Sensationalized Sex

As I was looking for a topic to write this blog post on, I stumbled across an interesting article in Men's Health. It was talking about the effects of Porn on the brain, told from the perspective of a sex researcher and writer. She had many interesting points throughout the article, one being that are brains are constantly rewiring, and that can lead to pornography having almost the same effect on the brain as drugs: they are both pleasurable and cause a rapid increase in dopamine in the brain. It also talks about how men's neurological responses to pornography are much stronger than for women because it "suits men's sexual interests much more" (Men's Health, 2012). This is because "the erotic depictions imitate the casual sex men crave, but without the threat of disease of unwanted pregnancy" (Men's Health, 2012).

I got about halfway through the article when I started noticing the ads for other Men's Health articles on the side panel. Here is a taste of some of them:

                       

I realized that a lot of these articles are geared towards men. I know it is Men's Health magazine, but I started to think about how casual sex is sensationalized for men more prevalently than it is for women. How does this affect real-world sexual relationships and not just one-sided relationships in front of a screen? It was proven that "men who were exposed to Playboy-type centerfolds found their partners less sexually attractive and rated themselves as less in love with them" (Peter & Valkenburg, 2009). In addition, "men who had watched a sexually explicit video featuring beautiful women were less satisfied with their (female) partners’ bodies" (Peter & Valkenburg, 2009). Sensationalized sex in the media leads to an unrealistic expectation for sex and sexual partners appearances in real life.

I decided to talk to some of my friends and do some digging about if they think porn affects women the same way that it does men. After talking to a couple people and reading some articles, I came to a few consensuses. One, women are taught by society to compare themselves to other women. By watching porn, the people I talked to said that it actually would lower their self-esteem because they would be comparing themselves to a hyper-sexualized woman, and how are they supposed to compare to that in the bedroom? Another thing I noticed while reading the articles was that most women are aroused more inside the mind then by visually watching something, which is why books like Fifty Shades of Grey are so popular. In cases like this, the visual is left to what the reader wants to picture, and they have insight to what the main character was thinking. Overall, I generalized that for women, it's more about the relationship than about the sex. Pornography is focused on sex without the relationship.

Although all of these things may not apply to ALL men, or ALL women, it is interesting to think about the sensationalized sex in the media, since it is everywhere, and how that affects both men and women similarly and differently. 

References:

Is Porn Harmful? (2012, October 16). Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/porn-debate?fullpage=true

Peter, J. & Valkenburg, P. M. (2009). Adolescents' exposure to sexually explicit Internet material and sexual satisfaction: A longitudinal study. Human Communication Research, 35(2), 171-194.