Would you really be all that surprised to learn that topical anal bleaching cream products have in fact become more popular amongst the general population than they were before it was generally known that porn actors often use them?
I lean something new every day. Ignorance fought!
Bad example. She’s the daughter of a director, and had an in - not that I’d describe her as average in any case.
Have a seat in any casting director’s office anywhere in NY or LA and you are not going to see average men or women, unless they are casting for character roles.
Definitely. Before reading this thread, I never imagined anyone caring that much for anatomical particularities. Any woman (or man) who suffers from misshapen naughty bits has already gotten to third base as it were. If a guy is going to be stupid enough to judge only on looks, it is going to be on clothed looks, so your model or actress is going to be the point of comparison. In any case if porn stars looked as good as top actresses they would be making bigger bucks without taking their clothes off.
Also, a lot of times these women will mention hearing hurtful comments about anatomy (grandma boobs, “meat curtains” etc.). Not to defend guys acting stupid/assholish, but I can attest guys like to brag/boast/insult in order to give the perception of value/self worth. The easiest/laziest way to make yourself feel seem “superior” is to trash and judge everybody else.
But I guess some young women take it literally. They’ll hear guys joking about girlparts that resemble chewed-up wads of gum and get incredibly self-conscious about their own genitalia. For some women this really sticks, and creates a long standing self loathing. Other women, not so much.
After reading many of these blogs, I asked my wife if she ever felt self-conscious about her body. She gave me a :dubious: look and said it was never an issue for her. She’s perfectly happy with her body and always has been. When taking her to a strip club (a pretty…touchy feeling one) with me, she commented once that other women’s boobs ‘felt different’ than her own. She had simply assumed other women’s breasts had more or less the same firmness/softness as her own. But discovering other people having different anatomy didn’t make her insecure.
She turned the question back on me, and asked if I felt self-conscious about having a penis that isn’t what people are used to seeing in porn. When I asked her to specify she said (jokingly) “You know, black, 14” long, etc" 
I’m a woman and I haven’t seen much porn, but I would say that bodies there are a lot more varied. Magazine covers and TV give me more body image issues that porn ever would.
It’s always nice to see English TV shows because the women are so normal looking.
Maybe your wife was joking, but I gotta say that pretty much every man who I’ve ever dated for longer than a month eventually disclosed, without any prompting from me, that they sometimes worry that their penises aren’t big enough. They were mostly well within average size ranges and sometimes even above. I have to think that this probably has something to do with the fact that you pretty much can’t find non-asian straight porn featuring sub-7" dongs without straight up doing a search for “small penis”.
As a man I feel like it’s warped my body image. I feel self conscious about not having zero fatpad and a hairless asscrack. At 6’ tall and 7" long I feel like I should be 5’6 and my penis should look 2 inches longer than it does.
So…Earth?
Yeah, there is a lot of different porn out there. But for the most part, when people think of female porn stars, they think of the tradition Playboy bunny proportioned big tittied, skinny waist, long legs, perfect ass woman.
The norm for most cultures can still be distilled down to “men are valued on how much money they make so they can afford to support a young pretty girl.” It’s so fundamental, it’s probably driven by some evolutionary instinct or something. That’s the reason why men internalize any issues they have as “I’m not rich enough” and women internalized their problems as “I’m too fat”.
Hollywood / Madison Avenue didn’t create these idealized images. They were formed by decades of trial and error and focus groups figuring out what people want to see. But constantly seeing those images reinforces expectations of what those ideals should be. Not just with body image, but wealth, standard of living, career, lifestyle, relationships and so on.
And most people don’t. That’s the beauty of the internet. If you are self conscious about something, you can always connect to enough jerks who would be happy to validate your fears that yes, you are being judged on it.
Trust me. It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. 
*Translation - have sex with lots of prostitutes.
Actually, I think that’s been a thing since the invention of the miniskirt. As least, I remember it from my teenager-hood (in the 80’s … sigh)
It must be a recently set standard that the thighs not, Barbie-like, touch. Since this coincides with the abundance of porn via the internet, *mabye or not.
In the 1970’s, when women only rarely saw porn, it was desirable that the thighs touch: but only if there was an open triangle of space at the crotch, best exemplified by Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman costume. Desmond Morris did his usual stupid reverse anthropology on it, claiming it was a natural signal that showed no scrotum blocked the breeze so come & get it guys. Instead of porn, the body standard were *set/seen in Fred Silverman’s “T&A” programming model back during Charlie’s Angels.
*does the mass media reflect or generate values and behaviors? Yes. Sometimes it does.
I think it coincides with the general nature of our internet society where everything can now be captured in images and videos so flaws can be analyzed in excruciating detail.
When I was a teenager in the 80s, I don’t think anyone every gave a shit about “thighs touching”. We just thought a girl was hot or meh or whatever.
But standards/styles do change, if for no other reason than that young men don’t want to be turned on by a previous generations version of hot; i.e. mom.
Thinking back more on the idealized triangle of crotch passage, I remember Gloria Steinem writing about its quest as an undercover Playboy Bunny, and its caused yeast infections. Back then it was “Men have the money, and this is what they demand.”
Today women have money too. (Porn and all that aside, remember the old saying: “no matter what we’re talking about, we’re talking about money”) Online dating gives women more men to choose from, and a safer place to turn down indesirables. Does it follow that standards of beauty will be more realistic, since those standards are set by the women who will bear them?
Firstly, I agree that porn actually shows a good range of shapes and sizes of women.
Secondly, while great boobs are disproportionately represented, that’s inevitably going to be the case: whatever is pleasing to the most people is going to be featured the most.
I don’t really see what alternative there is to that in a free market.
Finally, the “thigh gap” thing is a good example of how porn may help give people a good body image. While many models have such a shape, few porn stars do – that’s because few men find such a shape attractive (and porn is much closer to mean body shape on this).
I don’t think so. Your mom probably doesn’t look or dress the way she did when she was 20.
From talking to women friends who do online dating, the answer is no. Online dating also gives men more women to choose from and it makes it easier to pick the ones who conform to their standard of beauty. It also lets them hide or exaggerate aspects of their background or career in order to misrepresent themselves. My friend is always complaining about guys who are in “high paying jobs” (because that’s what she’s into), and yet they are always sketchy about what they do and she can never come over to where they live.
On second thought, I doubt even my best friend would tell me if she was concerned her vulva did not compare favorably to those seen in pornography. I still think a woman is a lot more likely to compare her face and figure to mainstream models and actresses than those working in porn, but parts of the anatomy that wouldn’t be revealed by a bikini are mostly only seen in porn and tend not to be discussed casually.
Then why do standards of beauty change from decade to decade? Do you think men change what they find attractive without any influence from the media?
As for the question in the OP, I think that with all questions of whether the media influences people, you have to remember two things:
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Advertisers (e.g. Victoria’s Secret) do not spend millions of dollars on something that does not influence the perception of women’s bodies. Therefore, we know that women can be influenced through TV images, and the question is whether porn is doing the same thing.
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Persuasion works best when your target does not know how she’s being persuaded. Porn does not directly influence women because women are very aware that pornographic images do not represent a realistic picture of a woman’s body. Porn influences women indirectly, the same way Victoria’s Secret does, by going through men.
If you look at any Victoria’s Secret ad, the audience for the ad is men. The women become convinced to buy bras because they see the ad and believe that this is what men want. It also helps if they catch men drooling over Victoria’s Secret commercials, catalogs, and public billboards.
That’s how porn gets to women as well. Men become influenced by porn, and then expect women to behave and look like they do in porn. Women want men, so some of them will try and live up to these desires.
Porn has less influence than Victoria’s Secret because there are less ways for women to see men enjoying how a porn star looks. And a lot less men would want a porn star rather than a Victoria’s Secret model. So porn is less influential, but it still has some impact.
The best way to prevent porn from having an impact is to teach men that porn is not realistic, not women. Women know porn is not realistic. It’s the men that are not aware of how porn is shaping their desires and influencing their standards of beauty.
Keep in mind that while I think porn is influential, I have no idea how influential. Advertisers probably have the most influence on body image in our society.
I’m not convinced of that.
People assume that when they see a sexy woman in lingerie that it’s targeted at men, but such ads are often squarely at women and don’t care if they titillate men as a side effect.
Magazines like Cosmopolitan feature plenty of hawt women, wearing sexy clothes. I doubt they are based on the concept of women catching men flicking through the magazine.
Also, people assume that beauty and fashion is entirely based on being more attractive to the gender you like. But that’s a very simplistic model, and doesn’t account for much of how we behave. For example, why are women’s handbags such a lucrative market when they have little to no effect on attractiveness to men?
I think the vast majority of men know porn is unrealistic too. We know that porn is disproportionately attractive women doing sexual acts that most real women are (understandably) uncomfortable doing.
I quite dubious of the idea that men are specifically seeking porn with large-breasted women, say, and then are thinking “All women have large breasts”.
Victoria’s Secret is not selling fashion. Selling lingerie is not the same as selling handbags.
And I might have been unclear when I said that men were the “audience” of a Victoria’s Secret ad. Maybe “viewer” is the more appropriate description. The women in the ads are posing for men. When women look at their ads, the goal is to have them think “this is what men want”.
I can see an argument being made that women don’t buy handbags to impress other men, but not lingerie.
I don’t think I ever said porn influences a majority of men. So I agree that the vast majority of men know porn is unrealistic. What I did say was that porn influences women indirectly through men. That means that for whatever influence porn does have, it’s coming from shaping the opinions of men, and not women.
How many men porn affects I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a majority of them however. That still doesn’t mean it’s not somewhat influential.
It’s not that they think “all women have large breast”. It’s that they think “the girl that I want should have large breast.” Then a woman figures this out and goes to the doctor for some large breasts.
When’s the last time you’ve seen a VS catalog? Only 10% of the catalog is lingerie if that. The rest is just regular clothes.