'The Spectator' Editorial Decries the Rise of 'Porn-Agains'

LOS ANGELES—Writing for England's venerable The Spectator, American-British journalist Cosmo Landesman has taken a first-person look at a largely unnoticed phenomenon he adroitly coins as "porn-agains"—meaning, "the steady pornification of a section of the adult metropolitan middle class."

More specifically, Landesman, who is himself middle-aged, single and admits to playing the field, observes, "Porn’s influence has seeped into the British bedroom. The good news is that there’s a lot more variety on offer; the bad news is that some of it’s pretty scary stuff. (You try uttering sweet nothings wearing a leather ‘gimp’ mask with wooden ball strapped inside your mouth.) Between the sheets, educated middle-class women now talk and act like working-class porn starlets. And middle-class, middle-aged men have a new set of erotic expectations based on what they’ve seen in porn videos. Sorry kids, but Mummy and Daddy have become ‘Porn-Agains’."

This trend, as it were, struck a chord with the writer after a sexual assignation he had with a "nice, middle-aged, middle-class mother" he'd met at a dinner party, who told him "she was very worried about the effects of internet porn on adolescent males. What, she wondered, was all this internet porn doing to the young? Did we really want a generation of teenage boys whose idea of emotional intimacy was anal sex?

"Weeks later," he continued, "we ended up in bed and it left me wondering: what is all that internet porn doing to nice, middle-aged mums you meet at dinner parties? Do we really want a generation of forty/fifty-something women whose idea of emotional intimacy is anal sex?"

The piece is not meant to serve only as an intimate observation of post-internet porn sexual mores among the British middle-classes, but also as a sort of complaint or criticism, a kind of cautionary scream by someone who has looked into the abyss of middle-aged porn and lived to warn the rest of us about it.

Following a particularly impassioned rant on the "the rise of the middle-aged Brazilian wax—a fad popularized by porn," Landesman explains, "Each to his own. But I can’t help feeling a kind of nostalgia for the old days before older people discovered internet porn. I miss the pubic bush. I miss middle-class reserve and reticence. Where have all the Nice Girls and Gentleman gone? I don’t want to go to a dinner party and hear jokes about anal sex. I want the bourgeoisie to be bourgeois—repressed, hypocritical, moralistic—and not all tolerant and transgressive."

Following this plea that people old enough to know better engage in something approaching respectable behavior, Landesman concludes, "It’s said by professional trend-watchers that whenever older people take up a practice that was once the prerogative of the young, it goes out of fashion and loses its appeal and audience. There is some evidence that the Brazilian wax is on the wane—at least with the young. Now that mum and dad are all porny too, it can’t be long before the young return to romance and we won’t have to worry about them anymore. Mum and dad, however, are another matter."

It's an engaging read, to be sure, but perhaps not to be taken at face value. One sharp-eyed commenter who encountered a whiff of inconsistency in the article could not help but note harshly of Landesman, "Anyone who really 'miss(ed) middle-class reserve and reticence' would not, perhaps, conduct a shamelessly [promiscuous] sex life and then share the details with 50,000 people? If you want to have any credibility, pick which side you are on and stick to it!"

For a more practical look at some issues related to older sex (and porn use), try this article from 2012 on for size.