With the new wave of feminism trickling in to almost every article and TV program I’ve seen recently, I noticed that men seem to be getting a lot of stick about the effect that porn has on them. It’s often claimed that it encourages them to treat women in degrading manners and to have false expectations about what ‘real’ women are like in bed. I’m not here to argue whether this is true or not (although the amount of ‘happy couples’ around seems to suggest that it must be a slight exaggeration). Instead, I want to point out that, as a result of watching too many romantic films, girls can have deluded expectations of men in just the same way.
Take the classic romance in ‘The Notebook’; the guy waits for her for seven years, writes to her every day for a year with no reply and still manages to profess his undying love whilst she is considering marrying someone else. What guy would ever do that? Films like this encourage us to think it’s legitimate to complain about the fact that your boyfriend isn’t perfect. They give us false expectations of men as fully co-operative, eternally understanding and unerringly devoted specimens. But they’re just not (sorry guys) and I think that most of us know this perfectly well. So when writers claim that men’s expectations of women are born out of porn, I think they really underestimate men. Can’t we give them a little more credit? I’m sure they can tell the difference between a porn star and their girlfriend (and if they can’t they probably won’t have a girlfriend for much longer) just as we can tell the difference between Edward Cullen and a real man.
So while you’re wondering why he doesn’t say ‘I love you’ with as much ardor as Jack does to Rose while the Titanic is plunging into the abyss, he might be wondering why you don’t think putting your legs behind your head is a comfortable position. But most probably we’ll both know that these are fantasies and what’s wrong with a fantasy? I say we should indulge our fantasies. So girls, let’s go and watch the new James Bond film and complain about the fact that no boys we know look, speak, act and most probably make love quite as well as Daniel Craig. And boys, while we’re out you can all go and watch some good healthy porn.
