Does Porn Make Me Better?
Morning stretches done, dog walked, breakfast eaten, I reached down to test the waters. How about a morning O'? Before I could drop trou, a question popped into my head:
Does porn make me better or worse?
Pornography is Nothing New
First, a little history. 17th century Europe was rife with war, disease, famine, and porn. There's no doubt been a rise in production of and access to pornographic material. The gist of the artwork, though, hasn't changed. Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience found some wonderful examples of erotic literature, paintings, and sculpture dating back nearly 30,000 years (Pappas, 2010). Artists risked jail time to explore erotic intimacies of man and beast, or of man and woman and beast (Kinniburgh, 2016).
Figure 2 Plate 5 from L'Academie des Dames 1680
Gaps in Understanding
Unfortunately for me, little research has been done quantifying erotic materials release over the last century. Even worse, most research on performance was done by asking the performer to rate themselves. For anyone that knows men and women, this is folly to the extreme. Women watch porn, many more than the average man depending on age (Haggstrom-Nordin, Hanson, & Tyden, 2005).
Empathy and Sex
I hear it a lot. Be a caring lover. Empathy is the key to relationships and trust. Trust is important for great sex. A lot of that is probably false or at least off the mark. Adult erotica models, at least those that do well and keep at it, tend to have greater orgasms dangerously cumming for camera. A dance with the unknown and untrusted, maybe the untrustworthy, leads some to greater self-reported pleasure during masturbation or intercourse (Angela, 2016). More self-reporting where I'd like to see better measurements of orgasmic intensity and frequency, but I don't doubt some validity to the findings. Bad-boy attractions are a thing. Not to mention, some women won't have sex with friends. Being empathic leads men to nearly twice as many friendships with women (Ciarrochi, Parker, Sahdra, & Conigrame, 2016), whereas I just want to be the best stud I can. That said, users of pornography tend to treat women on more equal grounds than non-users (Kohut, Baer, & Watts, 2016). Personally, I feel like this enhanced equality doesn';t work for most women socialized in American. While they may be more satisfied, even happier, in a more equal relationship with an empathic partner, the direct link to orgasmic intensity has not been made. There is research suggesting empathic sexual response, but that's just getting hot to the idea of whoever you are with having an orgasm (Haning, et al., 2008). That can be faked. Hello, Porn!
Would I Know What I Know Without Porn?
It's no secret that women report less orgasms than men. By some estimates one to three. There are some truly frightening theories running around. Women are bad at it. Women don't need to have as many orgasms biologically speaking. Thank God Freud is dead. Women can now tell us why they aren't cumming as much as they should. Aside from anxiety, which I touched on in a previous post here, women report insufficient arousal, lack of time during sex, pain, and poor lubrication among other things. I can say, porn taught me where the clit is. Considering nearly a third of women and a quarter of men (how do they not know???) don't know where the clitoris is and that lack of direct stimulation is hurting women's chances at regular orgasms (Castleman, 2016). Porn also got me into toys, and hence lube – two items that should be in every boy and girls' toy box. From data on myself, controlling ejaculation is much easier if I'm emptied out. I remember I came four times the night before my first big bang and lasted over an hour. We were both surprised. Shot off like a firehose too. Amazing stuff. So, I don't think I'd have as much control over pacing, accessories, or technique without porn. I think I'd also be a lot more gentle all the time, which seems boring to me now. Who wants to pound warm dolls to the tick of a metronome? What's furniture for?
Works Cited
Angela, J. (2016). "I Get Paid to Have Orgasms": Adult Webcam Models' Negotiation of Pleasure and Danger. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(1).
Castleman, M. (2016, February 01). Why So Many Women Don't Have Orgasms. Retrieved from Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201602/why-so-many-women-don-t-have-orgasms
Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P., Sahdra, B., & Conigrame, J. (2016). When Empathy Matters: The Role of Sex and Empathy in Close Friendships. Journal of Personality.
Haggstrom-Nordin, E., Hanson, U., & Tyden, T. (2005). Associations between pornography consumption and sexual practices among adolescents in Sweden. Internation Journal of STD & AIDS, 16, 102-107.
Haning, V., O'Keefe, S., Beard, K., Randall, E., Kommor, M., & Stroebel, S. (2008). Empathic sexual responses in heterosexual women and men. Sexual and Relationship Theory, 23(4), 325-344.
Kinniburgh, M. (2016). Equine Erotics, Possible Pleasures: Early Modern Bestiality and Insterspecies Queerness in Plate Five of L'Academie des dames. The Journal For Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16(4).
Kohut, T., Baer, J., & Watts, B. (2016). Is Pornography Really about "Making Hate to Women"? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample. Journal of Sex Research, 53(1), 1-11.
Pappas, S. (2010, October 11). The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present. Retrieved from Live Science: https://www.livescience.com/8748-history-pornography-prudish-present.html