My friends have the weird challenge that they do during a game that somebody designed. There are two teams and each team gets to choose a porn segment for the other team to watch. The team that watches the chosen video for the longest amount of time without laughing wins the challenge.
There are a few possible explanations for why we are laughing. Maybe it’s to mask the awkwardness of watching something meant to be erotic with a group of your platonic friends. Maybe it is because the video is ridiculous.
When I say porn, I mean pornographic videos and images distributed primarily through the internet and other video distributors.
They way that bodies are represented in porn is interesting to say the least. Women with enlarged breasts and absolutely no pubic hair, men with larger than average penises. Pubic hair is seen as a fetish. Petite women are depicted as “teens” and fetishized even further. Black men are depicted as savage and animalistic. Don’t even get me started on non-heterosexual representations.
These depictions may seem harmless because they are in a realm that is not seen to be indicative of reality. Pornography, however, is the medium through which many people have their first erotic experiences. Fourteen year old boys are watching porn videos and forming expectations about women’s bodies and about sex in general. Because of this, many people have unrealistic expectations about sex and body parts. This leads to another problem: a lot of people are having a lot of really bad sex.
I know, this isn’t the end of the world. But this shows one of the ways that representations can shape our realities. By only seeing depictions of certain bodies in porn, or having a representation of one’s own body being fetishized, people consuming pornography are forming unwarranted expectations for not only themselves but for sexual partners.
Porn is just so interestingly strange.
Unruly Bodies 
I agree with you very very much, friend. Porn IS weird. It’s kind of strange as a concept if you think about it for too long, but it also has really strange effects on the way contemporary culture thinks. It causes people to have fucked-up expectations for bodies and for sex, which is unhealthy for lots of reasons. It reinforces harmful stereotypes and body-image standards, which never helps anybody. And on top of porn viewership causing people to have really bad sex because they’re learning how to do it by watching porn… it also leads to very unfortunate ideas about what sex “should” be like. From the way one’s body is presented to who does what, porn viewership creates some very unhealthy standards for the way sexuality “should be” performed. And that’s worth critiquing!!
That said, I raise two points.
One, porn actors (of whom I know a few, I should add) should be treated with the same dignity and respect that civilians/non-sex-industry people should be treated, because at the end of the day, they’re trying to obtain an income just the same as everyone else. In fact, I say we should respect them more because they work in an extremely stigmatized field and often have to put up with a lot of unpleasantness in their line of work.
Two… Porn plots are some of the most ridiculous things I have ever encountered. And I don’t say this because I’ve necessarily looked for porn plots, I say this because I’ve had people say to me, “oh man, you have GOT to watch this porn intro, I laughed so hard I shot soda out my nose.” If you want a good laugh, go look for the one about the lemon tree. That is legitimately hilarious, to the point where you can tell the actors are having a lot of trouble holding back their laughter – which makes it even funnier!
And as weird as porn can be, we still, as a society, get a lot of our norms and values from it. Beauty standards, one could argue, could even come from porn and fetishes. Or porn could stem from unrealistic beauty standards. It’s a weird cycle of photoshop and naked women answering the door naked for the pool guys!
First of all, I love that you used the picture of Pornstache! Thank you for addressing that black men are “depicted as savage and animalistic”. I feel like they are always shown as being inhuman. All porn sites show of the black male is their penis. Basically what you learn from porn is that black men are nothing but an appendage.
I have to agree with you… porn is giving a lot of younger boys and girls unrealistic expectations when it comes to sex and even body image. A lot of girls feel insecure because they do not look the way the porn stars do. Boys try to treat girls like the men do in the videos, which can sometimes be disrespectful and degrading, because they forget that these are ACTORS and not real experiences. It really is so strange to think about.
I love that this game exists, it’s great! Sounds like an interesting thing to do with friends.
Porn IS interesting. Especially when you start to look at it from a critical perspective like you did. As you said, it is a shame that young boys are looking to porn for ideals of women and their bodies. It is also a shame that young boys start to think sex will be like what they see in videos. Unrealistic expectations and ideals are created, which just spirals out of control in adulthood.