Porn is like chewing gum—all artificial flavor.
After ten minutes of watching porn, I want to go home and screw.
After twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
—ERICA JONG
One evening in LA last year, over a couple of drinks, a male friend, a successful Hollywood producer who dates a lot of women, told me that he never ejaculates inside them, only on their faces. One FWB he sleeps with regularly dislikes this so much, he added, that when he’s near climaxing, she fishes under her pillow for an airline eye mask, which she quickly slips on so she doesn’t have to watch his finale. When I asked him why he persisted when it’s so clear she doesn’t like it, he claimed he was terrified to get her or any woman pregnant. He denied it, but I’m assuming he’s living out his porn fantasy because it’s so prevalent; men are always cumming on women’s faces, often into their eyes. Which seems as pretty clear a metaphor as you can find.
At Cosmo the face issue was a question we got frequently: “My boyfriend wants to cum on my face. How can I tell him I don’t like this without hurting his feelings or making him think I’m old-fashioned?” Props once more to the fearless advertising legend Cindy Gallop, who turned her intense dislike of the facial money shot into a TED Talk insisting, “Don’t do it! We don’t like it!”
Porn sex is not real sex.
“Porn is to sex what McDonald’s is to food,” says Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. “Stripped down to its most base elements: empty calories, high fat. You take a really healthy, fun, creative desire to eat or to have sex and in its place you give it a robotized, industrial product that basically is going to harm you.”
To get even more granular, porn is to sex what Chicken McNuggets are to an organic free-range roasted chicken.
I will let the academics argue about whether porn leads to more or less sexual violence. My biggest problem with it is that so much of it is overwhelmingly degrading and humiliating to women. It’s women being slapped about, flipped over like fish, and rammed in every orifice with huge hairless penises by men shouting “Whore!” or “Slut!” and then, the biggest lie of all, the women pretending they can’t get enough.
Porn is to sex what Chicken McNuggets are to an organic free-range roasted chicken.
One of the most depressing things that I heard persistently from young women while I was at both Marie Claire and Cosmo was their resignation that men now expected them to behave and look like porn stars. Pubic topiary is the most obvious example, with total bikini waxes now the norm and the lasering of all pubic hair increasingly common. We had readers who told us that they had sex with young men who, having had their default sex education on Pornhub, assumed actual pubic hair on women was abnormal or even worse, freakish.
It’s depressing to have one’s body image determined by the clichés of the porn industry. But my real objection is that it limits people’s expectations and imaginations about sex.
Back in 2014 Tracy Clark-Flory wrote a terrific piece for Cosmo, one that touched a nerve—no pun intended—and generated a ton of reaction, titled “How I Stopped Acting Like a Porn Star and Had the Best Sex of My Life.” Like many millennials, porn was Clark-Flory’s primary source of sex education and that of her partners, too. And so throughout her twenties, she pretended that it turned her on to have partners declaim about what they were going to do to her with their “big monster cocks.”
After a particularly vigorous romp fit for a YouPorn pop-up ad, “One partner told me, ‘I feel like I just discovered Playboy for the first time!’ But I never, ever orgasmed,” she confessed. “The only pleasure I got from these sexcapades was the satisfaction of feeling desired.” Adding insult to injury, her constant depilating led to razor burn so painful it hurt even to wear the lightest of panties.
The big reveal for her was that “sex did not get sexy until I stopped acting like I was Jenna Jameson . . . and got real about what actually turned me on.” That happened thanks to a new boyfriend who made her feel sufficiently confident to experiment with what excited her. As she explained, “I wanted something more from sex, beyond just making the guy feel good.”
When I was growing up, porn was available in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, the depiction of sex positively prim compared to what is available today online. VCRs next brought pornographic tapes into the privacy of people’s homes—and in the eighties and nineties, porn videos were rented four times more than regular Hollywood films. And then came the internet. “It made porn affordable, accessible, and anonymous,” says Dines. “The three A’s that drive demand. Porn sites now get more visits per month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.”
Pornhub, one of the most popular porn-sharing sites, got 2.6 million visitors per hour in 2016. In Pornhub’s exhaustively thorough global analytics, referred to as the Kinsey Report of our time in a 2017 New York magazine cover story, the US was hands down the largest consumer of porn, with Iceland a distant second. Users are 75 percent male in the US, 25 percent female. The age data starts at eighteen and stretches well past sixty-five (where “hot granny” and “hairy pussies” are popular searches).
That they don’t include any data on the under-eighteen group is problematic, as many studies have found that curious young boys coming into their own sexual awakening type “sex” or “porn” into a Google search and can quickly get barraged by violent images. Two clicks away and up pops “gagonmycockslut” and “roughassblaster.” There’s a porn genre for every niche. As I write this, Pokémon porn is trending.
And yet, as Erica Jong, creator of the zipless fuck concept in her groundbreaking novel Fear of Flying, points out, porn can provide a shortcut to getting turned on. Forty million people in the US alone regularly visit porn sites. Dines explains: “The job of porn is to get a guy hard and get him off in seven to eight minutes. So yes, it works in that specific way. But if we want a society where you connect sex to love and intimacy, then it absolutely doesn’t work.”
Good sex is so much more complicated than the language of porn. There’s no longing or buildup in the vast majority of porn being produced today—it is all immediate gratification, which is not how real relationships work. As to the effects of porn on relationships, a study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2012 found that porn consumption lowered commitment in both men and women and had a stronger impact on men. Another study found that porn-free relationships are stronger and have a lower rate of infidelity.
The behavioral psychologist Mary Aiken calls online porn the “largest unregulated social experiment of all time,” specifically because it is so widely accessible to children and teenagers. Gail Dines argues that exposure to porn is actually altering the “sexual template” for men who grow up on it. “Men have literally lost the capacity for intimacy and love or even know what connection is, by virtue of being brought up and socialized through porn,” she says. And that, of course, has a direct impact on healthy relationships as these young boys become men whose default understanding of sexual relationships is through the lens of porn.
“Sexual trauma has become the new normal,” says Dines, who lectures on porn’s impact on intimacy and love on college campuses nationwide and globally. Both men and women pack her audiences, and she sees how porn impacts both terribly. “These guys do not want to be using porn this way,” she says. “They feel ashamed. And the last thing you want around sexuality is shame—it’s a killer for healthy sex.”
If I were to swap a food pyramid for a love pyramid, respect would be your fruit and vegetables.
Healthy sex is, again, a key ingredient for any love relationship, and like everything else in this diet, it circles back to mutual respect. If I were to swap a food pyramid for a love pyramid, respect would be your fruit and vegetables. Those are the essential nutrients without which it’s hard to stay strong and build a viable immune system. So if porn is something you and your partner both like and you can use it in a way that helps you get satisfaction and aids your sexual communication, then all power to you. But using it as a guide for how to find pleasure or intimacy is like eating at Taco Bell 24/7 and assuming this is as good as it gets.
Porn could not be further from the real work and intimacy of a relationship because you are a spectator, a voyeur, not a participant, watching other people’s scripted, artificial, and often violent sex lives. The only way you are going to truly figure out what excites you is by first asking yourself, then experimenting, and then communicating with your partner.
For those who like being voyeurs, Cindy Gallop started her website MakeLoveNotPorn to get people talking about sex. “The problem is not porn,” she insists. “The problem is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world.” On her site, you can choose from a curated selection of “real-world sex” films made by regular people (and a few porn “stars” who wanted to have real-life sex on film). They have rules—films must be consensual, contextualized, and porn-cliché-free. They are also open to every kind of sexual identity and experience as long as it is respectful. “Our tagline on MakeLoveNotPorn is ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference,’” she says. “And our mission is to help make it easier for the world to talk about sex openly and honestly—both in the public domain as well as in intimate relationships.”
I don’t watch Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn videos, but I do love her argument that good sex is borne out of good communication. “I readily ask people, ‘What are your sexual values?’” says Gallop. “And no one can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think that way.”
Leaving the issues with the porn industry and the way it treats its female stars aside—for those interested I recommend the documentary Hot Girls Wanted, but be warned—it’s depressing. Gallop likes pointing out that there is porn out there that is not violent or degrading to women. “I get enormously frustrated when people use the word porn like it’s one big homogenized mess,” she says. “That’s like using the word literature and saying it’s all the same thing. It’s as rich and infinitely varied as for the genres, subgenres, types, divisions, etc. of literature.” Pornhub’s number-one searched term in 2016 was “lesbian porn,” followed by “stepmom” and “MILF.” Other terms trending at the time of publication include “hijab porn,” “squirt,” and “gangbang.”
I appreciate Gallop’s pro-sex mission. “Since we don’t talk about sex, it’s an area of rampant insecurity for every single one of us,” Gallop says. “We all get very vulnerable when we get naked. Sexual ego is very fragile. People therefore find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re actually having sex with, while they’re actually having it.” This circles back to knowing what brings you pleasure first and then being able to communicate that to a partner whom you trust.
“Sexual ego is very fragile. People therefore find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re actually having sex with.”
“Many of us, if we’re fortunate, are born into families and environments where our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability,” Gallop says. “Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should, because empathy, generosity, sensitivity, kindness, and honesty are as important there as they are in every other area of our lives.”
TO DO
I had never even considered the term sexual values before Gallop raised it, but it’s a great idea to figure out what yours are.
Write them down, as a continuation of what sexual pleasure means for you, from Rule #9, as the two are interconnected. Your values extend to what you want from a partner as, in my opinion, the best sex makes sure both parties are having fun.
For that to happen, you need to home in on what that means for you:
Are you someone who prefers to make love in a bed beneath the sheets?
Or are you an exhibitionist, and having covert sex in public places turns you on?
Do you like to experiment?
Do you wish you could experiment?
Do you like men/women? Both?
What do you need to feel safe?
What do you need to feel alive?
Think of the best sex you have ever—or never—had. Write down that scenario.
Think of the worst sex you have ever had—and write that down, too.
Now you know what to seek out and what to avoid.
You may never need to think about these scenarios again. But they are useful to reflect on now in the event you come across someone who either makes you feel uncomfortable in the moment, asking for something you don’t want to do, or someone who takes you beyond your wildest dreams and to the moon and back.
And last but not least, there is no need to act like a porn star, unless of course you want to.
CASE STUDIES
Grace*, 21, on realizing “being like a porn star in bed” was not going to get her the boyfriend she wanted.
Grace learned everything she knows about sex from watching porn. “I first watched it when I was a teenager,” the college senior says. “The first guy I had sex with texted me afterward and said, ‘You have sex like a porn star!’ I took it as a compliment, like I was doing it really well.”
This was precisely why she watched porn. “I based everything I did with guys on what I saw in porn,” she says. And while the different guys she hooked up with seemed to love her moves, she quickly realized it was not all that fun—for her. “The first time a guy came on my face was traumatic,” she explains. “It was disgusting—I literally could not see. You never see that perspective in porn. They just cut to the man’s face! Not to the woman, who has semen in her hair and eyes.” There was also the time when a guy asked if he could “slap her” as they were having sex. “That was directly from porn,” she says. As were all the times when blow jobs made her retch, literally. “The sound of gagging turns guys on,” she says. “Also, from porn.”
Grace did not enjoy any of it but thought that’s what it meant to be “good at sex,” and now she wonders if that’s why guys always wanted to hook up with her but never date her. “I’m the token single girl among my friends,” she says. Grace started hooking up in high school and has continued in college. While the sex can be “great,” she allows, it’s the aftermath that she finds so depressing—as well as confusing. She spent the first semester of her sophomore year hooking up with a guy from her friend group. “Whenever I saw him out and about, he wouldn’t even say hi to me. But then would text me at 1:00 a.m. every Friday and Saturday.” This move is, she says, “ridiculously classic.” That relationship finally faded, and she wound up hooking up with someone off-campus, which was the best hookup of her life. “I didn’t have to stress about seeing him in the dining hall the next day,” she says. “The waking up afterward, thinking, ‘That was great.’ But then you freak out because you wonder, ‘Is he ever going to speak to me again?’”
The only worse feeling is when there was too much alcohol in the mix. “People get sloppy and you don’t know the person so that means less communication,” she explains. “I’ve definitely been in situations where I wanted to use a condom and we were both drunk and I did not communicate my wants clearly enough.” Those feelings of worry and remorse, Grace adds, are far worse than “Will he talk to me afterward?” “Women are the ones who deal with the ramifications of unsafe sex,” she points out. “Not the guys.”
Her porn habits have shifted over the years. “I still watch it, but not the gagging or violent kind,” she says. “I’m more interested in the women. I have a set type I find attractive. But I only watch it alone—never with a partner.”
This, she admits, can also be depressing. “I’ve always wanted a serious relationship,” she says. “I’d rather be with someone than watch.” She has certainly tried to find that, and spent a semester hooking up with someone she felt very serious about. “When it was time to make the move to a real relationship, he was not into it. I was devastated.” Even worse, the final breakup was through a text.
That same pattern set in again her junior year. But this time, she was going to brunch and making dinners with the guy she was hooking up with, which she considered dating. After several months, she told him that she wanted to take their relationship seriously. “He said that he only wanted to keep hooking up with me and to fuck as many girls as he could before he graduated,” she says.
Grace ended that relationship and took a break from sex and dating altogether. “I realized that I was always leaving situations feeling disappointed and broken down,” she says. “Until I meet someone who treats me well, I don’t want to fill the void with men who don’t.”
The break has allowed her to reflect on her own role in these relationships—as well as the impact of porn on her love life. As a black woman who has had white men say, “You’re pretty for a black girl,” or “You’re the first black girl I have ever been with,” she became interested in how interracial porn shifts a viewer’s image of race and sex, and she is writing her college thesis on it. “Looking back I cringe at the things I’d do to get boys to like me,” she confesses. “I was making an active choice to let men do degrading things, whether cum on my face or ignore me, because I wanted someone in that moment. But in the end I realize that the only way anyone is going to respect me is if I respect myself first.”
Jess, 28, on replacing shame with forgiveness in order to save her marriage.
Jess was nineteen when she met Vaughn, just six months after she had given birth to her first child. “He lived across the street and I helped him and his brother push his car out of the snow,” she recalls. They discovered that they went to the same Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple, and Vaughn invited Jess back to his house one afternoon with friends after church. “Everyone left and we found ourselves talking until 6:00 a.m. the next morning,” she says. “We didn’t kiss or anything—but we never ran out of things to talk about.”
Jess even told him that night that she had just placed her daughter up for adoption. “He didn’t even bat an eye,” she says. “He just said, ‘That’s cool.’”
That was a first for Jess, who had had several one-night stands with random guys in the months following her baby’s birth. “That wasn’t like me,” she says. “I was acting out in my grief.” Most men were not so accepting. “When they learned I had a child, they either treated me like I was really easy to get into bed, or like I was damaged goods,” she says. Vaughn was different. “He’s very grounded,” she says. “I just felt this sense of peace and calmness around him.”
A week after they met, she invited him to her daughter’s adoption finalization. “I was standing outside the LDS temple sobbing, and he just held me,” she says. “He was twenty-two at the time and just knew that I needed someone to hold me.” That was the moment when Jess knew she was going to marry Vaughn.
But then she borrowed his computer, and his search history popped up. “That’s how I learned that he watched a ton of online porn. I was overcome with all these awful feelings—betrayal and disgust. But mostly I felt like there must be something wrong with me if he needs to look for that elsewhere.” She confronted him, and he promised he would stop. Jess was not all that experienced, either, so she just trusted him when he said he would stop watching it. But it took a toll on her self-esteem. “I was suddenly self-conscious in bed and out,” she admits. “I felt I couldn’t compete.”
Vaughn assured her that was not the case and that he no longer looked at porn. She believed him, and little by little let her guard back down. Ten months after they met, Vaughn proposed and Jess said yes.
But then right before their wedding, she borrowed his computer again and it was a horrible déjà vu. He hadn’t stopped. The couple sought counseling from their church, which is where Jess learned porn addiction is rampant in the LDS community because “there’s so little talk about sex,” she says. “That’s often how boys get their sex education, which is totally twisted.” They were referred to an outside counselor and learned that in order to address Vaughn’s porn problem, they first had to learn how to communicate with each other. “He grew up in a family of yellers,” she says. “And my family sweeps it under the rug.”
That was a long road. They did get married, and she discovered porn was still a problem right after their first daughter was born. “That was such a painful time,” she says. “I was confused why these fictional gross caricatures of humans were so much better than me. But I was also completely distraught over my post-pregnancy body.” She became repulsed by the thought of having sex with him—and seriously considered divorce.
After several nights of talking, during which Jess saw and remembered the man she first fell in love with, she thought about how he’d held her as she sobbed outside the adoption finalization, and she thought, “Am I really willing to give up that easily?”
Vaughn had a similar epiphany. “He realized that his family was way more important than cheap thrills,” Jess says. And she realized she had to be more open and honest about sex in their relationship. “A huge reason why porn addiction is so rampant is because there’s so much shame attached to sex,” Jess realized. “I was like, ‘You know what? I need to show him there isn’t shame in having issues, there’s just shame in not finding a solution for them.’”
Jess decided to help him instead of leaving him. “We agreed to nightly check-ins, where we talked about any urges he had that day,” she says. “We also put filters on our computers and phones.” The two worked on the plan together as well as on their own to spend more time focusing on their own love life. “I realized that even though I had two kids, I was still so naive about sex. Our sex has just gotten better with time because we talk to each other! I can say, ‘I like it when you do this!’ Or, ‘Do you like this? Let’s try this.’”
As much as porn almost ruined their marriage, it became the catalyst for them to create true communication around sex.