amused
In my circle of friends that I see on a regular basis (about 40 of them) I'm known as the ' porn guy ' because I've been involved in just about every aspect of the Adult Internet Industry for more than 12 years. I've produced content, recruited talent, owned adult sites, hosted adult sites, written for AVN Online & Klixxx , etc... Yeah I've been there and done that... I mostly handle the technical end of things these days as it's difficult to keep up the 24/7 party without getting a little burned out.
One of the top recurring questions I get asked, usually after a few drinks on a weekend night is " doesn't porn hurt relationships " or something very similar to that. It varies a bit from time to time, but the theme is usually the same, dealing with some aspect of porn being harmful to normal relationships. It's important to point out that about 75% of the time it's a girl asking, which isn't a surprise to most people. While I'm not what I consider to be old, I'm also not in my early 20's anymore either, and I don't remember anyone really asking this question too much back before the Internet boom of the the late 1990's and early 2000. Why is that ? The simple answer is that prior to the Internet as we know it today porn was something you needed to go and get, smuggle it home, hope you didn't run into your neighbors mom at the video store while you were coming out of the black curtain room, etc.. Today porn is everywhere, especially on the Internet. You can get it 24/7 in the comfort of your own home, you can use filtering systems to clean up your tracks on the computer, you can even use anonymous proxy services to mask where you're actually at while watching it. Like most things, you'll check it out if you think nobody is watching you.
So the question remains.... Does porn hurt otherwise healthy relationships in average people ?
I guess the first thing to analyze is what's the definition of "average" and "healthy" when it comes to relationships. I fancy myself as someone who really knows people in general. I do a pretty good job of picking up what makes someone tick after just a few minutes with them, a skill that was the difference between life and death in my former career in law enforcement. As I mentioned before I have a pretty decent group of close friends, but I have an even larger group of extended friends. The one thing I see most commonly in relationships is the simple fact that the people in many of these relationships shouldn't be together in the first place. After the euphoria of having sex every which way with someone new wares off, after you've gone out to dinner a few times, seen a few movies, and maybe gone to a baseball game or two the honeymoon pretty much wears off and you have to really still enjoy that person. From what I see many times a couple gets together after a short time of knowing each other, get hooked on the sexual part, then after that's no longer as exciting they just don't know when to call it quits. Sometime they have kids and that just makes it all the more harder. They linger on and on in a semi-unhappy state for months, sometimes years. Why ? Who the hell knows why, but I believe it's because they just don't want to be alone at nights for the brief amount of time it would take to meet someone else. The really sad thing is that ultimately in the end they hang on so long that they start to really dislike each other and then when they finally get around to the inevitable they basically hate each other. Very sad indeed. I see this way more than I would like to. I'm sure you have too if you think about it.
So back to the question.... what's average and healthy ? Well I would say that healthy is just about anything that allows for enjoyment of each other in various states and doesn't effect your ability to function normally, keep a job, not have rage, remain active, be social, etc... What's average ? I guess it could be said that average is being more or less like the majority of everyone else, and as I pointed out I believe that for most people average isn't healthy at all at one time or another.
So we have a rather sticky set of questions to digest while still trying to figure out how it relates to porn or the impact porn has.
The simple facts are that in any given set of circumstances those specific tangibles introduced in mass quantity over time will have a numbing effect on the graphical impact. Yeah, lots of mumbo jumbo, right ? What I'm trying to say is that the more you see something that shocks you the less you'll be shocked each time you see it. Like watching the Texas Chainsaw movie once a week for 20 weeks. By the 20th week you could be eating raw hamburger while watching it and laughing in the end. By that time it's going to take a lot more to gross you out or scare you.
It is important to point out that specifically committed couples (right or wrong) can be personally impacted by outside influences such as porn. Then again they could easily be influenced by a thousand other factors having nothing to do with porn, but I digress.....
The next thing to ponder is why is there so much porn ? That's a simple answer..... people want it. We've all seen way too many bible thumpers get caught in orgys, coming out of whore houses, preaching against gays while actually secretly being gay, etc... This just goes to show us that even though many people take a stand against it most of them still secretly enjoy it. Sex is natural, and for the most part is 100% good and exciting. In fact there are only two things a human being will do by pure instinct if somehow born in the wild and raised by humming birds. We'll try to find food and eat, and we'll try to reproduce or play with themselves. So it's very easy to say that sex consumes at least 50% of what we think about daily, knowingly or not. The next best thing to do if you can't have sex is to watch it. Humans are an extremely visual species. Visual stimulation can be enough to bring both sexes to climax. So that's the basics of why porn even exists.
So why is there so much ? Again, because people want it, more of it, different types of it, etc.. After you watch 2 people screw for a while you start to wonder what three people at the same time would look like, then if one was getting spanked, then if a girl was taking it from 2 guys at once, three guys at once, etc, etc... this is what I would call the normal progression of standard to extreme porn interest in most viewers. So the ultimate answer is that there is so much because the consumption rate is so high. Supply vs demand. In porn it's easy to keep up with.
So is it harmful ? Here's the answer that some people aren't going to like. Yeah, porn can be very harmful to some people and some relationships. Not because it's porn, but in the same manner as an addictive drug can be harmful in the hands of an addict. It's not what they're doing in porn that has any harm, it's what it means to those watching it. As I mentioned in the beginning of this atricle most couples shouldn't be together anyway. They're just holding on to mostly the sex on lonely nights or the overriding fear of being alone. Check out a dive bar on a week night, any girl you see there who's not in a relationship is more or less saying she can't stand to be alone. They make excuses for doing it, they join leagues and clubs to give them a reason to be there all the time, etc.. So once you introduce a surrogate influence such as porn you now have less interest in sex with a person youre just dragging along with. You may also see things that seem so exciting but your partner wouldn't try it in a million years type of thing. This will frustrate even the most patient of people. If you're in love with your mate, if you're both in a comfortable place, and if you're both more or less adults then porn is no more harmful than a candy bar.
There was an article I read a little while ago that cited some complete BS about how some survey of divorce attorneys indicated that in 50% of their cases porn was an issue with the spouse, to be precise.... the wife. They used that single piece of questionable data to say that porn was a major factor in divorce rates. Complete nonsense. People get divorced for many reasons, mostly because they simply don't like each other anymore. The minutia of why isn't important at that point. The damage is done and it's time to move on.
Here's where I get to the part that's really going to piss off the ladies..... From what I've seen in the last 10 years or so almost all of the people really upset about porn are women. Ironic if you think about it since the majority of people in porn are women. I believe this is because the majority of women out there are very used to being able to land and keep a man based on being somewhat cute and having the on/off sex switch in their pants. In lots of cases these girls idea of crazy sex wouldn't make it in even softcore porn, the HBO kind. So when their man starts to get excited about seeing things he really wants to do with his partner, and she isn't into it , that's where you get the start of problems. Those problems will never go away until he finds someone else or she joins the party. Now don't get your pantys in a bunch just yet. I'm not saying a girl needs to put out in some special way or do anything she doesn't want to do. What I am saying is that these differences in fundemental likes and dislikes will rapidly widen the gap between a couple, much faster than without things such as porn to bring it to the surface. To be clear these gaps would have already existed and eventually they would have gone their different ways anyway in most cases.
There are many case studies that back up this theory. Studies where large cross sections of men and women were surveyed about satisfaction in bed. The numbers were very interesting indeed. overwhelmingly men expressed dissatisfaction with their wives for reasons such as frequency, positioning, experimentation, effort. The last one was a biggie... effort. For women it was more or less the opposite, the minority was unsatisfied, while the majority was content with what they did in bed already. Why is this ? For most relationships all the above factors are controlled by the woman. When , where, how much , what is being tried, etc.. There is ONLY one exception to this general rule.... when you first meet. Then it's wild sex and just about anything goes. Watch new fun adventure fly out the window over time. Over time you get responses to sexual advances such as: being tired, not having shaved that day, not wanting to feel messy, and just about any other reason you can think of. Most guys think to themselves.... you weren't too tied to bend over a log ride when we sneaked into the closed ride at Knotts Berry Farm last summer at midnight when we met, you rarely shave everyday and that never stopped us from banging 3 times a day for the entire month of July last summer, etc... Again this just points back to what I said earlier about dragging on with a dying relationship the interest level has gone so far down that even sex isn't so exciting anymore. The point is that for many men the only time they get to see a naked girl is when their partner is naked, or when they watch porn. The issues is that if they aren't happy with their partner, yet stick it out because it's steady sex... porn will crush that couple. But then again they should have already called it quits a long time before that, right ? So it's easy to deamonize porn at that point.
Can porn hurt an otherwise healthy relationship ? I really don't think so. Alcohol will crush a relationship if one or both of them are alcoholics, but won't bother anyone if you use it in moderation. Again, healthy is the key. As an example... I was talking with my wife last year about ****s, and how lately I realized that they just weren't a fantastic as the year before. We have a great relationship and talk openly about this type of stuff all the time in efforts to keep things nice and exciting. She didn't realize anything was different and to be honest I hadn't noticed that much until I saw something in a movie I was editing. I was like " damn , she used to do that exact thing"... then I started thinking about when she stopped. I was shocked when I realized it was a year ago. If we were an average couple lagging on this may have been the beginning of the end ... and porn would have been to blame for reminding me ! Well, we're not the average couple and we're doing just fine so porn can't influence us in the same way as some of these sad sacks. Back to my point.... when I brought it up she had questions and when I described it to her in detail she actually started to tell me things like it hurts her neck, it hurts her knees, I take too long, etc... mind you this was a very casual conversation while driving someplace. I responded with " when we first met you used to blow me like I had the last drop of water on earth and it was hidden in my **** " type of thing. I said " if I died tonight, and you eventually met someone else you would, without a doubt suck him off with the same intensity as when we first met". She didn't argue, in fact she laughed and agreed with me. This conversation took only 5 minutes to have, but I can tell you that because we were already in a healthy place the conversation was meaningful. I've always encouraged her to tell me things similar so we can keep in tune and she does. This is what I call healthy. Also the BJ's are back up to porn status again :)
For sure it's mostly women who are getting the shaft from porn (no pun intended). Everything from eating problems, having cosmetic surgery, etc.. This is because of one indisputable fact about the majority of porn. The girls are usually smoking hot. They have attractive faces and that ' porn body'. Sure there's a market for everything and you got your big girls, your outright ugly girls, etc... but the mass produced majority feature what seems like an endless supply of young, extremely fit, attractive girls. The ironic thing is that 90% of the guys look like they came from a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome movie. Just completely fugly. My wife keeps pointing that out. Even when I see something that looks pretty interesting I'm usually distracted by the roided out balding muscle head in the scene. I mean I see girls every day that have that " porn " body. I see them at the grocery store, book store, hocky games, etc. When you do see them it's pretty unanimous " WOW that chick is smoking hot !!" My wife is pretty hot ( see my profile pics) and she has no problem pointing out other hot chicks and appreciating them too ...... but I rarely see any guy that looks like some of these porn dudes, not even at the commercial gym I go to. But, man of man .. when you do see one of these guys you're like " what a weird looking dude ! Freeeeakkky ! " . Ok , ok, I digress a bit.... Where was I ? Oh yeah... girls take the worst of it when compared to porn actresses. The fact is that there are more less than attractive girls than there are very attractive girls. The very odd thing is that the less attractive ones still hold up this notion that since they have the ultimate prize, a vagina, they can still keep on with business as usualy and try to hold on to a relationship with just anatomy differences on their side. I think it's this rude awakening that's sending some of these women over the edge.
The really biggie.... " isn't porn degrading to women ? " . Come on , you know you've heard that lame question before. I usually answer this with " was it degrading getting banged in the bed of that guys track a few months ago ? " , or " was it degrading blowing 2 different guys on the same night when you were single ? " Usually women who say things like this are really saying " that skinny bitch can obviously do things better than me so she's got to have a problem, or has no self esteem". Let's face it sex is messy and good sex is more messy. There's fluids in and out, licking, lube , semen dripping here and there... etc.... You should have to take a shower when you're done. You may not be able to , but you should need to :)
Here's a fun fact. Back in the 70's the radical feminists movement predicted that porn would soon breed a generation of sexual maniac men. The opposite has actually happened. Just as I mentioned before the raw amount of porn has actually raised the bar on what excites a man. So a little boob flash isn't likey to make a guy get excited and instantly have wood. It takes much more now. Again this makes lots of women scared out of their minds. They have to actually work for the excitement ? WTF is that ? Yepp that's the times we're living in. As another example our group of friends are pretty damn comfortable with each other. We party and play strip poker, skinny dip in the pool, the guys grab the girls tits while playing around, I've seen most all their boobs at one time or another, etc... I don't think I've ever been even remotely aroused enough to have to put a pillow over my lap or anything because of this type of sexually charged fooling around. 20 years ago that would have been compared to almost having sex. Like the classic scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High... when Phebe comes out of the pool... she was fully covered even, but damn I remember that as hot. Not by todays standards but for sure by yesterdays.
Final words....
If you like porn, and want to watch it, or even want to try some of the things you see in it be open and honest with your partner. Talk about what you like or dislike, encourage your partner to do the same. If you hit a brick wall then you may want to ponder why, and unless you're 100% ok with that you need to let your partner know. Otherwise the differences in sexuality will crush your relationship, porn or no porn.
Here's some interesting reading if you want other opinions which in some cases complete differ from my own:
Pamela Paul's Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming our Lives, our Relationships, and our Families.
Robert Jensen's Getting Off
Written by Ray Vanpraag