by Jackson Katz
The Abu Ghraib torture scandal did incalculable damage to perceptions of the United States around the world, and it badly undermined American claims to moral authority in the volatile Middle East. For a time, it looked like there might be pressure to hold senior officials accountable for this scandal, and not just the ordinary soldiers who claimed to be following orders. Limbaugh’s comments at the time were widely seen as an attempt to deflect criticism away from higher ups in the chain of command, up to and including the White House. But in playing this transparently partisan role, the nation’s number one talk radio personality did what powerful men have done for eons: he sided with the perpetrators of sexual violence over its victims. The rape culture will persist as long as influential people—for whatever reason—make excuses for sex crimes instead of firmly and unwaveringly declaring that sexual abuse will never be condoned, tolerated, or excused.
CHAPTER TEN
Guilty Pleasures: Pornography, Prostitution, and Stripping
“Pornography hates men. It tells them that they are cruel, pathetic creatures who can sustain erections but not relationships. Porn is based on the premise that men will buy into this image rather than see it for what it is—a cold, calculated strategy to manipulate them into buying billions of dollars of woman and man-hating propaganda.”
—Gail Dines
“Who are the ‘johns,’ those people who buy women and girls in prostitution? Johns are average citizens rather than sadistic psychopaths. They are from all walks of life—doctors, judges, famous actors, and CEOs, as well as construction workers, social workers, and traveling salesmen. Rich and poor, young and old, the men . . . are from every race/ethnicity in the world. Most are married . . . One woman reported that as she was about to perform fellatio on a man in his Volvo, she heard a cry from behind her, turned around, and saw a year-old baby, strapped into a car seat.”
—Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research and Education, San Francisco, California
It has long been understood that what people do for entertainment—and sexual pleasure—can be shockingly revealing. But until recently, most discussions about pornography, prostitution, and stripping have focused on the women and girls in those industries—who they are, how they got into that life, and what happens to them once they do. These are important areas of discussion, and over the past couple of decades activists and researchers have learned a great deal about the reality of women’s and girls’ lives in the commercial “sex industry”—largely as a result of the courageous testimonies of women who have survived it. But if we hope to prevent sexual violence and other forms of sexual exploitation, we must begin to ask another set of questions: How does heterosexual men’s use of pornography as a masturbatory aid help to shape not only their view of women and girls, but their own manhood and sexuality? What is the influence on boys’ sexuality of early and repeated exposure to the pornography industry’s particular representation of “normal” sex? Is it possible to discuss sexual violence in our society and not talk about the influence in male culture of the $10 billion pornography industry? What is the relationship between the sexual abuse of children and the proliferation of media products that deliberately sexualize young girls—and in some cases boys? How do men treat prostitutes, and what impact does this have on the way they treat their wives, girlfriends, female coworkers, and fellow students? As strip culture seeps ever more visibly into the mainstream, what effect does this have on men’s and boys’ attitudes toward women? What can be done about what seems to be a steady movement away from the idea of sex as mutually respectful? Short of creating our own version of a Talibanlike theocracy, is it possible to reverse the seemingly inexorable societal trend toward the pornographic fantasy of men using women like blow-up dolls?
These are uncomfortable questions, and what makes them even more difficult is that not everyone wants to know the answers. Men have an obvious incentive to change the subject. But it is also true that many women are not eager to find out about what goes on in certain parts of male culture that historically have been off-limits to them, especially when it gets personal and involves men close to them. And who can blame them? The “truth” about some men’s callousness, cruelty, and need for sexual dominance that is revealed in pornography, prostitution, and strip culture is a lot to stomach. Some women carry the added burden of having done things sexually with men to accommodate a man’s pornographic fantasy, which in another context they might feel compromised their integrity. It also must be painful for women to admit to themselves that their fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers are often the very same men who rent videos with titles like A Cum-Guzzling Slut Named Kimberley, pay twenty-year-old strippers for lap dances at “gentlemen’s clubs” on the way home from work, get blow jobs from prostitutes at friends’ bachelor parties, and in some cases travel abroad to have cheap sex with twelve-year-old girls.
REVOLUTIONARY HONESTY
The writer John Stoltenberg once said that pornography tells lies about women, but it tells the truth about men. I think Stoltenberg is only partially right. Unless it can be proven that male infants are born hard-wired for sexism, the only truth about men that pornography reveals is that they are products of their environment. Thus if we want to reduce the level of sexual violence perpetrated by boys and men, we need to critically examine the environment in which we socialize boys and establish norms in male culture. This will not be easy, especially since so many men have conscious or unconscious feelings of guilt about how they have objectified women, or perpetuated their oppression through their treatment of them as purchasable commodities. But in order for men to transform their feelings of guilt into something more constructive, they need to do something about the underlying problem. They need to move beyond defensiveness and ask themselves how they can help to change the sexual rituals and norms in male culture that are harmful to women and children. A good place to start this process would be to commit—in private and public—what Stoltenberg calls acts of “revolutionary honesty” about their lives, loves, and guilty pleasures.
In this spirit of revolutionary honesty, I want to come clean about some of my own guilty pleasures. At the very least, I want to make sure that I am not self-righteous or moralizing in this discussion. I do not characterize myself as a “good guy” while other guys who use porn or pay prostitutes are “bad guys,” or irredeemably sexist. I have never had nonconsensual sex or sex with a prostitute, but I am far from prudish. In my teens and twenties, before I was politically conscious about the sexist exploitation at the heart of the “sex industry,” I went to strip clubs and used pornography. But I never saw myself as oppressing women. I denied any connection between my private pleasure and the perpetuation of rape culture. At first I did not know, and then I did not want to know, how badly some men (and women) treat the women and girls in those industries. It was only as I came to hear and read about their life experiences—and reflect on the feminist idea that the high incidence of rape and sexual harassment in the U.S. is linked to the pervasive sexual objectification of women in our society—that I consciously refused to support or condone the commercial sex industry. Still, the effects of my earlier conditioning have stayed with me to this day. For example, I am sometimes aroused by images that I know are sexist and degrading to women. I appreciate the complexity of the human erotic imagination, but I wonder how much my fantasy life—and the fantasy life of tens of millions of my fellow men—has been shaped by the increasingly angry and misogynistic porn that has flooded the culture and our psyches in recent decades. I would never hold other men to a standard which I do not hold for myself. Any man who wants to fight gender violence—and all forms of sexism—needs to be careful not to condemn in others what he refuses to acknowledge about himself. The solution I have found is simply to be honest about my own self-doubts and contradictions. In my work with men, I have found that most of them respect and appreciate this, even if they do not agree with all of my interpretations or conclusions.
ANTI-SEXIST MEN AND
THE PORN WARS
Pornography is usually thought of as a women’s issue. But as the sociologist Gail Dines bluntly states, “Men make, distribute, and get rich on porn. They jerk off to it. Tell me why it’s a women’s issue.” Although men are overwhelmingly the producers and consumers of porn, they are nonetheless dramatically underrepresented among the people who take the time to reflect on and discuss its societal function. In fact, millions of men use pornography, but I suspect very few have ever had a serious conversation about it. (Pornography marketed to gay men is a huge industry itself, and many feminist critics—gay and straight—have called attention to the ways in which much of gay porn eroticizes power and control and sexual violence. For the purpose of this discussion, I am focusing on by far the largest segment of the pornography market: heterosexual men and boys.) I know that countless men with whom I have worked over the past twenty years report they had never even heard—much less discussed—thoughtful critiques of the role of porn in men’s lives, and the possible negative affect it has had on their sexuality and ability to connect with real women. Some men avoid this sort of introspection because it is still awkward to talk honestly about sex in this culture, and they are embarrassed. Other men like to shift the conversation about pornography into political arguments about free speech and censorship and away from questions about how boys and men use it, what types of porn they find pleasurable and why, and what affect heavy porn use might have on their feelings about women’s bodies and sexuality. I am certain that part of their motivation for these evasions is personal: if they engaged in serious discussions about pornography, men might have to ask themselves troubling questions about what effect pornography has on how they view themselves, their bodies, and their desires for intimate connections with women.
The debate in this country about hot-button issues like pornography and the sexualization of children in advertising has become so polarized that to the casual observer, there are only two positions: either you are for porn or against it, with no thought given to the complexity of the subject. In real life, people tend to have much more nuanced views of these matters. People in the movements to end sexual and domestic violence are often falsely accused of prudery by the self-described “sex positive” advocates and of being “in bed with the Christian right” if they dare to critique the behavior of “consenting adults.” In fact, over the past couple of decades, pornography has even been a divisive issue among people who call themselves feminists. There are two major camps. Anti-porn feminists take the position that pornography sexualizes women’s subordination, and is a critical factor in maintaining gender inequality. It might not directly cause men’s violence against women, but it portrays men’s domination and control of women as sexy. In practice, the porn industry is also a heartless corporate enterprise which can be quite brutal and exploitative of the largely working-class women (and men)—many of them in their late teens and early twenties—whose bodies provide the main attraction, but whose careers in the unforgiving adult film business—Jenna Jameson notwithstanding—are nasty, brutish, and short.
Pro-porn feminists, by contrast, argue that unbridled sexual expression—even if much of it is sexist and produced by and for men—is in women’s self-interest because one of the cornerstones of women’s oppression is the suppression of their sexuality. True emancipation requires the celebration of women’s right to do whatever they want with their bodies—which includes their right to appear in pornography, strip, and sell sex.
Notably, these arguments about pornography have largely taken place between women.
Until recently, men who have a public voice about pornography tended to fall into one of two categories: conservative Christians or pro-porn enthusiasts. In the former category are men like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Dr. James Dobson, who publicly chastise the purveyors of “obscenity” and “filth,” and who also oppose women’s reproductive freedom, readily available contraception for young people, and school-based sex education. In the latter category are libertarians like Howard Stern who talk endlessly about how much they love porn, along with men in the porn industry itself who write and speak about its positive effects and savagely attack its right-wing and feminist critics.
But as a growing number of men enter the sexual violence prevention field, a new men’s conversation about pornography is beginning to take shape. These men frequently bring an “insider” perspective on the role of pornography in the lives of boys and men. They do not have to debate in the abstract about whether they think the pornography industry is harmful to women. For many of them, the answer flows out of their lived experience and observations of the men around them. There are no formal studies on this topic, but my sense is that a sizable majority of men who have worked in college and community-based anti-rape organizations over the past fifteen or twenty years share the anti-porn feminist view that pornography contributes to the problem of sexual violence, and at the very least desensitizes men to women’s sexual subordination. There is by no means unanimity of opinion among these men about what can be done to counteract the popularity and influence of the porn industry in boys’ and men’s lives. And there are ongoing debates on college campuses and email Listservs about whether all pornography is objectification, and hence bad, or whether the real problem is the misogynistic vision of women’s sexuality and men’s power that the multi-billion dollar porn industry has sold to the public as normal and even liberating. (Note: There are competing definitions of pornography. But to simplify matters, consider the definition Gail Dines uses in her work. Pornography, she says, consists of those materials that are produced by the multi-billion dollar pornography industry. “The industry knows exactly what it is producing,” she says.)
It is also important to note that the vast majority of men in the rape prevention world who are critical of the pornography industry do not object because they think public displays of sex are obscene, but because of the harm inflicted on women and children by sexist displays of women’s and men’s sexuality. In fact, I would bet that most of these men would celebrate uninhibited expressions of women’s sexuality. Their opposition to pornography stems from their belief that most of the magazines and videos produced by the pornography industry actually limit women’s sexual freedom, while setting women up to be sexually victimized by men. The problem is not only that a high percentage of women in porn are sexual abuse survivors, some of whom were coerced into the business when they were troubled or naïve teenagers by predatory pimps and other abusive older men. It is not only the reduction of women to what University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, writing in the Sexual-Assault Report, painfully describes as “three holes and two hands.” It is the way the pornography industry helps to define heterosexual men’s sexuality. Every time a video portrays a scene where a woman asks to be penetrated by a succession of men who ejaculate all over her face as they contemptuously call her a “cum-guzzling whore,” it also portrays men getting pleasure from the sight of that “cum-guzzling whore” getting what she wants, and deserves. It normalizes the men’s pleasure-taking as it sexualizes the woman’s degradation. The idea that consumers of porn can masturbate and have orgasms to that kind of treatment of women and not have it affect their attitudes toward the women and girls in their lives is more a fantasy than anything the most creative porn writers can conjure up.
Mainstream pornography has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. People of a certain age who still associate heterosexual porn with “girlie magazines” and air-brushed photos of big-breasted women shot in soft light on luxurious beds with big pillows would be shocked by the brutality, outright contempt for women, and racism that is common in today’s product. One need not search out the extremist fringe of porn culture to find this. A simple Google search will suffice to see some of the “adult” titles readily available: A Cum-Sucking Whore Named Francesca, Rectal Reamers, Brianna Banks aka Filthy Whore #1, Love Hurts, and Ride ’em and Wreck ’em. There are thousands of porn videos that sexu
alize some of the most racist caricatures of women and men of color, with titles like Big Black Beast, Slaves on Loan, Asian Fuck Sluts, and Three Black Dicks and a Spanish Chick. The Web is full of porn sites that advertise not just “sex,” but the sexual degradation of women. One such site is called Violated Teens: Cum in and use them, which boasts of “Teens forced to fuck, exploited for hard cash: we do what we want to them and they have to love it.” Consider one of the most popular porn sites on the Internet, called BangBus. Since its debut in 2001, this site has pioneered what has been called “reality porn,” a new genre of “humilitainment” that features what Shauna Swartz in Bitch magazine calls “some of the most violent and degrading porno scenes to hit the mainstream.” BangBus consists of a couple of average guys who drive around southern Florida in a van, “in search of every girl’s inner slut.” What they are looking for—the viewer is led to believe—are young women who will agree to go for a ride with them on the promise that they will be paid a few hundred dollars to do something sexual on camera. The videotape documents the initial pick-up on the side of the road, followed by a brief conversation inside the moving van, where the men convince the seemingly naïve woman to take off her clothes. As the handheld camera rolls, the woman has vaginal or anal sex with one of the guys, or she performs oral sex on him. He then withdraws and ejaculates on her face, as the narrator with the camera shrieks in delight. Then after the sex act, the men figure out some way to get the woman out of the van, in one instance to let her pee, in another so she can wash off in a lake. Once she is outside, they hit the gas and race away without paying her. The men laugh and congratulate each other on another successful “drop off,” as the young woman’s face registers disbelief and then shame as she realizes she has been duped and literally kicked to the curb. The success of this site—which in recent years has drawn huge crowds at the porn industry’s major convention in Las Vegas—has predictably spawned a series of imitators, including a site called Trunked, which boasts, “It’s simple. Throw the bitch in the trunk. If she doesn’t like it, she can get out. Oh yeah. We’re goin’ 55 mph.”