OUR first glimpses of porn were usually illicit, thrilling, and brokered via a school friend or an older cousin, a glimpse into what made the still fuzzy idea of sex so intriguing, so forbidden.
Then we grew up, and porn was — or so we liked to tell ourselves — only for spotty schoolboys or the odd raging sociopath, not ‘normal’ grown-ups, or at least, not openly.
Then along came the internet, whose biggest accomplishment may be that it has made pornographic content on thousands of sites instantly available to anyone with a home computer and without the need for an embarrassing trip to the top shelf of the local newsagent.
Ordinary folk who would rather swim with sharks than go out and rent a dirty video now think nothing of logging on to the internet for a bit of hard core entertainment.
In the 1980s, anti porn activist Andrea Dworkin warned that pornography, if left uncontrolled, would eventually end up having an octopus-like hold on our culture. She may be right: our world today is saturated with pornography, all thanks to the internet; it’s a subject that has never been more discussed, more mainstream, or supposedly more socially acceptable.
The big worry is, our minds also operate like a computer hard disc, the only difference being we cannot simply press delete: everything we load into our brain stays there, and for better or worse it slowly changes our character.
This changing of character seems to be the biggest problem with internet porn, as it removes sex from normal social context, making everyone look as if they are having unlimited sexual action, free of inhibitions, in a world of multiple orgasms, and permanently erect penises, without fear of rejection, impotence, cramp in the left foot, in a world where condoms don’t exist, let alone the likelihood of one catching a nasty sexually transmitted disease…
Most women still find pornography rather threatening, the fact that their partner is secretive about it, is spending money on it, and is stuck on the computer for hours on end, ignoring them. It all adds up to a form of betrayal, a form of infidelity.
The thing is, no matter how ubiquitous pornography has become, for those women who find their loved one hunched over a computer accessing porn, the experience can come as a bit of a shock.
Eliza is 43 and lives in Cyprus. Every evening, her husband would go into his study to
“do some research”. She honestly thought that her hubby was searching the net for information on garden sheds, bedding plants, and on line chess players, not hunting down naked pneumatic blondes straddling Alsatians.
“I never disturbed him when he was on the computer,” Eliza explained. “Then one night I just walked in to the study to ask him something and there it was: this huge breasted woman lying spread-eagled on the screen. He pretended he’d just sort of come across her but I knew then that this was something he had been doing every evening and to be honest it was a real shock.”
What is it that makes a man reach for his mouse, rather than his spouse when he wants to be aroused? If anything, internet porn, rather than bringing couples together, seems to be pushing them further and further apart, creating a culture of loners who use cyber thrills to remove themselves from reality.
Jane is 34 and divorced. She recently started a relationship with a man and the third time they went to bed together he asked her if she would watch some porn with him.
“I’d never really been into this stuff before but to be honest it did turn me on.
“The only thing was that once he saw this, it was a case of me having to watch porn every time we came back to his flat. It was as if I wasn’t really there as a person, it was just the body and the moves that he needed, nothing else, so I finished with him as I was beginning to feel we were moving into other areas that to be honest were a bit uncomfortable for me. This wasn’t love or affection, what he wanted and needed only was performance sex.”
Porn is a both a tacky bulletin board for the turn-ons we won’t own up to, and a playground for discovering things we hadn’t previously considered. Far from turning men into raving sexual animals, internet porn is actually turning them off regular non digital women. Some men are now so dependant on the dubious delights offered via the internet, they are unable to enjoy real sex with their partners without the paraphernalia of porn.
The world has moved on a long, long way from the crumpled magazine in the school playground.
