Interesting article. (Sorry if there's already a thread!)
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6831573/The-true-toll-porn-Pretty-girls-hate-bodies-young-men-perform.html
Excerpt:
For many of the women and girls I see (whether they watch porn or not, many of my patients are affected by their partner’s porn habits) this can create wholly unrealistic expectations of them when it comes to sex.
When the Pill was introduced in the Sixties, one of the things it did was emancipate women — they could finally have sex just for pleasure. They discovered how to enjoy themselves by exploring their bodies with partners and, over time, questions about sex were discussed by the agony aunts in magazines.
But porn is staged and choreographed. It doesn’t represent the reality of sex, where, when you change positions, you might get cramp or lie on your partner’s hair by mistake.
Porn isn’t about intimacy and love between couples. It’s a performance. And while children may understand that when they see James Bond or a Marvel superhero on screen, they can’t be like them, when they see porn on screen, they think that because they have the relevant body parts, they can!
Ironically enough, I’m not anti-porn. In a healthy, grown-up relationship or sex-life it has its place and women should have as much access to it as men. But porn is largely shot to appeal to men. It’s very visual, unromantic, unsensual and not always the kind of sex women want at all.
More recently, the #Metoo movement has helped many women to speak out about sexual wrongs. But from what I see daily in my practice, younger women are more disempowered than ever.
High-profile campaigns are all very well, but in reality what I hear from my young patients is that they feel unable to say no to changing their bodies to please men, or to performing certain sexual acts. Many feel they can’t say: ‘I don’t want that’, ‘I don’t like that’, or even ‘stop’.
But does love no longer come into it? It’s difficult to answer. For while we focus on the practicalities of sex — contraception and sexually transmitted disease, and knowledge of both is vital — we are forgetting to teach children about the emotional impact of a sexual relationship.
There is a huge discrepancy between appearances and reality. Young people today may appear extremely sophisticated sexually, but I find many are confused about their own bodies.
The selfie generation have become obsessed with what their body looks like — they see it as an object, as opposed to something wonderful which can run, jump, think, and yes, have sex. Inside, though, they are the same awkward and uncertain teenagers they have always been — hesitant, learning about themselves and their bodies and where they fit in the world. It’s a very different world to the one their parents inhabited, so for once, when a child says: ‘You don’t understand’ they might have a point.