Porn: The New American Pastime
First, they came for our reproductive rights. Now they’re coming for our arousal.
Sex and Style is written by Certified Sexologist and Somatic Sex Coach Sarah Ward. This is intended as general advice. If you’d like a personalized guidance, I’d be honored to connect in a discovery session.
Note: It is not my intention to tell you that you shouldn’t use porn, or that you should. Make the decisions that are right for you. This is part one of a larger series about porn.
Forget baseball. Porn is the great American pastime.
Now before you clutch your pearls or get your panties in a knot, let’s look at the numbers:
Every year 69% of American men (eyo!) and 40% of American women use online porn
In 2023, Pornhub reported more than 2 billion visits (yes, with a B) in a single month, and 42 billion hits annually.
As far as frequency goes, a little more than half of adults (57%) use porn 18-25 times a month. About a third of adults (29%) use porn more than 25 times a month.
Think about it:
What else do you do more than 20 times per month?
You know, besides eating and going to work?
Take this all with a grain of salt, because here’s the kicker:
Porn statistics are self-reported1, and since there’s a tremendous amount of shame around pornography usage, it’s likely more prevalent than we know.
Let’s look at the impact of porn:
You don’t learn to drive a car by watching The Fast and the Furious. This is a harmful initiation into sex for boys and adolescents — without seatbelts.
It becomes an unrealistic bar to measure against. Many people become self conscious of the size of their penis or labia after consuming porn.
Porn warps our ability to recognize real intimacy.
Porn is an accelerated, violent version of the real thing.
Porn can hook the developing brain before they even know what real pleasure feels like.
Porn is virtually unavoidable as a teenager in the west. About 92% of teenage boys are exposed and 64% of teenage girls. It hooks its claws into young minds that are still forming, so they don’t have the ability to see it as literal truth.
Several of my readers shared their experiences with porn:
“Porn for the developing mind can create unrealistic expectations. Once you have access to this unlimited spectrum of categories within porn… it becomes like a festering demon within that feeds this hypersexual part of one’s self, without true feeling or intention behind it.”
— Tealer
“Porn is very harmful and does not prepare you for actual sex at all.”
— Many Such Cases
Let’s compare porn to real life.
In porn:
Cocks are always gigantic, erect, throbbing and ready for sex.
Pussies are always hairless, ready, willing and wet.
No foreplay or consent conversations are required to engage in penetration.
Ecstatic orgasms and squirting happens in mere minutes.
We are turned on by things that we’re ashamed of and that we don’t even know how to say out loud.
In life:
Bodies don’t behave like machines.
In heteronormative terms:
Men aren’t always hard and ready for sex.
Women aren’t always willing and wet.
Cocks ebb and flow in their erections. It’s part of the process and to be expected.
Pussies take an average of 45 minutes to reach full engorgement (peak blood flow) for orgasm.
The vagina has a neat trick called tenting where it will extend and elongate to prepare to receive a penis, with the cervix cleverly tucking itself out of the way of the incoming penis or toy.
This is not an immediate process.
Conversations around consent are important to creating a safe context for sex to happen.
Foreplay helps to create desire and arousal for sex.
Real sex is messy, tender, awkward, and takes longer than we see in porn. When you consider the average attention span in the west, it makes sense that the cum shots come quick.
No wonder we think there’s something wrong with us. We’re measuring against a broken barometer.
I sat down with my sister wife recently and she was regaling me with stories of the stable of younger men that she had bedded. As someone with insatiable curiosity (and libido), she finds sex a way to really get to know someone on a deep personal level.
She noticed an interesting trend in her latest lovers: several were addicted to porn. And while they could fuck for hours, they couldn’t cum through intercourse. In fact, it felt too vulnerable somehow to come at all, even when she offered to perform blow jobs on them.
These men, she shared, are in sex addiction recovery programs and have therapists, so are involved in doing the work.
Is porn America’s favorite pastime? At the very least, porn is America’s favorite sin, and one that we keep coming back to.
Since sex is a topic steeped in shame, a leftover from our nations’ puritanical roots, a lot of people feel a tremendous amount of guilt and shame about their relationship to porn and the need to keep it hidden.
Last year, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Now, Project 20252 wants to ban porn, prosecute sex educators, and redefine pleasure as criminal.
First, they came for our reproductive rights.
Now they’re coming for our arousal.
As of last week, steps were taken towards this reality.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed a bill for a nationwide ban on pornography3. In his proposed bill, The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, or IODA for short, it would make obscenity easier to define — and prosecute. His definition of obscenity would include “actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate or gratify the sexual desires of a person.”
Hello, pornography. They’re coming for ya.
To the men who were silent when Roe v. Wade fell: you didn’t expect the war on body autonomy would come for you. But here it is — coming for your desire. For your late night Google searches. Your autonomy is in their sights.
This isn’t just about porn — this is about controlling sexuality, controlling our bodies and weaponizing shame. Because desire scares the state.
Friends, what happens when we divorce ourselves from our desires and send them underground? They have the potential to become even more deviant and distorted.
It isn’t like people’s hunger for sex goes away — this is a biological hunger, it will never disappear.
Before Roe v. Wade, it’s not like abortions didn’t happen. The dark days when desperate women sought out dangerous alternatives with coat hangers in back alleys that could be deadly.
During Prohibition when alcohol was outlawed in the 1920s, people still drank. People find a way to get what they crave and need.
🔥 Become a Sponsor of Sex & Style 🔥
If you’re this deep into the piece, chances are something’s resonating.
Sex and Style isn’t just a passion project — it’s my life’s work. I spend hundreds of hours crafting these essays, offering sex education that’s raw, real, and censorship-free — in a world where access to accurate information is disappearing fast.
If you’re finding value here, you’re invited to become a paid subscriber: $8/month or $80/year. (Psst — rates will rise in 2025, so now’s a good time to lock it in.)
Your support keeps these essays flowing so you, too, can stay in your flow.
As a paid subscriber, you’ll get:
✨ Exclusive eBooks like The Pleasure Manifesto and the Sexy Menu
🔥 Unzipped — steamy, true stories straight from the bedroom
💌 Intimate behind-the-scenes shares
❓ Submit a burning question to The Sarah Sutra
🔮 Somatic embodiment practices, rituals & live workshops and replays like MORgasm
❤️ The satisfaction of supporting a BIPOC woman doing her soul’s work
Click to join and keep this life-giving work alive. It means more than you know to have your support. Thank you for being here. ♥️
We have deep cultural wounds around sex. We are both allured and appalled by it. Rather than providing accurate sex education, we shame and scare young minds into submission.
Abstinence is still something that the US heavily relies on for sex ed. As of 2024, 29 US states still mandate that sex education stress abstinence — often at the expense of medically accurate, comprehensive information4.
But abstinence education is not the solution.
Abstinence-only sex ed leaves young people dangerously unprepared. In states where they lean on abstinence for sex ed, there are higher rates of unintended pregnancy and STIs compared to states with comprehensive sex education5.
Porn isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom.
In our puritanical society, the system punishes our pleasure — unless it’s profitable. If it can sell us pills, porn and expensive lingerie in order for us to feel turned on, they benefit. Pleasure that is sourced internally doesn’t need these tools.
The great machine doesn’t benefit from us being connected to our bodies, from being turned on and tuned it. It benefits from our compliance. Pleasure is a threat to control, because people that are turned on are harder to manipulate. Do you remember George Orwell’s book 1984? The dystopian novel had an Anti-Sex League.
So instead, it sanitizes and criminalizes sex. Shame is weaponized strategically. When we’re ashamed of our desires, we’re easier to control.
This is the battleground. First Roe v. Wade. Now porn.
This isn’t just about porn, it’s about our body sovereignty.
Does it matter to you to have the right to choose what to do with your body, in your sex life, and with your body autonomy?
“The erotic is a resource within each of us… firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. It is an assertion of the lifeforce.”
—audre lorde
Your sexual life force energy is the source of your personal power. Because systems of oppression can’t tolerate life force being fully expressed in technicolor, this, dear one, makes your pleasure political.
I want to hear from you. What comes up in you reading this? Has porn shaped your expectations of sex? Did it teach you something true, or something toxic? Drop a comment below.
Sex and Style is written by Certified Sexologist, Somatic Sex and Style Coach, Sarah Ward. She has spent the last 20 years studying human sexuality and minted it in 2021, certifying in the VITA™ Methodology with Layla Martin, and as an Erotic Blueprints™ Coach with Jaiya. For a personalized path to pleasure, schedule a free call with Sarah.
I’m so glad you’re here. If something about this resonated with you, please press the heart ♥️ button to help other people discover it, too. If this was supportive for you, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to keep posts like this coming.
Guttmacher Institute
Guttmacher Institute, Advocates for Youth
I found my father's Playboys when I was about 7 or 8... I started my period at 9 years old (in 1967!) so I think the pump was primed so to speak.
I've always enjoyed porn but I've also been acutely aware that it isn't real. That real sex isn't at all like porn. And as I've gotten older, I've been more bothered by the choking and hands around necks (mostly of women's necks) and slapping women's vulva than anything else. It screams misogyny to me.
And maybe I'm old but if I want to get slapped or choked, I would negotiate a BDSM scene and not just a "regular " sexual encounter.
I agree that porn can be harmful to younger minds - especially young men. I have no idea what the alternative should be these days but I have found that woman- made porn to be absent of the misogyny and hotter than anything mass- produced.
It's a double edged propaganda tool, which is ultimately blaming any industry, prostitution from Christian times and obviously previous in history, to blaming and shaming what is or was always a shady subject, when you really level the whole deal of description of pornigraphy, it's the same as heroin or prohibition or drugs, drive it underground and the black market is unregulated, it's governmental control and most porn are actors and professionals, who would knock the Hollywood Oscars into the shit they've created, accepting awards, while funded by subliminal targeted beliefs with backing from dubious funding, and they keep there clothes on while thanking God and shite 😉