Lee Suckling: How porn is impacting your sex life

A new study has uncovered exactly what sex acts are being portrayed in porn, and how they compare to real life. Photo / 123rf

COMMENT:

Warning: This article contains sexually explicit content intended for an adult audience.

The sex acts depicted in porn are vastly different from what we do in real life. We should know this in theory, but the blurred lines between professional and amateur porn on the internet makes an impact on what we think must be happening in others' bedrooms.

For millennials, most of us have had online access to pornography since our teen years (or younger). I think we all remember waiting for our parents to go to sleep so we could power-up the family PC and see what naked bodies were out there.

This has shaped our views on sex and has come with many negative consequences – such as thinking certain dangerous moves are expected behaviour.

A new study by UK online doctor and pharmacy service Dr Felix has uncovered exactly what sex acts are being portrayed in porn, and how they compare to real life. Not surprisingly, people are, shall we say, a little more conservative in reality.

The main thing women are really doing at home, you ask? Vaginal sex. It's what 92 per cent of real-world heterosexual sex contains.

Oral sex features high in the real-life sex lives of regular people. Eighty-five per cent of women receive oral sex during an average session with a partner and 83 per cent will give it. The other things that make the top 10 for actual couples are wearing sexy underwear (75 per cent do it), mutual masturbation (53 per cent), sex in public (43 per cent), anal sex (37 per cent), spanking (34 per cent), bondage (21 per cent), and role play (22 per cent).

The difficulty with our society's love for porn is that it can be challenging to remain steadfast in your own sexual mastery. Every time you jump online you are essentially told, through the imagery you find, "you're a prude!" As if you should be more experimental, less vanilla, and that your own sex life is boring.

This is particularly problematic in relation to an observation noted earlier: it's hard to tell the difference between professional and amateur porn anymore. We have historically been told that porn stars are actors, and everything they do is a show.

But porn, these days, is grainy Snapchats and iPhone videos. It's dull-lit rooms and self-timer cameras. Amateur sex tapes (as we once would have called them) dominate the main websites like Pornhub, making it impossible to know how rehearsed or "put on" any sex act really is anymore. Anyone is a porn star if they want to be nowadays.

Porn can help us explore our sexuality, try new things, and find previously unknown fetishes. But while it has its downsides too, it certainly isn't going anywhere. Pornography is going to remain accessible (and probably free) for many generations to come.

For us to not feel so puritan (and feel the need to change our own sex lives too dramatically), I suppose the only way forward is to approach ALL porn as fake. You don't have to be an actor to put on an act. Nobody is filming their "boring" missionary sex, but that doesn't mean they're not having it. Treat porn like we treat social media – a curated, edited, filtered version of reality – and you can perhaps stop feeling so straight-laced because of what you're NOT doing in bed.