Taboo in Porn: The Younger The Woman, The Better
This, again, is not an open letter against pornography.
This is not an attempt to slut shame, kink shame, or otherwise guilt your personal tastes.
This is a call for a little more questioning and a little less acceptance of what the mainstream porn behemoths tell us we should like jacking off to.
Last time, I dug into the colonial history of porn and race. This time, it’s time to look at getting older. Close the curtains, shut the door, make sure your phone isn’t connected to the family TV, and come with me to explore how porn’s treatment and depiction of age warps our cultural conception age in relation to sexualities, consent, and discrimination.
There’s enough gritty discussion points to fill a book, but I hope to provide a brief overview of the origins of the dominant cultural discourse in the west; that, when it comes to getting your rocks off, young women are always better.
Last time, I took you on a more chronological journey of the colonial origins of racial fetishization. Unfortunately for my chronological-structure-loving self, people have had a thing for young bodies since the dawn of civilisation (see the Greeks and their penchant for pederasty). Instead, here follows a three-point argument.
Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking / Christian Rudder
Point 1 – The Data
In 2019, 61% of Pornhub’s 42 billion visitors were aged 18-34. Whilst the age of attraction for women generally increases in line with her age (i.e. a woman in her 30s finds men in their 30s the most attractive), men max out at fancying women in their early 20s.
A data survey of more than 12,600 porn stars found, unsurprisingly, that there is a strong preference for female performers under the age of 20 in porn videos. Male performers, in comparison, have a much more stable career as long as they can still get it up.
We should bear in mind that data surveys select ages within a certain bracket and that porn websites correctly have strict no-underage policies (but how well they’re adhered to is a different question). It is unlikely that any adult is going to say, on the record, that they are more attracted to 16-year olds than adult women. The data shows a strong trend that, as far as porn is concerned, the younger the woman, the better.
Point 2 – The Pubic Hair
3000-year-old copper razors have been found in Egypt and modern day-Iran (ancient Mesopotamia). There’s little in the way of documented pubes from medieval Europe, with Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (1400) a notable exception; the lovestruck young Absolon is traumatised when his wannabe lover, Alison, comes replete with “a thyng al rough and long”, despite Absolon’s belief that “womman hath no berd (beard)!”.
Shakespeare, the horny scamp, wrote about the “sweet bottom-grass” (Venus and Adonis) and “black wires” of his mistress (Sonnet 130). Bawdy songs from the 1650s complain of women with no pubes having “stuff (that) rustles like…leather jerkin”. Merkins (public hair wigs) were first mentioned in 1450, and continue to crop up in accounts of sexcapades for hundreds of years, well past the invention of the safety razor in 1770, pretty much consistently until the advent of (and who’s surprised?) mass-produced, male-produced media in the 20th century.
Why are pubes relevant to a discussion about age? Because, biologically, genital hair is a marker of sexual maturity. And yet, more than 30% of men surveyed in 2015 considered their partner having pubes to be a deal-breaker. The entrenched performance of feminine normativity through hair removal is a product of capitalism, yes, the visuality of porn, yes, but also a pervasive desire for women’s bodies to remain “pure”, youthful, and unspoiled.
(And, incidentally, removing your pubic hair is neither more nor less hygienic than letting it grow.)
Point 3 – The Spillover
Age isn’t just a problem for the young ‘uns. To generalise, there are no non-fetishized old people in porn because older people are seen as functionally asexual, despite the skyrocketing rates of STIs in retirement homes (you go, granny!). This article is not an attempt to explain why fetishizing mature performers in porn is demonstrative of our cultural discomfort around ageing and intimacy.
My focus in this article has been the fetishization of youth and why you should care that Leonardo Di Caprio won’t fancy you if you’re 26. I’m not trying to slate age gaps. I know plenty of couples, personally and anecdotally, who have loving, secure relationships with huge age gaps.
I am, however, arguing that there is a strong link between a cultural obsession with youthful female “purity”, male superiority, and abuse. In the United States between 2000 and 2015, there were at least 207,459 children, usually girls, forced into marriage, 80% of whom were married to adult men.
This is the same culture that gives us child pageants with prepubescent children competing in swimsuit rounds to a panel of adult judges.
This is the same culture that normalises public street harassment of schoolgirls and dismisses it as “a compliment” when young women are threatened and followed.
This is the same culture that tells girls who are the victim of grooming and abuse that they must have brought the abuse on themselves because young bodies have been sexualised so totally we can no longer separate the fiction of porn from reality.
One more note… I hope I’m not implying that age play and roleplaying between adults is disgusting, and I am certainly not trying to link age play to any kind of abuse. It’s not my jam, but as long as everyone involved is consenting and able to consent, don’t let me stop you. If you love it when your boyfriend tells you to call him daddy and dresses you in frills and curls, I’m glad you’ve found someone to be kinky with.
But that’s the thing: it’s a kink. And not everyone is into it.
The incremental normalisation of daddy/little play in dating and flirting culture is another example of the repercussions of porn’s hyper-sexualisation of young women and girls. Involving someone in your kink non-consensually is gross at best and harassment at worst. If it wouldn't be ok to choke someone without asking (more on that next time), then it's not ok to call someone daddy or baby girl without asking.
Conclusion - Why Should I Care?
Porn is a powerful medium through which social interactions, cultural norms, and acceptable behaviours are communicated. Stepdaughter, teen and barely legal are practically vanilla porn categories. When mainstream porn consistently puts women with “teen” or “young” or “barely legal” physical features (small breasts, no pubic hair, petite) at the forefront, the cultural view of what is sexually desirable (and sexually appropriate) is directly influenced.
As a consenting adult, you can pretend you're a teenager, or that you're fucking a teenager. You cannot fuck a teenager. The fact that fucking a teenager is a goal portrayed, fostered, and celebrated by our culture is a problem. The fact that children’s bodies are sexualised before they even hit puberty and this is accepted as “just what happens” is a problem.
Porn has a problem with age, and we can’t ignore it.
References / Recommended Reading:
http://apps.frontline.org/child-marriage-by-the-numbers/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54584127
Cute Cat Calls’ Instagram (@cutecatcalls)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/claryestes/2020/02/26/historic-high-rates-of-stis-among-older-americans
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parenting-in-the-digital-age-of-pornography_b_9301802
https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(15)30284-8/fulltext
https://www.porncartography.com/posts/porn-census-performer-age/
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
Lister, A Curious History of Sex (2019)
Nagoski, Come As You Are (2015)
Our Streets Now’s Instagram (@ourstreetsnow)
Taylor, Why Women Are Blamed For Everything (2020)
