The days of being shown old, badly animated diagrams of penises and vaginas are over.
The teacher putting the condom over the banana is finished.
Porn is the new sex education for teens.
Not just porn, but music videos, movies and tv shows.
For a lot of kids their idea of sex comes from what they watch on their computer screen late at night when no one is around.
Which is a problem as it’s not very realistic. Not only that but it shows a type of sex that is without love for the other person. In fact every time you look at porn you are loving only yourself. Maybe we don’t like to admit that porn isn’t realistic to real life sex in marriage because we are frightened that it won’t live up.
The great news is that in fact we should be excited, because it is supposed to be better. Much, much better.
The main thing about porn is that usually it is very polished. The sex we see in porn and also in other media is highly choreographed. There is no freedom and the people involved are told how to behave by a director, with a camera crew watching on. Hardly an environment conducive for great sex. There are two points that should be drawn out here.
Firstly the polished aspect means that when it comes to real sex we expect our husband or wife to be perfect. To have the right size of breasts, a big enough penis and to have no blemishes. We compare them and we compare ourselves. The truth though is that no one is perfect. That’s not to say that it’s wrong to want to take care of your body but at the end of the day if you are trying to fit into an ideal you have from porn you are going to fail. It will always be a letdown in some regard.
But instead of this being something that makes sex worse it should make it better in marriage. That’s because sex is about two imperfect people coming together with a God who is perfect to celebrate their love for each other. In the most intimate and special way possible. Which may sound cheesy but when you love a person even when they don’t look exactly like the girls or guys you watch in porn and you accept them naked; you are showing them the same love that God has for us all. A love that is unconditional and doesn’t make you conform before it is given. If that doesn’t create the intimacy required for great sex, then nothing will.
The second point that comes out of this is that porn doesn’t offer the freedom that sex should create. We create freedom when we accept someone for who they are. But it also allows us to be free to have fun and to enjoy sex. Porn never looks natural. From the dialogue to the way the two or more people move, it all seems so constructed. There is a very good reason for that. It is.
When you have a porn mindset there is a tendency to try and act a certain way, even if it seems unnatural and stifled. Freedom on the other hand allows a couple to enjoy the moment. There are no expectations other than to be with the one you love most in the world and enjoy them for who they are. The rest takes care of itself. Ironically porn focuses so much on the orgasm but it is actually the freedom that we ought to have in the part before that actually makes that bit even better.
There are a thousand other reasons why porn separates us from the way God intended for us to enjoy sex but none more so than the way it restricts sex through porn’s ‘rule’ of how you should look and behave.
They say rules are made to be broken and in the case of how porn influences sex, I believe this to never be truer.