An introduction to pornography and erotica
Sexually explicit material — for example magazines and films — is media that is intended to be sexually arousing. Sexually explicit material is often called pornography, but that name is associated with negative connotations.
Pornography is not very well-defined and means different things to different people. For some, sexually explicit material and pornography are synonymous. For others, pornography is a negative type of sexually explicit material and includes aspects that are dehumanizing or degrading.
Erotica can be considered the opposite of pornography in that it is sexually explicit material that is not dehumanizing or degrading. This is often considered more acceptable. For some, erotica invokes images of books such as Fifty Shades of Grey, which are not visual forms of sexually explicit material.
There are many different types of sexually explicit materials and multiple ways to access them. Access to them has significantly changed with the progression of technology.
Today, Internet porn is easily accessible and is often available for free 24/7 from anywhere that has an Internet connection. MindGeek’s top three free porn sites attract 100 million views and 488 million page views a day.This goes to show that online material is accessed pretty frequently.
While there are many genres of sexually explicit material, most of them are targeted towards males. They often focus on the sexual behaviour itself and have limited character development and foreplay.
Candida Royalle, a former porn film star, created Femme Productions to create sexually explicit material aimed at female desire and couples. Royalle’s videos have been praised by couples therapists due to their healthy and realistic nature.
These female-oriented videos are becoming more and more common among producers. They attempt to equalize power (instead of the traditionally male-dominated perspective) and tend to be from the women’s point of view.A study by Donald Mosher and Paula Maclan looked at identifying who benefits most from these videos. Males were aroused by both male-oriented videos and female-oriented videos. Females had more negative responses to male-oriented videos, but had a positive response and experienced sexual arousal from female-oriented videos.
Ultimately, you get to choose if you want to see sexually explicit material and what genre works for you.
Check out next week’s column for more information on who views sexually explicit material and why.
If you’d like a certain sex ed topic discussed, send your requests to tashafalconer@trentu.ca
Photo by Tasha Falconer