Sex on Screen

The textbook from my “Human Sexual Behavior” class lists three influences for shaping cultural norms on sexuality: the mass media, family, and religion. But where do we learn what sex is actually going to be like before we have it? My parents were the greatest force in keeping me from making any stupid sexual decisions. They told me about STDs and pregnancy and taught me words like “ejaculate.” But what does the explanation “the couple puts the man’s penis into the women’s vagina” really tell you about the experience of sex? As for religion, all the Bible would tell me was that “Person 1 went into Person 2, and Person 2 conceived.” Penis into vagina, right. I had that much already. Which brings me to that third influence. Growing up I spent maybe two hours a day with my parents, two hours a week in church, and six hours a day with my television.

Mass media is where we go for the details. It was television and movies that taught me it isn’t so much a “putting” as it is a “repeated thrusting.” Parents, without fail, leave that part out. TV showed me couples having sex montage-style. There is kissing, clothes fall to the floor, then some rhythmic gyrating motion under sheets which always manage to cover the woman’s breasts even if it defies logic, and finally the couple is lying in bed, man’s arm around the woman, sheets still carefully placed. For years, that was my impression of sex, but curiosity would drive me to pause in my channel surfing any time I saw a significant amount of flesh on the screen.

Now I no longer watch television to waste time. I have the internet. Before that drastic shift even occurred I got tired of haphazard channel surfing and turned to the source the internet affords us that everyone of our generation and younger eventually turns to- porn. I wasn’t even that curious about sex yet, but, gosh darn it, I wanted to know what a penis looked like. And what did I find? Disembodied penises raping women who acted like they enjoyed it. It made me hate the sex I had never had.

This is an example of how American prudishness hurts our society. My first sight of a penis should not have been in footage of a woman being raped by two men. We need more middle ground – something between those blanketed sex scenes and porn. We need more nudity and we need more graphic sex scenes in the context of a loving relationship. The first time I saw full-frontal male nudity in a movie was in the foreign film “Goodbye Lenin” in 2003. My first though was “My goodness! Nudity!” followed by “And there is nothing wrong with it. He’s just… naked. How refreshing.” It would be equally refreshing to see more pleasant sex scenes without NC-17 or TV-MA ratings. Just one good scene of a married couple having sex without a sheet would have kept me away from the scary parts of the internet till I was much, much older.