I’m by no means anti-porn or sex negative. Indeed, my reflexive position on this issue as a gay man is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with consuming pornography.
However, given that gay and lesbian adolescents have almost no access to sex education relevant to them, porn becomes especially problematic.
I can speak most directly about male-male sex, so let me stick to that. The most important observation I could make here is that gay sex in gay pornos is nothing like realistic gay sex.
Gay porn is idealized, stylized, and nearly impossible to emulate. Men become erect immediately and powerfully. Anal penetration, which is usually the centerpiece of the porno, happens quickly and easily, to the intense and orgasmic pleasure of the bottom partner.
The top never has a problem getting hard enough to penetrate or staying hard enough to penetrate. The bottom never experiences pain over a top’s awkward maneuvers. Partners almost invariably ejaculate either simultaneously or nearly simultaneously, the bottom often not even needing penile stimulation.
While this can admittedly be very hot to watch, that’s not how it works in real life. Not even close.
Real gay sex is often a bit awkward and requires patient communication between partners. In real life, gay men have anal sex much less frequently than other forms of sex, according to several credible academic surveys.
Adolescents logging on to PornHub and looking at gay pornos to try to figure out how they should be having sex are going to think they’re getting it all wrong or are hopeless in bed.
They’re also going to run into non-consensual playacting that might be fine between partners who understand dom/sub dynamics and willingly engage in that kind of thing, but which the pornos certainly don’t give any education about.
Kids are liable to learn slapping a partner in the face while penetrating him is an expected part of sex. And, yeah, um… it really usually isn’t.
When I watch gay porn, I do it for entertainment purposes, understanding it’s fantasy meant to stimulate. But then I grew up pre-PornHub, and had my first sexual experiences with guys my age. None of us had ever seen gay porn. We had to figure things out on our own, and while we might have made a muck of it sometimes, we were at least generally kind and loving to one another and didn’t base our actions on unrealistic fantasies that might suggest we shouldn’t be kind and loving.
Of course the obvious solution here, that we should as a society make better porn so the young people can learn better lessons, is pretty much a non-starter. We’re so sex negative that any kind of move toward real sex education for queer youth is impossible, with realistic porn being the most impossible of all.
