Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  Maybe Miley provides a release for her fans, an escape from respectability, a vision, however compromised, of a girl who doesn’t dither over whether anyone (parents, other entertainers, the media) thinks she is “too slutty.” The crotch slapping, the butt shaking, the crude talk, the simulated sex acts—all gave the illusion of sexual freedom, the illusion of rebellion, the illusion of defiance, the illusion that she “doesn’t care.” But of course Miley does care. As someone trying to maintain her status as a celebrity, as a chart topper, she cares very, very much. I keep coming back to her because I find her not unique, but the opposite: she’s a human Rorschach, a lint trap of images and ideas about mainstream, middle-class girlhood. When she was fifteen, that meant wearing a “purity ring” and vowing to be a virgin until marriage; at twenty-three, it meant performing mechanistic, mock sex acts on a dwarf while dressed in a racy leotard emblazoned with pictures of money—and calling that liberation. Perpetually striving to mix the perfect cocktail in her cultural blender, she both reflects and rejects what a young woman needs to do to maintain celebrity, to snag attention, to be noticed, to be “liked”—all without seeming to try. And isn’t that what every girl is struggling to do, writ very, very large?

  In the middle of the show, Miley took a break from singing to address the audience. “How the fuck are you?” she bellowed. Then she turned around, lifted her iPhone high over her head, stuck out her tongue, snapped a selfie with the crowd as backdrop, and posted it immediately to Instagram. She was, it seemed, just like them.

  Pop Goes the Porn

  “I’m very sensitive about porn,” said Alyson Lee, tugging nervously at her dark, purple-streaked hair. Alyson was nineteen, a sophomore at a mid-Atlantic college. She’d grown up in what she called a “culturally conservative” Chinese family in a Los Angeles suburb made up almost entirely of immigrant parents and first-generation kids like her. She studied how Americans are supposed to act and feel, especially about sex and romance, by watching Grey’s Anatomy. “So now,” she said, “I have the very typical, liberal college woman point of view.”

  One that includes ambivalence about porn. Alyson has had two serious boyfriends—one in her senior year of high school, one as a freshman in college—and both told her the same thing: “Of course I watch porn: every teenage boy does.”

  “I’m not one of those people who think that porn is wrong and morally terrible and disgusting,” Alyson explained. “But it makes me feel super insecure. Like, am I not good enough? I’m definitely not as hot as a porn star. And I’m not going to do the things porn stars do. Both guys were really reassuring that it wasn’t about me, and I knew logically there was no connection between them watching porn and some flaw of mine. But it stayed in my head.”

  If, as bell hooks suggested, pop culture portrayals of women beg the question “Who has access to the female body?” the answer may ultimately be found in the ever-broadening influence of porn. That is, after all, the source of the arched backs, the wet open mouths, the ever-expanding breasts and butts, the stripper poles, the twerking, and the simulated sex acts. That is the source of women’s sexuality as a performance for men.

  The Internet has made porn more prevalent and accessible than at any time in history, especially to teens. As with pop culture, that has spurred an escalation in explicitness, a need to push the boundaries to maintain an easily distracted audience. Mirroring (and raising further questions about) the mainstream culture’s “booty” trend, in one large-scale study of sexual behavior and aggression in best-selling porn, anal sex was depicted in over half of the videos surveyed, always as easy, clean, and pleasurable to women; 41 percent of videos also included “ass to mouth,” in which, immediately after removing his penis from a woman’s anus, he places it in her mouth. Scenes of “bukake” sex (multiple men ejaculating on one woman’s face), “facial abuse” (oral sex aimed at making a woman vomit), triple penetration, and penetration by multiple penises in a single orifice are also on the rise. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that in real life those practices wouldn’t feel good to most women. Watching natural-looking people engaging in sex that is consensual, mutually pleasurable, and realistic may not be harmful—heck, it might be a good idea—but the occasional feminist porn site aside, that is not what the $97 billion global porn industry is shilling. Its producers have only one goal: to get men off hard and fast for profit. The most efficient way to do so appears to be by eroticizing the degradation of women. In the study of behaviors in popular porn, nearly 90 percent of 304 random scenes contained physical aggression toward women, while close to half contained verbal humiliation. The victims nearly always responded neutrally or with pleasure. More insidiously, women would sometimes initially resist abuse, begging their partners to stop; when that didn’t happen, they acquiesced and began to enjoy the activity, regardless of how painful or debasing it was. The reality is, as one eighteen-year-old pursuing a porn career told documentary filmmakers Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, “I’m supposed to be having sex with guys I would never have sex with, and saying things I would never say. There is nothing sexually arousing. You’re just processed meat.”

  Media has been called a “super peer,” dictating all manner of behavioral “scripts” to young people, including those for sexual encounters: expectations, desires, norms. In one era, they learn that you don’t kiss until the third date; in another, they learn that sex precedes an exclusive relationship. Bryant Paul, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington who studies “scripting theory,” explained, “I’ll ask students, ‘Think about how you learned what to do at your first college party. You’d never been to one, but you knew you were supposed to gather around the keg. You knew that couples would go off to someone’s room.’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, from American Pie and all those movies.’ So where are they learning their sexual socialization, especially in terms of more explicit behaviors? You’d be foolish not to think they’re getting ideas from porn. Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they’re repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts. So when you see consistent depictions of women with multiple partners and women being used as sex objects for males, and there’s no counterweight argument going on there . . .” He trailed off, leaving the obvious conclusion unspoken.

  Over 40 percent of children ages ten to seventeen have been exposed to porn online, many accidentally. By college, according to a survey of more than eight hundred students titled “Generation XXX,” 90 percent of men and a third of women had viewed porn during the preceding year. On one hand, the girls I met knew that porn was about as realistic as pro wrestling, but that didn’t stop them from consulting it as a guide. Honestly? It pains me to hear that the scatological fetish video Two Girls, One Cup was, for some, their first exposure to sex. Even if what they watch is utterly vanilla, they’re still learning that women’s sexuality exists for the benefit of men. So it worried me to hear an eleventh-grader confide, “I watch porn because I’m a virgin and I want to figure out how sex works”; or when another high-schooler explained that she “watched it to learn how to give head”; or when a freshman in college told me, “There are some advantages: before watching porn, I didn’t know girls could squirt.”

  There is some indication that porn has a liberalizing effect: heterosexual male users, for instance, are more likely than peers to approve of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, they’re also less likely to support affirmative action for women. Among teenage boys, regular porn use has been correlated with seeing sex as purely physical and regarding girls as “play things.” Porn users are also more likely than their peers to measure their masculinity, social status, and self-worth by their ability to score with “hot” women (which may explain that disproportionate pressure girls report to text boys naked photos of themselves as well as the plots of most Seth Rogen films). Male and female college stude
nts who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe “rape myths”: that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim “asked for it” by drinking too much or wearing “slutty” clothing or by going to a club alone. Perhaps because it depicts aggression as sexy, porn also seems to desensitize women to potential violence: female porn users are less likely than others to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they’re in danger themselves.

  Boys (both in high school and college), not surprisingly, use porn more regularly than girls. Slightly less than half of male college students use it weekly; only 3 percent of females do. Given that frequent consumers of porn are more likely to consider its depictions of sex realistic, this can skew expectations in the bedroom. “I do think porn changes how guys view sex,” mused Alyson Lee. “Especially with my first boyfriend. He had no experience. He thought it would happen like in porn, that I’d be ready a lot faster and he could just, you know, pound.”

  “They think they’re supposed to do this hammer-in-and-out thing and that’s what girls like,” agreed a sophomore at a California college. “They don’t realize, ‘Dude, that does not feel good.’ It’s all they know. It’s what they see. If you’re just hooking up with someone, like a one-time thing or whatever, you just pretend it feels good.”

  In her prescient book Pornified, Pamela Paul found that women had begun feeling competitive with porn stars, worried that unless they put on their own show to maintain a partner’s interest, they would lose him to the Internet. They believed that the unnatural thinness, inflated breasts, and overfilled lips of those surgical cyborgs were distorting men’s standards of beauty, eroding women’s own body image, increasing their self-consciousness. “Porn has terrible effects on what young women are supposed to look like, particularly during sex,” said Leslie Bell, a psychotherapist and author of Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom. “There’s this idea that someone is going to be evaluating your appearance not only outside of the bedroom, which was true before, but also during sex, that your body has to look a certain way then. It seems very pressured and shame-inducing, because bodies don’t look like that naturally.” You’d need self-esteem of steel to remain immune.

  The girls I met sometimes disconnected from their bodies during sex, watching and evaluating their encounters like spectators. “I’ll be hooking up with some guy who’s really hot,” confided a high school senior in Northern California, “and we’ll be snuggling and grinding and touching and it’s cool. Then things get heavier and all of a sudden my mind shifts and I’m not a real person: it’s like, This is me performing. This is me acting. It’s like, How well am I doing? Like, This is a hard position, but don’t shake. And I’m thinking, What would ‘she’ do? ‘She’ would go down on him.’ And I don’t even know who it is I’m playing, who that ‘she’ actually is. It’s some fantasy girl, I guess, maybe the girl from porn.”

  JON MARTELLO IS a simple guy, a New Jersey native who cares about “my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my guys, my girls, my porn,” not necessarily in that order. The protagonist of the film Don Jon, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who also wrote and directed), Jon Martello got his womanizing nickname by “pulling” a different girl every weekend. No single partner, though, can compare to the bounty he finds online. “All the bullshit fades away,” he says in a voice-over, “and the only thing in the world is those tits . . . dat ass . . . the blow job . . . the cowboy, the doggie, the money shot and that’s it, I don’t gotta say anything, I don’t gotta do anything. I just fucking lose myself.”

  During one of Jon’s after-Mass Sunday dinners at his parents’ house, where the TV inevitably blares in the background, an ad for Carl’s Jr. comes on. The camera lingers as Nina Agdal, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, rubs oil onto her glistening, bikini-clad body. She arches like a cat on hands and knees on a beach, hair flowing, and then sits, legs splayed, and takes a big, juicy bite of a codfish sandwich. Don’s mother looks away, fiddles with an earring. His sister, whose back is to the TV, doesn’t even glance up from her cell phone. Don and his father, wearing identical white tank tops, stare at the screen wearing identical slack-jawed expressions. In an interview about that scene, Gordon-Levitt commented, “What I’m saying is whether it’s rated X or ‘approved by the FCC for a general viewing audience,’ the message is the same.”

  He’s right. You don’t need to log in to PornHub to absorb its scripts; they’re embedded in the mainstream. And the impact of that garden-variety, “pornified” media on young people—from Maxim magazine to Dolce & Gabbana couture ads to Gossip Girl to multiplayer online games to infinite music videos—is indistinguishable from actual porn. The average teenager is exposed to nearly fourteen thousand references to sex each year on television; 70 percent of prime-time TV now contains sexual content. College men who play violent, sexualized video games are more likely than their peers to see women as sex objects as well as to be more accepting of rape myths, more tolerant of sexual harassment, and to consider women less competent. College women who, in experiments, played the virtual game Second Life using a sexualized avatar were more likely to self-objectify offline than those who played with a nonsexualized avatar and, again, were more likely to hold false beliefs about rape and rape victims. (Seeing yourself as an object apparently leads you to view other women that way as well.) Meanwhile, in a study of middle and high school girls, those who were shown sexualized pictures of female athletes subsequently scored higher on measures of self-objectification than those who saw the same athletes engaged in, you know, actual athletics. Young women who consume more objectifying media also report more willingness to engage in sexualized behavior, such as taking a pole dancing class or entering a wet T-shirt contest, and to find those activities empowering. They’re more likely to justify sexualization, and less likely to protest against it. In other words, as Rachel Calogero, a psychologist at the University of Kent in England, has written, “Objects don’t object.”

  The sex in TV and movies can be simultaneously explicit and evasive. Sex, particularly noncommitted sex, is typically presented as fun and advisable; rarely is it awkward or silly or challenging or messy or actively negotiated or preceded by discussion of contraception and disease protection. There’s always plenty of room in the backseat of those limousines, and nary a pothole in the road. Of course there are exceptions: Glee in its early seasons deftly portrayed issues surrounding teen pregnancy, sex and disability, homosexuality, bisexuality, first intercourse, fat and slut shaming, and the nature of love. Orange Is the New Black, which was beloved by many of the girls I met, brought unprecedented gender and sexual diversity to TV. The sex in Lena Dunham’s work is radically raw. One of the most realistic (if depressing) scenes ever filmed may be found in her 2010 release, Tiny Furniture. In it Aura, a newly minted college graduate played by Dunham, finally gets together with the object of her affection, a loutish chef at the restaurant where she works. A typical Hollywood version of such an encounter—which takes place outside at night, in a metal tube on a loading dock while both partners are mostly clothed—would’ve been sleek and effortless, the woman instantly orgasmic. In Dunham’s hands, it went something like this: they kissed for ten seconds; he unzipped his fly and wordlessly shoved her head downward; he told her to “suck harder,” cursed her incessantly ringing phone, and then scuttled around her body to enter her doggie style; he pounded into her until he ejaculated, which took less than a minute; he never once looked at her face. Aura’s expression shifted from aroused to confused, to slightly disappointed, to resigned. Afterward, he bid her good-bye while checking his texts. The scene is hard to watch without cringing—it’s poignant, it’s agonizing, it’s embarrassing, and it’s real.

  Young women grow up in a porn-saturated, image-centered, commercialized culture in which “empowerment” is just a feeling, consumption trumps connection, “hot” is an impe
rative, fame is the ultimate achievement, and the quickest way for a woman to get ahead is to serve up her body before someone else does. If Paris Hilton synthesized the zeitgeist ten years ago, it may be her former bestie, Kim Kardashian, who embodies it now. Kardashian is the Horatio Alger of the selfie set, pulling herself up by her bra straps and parlaying exhibitionism and a genius for self-promotion into an impressive eighty-five-million-dollar empire. Like Hilton, Kardashian came to prominence via a sex tape in a deal that, rumor has it, was brokered by her mother. She, too, seems strangely bored by the on-screen acts in that tape, chewing gum throughout. Still, the notoriety generated by the did-she-or-didn’t-she-leak-it-on-purpose speculation was enough to pique the E! network’s interest in a reality show. Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK) premiered in 2007. Soon after, Kim posed for Playboy, encouraged on KUWTK by her mother. By 2008 she was the world’s most googled celebrity. Kardashian’s personal brand would eventually extend to boutiques, fitness videos, clothing lines, skin care products, perfumes, a best-selling video game, and more. She wrangled eighteen million dollars in endorsements and broadcast rights for her 2011 wedding to pro basketball player Kris Humphries (the marriage lasted seventy-two days, prompting rumors that it had been a publicity stunt). By 2015 she was thirty-third on the Forbes list of the World’s Highest Paid Celebrities. At this writing, she has more than forty-four million Instagram followers (she follows only ninety-six people herself) and has unseated Beyoncé as the site’s most followed person. Kardashian reportedly earns up to twenty-five thousand dollars per sponsored tweet and an average of one hundred thousand dollars for personal appearances. Her aforementioned full moon on the cover of Paper, while it didn’t “break the Internet,” generated nearly sixteen million page views within thirty hours. She’s now married to one of the foremost hip-hop artists on the planet—in an ode to their love, he penned a touching lyric about knowing she could be his “spouse, girl,” “when I impregnated your mouth, girl”—and, together they have a daughter, North West, currently a toddler. I wonder how they’ll react to her first sex tape.