Website fights porn with nice, normal sex

There is a US woman who has set up a website encouraging couples to upload videos of themselves having nice, normal sex. The website, MakeLoveNotPorn.com, aims to neutralise the millions of hard-core images available to anyone with access to the internet and remind us what nice, normal sex looks like.

Accompanying these videos are statements referring to what men like doing to women's faces in the "porn world" versus "real world'': "Some women like this, some women don't. Some guys like to do this, some guys don't. Entirely up to personal choice."

She has a point. Not to negate how damaging hard-core porn can be to the malleable psyche of a prepubescent boy, but it is not the only issue.

The sexualisation of young girls through questionable fashion gets a regular bashing - and quite rightly too. Social networking sites and smartphones are encouraging children barely into their teens to share "sexy" photos.

All wrong. Non-negotiably so. But what about the grown-ups?

The prevalence of porn is such that when scientists at the University of Montreal, Canada, launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography, they could not find any.

And what we watch influences our actions. If what we watch is compelling enough we want to emulate it. There is a whole industry built around that fact - it is called advertising. So even educated, experienced, intelligent people who watch porn enough will have a skewed view of what is normal.

So-called pornification is not necessarily a bad thing. Broadened horizons, when accompanied by communication, are positive.

But the testimonials on MakeLoveNotPorn.com are predominantly negative.

A young woman wrote that she "found it so strange the things [men in their 20s] believed".

As MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop put it: "Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of tastes. Everyone should be free to make up their own mind about what they do and don't like."

Of course, porn has been around ad infinitum, but it is the sheer volume available on the internet that is dangerous.

A 32-year-old woman wrote: "I have come to realise that lots of men struggle to be turned on by actual intimacy with a real person, having so few examples to emulate in port films."

For most people, porn is a bit of mindless escapism. A male friend argued that to say that watching porn is changing a generation's view on intimacy and "normal" relationships is akin to suggesting that watching the Twilight series means you will be checking the shadows for werewolves.

But the testimonials stand. Porn is not a bad thing, but letting fantasy impact your reality is. - ©The Daily Telegraph, London