PSE in escort nomenclature stands for “Porn Star Experience.” “Sex workers that offer a Porn Star Experience for their customers engage in kinky and taboo sex acts similar to those seen in pornographic films. This kind of sexual experience opposes the sensual and romantic sex characteristic to the Girlfriend Experience.” Activities “might include sex in adventurous positions, loud moaning, dirty talk, hair pulling, light spanking, anal play, extreme gagging, facials, and sex with toys or costumes” (Kinkly).

If money was no object, and fantasies were no obstacle…ask yourself this tonight: Who will she be, and how will you have her? The premise of one porn site consists of porn stars offering their services as escorts. It captures some of the dynamics of paid sex: the knock on the door of the hotel suite, the introductory banter, the exchange of cash. The sex that follows is decidedly PSE.

The ubiquity of pornography has left an imprint on sexual tastes. Cindy Gallop delivered a TED Talk a decade ago recounting how her sexual experiences with young men had become pornified. (Their most frequent request was to come on her face.) She urged them to “make love, not porn.”

But how unrealistic is porn?

Make Porn, Not Love

In its sexual acrobatics and wild erotic phantasmagoria, porn certainly seems unrealistic. Stephanie once complained about an inexperienced client who tried to replicate what he saw in porn. (“I’m flexible, but I’m not Gumby.”) There is nevertheless a profound sexual realism in pornography, for it does, according to Camille Paglia, “represent the brute reality of sexuality.” The pornographic narrative subverts the ideal of monogamous romance and decouples physical passion from emotional intimacy. It exalts raw pleasure over any procreative intent. In porn we confront the darkness of eros.

What critics of pornography have decried as objectification might be better described, according to a Yale philosophy professor, as animalification. Women in porn are appreciated not for their rational faculties but for exercising their sexual instincts. For me, much of the appeal of porn starlets comes from their unabashed sexuality. The message I received growing up in the purity culture was that the female libido is passive, tethered to the desire for emotional intimacy. Girls are naturally modest and pure; they must guard their bodies and hearts comes from the sexually assertive male. (Hence the need for modesty.) Female sexuality is marked by restraint. “Sugar and spice and everything nice.” Porn disrupts that myth.

Porn can affirm female sexual agency. Angela White says, “Pornography functions as a space where I’m able to be very creative with my own sexual desires. I’m able to express myself and explore the boundaries and depths of my sexuality.” Porn depicts women as sexually voracious, an antidote to the forced illusion of modesty. The constraints of chastity or fidelity no longer apply. Yet it does so through the prism of the male gaze in which women are presented as objects of desire. The women in porn present themselves as always sexually available. As Gail Dines notes, sex in porn is “something that the woman seeks out because she loves to be sexually used.” The subtext is that women function as vehicles of pleasure designed to satiate a man’s needs.

One of the well-worn tropes in porn (which nevertheless still entices me) is that of female innocence defiled — the schoolgirl, the cheerleader — even if the ostensible ingenue turns out to be the sexual protagonist. The stereotypical “porn star look” appeals less to me than “the girl next door turned hardcore.” Charles Stember writes, “The gratification in sexual conquest derives from the experience of defilement — of reducing the elevated woman to the ‘dirty’ sexual level, of polluting that which is seen as pure, sexualizing that which is seen as unsexual, animalizing that which is seen as ‘spiritual.'” A moralistic sexual ethic which exalts chastity and makes sex “dirty” interweaves sexual gratification with the violation of taboos. Porn exploits that dynamic.

Most vitally, porn affirms my experience of sex as detached from love. Sex has little to do with expressing love or affection. Outside the niche of so-called “couples porn,” the sex in porn is brutally depersonalized. Philosopher Roger Scruton observes, “It prizes sexual excitement free from the I-You relation and directs it to a nameless scene of mutual arousal, in which arousal too is depersonalized, as though it were a physical condition and not an expression of the self.” In that manner, porn replicates much of my experience with escorts. One artist distinguishes the “pornographic element” in that “what you’re left with is a sense of estrangement, not a sense of connectedness,” for porn is “never about warmth or emotional proximity.” One study documents that repeated exposure to pornography weakens among both men and women valuations of marriage and monogamy. In its baseness, porn nevertheless depicts a stark truth.