I honestly do not like porn and have a problem with it. I doubt I would ever use it in a committed relationship but I have never had a serious boyfriend so I’m not sure. My first issue with porn is that it changes people’s perception of what a woman’s body should look like. I am 25 and my sister a few years older and both of us have had a lot of negative feelings towards our own body because of what we have seen in porn. Most women in porn have had surgery to change the appearance of their vaginas. We started seeing porn in university and it just caused us to hate our body and think we have weird or ugly vaginas. To this day I still feel very uncomfortable getting naked in front of a guy because of porn.
My second issue with porn is the sex itself. Porn has completely separated sex from love-making and left us with an exaggerated and often, in my opinion, gross act. The sex in porn is usually directed towards men’s pleasure and the women are just objects in it to satisfy them, often doing extreme sexual positions. I have found that a lot of men now, who have grown up watching porn believe that women should be up for anything sexually and they are bothered when it doesn’t go their way. Most of the men have become desensitized because of porn and cannot get off unless they have more exaggerated sex and want women to do more extreme positions or scenarios that they might not be comfortable with.
I know that all men are not like this, and I don’t mean to generalize, but in my experiences many men are like this. A few of my friends (one in Toronto, the other LA) have told me of guys who didn’t want to use a condom and during sex took it off without telling them. These men have been so influenced by porn that they cannot understand why it doesn’t go their way. I have read many comments below that show how porn can be a great tool in a relationship but I worry how it is shaping people’s perception towards sex and women.

No, is the short answer. I have a few issues with Porn and the proliferation thereof, but just one is the way in which much porn portrays women – in positions (metaphorical and literal) of being controlled and humiliated – giving the perpetrator or the voyeur a feeling of “power”. Control, power and humiliation are also cited as the motivators for rape and other sexual abuses. On a completely personal level, I can’t imagine spending one iota of my “business time” watching actors (!?) banging away at it, when I could be going on a sensual and sexual journey myself, which involves mind, soul AND body, and can potentially be a way for us to “touch the sky”. Watching porn seems to me to be a poor substitute for that !!!

Finally, a question which I’d pose to people who consider porn to be totally “normal and acceptable”… “Would you be perfectly happy for your daughter (real or imagined) to be in porn movies?” For the vast majority of people the answer would be emphatically no… oddly, especially men. Then qualified by saying “yes, but my daughter is a good girl”. We create a schism between the sort of (esp) women who would potentially be in porn and those who we believe wouldn’t… ie: the ones we know and care about. Us and them. We seem to forget that all of those “actors” are people, that they have minds and souls as well – damaged souls I believe. Perhaps feeling some compassion for the people who are in porn movies (even if we believe them to be involved totally of their own free will) would be a good place to start. Then, to round out the question above… if you don’t want to perpetuate a world in which your children could potentially earn their living this way, then I’d suggest not supporting this industry, and not contributing to the “normalisation” of porn.