Why Don’t We Believe That Porn Influences Culture?
Even though advertising and other media clearly do
American culture teaches us that we are individuals, firmly at the helm of our own lives. No-one can influence us or shape us because The Marlboro Man creates his own destiny or something along those lines. None-the-less, the TV advertising industry alone is a 70 Billion dollar enterprise, with ample data points to indicate that it’s money well spent. What we mentally consume does influence our behaviors, from our buying preferences to how we interact with other people, including how we have sex.
The fundamental attribution error is the belief that people’s behavior is primarily caused by their own personality, temperament or habits rather than a person’s mental/emotional state as well as situational variables. “People from an individualistic culture, that is, a culture that focuses on individual achievement and autonomy, have the greatest tendency to commit the fundamental attribution error.” (1) We want to think that we are in control of our selves and our lives and that other people are as well. This is why, for example, unconscious bias, which makes up the vast majority of both sexism and racism, is such a difficult thing for many Americans to wrap their heads around.
Most people generally understand that porn is entertainment and is not a depiction of what actual sex is like, at least in theory. But unconscious beliefs about sex will arise when you’ve seen them depicted repeatedly in a particular way. Even if you’d like to think that you aren’t influenced by what you continuously put into your head, you most definitely are.
Back in the days when I was first sexually active, long before the internet, men did not expect to ejaculate on a woman’s face or breasts, and they certainly didn’t think that choking or stuffing your fingers in a woman’s mouth were a part of regular routine sex. That is a result of the internet and the types of porn that are most widely available for free online.
“According to a 2010 study that analyzed 304 scenes from best-selling pornography videos, almost 90% of scenes contained physical aggression, while nearly 50% contained verbal aggression, primarily in the form of name-calling. Targets of these displays of aggression were overwhelmingly women and either showed pleasure or neutrality in response to the aggression.” (2)
While research is not able to show causality, something no social science research can do, pornography is strongly correlated with factors widely recognized as contributors to sexual violence including defining masculinity as embodied through violence, hostile attitudes towards women, and gender inequality. Furthermore, the average age of first exposure to pornography is around 12 years of age and the pornography that is the cheapest and easiest to access contains very high rates of violence against women and promotes a degrading and dehumanizing form of sexuality for boys. Boys and men are the majority of consumers of such pornography, making it the dominant sexual framework to which boys are socialized and to which girls, as sexual partners, must respond.
And aside from quite often normalizing violence against women, porn just teaches bad sex. Thirty years of the internet ought to have closed the orgasm gap, but this is unfortunately not the case, in part because porn does not prioritize the things that lead to female orgasm. 86% of lesbian women say they always or nearly always orgasm during partnered sex, but only 39% of heterosexual women said the same, in comparison to 96% of men. (3)
Porn is primarily made by and for men, with an androcentric point of view. I would guess that the number of actual female orgasms in porn is somewhere close to zero because overwhelmingly the sex that is portrayed in porn is not the type that actually gets women off and in fact, is often something that is actually uncomfortable or painful. Jenna Jameson and other porn actresses have spoken out about the sometimes brutal and often degrading conditions that they endured while filming. Although they chose to participate in that world, it doesn’t minimize the fact that this is what is being put out into the culture as sexy.
In real life, you can’t kiss a woman for 30 seconds and then start jamming fingers into her vagina and have that be enjoyable for her and most women can’t reach orgasm from penetration alone, but if no-one has ever told you otherwise, how are young men supposed to know that if it’s what they’ve seen portrayed over and over again?
“What is startling and surprising to me is that both men and women buy into the same sort of cultural model,” he (Kim Wallen, professor of behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University) said. “If he is a good lover, he can bring me to orgasm with his penis alone. And a man buys into that and doesn’t offer any kind of stimulation. And because he’s not any good, she won’t say anything because it’s emasculating.” How is this cultural model still in play after 30 years of the internet?
Because mostly what’s available out there on sex that is graphic enough to be truly instructive is porn, and it’s teaching the wrong things.
Not only do boys get wrong messages about what constitutes good sex, but girls are being reinforced in the belief that they should find things they don’t actually like pleasurable or acceptable because after all, the woman on the screen is moaning in delight at the same things and in order to be hot like that woman, she needs to do these things for her partner. Peer pressure doesn’t just evaporate when you get a little bit older. If you think that’s what everyone around you is doing because no-one is telling you differently, it’s making a negative impact on our sexual culture.
My lover Tamera is in her early 30s and prior to meeting me and my husband James, she didn’t like fingering because she’d only had bad experiences with it. We played with one of her friends one time and she was about the same age and said the same thing — she’d only ever experienced fingering that was unpleasant and uncomfortable and therefore didn’t care for it. That’s hardly a scientific sampling, but the younger people that we’ve had sex with do all seem to have very little interest in or knowledge about foreplay, which is, I’m pretty sure because they primarily learned about sex from watching porn.
I understand that if you’re making a 10-minute video, you aren’t going to spend that entire time slowly working up to things that lead directly to orgasm because that would take the entire 10 minutes and more, but on the other hand, if that’s the only sex education that someone has ever had, how would they know to do something different? This is where the real problem lies, in that there is no alternative place to learn about sex-positive, consent-oriented, non-transactional sex.
Sadly, for a lot of young people, porn is the only real sex education they’ve ever had. Even schools that have sex education, which isn’t most of them, have programs that typically only teach things like safe sex and the mechanics of procreation. There are almost no sources for young people to learn to have pleasurable, mutually enjoyable and consensual sexual encounters. My generation didn’t learn about that in school either, but we also weren’t being bombarded with images of how to do sex in a porn-style way.
I would contend that so many young people learning about sex from porn has contributed to the hook-up culture that is prevalent on college campuses and for young adults more generally. This kind of sex emphasizes the transactional pursuit of orgasms rather than finding mutual pleasure through connection. It also contributes to a culture of sexual coercion and assault since getting your own sexual needs met is the primary focus and the pleasure of your partner is more for self-aggrandizement and bragging rights than actual caring.
Notably, my research suggests that hookup culture is a problem not because it promotes casual sex, but because it makes a destructive form of casual sexual engagement feel compulsory. Students who don’t hook up can end up being socially isolated, while students who do engage in this way are forced to operate by a dysfunctional set of rules. Hookup culture encourages a punishing emotional landscape, where caring for others or even simple courtesy seem inappropriate, while carelessness and even cruelty are allowed. At its worst, it encourages young men and women to engage in sexual competitiveness and status-seeking while meeting impossible standards of attractiveness. It privileges immediate pleasure-seeking and heightens risks that students will become either perpetrators or victims of sexual crimes.
I have no moral beef with porn in the abstract. In fact, I write erotica, but because of all of these issues, I find porn generally very unappealing. In recent years there is a greater variety of female-friendly videos currently available but for the most part that is only through paysites like Lust Cinema, which offers plot-driven sex-positive storylines with realistic sex created by female directors. However, your average 12-year-old boy (or girl) isn’t watching that. He’s seeing rough, androcentric, unrealistic depictions of sex that are never countered by anything else in order to balance that out or make it clear that this is not what good sex or even real sex is actually like. A lot of the women in this kind of porn are not empowered by it; they are often abused and may even be trafficked or otherwise coerced. It’s the opposite of sex-positive!
My own anecdotal experiences with younger lovers are confirmed by Cindy Gallop, another middle-aged woman who tends to date younger men. Several years ago she started Make Love Not Porn in response to the issues she experienced with lovers whose only sex education was porn. The site describes itself as, “Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference. We’re the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex video-sharing platform, celebrating #realworldsex as a counterpoint to porn, with the aim of socializing sex — making it easier for everyone to talk about, in order to promote good sexual values and good sexual behavior. We’re what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed everyone to socially sexually self-identify and self-express (which sadly, they don’t).”
The ubiquity and easy access to porn has changed how many people in our culture go about their sexual lives and we know this because:
- the continued issue of the orgasm gap, where many men have no idea how to actual pleasure a woman or even understand that they are ought to prioritize that
- the rise of expectations that are common in porn that did not exist before the internet, such as for anal sex, choking, and ejaculating onto your partner
- the rise of a transactional hook-up culture
Some might say that all of that could very well be due to other unrelated factors, but we do have a lot of data that indicates a real correlation between advertising and behavior, and a lot of the same elements are in play. We know that advertising works, even when the targets don’t consciously realize that they are being influenced and we know that media depictions distort our impressions of the world. According to the Perception Institute, “Media, entertainment, and other forms of popular culture play a significant role in shaping our perceptions of others.” This includes porn.
Because we are such an individualistic culture that wants to believe we make our own choices, many people do not easily recognize the ways that they are influenced by all kinds of media. Older people who did not grow up with porn may not understand the ways that it impacts those who have come of age on it, just as younger people who have always been around porn may not recognize it’s impact either. “Many adults, who are beyond the years of sexual development and exploration and who developed their sexual identities prior to the Internet, have not encountered the new sexual scripts Internet pornography is inscribing on the sexual identities of younger people.” (4)
The solution to this issue is not to try to ban porn or to resort to other puritanical impulses, but instead to draw very clear and widely available distinctions between the kind of sex seen in porn for entertainment purposes and what constitutes healthy, mutually satisfying sexual connections of all sorts in the real world.
Calling out violence and other ways that women are sexually degraded in porn is another important step. Actual BDSM is centered around respect and consent, not abuse, and this is a distinction that should be more widely made. Until this begins to take place, we will continue to live in a culture that is negatively sexually influenced by porn just as we are swayed by advertising and other types of media.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
(1) Social Psychology and Influences on Behavior
(2) Focus For Health
(3) The Orgasm Gap
(4) How Pornography Influences And Harm Sexual Behavior
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