Don’t you think that chocolate is amazing?
It’s just sheer joy, it pushes all the right buttons. It hijacks my most basic human instinct — to look for highly calorific food — and it satisfies it so well!
I know I should be eating more healthy stuff and it’s not like I have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but damn, do I love chocolate! I have my favourite brands, too. I keep buying the same kind over and over again — it tastes just as awesome every single time.
I quite like action and superhero films, too. I know they are repetitive as hell — it’s the same plot over and over. The stories are simplistic, the characters shallow, and the action completely unrealistic — but all these car chases and explosions sure make my monkey brain fire all the right neurons!
They are carefully designed to hijack another part of my brain’s reward system and make me come out of the cinema feeling I had a great time.
I quite like porn, too.
And not even any sophisticated porn — I like the stock variety, unrealistic, male-gaze, repetitive kind. Maybe not the most formulaic stuff with the same positions and scenes every single time, but still.
Sure, I’ll watch some more artistic or feminist vids, too, they’re nice and beautiful, but they don’t turn me on at all.
I get too distracted by the aesthetics and forget to get horny. I’d much rather watch bits smashing into each other, tongues in action, over-performed moans, and unrealistically beautiful bodies capable of acrobatic feats.
There is a reason they call them male-gaze — it’s because they’re designed to totally hijack my male brain just as much as chocolate and action films do. They make all the right neurons fire and they’re damn good at it!
And sure, I know that most real people don’t look like that and real sex doesn’t look like that. But I don’t watch porn to see real sex any more than I watch action films to see real people living a normal daily life, going to work, cleaning their house, playing a game or whatnot.
I want to see something that’s extraordinary, amazing, exciting! I have enough real life in my real life. Why would I want to watch it on the screen, too?
Don’t get me wrong, I love independent pornographers who create the really interesting, artistic stuff. I also appreciate queer and feminist porn that has nothing to do with the stock variety, male-gaze kind.
Same as I like great arthouse films, stories that offer great insight into the human condition, or very intellectually challenging plotlines. When I engage with art, I’m rather critical and have pretty high expectations.
But all these things satisfy a completely different need.
It’s like chocolate and a fancy dinner. Sure, I know which one is the actually valuable stuff that’s important, impressive and nutritious. But I also know that all the best dinners in the world won’t be able to replace a good old bar of the same chocolate I’ve been eating for years. They’re just not competing in the same category.
So pardon me if I won’t let myself be shamed into pretending that I don’t enjoy something that is specifically designed to tap into my male brain’s simple pleasure circuits. I don’t see why being capable of much more sophisticated experiences should preclude me from enjoying the simpler ones as well.
So what’s the problem?
The problem with porn, of course, is not whether we should enjoy it or not. The problem is that many people can’t really tell porn sex from real sex and try to transplant what they see on the screen into their lives.
With much of porn being oriented towards male consumers and horribly misrepresenting female sexuality, this ends up harming women who feel forced to perform roles they don’t want to or aren’t able to perform. But it also harms men who feel inadequate if they aren’t always ready and capable of continuous action for hours.
But why is it that people have trouble distinguishing life from fiction when it comes to porn, but not when it comes to action films? Save for some tragic outlier cases, people know exactly how unrealistic action films are and don’t try to emulate them in real life.
Most of us come out of the cinema without a deep need to drive off with tires screeching and straight into a high-speed chase, jump onto a helicopter and parachute back to our living rooms. We’re not trying to make it happen and we’re not disappointed when it doesn’t.
But then, we are taught what we can and can’t expect in our daily lives from a very young age. When kids play superheroes and want to fly from the shed roof, parents will tell them that this is not how the world works.
When they get out of the cinema and demand their parents drive off with tires screeching straight into a high-speed chase and so on, they are quickly taught what play and make-believe is, and what real life is.
My parents taught me all of that, but do you know what they did when I started watching porn?
Nothing at all.
Did they have ‘the talk’ with me before I got to that age so that I was prepared? Of course not. Did they try to explain what is fiction and what is reality? What real sex is like? What real women want? Not even once.
I grew up learning sex from porn. I guess I was fortunate enough to have been born at a time when it was mostly magazines and, once we got the internet, some online images. There were no millions of easily accessible videos showing the most hardcore stuff and presenting them to kids as just the normal things everyone does.
What can we do?
Of course, there are problems with porn itself — it can be exploitative, addictive, and it keeps getting more and more extreme. But the main problem is that we don’t tell people that sex in porn is about as realistic as fistfights in action films.
In cinema, heroes get punched in the face and keep fighting. In life, you end up in a hospital with a concussion.
Thus, first of all, we need to talk to kids about sex more. We need to make it abundantly clear that the same way they can’t just Hulk-smash their friends, they also can’t surprise-deepthroat their lovers. We can’t expect them to know the difference, we need to teach them.
I know it’s hard to have this talk with your kids, but teaching them the right attitudes from the start will always be easier than making them later unlearn the wrong ones.
What about all the adults who have already learned it wrong? I think that we should stress to them that what porn actors do, is work. Work that they prepare for, train for, in which they do multiple takes, have an offstage area to chill, and so on.
And most of all, it’s work they get paid for. You might not like your job, but you’ll still do it to get paid. You might even pretend to like it, because you want to get paid. It doesn’t mean you’ll do it for anyone for free, whenever they ask.
It would be pretty ridiculous to expect a pornstar to have acrobatic sex with you simply because they clearly ‘enjoy’ it on the screen. You might as well ask an action star to take you on a real-world car chase. They’re not at work, why would they do it for you for free?
Now, how much more ridiculous would it be to ask your partner to take you on a real-world high-speed car chase, simply because some other people out there work as action stars and do it on the screen?
Your partner might have just gotten their driving license! Do they feel ready for it? Can they do it? They might even want to, in fantasy, but not in real life!
Yet that’s the same as asking your partner to perform acrobatic sex acts just because some other people’s work is to do it in porn.
And finally, talk to people about action films. Show them that it’s just as easy to distinguish fact from fiction there as it is with porn. If your lover insists on performing acts you don’t want to do or don’t even feel you can do, ask them: ‘Do you mind if I punch you in the face a few times?
I saw it in some action films and the actors don’t seem to mind it very much, they shake it off and keep going. Should we try as well?’
I think that if you approach porn like you approach action films, you’ll be just fine. Simply enjoy watching unrealistically sculpted people consensually perform heavily staged acts, let them hijack your reward systems and fill you with a simple pleasure for some time.
Just remember that it’s all a show.
