Porn is necessary in normative society

A few days ago, I sent a few tweets about the proposed restrictions on pornography in the United Kingdom that were well-received enough as to gestate in my mind until the present. In full honesty, I proffer the following series of disclaimers: I am not familiar with the specifics on the “porn ban” in the UK, I am not British and I suppose therefore lack a certain specific understanding of any unique points on the interaction of porn and British culture, and I am a gay male who has had, at various points in my life, several friends involved in the porn industry in various capacities. As such, I offer my thoughts only on the idea of censoring porn on the whole, and do not wish to speak exclusively or specifically to the ban in the UK. With that said, let’s begin!

Porn is quite easy and safe to attack because it can be kind of sloppily applied into a number of undesirable areas. There are the anti-porn feminists (of course, there are also pro-porn feminists), concerned parents, religious concerns, and various other crusades against deviant social mores. I say deviant, and I mean it, because the society I see every day still has the ridiculous inability to approach sexual behavior as the complex world that it is. My generation is, thankfully, seemingly freer than our predecessors, a fact continuously bemoaned by the New York Times as a destructive hookup generation incapable of making meaningful sexual relations and instead hellbent on—gasp—having fun. Of course, my generation isn’t just the hookup generation enabled by myriad apps that allow us to conjure a fuck with the flick of a finger. We’re also the first to have an almost continual saturation of porn available throughout our formative years. 

I was first made aware of the existence of porn when I was in fourth grade. A classmate told me that if you search for “porn” in AOL (yes, those good old days. This was 1998, dears) you’ll find pictures of naked girls. If memory serves me correctly, it was somewhere around 2001 when it became anything of a habit for me, and my eventual discovery of gay porn very quickly monopolized my “research” habits. Thankfully in 2004 I got my own computer and my habits could redouble in earnest. By the time I was 18 and legally allowed to view porn there wasn’t much about it that I was a stranger to. Hell, at 17 an unscrupulous clerk at Hasting’s had sold me a copy of Shortbus that I watched with my friends one day. None of us were old enough to have purchased it. It’s a fonder memory than the time we watched 120 Days of Sodom together. I made pasta.

Regardless, I think my own personal porn historiography illustrates nicely two points on the importance of porn: it shows people what they like and how what they like works. My confidence in being gay came because by the time that I became sexually active I had already been sexually active for some years, just in a smaller context. I was spared the awkward need to explore with women because I’d tried everything within my available limits for years to figure out if it had the slightest inkling of appeal. It didn’t. 

But more importantly, porn serves as an educational tool on the variety and mechanics of deviant sex. There’s that word again, deviant. I’m not trying to sound like Ken Cuccinelli in calling all forms of non-missionary sex deviant but I think it’s a truth that’s hard to escape. This speaks only to my own experiences, but I grew up in a situation in which non-missionary extramarital sex was very explicitly a deviation from normative sexual practices. I was subjected to abstinence-only sexual “education,” I was fed lies about STDs and cajoled into signing purity pledges at an age when the thought of me being sexual disgusts me. I know my experiences don’t speak to whole, but I know they do relate to the experience of millions of people of my age and upbringing. The proponents of this very limited view of sexual education generally seem to claim that the youth shouldn’t be exposed to sex unnecessarily but of course they’re the ones cramming it down our throats.

Sexual education even in its broader applications seems to have a habit of teaching somewhat normative sexual practices. I can’t for the life of me imagine a high-school sex ed program teaching about the mechanics of anal sex or scissoring or what other combinations two people of the same sex can make with their genitals when they want to pleasure each other. Of course, formal education isn’t the only kind of education. There’s always experimentation, and learning from friends, and what I suspect forms a lot of sexual opinions: porn.

Of course, there’s the argument that porn forms unrealistic expectations of sexual encounters and I think that’s true. And there’s the concern that it teaches adolescent men that women are just tools to be used for sexual conquest and discarded. I’m not familiar enough with heterosexual porn to speak to the gender roles therein but I feel like this is reason enough to have more open dialogue about sex, not more constricted dialogue. 

Yahoo’s recent decision to censor tags like “Lesbian,” “Gay,” and “Bisexual” on Tumblr caused a significant amount of uproar for what really is a ridiculous decision, but one of the reactions really bothered me. It basically boiled down to “my lifestyle isn’t porn,” which is true, I suppose, but I can’t help but feel like this line of discourse only seeks to desexualize LGB behavior, which of course is absurd. If sex wasn’t important to LGBs then why is Lawrence v. Texas an historical LGB landmark? It all fits in to the narrative of gaining acceptance by hiding the parts of you that you think other people don’t like, which is regressive and deplorable. 

Pardon the scattered thoughts but what I think this all comes down to is that porn serves an implicit social function, and if you want to ban it then you’re going to have to be able to answer those functions in alternative manners. You’re going to have to have comprehensive sex education that shows people all forms of sex. You’re going to have to be able to talk about sex and the fact that people do it more frequently outside of the normative pattern than within it. You’re going to have to have families who understand and don’t judge the nascent same-sex curiosities in their children. Porn makes people uncomfortable because they’re not willing to do any of the above. It’s a social necessity.