The first boobs I ever saw were Kate Winslet’s. I was 11 years old at the time, watching Titanic on a sunfaded television set in the spare bedroom of my nan and grandad’s bungalow. I didn’t know how to feel, or what to feel, but even then I knew I’d seen something special. Something important. Something that would somehow go on to shape my adult life. In many ways, I’ve not stopped thinking about Kate’s boobs since that afternoon. They’ve always been there, steering me, guiding my life choices like two perfectly formed weathervanes.

If my brain is ever examined for scientific purposes, I hope the surgeons cracking apart my skull know what to do with the big, fat mental Rolodex of naked celebrities nestled in there. Picture an endless row of gun-metal file cabinets—each stuffed with a hundred manila folders bursting with boobs and tasteful tufts of pubes—and you’ll have a rough idea of the depth and breadth of my sex scene expertise. I’m not the first man in the world to admit he’s watched a lot of movie sex scenes, but I’d bet good money I’ve seen more than most. I can recite, pretty much verbatim, the dialogue between Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson in the scene from Little Children where she grabs onto a set of pipes in the laundry room while his pert, untanned ass ruts her like a jockey. And after a few beers, I could give you a fairly accurate rendition of the choreography to Lucy Liu’s bondage-inspired strip routine in 1997’s City of Industry. Watching that scene back for research purposes the other day, I was stunned to realise it’s only 60 seconds long, and that 34 of those seconds are close-up shots of Harvey Keitel smoking. In my memory, it was a four-hour epic that was 90 percent Lucy Liu. In reality, I was working with what I had.

I was born and raised in the United Arab Emirates, a country where any content deemed immoral, anti-Islamic, or politically sensitive is blocked on the internet. Common restrictions include gambling apps, dating apps, LGBTQ+ content, anything deemed to incite “political dissent,” and whatever the TDRA (The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority) files under the catch-all category of ‘pornography, nudity and vice’. Pornography, in particular, is singled out in their guidelines as “not acceptable morally in the UAE.” It wasn’t easy being a 13-year-old there, which, as I’m sure you’ll know, is the prime age for pornography, vice, and political dissent. Googling “porn,” “sex,” or even “could I be gay?” resulted in me hitting a foreboding grey page with a red stop sign and the following text:

“Access to this site is currently blocked. The site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy.”

Masturbating around that digital logjam wasn’t easy, but over time, I figured out a few ways to beat the system. Searching for ‘boobs’ was a no-go, but ‘breasts,’ it turns out, were fair game. Search ‘Angelina Jolie sex scene,’ and you were met with the grey wall of death, but peck out ‘Angelina Jolie nude’ on the keyboard of the family computer? Now you’re cooking. I’m not sure why ‘nude’ fell through the cracks of the country’s internet filters at the time—maybe it’s because its artsy ambiguity made it harder to blanket-block?—but I’m extremely glad it did. YouTube was censored to the nines, but video-sharing sites like Metacafe and Dailymotion weren’t as tightly monitored. Those were the two websites I’d bounce between, searching for the name of any actress I’d ever heard of, plus the word ‘nude,’ to line up a dozen tabs of softly lit shagging. 

That explains my prolific knowledge of movie sex scenes, but it also informs something else. Only being able to access this extremely safe, sanitized, Hollywood-style sex shaped my relationship with it at a formative age. It’s probably the reason I’ve got an overly sentimental view on sex, and probably why a little part of me still believes you have to fuck in the way movie stars do, passionately, dramatically, with urgency. It’s definitely the reason I lost my virginity listening to Lana Del Rey. 

However, just like you shouldn’t watch Wanted expectingto learn how to bend a bullet, watching Y Tu Mamá También won’t teach you how to be intimate with another human being or how to organize a threesome successfully. If I’d taken everything that happens in sex scenes as gospel, I’d have a pretty shallow understanding of conception. The sex you get in films is manufactured, made by committee titillation. There are no fluids, no funky smells, no sweat. No fun? Perhaps. But I’d take the tameness of those simulated sex scenes—which typically require a sign-off from several concerned parties—over the cowboy production of the porn industry, scored by the soundtrack of schlubby men peeling themselves off the casting couch, any day. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve watched porn. Obviously, I’ve watched porn. But I wasn’t able to access it until my brain was more developed and better able to handle the content. I didn’t know people were obsessed with fucking their step-siblings until I was 20. Yet research published last year by the UK Children’s Commissioner indicated that 27% of those surveyed had seen pornography online by age 11, with some reporting they had seen it ‘aged 6 or younger’.

Pornography can trigger unnaturally high and sustained dopamine spikes in the brain. And although it doesn’t spike quite as high as cocaine, the dopamine rush it gives you lasts longer than a line. I realize “cocaine, but it lasts longer” is a product that’d do great on Shark Tank, but it’s only great if you can keep it in check. One side effect of reported porn addiction is that it can make regular sex seem boring and potentially lead to ‘decreased sexual satisfaction,’ encouraging the user to seek out more intense material. These studies are, of course, imperfect. Does porn reduce sexual satisfaction, or do people with lower sexual satisfaction simply watch more porn? The intense material, though? That’s a worry. Watching violent porn is linked to real-world sexual violence, and there’s a great deal of evidence of relationships between porn use and its influence on developing harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that correlation out. Spend any significant time on a porn site, and it’s hard not to come out feeling depressed about the state of the world. 

I’m not saying Hollywood is perfect. Recent stories about the underage sex scene in Good Time are proof of how broken the system is. Actresses like Florence Pugh, who has spoken out about “completely inappropriate” demands from directors, and Salma Hayek, who has detailed her traumatic experience shooting Desperado, only further highlight how deep the rot goes. These experiences are, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg. That said, following the #MeToo movement, many film sets have made intimacy coordinators mandatory during sex scenes to try and ensure the actors are comfortable, often conducting interviews with them beforehand and doing general risk assessments throughout the shoot. Despite its flaws, the film industry is more regulated than the porn industry. And despite a horndog like Lars Von Trier’s attempts to push the limits, the content it produces is never as extreme. 

Jerking off to a CGI Angelina Jolie—playing Grendel’s mother in Beowulf, not a fish in Shark Tale, I hasten to add—was a low moment, sure. But the level of focus needed to masturbate to Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman’s cunnilingus scene in Black Swan, which includes a jump scare halfway through and another at the end, is healthy. Albeit a little terrifying when it’s the middle of the night, and you’ve got school the next day. Sex scenes require you to fill in the blanks. You have to use your imagination and put in a bit of effort to make something out of nothing. It’s friction-maxxing in the most literal sense of the word.

While banning porn wholesale might, on the surface, seem like a good way to stop children and teenagers getting their brains broken, censorship comes with its own raft of issues. As of July 2025 in the UK, all pornographic sites and apps have had to implement age checks in place—requiring credit card information, facial age estimation scans, or ID verification—to make sure children can’t access explicit content. Traffic to porn sites has plummeted since its introduction, but critics of the move are wary about submitting so much sensitive identification to third-party firms. Concerns about data breaches are at the forefront of people’s minds, as are fears that this is the tentative first step towards the introduction of a social credit system. 

With trust in the government on the decline (data from the Edelman Trust Barometer indicates that just 30% of the British population trusts the government), it’s hard to envisage many trusting Kier Starmer with access to their fetish preferences. It’s why there was an immediate surge in VPN usage and demand following the implementation of the Online Safety Act. I know firsthand that a horny enough teen will always find what they’re looking for. Life, uh, finds a way. All I hope is that going through the rigmarole of downloading a VPN and jumping through various hoops to access porn means they’re ready for what’s awaiting them on the other side.

As Alain de Botton puts it in How To Think More About Sex: “Pornography, like alcohol and drugs, undermines our ability to endure certain kinds of suffering which we have to experience if we are to direct our lives properly.” It numbs you to the world, taking you away from reality when it all gets a bit much. For half an hour a week, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. But for the self-described gooners who spend hours watching porn, hoping to slip into an unreality they call the goonstate, it’s a worrying amount of time for anyone to spend fleeing from their own thoughts.