by Pamela Paul
The more Harrison looked, especially in the online free-for-all, the less satisfied he became with his real-life sexual ventures. He wanted his partners to do more—to try positions he picked up from pornography, to be open to new things sexually, to have sex a lot more frequently. If his partner wasn’t in the mood, Harrison would get annoyed. He couldn’t help but be irritated if she said she was tired or didn’t have time for sex.
When a man gets bored with pornography, both his fantasy and real worlds become imbued with indifference. The real world often gets really boring—after all, compared with the fireworks of cyber-speed porn, assuming the missionary position with an overworked wife who has cellulite isn’t exactly a thrill. Porn women howl with delight at the mere sight of a man’s genitals and moan with pleasure no matter what he does with them. Next to such euphoria, real women can seem staid, indifferent, or even frigid. The 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll found that as a result of viewing online pornography, one in ten men said that he or his partner was bored with their sex routine; 17 percent said that viewing pornography made sex less arousing. One in ten admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body. Without the “voice of reason” accompanying pornographic viewing, some men, particularly younger men who grew up with Internet pornography, make assumptions about what can be expected from real women, based on their experiences with porn. Just as they upgrade their pornography, they attempt to upgrade their women in real life.
Couldn’t You Be More Like a Porn Star?
Pornography not only informs the male sexual appetite, it can whet it for a specific form of fulfillment, ideally achieved through real women. Though men may become accustomed to the porn star’s bodily arts of adornment and performance, they still turn to their real-life partners for sex. And with 51 percent of Americans believing that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look and 48 percent saying it changes men’s expectations of how women should behave, according to the Pornified/Harris poll, pornography ends up having a real impact on real women.
The degree to which pornography raises standards and alters men’s expectations of women likely depends on how much porn is consumed. In 2002, a professor at Texas Christian University conducted a study of online pornography consumers (heterosexual men who used pornography via Internet newsgroups). On average, respondents looked at five hours and twenty-two minutes of pornography per week. Respondents were divided into three groups: high consumption (more than six hours per week), average (two to six hours per week), and low (two hours a week or less). The study found that the more pornography men use, the more likely they are to describe women in sexualized and stereotypically feminine terms. They were also more likely to approve of women in traditionally female occupations and to value women who are more submissive and subordinate to men.12
Thirty-four-year-old Luis, a pornography enthusiast since the age of ten, has exacting standards for the women in his life. When he was growing up in Los Angeles, his father left porn videotapes lying around. Luis’s mother, a highly religious woman from Mexico, knew about the videos, but Luis never saw her get upset about them. For all he knew, she was watching the videos with his father. After he lost his virginity at thirteen, Luis had no trouble attracting women. First married at age twenty-one for less than a year, he has subsequently remarried and divorced, remarried and divorced. As a thrice-divorced man, Luis definitely feels stigmatized on the dating scene (“Women think I’m some kind of player”), but he’s hopeful about meeting the right woman. Part of being “right” for Luis is acting the part. His expectations, he says, have been raised very high by pornography: “I live sex the way it’s shown in porno.”
Luis encouraged all his ex-wives and girlfriends to watch pornos with him so they could see what turned him on. “If I were with a woman and I weren’t getting the kind of pleasure I see people enjoying in porn films, then I wouldn’t be with that woman,” he says. “I’ve broken up with women who wouldn’t perform certain things I’ve seen in adult films.” For example, if a woman isn’t into oral sex the way porn stars are—enjoying the act, the swallowing, the cum shots on her body—then Luis isn’t into her. The women he dates need to be open to experimentation, he explains. “If they don’t know what that means, I would suggest they watch some porn.”
Another problem is women who take too long. “In porn, the women have orgasms so easily,” Luis says. “But it usually takes longer in real life for women to have an orgasm. I get pretty impatient.” One woman Luis was dating had a difficult time reaching orgasm. “It was definitely one of the factors in us breaking up,” he says. Luis’s demands aren’t limited to his partners; he strives to maintain a high standard for himself. “I’ve always wanted to have a huge penis,” he says. To that end, he has bought pumps and creams to make himself larger. It’s worked somewhat, according to his own estimation.
At the Catholic school Luis attended as a child, there was no sex education. Nor did his parents ever sit him down for “the talk.” He looked to pornography for his lessons. “I think I started looking when I was too young,” he reflects. His own son, if he ever has one, won’t start looking at pornography until the age of sixteen or seventeen, not if he has any say in it. “I think porn had a bad effect on me, especially on my relationships,” Luis says. “I learned to live my life by pornography; it gave me my first impression of what sex is. For me, sex was all about fucking.”
Compared with porn stars, real women may not have shaved their legs that morning, their stretch marks may be visible. They may not want to wear a thong that day and perform a striptease that night. They may not want to be peed on or have their boyfriends ejaculate in their faces. And when real women fail to live up to porn women, it’s frustrating, annoying, and occasionally baffling to men, who ask, Why won’t she do what I want her to do?
Younger men, particularly eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, are more likely to think pornography affects their expectations of women’s looks and behavior than are older men. Tyler, at twenty-one still a virgin (“I’ve done absolutely everything but—it’s kind of embarrassing”*), thinks men are into pornography because for them sex is more physical than emotional. His porn-infused fantasy has specific physical parameters. “I prefer a woman with a C- or D-cup—full-figured, but definitely not overweight,” he says. “I don’t want some small spindly girl either.” Porn star Brianna Banks (“The most sensational porn star big-breasted blue-eyed-blonde beauty.”) is the ultimate. “She’s not only blond; she’s got the right chest size.” He also likes the female pubic area to be groomed. “I’m a big fan of full shaved,” he explains.
Unfortunately, most of Tyler’s girlfriends haven’t been shaved. He regularly asks them to shave for him and some do. His last girlfriend, Betty, had not shaved her pubic hair and would not do so for him; she told him it gave her ingrown hairs. Tyler didn’t get it. “Porn women don’t seem to have any problem shaving their hair,” he points out. “But at least Betty was blond and had very fine hair,” he says. “So it wasn’t that big a deal.” In other areas, Betty and his previous girlfriends have been more accommodating. That’s important, Tyler says, because pornography taught him that women are incredibly sexual beings. When he sees women enjoying sex in porn, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. The women tend to be slutty, Tyler says. “Both schoolgirl slutty and all-out slutty. They want it and they need it. And it’s up to men to give it to them.”
A year earlier, when Tyler saw pornography depicting a man fingering a woman in the ass, he didn’t think that was something he would enjoy in real life (“anal had kind of been a taboo for me”). But later he tried it out with a girlfriend and realized he was wrong. Likewise, having cultivated a fondness for images of cum shots on the face, Tyler decided to bring the scene to life. So far, all his girlfriends have agreed to try it at some point. With one girl, he came on her breasts and she told him it wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it was going to be. “We didn’t get around to the face thing, th
ough, because we broke up.”
Porn Sex vs. Real Sex
When men turn from porn stars to girlfriends, pornography doesn’t always disappear. Men who look at pornography habitually can become attracted to an artificially re-created zoom-pop version of female sexuality. “When they’re with their partner, they lose the ability to be aroused by her positive features,” explains psychologist Gary Brooks. “Many of them then try to re-create the images from porn in their brain while they’re with another person in order to maintain their arousal.” Yet by doing so, men are no longer mentally with their partner, nor are they able to lose themselves in the moment.
Men are apt to say pornography has nothing to do with real women or with their sex lives, but in the same breath will extol its benefits to their sex lives and describe how they tailor their sex lives to pornography. But the fantasy of pornography seldom meshes well with the reality of sex. Since pornography is supposed to be about what you can’t get from sex, or what you do when you can’t get sex—not what you do when you can—the intrusion of pornography into a man’s sex life can be disturbing. While some men say they try to keep pornography and real sex separate in their heads, it’s not so easy; pornography seeps in, sometimes in unexpected ways. The incursion can even lead to sexual problems, such as impotence or delayed ejaculation.
Soon after he discovered Internet pornography, Rajiv would go online nearly every day, masturbating for forty-five minutes to an hour: “After I was done, I would think to myself, ‘You know, that time could have been better spent some other way.’ I should have been writing or working or I could have caught up on sleep.” At first, pornography just filled in a hole in Rajiv’s sex life. He was coming off the end of a long dry spell, and wasn’t dating anyone. But after several celibate months, he started dating someone new in January 2004. The first time they had sex, Rajiv had trouble reaching orgasm. As he had always done, he conjured images from pornography in his head to maintain and enhance his excitement. But the old tricks didn’t help. Perhaps it’s just nerves, he told himself.
This was a strange twist in events, because Rajiv had always credited pornography with improving his sex life. Women told him he was an amazing lover, mostly, he thought, because of his staying power. He connected his ability to hold out for a long time during sex with masturbating to pornography. Whereas most guys took fifteen seconds, or so he imagined, it took him about forty-five minutes to even come close to achieving an orgasm. Rajiv figured his excellent stamina was due to the fact that he had “practiced” ejaculation control while masturbating to pornography. He thought he could come at will—that he could have a quickie or last a long time, mood depending.
Now he was just plain having trouble reaching an orgasm, no matter what he thought about. On several occasions, his new girlfriend asked plaintively, “Baby, I’m beginning to get sore, are you almost done?” Sometimes, Rajiv would just tell her, “I don’t think I’m going to come.” They would disengage and Rajiv would masturbate or ask her to masturbate him, in order to bring the relief of ejaculation. (In pornography films, the man routinely ejaculates outside of the woman’s body.) “My heart would race less,” he says. “Sex just seemed so ordinary; it was no longer thrilling or magical the way it had been before i-porn.”
When he repeatedly had trouble achieving orgasm with a second girlfriend, Rajiv decided to stop looking at Internet porn altogether. “I actually had to make a conscious decision to quit,” he says. “I was worried that I was becoming compulsive and even dependent on it. The fact that porn was altering my sex life scared me.” Rajiv thinks he got used to seeing explicit images while becoming aroused, making him dependent on visual imagery for sexual fulfillment. “When I don’t have those images in front of me, I just can’t get that aroused,” he says. “Sex is no longer as physiologically exciting.” Rajiv hasn’t had a new girlfriend yet, but when he does, perhaps things will go back to the way they once were. “I’m hoping this dependence can be reversed over time,” he says with a sigh.
When push comes to shove, nearly all men say real sex is far preferable to pornographic sex. Participation trumps spectatorship. Some men say even masturbation is better without pornography—the creativity of open fantasy provides more inspiration than the prefab play-byplays of porn. Freewheeling masturbation allows for a nostalgic foray into one’s sexual past, where one conjures up old girlfriends or particularly erotic episodes with a current partner. Yet many men who use pornography report that they no longer masturbate without it, especially once they discover the Internet. Some confess to becoming dependent on pornographic images, whether live or conjured in their minds. Farewell to that faded memory of sex in the beachfront cabana, circa 1987.
Harrison, the graphic designer, had porn on the brain. Women he had salivated over in porn, acts he had eagerly watched, sexual styles he had admired came floating into his consciousness—while he was with his girlfriend. He would be having sex and suddenly he’d think about a threesome he’d seen in a clip downloaded from the Internet. “But during sex, that image becomes bothersome because I don’t want to be in a threesome with my partner,” he explains. “What may be a turn-on in a porn fantasy is actually bothersome when it comes up during real sex.”
Because he always considered pornography to be a fantasy, its echo into his reality wasn’t only inappropriate, it was repulsive. Of course, when Harrison sees images of beautiful women in porn, he wants to have sex with women as beautiful as they are. But the desire for porn’s translation into real life ends there. “There’s a reason men are into porn that involves cheerleaders and nurses,” Harrison says. “They’re fantasies. Of course, some men may want to act out those fantasies, but for most men, it’s not something they would ever want to act out. We don’t always want our real lives to play out like porn.”
Harrison was having a hard time focusing on the woman in his bed. And because such unwanted pornographic images are a turnoff when rescreened in real time, Harrison’s body got turned off as well. His difficulty achieving orgasms during sex got worse. The women he slept with found it strange that Harrison had trouble having an orgasm—usually it was the woman who would have a harder time. And there was a new problem. Harrison found it harder to maintain his erections during sex; he wasn’t getting as hard as he once did. “It gets back to the expectations raised by porno,” he explains. “I think my erections have been affected because I’m not as hyperstimulated by sex as I am by porno. I’ve gotten used to a certain heightened level of stimulation, and when compared with porn, real sex just isn’t that exciting.”
What scared Harrison was that even after he decided to cut back on the pornography, his dissatisfaction continued. “Had I ruined my sex life permanently?” He was worried.
Omission and Deception
Most women have no idea how often their boyfriends and husbands look at pornography. Usually, the deception is deliberate, though many men also deny the frequency to themselves. Most don’t think about quantifying the amount they view. Others would rather not know. It’s better to hide it, many men figure. Women won’t understand. Zach’s last girlfriend, Jeanne, asked if he looked at pornography and the twenty-three-year-old Web site developer admitted to her that he did. She was jealous he was looking at other girls, but he made sure she knew that porn was no competition. “You don’t get attached to it,” he told her. Zach doesn’t understand why women take it personally, but in his experience, they do. “If a girlfriend or wife asked me not to look at porn, I’d probably look at it less and hide it, but I don’t think I would stop. Because I don’t understand why it would make her feel bad. Besides, it’s a habit. I’ve been masturbating to porn online since I was fourteen. Ten years is a hard habit to break.”
So despite Jeanne’s worried queries and occasional entreaties, Zach continued to use pornography. He knew it would bother her, but as far as he was concerned, she didn’t have to know. They didn’t live together, so he could still check it out online without her ever finding out.
“I don’t think porn and sex are the same thing, so one doesn’t affect the other,” he says. “Jerking off doesn’t have anything to do with sex at all. It’s more like blowing your nose than having sex. A quick physical sensation, bam, you get off; you’ve got nothing else to worry about. Whereas with sex, there’s another person there and you have to worry about them. It takes a lot longer, and there’s an emotional component. You’ve got a living human being who actually wants you and you want them. There’s a level of trust.”
But while men consider trust crucial for a healthy relationship, they seem willing to flout that trust when it comes to pornography—deceiving their significant others into thinking they’re either not looking at it at all or looking at it less frequently. Fitting pornography into one’s life isn’t always easy. Betty, for example, made it tough for Tyler, the computer science major. She didn’t approve of pornography and didn’t understand why he used it while dating her. But Betty was only sixteen and came from a fairly conservative background, so Tyler made an effort to be understanding. He tried to get her into pornography, to open her mind. When she warned him that it was either her or pornography, he asked her to watch porn movies with him. “I didn’t think it had to be a choice,” he explains. “And I don’t want anyone telling me what to do. I said to her, ‘Even when I’m looking at porn, I’m thinking about you,’ but she was never satisfied.” Betty continued to take his pornography personally. She told Tyler that she felt she wasn’t attractive or sexy enough; she couldn’t live up to the women in pornography. But it was crazy, Tyler says. “She was five-nine with long blond hair. She was a dancer so she was really toned. It’s true she was only a B-cup. But I told her over and over again she had amazing breasts. Betty still felt insecure.” Tyler didn’t get it. “Real life is entirely separate from pornography. She was so concerned that I would fall in love with the porn instead of her.”
