How Real Is the Sex You See in Pornography?

By Cory Silverberg, About.com Guide

About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by the Medical Review Board

Despite the fact that porn films have about as much to do with real world sex as Hollywood films have to do with daily life, many of us confuse what we see in adult films with what we expect to happen in our own sex lives, or what we imagine happening in the lives of others. This makes some sense. For starters, many people's earliest exposure to sexual material is through pornography. Add to this the fact that as adults most of us don’t get the chance to talk honestly and openly about sex with a diverse group of people, and you can see how easily porn becomes a kind of sex education.

Of course there's an important difference between sex education and good sex education and with very few exceptions porn rarely fits the criteria of the latter. People may watch adult films, get ideas from them, and mimic those ideas in real life, but that isn’t the same thing as good sex education and it's debatable how much one sees in pornography represents common sexual practices.

Why Do Women Feel Bad About Doing Things That Feel Good?

Women feel greater guilt about looking at porn than do men. Why are they primed to feel bad about pleasure?

AlterNet / By Liz Langley

The first time I rented porn alone I wasn’t really alone. There were other customers in the store, a small chain, popular in the days before Blockbuster had swallowed and sanitized most neighborhood VHS rental outlets. Back then most video stores had a back room where you could find adult films, typically separated from God’s wholesome sunlit earth by a set of white, swinging saloon doors, so that you'd feel like a big sex outlaw just by swaggering in. 

Which you never did. You skulked casually past a few times before sidling into the pervert annex and getting knocked in the face with an array of filth beyond your wildest dreams.

I was not always the only woman behind the swinging doors but I was almost always the only one who was alone.
It was a little discomfiting but it was also exciting. I was young, curious and not about to let a embarrassment stand between me titles like “The Czech is in the Male.”