When it comes to sex, I am a guinea pig. A confused, disoriented guinea pig.
I’m 19. And my generation, purely by immersion, is the first in history to be porn-educated.
No Where Did I Come From. No awkward parental talks. No going into your first sexual experience with the poise and grace of a blindfolded child playing pin the tail on the donkey.
Rather, I went into my first ever sexual experience convinced I had a thorough understanding; I’d already watched hundreds (thousands) of people having sex on a site called Redtube. Penis into vagina. Thrusty-thrust. Fin.
Listen: if you’re a big consumer of porn – and no judgment if you are – pornstar Madison Missina has some advice on how to do so ethically. Post continues after audio.
I couldn’t really have been more wrong.
Growing up watching porn means that my generation, and all those that follow, enter sexual maturity and have sex for the very first time with pre-conceived ideas about what’s right and wrong; about the sounds someone makes when they orgasm; about what goes where and what… doesn’t.
The big issue then, is that our main source of sexual education is a short-clip of dodgy-looking nude people doing the no-pants dance for pure entertainment; it’s contrived; a performance. Sometimes, an exploitative one. It repackages sex in a way that glosses over the rarely spoken about, somewhat clumsy aspects of the average experience
In no porn film ever have the man and woman (or man and man, or man and man and woman, or man and woman and woman) been forced to take a vibe-crushing 26-second break from foreplay to a: locate; b: open; and c: put on a condom.
In no porn film ever has a man smacked a woman’s bum only to be told to do so again “but this time much softer.”
And in no porn film ever have the couple stopped having sex on account of the woman getting her period. Or someone farting. Or a dog jumping up on the bed to find out what on earth is going on.
It’s not like we are totally naive about porn sex. On some level most of us understand that porn isn’t ‘real’. But when you see so much of it – simplified, stylised pornified sex – that distinction is effectively overridden. See enough skinny models and you start to believe that’s how ‘real’ women should look. Watch enough porn and your expectations of sex and women will become warped.
