Three things you might not have known about porn.

Orginally published @ Hijacked

Porn makes you a better lover? Source: Tumblr

I’ve never been interested in porn. I always assumed it was just a platform that enabled my male friends to get off when they weren’t getting it on. But after having my first porn experience a few days ago, I started to think about it a little differently.

Porn can be used to educate, titillate and fornicate, and it has the potential to be more than just tits and arse - you just need to look a little further than the infamous Redtube to figure this out. So I did just this: I logged on to PornHub - which I am told is the place to go for all your porn-related needs - and ended up perusing journal articles discussing real science, facts and figures. Before I knew it, my porn education had begun, and I was genuinely surprised by some of the things I discovered.

Porn can make you a better lover

Who’d have thought? I actually assumed the complete opposite: that porn skews people’s perceptions of real sexual situations, or that overconsumption leads to desensitisation.

But science has once again stepped in and dropped a total knowledge bomb, with recent studies suggesting that viewing visual sexual stimuli (VSS), AKA porn, could increase sexual performance. Research shows that participants who were viewing more VSS per week had a stronger desire for partnered sexual intercourse than those who weren’t watching porn at all.

This isn’t an excuse to lock yourself away and watch porn all weekend. It’s important to remember that sometimes pornography can have negative effects, so, you know, view responsibly.

Porn isn’t just for men

Sex educator Carlin Ross states that the reason some women don’t enjoy porn is because “taken as a whole, the sex acts depicted are the sex acts that bring men to orgasm, not women”. So for some people, it may be surprising that stats show women are actually quite interested in the world of porn. In fact, according to Nielsen ratings, one in three adults who visit porn sites are female.

PornHub released a chart with the most searched categories for both men and women, and surprisingly ‘gay men’ ranked as the second highest search for females and seventh for men. My thoughts are that perhaps women are simply interested in watching male-to-male sex out of curiosity, not necessarily due to a sexual desire.

Surprisingly, women are 193 per cent more likely to search ‘for women’ than men. The top search for ladies was ‘lesbian’, and interestingly, the top search among men was, ‘teens’, with ‘MILF’ (mother I’d like to fuck) coming in a close second. Women are also between 80-90 per cent more likely to search for rough sex and double penetration than men.

The stats also show that women are more interested than men in watching threesomes.

So for people such as myself who think porn is just for guys, we’ve had it wrong all along - apparently, some chicks dig it. Porn can be more than just a cum shot

Despite what I originally thought, porn isn't always about the busty blonde sucking on a big, hard dick. It can be a sexual discourse; a place to express fantasies and experiences. Adult filmmaker Erika Lust is at the forefront of new wave adult cinema and in her TED Talk, It's time for porn to change, she says porn itself isn't the problem - rather, it's the way in which it's portrayed.

She describes the average porno: "Between her pursed lips, she is giving him a blow job. Why? Because this nice man came to her rescue when her car broke down. And after the 'thank you' blow job, he cums all over her face and she smiles with fake pleasure. That is porn and it's time for porn to change."

Lust aims to instead create films about real people for real people. Her current project, Xconfessions, draws inspiration from the sexual fantasies submitted by her viewers and turns them into short adult films.

Will Lust's work change the entire face of porn? Perhaps not (it's a pretty big industry, after all) but by catering to a niche market, it could help some people to better understand porn and maybe even enjoy it.

#Lifestyle