A recent post to another blog responded to the question “Why women hate porn” and listed a number of reasons why some women may dislike pornography. This is understandable on some level since a lot of porn suggests things that do not or cannot happen in real life.
For example, how am I, a woman, able to do some of the acrobatics that occur in porn? Will my male partner expect me to stand on a 3-inch spiked heel, while the other one is raised on a desk, and he enters me from behind for 15 minutes?
This sparks an educational discussion about the realities of pornography and erotica. Much of the porn that is viewed today is made for the person watching. It is created to generate a response, not to get real people do imitate it. Many of the positions are good camera angles so the viewer can see everything and get turned on; not so we can try the calisthetics ourselves.
There may also be insecurity on the part of men and women watching porn. For example, some men may question their own penis size compared to many of the performers. Average male penis is 5-6 inches long; however, the average penis size portrayed in pornography is 10-13 inches. Also, many of these men are able to have sexual activity for long periods of time. Therefore, some men may question why they only last 7 minutes during intercourse but the performers are lasting 15-20 minutes.
And lets just say those ‘perfect’ breasts and hairless, blemishless women don’t exactly represent the real woman, and may make us feel inferior when we watch porn.
This needs to be addressed so we don’t look at porn as our answers to sexual information or our answer to the question, “am I normal?”
There are many types of sexual visual imagery. Maybe the reason why women don’t like pornography is because of the type of porn they are watching. Often we will hear that porn is degrading to women. Again, what type of porn are you watching? There are types of erotica that are educational in nature. They show real people, with real bodies talking and having sex. If you are interested in this type look on the Sinclair Institute’s website and Comstock Films. They tend to be more educational. There has also been a huge influx of women running pornography companies. They were porn stars in the business, who took their money to open their own companies and run things the way they see fit. There was a special on this on CNN called “The Business of Pleasure”. Quite often, these women who run the company offer different types of films that focus more on the woman. In fact, one of the producers stated that there are some scenes she will not include in the final cut because they are not appealing to women. Typically, in pornography, you know the scene is over once the male ejaculates, no discussion or focus on the woman. That doesn’t seem to appealing to woman. Yet with some of these women producers, they spend a great deal of time pleasing the women in the film. That may be very appealing to women. The answer to bad porn isn’t to abolish it; it is to demand for better pornography!