Don Jon's Addiction by Jesse Nussman

            Let’s face it; pornography addiction is not necessarily a topic that comes up a lot in discussion. Yet that is what the focus of the movie Don Jon is about. The movie is written, directed, and staring Joseph Gordon Levitt as a ladies man who prefers the virtual babes on his computer than sex with an actual person. Although the film takes a much lighter approach to the subject of sexual addiction than the 2011 film Shame, there is no sugarcoating the effects pornography has on Jon and his personal life. First of all, porn distorts Jon’s opinion on what sex is supposed to be. For Jon sex is nothing more than a way to “get off” and it is not until he meets Esther, a woman in his college class, that he experiences real intimacy. Another key reason for Jon’s detachment during intercourse is his comparison of the women he sleeps with to those he sees in porn. At one point Jon explains how girls in real life only want to have sex in one position (missionary), while the girls in porn will have sex in multiple positions. The comparisons go on and on from oral sex to money shots (ill let you all look up what that is). Eventually Jon sees the women in porn as the “ideal partner” and strives to find someone like them.

 Even when he meets the supposed girl of his dreams played by Scarlett Johansson, he still has to watch porn in order to fulfill his sexual drives. There are in fact several scenes in which Jon has to go jack-off to porn after having sex with a girl because it was just not enough for him. Eventually Jon’s constant need to watch porn causes his relationship with his girlfriend (Johansson) to fall apart. However, as much as the film focuses on how porn objectifies women and distorts our views about sex, there is another key message to the story. Scarlett Johansson’s character represents a counter argument about how women objectify men based off of the Casanova characters they see in romantic comedies that revolve their whole life around the women they love. Although this area of the story does not receive as much attention as the one about porn it allows a perfect point about how both sexes are responsible for objectifying each other. By objectifying others we prevent ourselves from discovering the real person.

Citation

Don Jon. DVD. Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Beverly Hill: Relativity Media, 2013