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KEADY: The porn identity

Pornography distorts sexual expectations by portraying exaggerated fantasies

The idea that watching pornography can start to negatively affect people’s lives holds sway in popular culture. Fans of the MTV series “True Life” may recall the episode about three young people addicted to porn. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is starring in “Don Jon,” a movie with a pornography addict as its main character. These examples show the effects of porn addiction. But it is also important to consider how pornography impacts the lives of not addicts but mere viewers.

While porn may carry the stigma of being a strange, sleazy hobby for lecherous people, everyone knows that erotic images, video and more are readily accessible free of charge on the internet. Some estimates report that as many as 40 million people watch porn on a regular basis. The fact that this many people view pornography with such ease is striking considering the “sexual script theory”: that the kind of sex people watch becomes what they expect.

Looking at pornography is far from new, but the ability to look at porn easily and cheaply online is. These factors make porn viewing more common, which changes perceptions of sex and sexuality. Porn provides an easily accessible example of intense, exaggerated sex that serves as a comparison with one’s own experience. While people watch porn for the same reason they have sex — to have an orgasm — sharing a sexual experience with another person is quite different from watching people have sex in porn.

Pornography is about the shameless enactment of sexual fantasies to their fullest extent. This is not to say that people should feel guilty about their real-life sexual desires, or that they should not seek to fulfill them, but rather that in a physical relationship these desires are shared between people as opposed to being displayed on a screen. Watching pornography will always be a voyeuristic scenario as opposed to a real experience.

By this same logic, pornography maximizes sexual fantasies, making use of lingerie, large-membered or big-breasted actors and actresses, and isolating fantasy from all other human interactions. Porn’s portrayal of sex is exaggerated, aiming at unfiltered sexual arousal for the consumer. Porn rarely demonstrates realistic sexual experiences. Not only could the excessive nature of this portrayal escalate the expectations of those who view it, but it could also limit expectations to where nothing except the excessive portrayal of sex seems arousing.

Pornography also exports one’s sexual fulfillment to other people. Certainly, many people who watch porn are masturbating, but this relegates sex to an individual action in which other people engage in the act itself. Porn stars are paid to have sex and do it in an exaggerated manner. If one only achieves an orgasm by watching actors have sex in this way, one’s could be prevented from doing the same in his or her own sex life, as it could never match the depiction in a porn clip.

I do not mean to say that watching porn is universally bad. While porn can create an unattainable ideal of what sex is supposed to be, it may also stimulate one’s sex life by introducing new ideas, and can be a healthy release for sexual desire without a partner. However seedy it may seem in public discourse, I would wager that a majority of young people have seen pornography at least once, and that it hasn’t ruined their sex lives.

Perhaps the best way to look at pornography and maintain a healthy sex life is to take it with a grain of salt — porn is not meant to be realistic or grounded, and should not be assumed to be so. Most importantly, however, is to be true to oneself — whether in a Google Chrome incognito window or not.

Walter Keady is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily.

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