Your bag is empty.
In the 1997 film “Boogie Nights,” Burt Reynolds’ character, porn director Jack Horner, said he didn’t want to make a movie where people just “jack off and leave.” That was deeply unsatisfying to Horner, who noted how a true artist desires to make “a film that the story just sucks them in and when they spurt out that joy juice, they just gotta sit in it. They can’t move until they find out how the story ends.”
Nearly 30 years later, Horner’s point about the plot in porn still resonates in real life. From the message boards of the early aughts to the Reddit threads of modern times, the question of whether adult films need storylines has been debated for decades.
Now, comedian Trevor Noah has entered the chat on porn plotlines. In a recent episode of his podcast “What Now?,” the former host of “The Daily Show” proposed a hypothetical law.
“If I was in office, I would say, ‘Legally, all porn has to have a story,’” Noah said.
He went on to explain that it is not the performance of sex for entertainment that is inherently obscene. The problem is that unlike in real life, the gratification in porn is instant.
“It is too readily available, and it removes the context of sex as a whole,” he added.
To be fair, cheesy tropes such as the pizza delivery guy with a hole in the box are a long-standing part of porn’s sense of humor. At the same time, adult films have become shorter over time, literally making a long story short when it comes to depicting even tongue-in-cheek human desire.
To Noah’s point, the lack of context can have real consequences, especially since research shows that a growing number of young people are learning about sex through porn.
“For a lot of kids, porn is becoming, unfortunately, their primary method of sex education because they’re not getting it in schools and they’re not getting enough at home,” Al Vernacchio, MSEd, a sexuality educator from Wynnewood, Pa., told the American Psychological Association in 2021. “It is not a good entry into learning about sex or relationships, and because kids don’t have scaffolding or context for it, they can easily be led into misinformation.”
This appears to have an impact later in life. Besides, Gen Z is the first generation that could fully watch porn from their smartphones instead of having to use dial-up to download porn on a shared home computer. But it’s not a coincidence that Gen Z’ers have also endured a well-documented sex recession. Data on Gen Z from Playboy’s 2026 Sex Survey found that 34 percent of young men say that porn completely satisfies their sexual desire. The survey also found that 1 in 3 young adults sometimes choose digital or solo sexual experiences over partnered ones. Still, without the anticipation, connection, and consent that comes from sex, and definitely not from porn, did we really think that many in Gen Z’ers stood a chance at building healthy intimacy?
The absence of story in porn is not just bad for emotional and sexual development; it’s bad for business. While the limited plotlines once present in porn have been eliminated, and the adult-film industry has struggled, the demand for erotica has skyrocketed. According to The Guardian, print sales of romance and erotica novels increased from 18 million copies in 2020 to over 39 million in 2023. And women are not the only ones reading smut, fellas.
As horny as people are for plot, tension, and character development, somehow we’ve gotten further away from Jack Horner’s vision of the “joy juice” being worth the squeeze. Because all we want is to find out how the story ends.