Connecting the dots: porn and women's declining libido

As Clayton observes, "Women in pornography are typically young and often surgically altered. Even their labia look uncommonly similar-even, hairless and small. Pornography has increased women's insecurity about their genitals." Women's seeming distress about this is not far off the mark; in recent internet filter review statistics both "teen sex" and "teen porn" feature in the twenty most popular searches. How can heterosexual women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond possibly compare?

As Ellwood-Clayton notes, "In previous eras, women had a better shot at meeting the ideal ... But what happens when the beauty presented to women as ideal is physically unachievable? Take Barbie. Most young girls in America, from the age of three upwards, own a Barbie doll. A study comparing body measurements of models, store mannequins and Barbie dolls found that: '[a] young woman randomly chosen from the reference population would have a 7 per cent chance of being as ectomorphic [slender] as a catwalk model, a 3 per cent chance of matching an international model, a 0.3 per cent chance of matching a shop mannequin, a 0.1 per cent chance of matching a 'supermodel', and no chance at all of matching Barbie'. Talk about setting us up for a fall."

And, of course, it is women's inculcation of these norms, and our at times slavish attempts to emulate them, in the hope of being attractive to men, that holds our libidos hostage. There's an irony, notes Ellwood-Clayton, when we are too busy trying to look sexy to actually ever feel sexy.

And what of the majority of women who simply can't live up to the "porno-chic" ideal because they fall outside that rare 7 percent (of naturally thin women) or because they are adults not teenage girls –and therefore, by definition, fall outside the contemporary pornographic ideal – or they do not have an eating disorder? The other 80 or so percent of women often feel, in Ellwood-Clayton's unceremonious terms, "too fat to fuck". Well, this was the finding of one recent study she quotes on the matter. That is depressing indeed and yet, if we think about it, a not altogether unsurprising finding in a world wallpapered with porn.

The siren son of porn is damaging relationships and it is high time that sex experts, educators and therapists in Australia recognised this (as they have in both the US and the UK). Bella Ellwood Clayton's book is a refreshing take on women's declining desires and offers some solutions (you can read the book for those) about what might be done about it. First up: switch off the porn.