How does porn influence our ideas about sexuality and the opposite sex - by Orchid132

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"How does porn influence our ideas about sexuality and the opposite sex?"
by Orchid132 (SO)

I remember a time when I felt beautiful. It was when I was able to view myself from the lens of my father’s eyes. To my father, I am pretty, smart and funny. I am all the things all girls hope to be. As I grew up, that image I had of myself became blurred and distorted. I started to see myself through the lens of my boyfriends’ eyes and through the lens of the media. I started to feel ugly and no words my father said to me were able to make me feel pretty again.

As I grew up, pornography had become a social norm and because I had been a pretty reserved person all my life, I started to feel abnormal. I felt uneasy many times growing up when confronted with porn. Boys in high school would speak of it as if it was cool. So I pretended to think it was cool. Boys in college thought it was fun. So, I went along with the act and pretended to think it was fun as well. I thought as I grew up I would be able to find someone that disliked it and I could just be me. I didn’t find that person so I found myself continuing the act. The more I pretended, the uglier I felt.

I found myself being compared to women of the porn industry and I was simply not measuring up. Like the skinny waif models of the 1980’s, the busty and overtly sexual porn stars became the new standard of beauty. Men I dated wanted me to look like porn stars. I found myself considering breast augmentation and buying clothes that I thought would make my boyfriends happy and satisfied, but deep inside I hated myself for wanting to emulate those women. I used to look up to strong women like Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks, how did I steep to the level where my only desire was to turn into a real life porn star look-alike? Pressures from society and our current culture promote this way of thinking and I bought into it without even knowing that it was happening.
Porn doesn’t only influence how people perceive beauty; it also has an affect on how people view sex. The danger with pornography is that it paints a false picture of what sex should be like and takes away the sanctity of an act that used to be between two people that are in love and turned it into a spectacle. “Normal” sex had become boring and we now see videos where men need multiple women to be pleased, or unusual objects in the bedroom, and the (very graphic and disturbing) list goes on and on. Like drinking alcohol, people who view porn build a tolerance to it and find themselves “upping the ante” and needing to view more unusual and oftentimes unsettling portrayal of sex to become satisfied.

I am now at a point in my life where I acknowledge how the presence of porn has affected me and millions of other people like me in the world today. Even with this acknowledgment, I still find it difficult at times to fight the pressure to be sexy and go along with pornography. It is easy to succumb to the media and their interpretation of what is right and wrong, but I am listening to that gut feeling inside of me now that tells me when something just doesn’t feel right, and to me, pornography just doesn’t feel right. I just think of my father who always looked at me with adoring eyes and I know how it must have pained him to see his little girl not see herself for who she really is. I decided that from now on I’d only see myself through my father’s eyes and I’d take off the lens of the media for good.

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