How Porn Impacts Us, Part 6: The “So What”

I work in an industry where I tend to do a lot of writing reports and giving presentations, and I’m often asked to distil complex topics down to simple concepts. When I’m preparing such reports or presentations a phrase I often hear is that I need to “get to the ‘so what’.” In other words, it’s all well and good to explain complex concepts in simple ways and educate my readers, but the main thing they’ll care about is, “So what? How does this impact me?”

For example, suppose I’m managing a project and the schedule is thrown off because someone was off sick, I would probably not say the following:

A key resource has been off sick and their backup hasn’t been able to get up to speed as quickly as anticipated. Therefore the schedule has been impacted by 2 days.

It’s too wordy, and there’s a bunch of extraneous detail before I get to the point that the reader probably cares about: the delay to the schedule. It makes it sound like I’m making excuses before I get to the point I’m making excuses about; the reader sees that I’m trying to cushion the blow before I get to it, so they’re only half paying attention as their brain tries to imagine what blow it is that I’m trying to cushion. Instead I’d probably say something more like:

Schedule impacted by 2 days due to resourcing issues.

If someone needs more detail I can always give it, but if they don’t I haven’t wasted their time. It’s hard to find the right balance, though, between giving enough information and trimming out the extraneous detail: give too much information and you’ll waste people’s time and risk them not reading what you’ve written in the first place (we’re in the Twitter generation where anything more than 140 characters is just too long to read, so many people will just skip it and ask for a summary instead), but give too little information and you’ll end up sending emails back and forth with people who are asking more and more questions looking for more and more detail.

On this blog, of course, I let loose and allow the words to tumble out of the keyboard willy-nilly with no regard to the consequences of my readers’ mental well being. 

Over the course of the last few “how porn impacts us” posts I’ve talked about the fact that so many people are consuming porn that there’s no longer a “control group” of people who don’t consume it, I’ve talked about addiction to porn, and I’ve talked about my belief that porn impacts the way we view sex in a similar way to how movies and TV impact our views on love and marriage and relationships. I’ve even given a skewed view as to how porn might impact people of colour (though I myself happen to be a middle-aged white dude). Now I’ll get to the “so what.”

If you read the posts in this series in a certain way it looks pretty negative for porn: I’ve posited that it’s addictive, that it skews our views on sex and on women, and that it’s potentially not very friendly to people of colour. So what am I going to do about that?

The short answer is: Nothing. As I continue thinking about porn, and its potential impact on society, and its impact on me, nothing changes about the fact that I happen to enjoy porn, and will therefore continue to consume it unabated. Would I be happier if its impacts on our views of women were more positive? Of course. Would I like it to better represent people of colour? Definitely – and any time I see people of colour in porn in non-stereotyping ways I enjoy it all the more. But in the meantime I’m the exact target demographic that porn is trying to capture, and I’m more than happy to be captured.

Porn is no different than TV or movies: It’s a form of entertainment, intended to be portrayed somewhat realistically but in no way claiming to be reality. Remember when the TV show Friends used to be popular, and people used to make fun of it because there’s no way that this particular group of people would ever be able to afford the apartments they were supposedly living in? That criticism is absolutely true, but it didn’t detract from people’s ability to enjoy the show. That’s not what you’re thinking about when you’re watching the show. Sure, if you decide to move to New York and get an apartment you might be in for a rude awakening, but I’d hesitate to call that a fault of the show.

Similarly, neither does porn claim to be reality. When I close my browser and go out into the real world and fuck a real girl the experience won’t be the same as what I saw on the screen, it will be different. As society consumes more and more porn the experience might get more and more similar, as we try to emulate what the porn stars are doing, but it will never be the same. Especially since I typically don’t bring a makeup and lighting crew with me when I go on dates. (Not being a pornstar I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to perform with all of that going on around me.)

When I have sex and it’s not the same as what goes on in porn it’s not the fault of porn, nor is it the fault of the girl(s) I’m with. It’s nobody’s fault; there’s no fault to be found, because it’s not a failing. Porn is different from sex, and sex is different from porn. If a girl wants to act like a pornstar when she’s with me she’s more than welcome to do so, but she should also be aware that she’s not performing for a camera.

To use two examples that were cited in a recent post on Boinkology 101:

• I happen to love the intimacy of the missionary position, though it’s rarely shown in porn. Other positions look better on camera.
• When I’m going down on a girl I try to do it in the most pleasurable way for her rather than the way that would best work for a camera operator. Similarly, if a girl is going to give me head she doesn’t need to worry about keeping her hair out of the way. (It doesn’t hurt if she looks up from time to time to make eye contact, but she should look at me, not the camera.)

And I’ll add my own example: it’s perfectly acceptable, in real world situations, to have sex in the dark. I know, crazy right? But it’s true! You can have sex without turning the lights on! You can’t make porn in the dark (unless you have some kind of night vision cameras), but you can have sex with little to no lighting. A couple of decades ago it was seen as kind of kinky to have sex with the lights on, but in the porn age we’ve become so accustomed to being able to see every nuance of what’s happening that I would guess the opposite is happening: it might be the new kink to have sex with the lights off.

To get back to my main point: real sex is different from porn, which is different from real sex. A pornographic movie is not a documentary, it’s a form of very specialized fiction. I plan to continue enjoying real sex with real women, and I also plan to continue enjoying porn.