Study Shows That Watching Porn May Negatively Affect Our Sex Lives

Australian researchers at the Women’s World conference at the University of Ottawa have presented findings that indicate that watching porn affects our sex lives and relationships negatively; we idealize the people we see in porn and that we attempt to imitate their behavior.

“When it comes to pornography, life is starting to imitate art — and that’s something both women and men should be worried about,” The Ottawa Citizen reported on Wednesday.

Pornography has become so ubiquitous that men and women are modeling their real sex lives on what they see on screen says Renate Klein, a retired professor of women’s studies at Deakin University in Melbourne.

“In porn sex men are all sleekly muscled studs with erections that last for hours, while women are hairless, bronzed, botoxed and surgically enhanced. She says these images become the sexual ideal that people try to live up to…But even worse, she says porn sex is built around the idea of submission and dominance, where the woman is reduced to ‘a servicing station for men’s sexual needs’.”

For Klein, the problem begins when children learn about sex through pornography, beginning a trend in their lives as regarding what they see on screen as normal sexuality.

Klein and her associates went on to challenge the idea that pornography could be empowering for women, pointing out that what’s shown weren’t just images of submission and dominance, but actual things happening to women on screen, going on to say that as porn becomes more ubiquitous we can only expect these acts to get more dangerous, as consumers will want more daring acts.

Ultimately, Klein concluded that this is a societal problem. Her dismissal of the feminist/empowerment argument, based on the idea that while women may volunteer to be in porn, if they have other options, the are not very good ones.

Does porn influence your sex life? Has it ever?

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by John Ortved

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