The Problem with Porn

For centuries if not longer, sex has been fraught. It’s seen as a rich, deep and mysterious experience, as one of the most powerful and significant experiences we humans can have. You go to bed with someone and who knows what will happen? Intense emotions may arise. Intense sensations may be felt. Hey—it just might drive you crazy.

Yeah, she could drag me
Over the rainbow,
Send me away.
Down by the river
I shot my baby.
          (Neil Young, Down By the River)

The potential for bliss, the potential for disaster, the potential for babies and family, the potential for leashes and unleashing—all this amazing potential wrapped up in a hardwired mingling of juices and genitals.

Save it for marriage! Wait for your soulmate!

Sex means you’re special. If you weren’t, they wouldn’t be having sex with you. 

(It can also mean they’re really angry with you, which is why they’re fucking your best friend. But that’s saying “You’re special” too, in a doggie-style kind of way.)

All these attitudes and choices arise from the same basic assumption. Sex is a big deal and not to be taken lightly.

Sex is an animal act that we swaddle in meaning. Lots and lots of meaning. It has a mystique, a romance, about it.

There’s another side to this story, of course. Throughout human history, sex has also been just sex, the simplest of animal acts. One reason whorehouses have flourished is because they’ve made it easy for men to meet their sexual needs while leaving all that extra meaning at the door. For their brief bordello vacation, they can get their rocks off with no more ‘This means I love you,’ no more ‘This means I’ll help raise your babies,’ no more ‘This means I owe you something beyond money and some basic courtesy.’

The sex-as-fraught track run parallel to the sex-as-instinct one. And now sex’s mystique may be disappearing. It’s being undermined, certainly.

By what? In a word: Porn.

If there’s one thing porn (correction: mainstream porn) tells us, it’s that sex does not matter. It’s a festival for the eyes and other senses. It has no depth or mystique. It’s all surface, all animal act—and if the challenge for the performers (especially the women) is to stretch their bodies to the limits of what is physically capable, well, that’s just the animal act as performance.

The animal act as circus act, too.

Step right up, see the porn stars with their amazing expandable orifices!

Porn is also sex as spectator sport—and the performance baseline is rising steadily. People keep running the 100-meter dash faster and the sex tricks keep getting more impressive, too. Forty years ago, Linda Lovelace broke new glottal ground in the porn classic Deep Throat. Now sword-swallowing is pretty much de rigueur. Ditto with anal, which once was bold and now is blah. You can even find performances now with something called “double vag penetration.” I saw this once, complete with stoke-the-excitement color commentary. This was her first double vag!

This is the state of the world we live in. Extreme sells. Meaning doesn’t.

(Not when it comes to sex, anyway.)

But it’s not just what we see when we watch porn that sends this message. There’s also what we know.

We know that these are rarely romantic partners we’re seeing. These folks are under contract. They’re professional entertainers. They’re doing the deed for dollars. And my, but there are a lot of them!

We also know that a lot of these performers just don’t seem very into it. They mug for the camera. They fake passion, badly. They reside in the image and seem to be oblivious to what actually makes sex hot—passion that comes from the inside, not from posing. They’re modeling sex from the outside in, sex stripped of its soul and humanity.

And then there are the numbers. Here are some factoids for you:

• About 30% of web traffic is porn-related. (Source)
• Porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. (Source)
• 64% of American men view porn at least monthly. That includes 79% of men aged 18-30 and 55% of married men. (Source)

Our national pastime? Forget about football or baseball. Our national pastime is fapping.

The cumulative effect of all this porn on the male psyche is, I submit, transformative. It does away with the lens that for centuries has halo’d sex with its special aura of intensity and mystery. It reduces (or, if you will, returns) the sex act to its lowest common denominator—and then, because competition is king, it goes the extra mile and tosses in some circus tricks for good measure.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Are we getting back to reality here, or are we losing the romance that for centuries has gone such a long way toward filling our souls’ sails and giving our lives purpose and meaning? Is the mystique a mistake? Here, I’m a traditionalist. I want sex to matter. I don’t want it to just be an animal act, and I especially don’t want it to be just an animal act with a side of competition.

The marriage of the Internet and pornography has gone a long way toward normalizing sex. In many ways, that’s a good thing. But it also strips out the magic and the depth. This speaks to the end of an era—and, more specifically, to the end of a longstanding way we’ve understood sexual desire as a culture. I don’t know about you, but this makes me sad. I don’t want my personal experience of sex to be flat, and I don’t want our cultural experience of sex to be flat, either. I want sex to transport me to the sphere of the angels—and the only way that can happen is if the magic carpet I’m riding on has been woven with rich threads of meaning.