Pornography or ‘porn’ usually means videos and photos showing naked people or people engaged in sexual acts. Some people might look at porn as a way to learn about sex but it can have a damaging effect on their lives and relationships if they think it’s realistic.
Does everybody watch porn?
No not everyone is watching porn, even if a lot of people say they are. It’s OK to not want to watch it. It’s definitely not something people have to do or feel pressured to do.
So what’s the problem?
Porn can make you feel under pressure to look or behave a certain way. Most people wouldn’t like it if you treated them the way people are treated in a porn film. Chances are, it wouldn’t score you points with your partner. Watching it can make you think what they’re doing is normal and that everyone would like it. But everyone is different, and what porn shows often isn’t what happens in healthy and happy relationships.
Because the very definition of pornography is subjective, a history of pornography is nearly impossible to conceive; imagery that might be considered erotic or even religious in one society may be condemned as pornographic in another. Thus, European travelers to India in the 19th century were appalled by what they considered pornographic representations of sexual contact and intercourse on Hindu temples such as those of Khajuraho (see photograph); most modern observers would probably react differently. Many contemporary Muslim societies likewise apply the label “pornography” to many motion pictures and television programs that are unobjectionable in Western societies. To adapt a cliché, pornography is very much in the eye of the beholder.
In many historical societies, frank depictions of sexual behaviour, often in a religious context, were common. In ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, phallic imagery and depictions of orgiastic scenes were widely present, though it is unlikely that they fulfilled anything like the social or psychological functions of modern pornography (see phallicism). A modern use seems more likely in some of the celebrated erotic manuals, such as the Roman poet Ovid’s Ars amatoria (Art of Love), a treatise on the art of seduction, intrigue, and sensual arousal. Some of the 100 stories in the Decameron, by the medieval Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, are licentious in nature. A principal theme of medieval pornography was the sexual depravity (and hypocrisy) of monks and other clerics.
