When you’re between the ages of eight and eighteen, one of the worst things in your own mind is to be considered “weird” or “different.” We all want to fit in and feel “normal.” When puberty kicks in, many of us think something is very wrong with us, especially if we don’t have the guidance of a parent or other adult to help us understand that the sexual urges, feelings, and fantasies we are having are natural and normal.
With its explicit views of sex and its “no holds barred” approach to expressing sexual desires and activities, pornography gives kids a playground in which they can privately explore sex and create sexual experiences for themselves. According to erotic art photographer and writer David Steinberg, “Pornography is still the medium that most vociferously advocates free and diverse sexual expressiveness, a radical stance in a culture which is still essentially puritanical and sex-negative.”
Porn gives the message that it is okay to have sexual feelings and for our bodies to do sexual things, such as become aroused and enjoy orgasm. Porn not only validates our budding sexuality, it encourages us to pursue the pleasure that comes with it. It tells us feeling sexual is normal and good.
Porn can be especially liberating for anyone who grew up feeling sexually ashamed or repressed. Rory, who at sixty years old was one of our oldest interviewees, said this was part of the big draw of pornography for him. “Growing up, I was filled with sexual shame and self-loathing because of my sexuality. I had a tremendous visual hunger to look at naked women. I wanted to stare at them and feel the way my body could light up. Playboy showed me this was fine to do—something that sophisticated, cultured men value. It made me feel less of a cockroach because I had genitals. I could stare at centerfolds all I wanted without offending any one. I like to joke that I was twenty before I realized women didn’t have staples in their navels!”
The homosexual men we spoke with said gay porn had a similar effect of helping them feel comfortable with their sexual feelings and desires. Unlike straight boys and teens, gays have extremely few opportunities to learn about homosexual relationships, so porn fills a huge gap for them. Alan, a thirty-eight-year-old chef, told us he felt alone and deviant about his emerging sexual feelings until he saw his first gay porn video. “Pornography gave me my first depictions of male-to-male sex. Being raised in a conservative community, I had no other way of finding out who I was sexually and how I could be with a partner.”
Regardless of sexual orientation, pornography can help validate a young person’s budding sexual thoughts and sensations, and natural desires to pleasure themselves sexually. Masturbation is a common form of sexual expression during childhood. It usually increases, with a focus on achieving orgasm, during adolescence. Porn approves of and even encourages masturbation. The actors in porn fondle themselves frequently, and the people around them don’t condemn them for it. Ed, a forty — seven-year-old former porn user, explained, “Pornography served a very important purpose for me that helped break the bonds of my sexual repression—it justified my self-pleasuring and sexual release.”
While we may be attracted to porn when we are young because of its pro-masturbation stance, it doesn’t take long to discover that it offers more than a message. Porn not only encourages masturbation, it provides a focus for it and facilitates it. Porn provides an abundance of readymade sexual fantasies as well as images of people we might find sexually attractive.
Martha, an artist in her late forties, enjoyed Playgirl when she was in her teens. “I have always been a very visual person. I remember seeing my first Playgirl magazine when I was in high school in the mid-1970s. It featured naked men in lots of poses. One guy, who I can still remember today, just struck me as beautiful, exceptionally erotic. He was laying back in a casual pose as innocent as could be. His hair was dark, his eyes were smiling, and his skin was golden and smooth. But best of all he had this large erection that just lay against his hip. I used to fantasize about him a lot.”
Helping us feel that we are not alone when we are being sexual is one of porn’s most compelling attributes. It may also be one of the strongest reasons it is popular among boys, especially given that most boys grow up in a culture where they are often pressured to assert their masculinity and “prove” they are not gay. For heterosexual boys, porn offers a way to “heterosexualize” masturbation. Rather than focus on the fact they are stimulating male genitals (their own), they can focus on the reassuring presence of a female. Pornography allows the experience of masturbation to shift from “self-loving” to “doing to” someone else. It doesn’t matter that the someone else is only an image on a piece of paper or a screen.
George, a fifty-six-year-old grandfather, says that his youthful interest in porn had its roots in searching out sexually explicit materials to help him masturbate. “Like many a young lad in my teens, I started out masturbating using sexual pictures. It was the 1960s. I used the only thing that was available: images of bare-breasted women in National Geographic and the pictures of scantily clad women in the underwear sections of the Sears and Roebuck catalogs. I progressed to pornographic magazines when I was old enough to buy them. Masturbating to pornography was entertaining and offered me a pleasurable escape.”
Though twenty-two-year-old Max grew up in an era inundated with graphic images of sex, like George, he also turned to porn as a teen when he masturbated. He shares, “I don’t like how the women are treated in porn, so I wouldn’t watch it just to watch it. I’d only look at porn when I needed to get off sexually. It was right there on the Internet when I wanted it. It gave easy and instant gratification. But, once I climaxed, I was done.”
Max also says that having porn as his sexual outlet in his teens made sense because he didn’t feel ready to be in a sexual relationship back then. “Looking at porn and masturbating helped me to keep my sexual drive in check. If I hadn’t used pornography, I would have felt more compelled to have sex with a girl. That would have taken a lot of courage that I didn’t have. It didn’t feel appropriate for me when I was that young. I wasn’t ready to invest the time, energy, and emotional commitment it would have taken to have a meaningful sexual relationship.”