So…can we talk about the porn?

2,439 points•217 comments•submitted by [deleted] to r/MensLib

There doesn’t seem to be any way of approaching this topic without everyone freaking out and backing into a corner. But if there’s anywhere to have this discussion, I think r/MensLib is probably about as good as I’m gonna get; so here goes….

I’m really conflicted about porn. I’ve looked at it since I was in my teens, when smutty magazines where a thing and the internet barely was (Yeah. I’m old.)

For the longest time I didn’t really examine my relationship with porn. My tastes were (and are) pretty vanilla. I’ve never felt like porn interfered with my sex life. I’ve never had ED, compared my partner to what I’ve seen in porn, or demanded that we perform what I saw there.

But for the past year or two, I’ve looked at Pornhub et al; and it all just seems weird and alien. It’s gotten to the point where what’s on screen doesn’t even remotely resemble actual sex anymore. I had to delve into odd little corners of alt porn to find anything that felt even remotely familiar. Whenever I looked at mainstream porn, it felt like some kind of David Lynch-esque body horror. All I could think of was the women getting hurt making this shit, and how wrong the whole industry was.

So I quit watching. I can’t say much changed in my life, FWIW.

I see the anti-porn brigade freaking out about “The New Drug”; but they’re easy to write off as a bunch of pearl-clutching evangelicals and anti-sex radfem academics.

But I hear about young women getting hurt by their partners, young men with Porn-induced ED, and hear the way the young dudes I work with talk about porn, and I genuinely worry. Is porn just another wall we’ve built between us and our evolution?

For real – I don’t have an answer, but I’d love to hear what you lads have to say.

EDIT: As I look through the comments, I see a lot of dudes saying “it’s a bit of a problem, but not a big deal”, but a lot of women saying “it IS a big deal”.

Maybe we should reflect on that.