Online Porn's Effects, and a New Way to Fight Them

    "When I asked one successful 29-year-old last week if she feels porn influences
    her life, in bed or out, her answer was typical. "A thousand percent," she said.
    This woman finds herself repeatedly in porn-informed situations that are 
    unpleasing, even unpleasant, while—crucially—her partner feels nothing's amiss."

Uggg... the problem in situations like this can equally be attributed to men that watch too much porn as women who don't watch enough. It's purely relative. A person who watches more porn and a greater variety of porn, is more likely to be better informed (and stimulated) by a greater variety of sexual situations. They've developed taste.

This really is no different than someone who has a broad range of tastes and interests in other pleasure seeking activities such as music, movies, fashion, design, etc. For example, someone who has listened to lots of music and lots of types of music or someone who pays a lot of attention to fashion and dressing, is going to have a broader range of tastes and be more selective and critical in those arenas. This selectivity and criticalness is going to extend to dating and their expectations of their partner.

    "When I asked one successful 29-year-old last week if he feels fashion
    influences his life, his answer was typical. "A thousand percent," he said.
    This guy finds himself repeatedly in fashion-informed situations that are 
    unpleasing, even unpleasant, while—crucially—his partner feels nothing's amiss."

That statement can be rewritten for a variety of situations where taste is involved. Heck, you can rewrite it for one situation in particular that tons of guys can relate to, situations that are romantic:

    "When I asked one successful 29-year-old last week if he feels romance
    influences his life, his answer was typical. "A thousand percent," he said.
    This guy finds himself repeatedly in romance-informed situations that are 
    unpleasing, even unpleasant, while—crucially—his partner feels nothing's amiss."

When to get flowers. When to buy dinner. When to open the door to be romantic, when not to so you aren't a chauvinist. Romance porn is all over the place... tv, movies, books, etc., yet we aren't having a serious discussion that we as society have a romance problem, are we? (I'm looking at you Disney).

On top of the issue of taste, comes the issue of awareness of what is good and what isn't. When you watch a lot of porn, you become more discriminating in what is considered good sex and bad sex, and you're likely to be more vocal about it when it's not up to your expectations, because the other person is simply ignorant about it.

In the arena of sex, the simplest example I can think of is what constitutes a good blowjob. There are only two ways to know what a good blowjob is. Either you've had the privilege of receiving one (pretty hard to do if you're a woman) or you've watched enough porn and related the things past partners have or haven't done with what they could be doing that you've observed in porn (if you're a guy) or reactions your partner has or hasn't had and what you were doing at the time compared to the reactions you've seen in porn and what the person giving the blowjob was doing (if you're a girl or a gay man). My experience is that there is a direct correlation between how good blowjob someone gives is and how much porn they watch. This isn't even meant to be a sexually discriminating point either. This can also be applied to cunnilingus as well. You either need someone else to show/tell you what you should or could be doing (direct instruction) or you need to observe a skill being practiced enough to extrapolate lessons from it (direct observation and mimicking) and try to apply those lessons through trial and error.

tl;dr = I bet you that 29 year old who "finds herself repeatedly in porn-informed situations that are unpleasing, even unpleasant, while—crucially—her partner feels nothing's amiss," is probably unpleasing or even unpleasant in bed, and crucially feels nothing is amiss.

PS as much as I like bikeshedding on topics like this, wtf is this doing on Hacker News?

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