How porn is rewiring our generation

By Rafaela Davies, Second Year, Social Policy and Politics

Does porn depict the world, or does it shape it? For anti-porn feminists, porn is the promotion of an ideology. By eroticising the subordination of women, both genders are made to accept, and even desire, an unequal sexual dynamic. This has unlimited repercussions. It is visible in every innocuous remark. It is heard in everyone’s tone, and in the way slang for promiscuous women is very different from the slang for promiscuous men.

Peggy Orenstein, in her books about the sex lives of young people, describes a life of sex without dating: a world where girls give and boys receive, and where a discourse of empowerment is a flimsy cover for disappointment and shame. Watching porn is not linked with sexual enthusiasm, as you might expect, but instead is closely correlated with depression, anxiety, loneliness and self-esteem issues. What was supposed to be entertainment has become destructive. 

'Porn has provided a script: the physical movements, the sounds, the gestures'

For younger generations, the children of the internet, porn has always been within reach. Anything they wanted to know or see was available to them, no matter their age or inexperience. A troubling side effect of seeing porn at such a young age is that people do not understand that it is fake. A UK study found that 53 per cent of teenage boys and 39 per cent of teenage girls think the sex they see in porn is realistic, and an even larger portion of this age group says porn is the primary way they learn about sex. When porn is your first introduction into the realm of sexual desire, then all sexual encounters are mediated through that lens.

Porn has provided a script: the physical movements, the sounds, the gestures. Any deviation from that script, such as the girl being reluctant or the boy struggling to have an erection, is seen as abnormal. This undoubtedly invites shame. As Amia Srinivasan observes: 'sex for my [university] students is what porn says it is.' But is it the fault of porn that we give it so much power? 

Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s warned that porn would have this transformative power over how sex is seen and performed. Legal expert and feminist figure, Mackinnon, predicted that 'sooner or later, consumers want to live out the pornography.' She believed porn-obsessed men would be 'epistemically incapable' of seeing women as anything but submissive sexual objects. Porn would lead men to see women as a monolith rather than as individuals. This indiscriminate sexualisation of women would make it psychologically easier to commit acts of violence towards them.

There is a significant link between pornography consumption and attitudes supporting violence against women, and this is true for women as well as men. However, correlation does not imply causation, and it is plausible that those who tend toward derogatory attitudes are more inclined to watch porn. Clearly, porn is not acting in a vacuum; even if the average age a child sees porn is 13, they have already witnessed men dominating and women submitting. Porn endorses this outlook, but it does not create it. 

It isn’t always clear whether porn is driven by the desires of its consumers or the other way around. As Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry, puts it, porn-users are often oblivious to the degree that their tastes are “largely moulded by a corporation”. The belief that men just 'happen' to prefer short women with limited sexual experience, and women just 'happen' to prefer tall men with high confidence, is ludicrous. Preferences have everything to do with culture, norms, and perceived status.

A 2017 German study found that 'the more a woman watched porn, and the younger she was when she started, the more eager she was to engage in submissive sexual behaviours.' The effect that long-term porn consumption has on the human psyche still isn’t understood. Instead of taking our desires for granted, we should interrogate the values underneath them. 

For women, participating in the kind of aggressive sex seen in porn means scoring points with the generation of men who have been watching it since they were pre-teens. But this is not just a choice, or a compromise, it is a mindset that fundamentally places the pleasure of their partner over their own. Consider the orgasm gap, exclusive to heterosexual sex, which dictates that men climax over 90 per cent of the time and women less than a third.

And men are not immune to porn-induced insecurity either. For example, porn consumption is closely linked with penis size dissatisfaction. Out of the thousands of men who have sought penile-enlargement surgeries, only eight per cent actually had smaller-than-average genitalia. The idea that porn is something people simply watch and then forget about is a myth. It permeates everything from self-image to sex itself, with more than 80 per cent of compulsive sexual behaviour being porn-related, particularly erectile dysfunction.

In conversation with REMOJO: the damaging effects of pornography on the student mind

Epigram interviewed Jack Jenkins, CEO and founder of REMOJO—an app designed to help break addictions to pornography—to discuss the addictive nature of pornography, and its potentially harmful impact on the emotional and physical wellbeing of the student demographic.

EpigramJessica Lees

Similarly, women who watch porn excessively can find sexual arousal impossible without it. The psychologist Clare Faulkner explains that because porn is a 'dissociative experience', frequent use can make being present during sex very difficult. Furthermore, as most porn use is solitary, those who have severe porn dependency can find sex overwhelming, as they are presented with another person’s set of desires and insecurities. Far from enhancing sexual experience, porn-users are far more alienated and dissatisfied than non-users. 

The defence for porn is that it is fake, that consumers are reasonably expected to know this, and, being entertainment, it has no real power. I argue that porn does have power. That its ever-younger users do not realise it is fictional, and their belief in its reality leads them to make it real. It exacerbates appearance-based insecurity and creates greater sexual dissatisfaction. I believe porn is a problem, but it has plenty of solutions.

Featured image: Unsplash / Charles Deluvio

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