Silicon Valley Porn Star: A Memoir of Redemption and Rediscovering the Self
by Jason Portnoy
Honest Climb Media, 222 pp., $15.97
Most men watch porn. Many will admit to it. Many don’t even consider it something that requires admission at all.
There are numbers to quantify this: Various studies estimate that between 60 and 98 percent of men consume pornography, depending on who you ask and how you ask them. Women, too, consume plenty, at rates of 30 to 90 percent. Without any figures at all, though, porn’s status as a form of mass-consumed media is readily apparent. Look toward memes, music, television—the language of pornography, whether terms like “MILF” or the PornHub drum beat, have been woven into our cultural fabric. Even the constant discourse over the merits of sex scenes and the rising puritanical reaction against them are marks of porn’s social weight: Porn is so embedded in our lives (whether we view it or not) that some feel as though there is no need for sex elsewhere.
But even so, we refuse to delve much further into how we got here, and how our own practices play a part. Men may say they watch porn: What kind of porn are they watching? How often are they watching it? Where? And most crucially, how has this viewing shaped their sexuality overall? How has this shaped our culture?
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