The Other Porn Land

In Pornlandia, relationships have a really particular failure mode: people get mad at each other for failing to live up to a sexual ideal.

In Pornlandia, there is no stigma against exposing kids to porn. Kids grow up watching it, and in fact people make kid-friendly porn with fun animations and simple shapes. It’s normal for teens to have photos of genitalia on their walls and rank their favorite pornstars and talk about getting laid as the only thing that matters. They might get up to silly hijinks like “installing hidden cameras in the locker room” or “pressuring each other into sex” - and people simply shake their head at teenagers being teens.

But as people grow older you really start to see the cracks show - people fall in love, and date, and marry, and find in most cases that the other person is not what they expected. They grew up on porn - watching two people in various degrees of ravenous for each other assuming every single position and deepthroating as far as the dicks can go. In Pornlandia, there’s not much of a distinction between porn and sex - people view porn as simply depictions of what sex is, or at the very least ought to be. And so people pressure themselves to live up to pornographic ideals, which they consider to be healthy and good - it shows two people in the throes of passion for each other, how could that not be good? They pressure their partners into the kind of sex they see in porn. If their partner is failing to fuck them in the way that porn makes them feel, then something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

You, suddenly cast into Pornlandia, might try to help them out: “You guys are just totally pornbrained. Porn totally warps your conceptions around sex and you need to be more careful.”

The local Pornlandian walking by vaguely shrugs. “Sure, it’s true a lot of sex lives don’t end up like that.” But he doesn’t seem too concerned.

“Okay, so don’t expose kids to it,” you say. “Or if you do, if you absolutely have to, you need super extra warnings that this is not real. You should have careful education around this.”

“I mean that seems a little excessive,” the Pornlandian says, pushing up his glasses in a way that somehow reminds you of hentai. “It’s pretty harmless for kids. Sure maybe we should tell them that real sex can get complicated, but everyone kinda figures that out anyway.”

You notice you’re stuttering-

“It’s not bad to be exposed to sex lives,” the Pornlandian native continues. “Sex is just part of life.”

“But it’s not real”, you say.

“Of course it’s real,” he seems confused. “They’re just banging each other right there, you can see it.”

“I mean that in real life people - usually women - don’t really like doing that stuff. They’re just acting like they’re into it in order to fulfill a fantasy. If people were really in touch with what they wanted, most people would not be doing most of that insane stuff you see them doing.”

“I dunno, my girlfriends seem super into it.”

“Probably because they think they have to be! Or because early in the relationship they were excited by the sex and willing to try anything because they had butterflies! But it’s just not sustainable.”

The man looks at you as though you are an alien. He cannot conceive of the worldview you are trying to communicate. “Sure most people have sex problems, but that’s just normal and totally unrelated to our copious porn consumption. Sex isn’t bad. We like sex. What, are you trying to say we should live in a world without sex? We should go around being like ‘ew sex is bad let’s ban it’? That sounds sad and you are a dullard.”

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Okay so hear me out: we’re all living in Romantica.

I think it’s pretty insane that we just expose kids to romance with zero safeguards. We literally go make them cute animated movies of people falling in love in simplified romantic ideals and go ‘here you go, kids, mainline this straight into your actively-forming brains. We are not going to provide any education or give you any warnings about this whatsoever.’

Teenagers getting absolutely possessed by the romance drive, where their will and identity is stripped from them and they are replaced with the Romance-Optimizing Egregore is something we look back and laugh on as funny. My friends have anecdotes from their youths like “I backread 3-5 years of all of their posts on every social media I can find after which I sent an email proposing marriage” and “I flew across the world to spend an extra two weeks with them even though we were going to see each other in two weeks anyway” and “I would set up surveillance on guys I liked, would hide to watch them and get friends to would gather intel for me, and then would pretend to like everything they liked”. After romantic failures, one friend “slashed a boys bike tires for wronging me and then another time scratched LIE into my arm while listening to “last resort” on repeat”.

If you find yourself laughing, please notice that these all involve quite a lot of stalking, deception, and intentional manipulation for the goal of experiencing romance, and if you simply swap out ‘romance’ with ‘sex’ the scenario seems much darker.

As people grow older you can really see the cracks start to show - people fall in love, date, marry, and find that in most cases the other person does not conform to the romantic ideal they have been fed. They grew up watching romance - two people in various degrees of ravenous for each other performing every possible act of fealty and gesture of symbolic affection. In Romancelandia, there’s not much of a distinction between romantic narratives and actual romance. People view romcoms and romantic dramas as simply depictions of what romance is, or at the very least ought to be.

And so people pressure themselves to live up to romantic ideals, which they consider to be healthy and good - it shows two people in the throes of limerence for each other, how could that not be good? They pressure their partners into the kind of romantic behavior they see in disney movies. If their partner is failing to romance them in the way that movies or romantic novels make them feel, then something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

If a man wants to cum on his girlfriend’s face because he saw it in porn, and she doesn’t feel like getting her face cummed on, we cheer go-girl and frown at the man for even watching porn at all. But if a woman wants her boyfriend to buy her flowers because she grew up being fed this action in movies, and her boyfriend doesn’t feel like it, we have no sympathy for him. We are horrified even at comparing the two things. It’s obvious to us that porn should not influence what happens in sex, but we have been so immersed in romance-porn that the idea of buying flowers for a woman is seen as what romance ought to be. The romance narrative has become romance, and rejecting the narrative becomes rejecting romance itself. We have lost the ability to distinguish!

To be clear, I like both porn and depictions of romance. They are drugs that mainline straight to the heart of our cute little primate bodies, and the ancients have been trying to get high on this stuff for millennia with vessels such as shakespeare or stone carvings of big bootied fertility goddesses. I am pro getting high; I like drugs, I am a hedonist, I think a flourishing life is one lived with as much infatuation and butterflies and engorged penises as we can possibly muster.

But they are still drugs, and like all drugs we need to handle them responsibly, and not literally feed them to children in hyper-attention-optimized media as soon as the kids are conscious enough. Disney has done significantly more damage to adult relationships than porn. I am personally okay with youths accessing both porn and disney, but I would feel uncomfortable without making sure they had access to warnings, and education about how to have good sex and good romance in a sustainable, healthy way.

Some people are lucky enough to find relationships that look like happily ever after. Some people find sex lives that look just like the front page of pornhub, where your girlfriend wants to do all the anal she can and your boyfriend wants to choke her out while doing it, and they’re both nymphomaniacs. The things we want sometimes do manifest beneath the fingers of the blessed, but most of us end up with lives much more complicated than this. We are probably not the ultimate fantasy for others, and we are not entitled to someone else fulfilling our own ultimate fantasy. That’s fine.

For most of us, our sex gets better when we stop comparing ourselves and our sex lives to what we’ve seen in porn. and our romantic lives get better if we can manage, somehow, against all our intense conditioning, to get the fairytale romances out of our heads. It’s better if we do not romantically objectify people we love. If you can have a happy sex life without ever cumming on a single face, then maybe you can have a happy romantic life without ever once setting a tablecloth and lighting candles, too.