Porn has become a commonplace part of many people's lives. Some people love it and use it as a part of their sex lives; others use it almost exclusively as their "sexual" outlet. Some people don't use it (or approve of it) at all, of course. The people who don't approve of it come from a number of angles, but I want to focus on straight porn as commodification (treating humans as saleable goods), objectification (treating humans as non-human "entertainment"), alienation (emotional detachment from what one is doing in the physical world [in this case masturbating or using porn as a sex aid]), and misogyny (a strong word, but being used here as a shorthand for "treating women differently as humans than we treat men, as secondary or subordinate"). Another thing that troubles me about porn is simply that it is another example of the Society of the Spectacle, the replacement of lived interaction, participation, and creation with the isolated passive consumption of dead media.
Critics of pornography worry that the vast majority of it intended for straight men degrades women, largely ignores what is interesting and exciting in their sexualities, and reinforces a cultural norm in which men are on top and women are submissive, men are consumers and women are consumed. As mentioned, a worry is that sex with robots or AI simulations is essentially a kind of porn, and will only lead men to expect even more servility from their human female partners and to have even less interest in what their partners want - further normalization of heterosexist double-standards, in other words, and further strengthening of an unequal gender binary. Further disconnection between men and women, of which there are some indications in the contemporary world. In a 2012 conference paper, Sinziana Gutiu reminds us - the mantra of this course - that "Technology profoundly affects the way humans interact with each other, especially in the most intimate spheres of life." Her paper imagines at painful length
how male interactions with female sexbots will erode the notion of consent by dehumanizing sex and intimacy in male-female relationships ... sex robots foster antisocial behaviour in users and promote the idea that women are ever-consenting beings, leading to diminished consent in [real-life] male-female sexual interaction. (Ginzu 2012, 1)
As I keep mentioning, some would argue that pornography and even virtual sex play and sex with robots are "obviously" distinct from having sex with a real present human partner and that almost everyone can tell the difference. As with violent video games, what we do in games doesn't lead to us behaving diffferently in real life, and that these virtual experiences don't actually shape our embodied attitudes and behaviours but are just harmless fantasy play.
It seems worth recalling here, however, what the idea of hyperreality implies - a blurring of the distintion between real and fictional, real and imaginary, real and simulated, real and mediated. Real here means embodied, and being involved with other people and the rest of nature. If there is one form of media that focuses a discussion of hyperreality usefully, it is probably pornography. Straight video pornography is clearly both real and not real in a very hyperreal way. The people on screen are really "having sex" and yet the whole thing is performed, partly scripted, and represesentational - in other words, a "simulation" - even if it was also physically "real." It is hyperreal in the worrying further sense: a "copy" of something that is not originally real, and yet that people then copy themselves in their real sex - or try to, perhaps with frustration and feelings of inadequacy, perhaps sometimes fairly successfully, turning themselves into porn performers for an audience of - themselves.
Many critics are concerned about the easy access young people have to pornography today thanks to the Internet, and how that is shaping sex in their lives. When I was an adolescent I saw zero video pornography, and it was difficult and mostly considered shameful even to look at "dirty magazines." I'm not claiming that this made us better or worse; I'm just pointing out how much the world has changed, partly because of technology (and partly because of shifts in social mores). We could definitely have used more sex education. Our first experiences of sex tended to be real, not hyperreal or virtual, though obviously what we did was influenced by the hints in movies, descripitions in books, and what our more experienced friends told us about it.
Can porn be educational in a positive way? (And by extension, could this be true even of sex with robots?) Seeing other people "having sex" on video can be useful for understanding something about what real sex can be like. It can give couples new ideas to explore, and for many people, of course, it is a turn-on and can be used in conjunction with real live sex. Sexologists are starting to find that for some the hyperreal Spectacle of porn has actually become a necessary part of real embodied sex with a partner. Having sex while watching people have sex on video. When I was young, we might imagine fantasies about the person we were having sex with and ourselves, or occasionally dress up and act out scenarios, but most of us had no experience of watching professionals have sex while we were having our own. I've still rarely done that. For some people, it is apparently now standard.
Critics of pornography as it exists today obviously think it can lead to unhealthy outcomes. I'm not talking here about "sex-negative" critics (religious people, or those who think that sex out of wedlock is immoral or that all sex is evil (if such people still exist today)), but more about the worries of feminists, psychologists, sociologists, and cultural critics like myself.
To repeat: the majority of pornography available today is made by and for straight males, and most of it objectifies, subordinates, and dehumanizes women at least to some extent. The women themselves may well sometimes enjoy it, the ones performing or the ones watching it; but it arguably propagates and reinforces a hyperreal view of the genders and their roles, and an idea about the relative dominance and submission of men and women, in terms of social power, pleasure, and point of view. Mainstream porn "re-normalizes" many aspects of patriarchal and heterosexist society and encourages the continuation of stereotypical power dynamics outside of sexual relationships.
The hyperreal simulations of mainstream pornography don't just tend to instrumentalize and objectify women; they can also put unreal pressures on men, in terms of penis size, stamina, and other aspects of "performance" which can cause anxiety to real men as they try to engage in sex as it is represented to them by their media. Many find they can't copy the behaviour in the porn, just as they can't copy the lifestyles of the rich and famous on tv or Instagram. Studies are suggesting a degradation of men's self-confidence, mental health, sexual health due to porn watching and porn addiction. A report published in 2019 showed that the number of young American men under thirty who reported having no sex in the previous year had almost tripled from what it had been 30 years earlier. Lots of factors could be contributing to this, but one of them could be the ease with which porn can be accessed and the alternatives to real-world dating and socializing in general that we now have. There have been some limited studies showing a correlation between overconsumption of porn and erectile dysfunction. In one, it was shown that 45% of males with porn addiction have erectile dysfunction if you take away the porn (Levine 2021). Other men may feel they can't live up to the performance and stamina they see in porn, and they may feel that real-life sex can't live up to the glamour and perfect looks and acrobatics that get them off when watching porn. If we view sex as a social relationship, then it seems to be becoming more "parasocial" and hyperreal for a lot of people, just like many other interhuman relationships - thanks to technology.
In her 2026 exposé Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else, Patricia Nilsson argues that the porn model that has emerged on the Internet is the most telling example of the entire structure of the internet consumerism that humans have started to embrace in the 21st century because it is easy and convenient and gives quick dopamine fixes and "escape" and appears to be free.
The underlying product in this economy becomes continued stimulation (as it is with doom scrolling, Instagram, etc); human personality and human and animal intimacy are turned into commodities for sale (everything, including even your sex, your love and your eroticism, becomes a transactional counter in an economy); workers' income depends on continually making themselves, their skin, their cries and groans—and the promise or illusion of intimacy—available to customers of this sophisticated and multidimensional peep show. This is true not just of literal porn but the "pornographic" nature of even non-sexual media consumption - perfromed for money and attention; consumed for easy pleasure and a fantasy of control). For the creators, this is selling your self on a whole new scale, though it ultimately just continues the trading of your body for wages that Karl Marx saw at the heart of all capitalist labour. From the "consumer's" point of view the suggestion is that stimulation and sexual satisfaction are products to be purchased in a private and depersonalized marketplace of simulations, run by who knows who. And the main currency on Pornhub, as on other free media streaming and social sharing sites, is your attention (to be marketed to) and your own personality as dataveillance to be fed to algorithms for more refined manipulation/pandering. You pay by watching ads and being marketed to and providing insight into your own personality in its most intimate details in exchange for your "free" visual pleasures. The whole Internet becomes a kind of whore, and the pimps lurk back there in the shadows, collecting their grift. Or, if you approve of commodification and see no alternative to it, their well-earned cut.
Ultimately, I don't think you can buy or consume physical or spiritual intimacy. I don't tend to think it can exist between a machine or an electronic medium and a human animal. The simulation of intimacy, however, could be a seductive and powerful tool of exploitation for those who can't tell media from reality. Yuval Noah Harari argues that with AI we are witnessing an attempt to capture, monetize, and instrumentalize our human intimacy. The Internet captured our attention, but "The next frontier is intimacy. And intimacy is much more powerful than attention. If you want to change someone's views on politics, to sell a product, anything, intimacy is the most powerful tool to do that" (Harari 2025). So it's possible that it won't be you controlling your AI girlfriend, but your AI girlfriend that is controlling you.
What does this do to the traditional social version of embodied intimacy between humans? In what ways does it derealize and dehumanize sexuality, one of the most intimate and animal parts of human life? As I mentioned, most people when I was a young man learned about sex from books, discrete scenes in mainstream movies, hearsay, and through trial and error with real partners. Presumably most young people today learn about sex from pornography, and what exactly are they learning? Remember that one of the chief issues with hyperreality involves real people copying things in media that are not copies of real things themselves but imaginary distortions and "idealizations." I had to laugh at a brief bitter comment made by a young woman in Jane Campion's miniseries Top of the Lake: China Girl (2016). Most of her girlfriends in high school, she said, are still technically virgins, because they have only ever had anal sex. Patricia Nilsson talks at length about the standardization of rougher and more BDSM practices in the real world because of the romanticisation of these things in porn, which is always trying to be more transgressive or shocking or male-dominant etc.
But what if true transgession is now becoming the act of just having plain sex with another human being, not making or consuming or trying to imitate edgier video fantasy more successfully?
If young people really are (or were before the pandemic) having more anal sex, it would probably be because of porn. Heterosexual anal sex used to be much less common in real life than in porn. Perhaps it is becoming standard now, as we all try to imitate the images in hyperreal pornographic media. For all I know, people getting into sex for the first time these days are even sometimes recreating the bizarre "money shot" at the end of almost every mainstream hetero porn video as well! I hear it mumbled about in trap lyrics sometimes.*
* A whole course could be dedicated to "the money shot." Hyperreality, male dominance, male anxieties and misogyny seem to me to converge in this convention, a touch (or lack of touch) that "proves" that the sex in the video was "real," reaffirms that the woman remains the object and servant (and in a certain sense possession) of the man, and allows the final identification of the masturbating male viewer with the male in the video, who is also (unaccountably) ejaculating into thin air.
I don't know about young people today, but I have never had a real partner request a money shot from me at the end of sex, nor have I actually wanted to finish things that way myself. From a purely pleasure-oriented (as opposed to power-oriented and symbolic) perspective it is clearly pointless, distracting, and counter-productive, as well as embarrassing, absurd, and misogynistic. Just sayin. ,-)
The whole spectacle of straight porn - which I'm not incapable of enjoying and identifying with at times - can make me feel a sad compassion for all of the people trying to cling to these sexual identities, both the women and the men. Am I just old, or have we ruined sex too, through overproduction of media?