X-rated entertainment celebrates every adult size, shape, age, gender and sexuality – let’s stop blaming it for body shaming and cultural conformity.
It’s been a while – by which I mean a couple of months, not any time of actual significance – since I saw a hysterical newspaper article about porn and body image, but here we go again. Fiona Vera-Gray’s Guardian piece this week, which is essentially a promo piece for her book Women on Porn, manages to dive into all the cliches and untruths about how online adult entertainment is harming women – always women, never men; and always heterosexual women, who are a particularly delicate bunch it seems.
Things start interestingly in Vera-Gray’s piece, as she discusses how a Caribbean woman was taught never to discuss or touch her vulva – or ‘munchie’ as it was curiously called in her family (a name that brings up a lot of questions that we won’t go into here) – and how large proportions of the American British public are woefully ignorant about female genitalia. A terrible indictment of the sex education system and the influence of Christian sexual panic, you might think. The fact that female genitalia is hidden by hair and physicality keeps it buried, figuratively and literally, a thing of mystery and suspicion, only to be seen under exceptional circumstances by a select few – your husband, your gynaecologist – and even then, not to be discussed or explored. This, more than anything, has surely led to the fear and ignorance that still surrounds female sexuality.
You might think, then, that adult entertainment has played an important part in allowing women and men alike to discover the female body, understand its variety and form and show its functions and demystify its behaviour. In the absence of sex education that is more than perfunctory and medical, porn at least explores the pleasures of sexuality and normalises the variety of both desire and physical reaction. Yes, porn is a work of fiction and the scenarios therein need to be accepted and emphasised as such. But it also allows us to see physical reactions that we might otherwise never encounter or experience – or if we do, to think of as abnormal. Female ejaculation, for instance, is something that porn has presented as normal, acceptable and even desirable, even as more allegedly feminist organisations like the BBFC insisted that there was no such thing. Porn might not be the place to learn about sexual behaviour, but it is certainly where you can find all varieties of adult humanity presented as sexually desirable.
Vera-Gray doesn’t mention religion, social convention or anything else as an issue facing women. Rather, porn is the problem, not the solution, when it comes to body insecurity. As her book title suggests, this is based on interviews with one hundred women, The Guardian piece does not tell us who these women are or how they were selected for interview; perhaps the book does. certainly, they seem to trot out many of the anti-porn claims about the uniformity of the women you see on PornHub or wherever else. “The women that I see in pornography have a very specific look; they have these very fit bodies and these perfectly waxed vulvas” says one interviewee. “Most porn shows white women” comments another.
Now, back in the days of home video and feature production, there may have been a degree of truth to this. Only a degree, mind, but I’ll accept that there was a ‘porn star look’ in the mainstream films being made in Los Angeles and by major producers like Private. Even then, though, this was only part of the story and nowadays, it isn’t the story at all. Adult sites feature every variety of humanity – all races, all colours, all genders and sexualities. You can see MILFS and GILFs alongside the ‘barely legal’ teens. Pretty much every aspect of legal human desire is catered for. While one interviewee says “I find the mainstream stuff quite violent, gross and exploitative-looking”, she seems to be talking about bukkake, which is still somewhat niche; she might simply be discussing facial cum-shots though, and so her comments feel loaded and judgemental. Disliking a sexual act doesn’t mean that it is gross or – especially – violent.
The thing is that if something isn’t for you – if it doesn’t reflect your sexual tastes or your body image – then you can move on and easily find something else that will. The categories of the major porn sites are endless. Admittedly, you might struggle to find something that looks exactly like you. One woman comments “I have stretch marks and strawberry legs [follicles or blocked pores that appear as black dots]; discolouration all over my body. Even my vulva area is darker than the rest of my body.” The desire for representation of the minutest detail is probably unrealistic – but in truth, it is all out there. You’ll find stretch marks, skin discolourment, scars and more. But if you are watching porn to find affirmation of your own physical attractiveness, perhaps the problem isn’t with the porn at all. It’s easy to blame poor body image on porn but I can’t think of another medium that offers a wider variety of body types and presents them as sexually desirable. “I don’t want to be judging people who have had cosmetic surgery” says one interviewee who is clearly judging people who have had cosmetic surgery, “but most people’s bodies don’t look like they do in porn.” Well actually, yes they do. You’re just looking in the wrong places and perhaps that says something about what you find attractive.
But let’s get into the big, constant myth, the thing adult entertainment is blamed for again and again, which is right there in the article title: Everything is Hairless. I feel that I’ve written more about the pubic hair wars over the years than is strictly necessary, but here we go again. “Nobody has any pubic hair any more,” comments one interviewee, a doctor. “Pretty much everybody under 40 is waxed completely.”
The spread of waxing, shaving or other techniques of removing public hair has been blamed on porn for so long now that even if there was ever any truth to it, it must have long since stopped being a cause and more a sign of social convention. My memory of the spread of depilation is that it began to become the norm at some point in the 1990s and that adult movies and magazines followed, rather than caused the trend. Body grooming – for men as well as women – became a fashionable thing, which is why you also never see men with hairy chests any more. It’s something that rose alongside the trend for body art – piercings and tattoos – and is connected more to that fashion than it is to porn. Given that, despite claims to the contrary, there don’t seem to be any significant health issues related to the removal of pubic hair (certainly no more so than with armpit hair, which no one ever seems to have an issue with), I do wonder why people get so worked up about the removal of pubes, beyond the fact that it lays bare something that they instinctively feel should be hidden.
In any case, you’ll find endless amounts of public hair on the porn sites. You don’t even need to look for it – a surprising amount of younger performers have gone ‘full bush’ in the last decade or so, even Sasha Grey, porn’s last superstar. Complaining about porno depilation in 2024 is like believing that porn ‘tasches are still a thing.
There are probably many reasons for people having a negative body image – everything from teenage insecurity to celebrity culture, the shame-based nature of religion and social anxiety. Adult entertainment is easy to blame and a convenient scapegoat for groups that are looking for reasons to demonise adult entertainment and so fund dubious research to reach the desired conclusions based on loaded, shame-based questionnaires. No one is suggesting that porn should be seen as a guide to real-life sexuality – but to claim that it offers a narrow and artificial view of physical beauty is nonsense. The people making such claims should try broadening their search terms once in a while.
DAVID FLINT
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