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Is porn damaging your emotional health?
Thanks to the internet, porn has become central to our lives, with serious consequences for our sexual and emotional health
Naomi Wolf
Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist, rose to fame in the 1980s arguing that if we did not limit pornography most men would objectify women more intensively and treat them less as people than as porn stars. The floodgates would open; rape and other sexual transgressions would follow.
Since then the advent of the internet and, more importantly, broadband in most Western homes has meant that pornography has left the space that it once occupied of being a marginal, adult, private pursuit and has saturated a mainstream public arena. The whole world has become pornographised. A decade ago the “outing” of men's use of porn was often a scandal. But in the fallout from Jacqui Smith's expense claims, and the exposure of her husband, Richard Timney, for watching pay-per-view pornographic films, there has been no particular outrage about his use of porn. The scandal has been more that public funds settled the bill.
The unspoken assumption now is that everyone - at least, most men - use porn. A survey of British teenagers for Channel 4 revealed this week that 28 per cent learnt about sex from porn. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training. This is a giant shift for our species' imprinting about sex. For most of our history erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. But today, for the first time in human history, the power and allure of the images have supplanted that of real naked women.
When I came of age in the Seventies it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response merely by showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but, hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am 42, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Now, simply being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, tanned - with no tan lines - have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax, just like in the XXX-rated movies. The norms for Western beauty seem to be informed, whether it's intentional or not, by pornography. In my gym I notice that 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair but the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled - hardly a look derived from, say, the fashion world. In the 1970s porn was a bad substitute for real naked women. Today it is perfect porn that is “real” sex to young people - and real naked women are just bad porn.
Porn is no longer beyond the pale; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses. Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated?
