The Impact of Porn Industry on Conceptions About Intimacy

I can 99% be sure that most of us have at least opened mainstream pornography websites like PornHub for pleasure, curiosity, fun or perhaps just by accident. It probably happened in our teenage years, at least it did for me. At that point, I was just beginning to form an idea of what sexuality is and what it looks like specifically for me. I was learning what intimacy and attraction is and how it feels. I knew about sex and the act itself was not as surprising to me (maybe that is the human instinct or whatever) but PornHub was THE platform that introduced me to basically everything else. I had zero understanding how that affected my psyche and honestly neither do I understand it right now. Luckily, I had a lot of outside influence a bit later too, so I’d like to believe that my understanding of intimacy is quite healthy now. However, the portrayal of intimacy in the porn industry a lot of the time is not very accurate which leads to widespread misconceptions that can affect personal relationships and sexual expectations. In this blog, I’ll explore some common misconceptions and their effects. 

Intimacy = Sex

Pornography often emphasizes sexual acts over emotional connection, leading to believe that sex is on the top of intimacy’s pyramid. And yes, maybe for some people it is, but not for everyone. We are led to think that our relationship will reach the peak when we start having sex with the partner. Although the peak of intimacy might look completely different for each of us. Maybe it’s pooping in front of one another? 

When you open mainstream pornography websites, most of the videos are the sexual act itself. Again, it might be that way for some people. In reality, to get into a sexy mood, foreplay often lays the foregrounds for it. Be it cuddling or deep conversations, shared experience or literally anything else. Unfortunately, we don’t see foreplay in the porn videos. Most of it is just getting to the point. 

Additionally, asexual people exist. HRC defines asexuality as a complete or partial lack of sexual attraction or lack of interest in sexual activity with another person. That for a fact does not mean that asexual people do not experience intimacy, but our 2024 society, which is heavily affected by porn industry, is obsessed with sex, puts it on the top of everything and makes us believe that intimacy looks the same to everyone. This also can lead to a lot of confusion and lack of self-acceptance for asexual people.

Gender Stereotypes

The other thing that mainstream pornography loves to do is to objectify women, reducing them to mere objects for male pleasure. It does not portray them as individuals with their own desires and agency. Peter and Valkenburg (2007) conducted a study involving 745 Dutch adolescents that explored how exposure to sexually explicit material influenced perceptions of women as sex objects. Their findings indicated that greater exposure to such material heightened the likelihood of adolescents – regardless of gender – viewing women in objectifying terms. Therefore, it does not only affect men’s misconceptions about women but also on self-image of women themselves. The constant objectification may distort women’s image about their bodies and self-worth leading them to feel valued solely for their physical appearance and seeking male validation. 

Sexual Violence

Porn can also shape perceptions of acceptable sexual behaviours. I can honestly say that I’ve seen a couple or more videos on PornHub or other mainstream websites and never did they have a conversation about consent. There is no conversation whatsoever. They also never even involve a slide before the video saying “the actors were consensual”. I came upon porn when I was around 11-12 and learned about consent only when I was maybe 16. Which still probably is quite early since some people don’t learn that consent is a thing at all. This normalizes practices that do not include mutual consent or genuine intimacy. Well, of course porn is not the only, and most likely not the main thing which leads to sexual harassment, but it for sure is a part of it. 

When it comes directly to violent sexually explicit material, research suggests that normally it does not lead to not-consensual violent sexual practices. Nevertheless, if the consumer of porn already has a more aggressive background, he is more likely to be “inspired” by the scenarios portrayed in porn. A study by Alexy et al. done in 2009 found that high-risk individuals who consumed porn were more likely “to engage in coerced vaginal penetration and forced sexual acts such as oral or digital penetration, to express sexually aggressive remarks (obscenities), and to engage in sex with animals” than those who did not.

It’s Not All Bad

After all this scum I dropped on mainstream porn, I want to end on a more positive note. Not all of us have sex-ed in schools (basically none of us) and not all of us get it from our parents, so yeah we end up on porn websites and learn what is sex, how it looks. We learn some good stuff, we learn some bad stuff. Porn lets us explore what we like and find attractive, it might teach us what pleasures us and use it in our sexual activities (while its consensual, of course).

Even though when we were young we probably would never pay for porn. It’s about time to start doing that. There are quite a lot of websites providing us with ethical porn and I highly recommend changing from PornHub to those. One of the websites I’d suggest is AORTA. Led by Creative Director Mahx Capacity, AORTA films focuses on producing content “on the basis of explicit, ongoing, enthusiastic consent” (I won’t dive deep into their policies, you can look it up yourself here). Their content is also wide range, through different lenses and with different bodies, often made and produced by queer people for queer people (but also for everyone). 

So, at the end of the day what matters is finding ethical porn websites which produce content focusing on consent, real-life looking sexual interactions and paid+happy workers. And from there, whatever floats your boat. 

Sources:

• Human Rights Campaign. Understanding the Asexual Community;
• Peter, J., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2007). Adolescents’ exposure to a sexualized media environment and notions of women as sex objects. Sex Roles, 381–395;
• Alexy, E. M., Burgess, A. W., & Prentky, R. A. (2009). Pornography use as a risk marker for an aggressive pattern of behavior among sexually reactive children and adolescents. Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, 442–453.