Is Sex Different Now or Did I Just Miss All the Weird Stuff?

26 comments

1. Sex has most definitely changed due to porn, there absolutely no doubt about it. In the sense we desire something that does not actually exist in real life.

   Most positions in porn is gimmicky as hell and offer no real pleasure what so ever, it is just extremely pleasing to the eye.

   Most of the positions are just plain uncomfortable as fuck, and if you check out various porn stars on YT (many have their own channels now) they all say that most of the positions are awful and are not sexually pleasing to perform at all.

   Now anal, and squirting have really caught on and these things are I would say mainstream normal, that is both anal for women and men as well as prostate play. As for squirting as I am a man I can only share observations and personal experience with my wife and what I have heard other say, some women absolutely love it, others don’t care much for it, some have not experienced it, and lastly those who have no desire to attempt it.

2. Many things working together!

   The main phenomenon you are describing is called ‘selection bias’. Basically, the people you actually hear about are the people that are more out there. People who are having fairly normal vanilla sex don’t trumpet it from the rooftops because… well that’s just normal vanilla sex. The reality is still ‘most people have not had a threesome’. Its just that, when someone does, they talk about it, and you hear about it. We focus on the dozen people that talk about having had a threesome a lot more than the million people who just… don’t.

   Some of it is porn based though! We all learn through example; we see someone doing a thing and then try to replicate that thing. This is obviously not ideal when it comes to porn, because porn is filmed to try and show off what is going on. You need to know when the guy nuts, so lets get a closeup of that creampie! You need to see the dick going into pussy, so lets have a really awkward position.

   Then, the third component is the ongoing sexual liberation. Men in the 80’s might have been too ‘macho’ to admit that getting rimmed feels good. Now, people are more comfortable saying ‘hey, yes, this is actually nice and I like it’. On top of that, people are more comfortable actually talking about things with fewer euphemisms and deflections and so on. Its possible a decent number of straight guys in the 80’s actually were getting rimjobs, but just didn’t tell anyone about it because of social pressure. Now that pressure is going away, so people are freer to discuss these topics.

   Things change for lots of reasons, not just one or two.

3. I’m a few years younger than you. When I was young sex education was a friend finding one of his dad’s Playboys and whatnot.

   Years later VHS and Beta videos flourished, so now really bad porn (and new ideas and methods were now a trip to the local video rental store away. That was my first experience seeing facials and many other things (late 1970s).

   Then dial up bulletin boards, and later the internet became the easiest way to disseminate information. The more people saw the more they experimented.

   Much of what seemed like hard core back in yours and my youth are fairly garden variety and normal these days.

   Marked influence and changes began with video rentals, much more so than printed works at that time. That is where things really began to accelerate, years later the internet turbo charged it by bringing every sexual activity you can think of to anyone’s fingertips at the click of a mouse (or thumbs on a phone).

   Porn has been with us since early humans began making art, we just have a better delivery method for it now.

4. Here we go… I’m about the same as you and dont think things generally have changed that much with a couple of exceptions but.. the electronic age has focused massively on sex related stuff and the ones who use it tend to be the out there ones. Vanilla people don’t really publicise stuff, I mean why would you. I do believe that exposure to porn at a very young age has definitely changed the way teenagers see sex as they don’t have anywhere near enough sex ed to explain that this isn’t real and part of a normal relationship. Free porn is chock full of deep throat, anal, 3sms, spanking etc so it must be really hard for a 14yo not to think this is normal. While girls remain the gate keepers to sex, they are gonna learn from the boys they let through so on it goes. It is also very well documented that both sexes have massively more body dismorphia as a result of their dicks and tits not measuring up to what they also see as normal.

5. I think the “weird” stuff was still there in ’77 but you guys were just more private about it and not connected like we are now via social media and the internet. My grandma told me once swingers parties were pretty common on the weekends when her and my grandpa were young.

   Want a lady to piss on you while you jerk off in ’77?
   You’re looking at your immediate geographic area and have to talk to women in personals or go find a sex worker in person. In 2023 you can remain pretty anonymous online while you search and find a lady within driving distance outside your area. If that makes sense?

6. I’m 37F and my experience has been the same as yours. I started having sex when I was 15 (so ‘02-ish) and in the past 6 years – I feel like I’m a fish out of water with all the crazy shit going on these days.

7. I’m a little older than you, and I think that it’s our perception of sex now bs sex then. You and I didn’t have video porn readily available to us, so we didn’t see those things.

   Some people were into a lot of those things back then. I knew one who was, but that’s a story for another day.

8. 61 here. Sex was a lot more “simpler” then, as there was not such a thing as mainstream, easily got p0rn.
   So anal was about the dizzy heights of reasonably vanilla sex, unless you went the BDSM route.
   Swapping was a thing, 3somes very few and far between- done FFM & FMM- only ever once DPed a girl.
   80s were a hotbed of experimentation, but we just didn’t have the wealth of reference material there is now.

9. Time has changed and mostly rhis is beacaue porn

10. Don’t know about if things were different before or if people just now openly talk about it.

    I’m over 40, will never do BDSM, any man that calls himself a DOM gets instantly unmatched, I love all ass play, yes including rim jobs for both. Deepthroating is super fun, but I’m the one in control. And yeah, my new guy loves facials and I love his reaction so….that’s in the rotation.

    As for cream pies, that’s just….sex without a condom….I’m on birth control, so as long as we see each others tests and are exclusive, then that’s the norm.

11. Porn and the internet happened. Porn is way easier to access than ever before. People reenact things they see in porn that they found to be sexy, then they go on social media and talk about it.

    Is porn more mainstream now or are we just hearing about it more because of social media? Both.

12. Online porn raised the bar, plus most people are now open about their kinks and desires

13. I’m a similar age and we did all those things. If you were at Woodstock you would have seen some things beyond what you described. BUT, we did not have social media so you your sphere of information was pretty small.

14. I’m with you, pal.
    From the time I started having sex, (1970) to now, I hardly know what people are talking about. Cream pies? That’s just sex. Facials? Get that stuff off me, please.
    Sex seems more violent and un-fun now, but there must be good sex going on because we keep doing it.

15. Reading over everything you wrote, I was going to say that people do take their cues from porn…until I got to your last point on squirting. Squirting may be fetishized in some porn, but with that said, it’s a natural bodily function for *some* women. I discovered that with my current partner (but not my previous one) the sex is so good that I squirt multiple times each session, without fail. He always has to throw his comforter and sheets in the wash when we’re done, because I soak through everything. It’s not intentional. I didn’t try to do it, and I personally never watched it in porn. It was just my body’s natural reaction to him. He tells me most women can’t squirt though.

    But most of the points you mentioned, I think most people do take their cues from porn, and I can definitely feel the influence of porn in my sex life, mainly because all the guys are into it these days.

16. I’m 52, and yes. It’s different. In my experience it’s not the sex acts themselves that are different but the overall level of sex positivity. Also there are major changes in gender roles. Women don’t seem to be as afraid of being slut shamed as before.

17. I mean, I don’t think a lot of this is especially new. Anne Rice was publishing her Sleeping Beauty series starting in 1983 and that’s super kinky even by today’s standards lol. You may just not have been moving in especially kinky circles pre internet and now it’s much more easily available.

    Most straight people still don’t have threesomes or lick ass lol.

    I’m going to guess the fetishization of cream pies may be tied into how condom use really increased during and after the aids crisis, so there’s a bit of a taboo element to going raw etc.

18. Boy do I wish I grew up back in that time. People be crazy now

19. I think it’s different. I’ve been active since 1997. Plenty of kinkier things were happening then and before but not talked about so openly of course. But just the attitude around sex felt different, and I’m talking about people who were sex positive and often kinky, though that word didn’t seem to be used nearly as much then either. It was fun and open and experimental and there was more active communication about sex during the get to know you phase of potential partnerships, where you could feel each other out (and up) as you went. Now it seems like things are up front. Which is good in some ways, but certainly different than what I’m used to.

    But the biggest change I’ve noticed and I’m pretty upset about is the violence and/or degradation. I would be absolutely terrified as a young person to be choked upon first encounter with a new partner. Hell, I’m very terrified now. I don’t think I can get back out there. I can’t tolerate being spat on or choked out by a stranger, and that’s what people are until I really know them. There’s no way I can participate in casual anal, even casual PIV has never gone well for me. I don’t want to lick someone’s asshole unless I love them. Is that so bad? I love going down, but to get face fucked every time? No thank you! Years ago I was considered quite adventurous and was willing to do more than most, at least in my circle. But now I guess I could be considered a prude for wanting just plain ol’ fucking and sucking.

20. I feel the same way (66/1975).

21. > now practically everyone is into BDSM, daddy/dom, CNC, choking, etc.

    No, practically everyone is not into any of these things. Most people aren’t experimenting with these. The vanilla people just aren’t posting as often about their vanilla sex lives on Reddit. I think this honestly explains a lot of your points, except for one in particular I have a different opinion on:

    > Ejaculation wasn’t fetishized – facials weren’t routine, creampies weren’t obsessed over.

    I think this is largely due to porn.

22. Readily available porn is one reason.

    Those things were around (but not as common) and people kept it private because it was taboo and/or illegal.

    Also a majority of women used to be taught not to be “slutty” or that sex is mostly for the males pleasure. That women who engaged in that type of things were whores, etc. so you wouldn’t find a lot of women that would engage in this behaviour back then.

23. Times have definitely changed, especially as a result of online-driven trends.

24. I’d like to share a somewhat tangentially relevant observation: most of the posts on this thread are way longer than the usual on this subreddit; and many of the users involved in the discussion are older than the usual.
    Coincidence?

25. Porn is just so easily accessible today online. I’m 45 and back when I was a teen you had to get a VHS tape or DVD to access porn. Now I can go on PornHub and access a million+ videos in an instant. Plus as others have said, women are not slut shamed as they were before the turn of the millennium. It does seem to have gotten more out of control the past 10 years or so. Sex education though seems to be from porn only now. Schools and governments have taken a more hands off approach the past 20 years. So, young people can only learn from watching porn unfortunately. Plus porn is more wild now than the stuff I had back in the 80s and 90s.

26. Most folks within the last 20 years have had a high speed connection to pornography throughout their adolescent life. Trends in the porn industry probably influenced everything from pubic hair style to fetishizing of certain acts/demographics/body parts. At worst, some folks have been battling a porn addiction since their teenage years and need more stimulation to feel anything arousing