Porn is generally quite fake and it has almost nothing to do with the amount of kink involved. The most obvious "tells" are the poses which are used for their telegenic qualities above all else. Also notable are the buildup times, which are routinely trimmed to a minimum.
It's not just the pizza delivery story lines. Almost everything about porn is fake.
The settings are fake, the lighting is fake, the actors' physical appearance is fake (make-up, post-processing, etc.), the emotions are fake. Often the actors lie about their age, their sexual experience, etc.
Someone on 4chan, a forum with many devoted experts on porn, said that most of the big penises are fake (i.e., prosthetics), too. (No one further down the thread contested the assertion).
Agreed. And most porn is not even made to resemble reality, like sex scenes in most other movies usually are. It's crudely, unabashedly fake.
I don't understand your comments vis-à-vis Cindy Gallop's views. Her position, which I gather from her TED talk, is that it's increasingly easy to get access to hardcore pornography, which gets more people to believe that what happens in hardcore pornography is the way to have sex. Moreover, we live in a puritanical society where parents and schools don't talk with children about sex. As a result, she believes that hard-core pornography has become de-facto sex education.
As a specific example, many of the 20-year-olds she has had sex with believe that coming on a woman's face is part of normal sex. She's fine with telling them that she does not want that. Her concern is that a young woman who does not want that, but where her boyfriend does, and where "hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women's faces, that all women love having their faces come on, and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it."
She explicitly states that this is not a good and bad sex view, and indeed asserts that sex "embraces the vastest possible range of proclivities." Instead, she says that hardcore porn presents a "one-world view" and she wants to say "not necessarily."
Which means that no, porn is "not real" in that regard. The "makelovenotwar.com" site has examples of "porn world", where women have no pubic hair, and "real world", where some do, some don't, some men actually prefer women with hair, and it's a personal choice. In "porn world", "women come all the time ins positions where nothing is going on anywhere near the clit." In "real world", there needs to be something. In porn world, "all women love anal sex." In the real world, a lot of women are not. In the porn world, camera angles are important. In the real world, one of the pleasures of sex is the full body skin-on-skin contact - which would make it hard for the camera. And so on.
(Yes, porn is vast, and there are niches with all of these examples. That's not part of mainstream porn.)
So yes, the sex shown in hardcore porn is real sex. But so is a lot of other things which makes for great sex but boring porn. Do you really want to watch the foreplay of a couple, naked but under a warm blanket, talking about how their day went or the frustrations at work while enjoying the nearness of each other? And then stopping for a moment to look something up in the dictionary? No, no more than you want to watch video of most real families going about their lives.
There are many other ways to learn how families work than by watching TV. Where does one learn about how sex - and I of course mean more than the mechanics - works? Her argument seems to be that porn is not diverse enough, and that instead viewers are channeled into a certain set of ideas of what sex is.
This is nothing to do with kinky. This is nothing to do with boring sex. Hence I don't see how any of your comments apply.
But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?
It's different from real sex because many of the things done in porn are done more because they look good on camera than because they actually feel good. Traditional and boring as it might be, missionary feels nice. It's uncommon in porn because you can't see the girl.
It's a lot like the relationship between stage fighting and real combat. A spinning jump kick to the face looks really cool, but a rabbit punch is far more likely to end a fight.
But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?
This question highlights the worst effect porn has on male understanding and perception of sexual intercourse.
First of all, there's very little porn out there where the woman truly enjoys the experience. It's not always glaringly obvious (although we'll get back to that in the next point), but if you actually stop and look, you'll see the discomfort and/or indifference very often.
Second, a lot of porn out there focuses on and glorifies the woman's suffering, pain and degradation. Seriously, you only have to read the word "painal" once to realize that. However, if that's not enough, you might also look for the occurrences of "choke", "gag", "destroy", "slut", etc.
Third, even the porn that doesn't focus on pain teaches wrong stuff. One might get the idea that the only thing a man need do to make a woman enjoy sex is to pound her fast and hard. On top of that comes the whole issue of hygiene: the way anal is portrayed means that if you try it at home, your female partner will likely end up with an infection.
Fourth, it creates unrealistic expectations. Let's just say that gag reflex is not as easy to suppress as the porn makes you believe and that anal sex is not a matter of just sliding in any time you want.
TL;DR: No, it's not just about whether the sex if fun or boring.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that I'm male.
I'm loathe to write about this topic because it's so easy to be misconstrued if you have a nuanced view. Even the dialog about it can get rather scripted and dull. But I think you probably also have a nuanced view, and I just couldn't let go.
Women's enjoyment is not a real problem with porn, for several reasons. First, they're not the target demographic. Second, it's easy to fool people who want to be fooled and that's exactly the market here—there's not much tangible benefit to better acting. Third, this is just a job. I don't experience constant ecstasy at my occupation even though I clearly have the right one and I do enjoy it a lot. I think expecting someone to perform these kinds of acrobatics with a smile on their face is about the most you can expect. It would be ridiculous to imagine that they're literally orgasming from 8 AM to 5 PM just because they work in porn. They're called actors for a reason.
Second, you get what you search for. Really. Why would the industry care what kind of customer you are? They're not somehow going to make more money on people that like harder stuff; they have nothing to gain from incentivizing it. If they can shoot a woman fake masturbating for an hour and sell that for $20, of course they'd rather do that than have to shoot a bunch of actors all having really acrobatic sex for an hour and sell that for $20. On top of that, the weirder it gets the more expensive the actors are going to be, because fewer of them will have the capability or be willing to do weird things. This is just a job. I would expect acting in the kinds of things fewer people want to act in pays better, and that's overhead.
Third, it's entertainment. It doesn't need to teach. In fact, you can find plenty of material intended for teaching—it's consistently underviewed, because this is an entertainment medium and tutorials aren't great entertainment. Are these people who are fooled into thinking reality will be just like it is portrayed here also under the impression that hacking involves drag-and-drop green cubes, and CSI is all magic computers? Entertainment is entertaining to a large degree because it removes unnecessary details and focuses on the visceral. I would hate to live in a world in which all my entertainment had to be realistic.
Same thing for item 4, unrealistic expectations. This is an accusation you can levy at all forms of entertainment. Expecting your sex life to be like porn is just as stupid as expecting your career to be like the movies or your family to be like 50's TV. Who's that naive?
TL;DR: Porn is a product, porn actors are paid to act, realism oughtn't be mandated in entertainment and that the naive will believe anything is not a problem that can be solved.
But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?
This is a bit like asking if Hollywood hacking is really that much different from real hacking. Real sex is exciting to the participants -- if done right, more exciting than porn sex -- but that excitement doesn't show up well when the act is filmed, so porn producers have settled on a series of tropes intended to make it exciting to the (predominantly male) audience. So there is lots of emphasis on body parts moving against and within each other, and the event of male ejaculation. To allow the camera a good view, porn actors fuck in positions that would be fatiguing if used regularly by people of ordinary fitness levels.
For most people, real sex involves a lot of kissing and fondling non-genital, non-breast body parts. (Sometimes biting, smacking, or pinching if you are kinky.) They may be seated or reclining, next to each other or one atop the other, for long periods of time with relatively little movement. Bringing a woman to orgasm is especially tricky: some can cum in 15 seconds while others require long and careful attention. Some have physical needs which change with time; I recall one girl who preferred a bit of roughness early in play and a gentler touch later on. When she does cum, a woman may scream and holler, moan quietly, or not at all; sometimes the only clue she gives you is holding you tighter, or an involuntary twitch of the hips that can be felt more than seen. Joe Six Pack stroking it at home doesn't want to see that shit, he just want bang bang bang. And that's what porn delivers, but imho it's the easiest and most boring part of a sexual relationship (whether committed or not).
>But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?
Oy vey, you're constructing a spectrum with "porn" on one end and "boring" on the other. I strongly (strongly!) disagree with that sort of assumption about sex--- getting naked with a partner who you're excited about and is excited about you can be so damn varied, and spontaneous, and goofy, and expressive, and...well, just all around great. Porn, on the other hand, is generally bound by some weird and arbitrary genre conventions. If you were having sex as contrived and indifferent as you see in a movie, you'd probably get bored!