a kind of out-of-body experience. I was really uncomfortable with sex for a while…”
The Creation of a Pornography Addiction
“In a majority of my cases, the earlier the exposure to pornography, the deeper the client’s level of addiction. In most cases I see involvement with pornography starting between ages ten to fourteen… [C]hildren and teenagers are faced with sexual decisions before they fully understand the consequences of their own sexual behaviors.”
Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution, Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs
In 2002, researchers reported in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy their findings from analyzing a sample of 100 personal letters posted to 4 different Internet message boards by spouses, fiancés, and girlfriends of men perceived to be heavily involved in pornography. The sample was taken between November 1999 and September 2000. “Analysis of women’s letters posted online revealed two themes regarding pornography consumption and its impact on sexual desire. First, many of the women believed they were no longer sexually attractive to their partners and this was the reason why sexual relations had diminished. Secondly, in relationships where sexual relations had continued despite the partner’s pornography use, women believed they were viewed more as sexual objects than real people in the relationship…”
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: “Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing… caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, ‘Gosh, you look pretty’, not, ‘Slut bitch, come over here,’ that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.”
The Impact of Internet Pornography on Marriage and the Family: A Review of the Research
…according to data from the General Social Survey in 2000 (N = 531), people who report being happily married are 61 percent less likely to report using Internet pornography compared to those who also used the Internet and who had completed the General Social Survey in 2000…
…the following observations were made by [the 350 attendees of the November 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers] polled with regard to why the Internet had played a role in divorces that year…56 percent of the divorce cases involved one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites…
Whitty (2003) also found that both men and women perceive online sexual activity as an act of betrayal that is as authentic and real as offline acts and that Internet pornography use correlated significantly with emotional infidelity (N = 1,117; 468 males and 649 females)…
“Spousal Use of Pornography and Its Clinical Significance for Asian-American Women”
Many female participants in the study by Bridges et al. (2003) noted a diminution in their partner’s sexual desire for them and believed that their partners had come to prefer the pornographic models to them… They reported a decline in the intimacy of their relationship, a diminished sense of their partner’s commitment to them, strong feelings that their partners failed utterly to respect them or understand their emotional distress concerning the pornography, and lastly, a sense that they were living a shameful lie by presenting themselves to others as a loving and committed couple… More often than not, the woman blames herself for losing her partner to his pornographic interest. She believes that if she were a ‘good’ enough woman, she would have been able to keep her husband’s attentions and affections and her loss would never have occurred…
Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values; Women’s Desire to Have Daughters Plummets
Pornography consumption had a most powerful effect on evaluations of the desirability and viability of marriage. Endorsement of marriage as an essential institution dropped from 60.0% in the control groups to 38.8% in the treatment groups…
Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and the Death Spiral of a Marriage
…we would have incredible arguments with each other. I would tell him I loved him, I only wanted to love him, I wanted to be a good wife, I wanted our marriage to work, but I didn’t want to be with these other people. It was he I wanted to be with, and no one else. He told me if I loved him I would do this. And that, as I could see from the things that he read me in the magazines initially, a lot of times women didn’t like it, but if I tried it enough I would probably like it, and I would learn to like it. And he would read me stories where women learned to like it.
Laurie Hall, An Affair of the Mind
Over the years, I’ve spoken with other women who have had similar experiences. They tried extra hard to be attractive to their husbands; but the year-after-year battering of constant comparisons with other women and the continual attack on their desirability as a sexual partner wounded their spirits to such a point that they gave up and became the exact opposite of the firm, gorgeous, beautifully made-up women their husbands kept trying to force them to become. Ironic, isn’t it, how pornography creates the exact opposite in real life of what it promises in fantasy life?
Sexual Ecology: Porn, Promiscuity, and AIDS (explicit language)
Rotello observes that all infectious diseases are ecological. The human behavioral environment is as important a factor as the biological properties of the virus…
Today’s mainstream heterosexual porn…promotes rates of partner change (“50 Guy Cream Pie”) that are far beyond what any society has considered sustainable for sexual health. The one community that adopted this porn myth on a massive scale–gay men in developed countries–was hit with a devastating epidemic within a generation. Nonetheless, porn continues to hold out extreme promiscuity as the universal and natural state of male sexuality, so central to male identity that critical analysis of its historical and ecological contexts is taboo…
Rotello’s ecological model suggests a provocative comparison between sexual behavior and other misuses of physical resources. Progressives decry the wastefulness, short-term thinking, and entitlement mentality of corporations and consumers who place personal satisfaction over sustaining our common ecosystem. If it’s reasonable for our economic choices to be tempered by awareness of the interconnectedness of living creatures, why should a different morality (or really, none at all) hold sway in the sexual realm?
Types of Porn and Their Occupational Safety Risks (explicit)
The list of STDS on the AIM handout includes: “HIV, Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Syphillis, Hepatitis, A,B,C, Herpes, Genital Warts, Molluscum Contagiosum, Crabs, Trichomonis, Bacterial Vaginosis, Rectal Chlamydia and Gonorrhea, Gonorrhea of the throat.”
…The handout continues with some special cases, which are at “slightly different risk” than the “risky sex acts”:
BUKKAKE–multiple males ejaculating on a female’s face–AT RISK FOR CHLAMYDIA OR GONORRHEA OF THE EYE, HERPES OF THE EYE OR NOSE, OR HIV AS THE EYE IS A DIRECT CONDUCT INTO THE BLOODSTREAM…The compliance of the adult industry and porn workers with these requirements and recommendations is an open question. In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported that “[M]ost porn stars receive extra money–as little as $50 per sex act–if they forgo condoms.”
EYE BALLING–HERPES OF THE EYE, HIV, CHLAMYDIA AND GONORRHEA OF THE EYE…
Testimony in Minneapolis: With Growth of Porn, Rapists Show Less Remorse
[T]he work of Dr. Natalie Shainess (psychiatrist of New York) and Dr. Frank Osanka [sic] (psychologist and child-abuse specialist, Chicago) show that convicted rapists who, even five to seven years ago, expressed remorse about their acts of violence, recently show no such remorse and often cite as a reason for their guiltlessness that “everyone knows women want to be raped; all the porn stuff proves that.”
Hugo Schwyzer Reviews “Getting Off” by Robert Jensen
A great many men look at porn and don’t rape women. But “not-raping” is hardly proof that porn is harmless. There are many ways in which pornography can damage our sexuality short of turning men into rapists. The discomfort and bewilderment of the girl who sent me that note, wondering why her boyfriend (who, in her own words, was otherwise a “good guy”) would even want to come on her face, makes this case with heartbreaking and stomach-churning effectiveness. The answer to the “why” is that he’s seen facials in porn. He might accept “no” for an answer, or he might just keep nagging until she gives in and lets him ejaculate on her face. She won’t be raped in the legal sense, of course, but she’ll be learning a bitter lesson about male sexuality and her own value that she didn’t have to learn.