We’ve been trying to drum it into teenagers that porn (at least the kind with performative moaning, unbelievable storylines and reshaped labia) doesn’t show what sex is really like. Pornhub’s reigning category for the past two years, hentai, would have you believe the industry hasn't grown any closer to that.
But a yearning for realism and authenticity is rampant everywhere you look: people demand better representation from reality TV, social media is filled with summer photo dumps; even Taylor Swift (arguably the most famous person on the planet right now) captions her Instagram posts to her 271 million followers like she’s texting a best friend.
Porn is starting to follow suit, with 2022 seeing a 179 per cent increase in Pornhub searches for “real” and “homemade” porn (or what the site has dubbed “reality porn”) making it their fastest growing category. This demand is apparent in other facets of the industry, too. OnlyFans went from 7.5 million users pre-pandemic to over 120 million today.
The rise of realistic-style pornCarly Pifer, founder of Aurore, a collection of erotica written by women and LGBTQIA+ people based on their real experiences, attributes this trend to the different ways younger generations use social media. “There’s such a movement towards being a little bit messier, just not putting on your face before going on TikTok and that is refreshing,” she says. “Reality porn reflects that sense of being online in a different way, where the perfection of mainstream pornography is so different to amateur stuff. The lighting is different, the close-ups are different and the genitals are different.”
Just as the photo dump trend rejects a polished social media presence, “people are really sick of what mainstream porn has to offer”, says sex expert and feminist writer Gigi Engle. “It's rigid on body types, there's a lot of fetishisation of different races and body parts, it can be kind of off-putting. Just generally people are starting to look for more diversity in their pornography because it feels much more authentic. It's real people, real bodies, real connection.”
Anette Suveges, 26, has watched porn since she was 15 but it wasn’t until she was introduced to the indie erotic films of Erika Lust at university a couple of years ago that she started to appreciate how much authenticity can add to it. She now watches all kinds of categories, from gay male to travel vlog (videos emulating the style of a YouTube travel vlog, just with people having sex in the middle).
Authenticity is keyRealism is a crucial aspect of them all. “Realistic scenarios are what works for me because I feel like the overly produced channels – like Brazzers and RealityKings [who call themselves “The World’s Best Real Porn Site”] and all of that – even though they try to be quite relatable, it just looks overproduced. It’s not a vibe,” she says.
“The past couple of years we’ve been bombarded by all these super produced things and I think everyone just needs a bit of reality now, a bit of authenticity. It’s the same in porn. It’s so accepted to watch porn just to enjoy it, so of course you want a bit of quality.”
That quality can’t necessarily be found in mainstream porn, Suveges explains. “You don’t want to see someone bloody pounding someone in a handstand, that’s just so unrealistic. I think people crave that [authenticity] because it feels real. It’s almost like you’re there with them and I feel like that adds an extra layer of excitement into it.”
Continuing the legacy of the amateur category (created in the 1980s as a rejection of mainstream videos), reality porn allows people to film themselves doing what they personally enjoy. This was catapulted during the pandemic when porn production halted and sex workers lost their contracts with big studios, many of them moving to platforms like OnlyFans where they had control over their content for the first time. Claims about the level of income you could earn on the site also attracted people into sex work who had never done it before.
This helped put the reality genre on people’s radar – explains Paulita Pappel, founder of curated homemade video site Lustery. “There are more and more people that are really into the stuff they’re doing and that makes them into amazing performers or producers. It has really opened up the horizon to what is a huge repertoire of different fetishes that people have,” she observes.
But Pappel worries that the surge in demand for authenticity could have an antithetical effect on the category: “In a way we’re levering so hardcore on this reality thing that it’s becoming unreal again. People seem so eager to have the real deal that they’re also willing to buy into things that actually might not be.” While amateur and reality porn seeping into the mainstream has its benefits, it also depreciate its implied genuineness and spontaneity. “The moment you start mass producing certain stuff it may be further away from an authentic representation of sexuality,” she posits.
Breaking down sexual stereotypesHaving worked in the industry, Pappel has first-hand experience with production companies being prescriptive about what sex should look like. Even while performing in amateur “girl next door” videos (a porn category starring an approachable female lead), she was told what kind of underwear to wear and what she was, or wasn’t allowed to do. “It was like we were selling this idea of authentic sexuality but it’s actually just reproducing a preconceived, stereotypical idea of what this person should be,” she remembers.
And that didn’t reflect her own experiences. She started to wonder: “How can you come the closest possible to document or represent real sex the way it’s happening in people’s lives?”. Away from the pre-packaged idea of sex, she created Lustery to put the camera in the hands of real couples with an established connection without giving them rules for what to film.
For women and queer people particularly, being able to sense this connection can be game-changing. A 2022 study found that women value authentic expressions of pleasure and desire in porn, both because of the gendered shame around watching it and negative experiences they might have had during sex. “Especially for women, if you're watching pornography and anyone involved looks uncomfortable or like they’re not really enjoying it, that can really take you out of the moment because you connect to that feeling so much,” explains Pifer. “We’ve all been in situations where we’ve disassociated or had to stick it out and that can trigger a response that’s the opposite of being turned on.”
Greater representationThough “transgender” is one of Pornhub’s top search terms, a recent study found that trans and non-binary people can feel fetishised or invalidated in their identity by mainstream porn. In a political landscape that constantly poses a threat to their sexual and bodily autonomy — in Florida, teaching about gender is criminalised, while women and queer people around the world feel that their pleasure is too often ignored — positive representations of “can normalise their sexual desire and their sexual behaviour”, says psychosexual therapist Silva Neves.
Pifer remembers receiving feedback from Aurore readers about including different genders on her site: “‘I’m a trans woman and I’ve never had a story that was about a trans woman who was with a man. This is so enlightening for me to have my experience reflected’”, one reader said. Seeing a spectrum of people have sex in a myriad of ways can also be educational. Pappel says that for the couples in the videos, filming themselves have sex can be “an incentive to keep exploring and keep the passion alive” in ways that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
This goes for people watching, too. “People that don’t even know how they identify yet can read stories and be like ‘oh this is turning me on, maybe this is a pathway for me to go down sexually’,” Pifer hopes. Consusing porn with your partner can help foster conversation about things to try out: ”In dating straight men, [porn] becomes this elephant in the room. It’s something they hide and then you discover it and compare yourself to what they’re watching and wondering if that’s what they want,” says Pifer.
Watching any type of porn together can change this, but particularly reality. “Sometimes watching with your partner can really help,” describes Suveges, who identifies as lesbian. “Watching overly produced porn just feels cringe, like you start laughing and just look at each other like, we know this is not real.” Having these conversations can open up the chance for experimentation in your own sex life. “The sex positions are less gymnastic compared to studio porn, so it feels like it’s more translatable to their own bedroom because it’s more real, there’s less accidents happening, it’s easier,” Neves describes. “People might be more curious to say, ‘Well if real people do it, then I can do it too’.”
If others feel empowered to share their sex lives on the internet, you can stand up for your pleasure too. The rise of reality porn signals just that: individuals and couples filling in the gaps of their sex education by learning from real people, like them or not, out there in the world all the ways to have sex. Or as close to real sex as porn can be.
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