Porn is normal. It’s efficient, it doesn’t require a partner and it’s hot. People love porn, and in this Internet age, it’s so accessible that for many if not most people, the ideas of porn and masturbation are tightly bound together.
But what if we rewind even just three decades before Rule 34? (For those of you unfamiliar with it, Rule 34 is a meme that originated from a comic illustrating the artist Peter Morley-Souter in shock after discovering Calvin and Hobbes- themed porn. The comic shows an open-jawed teenage boy in front of a computer and is captioned, “Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.”)
Once upon a time, masturbation wasn’t so intensely coupled with porn. Masturbation didn’t necessitate sexy pin-ups, raunchy novels or racy magazines; instead, it easily and commonly existed without those things.
Think about how porn may have changed the average experience of masturbation over the last few decades. Porn provides you an external focus for your attention. You may not be explicitly thinking of what is physically happening to your body. You don’t think about what your hands are doing, you usually think about a fantasy of something else.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that fantasy is wrong, or even that porn is bad. But, I do think it’s important to understand how it affects your sexuality. After all, if something is actively changing your experience of sex (all sex – masturbation, oral, all of it), wouldn’t you want enough awareness of it to make an educated decision about it?
So, imagine: what if you were really turned on by the idea of pleasuring yourself? You create the inspiration for yourself; you do the work; you get the reward. It’s easy to forget that that’s even possible when you’ve developed a masturbation routine in which watching porn is a given.
But when you watch porn, most of your attention is on the porn itself, and barely any of it is on yourself. When you think about that fact, it makes sense that erectile dysfunction affects one in four men under 40. With that statistic comes the added consideration of how porn can condition you to be further aroused by porn.
It’s classical conditioning as a mechanism of addiction.
You learn to respond to words like “slut” or “dirty” with arousal. You become conditioned to see painful, boring or non-consensual sex as arousing. Those not-sexy things are often disguised by the actually-sexy things that are also abundant in porn, and it’s easy to imagine how the line blurs over time.
In the end, much of today’s popular porn is incredibly damaging. Disembodied cocks take away the sexiness of a man’s ability to do anything other than thrust. What about the look in his eyes? What about the excitement of hearing him ask what you want?
Women “taking it all,” being ejaculated on, or having their body grabbed and positioned without the context of consent takes away their higher thinking, leaving them more objects than people.
The bodies of pornstars set impossible body image standards. Yes, there is such thing as plastic surgery for vaginas, and yes, they all have had it.
And, in addition to porn depicting violence and lack of consent in sex, its attempts to disguise women’s pain, discomfort, or boredom promotes rape culture.
But porn can still be a fun, healthy sexual aid even though healthy porn can often seem scarce. Alas, the wonder of Rule #34! There is porn produced with all this in mind: porn that recognizes the sexiness of intimacy, porn that gives equal focus to men and women, porn that depicts realistic gay and lesbian sex. Look for it by searching “feminist porn” or “female friendly porn”. (As if only females could be interested in healthy porn! What an insult!)
Whatever you choose to watch, however often, remember that porn does not equal sex, masturbation does not necessitate porn and porn does affect how you think.
Armstrong is a member of the class of 2016.
