Why I asked Anne Robinson to watch porn with me
Fetish; she's tied up, gangbang; there's lots of them, blowjob, HD, Redhead - maybe I should
look at that?
You’re probably wondering why you’ve just watched Anne Robinson watching porn. Let me explain.
Online, porn is everywhere. There are at least 68 million searches for explicit content every single day.
Almost half of the Internet’s users have watched porn. I’m 20 and grew up online.
In the past, teenage boys might have explored with a bit of this or this. But now, hard-core
porn is instantly available. Young people are supposed to learn about sex here, but
now they’re learning about it here. And this means my friends and I are dealing with
sexual expectations that have often seem to have stemmed from porn. Like being choked…
During sex… Having not consented. When did that become normal?
So, there's an issue with separating real sex from online sex. But have unrealistic expectations
always been a problem, or is this unique to the internet age? I asked a journalist who
has never watched any porn to have a look at what’s out there.
What do you think of people who do watch porn?
Well I don't have a judgment on them. If they're not harming anyone... I like a world where
there's as few things banned as possible. So I'm typing
in porn, what do I do next? Ok I'll just choose the first one, yeah? Ok,
there's a woman with absolutely ginormous breasts: now this is coming up…
Good heavens...
Hard Double Anal 3.... Good lord! What puzzles me, I suppose, is how people find that erotic
because it seems so crude and so far away from any fantasy about a loving sexual relationship.
Anal is a popular category for porn users. And it’s now on the rise in real life too.
These days, 40% of women in my age group have tried it. That’s fine, if it’s a personal
choice. But men assuming that if I consent to sex, I’m automatically including anal
sex is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Obviously, anyone who gets involved in a porn movie has no pubic hair.
Pubes are becoming a thing of the past for my generation. A study by Indiana University
found that two-thirds of women my age had totally or partially removed their pubic hair
in the past month. Again, if this is our choice, it’s cool, but when partners are saying
things like this: ‘it’s dirty’, ‘I won’t sleep with you unless you wax’ and
‘women aren’t supposed to have hair down there,’, it suggests that the lack of public
hair in porn is having a very negative impact on the way men react to women’s bodies.
Do they seem like they're enjoying it?
Well, I don't think that Martin Scorsese is going to sign them up any time soon. In fact,
the one who's rubbing the clitoris could really be pounding
some pastry. The most revealing
part of this is how fake it seems and it's difficult for me to imagine it would excite anyone, actually.
The problem with porn is that women are almost always being reduced to passive roles. The
female actors seem to orgasm within seconds, regardless of what is actually happening to
them. Although much of what Anne came across was “tacky, corny. Predictable” some of
it was more sinister.
There's one called Eighteen - I think it says - Eighteen, and then it says "abused". Although
one I've seen there looks as if they could possibly be quite young, so I really don't
want to watch that anymore. I mean, I just absolutely don't want to watch that. I'm very
shocked that somebody who looks very young there and well underage, is on a site that
is accessible by simply putting 'porn' and still being on the first page.
A recent content analysis of the 50 best-selling adult videos revealed that across all scenes,
88% showed physical aggression - and 72% of those acts were perpetrated by men. Porn is
increasingly linking sex with violence, and a generation of boys are being exposed to
a warped sense of what is normal sexual behaviour - and what a woman might want. By 14, 2/3
of young people have watched pornography. Psychologists agree that the porn a young
boy seeks will likely become more hardcore and violent over time - they get bored quickly:
that’s part of the ‘risk-taking’ nature of adolescent brains. What they watch informs
what they do and adolescence is a crucial period for the formation of sexual identity.
So what’s the solution? We can’t ban these films. I’m not even saying we should. But
when 83% of young people say they aren’t getting good sex education at school, we cannot
have porn taking its place.