Like most people who have tried it, I love to fuck. And I’m lucky enough to be with a woman who’s cool, kind, funny, and hot. After doing it on a train, atop a parking garage, and in Golden Gate Park, we were up for another challenge: Pornhub’s sex-based workout routine, BangFit.
The in-beta app deploys a kitschy ‘80s theme and promises to “fight against our sedentary lifestyle.” Its intro video is a supreme example of punny innuendo, employing cheeky and harmlessly erotic animations and a giddy British voiceover to pitch sex as the superior fitness regimen.
And this isn’t baseless. Sex can ease stress, improve sleep, soothe headaches, lower blood pressure, and counts as semi-strenuous exercise (30 minutes = 3 mile bike ride). To measure exertion, BangFitters don an elastic belt holstering a laptop-synced smartphone, then “hump along” with onscreen demonstrators to earn points. And since it’s 2016, scores can be can shared on social media. Naturally.
BangFit is a lot like Dance Dance Revolution, except your avatars aren’t cutesy characters—they’re actual pornstars engaged in hardcore sex, much to me and my girlfriend’s surprise (the video left that detail out). The beta-version only has one scene available, but the app will soon be fleshed out with a wider variety that depict different sexual preferences and orientations.
Predictably, the available scene is ludicrous.
A #blessed or artificially ample-chested woman from hardcore porn Brazzers works out in an impractical outfit, then wordlessly decides to mount her trainer’s cartoonish dong. In reverse cowgirl, she commences some professional-grade fucking, leveraging a black strap hanging from the ceiling to maximize her bouncing efficiency.So, y’know, just super casual stuff anyone can do. Over the next ten minutes, she and her co-star whip through about six positions with dizzying speed.
We gave up early trying to match them.
Our debut session confirmed that I’m not cut out for the business of filmed sex. The unfamiliar belt, music, and visuals induced some—ahem—mild performance anxiety. So we stopped midway through, giggling at the scene’s corniness and the inherent absurdity of trying to quantify our sex life with an app. On the restart, I started on the bottom. After finding our rhythm, we were thrown again when the actress took the “Clean and Twerk” and “Cardi Oh-Yes” positions, which looked potentially painful and physics-defying. The porn star then dropped to her knees for a money-shot finale, which despite its popularity in porn, felt objectively gross.
We checked our scores. Being on the bottom was a crucial error; my hips hadn’t moved enough to register on the app for most of the session. According to BangFit’s calculations, I burned a measly 1.63 calories and qualified as “not fit to bang,” leaving me tacitly mocked by the top leaderboard guy’s score, which was nearly 20 times higher than mine.
Miffed by BangFit’s unkind assessment, we tried again. This time, I got on top and focused on matching the app’s prescribed rhythm. As I stared at the screen, I felt my girlfriend pull me down for a kiss, but I hesitated because I didn’t want to lower my score—an absolutely fucked up thought to have while inside another person. This time, we missed the leaderboard by only a few thrusts. Wanting to prove to this incredibly niche community of porn app beta-testers that we have some of the Best Sex in America, we decided to give it a fourth try.
It went awful. I got a shitty score, and worse—my girlfriend didn’t enjoy it.
BangFit advertises watching porn with your partner as a way to “spice up your sex life,” but all we got were fake-sounding moans and a synth-laden soundtrack. Compounded by the too-slow scrolling icons that dictated our timing, we couldn’t have been more turned off. As we laid next to each other, she rolled over and said, “I feel so inadequate. I’d rather have you look at me instead of the girl with the super round, perky tits.” Duh. I fucked up. I’d prioritized a meaningless score over my woman.
Like every man, I jerk off to porn. But whacking it is a private, selfish activity rooted in fantasy. Watching porn while having sex just felt like I was using the woman I cherish instead of my hand. It felt like a dystopia where people fuck while wearing virtual reality headsets.
Good sex is generous, intimate, and palpably grounded in the moment—it's not concerned with appealing to onlookers. If sex is like pizza, then porn is display-pizza: artificial and lacquered. What looks good often doesn’t feel that way. Juxtaposed with the real deal, porn just feels trivial—money shots, acrobatic positions, and fake orgasms don’t compare to actual passion. When I have that connection, fantasy can’t trump reality. Ultimately, BangFit is kinda dumb. The scene isn’t that hot, the music sucks, and the prescribed pace didn’t do much for us. The app has some nifty “sexercises,” but I’d rather discover those spontaneously. And I don’t need a smartphone to know I’m getting a workout.
Maybe down the line, my girlfriend and I will try to get on that leaderboard for pride, but probably not. When it comes to sex, I want us both to score.
