When I meet a patient for the first time, we always go over a sexual history. It’s the usual questions you might expect: first masturbation, first intercourse, family attitudes, how many partners, etc. One of my favorite questions is, “How did you learn about sex?” Rarely is the answer, “From my parents.” Instead, it is usually “Hmmm, friends maybe….mostly porn.”
The internet has certainly influenced this. Gone are the days where a guy had to stand furtively at the magazine rack in the corner store, gazing at plastic wrapped objects of carnal desire. And, oh! The great fortune to have a friend who had access to a brother’s or father’s secret stash of smut! Magazines made the rounds among tight circles of friends. Unlucky the adolescent who came upon especially arousing pages glued together by an earlier viewer. The business of illicit erotica was a risky one back in the day.
For any guy coming of age during the internet era, porn has been a ubiquitous presence. Viewing any sexual proclivity or fetish is a mere few clicks away. In the old days, we were happy to see naked women in carefully posed photos. Now, younger and younger sexually curious boys can watch things we never even dreamed of. It’s a brave, uh, scary, new world.
Now, Porn is great. It has a place. But Porn can also be a mesmerizing mistress. Even though we know it’s fake, it’s still captivating. There is no longer even a pretense of a plot anymore; No more pizza delivery guys, hotel maids, hospital nurses, or airline stewardesses. Porn is now mostly short clips of oral sex, masturbation, anal sex, gang bangs, and vaginal intercourse. Point-of-View (POV), where the participant holds a camera and films him/herself during sex, has even come and gone in popularity. It’s also all about the money shot (I do warn young men that, contrary to what they may see in porn, most women do not want to end up with a face covered in semen).
Porn features people with larger-than-life physiques; the women have huge breasts, the men have enormous penises. Everyone has a six-pack and perfect skin. Men stay erect for hours and hours. The sex displayed is variations on “Which orifice does the penis go in this time? And even though we KNOW it’s fake, it still affects our thoughts and fantasies of what we would like to do. Most young men I talk to admit that they sometimes try to re-enact what they’ve seen in porn.
The porn lie is: if you have a huge penis, that can stay erect for ages, you poke it into every bodily orifice and she will go absolutely nuts for you. Now, some women might – and that is great. But for most people, great sex does not look like porn. I tell guys all the time that if you recorded real, normal people having great sex, you often wouldn’t see that much.
Why am I so sure this is a lie? I talk to porn stars. I work with some of them in my office. First off, most of the guys are not as big as they say. I had one guy whose claim to fame was his 11” penis. He confided that it was nowhere near 11” but who was going to measure it? Also, nearly all of these guys now use penile injections to give them an erection that lasts for hours.
This patient/porn star also told me that porn was just another job. Sure, sometimes he liked some cast members more than others, but, for the most part, they are all pretending to be in ecstasy – but were not. He is pretty sure that only a handful of women actually had orgasms during a shoot. The positions are painful and awkward. And when he has sex at home? It is nothing like the sex he has on the set.
So, go ahead. Enjoy the porn. But don’t use it as a ‘How To’ guide. Don’t look to it for ideas. Porn is not a documentary! It is complete and total fantasy. And like any fantasy, it’s not real, it’s not true. It’s a lie.
