Is porn’s ability to compromise or even ruin our real-world sex lives leading to a grassroots kickback against XXX material? Two bodies of work in the past week seem to suggest that may be happening.
The first is a study of 366 British women aged 17-69 by the University of Kent showing that participants' desire for “sexual perfectionism” – drip-fed through exposure to online pornography – is stressing out both them and their male sexual partners.
When asked a series of questions about their expectations of sex, the more women expected to give and receive perfection, the less they enjoyed real sex.
According to the study, porn-induced performance anxiety is effecting women’s chances of climax, and even stopping some men from rising to the occasion. (Incidentally, those women who most expect perfection were also the most likely to be single – a sort of kama sutra karma). In addition, sexual perfectionism is most prevalent in the young. As we get older, both men and women worry less about pleasing others, and instead concentrate on their own enjoyment.
The second anti-porn pointer is Time magazine’s current cover story, “Porn and the Threat to Virility: Why young men who grew up with internet porn are becoming advocates for turning it off”.
Interviewing porn users from NoFap – an online resource to help porn-dependent men quit – the report features young men who suffer from porn-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED) when faced with a real-life sex partner. These young men, reared on porn to the point of addiction, are now forging a fightback.
"Modern porn has the creative originality of a Rich Tea biscuit" Martin DaubneyThe story mirrors a trend I encountered three years ago, while making Porn On The Brain for Channel 4. I spoke to 23 of the UK’s most extreme porn users. One guy, a 19-year-old who confessed to masturbating 28 times per day, told me: “the porn is always better” than real sex. These lads were so dependent on artificial sexual images that they had to think of pornography during real sex encounters. Without it, they couldn't perform.
While these men are at the extreme end of porn usage, their cautionary tales are useful: being a sexual flop is most teenagers’ worst nightmare.
This message – that porn isn’t enhancing real sex, but scuppering it – is much more likely to resonate with teenagers than the fire and brimstone approach of the anti-pornography feminists, internet censors or the Church, especially as kids intrinsically want to do things that they aren’t supposed to.
Tell teens they’ll go to hell, or jail, and they'll mostly laugh at you. Tell them they might not be able to please their sexual partners, and they may just listen. Most young adults enjoy sex and want to be good at it.
Certainly, having visited scores of British schools and spoken with thousands of teenagers, teachers, parents and educators as a porn safeguard mentor, it is my experience that porn isn’t so much damaging a generation as placing a stressful burden and template on their expected real-world performance.
Many teenage girls are angry that they have to perform and look like porn stars. Many young men feel they don’t measure up, too, and they are horrified by the idea that if they watch porn they might become sexual aggressors, when the overriding majority have never harboured a single violent sentiment towards women.
So many women tell me: “I think he wants porn sex, which I don’t particularly enjoy, but I go along with it, only to find out he’s not really enjoying it either. Porn sex is exhausting, takes ages, it feels scripted and I don’t climax anyway. What’s the bloody point?”
It is time for a healthy dose of “we don’t have to do it like porn, unless we both want to, in which case, fine – but ask first, and no always means no”. This strikes me as supremely uncomplicated. Importantly, we need to get this message to kids by the age of 13 or 14, as we know children are routinely watching porn aged 10. By the time they reach the age of consent, they’ve basically seen it all.
And here's the crux: the Great Porn Panic is ending not in bedlam, but boredom. After three or four years of watching porn, it seems dull, predictable, formulaic, heavily scripted. Most modern porn has the creative originality of a Rich Tea biscuit.
In fact, it’s this – and not a guilty conscience – that keeps pornographers awake at night. They tell me “there are only so many ways we can show people having sex, and we’ve basically ran out of ideas”.
For the huge majority of men who don’t want their online porn lives to lead to paid-for sex encounters – webcams, hook-ups, escorts – there’s nothing left, save the unremitting sadness of 3D or Virtual Reality headsets and, worse, the futuristic dread of sex robots.
And as the UK looks set to introduce compulsory 18+ age verification for all users to help quash underage use, it seems the porn party could soon be over for all but the determined under-18s who decide to flaunt the law.
You never know, many people might just enjoy real sex more without the oppressive burden of porn. The Western World has reached Peak Porn. How was it for you?
Martin Daubney is an Associate Lecturer at Self Esteem Team
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