The Unreliable Guide To… Porn

By Nat Shepherd on July 1, 2019 in Satire

Don’t pretend you don’t know who she is, by Wayne Kerr.

Love it or loathe it, porn is big business. Last year it netted an estimated $138 billion – an incredible $4,300 per second. The website ‘Paint Bottle’ estimates that 30 per cent of all data transferred online is porn. That’s a lot of wanking, but is it doing us any harm? Surely porn is just entertainment? Many claim it prevents infidelity or enlivens sex lives that have lost their lustre. Mega porn stars like Jenna Jameson earn big bucks – her personal fortune is estimated at A$42 million. So what’s the problem with porn? The Unreliable Guide has been doing some research on your behalf (ahem) and the results were surprising.

Porn can permanently rewire your brain
Columbia University researcher, Dr. Norman Doidge, has found that porn triggers the release of chemicals that can make lasting changes to your brain. For years scientists believed only ingested substances such as cocaine, coffee, heroin, etc. could cause addiction, but now we know that online entertainment like gambling, gaming, surfing and social networking can do the same. Bad enough, but according to the director of the United States’ National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Dr. Nora Volkow, porn has the strongest addictive tendency of all these online habits. Why? It’s porn’s ability to imitate real sex, a function vital to the survival of the species, that enables it to hijack the brain’s reward pathways and flood your brain with intense levels of dopamine. When the brain tries to defend itself by releasing another chemical that slows the pleasure response, addicts must seek more and more of their drug to get the same high. For junkies that’s more dope, for porn addicts it means harder and more extreme porn.

Porn is bad for your sex-life
Assuming you manage not to develop or induce crippling low self-esteem by expecting you and your partner to look and perform like porn stars, porn helps bring back the fizz into a flagging sex life, right? Not necessarily. Due to those unnatural levels of dopamine, research shows that those who make frequent use of pornography have brains that are less active, less connected and actually smaller in some areas. Porn can physically and psychologically programme you to prefer sex with your laptop instead of a real life human being. No wonder it’s such a growth industry.

Porn is unrealistic
Most men don’t have twelve inch cocks and the lady garden was not designed for more than one caller at a time; porn suggests that such things are not only normal but that they are easy to achieve. And teenagers are buying into that fantasy. Porn creates the illusion that the sexual Olympics are achieved instantaneously. They omit the hours of preparation, the injections, the lubrications and manipulations that take place off camera before the show begins. And even the professionals get it wrong. Some male performers permanently damage their dicks through excessive injections of erectile drugs. Female porn actresses required to accommodate multifarious simultaneous nobs and objects into unexpected places can suffer terrible internal damage. But hey, that’s off camera so don’t worry about it. Just don’t try it at home, kids.

Porn star or sex slave?
Porn, like food, is not always free range and organic. Some porn stars, like Jenna Jameson, make a great deal of money, but watch the US sex industry’s AVN awards, the ‘Oscars of Porn’, and it would appear as if everyone doing the dirty on camera ends up walking down the red carpet to fame and fortune. Not true. Many porn actors and actresses are poorly paid and would much rather be doing something else. Some are conned into it with offers of real acting work. Some aren’t even there willingly but are victims of sex trafficking. Sexy huh?

Finally, The Unreliable Guide suggests that if you find yourself booking a dirty weekend for you and your laptop it might be time to rethink. Porn is for wankers.