In an exclusive survey, we asked the nation what they watch online — and how it affects their sex lives. The results will surprise you
Just how endemic is internet pornography? What effect does it have on our relationships? And how different is a baby-boomer’s search history from a millennial’s? According to our survey, nearly two-thirds of us (58%) watch porn. We asked them what they watched, how long and how often, and with whom. Here, India Knight reveals the results and asks what it means for our sex lives.
I feel conflicted about porn, as I am significantly less liberal than I want to be. My instinct has always been to think you can’t police fantasy, to live and let live, as long as there is consent and nobody’s getting hurt — but I don’t know what to do with that now women getting hurt is the new normal. I am shocked by what younger women consider standard sexual practice, specifically by their apparent (if perhaps reluctant) embrace of things that seem expressions of misogyny, usually painful and sometimes violent: the sex equivalent of a punch in the face.
It amazes me that the causing of pain or humiliation has escaped from its relatively niche BDSM (an umbrella term for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) specialism and is now ordinary. Bit of slapping, bit of choking, bit of anal — no problem, crying a bonus, let me just film it on my phone to add to the fun. This is mainstream: on porn sites, it doesn’t even merit its own category. It’s just sex. The hit HBO teen drama Euphoria, which began on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday, examines the lives of sex- and drug-fuelled teenagers in middle America. The show offers an apocalyptic view of the first generation born in the 21st century as they approach adulthood. In the first episode, a boy and a girl go upstairs at a party to kiss, only for the boy to suddenly yank off his jeans and start violently choking her.
Rough porn is a gen Z favourite
This is closer to reportage than to fiction. As our survey shows, for gen Z (those aged 22 and under), “rough sex” — hair-pulling, biting, slapping, choking and other aggressive behaviour — was the second most popular porn category. Almost half (42%) of those aged under 23 stated that it was something they enjoyed watching. No other generation came close: in comparison, just 29% of millennials (23- to 38-year-olds), 17% of gen X (39- to 54-year-olds) and 6% of baby-boomers (aged 55-73) selected it. When it came to BDSM, gen Z again led the way, with 17% selecting it, compared with less than 10% of everyone else.
And it is not just on screen: 12% of gen Z-ers say they received all their sex education from porn and another quarter say online porn made up the “majority” of their knowledge. You would assume its consumers understand that porn is not real, but about a third of people consider it to be “very similar” (7%) or “somewhat similar” (24%) to real-life sex. No wonder young women are having bad, anxiety-triggering sex. Here is a thing, and not an unusual one, that happened recently to a friend’s 14-year-old daughter. She was going on a date that she was excited about. Towards the end, it turned out that the charming, polite boy who she’d been having a lovely time with was expecting sex. Anal sex, to be precise. The girl, a virgin, declined, though not without anxiously wondering whether this made her abnormally prudish. She was able to discuss it with her mother when she got home, and has the kind of mother who has told her children about the difference between real sex and internet porn. Not everyone is so lucky — and not every child listens. Besides, this is normalised. Young gen Z-ers are most likely to start watching porn between the ages of 15 and 17, and say they now watch it “most days”. By contrast, the majority of baby-boomers didn’t begin watching online pornography until their thirties or later, and now say they watch it just once a week.
Porn, body image and relationships
It’s not normal to be a virgin, heterosexual 14-year-old girl out on a date and to be expected to have anal sex, even if Teen Vogue recently ran a long piece called “Anal sex: what you need to know”. This was accompanied by a biological diagram — urethra, anus, vagina and so on — that did not include the clitoris. “The anus is very tight, and the feeling of having something in your rectal area is unique,” it says. The feeling of having something in your very tight vagina is unique too, but maybe vaginas are — what? Boring? Less fun? A bit square, even to readers of a teenage magazine who aren’t yet through puberty?
As the parent of a teenage girl, I have heard dozens of hideous stories about the sexual expectations of young people. Some involve traumatised girls. Some involve boys who don’t understand what the problem is with basing their expectations on porn — foreplay, for instance, does not feature — or with asking for intimate pics. Some involve boys and girls who have debilitating feelings of physical inadequacy about their bodies as a consequence of viewing porn. And it’s not just young people: nearly a quarter (23%) of our respondents across all age groups felt their porn consumption had “negatively affected” their body image and made them worried about how sexual partners would perceive them. This was especially true for women. One said the videos are always “of slim, beautiful girls who don’t have stretch marks or spots on the body”, while others singled out porn making them insecure about their body hair and vaginas.
Some stories around this are grimly funny: a friend was watching Last Tango in Paris — a once-banned 1972 film in which a middle-aged Marlon Brando anally rapes the much younger Maria Schneider, using butter as a lubricant — when her late-teens/early-twenties children walked in. They were disgusted, but only by the characters having full pubic hair. No wonder: consent is irrelevant in porn. Unlike the pre-internet young people who grew up only with erotic films and top-shelf mags for titillation, gen Z have had wi-fi and smartphones for their entire lives (67% of all traffic to PornHub in the UK now is via a smartphone).
A friend recently told me about her high-achieving, spectacularly good-looking 19-year-old son, who is not able to get it up with “normal” girls because he’s watched so much porn that reality always disappoints. He is in recovery from porn addiction, and again he’s far from the only one. Our results also shed light on the capacity of porn to alter sexual tastes, with users quickly tiring of “mainstream” stuff and constantly searching for rougher, more subversive content. Almost a third (29%) said their taste had become less mainstream, and a similar number (31%) had found it increasingly difficult to find porn that sates their desires. “It becomes harder to find stuff that satisfies my tastes,” said a male gen-X respondent.
Unsurprisingly, what’s good for the porn industry is bad for romance. In our research, 23% said their porn consumption had negatively affected relationships, with 17% finding it more difficult to be aroused by real-life partners. “Porn has left me never wanting conventional sex,” said one respondent. Another added, “It makes me try to push the boundaries of what my girlfriend wants.” Others were more candid: they find it “impossible to climax without porn”.
When I was younger, I’d always thought of myself as pro-porn, in a vague, liberal sort of way. As a teenager, I thought feminists such as Andrea Dworkin were damaged and hysterical, always banging on about misogyny and how all porn was a celebration of rape and injury to women, like a dungareed Voice of Doom; looking back, she seems like a prophet.
*The survey is representative of the wider UK population. Of 5,690 respondents, 3,415 (58%) said they watched internet pornography. The results are taken from the subset of 3,415
Data compiled by Jenna Davies and Louisa McGillicuddy
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