OK. So… I’ll just come out with it… I’ve been watching bucket loads of porn lately. I was approached by a production company to make a documentary about pornography, and, as I knew virtually nothing about it, I jumped straight in.
I’d seen a porno once when I was 15, but was so traumatised by what could be done with a cucumber, that I haven’t seen one since (nor have I eaten a salad in 12 years). No lie. I felt ready I could handle the documentary, as I didn’t think it could get any more extreme than that. Big mistake. Huge.
Stumbling through the minefield that is the endless websites of ‘erotica’, I was terrified by what I saw. It is essentially a cemetery of women’s rights… Thousands of videos of acts being performed ‘on’ or ‘at’ girls. Not ‘with’ them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to cast judgment on women who wish to have these things done to them. Each to their own. But I am concerned by the brutality, and it is brutality at times, that is shown on these videos, and is so freely available and labelled as if it is commonplace. That, to me, is dangerous. Is this a healthy and equal approach to sex?
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I worry about the new generation of men whose first real introduction to sex is what they see on their laptop… Rather than what they see in a bed with a girl they have any sort of mild affection towards. They think we like having all of those things done to us, because the ‘actresses’ pretend they do. They think it’s acceptable to treat our bodies as a dumping ground with a sole purpose to arouse them. They think we are supposed to look, sound and move like that. Putting on a show rather than being in the moment. What’s scarier is that I worry young women are starting to think the same.
Friends of mine are on a monthly basis coming back to me with horror stories of what they allowed someone to do to them because they thought it would make the man like them, because he’d broached the topic as if it was a given that a woman should do and enjoy it.
This is damaging nonsense. It is YOUR body. It’s what YOU like. What YOU want. Sex is a two-way street with speed bumps set by YOU. A real man knows the difference between fantasy and reality. If he can’t understand or respect that, quite frankly, he can bugger off back to his laptop.
