TRIGGER WARNING: This article features discussion around eating disorders and porn. Some names have been changed to protect the identity of the author.
I was 14 when I was first introduced to porn. My friends fell victim to its allure and I wanted to know why, but I had no care for sex, and so as quickly as porn appeared in my life, it disappeared. I later revisited the site but with a new perspective: what others use for self-pleasure, I would use as my personal textbook guide to what society deemed appealing.
Typing the website into my private browser felt criminal as the black screen and bright orange text flashed on my phone. I formed an obsession with analysing the bodies of female pornstars; using their modified bodies as ‘thinspo’ for what I wanted my underdeveloped teen body to look like. It wasn’t long before I found myself skipping meals and purging what little I had eaten, running laps around my house, and working my abs to exhaustion.
It’s not just porn. My Anorexia was an amalgamation of many traumatic life experiences I faced too early in life, long before I could handle them the right way. My intention is not to villainise it, but I can’t deny it played a strong role in why I cringed when anyone touched me. Why I showered with my eyes shut. And why, for a while, my parents couldn’t hug me.
Porn and its impossible body
The prevalence of supernormal stimuli in porn, as studied in a book by American author and psychologist Diedre Barrett, lends itself to the dissatisfaction of our own bodies. As a man-made stimulus on our base instinct, we find it very hard to resist.
Ian Baker, a sexual addiction and psychosexual therapist, says: “You’ve got what porn tunes into and what makes it better according to supernormal stimuli. They know what’s going to stimulate you the best and pull you in.
“The BMI preferences are 18.5 to 21, anything above that starts turning people off. Smooth skin, baby-like newborn face. The most beautiful face has to have a 70% character of a child, a baby face- large eyes, small nose, fuller lips, prominent cheekbones.”
My 20-year-old sister, Yasmine, grew up with the same influences as me, an emphasis on the need to have the perfect sexual body.
She says: “As teenagers, we want the attention of the opposite gender, to understand why they look at females the way they do. The need to be wanted and desired. It differs from social media because I saw the whole body and it made me insecure about body parts no one should be insecure about.”
Yas told me that she had cried during sex. That when she looked down and saw rolls form in her belly, she broke down. “I know for a fact pornstars don’t get rolls, they get into positions that make them attractive. I thought I’d never be good enough because I didn’t look like them.”
In my journey to become ‘desirable’, I developed a fear of sex; the idea of eyes and hands having access to all the parts of me I so fiercely grew to hate terrified me. During sex, my body was no longer my own. My actions would become purely performative to distract my partner from insecurities they never even knew existed.
In a past relationship, I starved myself in preparation for whenever I anticipated sex. Whatever progress I had made in my relationship with food became nullified the moment I felt that expectation. I grew to resent a man, who had never expressed anything but love for my body, with my own delusions.
Competing with a fantasy
Baker says: “It’s competition. A female would start looking at ‘well my vagina doesn’t look like that vagina’, then there’s a pressure of ‘oh I should have the perfect vagina because that’s what I’ve been watching’, which goes into getting your vagina surgically changed. Let alone, do my breasts look the right size compared to what’s out there? Do my hips look like how they should? That raises anxieties through the roof.”
Aya Hamid, 19, from Alberta, Canada, started regularly watching lesbian porn at the age of 11. With societal shame on women saying, ‘you shouldn’t be watching porn’, there aren’t the same amount of women coming through as there are men, even in lesbian porn which seems contradictory. And so, as a non-binary lesbian, they haven’t escaped the impossible standards of male preferences, namebly that attractive bodies must be hairless. They endured hours of the painful sugar waxing process. The results were satisfactory but short-lived.
Aya says: “Porn represents an ultra-performative version of a person. It’s so focused on the body and its ability to provide sexual gratification that it’s easy for it to present as dehumanising.
“It’s given me a warped view on what I’m meant to look like during sex. I often feel that I am performing for an audience, my body almost becomes a separate part of myself. I feel the desire to control every aspect of it, as if it was an animal to be tamed.”
Porn-ufactured Identity
‘Latina women must be curvy.’
A statement that Andrea De Jesus Pilonieta, 20, student at Reading University, has grown up constantly hearing. As a result of porn and peer pressure, she began to sexualise herself at the age of 14, criticising her body in doing so.
She says: “The stereotype of ‘oh you’re Latina so your ass is big’, I fit that stereotype and that became my only personality trait. I sexualised myself. That’s what I thought people wanted from me. I would wear really skinny, tight clothes so my ass would look bigger, I would stuff my bra so fucking much because thats what I thought was expected from me.”
The fetishisation of anything other than the western beauty standard has affected whole ethnic groups with illusions of identity and the pressure to conform.
She says: “My friend, she’s Colombian and she’s very skinny, the way she was viewed in high school was that she’s not Latina. Why? Because she doesn’t look like a stereotypical Latina even though she speaks better Spanish than me and she’s more Latina than I am but, because I look the part, I am more than her. Because of how it’s been painted, it makes me not feel pride.”
Opposing Porn’s power
Porn will never disappear, children will continue to watch and learn from it. To get such a powerful and influential industry to change is an impossible feat, but educating people on its effects will lessen its damage.
It would also be ignorant to ignore the progress females have made in porn.
Baker says: “Through the ongoing breakdown of social constructs, women are given more liberation from societal shame than ever to explore sexual freedom and fantasies. More openness of values and acceptance of people.”
Since leaving porn behind, I’ve come a long way in healing my mind and body. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop comparing myself to others, but I know that now I can tell the anorexic voice in my head to go fuck itself, you and porn no longer have power over me.
Expert Insight – Ian Baker
Ian Baker is a qualified sexual addiction and psychosexual therapist. Originally qualified as a counsellor and psychotherapist Baker went on to specialise in sex addiction therapy. In his practice Baker also has work focused on controlling sexual behaviours and the impact on partners of sex addicts.
