I’m sick of pretending: I don’t get why other guys enjoy porn

Like every curious, mischievous, testosterone-fuelled teenage boy discovering sex I’ve watched my fair share of porn. And I’ll admit it was fascinating. But then something happened. I lost my virginity.

From this point on my desire to watch porn started to dwindle, slowly at first, but then I became more and more disillusioned. By the time I had finished my gap year and started at uni I’d come to the realisation that, frankly, watching porn is shit.

One of the first things that dawned on me was that that grunting, sweating, occasionally overweight and often balding guy with a really chubby dick is sort of off-putting. He’ll most likely have at least one stereotypically shoddy tattoo for a man simple enough to be relying on the size of his penis for a career and you can guarantee he definitely won’t make a convincing pizza boy despite previous aspirations to be an actor. When I raised this issue amongst guy mates they provided exactly the response you would expect from 16 year old boys…”Eurgh! Why are you watching the man anyway?”

So I took their advice and paid as much attention as I could to Jenna Haze or Breanne Benson or whichever supposedly glamorous girl it was contorting herself into uncomfortable positions on my computer screen. Only problem with this is they all look pretty cheap, tacky and well unpleasant is probably the nicest way I can put it. I couldn’t help but compare them to the pretty shabby bunch that frequented my local Oceana on a Saturday night caked in makeup. But this may be rather unfair as you can guarantee these girls would have great figures. This in itself though leads me on to my next issue – it’s pretty much all fake.

Not about this life

When I say it’s pretty much all fake, this doesn’t just apply to their bodies. Yes the boobs are fake, maybe the bum also fake or the lips are Botox but the groaning – fake, the orgasm – fake, the erection – medicated (fake), the stamina- fake, the enjoyment – fake, the positions – scripted, everything you’re watching is put on for the camera over hours of retakes and do-overs. It’s just not convincing. It’s not what sex is at all; as I got older this became increasingly apparent and that’s my biggest problem with it now.

Watching porn distorts your view of sex. Many of you will have seen Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s film Don Jon where in one scene Julianne Moore (Esther) explains to Jon that he wasn’t very good in bed. Jon who is addicted to watching porn was stunned, he’d done everything right in essentially recreating his favourite videos but she was left less than satisfied. She said Jon was basically just using her to masturbate himself rather than his hand. Yes it is a film but this anecdote has plenty of truth behind it.

Repeatedly watching porn scenes is proven to reduce your ability to get turned on by your sexual partners. Sex is good. I enjoy it.  Why would I want to engage in something that is going to be detrimental to my enjoyment of it?

It gives you unrealistic expectations; girls don’t all squirt (which by the way has recently been proven to actually be piss anyway), they won’t all beg you for anal, your cock will never be as big as his and you’re definitely not going to last 45 minutes very often, if ever. Let’s face it, trying to remember how to twist yourself into the next ungodly position you saw on pornhub yesterday and grunting a lot is never really going to produce anything of note, it’s only going to detract from what’s really going on.

Watching two ex-wannabe actors degrade themselves on camera in a somewhat lacklustre attempt to convince me that sex should be this way, is a genuinely farcical concept, a waste of time and not something I will pretend to enjoy anymore.