Behind The Scenes at a VR Porn Shoot

Porn Makes Men Terrible in Bed

What turns women on? Well, they don’t show it on Red Tube.

I hate porn.

I don’t hate it because it’s immoral, or because it often explores “unusual” tastes, or because it has uncovered a bestial side of humans we pretended didn’t exist. I hate porn because fucking men who have watched a lot of porn is the worst. The absolute worst. For the sake of your future partners, go easy on the porn. Many young men will watch porn more often than they have sex with other humans. Their beliefs about sex will come from porn and not from interactions with real people.

And, the real humans who eventually have sex with suffer for it.

Most porn is about watching women pretend to enjoy sex acts that are unpleasant to them. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is. Men who watch this type of porn are basically being taught sexual practices that will not work in real life. Why does that matter? Well, if you’re an 18 year old virgin, the only moves you’re learning are moves that will leave your partners miserable.

More than that, however, is men become accustomed to watching women pretending to be turned on. Being good in bed, fundamentally, is about being able to read someone else, and men are learning false cues. Humans are very sophisticated at reading the emotional expressions of other humans. We can tell when someone fake smiles because there are certain involuntary muscles that can only be activated when someone is genuinely smiling. Similarly, we can tell when someone is sad, or in pain. Porn actresses are not usually genuinely turned on. In fact, they are often in pain. Porn actress Shelly Lubben (former porn actress) describes filming porn:

To add to the mind-numbing process, women are never able to experience sexual pleasure because of the continuous cutting during sex scenes. In the background the director constantly yells, “cut” and the flow of action is interrupted in order to get a better shot, adjust lighting or to wipe up bodily fluids. Repeatedly pornographers stop scenes and ask actors to “freeze” in position during very hardcore sex acts, which causes great physical and emotional pain for porn actresses. I speak from personal experience when I say to be in the middle of a hardcore sex act with several actors at the same time and told to “freeze” in position for several minutes while lighting or cameras are adjusted is extremely painful and degrading. It’s also very humiliating when scenes are stopped in order to wipe up bodily fluids such as semen, feces and blood.

Shelly Lubben describing the filming of porn

Men become conditioned to watching women in pain pretending to be enjoying sex. How good an actress is your average porn actress? Good enough to cover up all the subtle cues that she’s hurting? Good enough to be able to fake genuine sexual pleasure? I suspect not.

This means that your average young man is starting at worse than zero when it comes to sex with women. If he’s having sex with a girl, and she’s giving out cues that she’s in pain (through her facial expression, or the noises she makes) he’s going to think that’s how sex should be because that’s what he learned in porn. If she’s genuinely turned on, he will not know how to identify it, because he’s watched so many women pretending to be turned on that his ability to identify genuine pleasure has been scrambled. And, this is best case scenario porn. This is if he watched porn where the women were at least pretending to have a good time.

More sadistic porn will teach young men to derive pleasure from causing women pain — and I’m not talking about BDSM. I’m talking about “vanilla” porn where men fuck women in ways that hurt them. Jenna Jameson describes one of her more “epic” porn scenes with TT Boy in her autobiography:

He raced through the foreplay — a little kissing a little oral sex — then all hell broke loose. He slammed me so fast and hard that it took every ounce of control I had to stay focused and in the moment…. I could feel my thighs bruising against his. Then suddenly it all stopped. He pulled out and shot straight into my mouth. I wasn’t expecting him to pop so soon. ‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. He grabbed my hips and helped me just over his lap and started slamming me into his dick. I was in decent shape cardio-wise, but he moved with such force and speed that I was winded. It felt like my insides were going to fall out. And then, finally, he popped — again. ‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘No’, he grunted. And he put it right back inside. The guy was a machine. There was no lull. His focus never dimmed. His intensity never wavered. He’d throw me into position after position, and would come in each one. I was in shock. I’d never been fucked like this in my life. I couldn’t wait for him to finish. I was starting to get sore. Finally, after four pop shots, he said, ‘Hold on. I have to go eat something.’ ‘Are we done?’ I dared to ask. ‘Not by a long shot,’ he said. I didn’t think I could take anymore, but I kept my mouth shut. I was curious to see what he was up to now. He walked off, devoured three cans of tuna, and was back with a raging hard-on still pulsating in the air. Within minutes, he was pounding me over and over, in every position I’d ever imagine and some I hadn’t, until finally, with one last climactic pop, he was done. Time elapsed: 156 minutes. … I literally limped away from the set, licking my wounds…

Jenna Jameson, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

Obviously, TT Boy’s “pleasure” was the center of the scene. He came — what — like 5 times? And, she was supposed to just lie there and take the pain. This was normal, standard issue porn. This is the type of porn that young men will be consuming in vast quantities. THIS is the type of porn that people will grow up modeling in their private lives.

Why would a woman ever want that done to her? Even Jenna Jameson, who romanticizes a lot of the porn she was in, admits “I couldn’t wait for him to finish. I was starting to get sore.”

I almost hesitate in posting that quote, because I’m sure a bunch of people are going to read it and be like “that sounds hot.” Sure — Jameson is a porn star, and she wanted to present herself as sexy in her autobiography so she’ll write things in a way she know turns people on. But, in a way, that sort of proves my point. A woman in a lot of pain reads as sexy to a large group of people. And, Ok, some women like painful sex and they can go have painful sex. But, I’m pretty sure most women don’t like having painful sex. Or, maybe they romanticize the idea of it, but when their vaginas are actually being run raw, they realize they’re miserable.

We idealize women in pain as the epitome of “hard core” sex then wonder why nearly half of all women suffer from female sexual dysfunction. We create porn that caters to male pleasure while eroticizing female suffering, then philosophize on the low female libido. Men learned to get turned on by female suffering, and women expect to get turned on by their own suffering. But, suffering sucks, and a lot of women eventually decide they’d rather not have sex than suffer whenever they do.

Then, when their relationships suffer from sexual anorexia, the advice women are offered for their low libidos is usually advice about how to please men. Joan Sewell, in her book “I’d Rater Eat Chocolate,” describes a book by relationship expert Myreah Moore called Date Like a Man:

In it there’s a section with the bold title “How to Have Sex Like a Man.” But very curiously, the majority of the chapter deals with what men want sexually, not women. Here are some of the headings:

Men Like Blow Jobs

Get to Know Mr. Happy

Kiss It, Lick It, Squeeze It, Tease It

Deep Throating

Men Like Women Who Swallow

Men Like Pornography

Men Like Lingerie

Men Like to Talk Dirty

Men Like Women Who Bring on the Noise

Men Like Women Who Are Flexible

Men Like Lesbians

I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido by Joan Sewell

When I think about wanting to have sex like a man, I think about wanting to enjoy sex with reckless abandon the way men enjoy sex. Devoting all my energy to pleasing a male partner at the cost of my own pleasure isn’t having sex like a man. It’s having sex men like.

We think of all these cures for low female libido — testosterone patches, sexy lingerie, getting husbands to help with the cleaning (?) — but not one of these cures is ever about doing more of things that turn women on. Not one of them is exploring the type of erotica that women like. No one ever looks to the root of female desire, and why so many of us are cut off from it. As Vera Mass says in Facing The Complexities of Women’s Sexual Desire:

[B]ooks that, while asserting the importance of sex for women and promising to provide guidance for women in raring for their sexual selves … have devoted only about 6% of their volume to the discussion of the topic of sexual desire.

Facing the Complexities of Women’s Sexual Desire by Vera S Maass

All the sex advice out there generally tends to cycle back to the same thing: how can women get more comfortable with doing what men like? Even women reporting on their own pleasure has become suspect, because somewhere along the way, women figured out that men like it if they pretend to be turned on. So, now you have all these women claiming to love sex, and love getting fucked over 5 ways from Sunday, but three years into their marriage they’re like “don’t touch me.”

Men are all confused, like “omg, she pretended to be into sex, then once I married her ass she went celibate! She led me on!” but any attentive man wouldn’t be confused by this at all. If a woman is constantly easy to please, if she requires no work, if she always wants to do what you want to do, if she never makes requests or opens up about fantasies of her own she is faking it. Apparently, 80% of women fake orgasms half the time during sex. Half the time. 80%! And of course, men can’t tell, because most of the sex they’ve been exposed to has involved the insincere moans of porn stars.

Researchers found that women are often quietest when they are actually receiving pleasure, like during oral sex or foreplay. They make the most erotic noises when sex starts feeling uncomfortable or when they get bored. They also get noisy when they sense their partner is ready to climax — to boost their partner’s self esteem, many reported.

CBS News

I never fake my orgasms, and having sex with men who are conditioned on porn and fake orgasms sucks. I’m like, the perpetual bearer of bad news. No, I’m not ready to come yet. Sorry, I need more attention. More time. More foreplay.

I’m sorry, everything you learned about sex is wrong.

Porn culture has warped female pleasure to be just another thing women do for the benefit of men. This is why I’ve grown weary of sex-positive feminism. Sex may be fun, and pleasure may be good for you, but in my experience, very few women are actually adventurous enough to go out in selfish pursuit of their own pleasure. Many women like to appear sexually forward because this is a way to attract men, but the best strategy for attracting men is to pretend everything that turns them on also turns you on. Sex positive feminism, while good in theory, often becomes another way to justify catering to male pleasure.

Most women, I think, get stuck in a rut around male pleasure because it feels safer to cater to someone else’s pleasure than it does to open up about your own. If you are not actually receiving pleasure in sex, you are the one in power; your partner will always crave you more than you crave him. This gives you some degree of control. And, universally, while women may not be the ones enjoying sex, they sure seem to be the ones controlling it. Keeping tight control over sex was probably how women negotiated for the things they needed when they relied on male partners for their survival. But, such sexual control came at a cost; the cost of our pleasure.

Anyway, we now just act like that’s the normal state of things; women have lower sex drive than men cuz testosterone! But, frankly, I’m surprised women have sex drives as high as we do given how little of our culture is devoted to appealing to feminine desire. We’re fed lines like “looks don’t matter to women” to which I would respond HA HA HA HA HA. Yeah, looks don’t matter if women aren’t expecting to get any sexual pleasure out of the relationship. Which many aren’t. If you want to attract women for something other than your wallet, however, put some effort into your physical appearance. The average straight guy sets the bar so low on this one, frankly, you probably don’t need to do too much to be pretty good looking. And, even if you don’t end up looking good, looking like you care is probably good enough. It signals that you value a woman’s physical attraction to you.

So, what do we do about this? I have no fucking idea. Seriously, this situation is so messed up the best thing I could think to do was not have sex with men for 5 years. But, I guess for a start, realize that when it comes to what women like from sex, we are perpetuating far more lies than truths. Try to re-learn what women like, or what you like, from real women or in person experiences. Ignore the media, ignore porn. Ignore anyone trying to sell you something. Spend more time observing real life.