I was always someone who had a strong opinion about anything and everything. If you were to ask me what I thought about gay marriage, or abortion, or gun laws, I had an opinion to share and held a strong stance. Yet, I remember quite vividly one day someone asking me, “do you think that porn kills love?” and I was stumped. Though I was, nor had ever been, a consumer of the porn industry, there were plenty of people in my life that had been affected by porn in some way or another. I had friends that faced grueling porn addictions and I had friends that watched porn every-now-and-then on lonely nights. Much like any other political issue, I found that there was no black and white—but this did not change the fact that I so desperately wanted to pick a side. Was it simply a way to get off? Or was it a tragic downhill slope into failed relationships, broken marriages, and a distorted perspectives of what sex really is supposed to be.
After making what was essentially a pros-cons list of porn, I wondered did others share this same confusion? This same uncertainty? In an attempt to gauge where my peers stood on the issue, I conducted some informal polling on my Twitter account, and also personally interviewed some close friends about their experience with porn. In my first poll, I decided to keep it general, the basic question, “Does Porn Kill Love?” Out of seventy-one people who took the survey, 59% of people agreed that it did. With that mind, I wondered if people’s opinions on the issue differ because of religious aspects. Was this simply a question between whether or not you agreed with the consumption of porn itself? In my second survey, I asked people to identity first, whether they were religious or not, and secondly whether or not they agreed if “Porn kills love.” Though, as I expected, the larger percentiles were “Religious: It does” and “Not religious: It doesn’t,” it was interesting to see that opinions on porn were not always correlative with religious affiliation.
Because porn is often an issue kept behind closed doors and cleared browser histories, I wanted to hear open and honest opinions on the matter. To get the widest range of opinions, I surveyed people from a wide age range and varying religious backgrounds. However, my personal interviews held similar results to the informal polls I had conducted. My religious peers were adamant that porn killed love, while my non-religious friend groups often said that porn could be something completely casual, and at times, even something that helped their sex lives. Though I had caught glimpses of either side of the issue in my own life experience, I wanted to completely delve into the dirty details of pornography.
In my first interview, Person A, age 20, who identified as Mormon, said that pornography created unrealistic expectations of sex and women. He stated that porn had the potential to completely distort what everyday sex would be like, and would leave users disappointed with normal women, normal positions, “normal” sex. Person A essentially believed that one could never be satisfied with their own sex life, when they were consumed by the sex lives of strangers behind a camera.
In my second interview, Person B, age 19, who identified as non-religious, said that porn was merely a sexual outlet. He even compared watching porn to watching a movie and said that the statement of “Porn kills love” was comparable to saying, “movies kill fun.” We don’t stop having fun in our everyday lives because movies depict glamorous, unrealistic ideals of what life is supposed to be like, so why should we expect that porn might ruin perfectly good sex? Person B believed that is completely possible that one can be an active porn user, all while being perfectly conscious that the sex they see on these Internet sites is unrealistic. Although I had wanted to get an inside look on the opinions of those who believed that porn did not kill love, finding individuals willing to open up about their experiences with pornography, posed to be a difficult task.
In my third brief interview, Person C, age 50, who also identified as religious, was a witness to the common critique of pornography: its holds the power and ability to destroy marriages. When I asked her if she thought porn killed love, she took a few moments to list off friends’ names whose porn addiction led to their own demise and their own divorces. She also shared a particular story in which a friend’s husband had dealt with quite a raging addiction to pornography. Because of this, this particular husband was constantly seeking out new sex positions, roleplaying, S&M, and even went as far as bringing his wife to a strip club to fulfill one of his porn-driven fantasies. Person C believed that Porn killed love because it was comparable to any drug, a constant search for the higher high. She was convinced that users of porn would be trapped in a never-ending desire for kinkier and kinkier sex until one’s sex life would read like a page from Cosmo’s “spicing up your sex-life” section.
Here I stand in the midst of a nationwide campaign broadcasting, “Porn kills love,” all while simultaneously living alongside men and women, who consume porn and maintain healthy relationships. Yet, I feel somehow more enlightened. I am not naïve enough to deny that there are people out there who can consume porn without forming an addiction, just like there are people out there who can sip at a beer and not end up in AA. But, still, I find myself with a newfound belief that porn completely blinds users to the true meaning of sex. I don’t believe that the act of sex plummeted to earth for the sole purpose of orgasm, sexy lingerie, and kinky sex positions. See the thing is, in these pornographic scenes, you don’t see the love behind it, but rather a nearly animalistic portrayal of sex completely centered on pleasure. Perhaps people have forgotten that sex is not about chains and whips, but is about the love that motivates such an act. After all, there is a reason people call it “making love.” Though, I am not going to pretend that boring old missionary sex will suffice for the rest of everyone’s lives, I believe it is important to realize that porn often has the tendency to take the love out of sex and manipulate it into a sort of game in which we strive for hyper-erotic intercourse.
Editor’s Note: All articles for Her Campus at the University of Utah are the opinions and beliefs of the writers and do not reflect Her Campus at the University of Utah, the University of Utah or Her Campus as an international magazine.