What has growing up watching porn done to my brain – and my sex life?
February 12, 2022
‘Kids need to be told porn is a fantasy projection.’
—
The gist:
The first time she saw porn (at 13 on a playground on a boy’s phone) she hadn’t even kissed anyone yet, and her ‘experience’ with sex was her school lectures that included bananas and a condom.
When she was 15, “MindGeek bought Pornhub, making millions of videos available for free each week. In the absence of any other guidelines, my friends and I continued to be influenced by what we saw, trying for something most of us weren’t getting much enjoyment out of.”
I wanted to learn to be like those malleable, impressive bodies. I remember being stressed about what happened between missionary, eagle and doggy because so many videos cut out when people changed positions. I wanted to watch those hidden gaps. Was it clumsy and awkward, like getting out of a car in a short dress? Do you say with your voice where you want the other person to go? Or should the voice only be used to say things such as “Don’t stop!” and “Harder!”?
While “the men I saw on screen did lots of different things to the women they slept with – slapping, choking, pulling, gagging – it always had the same effect. She would arch her back and moan louder. We didn’t read this as unrealistic or uninspiring because it fitted in with the world we were already learning to live with.”
She continues by saying, “When it came to having sex, my friends and I knew to pretend to like it when guys started using that aggressive gun finger motion between our legs or mistook a thigh crease for a clitoris. That seemed to be women’s role in sex, as in life: liking stuff. We were trying to make men feel good, but the whole time teaching them they didn’t need to do the same for us.”
She wishes that then, “a teacher couldn’t have got there in time to shield my eyes from what I saw on that phone when I was 13, but they could have explained to me what to think when I did see stuff like that. Such as: porn isn’t real, all bodies look different, very often you have to show people how to touch you, and there’s a lot of trial and error involved.”
Today, she hopes “that future generations demand more from their sex life; that they come of age with an enhanced sense of what is real and what is fake.”
The Stats:
Fifteen million UK adults said they watched porn during the pandemic.
In 2020 the government updated official guidance on relationships and sex education, for the first time in 20 years. Now compulsory from primary school, sex education must cover consent, abortion and domestic abuse
Photo: Photograph: Serena Brown/The Guardian. Illustration: Justin Metz. Model: Zoe Rhode
Connect with The Guardian article here.