by Sara Pascoe
No other animal expresses the range of behaviour that humans do. Dogs do mostly dog things; they all like walks and have a good sense of smell. Cats all like to sleep in patches of sunlight. All polar bears are united in wishing we hadn’t melted away their habitat. Humans are everything. No spectrum has ever been so wide. We are, all at once, spectacularly stupid and incredible geniuses. The theory is that our early birth, because of our big brains, means that we are affected by environment more than any other animal. Our brain grows while we are outside of the womb, meaning we are shaped and individualised by external stimuli through our extended childhood.
With all human behaviours there is an inbuilt plasticity. We all recognise the weight of nurture in the nature/nurture combo that we inhabit. Kindness is shaped. What we enjoy as hobbies, what we like to eat can be magnificently different from culture to culture. How we speak is moulded by who spoke to us as children, and how. Sexual behaviour is no different. All of us went through critical learning stages. Some of us heard a balloon pop, felt a sexual thrill and now have a fetish. Some of us associated certain sex acts with fear because we misunderstood the plot of Dirty Dancing. Some of us have a guilt provided by religion that makes our orgasms incredibly powerful and then regrettable.
Let’s think more about the multivariate possibilities for human arousal as we continue to consider the industry that it has created.
* They have that reality TV show: The Only Way is Egg-sits.†
† I hate myself.
‡ BBC stands for the Bigger Better Cuckoo.
§ Always get a baby’s ears pierced straight after birth. Then you can recognise it, and also it’ll look nicer.
¶ It’s an app for singles to meet up with couples, or couples to find singles who wanna join in. I know you knew that already, but just in case you lend this book to Grandma.
Outdoors Sex Survey
After gleaning so much from the Facebook responses to my question, I decided to ask some strangers in real life. I knew that my Facebook friends would be a similar age range and demographic to me, and I wanted diversity. Also, writing a book is lonely.
At a gig in Leicester Square I told the audience what I’d been researching. I couldn’t effectively describe MacPlaymate with words. ‘She’s a cartoon lady who can put outfits on … she likes amputee hands on her … HER BOOBS CAN SMELL.’ I tried showing images on my laptop but every way I turned it the woman was upside down and I seemed like a mum who can’t use her own computer.*
At the end of my technologically challenged set I said, ‘If anyone has any memories about internet porn, come tell me in the interval.’ I had some stimulating chats. People seem very open to discussing porn and are free with their experiences and opinions. I’ve not met a single person who isn’t worried or fascinated by this relatively new aspect of sexuality and sexual expression.†
Some women in their early twenties told me their first experience with porn was boys at school making them watch ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’. ‘Yuk, gross,’ I said maturely, just like Alfred Kinsey would have done. They explained that by the time they had phones, aged eleven or twelve, they knew you could look at porn on them. A few minutes later, two girls (one conversation) came over and told me EXACTLY THE SAME THING. That they became aware of porn when boys at school made them watch ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’. ‘It’s not porn, it’s a YouTube video,’ one of them clarified.
‘WHY were they making you?’ I wanted to know.
‘You had to watch it or they called you frigid.’
Both groups of women described this as a rite of passage. They didn’t know each other, were from different parts of the UK, were a few years apart in age, yet repeated virtually the same story.
I’ve since wondered if kids in the late 2000s were all aware of ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ because it was on YouTube and easily accessible. There are always cultural tsunamis that come out of nowhere and hit us simultaneously: the ice bucket challenge, fidget spinners, a third example.
When I was at primary school there was a Tango advert where an orange blob man tapped people on the back, slapped them round the face and yelled informatively, ‘You’ve been Tangoed.’ This went whatever things went before they went viral. Crazy? Popular? It went crazy popular. The kids in my school did it all day long. We slapped and got slapped, and we loved it even though it hurt. We were unified by it for several cheek-smarting days. Then the advert got banned, orange blob man was elected President of the United States and the fun was over.
Twenty-five years later and I still have a powerful urge to tap and slap any time I’m in a queue. The instinct occurs to me daily. Things we see as children can have a lasting effect on us. Hence why people worry about children watching hardcore sex, hence why articles have been asking ‘Can we protect our kids?’ since time immemorial Time magazine.
I was ten years too old to have anyone make me watch ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’. I heard what it was about and that’s why I didn’t watch, because it sounded awful. Ditto The Human Centipede and the second series of True Detective. When it came out in 2007 I was doing reminiscence theatre in care homes. Our plays were about childhood after the war, women learning to drive, marriage in the 1950s. When I’m in a care home the theatre will be about getting Tangoed and slapping foreheads and yelling ‘Spam!’ Millennials’ pensioner nostalgia will be ‘Remember when that girl ate the other girl’s poo then puked in her mouth?’
The responses to ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ weren’t sexual. Most people found it disgusting. Kids showing it at school were trying to revolt each other, not inspire an orgy. But to those with particular tastes, it was erotic. I now know (I read the Wikipedia entry) that ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ is the trailer for a scat-fetish porno called Hungry Bitches. It’s a genre that a subculture of people enjoy and another reminder of the huge spectrum of what pornography can be. It’s also an interesting bookend. 2007 is a decade after I took my GCSEs and left school. Technology changed dramatically during those years. While I used to enjoy flicking through the dictionary looking for sexy words, by 2007 part of a young person’s journey into cultural consciousness involved finding or being confronted by porn. In my documentary this will be illustrated beautifully:
A blonde child, dressed in an Amish outfit, or maybe an Elizabethan ruff. She looks around furtively, then opens a large leather-bound book. Her finger scans down the Ps until she finds it – Penetration! The girl gasps, giggles and faints. Fast-forward sounds, broadband wires wriggle across the screen like sensuous snakes, they vomit out smartphones and children pick them up from the grass and bite into them. ‘Biblical symbolism,’ says the presenter, while holding out a red apple with the Apple logo on it. The children behind her start pooping the words ‘wifi password’ and ‘parental lock’ onto the dictionary.
Are your fingers made of lead? Cos that documentary is heavy-handed.
The reason I brought up the gig is because one of the people who came over to talk to me was an older man called Stefan. He was chatting away about the old dial-up speeds and accompanying frustrations, then announced, ‘I always wished they would post the pictures upside down.’ I thought he was trying to make me feel better about showing MacPlaymate the wrong way up, I didn’t understand. He clarified: ‘So you could see the good bits first and not waste time on the face.’
‘Whoa,’ I exclaimed, wasting more of his time by existing above the waist.
Stefan had meant his remark light-heartedly. He waited for me to laugh. I’m a comedian, I’m supposed to love jokes. He’d misjudged me as a crowd because onstage I’d been talking about pornography obscenely and without reserve. But I’m still one of those hardcore extremists who expects women to be treated like people and not bits of body.
Stefan walked away, a perfectly nice normal man. He’d come to my show to listen and engage; his comment wasn’t intended to threaten or humiliate me, and it didn’t. Images of people aren’t people, are they? We don’t empathise with a poster, a billboard, a centrefold. We didn’t evolve to consider the feeli
ngs of inanimate objects; our ancestors didn’t ask cave paintings what they wanted for dinner, didn’t befriend the cloud that looked like a face. Maybe that’s why although pornographic images depict real people, to the viewer that person is made object. The human body becomes ‘bits’. A normal man at a gig can also be a butcher surveying a cow he’s about to eviscerate – good meat and bad meat, useful and irrelevant.
He can’t wank to a face.
And thank goodness, he doesn’t have to. We have broadband now.
There is no neat graph detailing how the numbers of people using porn have risen. It’s all unreliable estimates. All we can say for certain is that with the introduction of the first ‘tube site’ in 2006, the amount of people who had unthinkably easy access to an all-encompassing range of porn increased exponentially.
This moment would be pivotal in the documentary:
Same-sex and heterosexual couples hold hands while browsing in a vintage clothes shop. A shopkeeper stands behind a counter looking at a poster for the Beatles song ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. A tannoy announces: ‘It is 2006 and now there is YouTube but with porn on it.’ The shoppers all start grabbing jackets and trousers off their hangers and running out of the store. ‘Stop, stop,’ yells the shopkeeper. ‘We don’t need to pay!’ shouts a tall woman. ‘But it’s my livelihood,’ cries Samira. (She’s the really good actress playing the shopkeeper.) A man pushes Samira out of the way – this is my friend Brett, who is appearing in the documentary as a favour. He looks at the Beatles poster, then ejaculates the words (this is done with CGI) ‘Don’t Buy Anything’ over the song title. The Beatles all look sad (Photoshop) and I win best BAFTA in every category.
So can we tell what difference free porn makes to the lives of the people who watch it? Are their lives improved, destroyed? Is it true that people suddenly can’t concentrate at work or have erectile dysfunction? More people are watching porn, but do they also explore more? Do they watch things they wouldn’t have done if they’d had to type in their full name and credit card details? Is it the ease of access or the freeness that’s changed things? Or more probably a combination of both? What I noticed in the recollections of nineties porn was that it was those good with computers who managed to utilise it. There was some capability involved. Now even the most illiterate person can open a search engine and watch as much hardcore fucking as they like. Even my mother could manage if she didn’t have so many cats sitting on her.
Pornhub launched in 2007, fast becoming one of the most popular websites in the world. At the time of writing Alexa‡ ranks it as the thirty-third most visited site worldwide, just behind Google Hong Kong and one ahead of LinkedIn.§
The people at Pornhub keep track of their users and regularly release figures about common search terms and trends which are useful for someone like me trying to get an insight. I wanted to ascertain how reliable these numbers are so I checked with my friend Mona, who’s a statistician. She replied: ‘I steer clear of stats where the source is a private company that has an interest in saying things are a certain way. Pornhub’s stats are published by their own PR team. At a minimum they are not going to be disclosing when the stats aren’t good for the company. Most likely, though, they’re just a bit selective and exaggerated so anyone reading them should keep that in mind.’
With that in mind, here are Pornhub’s (bragging, selective) stats. In 2007 they recorded around one million visits to their website every day. Ten years later that had apparently risen to seventy-five million daily visits. They can’t all be Richard Branson, when would he have time to balloon? In their first year Pornhub uploaded 134 hours of content. By 2010 this had risen to over 22,000 hours. In 2012 it was up to 120,000. In 2016 it was over 476,000 hours … that’s over FIFTY-FOUR YEARS’ worth of content! If you laid the tape from all those films around the earth, you’d get in trouble for leaving porn all over the floor.
It’s fair to say that this technology has changed the world. Is it changing us apes along with it?
* Mainly referring to my mum. She has two computers, one in front of the other because one broke and she bought one with a bigger screen to hide it. Also, she has six cats now. Which isn’t relevant, but it is too many.
† A nice change from researching my last book, when NO ONE wanted to talk to me about child brides and rape law.
‡ Alexa is a disembodied know-it-all who works for Amazon. Stefan wouldn’t like her, she’s all brain and no good bits.
§ I still don’t know what this website does or why Pete from university sends me biweekly emails asking to ‘connect’ on there. We only spoke to each other once when I told him Gemma Williams might have given him chlamydia, what’s there to ‘connect’ about?
Science of Masturbation
I could write a metaphorical short story about a man who consumes so much pornography that it piles up around him. Towering towers of video tapes, metres of genital posters, acres of gaping legs and mouths. As his collection grows the man masturbates in a smaller and smaller space each day. The more porn he uses, the less life he has until one day – SPLAT. The porn falls down. The man is killed. His body isn’t found for months, but when it is, the weight of the tapes and magazines has squashed his head in such a way that his eyes have popped out.
He ogled himself to death!
It’s so gross, and so perfect. It’s a morality tale, a perfect analogy of what many of us believe to be the dangers of obsessive porn use. The user becomes shut off from the world, out of touch with reality, they wank themselves to oblivion find life is not worth living. I would love to write this story, especially the bit about the popped-out eyes – how perfect is that? He’s been gawping and gawking, his eyes bulging more and more until they fly from his skull towards the boobies. That’s my favourite bit.
But that man’s death was a real thing that happened and was on the news.
Joji, fifty years old, Japanese, squished by his porn collection in 2016. He might have been a really funny man, very kind, brilliant at crosswords or a super good swimmer. But I don’t know anything about him, because his death is the kind that obliterates any life.* I think about old Joji, I wonder if he would chuckle at his ending. ‘What a way to go!’ he might quip, but in Japanese. Or maybe he would be deeply, deeply ashamed of what happened to him, this avoidable tragedy, stealing decades from his existence and telling the world he was a pervert?
People don’t usually get physically hurt by their pornography. Your mum didn’t get papercut to death by her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. The internet doesn’t weigh anything, so even the most compulsive porn watchers needn’t fear a fatal collapse. But there remains much discussion about the non-physical dangers, the harmful effects of porn on mental health and relationships.
I’ve felt sick and sad through lots of my research into this topic, but my intention isn’t to make you feel like that. I want to examine this intellectually where possible and explore the existing studies, so we have a full set of information to support our arguments. Let’s dedicate our investigation to Joji. Could his life have been saved if he’d found a different hobby? Maybe if he’d played squash, he wouldn’t have got squashed? I’m raising my keyboard to ya, Joji, this is for you.
The male body has an evolved need to masturbate. No matter what you might have heard from the NoFappers or the Catholic Church, men should masturbate. Even if men have regular sex, they’ll feel masturbatory urges. Sometimes the more sex a man is having, the MORE he will feel inclined to masturbate. If a male-bodied person forgoes masturbation, their body will often emit nocturnally (wet dreams), which is something that the sleeping person cannot control.
You may know yourself that attempting not to masturbate, for religious or personal reasons, can require much focus and energy – that’s because it is a necessary part of sperm production. The male body wants to do it because it needs to. It takes around three months for spermatogenesis to take place, but the little fellas can’t stay in the balls forever. After four or five days they l
ose energy, become weary and need walking sticks have less chance of making a healthy baby (their whole raison d’être). By masturbating every few days a man keeps his sperm fresh and energetic, vital for sperm competition. New studies also suggest that masturbating reduces the chances of getting prostate cancer and lowers stress, so it’s an all-round great way to spend your time.
PRIVATE TIME. PLEASE DO NOT DO IT ON THE BUS.
And with my ‘kindly sex education teacher’ face on, let me say that while all men vary, any amount of masturbation is normal. Some people do it several times a day, some people a couple of times a week, maybe some people only once or twice a month. There isn’t an official ‘average’ wank rate, there’s a spectrum that ranges from ‘very little’ to ‘a lot’ depending on the person. It can be influenced by hormones, stress levels, boredom, a sexy new receptionist at work. It might lessen in older age due to a drop in androgens (the viropause).
Even if you are trying to get someone pregnant the amount you wank will not affect your sperm count. The testicles produce 1,500 every second! It’s only when self-pleasuring becomes ‘compulsive’ that it’s a problem. But that’s the same with any behaviour, like checking your phone or picking your nose.
Do men do it more than women?
If you believe culture – yes. Male masturbation is talked about as an inevitability and joked about in comedies with PG ratings. In general, I think we’re more familiar and comfortable discussing men self-pleasuring. When I was at school boys were always going on about it, but there was only one conversation about female masturbation, when Vicky Thomas got caught fingering herself behind the cricket pavilion, and looking back, I think that was just a rumour. Vicky didn’t even like cricket, but too late, she remains Sticky Cricky Vicky to this day.
