puberty – with a smartphone in one hand and
their penis in the other.
As one on the receiving end of this early,
intense and isolated porn exposure once they
reached maturity, there were upsides. Ben,
whom I dated on and off for a few years
from the time he was 23 (and I was 40), was
a bright, keen and diligent student who had
applied himself to learning how to give great
oral sex by watching a shitload of porn. It
had worked; he was a fantastic lover – skilled,
spontaneous and dedicated to his partner’s
pleasure. He was also far more open-minded
and sexually adventurous than the men I’d
dated back when I was 23. I can’t say whether
that was all down to a heavy teenage devotion
to porn, but I believe it played a big part.
But some aspects of his generation’s
open-minded adventurousness can also feel
offputtingly aggressive. I’ve had an alarming
number of men in their twenties try to choke
me during sex, assuming that it’s part of
the normal, everyday sexual menu, even
on a first date. And while I hear from my
female Gen Z correspondents that that is
the case for many of them, it is certainly not
for me. And forcibly removing a man’s hand
from your throat can really ruin the moment.
One guy, Adam, slapped me around the
face without warning or consultation, and,
when I asked him never to do it again, told
me that I should “push my own boundaries”.
I’ve even had a man – lovely, clever Jack,
with whom I was in a committed relationship- ask if he could strangle me to the point that
I blacked out. He assured me I would regain
consciousness quickly, but, call me a prude,
I wasn’t that keen to find out.
I’m not judging anybody’s kinks here - everyone has the right to indulge their
peccadillos (with consent). But I seriously
doubt whether so many of the thoughtful,
intelligent, egalitarian men who then put their
hands to my throat would have thought of
doing so on their own, without the firehose
of porn they’d streamed into their still
malleable minds since puberty.
There is other odd stuff too, like the fact
that they consider pubic hair so wholly novel
they have to talk about it all the time. To the
point that their wide-eyed wonder over a full
bush can get a bit boring and uncomfortable
eventually. They’ve apparently never seen
an adult woman’s vulva that wasn’t entirely
waxed or shaved, either in porn or sadly – and
undoubtedly as a result of the pornification of
popular culture – among their peers.
Far worse, in my opinion, is the effect
it appears to have had on their ability to
enjoy real-life sex. The brain-body connection
seems to have been entirely broken by years
of youthful masturbating, in private, to a
tiny handheld device loaded with a never-
ending supply of ever more extreme sexual
The Times Magazine 19I LOVE YOUNGER MEN. THEIR
PORN HABITS, NOT SO MUCH
PR executive Lucy, 43, used to have a liberal
attitude to porn. Dating younger men with
dangerous fetishes has changed her mind.t was probably around the time
I found myself removing a much
younger man’s hand from my throat,
and explaining – much to his apparent
surprise – that I didn’t enjoy being
choked or strangled during sex that
I began to revise my opinions on porn.
Like, I imagine, most women my age
(a very youthful 43), my actual exposure
to porn was limited – almost non-existent
really – pre-internet. (For our younger readers,
I should probably explain here that back in
the 20th century, you had to work quite hard
to come by porn, sequestered as it was on top
shelves, in specialist newsagents and video
shops or, via mail order, in brown envelopes.)
I’d never sought it out, never inadvertently
stumbled across any – certainly not on the
bus or in the House of Commons chamber- and the men I dated in my teens and
twenties were not (as far as I knew, anyway)
habitual consumers.
No men I knew had, unlike former MP
Neil Parish, experienced a “moment of
madness” in viewing explicit content while
at work, and nor had they, also unlike Parish,
found themselves – oops – accidentally
landing upon porn while “looking at tractors”.
My lack of actual experience of porn did
not in any way stop me – as a strident, mouthy
liberal – from holding some strong opinions
on it regardless. It was harmless, I believed,
and I would regularly debate as much with an
older, equally liberal but vehemently antiporn
friend. Men wanking to one-dimensional
imagery wasn’t in any way troubling to me.
I mean, whatever. Their getting off to Razzle
wasn’t hurting anyone.
And my boyfriends to that point backed up
my view. They’d read a few jazz mags, perhaps
seen a fuzzy VHS tape or two and, from my
university years onwards, possibly visited
some rudimentary websites, but their
scant consumption of porn had no bearing
whatsoever on what happened between
us in the bedroom. There was no connection
between anything they’d seen or read and
our own sex life.
It was, I went so far as arguing, an industry
that should be less regulated and vilified.
God, I thought, we’re all so prudish – porn’s
not problematic.
Twenty years on, with Pornhub receiving
more traffic than Amazon or Netflix, I take a
very different position. At some point in my
early thirties, I gradually (and entirely without
design) stopped sleeping with men my own
age or older, and started dating – and having
casual sex with – men who were 10, 15,
sometimes 18 years younger than me. Men
who – perhaps as a result of having grown
up in a world of female empowerment and
less rigid gender roles – were wonderfully
untroubled by dating an older, more successful
woman who sometimes referenced things they
couldn’t remember. Like the Gulf War. Or 9/11.
They were also the first generation of
digital natives. While I was at university, still
writing essays by hand, they were growing up
without landlines. And by the time they were
hitting secondary school and the hormonal
apocalypse, porn was no longer something
they had to leave their bedrooms to procure.
They came of age – by which I mean ragingI
‘I never stumbled
across any porn
- certainly not in the
House of Commons’
Former MP Neil Parish, who watched porn
on his phone in the House of Commonsl The top 3 porn sites receive
5.81 billion visits a month.
l Porn sites get more website
traffic than Twitter, Instagram,
TikTok, Netflix, Pinterest and
Zoom combined.
l 77% of Pornhub’s UK traffic
was via a smartphone in 2020.
l 1 in 8 porn titles shown
to first-time visitors to porn sitesPREVIOUS PAGE: KENNETH WILLARDT/AUGUST. THIS PAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK describes acts of sexual violence.