This post features details of sexual violence that could be triggering for some readers.
Louise Perry doesn’t think you should be watching porn.
That’s what she told Mia Freedman in the subscriber exclusive part two of her conversation on Mamamia's No Filter podcast.
Perry is a London-based writer, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and campaigner against sexual violence.
“I don't think that there is a good reason to do it [watch porn]. I don't think you can do it in a feminist way… It’s just not ethical,” she told No Filter.
And it’s bad for the consumer, Perry elaborates.
She contrasts the centrefold mags of the '60s to the modern online porn of today - “carefully designed to arouse users as quickly as possible, and get them to come back for more”.
“It trains your brain to think of sex as a spectator sport.”
She poses, when a consumer logs on to any porn website, what are they faced with?
An abundance of porn offerings, each thumbnail teasing the most explicit highlights.
“Everything is set up to bombard you with hyper-real sexual stimuli… It’s all about making the natural stimuli that you'd see in the wild, super exaggerated… stuff that you'd never actually see in a normal sexual encounter. But it's all about turning you on quickly.”
The rapid arousal suppresses your disgust response - “closely linked to your moral intuition,” says Perry.
“And for many, after they orgasm, they'll put the laptop away and be like, ‘Oh my God. What did I just watch?’. And there's that feeling of instantaneous regret.”
Listen to part one of Mia Freedman's interview with Louise Perry on the No Filter podcast. Story continues below.
The more that one watches porn, the more one becomes immune to ‘vanilla’ content, warns Perry. Each time there becomes a need to up the ante, venturing into more racy - and often, increasingly ethically questionable - territory.
Perry likens it to a drug, where one must ingest a little more each time to get the same buzz as the initial hit.
She has observed compulsive users who begin with veering towards BDSM, but then look for something more extreme. Some - “a minority, but not that small a minority” - spiral into the deviant world of child sexual abuse material.
Perry recalls discussions with clinical psychologists where they’ve differentiated between ‘true paedophiles’ - that is, “those exclusively interested in children sexually” - and men who don’t fit the standard profile, but have consumed so much porn, they are “desensitised to any sense of normality and morality and have ended up in the worst places in the internet - and got caught".
Perry has also observed the impact of porn in changing the sexual landscape - where young men’s sexual expectations are formed based on what they see acted out in porn. The proliferation of violent sex is understood as regular behaviour. And for women, it plays to the internalised shame of the slut versus prude dilemma, and the prevailing cultural pressure to be ‘up for anything’.
Such behaviour includes choking, once contained to a niche BDSM magazine, she says, but readily available on the homepage of any porn website, found on any smartphone, anytime.
Perry cites survey findings that showed as many as 50 per cent of young women had been choked during sex - “very often without consent, [and] without warning”.
“In the last 10-20 years, choking is suddenly considered to be normal… A lot of men seem to think that you don’t even need to have a conversation about it before suddenly doing this to women in bed,” she tells No Filter.
And the consequences can be dire.
Perry is the press officer for ‘We can’t consent to this’, a campaign that highlights women who have been choked during sex - and died.
Their killer's defence is that the woman consented to violence as part of rough sex.
“But the woman is not here to tell her side of the story.”
She says there have been over 60 cases in the UK where this defence has being attempted.
Perry also speaks on the issues presented by the sex positivity movement - especially the over-destigmatisation and acceptance of all sexual behaviour, (such as cannibalism); as long as there is 'consent'.
“It ends up with this insane level of no norms allowed… [and] the question is, where do you set the line?”
“The sex-positive movement wants us to sort of push that line back, and permit more and more freedom for everyone all the time… It just hasn't reckoned with the inevitable negative consequences - which mostly fall on women.”
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry is out now.
Listen to episode one of No Filter where Mia Freedman and Louise Perry deconstruct the idea of 'meaningless sex'.
If this post brings up any issues for you, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service. It doesn’t matter where you live, they will take your call and, if need be, refer you to a service closer to home.
Feature Image: Twitter/Mamamia.
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