P*rn is no one religion

In today's Sydney Morning Herald (May 26, 2007) there is an item on the growing numbers of women choosing to visit adult sites such as adult dating and porn sites. Right underneath it, on the home page is a screeching polemical by Adele Horin on how porn is “poisoning couples and destroying families”.

As much as I would like to avoid discussing the most “personal” areas of our sex life (partly because of the icky prospect of our families stumbling across this blog one day and reading it), I'm going to have to refer to it in some capacity in order to point out just what bunk Ms Horin has spewed up this week. I'll keep it as tidy as possible, but for anyone who's not interested in knowing our porn habits, please don't read any further ...

Just a mouse-click away are images that exceed the bounds of fantasy or imagination.

Only for those who lack imagination, Adele! As for the bounds of fantasy, in my experience, fantasies are something for which there is a boundless range. Whose fantasy is Adele referring to? Mine? Gam's? Yours? No matter how totally bizarre something you think of may be, it's pretty safe to bet that there's already a porn site or forum catering to the people who get off on it. As I found out when I went searching for a picture of a hairy armpit to use on one of my posts- most of the images that appeared in my browser were from hairy armpit erotica sites!

The godfather of US sex addiction research, Patrick Carnes, the author of “In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behaviour”, claims 3 to 6 per cent of people are sex addicts.

“Dr” Patrick Carnes, PhD, according to his website "graduated in 1966 from St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He received his Master’s degree in 1969 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a PhD in counsellor education and organisational development from the University of Minnesota in 1980."

Thought so. Another one of these self-styled “experts” from the United States, whose chosen field has nothing to do with the degree they received their doctorate in, yet they use the “Dr” title to lend them an aura of credibility. In other words, they make shit up and people like Adele Horin lean on their every word.

That figure of 3-6 per cent does not arise from any kind of valid body of scientific literature. “Dr” Carnes simply pulled it out of his arse, and Adele Horin was happy to publish it because it came from “the godfather” of the anti-porn crusader movement sex addiction “research”. Horin publishes a token acknowledgement on the next page that such figures are completely unscientific, but lack of a sound scientific basis didn't prevent her from spreading them in the first place.

What seems undeniable is that a subset of people spends so much time porn gazing online that they are damaging their relationships.

Why is it damaging to the relationships? I have no doubt that it's possible for someone to look at so much porn that they neglect to carry out other activities. On the other hand, it's equally likely that there's a subset of women who find the idea of masturbation disturbing and take their partner's masturbation activities to mean that there is something lacking in their sex life. Instead of finding out how the woman's views on sex and masturbation affect how they perceive their partner's porn habits, all we hear from Horin are horror stories:

Men became [...] "lazy lovers". In the end they could not be bothered with real-life sex. In other cases, sex lives became porn-like, male-focused, extreme and lacking in intimacy.

This is based on the reports from female partners who believed that porn had negatively affected their sex lives. If this is a problem, it's alarming. It's alarming in the same way it would be if men started emulating the boys from South Park or Family Guy. Most men are perfectly able to tell the difference between fantasy, fiction and reality, just as most women are. What's harder for the public to discern is the bounds of the fantasy that exist within Horin's article when she quotes self-styled “experts” in the same breath as university researchers:

Women's self-esteem nose-dived. They felt they could not compete with the nymphs on screen. They did not measure up to the bodies or sexual performance of the women their men were watching. Connie, a 50-year-old graphics designer, whose former partner looked at pornography constantly, says: "After a while I started to feel worthless." Karen 44, whose eight-year marriage broke up over her husband's porn obsession, agonised over "why he preferred that to me".

What's happening here is an overgeneralisation about the sort of women you find in porn. Porn is a broad church. What don't these women measure up to? BBW's? Hippy chicks? Big booty? Big boobs? Small boobs? Leather-wearing? Hairy/Shaved? White/Black/Japanese/Indian/Latina chicks? One weird type of Japanese hentai where thumbelina-sized women (and probably men too) are molested by giant genitalia? Arms not hairy enough?

What kind of “sexual performance” is Horin referring to? The problem here is not the pornography, it's that the women start to convince themselves they are worth less than a 2D woman on a computer screen. We don't hear the perspective from the men - whether Karen's partner really did prefer “that” to having sex with her, or what Connie's husband thought about her feelings of worthlessness. What we have here is a failure to communicate!

The perspective that Horin is pushing here is that porn is a viable replacement for a real woman. That, given the chance, men will take porn in preference to the real thing. Is that true? While I can't quote any scientific literature to counter Horin's views, my guess is that if men who use porn were actually asked such questions, they'd probably laugh in astonishment. It would be a very abnormal man indeed who preferred using porn to having sex with a woman, and to my mind, women are better off with men like that taken out of the dating pool, because they're bound to have other strange issues as well!

A well-conducted British survey based on a representative sample of partners of regular porn users shows these feelings are widespread. Most partners are largely neutral about their men's regular pornography use, the survey, published in the “Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy” in 2003, shows.

But a significant minority - about one-third of the women - found it highly distressing. About 32 per cent said their partner's porn use had adversely affected their sex life, 39 per cent said it had negatively affected their relationship, 34 per cent had lessened self-esteem, 41 per cent felt less attractive and desirable since having discovered their partner's use, and 42 per cent said it made them feel insecure. More than one-quarter viewed it as a kind of affair.

The assumption here is that it's the “fault” of the male partner for viewing pornography and causing distress to the female partner. What's not addressed is that maybe some of the women have underlying issues with sex and masturbation that lead to their lessened self-esteem and feelings of being less attractive and desirable. The fact that more than 25 per cent of women viewed their partner's viewing of pornography as “a kind of affair” is what sets the alarm bells ringing; would these women also view their partner's masturbation in the same way?

Would their partner jerking off in the absence of visual stimulation elicit the same reaction? Why would they have that reaction? If a survey showed that 25 per cent of women felt less attractive and desirable because their partner masturbated from time to time, would we see articles from Horin on how masturbation, a perfectly normal and healthy behaviour, was “poisoning” relationships? Or would we say that the women's views perhaps reflected something fundamentally wrong with the way our society judges sexual behaviour?

The point that Horin completely misses in her article is that porn is simply a masturbation aid, not something that men use as a replacement for a sexual relationship. Men who do not want a real sexual relationship are a genuine minority. If they weren't we wouldn't see the proliferation of adult “dating” (great euphemism that) sites such as Adult Matchmaker, because men would all be getting their fix from porn. Clearly they're not.

Horin shares a few extreme examples, presumably real, to hammer the horror home:

Gracie, a human resources manager, insists she is no prude. She is a willing sexual explorer. But even she was surprised at what her 33-year-old boyfriend, a builder, stored under his "favourites" file. "There must have been 20 porn sites there. I was pretty shocked - not that they were there, only that there were so many," she says.

My thought? "Only 20?"!. Of course, if Gracie's boyfriend was paying $30 a month for all those sites, then it might be a problem- a financial one! $30 seems to be the going rate for many- some are cheaper ... Gam and I subscribed to Wifey's World for a month once, and I think it was about $30. I imagine if a guy couldn't control his spending on porn then it might become a problem. The real problem in Gracie's case seemed to be that her boyfriend confused fantasy with reality:

The sex became impersonal and aggressive: "It became more 'porn' style - pulling my hair, no kissing, slapping around a bit, all stuff I was initially OK with. And always he wanted to come in my face," Gracie says. "There was no real intimacy, no thought about what I might like."

I've seen a lot of porn. Not all porn involves the guy cumming on a woman's face! Not all porn involves hair pulling. Most of the porn I've seen involves some kissing, but in my opinion it only works when there appears to be genuine chemistry between the “actors”. I've also seen a lot of amateur porn, in which none of those things occur: the girls are average, the guys are average, the sex is average, there's just the “naughtiness” of two very normal people doing it on camera. In fact, it's often better, as the two people want to sleep with each other and aren't being paid to do so.

Horin is buying into the myth than all porn involves plastic-surgerified actresses like Jesse Jane and Gina Lynn being contorted into uncomfortable positions all for the gratification of some well hung (but usually not very attractive) guy. I find myself scarcely able to believe that Gracie's boyfriend wanted the same thing every time, because if sex was the same every time it would be boring. Variety really is the spice of life.

Porn is a broad church, Adele, and you'd know that if you'd actually watched some instead of just railing against it.

Ordinary women's desire or desperation to "make it more like porn" has helped fire the popularity of Brazilian waxes [...] Unlike the natural-looking porn stars of the 1970s such as Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, the nymphs populating internet porn today have their pubic hairs ripped out after an application of hot wax. The desired look is "clean" and pre-pubescent. "Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair," says Etcoff, "and I think men like it".

I'm not sure what Horin is getting at here, particularly with the use of the word “clean”. The implication that pubic hair is somehow dirty is a pet dislike of mine. Brazilians are just a fashion, pushed as much by women's magazines and shows like Sex and the City, and not something that all guys buy into. Women in 80s porn have hair in places that I scarcely knew it grew, and I'm sure men back then weren't thinking "If only there was no hair down there, this porn would be so good". More like they were thinking "Naked chick! Having sex! Alriiight!"

Figures provided by Nielsen/NetRatings NetView show 2.7 million Australians visited an "adult" website in March (this figure counts repeat visitors to adult websites only once); 4.3 million visited in the first three months of this year. More than 35 per cent of all Internet users in the quarter ending March visited an adult website at least once

I take that to mean that about a quarter of the population visit adult websites. I'm one of them. Gam's one of them. We look at a lot of stuff together. We've had a great sex life right from the word “go” in our relationship, and we still have a great sex life now. Some of the porn we look at is simply out of sheer fascination rather than erotic desire (there's some weird shit out there). When we're apart we might look at porn alone. In fact, because Gam is much more patient at wading through crappy porn than I am, I rely on him to save clips that he thinks I might like!

And while we enjoy some of the same porn, we have different tastes too, as you might expect - Gam likes women and I like men. He gets off more on watching women enjoy themselves, and I get off more on watching guys enjoy themselves (that's why gay porn is often better than straight porn!). I also like to read erotic literature, as my imagination can often do a better job than a porn director can. And no, my imagination does not dream up soft, romantic fantasies - it's a horrible stereotype of women's sexuality. Women don't all want the same thing any more than men do.

Do I feel less attractive when Gam takes a look at the big-bootied Latina women of Mexican Lust? Do I feel like I need a bigger arse to “compete”? Hell no! Gam likes me exactly the way I am! It's only when a woman's partner pushes her to change her appearance so that she better fulfils his sexual fantasies that there is a problem in the relationship (if there ever was a “dump him” scenario it would be that). If a woman decides by herself that she needs to change in order to please her partner, I would argue that it's probably a psychological problem on the part of the woman, not a problem that can be addressed by her partner ceasing to view porn, and that both partners might be better off discussing their views and perhaps visiting a counsellor.

Women are also under pressure to emulate the porn stars' apparent penchant for anal sex, according to four consecutive Swedish studies, the latest published in 2005 in the International Journal of STD and AIDS. Young men who are regular porn consumers are more likely to have had anal sex with a girl, and most of the men liked it. Most young women did not like anal sex, with fewer than half saying they would do it again, the studies found.

[...]

Nadine, a 30-year-old accountant, who observed her boyfriend, a 33-year-old lawyer, graduate to harder and harder porn sites over years, says: "He loves anal and I hate it. He knows that I do but he still insists on it. I dread it and honestly, I close my eyes and pray that he hurries up and gets it over with it."

Wow. Another “dump him” scenario. What kind of relationship is that? Here, Horin is using an example of a woman experiencing something that I would argue at best borders on rape to prove that porn results in women having anal sex against their will. The problem here is not anal sex in porn, it's: a) the fact that any woman might feel she has to give in to any kind of sexual activity she does not want to engage in; and b) the fact that there are men out there who feel they have the right to engage in sexual activities with an unwilling partner. That's an attitude that's been around for a lot longer than porn has existed, and it's one that's absolutely and fundamentally wrong.

Basically, Horin's article is one that attempts to lump responsibility for some time-honoured sexual and relationship woes experienced by ordinary men and women onto “porn”. Her article lacks any recognition of the fact that “porn” is a term that covers an incredibly broad range of content that caters to an even broader range of people, women included. If masturbation while viewing porn is cited as a factor in relationship troubles, it's not necessarily porn that's at the heart of the problem.