I get a surprising amount of questions about porn. Whether or not to watch it, whether I think it’s made society better or worse, practicing “no fap” to boost motivation, and various other things. Porn is a very big topic, so today I’m just going to lay out an overview, both as an editorial and as advice.
I’m Not A Fan
I’ll be right up front in stating my own bias. I’m not a big fan of porn and never have been. It’s not something I find enjoyable at all. The vast majority of porn I do see really turns me off, and I don’t even mean the weird, hardcore stuff. Even normal, everyday porn is pretty shitty in my opinion. I have several reasons.
In porn there’s a huge over-focus on oral sex. Hey, I love oral sex in real life, both giving and receiving. But Jesus, watching a man and woman give each other oral sex doesn’t turn me on in the least. It’s boring at best, gross at worst. Giving and receiving oral sex in real life with a woman is fantastic, but watching it on a computer screen is just…dumb.
When not engaging in oral sex, the two people are usually in oddball sexual positions that are optimized for the camera and not an actual representation of real life. Seriously, positions like reverse cowgirl really don’t turn me on and I have no interest in doing these positions myself, beyond an every-once-and-a-while thing for just a few minutes.
Lastly, the women in porn do not behave at all like normal women having sex in real life, and I would know, since I’ve had sex with a large number of women. If you’ve had sex with less than five or ten women in your life but watch a lot of porn, I’m here to tell you officially that women do NOT act like that during sex in real life. They just don’t. To me, women in porn end up looking stupid and fake. Stupid and fake is not a turn-on. At least not for me.
So yeah, I don’t like porn. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just stating an opinion here, and I realize I’m a very bizarre exception to the rule. The vast majority of men, and a surprisingly large number of women love porn and really enjoy it. I have found that, unsurprisingly, monogamy-guys absolutely worship porn and it’s often a very big part of their lives. At the same time I know plenty of Alpha Males (both 1.0 and 2.0) who also enjoy porn, so I’m not saying that enjoying porn is a beta male trait. It clearly isn’t. It’s more of a guy trait.
I’m also not saying I never watch porn. Hey, I’m a man. Of course I watch it sometimes. But honestly, it’s quite rare. Many weeks will go by between me actually bothering to watch any. Normally I’d say it’s because I get laid so much and have constant sexual variety of high quality in my real life, but it’s probably more complicated than that. This is because I know many Alphas who also get laid often with multiple women and yet still watch porn regularly and really enjoy it. I admit porn is sometimes better than nothing, but it doesn’t satisfy me at all.
So maybe it’s because I’m spoiled with my real-life awesome sex life. Or maybe it’s because my sex drive is insanely high and I love real-life sex so much that it’s hard for me to enjoy simulated sex on a screen. Or maybe I’m just weird. Who knows? Porn just isn’t for me.
Porn and Women
One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed in the last decade or so is the amount of women who like porn. The old adage is that men like porn and women like trashy romance novels. The success of 50 Shades of Grey obviously shows women still like trashy romance novels (if you want to call 50 Shades “romance”; it’s more a mixture of porn and Disney), but women are at the point where they enjoy porn as much as men do. Frankly, most of the last few times I’ve watched porn was when I was with a woman and SHE wanted to watch porn while we had sex.
It’s surprising. Men are clearly more sexually visual than women, yet a shocking number of women these days are really getting into porn, which is a mostly visual medium. I predict as time goes on, more and more women will be getting into porn. It’s clearly a growing trend.
Porn and Society
When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was very difficult to get your hands on porn. There was no internet. Computers weren’t yet advanced enough to play video. There was cable TV, but it was very new and not much was on it. Dirty magazines were illegal to sell to kids under 18, as was porn at the local video store. The only way a young guy could get porn was from his dad or older friends.
Funny story. Back then my next-door neighbor was big on Playboy magazine, and my two little brothers used to wait by his trash can until he came out to throw away his old issues. As soon as he went back in his house, they would leap into his trash and fish out Playboy and Penthouse magazines, often covered in food and other garbage.
Hey, this is what you had to go through to get porn back then. You young guys these days don’t know how good you’ve got it. Even if you were an adult back then, porn was reasonably expensive and complicated to acquire and watch. You had to buy a VCR player and buy or rent big, bulky VCR porn tapes which were not cheap at all.
Moreover, women back then did NOT watch porn and were hugely offended by it. If you were married or had a girlfriend, you had to devise all kinds of super-secret, James Bond-like methods to keep her from finding your porn stash. If she found it, ooohhhhh shit, you were served up the biggest bowl of drama you’d ever see. It sounds so funny to talk about this stuff today, but for many years this is how things were.
Today, anyone, of any age, at any time, is two clicks away from all the free porn they could ever want. You don’t even need to hide it from your wife/GF, because not only does she know how prevalent and “normal” it is, but she probably likes it herself! This is all such a massive change in such a short period of time.
Has this prevalence of porn made things better or worse? This is a difficult question for me to answer, again because I’m very biased. The prevalence of porn has taken a huge swath of men out of the dating pool. I’ve talked before about how one-third of Japanese men don’t even like sex and don’t want any. This is largely because of computer-based porn in the form of videos and video games. This same dynamic has happened in the Western world (though not as starkly).
I actually like this. The less men on OKCupid or meeting women at malls, the more women are available for me and those other Alpha Males who enjoy sex and have the courage to go get it. Every man who decides to stay at home in his basement and jerk off to porn instead of pursuing real-life sex raise my odds of success with women a little bit. Multiply this by millions of men, both in my area and all over the world, and that’s pretty awesome…at least for me and those few men like me. So yeah, listen up all you betas! Stay away from real-life women and keep watching that porn!
Is this good for society? Probably not. If you’re asking if porn has made society better, worse, or the same, my answer is “worse,” despite the fact that the porn dynamic probably assists me personally. Not that I care of course, since I stopped worrying about society a long time ago.
Porn and You
If you’re an Alpha or aspiring Alpha, is porn good or bad for you?
There are some manosphere guys who have strong opinions on this issue. I do not. I think porn is like most other things, in that a little every once in a while is probably fine, but if you’re watching it all the time, it’s probably harming you. A guy constantly jerking off to porn like Don Jon is likely going to be less motivated to get out into the real world and have sex with real women. He may also have a harder time getting it up, keeping it up, and getting to orgasm at the correct time during real-life sex, because he’s been programming his subconscious with all that porn bullshit. And never forget, porn really is bullshit. It’s not a representation of sex in real life in any way (at least the vast majority of it). That’s why I don’t like it.
My opinion, and this is just an opinion, is that if you watch porn every day, that’s too much. You need to get out there and get laid, my friend. If you’re already in a monogamous relationship, then clearly you’re not getting laid enough and need to either end your relationship or convert to an open one.
As long as you take all the correct precautions, real-life sex is very healthy for you in ways masturbating is not. Real sex with a flesh-and-blood woman you don’t have to give money to benefits you physically, emotionally, mentally, with your self-esteem, and sometimes (though rarely) even spiritually. Not having regular sex because you find it easier to spank it to Pornhub is bad for you in all kinds of ways. Don’t do it.
I’d personally rather have real-life sex with a barely-cute woman than watch the best porn movie ever made. I think the closer you can get to that kind of attitude, the more mentally healthy you’ll be overall.
