The internet is useful for a great many things, from watching videos of dancing penguins to finding out what Dickens character you are. And amid this Niagara Falls of information and white noise, it’s thought that around 37 per cent of its content is of the pornographic variety. What’s more, Pornhub, which set up an office close to Dublin’s Grand Canal Quay last year, revealed that Irish people spend longer looking at porn than users in many other European countries.
Much ink has already spilled about men’s complicated, occasionally fractious relationship with pornography. Ditto the bubbling-under problem that is children with access to porn. What’s perhaps less discussed is women’s porn use; their enjoyment of it even less so. Often, it can be hard for women to reconcile their enjoyment of porn with the narrative that casts women in porn as sex objects. If you’re a mother, used to considering pornography as an evil, insidious sex educator for your own children, it’s likely your relationship with porn is complicated further still.
The problem with the current discourse surrounding porn is that it implies that men and women think of sex in very different ways: that men prefer animalistic, purely physical rutting, while women prefer a more connective, sensitive sexual experience; that hardcore porn is a boys’ club and women prefer the “safer” confines of Vaseline-on-the-lens erotica. That’s simply not the case.
Do I use pornography? Well, I’m a thirtysomething woman who lives and works alone. I work in a busy, deadline-oriented profession, and I have a broadband connection, so you do the maths. Stress relief aside, I’m also (best feminist voice here) a sexual being, curious on an ongoing basis about my own desires, quirks and fantasies. Sometimes I get to explore and work this out with another person, and sometimes not. This does not make me transgressive, unusual, skeevy or oversexed, yet there’s a veil of silence surrounding women’s use of pornography that might make some women feel that way.
Some weeks ago, the topic of porn came up at a dinner party, and a pal and I argued the toss; specifically, about our own relationship with it as card-carrying feminists. We met a wall of disapproving clucks, then loaded silence. “Let’s move the topic away from porn,” ordered an agitated male friend, to the palpable relief of everyone else. Many seem to have a haughty soundbite to hand about how porn is ruining everything in the world, from pop music to feminism, but, as sexual beings with adult content literally at our fingertips, surely it’s time to fess up?
Apparently not: in a survey conducted by the makers of the recent RTÉ documentary We Need to Talk about Porn, only 56 per cent of Irish women surveyed admitted to ever having watched porn.
Nothing to admit
Cindy Gallop, founder of Make Love Not Porn (a gender-equal, user-generated website that promotes "real-world sex") takes umbrage at the word "admitted".
“Why does there have to be a sense of admittance?” she asks. “No, I don’t think that statistic is true. Undoubtedly, there are more women that have seen porn in some way or another, but the fact that the phrasing is ‘admitted’ rather than ‘said’ reflects society’s prudishness and hypocrisy around porn. That very wording reflects a sense of embarrassment.
“I get very frustrated when people use the word ‘porn’ like it’s one big homogenous mass,” she adds. “The landscape of porn is like that of literature; there are genres, subgenres and they’re vastly varied, extraordinary and rich. Porn exists in a shadowy otherworld. If you’re an Irish woman who is more landed with guilt and shame than some others, and because you have no navigation guide to find what you really enjoy, your first instinct is to recoil.”
She’s right. Once you learn – by dint of extensive trial and error – how to navigate the vast vista of porn, you’ll find that all of life is there. As the dominant discourse implies, you will find plenty of dead-eyed mainstream movies but there’s much more there besides.
A piecemeal education
Women of my age have an especially curious relationship with pornography. We were the last generation to grow up without the internet at home. On-screen sex made our parents run to the TV in flustered indignation. We gleaned our sex education piecemeal, from playground hearsay and a below-par official education. We were desperate for information and understanding, as all youngsters are. A thumbed copy of Judy Blume's Forever here, a copy of Playboy there, and suddenly we were all getting down with our bad selves. Factor in the magazines of our youth, with their how-to-blow-his-mind-in-bed diktats, and we were well on our way to getting a clue.
What's rarely said about these magazines of yore is that they promoted what Cosmopolitan.com's sex editor Anna Breslaw describes as "creepy, servile blowjob magic". The focus was largely blowing a male partner's mind with technique, tips and trickery. Ergo, porn's not the only way in which women have been told that in the bedroom, the man comes first.
Gallop breathes fresh air into the ongoing porn debate: she is an enthusiastic consumer of adult material (“I like my porn hardcore”), yet she is aware that the current industry set-up means that porn is a product made by men, for men. Now 54, Gallop largely dates men in their 20s and has noticed a sea change.
“Because most mainstream porn is made by men for men, we have a generation of guys and girls who believe that the be-all and end-all is to get the man off,” says Gallop. “Back in the day, it was enormously important to my lovers that I came first. The men I slept with used to marvel at my vagina. Now, the men I sleep with believe that their penis is the centre of the universe. These days, young men have seen 50 million vaginas online.”
Porn isn’t always prohibitive of good sex: used in the right way, it can be a useful conduit into a conversation between two people in a healthy relationship. It’s a great tool for learning about yourself. And how reassuring to know that many others share similar tastes in our more colourful, sometimes unspeakable fantasies.
Still, there’s room for a middle ground. Describing herself as “the Michael Bay of business”, Gallop threw her advertising acumen behind a groundbreaking new initiative, and launched Make Love Not Porn in 2009. Its tagline says it all: “Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.” Instead of deploying language like “pounded”, “blasted” or “banged”, the site’s taglines are “juicy” and “succulent”. It’s a different, much gentler consumer experience than other sites offer and, just maybe, the shape of things to come.
Back at the dinner party, my friend comes up with the perfect analogy. “Porn is a bit like cake,” she says. “I’ve been raised to know that a little bit of cake is perfectly okay as part of a healthy and balanced diet of breakfast, lunch and dinner. But then, we didn’t grow up with all the cake in the world behind an unlocked door, right next door to our bedroom. Imagine how that would be.”
