Behind Closed Doors: Does Porn Really Make Men Awful in Bed?

My boyfriend - we'll call him Hugh, for privacy's sake - watches a lot of porn. Once or twice a day most days a week, he says, the same frequency he's been watching since he was very young. (13? 14? He can't remember.) Hugh's also been with a lot of women; more than a hundred, a statistic that reflects the drive to capitalize on his sexuality the way men in our society are taught to do from birth. That exact cultural tenant - the kind that so starkly contrasts with a world where women struggle to orgasm and are deemed sluts for having more than a handful of sexual partners - is the kind of stuff that keeps many people up at night, biting their nails and penning impassioned essays about the orgasm gap. 

Rewind to my room, earlier this month: Hugh is laying next to me on my bed, holding a small purple vibrator. During all his casual encounters, he'd never played with a toy before. He's already so hard he's throbbing, yet has somehow remained laser-focused on his hand placement.

"How does that feel, baby?" he murmurs. It took a second for him to acquaint himself with the toy - even when you have your own clit to experiment with, finding the right spot is a guessing game - but he's wielding it expertly now. My brows furrow as I consider that he might not stay turned on if I'm not actively stroking him, and I don't want to disappoint. "Shhh," he says, carefully watching my expression. "This is all about you." By the time I come, he's so excited that he slides right into me, sporting the gleaming triumph in his eye not of a man who just figured out how to solve a very complicated puzzle, but of one who just made someone he cares about very happy.

The first time I read Emma Lindsay's Medium essay Porn Makes Men Terrible in Bed, I recognized the frustration of someone who was never given the permission, the knowledge, or the careful concern she needed to express her sexuality in any kind of satisfying way. I know how that feels - I've been that woman too. Sometimes sex hasn't felt good, and more often than not it didn't feel great, which always left me wondering: Is this it? Am I broken? 

The second time I read Emma Lindsay's Medium essay, I recognized the hostility toward both a medium and a gender not responsible for a far more pervasive historical issue. It's a logical fallacy that's easy to make when you're angry and looking for a place to direct that energy, but it's not one any of us can afford to make.

Shall I explain? 

A tale as old as time

Let's travel back to in history before the sexual revolution and the groundbreaking research conducted by Masters and Johnson. Sexual repression has been commonplace for both genders at different points in history, but we'll start with Victorian times for brevity's sake. Religion, a lack of birth control, and societal repercussions meant that women were severely restricted from having sex for any reason other than procreation. So much so, in fact, that wives were often only allowed to engage in sex if they were trying to conceive - pleasure for men was encouraged outside the home. This was the narrative of female sexuality for thousands of years: It was dangerous, taboo, and unproductive.  

Fast forward to the Freudian era, when the famous neurologist declared that clitoral orgasms were juvenile, and that mature women would have purely vaginal orgasms (which, of course, we know now are merely orgasms that stimulate the backside of the clitoral network, which bumps up to the G-spot). According to that logic, exactly what felt good for men should have been what felt good for women - which I understand would be a function of convenience. The only problem? No one had ever endeavored to actually study female anatomy and how it works. In the early 1900s, female sexual pleasure was still trivial.

All orgasms, even internal, are actually clitoral. With the right amount of warmup, penetration still feels great.

Since Masters and Johnson changed the landscape, we've conducted groundbreaking research on sexuality and gender. Sex experts, journalists (eh hem), and researchers now know that men and women have equally potent but vastly different sexualities, that the clit is an iceberg, and that 80 percent of women need external stimulation to have an orgasm. One of the most startling was discoveries is that it takes 20 to 30 minutes of external and internal clitoral stimulation for a woman to even approach a clitoral erection, and that wetness alone does not mean her body is ready. We've learned that male and female genitals are homologous, meaning that they are made of the same things arranged in different ways. 

Rewriting history

The only problem? None of that is taught to people who don't study this for a living. We don't learn about anything other than penis-in-vagina penetration in sex ed, should you be so lucky to have sex ed at all, and all the ways that female sexuality differs from male sexuality is left entirely out of mainstream movies and TV. We don't learn those facts in our anatomy courses or learn it from our parents, and we rarely see it in magazines. There are no evil masterminds scheming away in their fortresses, wondering how we can perpetuate that lack of education, study, and emphasis - at this point, most people simply don't know that we've had it all wrong and they don't have the information they need to present a more accurate depiction of sex that is more enjoyable for all genders. 

Just like a penis, a clit becomes erect. 

As someone who does this for a living, I like to think I have salient responses to articles pointing fingers in the wrong direction. But this time, a commenter said it far better than I could have:

"Honestly this should have been titled 'Patriarchy Makes Men Terrible in Bed', which would have been more accurate. It’s not about porn, which is just a form of media?—?what makes it all about 'sex that is awful for women' is a social structure that does not give a damn about what women like in bed. It’s a REFLECTION of that culture."

I'll take it one step further: I'd say a lot of people in our society do give a damn about what women like in bed, particularly the men who are trying to please them. (Ladies: If your partner doesn't care about your pleasure, promptly dump them.) The problem? Equality of the sexes is still relatively new, and we're in the hangover stages of repression. Centuries of illiteracy on female sexuality have indoctrinated ignorance in all of us, leaving us confused, misinformed, and frustrated. Porn (or the very narrow-minded genre of it this writer is discussing) is merely a reflection of what people think sex should be like. Porn is media, after all, and most grown men are media literate enough to know how to differentiate fantasy and reality. 

Relearning sex

Here's the thing, though: For those who have a thorough, continuous sex education that includes the information we've recently gleaned on male and female sexuality, porn can be a great education system - it teaches you about new kinks, gives you fresh ideas, and helps you understand the creative ways bodies can move together. But that is only - and I mean only - true if you begin with a comprehensive base of sex education first. As sex expert Philip Brenot said in an interview with the Guardian, "Sexual education should teach the rules that should govern relationships; it should teach us about communication, about consent and respect. This is not natural. We have to learn this.”

We have to learn this. 

I love porn - as all of you lovely Fleshlings know - but I will agree with Emma Lindsay on this much: A great deal of porn omits a realistic or substantial amount of foreplay. Some folks, like sex therapist Ian Kerner, call foreplay outercourse, promoting the idea that we should rebrand the definition of sex to be anything that makes you come, something that varies widely for everyone. Mutual masturbation, erotic massage, fingering, oral sex, 69ing, dry humping, power play, and using sex toys are all forms of foreplay, and spending enough time on it will give women the clitoral erections they need to make penetration feel as good as it looks for the ladies in your favorite scenes. Some performers warm up by masturbating off screen, some porn is edited to taper it down to speed up the narrative, and sometimes the lack of representation is just a reflection of what society believes about sex and foreplay in general. (Also: This woman has clearly never watched a woman squirt on camera. There are forms of pleasure you just can't fake.)

During female arousal, a woman gets an erection too - one that you can see in the form of swelling. 

Here's a stat to drive home my point: The average female needs 19 minutes of foreplay to be properly "erect" and swollen. But is it porn's job to depict this in the first place? We don't look to Marvel movies for a realistic peek into the average civilian's week in Hell's Kitchen, so why are we looking to porn to illustrate what real, human, everyday sexuality looks life? I'd argue that the responsibility lies with sex education, especially considering that porno must also consider what looks good on camera - but I understand that most young adults in the United States have to use porn as their education instead. That's a problem. 

We have to learn this. 

So, what do we do about this? To refute Emma Lindsay's proposed solution, I have a fucking idea. For starters, remind yourself that watching porn can be an amazing turn on and treasure trove of fantasy, but we need to apply media literacy to it as we would anything else. Subscribe to reputable newsletters and publications covering sexuality. Read Fleshbot. Listen to sex podcasts, and check out books on sexuality from time to time. Talk to your friends about sex, forgive yourself when you realize you had a few things wrong, and most importantly, talk to your partners about what you've learned and ask what specifically gets them off - even our learnings on female sexuality will cast generalizations that are far too wide. If you're not having sex with assholes (the figurative kind - not the literal ones), you will make the most progress by assuming your partner would love to make you feel good provided they knew how to do so.

My boyfriend - you remember Hugh - has watched countless hours of porn throughout his life and benefitted from culture historically rooted in male pleasure, but those things haven't made him bad in bed - not even close. He isn't apathetic about my pleasure, and he isn't afraid to readjust his sexual routine if something isn't working for me. Learning and trying new things excites him, and he listens intently when I go on an excited rant about something I've just learned about my own body and what makes it tick. Admittedly, I'm still learning what makes me feel good - I have a lot of things to unlearn as female sexuality finally emerges in its own spotlight. The road to sexual enlightenment is a long one, but I have a partner (and our favorite porn) in tow for the journey.