Pornography can create all kinds of unrealistic expectations, but here is the worst unrealistic expectation that porn instills on a subconscious level: ‘My partner is there to please me, with no needs of her own’.
You see, there is one element of functional real-world sexuality more important than all others that is glaringly absent from porn: empathy between partners.
For real life sex to be a good experience for both people, an experience that makes both partners want to come back for more, a relationship-enhancing, pair bond-building activity, at the very heart of that activity needs to be two-way empathy.
In two-way empathy, the man has carefully studied his woman, he understands her feelings and needs, he is alert to how fulfilled those feelings and needs are moment by moment as a situation unfolds, and the woman has carefully studied her man, she understands his feelings and needs, and she is alert to how fulfilled those feelings and needs are moment by moment as a situation unfolds.
In pornography, by contrast, we find one-way empathy - the porn producers are there to fulfill your heart’s wildest desires, but you, as the viewer, are required to know nothing of the feelings and needs of the producers and performers who satisfy you.
When you watch porn, you get what you want without having to understand what anyone else feels. You pay for the privilege of not having to empathize with anyone by exchanging money for this special focus on your desires and yours alone. The porn producers get wealthy and you get off.
During porn use, the flow of empathy is all one-way - it is all flowing toward you, not from you.
It pays porn producers to know you intimately, to understand exactly what punches your buttons. When you enter search terms to find your preferred type of pornography, it probably doesn’t occur to you that you are being monitored like a guinea pig in a lab. Every nuance of your search and watch behavior is being recorded, the analytics closely analyzed, to provide more of exactly what viewers like you are wanting to see.
Porn producers are obsessed with figuring out your whims and using their considerable budgets to cater to those whims, with no thought toward their own personal preferences or those of their performers. It’s all about you - knowing you, understanding you, enticing you, pleasing you. They know all about what fires your rockets. You need know nothing about them.
These people cater to you, because it lines their pockets.
Fightthenewdrug.com estimates that the global porn industry is a $97 billion industry.
Your personal quirks and kinks are big business.
So when you watch porn, you are interacting with people who are bending over backwards (literally or figuratively) to give you what they know you want, not because they get off on it, but because it gets them into your pocket.
This is all fun, games, and big business until you try to interact with someone who is more than a pile of pixels on a screen. Someone who has feelings and desires of her own. Someone who has emotional - rather than merely financial - skin in the game.
This is when we run hard up against the problem that pornography trains a man to get sexual satisfaction without having to coordinate his actions with the feelings of another. Every time you get off to porn, you’re practicing getting sex without giving empathy.
Which is to say, you’re practicing a strategy that will lead to real-world failure in the arena of intimacy.
Imagine if a pilot trained day after day after day in a flight simulator in which the controls were arranged exactly backwards from their placement in a real airplane. Imagine what kind of habits he is building, what kind of neural pathways he has put in place to unconsciously execute in times of stress. Now imagine the pilot is put into a real airplane and asked to fly with only this type of backwards-built simulator training for reference. What do you suppose are his chances of staying in the air?
Pornography is the simulator with the backwards controls. It looks like a sexual experience, but its self-centeredness is the very opposite of what a man needs to successfully navigate a real sexual encounter with a real woman. Flying the airplane is real life sex with a real woman, the thrilling and challenging activity, with its real risks and real rewards, for which a man is completely unprepared if he has done nothing but hang out inside a poorly suited simulator.
This realization that porn is a poor simulator for real world sexual activity chiefly because porn does not require the man to feel empathy for anyone outside himself may lead us to wonder what kind of training would form a better preparatory experience, and in order to identify suitable training, we need to know what we want to be able to do in the real world.
So, what kind of sexual behavior does work in real life?
First, let’s make some assumptions - let’s assume that you’re not sleeping with a prostitute, which is just a kind of live-action porn star. Let’s assume also that you don’t want this partner of yours to go to bed with you one time and be so put off by the experience that she never wants to find herself in your arms ever again. Let’s assume also that you want some kind of harmonious interaction with this person outside the bedroom.
In order to keep your partner eager and willing for sex, and in order to maintain her trust and affection for you as a friend and romantic partner, you need to ensure that sex is a win-win experience. You need to conduct yourself in such a way that she has as good a time as you do between the sheets.
And in order to ensure that that happens, you have to be able to empathize with her. Do you understand what she needs to feel? Can you put yourself in her shoes? Can you see a given situation through her eyes? Can you imagine what a given activity would feel like for her, both physically and emotionally? Do you understand how she would need to feel about an activity in order to enjoy participating in it?
This empathy is then a tool you can use to devise ways of acting and being that will ensure your desires get fulfilled in a way that is mutually satisfying for your partner.
You want that win-win outcome. You want to take care of yourself in such a way that the other person is also taken care of. That is what will net you a willing partner and a strong relationship.
Pornography does not train you to do this. Pornography does not train you in how to mesh your feelings and desires with the feelings and desires of another. Thus, we could say that pornography, while perhaps immediately gratifying in some ways, is training for failure in real-life sex.
Hence, I am going to suggest that to fully recover from the ill-effects of porn addiction and become a better lover would involve learning to rethink the purpose of sex. Porn encourages the viewer to unconsciously think, “The purpose of sex is to gratify myself.” A view of sex that is far more in harmony with an emotionally fulfilling relationship would be this: “The purpose of sex is to create an equally satisfying outcome for both parties.”
Thus, if a man has set out to recover from addiction to pornography, the task before him involves a lot more than just "stopping a behavior" - what is really asked of him is that he overhaul his entire view of sex and what sex means to him and to a potential partner.
And that takes us back to one of the key factors that makes porn alluring in the first place: many men have no clue how to make sex a positive experience for their female partner. What’s the point of empathizing with your partner’s feelings and needs if you have no idea how to satisfy those feelings and needs? Without knowledge and skills, an awareness of your partner’s desires can just highlight your own sense of inadequacy at your inability to fulfill those desires, making empathy a painful thing to feel - better to just avoid it altogether, better to retreat into the self-serving safety of porn.
But you don’t have to go there. You can learn the secrets of female eroticism and discover how to take a woman to a level of satisfaction she never imagined possible. You can develop the skill to satisfy a woman so completely that taking her feelings and needs into consideration is nothing but pleasure for you, because you can so easily blend her satisfaction with your own, and so competently address her feminine needs that it is just plain fun to connect with this aspect of her being.
That’s what we’re about here at Intimate Harmony.
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