The following article was written with the intention of being published in The Age. When they declined to print it, it was provided to the Witness instead. Please be warned: This article and the original article it responds to contain explicit sexual language.

Thanks Bettina, But Don’t
Swallow the Porn

by Rev Nathan Nettleton

I am usually a fan of Bettina Arndt’s writings. She is one of the few female commentators who really gets male sexuality. Like many men, I read her books and articles and find myself repeatedly wanting to cheer out loud: Yes. That’s exactly what it is like for us. Thank God someone understands and doesn’t condemn masculine sexual appetites.

But when I read Porn is not a dirty word (The Sunday Age, 16th October 2011, accessible at: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/porn-is-not-a-dirty-word-20111015-1lqqe.html#ixzz1b0L0Szih), I began to wonder whether she had crossed an important line and just become an uncritical apologist for everything men do in the name of sex. Like some of her opponents, she seems to want to treat it as all good or all bad, and unfortunately such a simplistic approach won’t help any of us negotiate our way through the realities were facing.

I need to preface my response by saying that I probably don’t fit the stereotypes of my vocation. I’m a twice-married heterosexual Baptist pastor and marriage celebrant who supports same-sex marriage and is happy to admit that I enjoy watching well-filmed erotica. But the world of porn is increasingly complex, and the corrosive side of the story can’t be dismissed quite as lightly as Bettina Arndt’s article tries to do.

Much of the problem in this debate centres on questions of how the regular consumption of porn affects the sexual attitudes and expectations of we men who consume it. In the main thrust of Bettina Arndt’s argument she states that the suggestion that porn changes men's attitudes to sex is really questionable. But just three paragraphs earlier she had said, I've talked to men who cut back on their porn viewing when they felt it was distorting their feelings about normal sex, and just a few paragraphs later she says that porn has helped to change attitudes to oral sex and porn is giving men new ideas about sex and that can cause tension in relationships.

The example she uses to illustrate this last point perhaps takes us to the crux of the issue. She quotes James who was jolted to the realisation that ejaculating on a woman’s face is not nearly as popular in real life as it is in the porn movies. Here is a man whose sexual expectations had been shaped by porn in such a way that he initially saw nothing wrong with a practice that many women experience as inappropriate, disrespectful, unpleasant, and probably somewhat degrading. Arndt accepts that their distaste is at least unsurprising.

So despite her assertions that ordinary mainstream porn doesn’t distort men’s expectations of real-life sex, here she is providing an example where something that is common in porn is clearly doing just that. And one thing we can be certain about is that James interest in the money shot was cultivated through watching porn. Pulling out just before the moment of ejaculation and finishing the job with your own hand, the way it is usually depicted in porn, significantly diminishes the physical intensity of a man’s orgasm. I remember Billy Connolly during one of his Australian tours making fun of Catholic priests advocating the withdrawal method as contraception, and saying, personally, at the moment of ejaculation, a team of wild horses couldn’t get me to pull out. Id love to hear Connolly waxing lyrical on how porn has now managed to make men think that the very same self-defeating absurdity might be a fun idea!

Unfortunately, this issue doesn’t stop with the money shot. Although Arndt argues that most men do not have a taste for the more misogynist and violent pornography, she notes that the internet is a sexual smorgasbord and observes groups of young men all able to discuss the latest online girl shagged by donkey type video. It seems consumption of the nasty stuff might be higher than she wants to admit.

Possibly there is a difference here. The consumption of some of the extreme stuff may not be motivated by sexual desire so much as by a kind of freak-show curiosity with witnessing the extreme and the gross. But the consumption creates a market and so contributes directly to the perpetration of abuse.

It is probably true that most men wont develop an appetite for bestiality, but what happens when we regularly view things in the money shot league: just a little bit beyond the edge of our normal sense of what is loving and respectful? Surely we are in danger of gradually and almost imperceptibly distorting our perceptions of what is normal and acceptable, and perhaps imaginable and attainable.

Arndt dismisses the argument that porn turns men off real life sex, but the real issue is not so much that it turns them off, but that it distorts their expectations their satisfaction threshold and so diminishes their capacity to fully enjoy real life sex. Our enjoyment of most things is directly affected by our expectations. When something exceeds expectations, we are ecstatic. When something is okay but not as exciting as we were hoping, our enjoyment is tainted by disappointment. Porn sets us up for disappointment in the real world while promising that greater fulfilment is just a few clicks away in the virtual world. This is no surprise since porn is a commercial product (either purchased or paid for by advertising), and like most commercial products its main purpose is not to help us find fulfilment elsewhere, but to keep us coming back for more of the product.

Although porn has been around for centuries, it is only the recent advent of the Internet that it has made an endless supply accessible enough to become regular fare for a large percentage of men. Some things only become toxic when consumed in excess, and some of Arndt’s opinions about porn’s harmlessness may be rapidly becoming out of date. It certainly seems that the designers of internet porn sites went to the same schools as the poker machine programmers, because they know just how much to give us to keep us imagining that if we just take it to the next level, all our dreams will come true.

So, Bettina, I remain truly grateful to you for understanding how we men are wired and for continuing to speak out against the widespread tendency to treat male sexual appetites as a hideous deformity that we should have evolved out of by now. But please, don’t become such an enthusiastic cheerleader that you give us licence to mindlessly indulge every appetite without keeping at least half an eye on our long-term sexual wellbeing.

Rev Nathan Nettleton is the Pastor of South Yarra Community Baptist Church.