Raise your hand if your first time having sex was not how you expected it to be, for better or for worse. Keep your hand raised if your expectations for sex (sexpectations?) had been previously established by porn.
Porn, in this case, is defined as any graphic images or videos or even gifs (because we all know that there’s porn on Tumblr) showing people engaged in a sexual activity. And let’s keep it nice and vanilla here—you can talk about the categories of porn on your own time.
For many people, porn was the answer to our juvenile questioning of what happens when actors in mainstream movies go under the covers or when Sims characters go woohoo! Porn makes us say, “Wow. That is not what I thought that was going to look like based on those health class diagrams.” It’s a step beyond the answer to “Where do babies come from?” that involves close-up shots of the birds and the bees.
Problems with porn arise when it becomes our de facto sex educator, especially for teens and young adults. Typically, young people who have already gone through puberty and who are starting to feel things learn from their parents or someone they trust that penis + vagina = sex. I have a vivid memory of seeing “PPV” carved into a table at my neighborhood Starbucks when I was in middle school, and I guess I knew everything after that.
But the whole PPV = Babies equation is usually as far as the conversation goes. There are no Q&As about oral sex or what to do after the penis and vagina are connected or instructions for different sex positions. There’s no foolproof guide to how to be good at sex. We’re not given a glossary of colloquialisms by our parents so we understand all the jokes our peers make on the school bus. We just fake it until we make it.
Where are my Southern readers at? Y’all know that we weren’t even taught in school about contraception but were bombarded with messages like “Abstinence is the only 100% way to stay safe.” At my school in Texas, all I learned were the differences between tampons and pads. So much for sex ed.
So, we learn from porn.
The key ingredients for a classic American porno include a well-endowed, circumcised man, a lithe and sexy woman making lots of moaning and groaning noises, and an absence of body hair. And…well, that’s about it. The porn industry is pretty unrepresentative of the sexually active population.
Studies have shown that watching porn over an extended period of time can lead to performance issues. Users can develop a kind of Pavlovian need to watch porn to become aroused and may not be able to become aroused by “just” their partner. It can also negate the idea of “making love” and replace it with something cruder, taking away the true specialness that sex can have. Porn can also negatively affect the sexpectations and sexual experiences of both men and women.
Ways that we are misled by porn:
- Porn penises come in pretty much only one shape and size, and they turn into erections that last for an impossible amount of time
- Porn stars have no chest hair, no pubic hair, probably no toe hair—no nothin’. Originally, industry actors and actresses got rid of their body hair to increase the visibility of shots of their stuff. But teenage boys and girls don’t know that—they start to believe that having no body hair is the norm and that that’s what their partners would want.
- Partners in pornos like to have sex quick and hard. Honestly, sometimes it looks just painful for the person on the receiving end of the penetration. Sex doesn’t have to be like that.
I’m not saying that porn is a bad thing, but there is definitely a bad side of it that people who engage with it have to be mindful of. We can all have better conversations about sex with our partners and the people we trust by being more informed and by taking porn with a grain of salt.
