In straight porn you will usually see more fellatio than cunnilingus, for example. There are also certain activities that are used in porn disproportionately, misrepresenting the sex people have outside of porn.
While there are plenty of other parts of sex and sexual activities - like kissing, “dry humping”, manual or oral sex - intercourse is treated as most important in both straight and gay male porn, with most or all other types of sex being reduced to just “foreplay." The intercourse and fellatio that we see in porn are often aggressive and intense, involving fast thrusting and deep-throating (putting a penis so far into the mouth that it goes into the throat). Porn, like the rest of heteronormative and patriarchal culture, loves to focus on intercourse. Pain might also come from fitting a very large penis (or multiple penises) into the performer’s vagina or anus. For example, even while a performer is acting out pleasure, their penis may be painfully bumping into their scene partner’s teeth, or their cervix may be being repeatedly and painfully hit by their scene partner’s penis. There are also times when a sex position or act, beyond just being not super pleasurable, is explicitly painful for a performer (and not in the context of a BDSM scene where pain is intended to be experienced pleasurably). This is not the most comfortable, and is definitely not typically the most pleasurable, way for most people to have sex. Performers “cheat out” or “open up” so that the penis, sex toy, or tongue is clearly visible going into the vagina, anus, or mouth. Rather than actually stand in a circle, and block the audiences view of the action, the actors will “cheat out” and form a semi-circle so that each performer can be seen and heard.
Have you noticed how in plays or other kinds of theater, actors’ backs are almost never to the audience? Say a group of people are on stage standing in a “circle” discussing an important matter. A big part of that is “cheating out” or “opening up” (links to YouTube video "Ask A Porn Star: "Real Sex VS Porn Sex." Includes explicit language). When people have sex in porn scenes the goal is to have it look good on camera in order to make a profit.
In this second installment, I’ll look at the landscape of mainstream video porn in America, and the ways in which it is - or spoiler alert: isn’t - accurately representing sexual experiences-from sex positions and orgasms to consent and safer sex.
As with part one of this series, I'll be exploring mainstream porn in this piece-the content that is often available for free on tube sites-meaning porn that is not explicitly feminist, queer, or alternative.