These days, I am rarely surprised when, after a lecture or book signing, someone will try to talk to me about their addiction to porn and ask where he or she can get help..
As an author and feminist social commentator, I often discuss my work at events and meet a wide spectrum of people who talk to me about sex, relationships and, more increasingly, the impact of pornography on their lives.
There is no stereotype of what this person will look like. A man in his 60s has asked me if I think his porn addiction accounts for his current impotence.
A lovely young mother of three boys asked sadly how her husband, in an otherwise happy, sexually fulfilled marriage, became ‘lost to porn’ to the point that she had to leave him. She now wonders how to protect her sons.
A bright, male college student confessed that he is worried about what he calls ‘the kink spiral’ – the term he uses to describe feeling trapped by his need to see more and more extreme porn to get aroused.
the fact he needs more and more extreme, violent or fetishistic porn images in order to get aroused.
Couples in their late teens tell me no one they know can have sex without porn playing on a screen. A guidance counsellor at a private school asks where he can find help for his students – many of whom are so addicted to online porn that the obsession is affecting their schoolwork and social development.
Recently, A major British study, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which questioned more than 15,000 people aged 16 to 74, showed couples are having about 20 per cent less sex per monththan they did just just ten years ago.
As someone who has been researching in this field for over 20 years, I believe we must take seriously the rise of pornography. New research shows it is having a detrimental effect on men’s and women’s sexual responses and harming relationships as a consequence.
Popular culture is reflecting this trend: the new film Don Jon centres on porn addiction. The hero is sleeping with Scarlett Johansson but sneaks off to watch porn, since he says nothing with a real woman (even Johansson!) is as good. Meanwhile, sex scenes in mainstream movies are getting more violent. In The Kids Are All Right, I was startled to see Julianne Moore’s character start slapping her partner’s face as he neared orgasm.
Young women tell me that hair-pulling, and even pressure around the neck at orgasm, are normal parts of courtship sex these days. These are ‘porn cliches’, as one young woman put it. I am not surprised by these shifts because we all know about the pornification of society.
Maybe Naomi Wolf is simply so jealous that people watching porn are having more fun and getting more sex than she is personally. That’s the only reason I can see why she is so closedminded and meanspirited on this topic. So what if some people are mimicking what they see in porn when they engage in sex in real life?? Guess what, Ms. Wolf?? Those are real people still engaging in sex on screen, and they have lives and feelings of their own. Shedding crocodile tears about it isn’t going to change a damn thing about that. Care for your… Read more »
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. — H.L. Mencken
Yeah, this has been the latest idiotic party line from rad-femland: Watching porn will make you a bad fuck. Guess the watching porn will wreck your relationships didn’t work so they assumed that men would respond to this new illusory threat with greater alarm.
Yawn.