Is Porn Misleading Men? | Hacker News Reader

Is Porn Misleading Men?

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  What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Of course a fantasy of an impossibly hospitable world is misleading. Yes if you spend too much time there the ordinary world will become less appealing. Sure some people will confuse them. Same for any utopia.

But most porn isn’t really an utopia. I think the article is entirely missing why porn is bad.

It’s not about the acts portrayed. It’s that what most porn performers do is just bad sex. How could it be otherwise? It’s made to be tapped and consumed in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Make better porn then. How else are guys going to learn about sex? Definitely not from trading stories among themselves. Sex ed in schools is all about pregnancy and STDs, not practical pleasure. For parents, practical advice is basically taboo.

The article says the opposite of what you're assuming.

Sex is one of those things that's best learnt by doing. Half the fun is in the learning, after all.

That being said: sex education is an absolute mess. I imagine that this is mostly because when people start getting interested in sex, society typically thinks they're too young to be having sex, let alone getting any pleasure out of it. And so we (barely) educate on things like puberty, reproductive organs, and STDs, but to my knowledge we never educate young people on sexual pleasure. Would that be awkward? Probably.

By and large, anything related to sexual pleasure is accompanied by poorly drawn cartoons, by heavily censored imagery, or by fully clothed people simulating sex. This is, in my opinion, idiotic. Probably caused by the prudeness of advertisers and payment processors ...

However, there are some good resources which include graphic content. OMGYes comes to mind, as do Nina Hartley's sex education videos. But it would be nice if we could get more quality content in this space - and break a few taboos in the process.

Learning by doing is the best, of course, but 1:1 instruction with another naif is not best way to learn.

Depends on what you're optimizing for. I imagine most people who are in standard 2-people relationships want to be good at pleasuring their partner and themselves. They're not aiming for a gold medal in the sex olympics.

Yes, and depleting our dopamine.

tldr: Men who watched porn more frequently were slightly more accurate in their predictions about what women liked

... From a pool of respondents who follow this internet personality. She acknowledges that only 10% of her followers identify as women and may respond differently than their cohorts.

Yea, this is how I interpret the results.

'Men who watch porn self-identify as "knowing what women like"'. Quite a different insight.

The article compares men's predictions of women's preferences to women's stated preferences. They didn't ask men if they were good at predicting.

How could this support your interpretation?

I’m skeptical that people surveyed are being honest about their gender in the survey.

Tbf though looking closer it does appear that there’s a similar result in the paid responses as well so I might be being far too cynical.

However getting some paid responses and comparing them to the other respondents is surprisingly good methodology for a blog post. And I think it does show that while the results weren't identical they weren't wildly skewed either

That is incorrect. She got the same results from both her followers and from spending $1057 on Positly surveying people who are not her followers.

Sometimes people are right on the internet.

Also men are actually pretty good at predicting what women (in aggregate) like but are bit too conservative (the women are a bit freakier than predicted by men). And men slightly underestimate the change in preferences with age

Cindy Gallop begs to differ; she delivered the "no, I do not want you to come on my face" Ted Talk (Make Love Not Porn) https://blog.ted.com/cindy_gallop_ma/

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