Men, Women, and Internet Porn

(About a 4 minute read)

I am old enough to have known a time — long before the internet — when porn was something you could get hold of only by being man enough to face a real human in order to lay your sweaty hands on it.  A store clerk, or at least now and then, a postal carrier.

Well, I concede you didn’t really have to be fully a man to get it.  In an earlier post on this blog, “How to Get Away with Buying a Playboy, Circa 1970“,  I confessed to how I would buy porn long before I  — much to my mother’s surprise — actually turned into a man.

By the way, the post was deemed good enough reading to be selected for the first post launching a new internet magazine.  I have always since then been proud of how my youthful skills at masturbation were thus appreciated and enshrined.  Both the gods and the Kleenex Company know, I spent enough time perfecting them!

“Paul Sunstone? I have a delivery for you.  One gross boxes of Kleenex Super-Strong Happy Nose Tissues, along with a personal thank-you note from the Company’s new full-time employees.”

“Yes, that’s me.  I have a cold. Achoo! Achoo!”

“Hm…doesn’t sound much like sneezing to me, Mr. Sunstone.  Sounds more like you’ve been ‘sneezing’ some other part of you besides your nose. Ah! To be young again!”

Internet porn took off so fast in the early days of the net that today it is plausibly said it was what financially sustained the net while it was getting off the ground.  Like many people, I have mixed feelings about that.

In the first place, I am deeply concerned with how the net seems to have driven porn to extremes — e.g. brutal rape and child porn.  I see no ready solution to any of it, given both the alarming market demand for the extremes, and the desirability of preserving freedom of speech.  There are always those among us who are ready and eager to use porn as a foot in the door to wider and ever more evil suppressions of free speech.

Second, I am appalled how porn’s depiction of sex has now become for so many of us the standard way to practice sex.  Good gods, do people really think those videos show how it’s to be done?  Well, apparently, all too many of us do.

Last, I have a growing suspicion that the way porn depicts women is creating in young women a perception that they must live up to porn’s depictions of “proper female sexuality” or else become unattractive to young men.  And too many young men also seem to be embracing porn’s notions of what a woman should be to them sexually.

If that’s the case, it does not bode well for the future, because there seems to be no natural limits on the extremes to which porn might drive people’s expectations.  What a desert the future might be!

The only conceivable solution is for delightfully attractive  young women in droves to seek out older men — preferably in the 60 year age range — for intense, face-to-face consultations on how they properly should and ought to be treated in bed.  Only by this proven means can the ill effects of porn be combated. For more information on this sane and sensible approach, dial 1-800-SUNSTONES-SCAM for an initial screening.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that some of the concern about the ill-effects of porn seems (to me, at least) to be unnecessary.  Specifically, that’s most — but not all — of the times a woman worries about her partner’s interest in and use of porn, despite her being generally and reasonably sexually available to him.

As I hinted above, I think men (and even women) can go way too far in having their tastes, expectations, and standards influenced by porn.  Given human nature, there must be plenty of people out there who would provide us with ample shudder-material if we only knew what porn has inspired them to demand of their partners.

But genuine perverts aside (perverts not always so much because of their tastes, as because of the unreasonable demands they are willing to place on another human), it’s my impression most men’s use of porn — even within the context of a healthy relationship — is pretty much innocuous.

I think women tend to mistakenly see the use of porn as a threat to them — even, sometimes, as a form of cheating on them.  But I would wager that for most men, the use of porn in no way affects their loyalties.

I have only met one man who seriously told me that porn had made him so dissatisfied with his partner, he wished they had never married.  And that man’s wife refused him everything but vanilla sex.  She’d even consent to oral sex only on special occasions such as his birthday.

I suspect that for most men, porn is not a form of cheating — and completely lacks even the thrills of breaking taboos — but is merely a means to getting a bit more pleasure out of life.

Then again, if your partner proudly shows you the thank-you note the newly full-time employees of the Kleenex Company have sent him….

Questions? Comments?