How Porn Impacts Us, Part 4: Attitudes Toward Women

The last post in the “How Porn Impacts Us” series was long. Long! It was really, really long. 

You’d think that after all that typing, after that veritable ocean of words, I’d have exhausted the subject. Turns out that I didn’t quite, though, because there’s a point that could bear some extra thought. I had hypothesized that porn impacts our attitudes toward sex, similar to how TV and movies impact our attitudes toward love and marriage. I had also given an example about the fact that in porn movies it’s incredibly easy to get girls in bed because, really, that’s all girls in porn want to do anyway. They’ve just been sitting around, pussies gathering dust, wishing somebody would fuck them, and that guy delivering a pizza provides the perfect opportunity.

As a side note, I’ve never actually seen a porn video involving a pizza delivery guy. They may not even exist for all I know. But I like to use the cliché anyway. It’s called lazy writing, and it’s how these blog posts get churned out so fast.

But I think those two ideas – that porn impacts our attitudes toward sex, and women in porn don’t always act like women in real life – are very closely intertwined. I think porn impacts not just our attitudes toward sex, it also impacts our attitudes toward women. And before I go too far, let me dispel a misconception before it even materializes: I’m not saying that I think porn impacts men’s attitudes toward women, I’m saying it impacts everyone’s attitudes toward women. I do think these attitudes play out differently in men than they do in women, though I think it’s bad news for women in both cases. Sorry ladies.

Looks

When I talk about porn impacting our view of women the first thing that probably comes to mind is looks, because women in porn are typically better looking and have better bodies than women in real life. That’s not an absolute, there are hot women with amazing, jaw-dropping, saliva-inducing bodies who aren’t in porn. I sometimes see them on the street, just... walking around. Like regular people! There are also, occasionally, women in porn who aren’t that good looking, and/or who don’t have great bodies. But on the whole if you consume porn you’ll be seeing sexy girls and if you walk down the street you’ll be getting a mix.

But when it comes to looks I don’t think porn shapes our views of women’s looks any more than what the rest of the culture and media are already doing. If anything porn is following general trends that the rest of the culture is already pushing; if fat girls start to become the new sexy, you’ll see that pretty much immediately all of the girls in porn will get bigger and bigger. (Along with “specialty” porn that features skinny girls, just to try and catch the skinny fetishists.) It’s true that you’ll see more fake breasts in porn than in real life, there’s maybe a bit more artificiality to the beauty in porn than in TV and movies, but that’s only because porn is pushing it a bit further; thin girls with big breasts are more attractive in our society, but it’s more normal for pornstars to augment their breasts than it is for non-pornstars. (We actually see the breasts in porn, so they have to be perfect. In TV and movies, where the breasts will usually be covered by clothing, you can do a lot with good bras and double-sided tape to augment reality when necessary.) Boob jobs are getting more common for women in all walks of life, but I’m not sure if it’s really porn that’s such a contributing factor, or if it’s all of the rest of our culture.

Attitudes Toward Sex

The other factor though, in addition to looks, is our attitudes toward sex.

Oh man, he’s going on about attitudes again? When is he going to stop talking about attitudes and just write about facials again or something?

Yes, attitudes. Let us again remember that porn is about one thing, and one thing only: fucking. There are often plotlines and stories and even – gasp! – dialog, but in porn all of that, all of it, is just to get us to the fucking.

Sex also exists in television and movies, but there’s a lot of other stuff that happens too. Sometimes movies are about love, or adventure, or about solving murder mysteries, or about aliens attacking the planet, or about the holocaust, or documentaries about global warming, or … you get the idea.  There’s no end to the themes that come out in movies. And even though the girls in movies (aside from documentaries) are usually sexy, and even though so many North American films end with “the guy getting the girl” (and sex is implied in that), sex is only part of the mix when it exists at all. In the movies women solve crimes and have adventures and fall in love and have their hearts broken and fight aliens and kill zombies, and their motivations are sometimes quite complex.

“Why did you kill that zombie?” “Well if I didn’t, it would have eaten my brain and made me a zombie.”

“Why did you solve that murder?” “Murder is wrong, and murderers need to be brought to justice! And it’s personal for me because my father was murdered and the murderer was never caught, so every time I solve a case it’s like bringing a little bit of closure to that crime.”

“Why did you fall in love with that guy?” “Oh, why do any of us fall in love? Don’t we all have a hole in our souls that needs filling? Don’t we all yearn for someone to share our lives with?”

Things are never that complex in porn. In porn the only thing women care about is sex. Their only motivation, when they do anything, is to fuck.

“Hey... weren’t you supposed to kill that zombie?” “Yes, but he had a huge cock, and I just couldn’t pass it by.”

“Hey... why did you let that murderer go?” “Well I caught him fair and square... but then he pounded my pussy so good and I came so hard that I just couldn’t bear to put him in jail. I’m seeing him again tonight, and bringing a friend.”

“Why did you fall in love with that guy?” “He has a huge cock. And he has a bunch of sexy friends, and doesn’t mind if I fuck them. And he loves it when me and my girlfriends get nasty with each other. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to plan for my wedding. Do you know where I can buy a topless wedding dress? And do you know any priests with huge dongs?”

So we know that the girls who live in porn movies care about nothing but sex, and we know that girls in real life don’t care about sex quite as much as that. Hell, even guys don’t care about sex as much as the girls in porn movies do. Girls in real life definitely like sex, don’t get me wrong, sometimes they even set out to get laid, just like guys do. Maybe they decide to go out to a bar on a Friday night and find a cute guy and do him, or maybe they hang out on sites like Adult Friend Finder or Fantasti or some other social network that’s centred around fucking. Or maybe they’re in their dorm room studying one night and they look over and see their roommate in a skimpy nightie, and they have a quick pillow fight which turns into “experimentation.”

OK, maybe that last one doesn’t happen in real life. It feels more like porn, to me, than reality. Though... I’ll return to this point later.

Men’s View of Women

But how does all of this impact the way men view women? Frankly, it would be easier if there was more of a dichotomy: girls in porn movies love and chase after sex, while girls in real life don’t like sex and only do it when they have to (or in order to get their sugar daddies to buy them something). If that were the case, then any time we see a girl in porn who’s so ready and willing (and aching) to fuck, we could say, “That’s made up. Girls in real life aren’t like that.”

But it’s not a dichotomy. There is a range of sexual openness and willingness to experiment (and enjoy), where girls in porn movies are way at one end of the spectrum and girls in real life are all over the place. Some girls are flat-out slutty and are quite happy to “give it away” to anyone who wants it. (I call these girls “ideal.” I’m led to believe they exist.) Some girls really love to get down and nasty with their boyfriends or husbands, and trying different positions and wearing costumes and getting it up the butt and stuff, but would never dream of having sex with a stranger. Some girls are somewhat reserved with their boyfriends or husbands, yet are more than happy to sneak around and get some on the side, and get a secret thrill from the concept of glory holes. Some girls are frigid (to use an outdated term), and don’t like sex at all, but they’ll do it once a year (on their husband’s birthday) for the sake of the marriage. Some girls are into the whole swinging thing, and have an idea of “monogamy” that includes sex with others, as long as their primary partner is always aware of what’s going on.

So when we see a girl in porn who’s so ready and willing (and aching) to fuck, all we can say is, “Some girls might be like that, but most aren’t. Except when they’re in the mood and they really are. Or they’re with their boyfriend. Or they have their husband’s permission. So it’s exaggerated. Maybe.”

Reality is much more complicated than porn, but when we see a coed in a porn movie approaching her college professor after class for “extra credit” so that she can get him to fuck her we can at least consider it realistic. I’ve known a number of girls who slept with professors in college or university, so that type of scenario is not far-fetched.

But can we go the other way around? If a coed comes up to her professor after class in real life and tells him that she needs some extra help after class, can we assume that all she really wants is to get his cock inside her? Of course not. This is real life, not porn, so although, as stated above, it’s a possibility, there is also another possibility: it’s possible that she needs some extra help after class. From her professor. Whose job it is to provide help to his students.

Based on a purely hypothetical situation like this it’s impossible to say whether the fictional coed I’m making up wants to screw her professor or whether she just wants help with her class. In real life the professor could look at other factors, like how she’s been doing in class all year, and whether she’s had problems in the past, and whether she’s acting “flirty” as she talks to him.

But – and here is the crux of my argument – if you’re that professor there has got to be a part of your brain that’s at least asking the question. “She says she needs help, and maybe she does. But is she hitting on me, too?” And I would argue that if you’ve been consuming a lot of porn (where the likelihood of the girl wanting to fuck is somewhere around 100%), you’re more likely to think it’s possible than if you haven’t consumed a lot of porn.

Similarly, if a guy is walking down the street and a pretty girl smiles at him he’s going to wonder if it’s because she wants to fuck, and the more porn he consumes the more possible he’ll consider it to be. It is possible, I guess, in theory, but you know what? The chances are really, really low. I’m going to over-generalize here, but in real life girls don’t typically just see a guy on the street and decide on the spot to fuck him. She might find him attractive, she might be open to starting a conversation, she might even be open to being asked out. Maybe, after all that happens, and if they hit it off on that date, she might even fuck him. But chances are really, really low – miniscule even – I’m talking outside the range of statistical probability – that when she originally saw him and smiled at him on the street she immediately wanted to spread her legs for him. If he approaches it from that viewpoint – “She wants to fuck, so why don’t I suggest we get a hotel room? And then, to be polite, I should ask her name.” – he will probably strike out.

But ladies, there are two things to be aware of:

1. If a guy is walking down the street and smiles at you, chances are very high that he does want to fuck you. Right there and then. He would if he could. He’s not thinking about flirting or getting to know you and he’s definitely not thinking about marriage. He’s wondering what you would be like in bed, right from the start.
2. If you are walking down the street and smile at a cute guy, at least part of his mind will be wondering if you want to fuck. I know that seems absurd to you, but he’ll be wondering it because that’s what he would be thinking if the roles were reversed, and he’ll also be wondering it because if you were in a porn movie that’s exactly what you would be thinking about.

There is a difference between men and women here, so I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. I know I’ve heard of studies that say a woman decides whether she’ll be willing to sleep with a guy within 20 seconds of meeting him, or whatever the number was (it was very low), but that’s not the same thing as what guys are doing. What a woman is deciding in that initial impression is that “this man is attractive, and if it comes to it and I’m attracted to his personality, then yes, I’ll be willing to sleep with him.” What she is not deciding is that “if there was a bed handy I’d already be taking my panties off.” That would be ridiculous, the women are thinking. Who would meet someone and immediately fuck them?

And the answer may surprise you: men would. I know you think I’m just exaggerating to make a point, but really, if a guy meets a girl for the first time and the first words out of her mouth are, “I’ve got 20 minutes, you want to screw?” he will seriously consider it. There are numerous reasons he might say no (she’s not attractive, she might have an STD/STI, he’s married and doesn’t want to cheat, …) but none of those reasons will be based on the fact that she’s a stranger and he needs to get to know her. That’s not a problem at all; it doesn’t even enter into the equation.

I don’t take myself out of this category, by the way. When I meet a woman for the first time (or for the thousandth time), part of my brain is wondering what she’d be like in bed, whether she’d be a screamer, whether she’s into kinky stuff, whether she likes it slow and tender in missionary or whether she prefers to be slammed from behind while I pull her hair. She doesn’t even have to be attractive. I could meet a 90 year old lady and a thought might flit across my mind. Yeah those thoughts will spend a lot more time in my brain if she’s attractive than if she’s not, but it’s not like I’m choosing to think about it in the first place, the thoughts come automatically.

I hesitate to say that these thoughts are caused by porn. I think guys have been like this for a long time. I do think, however, that porn gives us “permission” to dwell on these thoughts more than we used to, and has subtly edged our understanding of women’s wants and desires a bit more toward the slutty side of the spectrum.

And I think the idea of women’s wants and desires we get from porn gets internalized more than we think it does, to the point that we think it really is possible that the girl who smiled at us wants to get down and dirty right there and then.

Women’s View of Themselves

I’m getting way out of my area of expertise on this part by virtue of the fact that I’m not female. I can make some educated guesses and empathize and try to put myself in the place of women, but I’m talking about things I simply haven’t experienced. So keep that in mind as you read this bit.

That being said, it occurs to me that television and movies (and radio before that) have always been telling us how we should live, how we should act, how we should be, and that we’ve always put more pressure on women than on men to conform to the society’s idea of the ideal. And when I say that “we put pressure on women,” I mean the Royal We, all of us, including the women themselves; there are complex external and internal pressures going on.

If it was as simple as a middle-aged white guy coming on TV every evening at 6:00 and telling women that they have certain standards to live up to it would be much easier to ignore, but it’s not like that at all. Women have men reacting in certain ways to the beautiful women they see in the media, and they (the women) aren’t fully able to reproduce that beauty in real life (funny how we don’t walk around with a lighting crew and makeup SWAT team at all times), and of course their female friends and relatives alternate between helpful beauty tips and compliments and catty comments.

So yes, of course, when a girl or woman sees some icon of beauty on the screen or in the pages of a magazine part of her will be asking if she lives up to that standard of beauty. All the more when that icon of beauty on the screen is witty and always knows the right thing to say, and is just smart enough to be incredibly successful but not so smart that she makes the men in her life feel dumb and not so successful that the man can’t “take care of her” at the end of the movie, and none of her friends are jealous of her success. (Or, if they are, they’ll get their comeuppance later in the movie.)

People might agree or disagree with what I’m saying, and as I mentioned I’m not a woman so some of it might not even ring true, but neither is anything I’m saying new. I’m saying things that have been said a bajillion times over the last few decades. What people talked about a bit less, however, was the fact that at least women had one private aspect of their lives, where they weren’t judged by external standards: sex. There didn’t used to be a basis for comparison, so a guy could only make assumptions about what other women were like in the sack, and the women themselves could only guess at their own levels of skill or what was normal. Up until recently porn wasn’t exactly easy to come by so only “perverted” men consumed it, and occasionally teenaged boys got their hands on some to fuel their own dreams and confusions. The average man didn’t consume porn. At least, not much; definitely not enough that it would greatly shape his worldview – and women definitely didn’t consume porn.

But now women and girls are starting to consume porn (I’ve written about this before), and guys are consuming porn all the time. Which means we are supplementing our “old school” media – television and movies – with pornography. Previously women had to compare the way they looked and the way they dressed and the way they acted and the way they spoke with how women in TV and movies looked and dressed and acted and spoke. Now they also have to compare the way they fuck. (To take it a bit further, the other categories have a new nuance to them as well: women have to compare how they look naked and how they dress underneath their clothes – lingerie? sexy panties? commando? – and how they act and speak when they’re with lovers.)

There is good and bad to this, of course. The good part is that women don’t have to be ashamed to want or enjoy sex anymore. It was always an unwritten rule that women should not like sex too much, for fear of becoming sluts (or at the very least being judged slutty), to the point that even when it came to sex with their own boyfriends or husbands women had some amount of reason to hold back on getting too into it, for fear of being judged. Sometimes they might have gotten lucky and found a partner who’d be supportive of how much they liked sex. (Really, though, it’s the partner who would be the lucky one, isn’t it?)

Now there is less of a stigma for women who want and enjoy sex. The stigma isn’t gone by any means – we can always find reasons to judge women, can’t we? – but it’s less strong. We still participate in slut shaming (I’ve written about that before, too), but things are getting better, and women and girls who actively enjoy sex with their partners are judged less harshly for it than they were in the past.

The bad part of all of this is that as women are being allowed to enjoy sex more we’re also expecting more of them. Sure, ladies, go ahead and enjoy sex like the girls in porn do – but you’d better perform like they do as well, because we’ve been consuming a lot of porn lately so suddenly our standards for skill in the bedroom are much higher. No matter how crappy your lover is – guys don’t have the same pressures you do, so we don’t have to be good – the second that cock gets anywhere near you he’ll be expecting you to be in the throes of a loud orgasm. An orgasm that won’t stop until he’s done. So... 30 seconds should do it.

200 years ago a girl would be reading a novel and measuring herself against the characters in that novel: was she as “womanly” as the female characters portrayed? 100 years ago a girl would be listening to the radio and measuring herself against the characters she’d hear there; was she as witty and alluring and feminine as the women whose voices she heard? 75 years ago she’d be watching a movie and measuring herself against those characters, and 50 years ago she’d be doing the same with TV. 25 years ago magazines got added into the mix (I’m sure magazines are older than that, but they’ve gained in popularity over time). Over those last 50 years the influence of TV and movies and magazines has become so pervasive in society that nobody seriously questions it. Now our fictive girl has access to porn, and can measure herself against those women: is she making the right noises? Wearing the right lingerie? Striking the right poses? How does her body measure up? And... Jesus Christ, are her breasts different sizes?!?
And meanwhile, as she’s doing her best to become the next Jenna Haze in the bedroom, she’s also doing her best to avoid being labeled a slut outside the bedroom. It’s kind of lose-lose, isn’t it ladies? If you’re not giving a 5-star performance with your mediocre lover and wearing the hottest (most expensive) lingerie for your boxer-shorts-hero he’ll be disappointed, whereas if you ARE amazing in the bedroom he’ll brag to his friends about how hot you are in the sack and then those friends will tell their girlfriends/wives and you’ll be labelled a slut.

And with all of this pressure to be like the women they’re seeing on the screen, sometimes other lines get crossed. Porn is rife with lesbian scenes, and it’s pretty much taken for granted that any girl you see in porn will be more than happy to get nasty with her female friends. So, that pillow fight scenario mentioned earlier? 20 years ago I might have said that real girls don’t do that, it only happens in porn, but now it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that type of hot coed experimentation happens, because girls are following the path forged by porn. They’re expected to experiment, after all – even Katy Perry is telling them to do it – so why not follow the script?

If it will help ease your pain, feel free to find a hot friend and come and find me for some soul-soothing MFF sex. You don’t have to have a lot of skill, just a willingness to enjoy yourself. You will not lose my respect; if anything my respect for you will go up.

Your boyfriend/husband doesn’t have to know. Consider it practice.