Pleasure Politics: Porn and Sexual Education
Imo Sneath continues the conversation about the 'pornography debate' by considering the importance of sexual education and its state within our current social environment, in the second part of the two-part QUIRK special.
Imo Sneath
30 November 2021
30 November 2021
The problem of pornography is perhaps rooted in the lack of sexual education societies across the world receive. Research has shown that the younger the men that access porn, the more trouble that they have forming mature relationships with real partners. Porn is a fantasy and there is an extremely blurred line between how people translate their own watching of porn into their experience of pleasure in the ‘real world’.
Take the anti-fap movement where men have stopped masturbating because it affected them too much. Not only have they reported changes to their concentration, but porn has made them insecure or depressed and has even inhibited their ability to interact with women in the real world: they’ve become scared of the prospect of womanhood because most of their experience of sexual pleasure is based in a fantastical reality of erectile glory- a private place of pleasure where the women are the submissive, and they are the dominant.
Take the anti-fap movement where men have stopped masturbating because it affected them too much. Not only have they reported changes to their concentration, but porn has made them insecure or depressed and has even inhibited their ability to interact with women in the real world: they’ve become scared of the prospect of womanhood because most of their experience of sexual pleasure is based in a fantastical reality of erectile glory- a private place of pleasure where the women are the submissive, and they are the dominant.
"The complete lack of censorship within the porn industry has become damaging to the point of no return."
In the past, porn was something that you actively had to seek out – magazines were sold in newsagents and put on the top shelf, only available to those over 18 who had to openly pick up the magazine and pay for it at the counter. However, with increased internet connectivity, porn of all genres can be viewed in complete secrecy on mobile devices. A recent survey in the UK showed children as young as 7 had stumbled across porn sites whilst surfing the net, and 60% of 11-13-year-olds had viewed porn, often initially by accident. Skip forward a few years however, and 64% of American 13-24-year-olds actively seek out pornography at least weekly and porn sites worldwide have more regular traffic per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined - ‘Porn Hub’, gets 115 million visits a day – each lasting an average of just over 10 minutes. This active seeking of pornography is a plain example of how our youth are turning to porn as a form of sexual education, instead of receiving the correct information within protected environments such as schools.
In my experience, the extent of my sexual education at secondary school was quite literally putting a condom on a banana. There was no exploration of respect within relationships based on mutual understanding, consent was only explored briefly at the age of 16 and I’m not sure a single adult ever mentioned porn within the entirety of my school career. The plain issue therefore is sex being taboo and sexual pleasure being something society for the most part considers private. Yes, conversations about sex are complex, but you wouldn’t watch Fast and Furious to learn how to drive so children shouldn’t be watching porn to learn how to have sex. It is no longer okay for society to subscribe to outdated ideologies that sexuality shouldn’t be discussed more openly than simply within a single Sex Ed class within a person’s 6 years of teenage education. It has got to the point where porn is dictating what society considers normal and what the youth understands as pleasure.
Performance expectations do exist. Our heterosexual male society in parts, because of porn, is intrinsically attracted to the image of pre-pubescent girls. Take pubic hair, a simple and natural signifier of adolescence. Shaving is a societal construct and the fact that in 2021, women still feel compelled to shave ‘down there’ irrelevant to whether they want to or not, purely because of the pressure received from patriarchal aspects within society, is ridiculous. And this is just one of the many examples of how the ease at which developing adolescents access pornography is damaging. When people are starting to treat erotic fantasy like a sexual bible, you know you’ve got a problem. We are still deviating to conformity simply because people are growing up thinking this is the norm.
So, it is viable to say that pornography diminishes the female in certain aspects. This assessment however is that although hard-core genres promote the ideology of sexual aggression, the issue doesn’t root itself in the existence of porn, but instead in the existence of hard-core, unlegislated genres. Take rape porn, which shows a non-consensual sexual act. Young people view this and take it as gospel simply because they don’t know better because our society has failed to teach them otherwise. The pornography industry must stop ignoring the relevance of age rating on sites - you can put a U on a Disney film, so you can put a 16+ on erotica. A 16+ which would allow people to learn correct sexual practice before entering physical relationships with not just women, but people. The pornography industry, intrinsically flawed, needs to assess its promotion of damaging cultures, which have become the sexual education of the younger generations - why is our society so obsessed with capitalising off of curiosity that they fail to ignore the importance of basic human rights and sexual knowledge? People view access to porn as a “right”, but they are ignorant to the prospective wreckage that a sexual education learnt from fantasy can cause.
The more that porn is given the opportunity to sexualise and encourage violence against others - most prominently people who don't identify as a cisgender, heterosexual male - the more it normalises and legitimises sexually aggressive behaviour, and this is what needs to be re-evaluated.