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How teenage access to pornography is killing intimacy in sex

Posted in: UK Sex News | Jan 19, 2010 - 2:20:12 PM

Teenagers have such easy access to hardcore porn that a skewed view of sex is becoming the norm in society and the idea of intimacy is dying.

The stuff I saw as a kid was what we called hardcore, but the idea in the text alongside was that it was based on mutual consent - mutual pleasure - but what I see now is more male domination.

One day I found myself ringing on the doorbell in a suburban street in Essex to talk to a self-confessed pornography addict. Jim, a quiet man in his early forties, was embarrassed by what we discussed over the following couple of hours but also eager to tell a story that he feels is probably less unusual than one might think.

"I know I'm not the only guy who's like this," he kept saying. Nor is he: there is a great leviathan of obscenity on the internet that anyone can access at any time with a couple of clicks of a mouse.

Jim first became aware of pornography long before the internet era. "My dad was really into pornography. I was five when I found a copy of his Mayfair. I found it quite captivating, to be honest."

When he was about seven, Jim discovered hardcore European pornography in his father's wardrobe, and he can remember some of those first images he saw. "I found them quite disturbing. I couldn't talk to anyone about it, of course, because the whole point is that it's hidden. You know that you're not supposed to know about it."

From then on he would get up before his parents woke, before six in the morning, to look through his father's briefcase and find the porn magazines. "Then my dad got a Super 8 projector, when I was about 11 or 12, and he would hire porn films. He would lock himself in the dining room to watch them. But the real change came when he got a video, and I persevered till I found the films. I was about 14 and I would find them and watch them when I was alone in the house. Constantly."

At this age, Jim did not have any relationships to set against this obsession. He was going to a boys' school and never met girls socially. "I was obsessed with pornography, I wanted to be pornography, I wanted to live pornography," he said. "It wasn't good for me, I can see that now. I knew that even then, I think, but it was an addiction from the start. It had such a powerful hold on me. It had a huge effect on my behaviour with women.

"I was unable to think of women except as potential pornography. I looked at them in a purely sexual way. I remember one day I was walking to school, I was about 15, and I got talking to a girl who must have been about 18. I immediately said I wanted to grope her breasts. I had no idea how to interact with women as people."

Even though Jim began to have girlfriends from the age of 19, he never managed to shrug off the power of the fantasy world. "The power of pornography has continued throughout my adult life. Nothing has really measured up to the world of porn, for me. I've seen thousands of strangers having sex. So when I have sex, I am watching myself having sex."

In his thirties, he started a relationship with Ali, a direct-talking, well-read woman. He told her about his interest in porn and they used to watch videos together. At first she could see the "high" but when she became uncomfortable, he agreed to try to abstain. Once the internet was part of their lives, he could no longer control himself and began to use pornography again. The relationship broke down after seven years. "Pornography has made him only able to see sex one way," Ali said. "He has always seen sex as something that has to be performed, not felt."

She would like to see a public debate about the effects of pornography. "Porn has been so normalised that anyone objecting to it now is just going to be laughed at. I think we need to hear again about how pornography threatens intimacy."

For Jim, pornography "has destroyed my ability to have intimate relationships". One might think that someone who has seen as much as he has would not be unsettled by anything, but he is shocked by the way that the growing acceptability of pornography is putting into the mainstream a dehumanising view of women.

He finds the internet - with its images of rape, incest and abuse - "quite disturbing". He said: "The stuff I saw as a kid was what we called hardcore, but the idea in the text alongside was that it was based on mutual consent - mutual pleasure - but what I see now is more male domination."

Read complete article - courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

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