No matter what the product or activity, we all have our own personal preferences at any given time. Yankees or Red Sox? Plasma TV or LCD? Hybrid or Hummer? Ice cream or apple? The same goes for graphic sexual imagery. Some of us see it and automatically love it, while others of us find it weird, too intense, or just plain disgusting. It’s not unusual, however, for our knee-jerk reactions to porn to change over time, but those first gut feelings about porn are the ones we often return to over and over again.
Some people tell us that their negative reactions to porn feel visceral, much like a reaction you might have to being faced with the prospect of eating something you don’t like. Others object from a more philosophical, spiritual, values, or political level.
Like many teenagers, Jack found his first Penthouse magazine sexy and exciting. But he also had a number of negative personal reactions to it that muffled porn’s ability to completely “wow” him. Besides finding them attractive, Jack experienced the women in the pictures as strange, otherworldly, unhappy, and intimidating. The porn triggered some anxiety as he wondered what it meant that his father had one hidden in his fishing tackle closet. Even as a ten-year-old, Jack seemed to have already formed some pretty clear values regarding what is acceptable behavior for a man when it comes to sex.
Other people we talked to were turned off by the fact that porn seemed one-dimensional and boring. No matter how diverse, the plots and stories are usually shallow, and it is clear that the actors and actresses are picked primarily for one thing they do well on screen—and it’s not their ability to further a storyline. Sam, a twenty-year-old lifeguard, shared, “I was really turned on to porn at first. But after a few months I lost interest. The women in porn are unreal. They don’t look like regular people I come in contact with in my everyday life. I stopped being able to fantasize about them because they are so fake-looking. Why get used to thinking about someone sexually I would never meet in real life?”
Similarly, Bonnie, a twenty-one-year-old coed, found the people in porn off-putting. “I thought it would be really exciting, but porn is really boring. A guy in porn looks like he loves his body more than I ever could. Porn shows things I’d never want to do, like have sex with a stranger or with another couple. The infidelity and mental nonpresence in porn is a big turn-off to me.”
For Jerry, a rehab counselor in his mid-twenties, it wasn’t so much the look of the porn stars or promiscuity that bothered him, it was that he didn’t like the way women are portrayed and treated in porn. “I used to watch porn in high school with a group of guys, but it always felt awkward to me. I didn’t really enjoy it. One friend and I would sometimes talk about how a girl displaying herself in the porn was somebody’s sister or daughter. It didn’t feel right.”
Chad, a single twenty-four-year-old, dislikes porn because of how it affects his emotions as well as the emotional energy of other males when they watch it. “I find porn arousing, but I don’t like the predatory energy it brings up in me and other men. Last month I was with a bunch of guys from my basketball team and we were drinking and eating roast beef sandwiches at this one guy’s apartment after a game. The guy started playing a porn DVD. A group of the players began hooting and hollering out derogatory comments at the women on the screen. ‘Do it baby,’ ‘Hey big tits’—that sort of thing. They were scoring the women’s bodies by attractiveness and shouting out orders for what they wanted the girls to do next. I didn’t like the energy. I felt like I was witnessing a gang rape. I moved to the back of the room and left that scene as soon as I could.” Chad’s negative feelings were so strong they overrode what must have been tremendous peer pressure to stay.
There are people who stay away from porn because they are low risk takers, fear getting caught, and do not want to suffer the embarrassment or shame of being found out by someone else. Others avoid porn because they feel it has a contaminating influence, much like encountering a harmful chemical in the environment.
Our personal feelings about porn often differ vastly according to gender. More women than men have a personal dislike of porn. Porn is a product geared to portray male sexual fantasies, help men masturbate, and serve as a sexual outlet for men. It often ignores the sexual needs and interests of females. For instance, women’s sexual fantasies often involve sensuality and relationships that are based on caring, affection, and commitment. Porn focuses on body parts, acts, and anonymous sex. Regardless of the physiological arousal porn is likely to stimulate in a woman, she may come to dislike porn because it is demeaning and degrading to women. In a 1975 Playboy interview, writer Erica Jong said this regarding her reaction to porn films: “After the first ten minutes I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes I never want to screw again as long as I live.”