Yet your logic would be that "the moment you try to judge what 'real' families are, you have stopped being reasonable." I do no think I am being unreasonable to say that Ozzie and Harriet does not portray a real family. Yes it was very popular, and that show is still used as short-hand expressing a longing for an idyllic bygone American life, but the situations and reactions were only valid for a very small percentage of the US. It took another 15 years, with shows like All in the Family, for more realistic themes like miscarriage, impotence, and racism to be included as part of the issues that families might deal with. Roseanne would also fit into that category, as Barr included a lesbian main character because Barr sought "to portray various slices of real life, and homosexuals are a reality."

Why can't I also say that most pornography does as good a job of portraying real sex as Leave It To Beaver does at portraying a real family with husband, wife, and two sons?

Our disagreement could be a simple as a difference in what 'real' means. I use it as "more likely to be characteristic of the general culture practice." You seem to interpret it as "whatever can happen in the physical world."

In which case, sure, I Love Lucy could be a perfectly accurate portrayal of a real family - unlikely, but it could. And it misses the point. That being: “The issue I’m tackling is not porn,” she said. “It’s the complete lack of open, healthy dialogue around porn and sex.”

However, I actually am using "real" very similarly to your definition. If porn has an impact on cultural practice, sex that is influenced by porn is real in that way, and so is sex influenced by romantic novels. We probably are less aware of the latter, though, since the ubiquity of porn on the internet is a newer phenomenon.

The quote you use sounds quite sex-positive. But please also note that the article uses "real" in quotes (sometimes even capitalized), so it is fair to assume that Gallop uses that term extensively as well, and probably in a judgmental fashion. Also, her site is called "make love, not porn". I find both quite hypocritical, since, after all, she is operating a porn site.

All that is in her TED presentation. Perhaps watching that video would give you a different sense of the person than that NYT article about the person?

I think you are right to argue that she's advocating for more of the variant of reality pornography which is a higher quality of amateur pornography, or for more erotica. However, I think her real goal is that pornography is not where people should be learning about sex, and she's using this as a way to advocate that goal.

Framed your way, she thinks porn's impact on cultural practice is too constricting, and detrimental to the type of society she wants there to be.

Okay, the stories definitely don't happen (pizza boy/girl etc.) but nobody knows why those are a part of porn anyway, everyone just skips over them.

And I'm guessing the logistic problems make three+somes less frequent than in porn, the tabooness of it all as well I guess.

But the sex itself, is it that much different than "real" sex? Are there really that many people having boring sex to make the amount of people coming close to and/or surpassing porn a statistical anomaly?

If I recall the movie correctly (yes, I only watched the movie), Kinsey found out people are a lot kinkier than they let others believe once you really get down to finding out their true behind-the-scenes actions.

With the shifting social mores, has that changed? Do we now let others think we are far kinkier than we really are?

As a specific example, many of the 20-year-olds she has had sex with believe that coming on a woman's face is part of normal sex. She's fine with telling them that she does not want that. Her concern is that a young woman who does not want that, but where her boyfriend does, and where "hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women's faces, that all women love having their faces come on, and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it."

She explicitly states that this is not a good and bad sex view, and indeed asserts that sex "embraces the vastest possible range of proclivities." Instead, she says that hardcore porn presents a "one-world view" and she wants to say "not necessarily."

Which means that no, porn is "not real" in that regard. The "makelovenotwar.com" site has examples of "porn world", where women have no pubic hair, and "real world", where some do, some don't, some men actually prefer women with hair, and it's a personal choice. In "porn world", "women come all the time ins positions where nothing is going on anywhere near the clit." In "real world", there needs to be something. In porn world, "all women love anal sex." In the real world, a lot of women are not. In the porn world, camera angles are important. In the real world, one of the pleasures of sex is the full body skin-on-skin contact - which would make it hard for the camera. And so on.

(Yes, porn is vast, and there are niches with all of these examples. That's not part of mainstream porn.)

So yes, the sex shown in hardcore porn is real sex. But so is a lot of other things which makes for great sex but boring porn. Do you really want to watch the foreplay of a couple, naked but under a warm blanket, talking about how their day went or the frustrations at work while enjoying the nearness of each other? And then stopping for a moment to look something up in the dictionary? No, no more than you want to watch video of most real families going about their lives.

There are many other ways to learn how families work than by watching TV. Where does one learn about how sex - and I of course mean more than the mechanics - works? Her argument seems to be that porn is not diverse enough, and that instead viewers are channeled into a certain set of ideas of what sex is.

This is nothing to do with kinky. This is nothing to do with boring sex. Hence I don't see how any of your comments apply.

This question highlights the worst effect porn has on male understanding and perception of sexual intercourse.

First of all, there's very little porn out there where the woman truly enjoys the experience. It's not always glaringly obvious (although we'll get back to that in the next point), but if you actually stop and look, you'll see the discomfort and/or indifference very often.

Second, a lot of porn out there focuses on and glorifies the woman's suffering, pain and degradation. Seriously, you only have to read the word "painal" once to realize that. However, if that's not enough, you might also look for the occurrences of "choke", "gag", "destroy", "slut", etc.

Third, even the porn that doesn't focus on pain teaches wrong stuff. One might get the idea that the only thing a man need do to make a woman enjoy sex is to pound her fast and hard. On top of that comes the whole issue of hygiene: the way anal is portrayed means that if you try it at home, your female partner will likely end up with an infection.

Fourth, it creates unrealistic expectations. Let's just say that gag reflex is not as easy to suppress as the porn makes you believe and that anal sex is not a matter of just sliding in any time you want.

TL;DR: No, it's not just about whether the sex if fun or boring.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I'm male.

It's different from real sex because many of the things done in porn are done more because they look good on camera than because they actually feel good. Traditional and boring as it might be, missionary feels nice. It's uncommon in porn because you can't see the girl.

It's a lot like the relationship between stage fighting and real combat. A spinning jump kick to the face looks really cool, but a rabbit punch is far more likely to end a fight.

This is a bit like asking if Hollywood hacking is really that much different from real hacking. Real sex is exciting to the participants -- if done right, more exciting than porn sex -- but that excitement doesn't show up well when the act is filmed, so porn producers have settled on a series of tropes intended to make it exciting to the (predominantly male) audience. So there is lots of emphasis on body parts moving against and within each other, and the event of male ejaculation. To allow the camera a good view, porn actors fuck in positions that would be fatiguing if used regularly by people of ordinary fitness levels.

For most people, real sex involves a lot of kissing and fondling non-genital, non-breast body parts. (Sometimes biting, smacking, or pinching if you are kinky.) They may be seated or reclining, next to each other or one atop the other, for long periods of time with relatively little movement. Bringing a woman to orgasm is especially tricky: some can cum in 15 seconds while others require long and careful attention. Some have physical needs which change with time; I recall one girl who preferred a bit of roughness early in play and a gentler touch later on. When she does cum, a woman may scream and holler, moan quietly, or not at all; sometimes the only clue she gives you is holding you tighter, or an involuntary twitch of the hips that can be felt more than seen. Joe Six Pack stroking it at home doesn't want to see that shit, he just want bang bang bang. And that's what porn delivers, but imho it's the easiest and most boring part of a sexual relationship (whether committed or not).

Oy vey, you're constructing a spectrum with "porn" on one end and "boring" on the other. I strongly (strongly!) disagree with that sort of assumption about sex--- getting naked with a partner who you're excited about and is excited about you can be so damn varied, and spontaneous, and goofy, and expressive, and...well, just all around great. Porn, on the other hand, is generally bound by some weird and arbitrary genre conventions. If you were having sex as contrived and indifferent as you see in a movie, you'd probably get bored!

The settings are fake, the lighting is fake, the actors' physical appearance is fake (make-up, post-processing, etc.), the emotions are fake. Often the actors lie about their age, their sexual experience, etc.