Porn-agains: meet the middle-aged men – and women – warped by internet porn

I met a nice, middle-aged, middle-class mother at a dinner party who told me  that she was very worried about the effects of internet porn on adolescent males. What, she wondered, was all this internet porn doing to the young? Did we really want a generation of teenage boys whose idea of emotional intimacy was anal sex?

Weeks later we ended up in bed and it left me wondering: what is all that internet porn doing to nice, middle-aged mums you meet at dinner parties? Do we really want a generation of forty/fifty-something women whose idea of emotional intimacy is anal sex?

Society’s anxiety about internet porn has been so focused on how it affects the young that its impact on the older generation has gone largely unnoticed. Over the past few years I’ve noticed the steady pornification of a section of the adult metropolitan middle class.

Porn’s influence has seeped into the British bedroom. The good news is that here’s a lot more variety on offer; the bad news is that some of it’s pretty scary stuff. (You try uttering sweet nothings wearing a leather ‘gimp’ mask with wooden ball strapped inside your mouth.) Between the sheets, educated middle-class women now talk and act like working-class porn starlets. And middle-class, middle-aged men have a new set of erotic expectations based on what they’ve seen in porn videos. Sorry kids, but Mummy and Daddy have become ‘Porn-Agains’.

You can hear it in the way they talk. When in 1907 Bloomsbury’s Lytton Strachey uttered the word ‘semen’ in mixed company, Virginia Woolf wrote that British life would never be the same again because ‘all barriers of reticence and reserve’ had broken down. But Woolf would have been shocked to hear how at dinner parties porn talk has filtered into polite society. What Keynes called the educated bourgeoisie now discuss blowjobs, anal sex and penis size as if they were talking about the weather.