by Jackson Katz
The word “pornography” translates from Greek to mean “writing about prostitutes,” and there is no doubt that just as women’s bodies are the center of attention in heterosexual pornography, most of the people who have written about pornography as a cultural phenomenon have written about how it affects women’s lives. This is understandable and appropriate, because it is primarily the bodies of women and girls that pornography producers use and abuse for profit. But if our goal is to dramatically reduce the incidence of sexual violence, we must turn our attention to the demand side of the pornography question and begin to look critically at the role of pornography in the lives of boys and men.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the concept of rape culture, which starts with the premise that sexual violence is common in our society not because there are so many sick men, but because we socialize normal boys to be sexually dominant and normal girls to be sexually subordinate. The pornography industry is clearly a key area in the culture where “normal” boys learn to objectify and dehumanize girls and women. For example, Diane Rosenfeld, who teaches gender violence at Harvard Law School, says that her students worry about whether the male judge who watched a porn movie last night is taking her seriously at all.
But sexual objectification notwithstanding, Robert Jensen has written that people are mistaken in assuming that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it is about sex. On the contrary, Jensen maintains that our culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is really about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. Like many women in the anti-rape movement who have studied pornography, Jensen has spent thousands of hours coding and analyzing the content of mainstream porn videos and magazines. His research focuses on men’s use of pornography, and how that might shape their attitudes toward women or their own sexuality. In his prolific popular writings on the subject, he cites numerous examples as evidence, realizing that people who are not familiar with contemporary heterosexual porn—especially women—can be skeptical about feminist claims that porn is less about naked bodies and “sex,” and more about the eroticization of men’s dominance and control of women. The following extended quotation is from an article by Jensen that was published in 2004 in the Sexual-Assault Report.
One of the ten scenes in the film Gag Factor #10, a 2002 release from J. M. Productions, begins with a woman and man having a picnic in a park. He jokes about wanting to use the romantic moment to make love to her mouth, and then stands and thrusts into her mouth while she sits on the blanket. Two other men who walk by join in. Saying things such as “Pump that face, pump that fucking face,” “All the way down, choke, choke,” and “That’s real face fucking,” they hold her head and push harder. One man grabs her hair and pulls her head into his penis in what his friend calls “the jackhammer.” At this point she is grimacing and seems in pain. She then lies on the ground, and the men approach her from behind. “Eat that whole fucking dick. . . . You little whore, you like getting hurt,” one says, as her face is covered with saliva. “Do you like getting your face fucked?” one asks. She can’t answer. “Open your mouth if you like it,” he says, and she opens her mouth. After they all ejaculate into her mouth, the semen flows out onto her body. After the final ejaculation, she reaches quickly for the wine glass, takes a large drink, and looks up at her boyfriend and says, “God, I love you baby.” Her smile fades to a pained look of shame and despair.
Jensen recounts several similar scenes from a variety of bestselling porn videos, and then concludes that because the vast majority of people who rent or buy these sorts of videos are men, “we have to ask why some men find the infliction of pain on women during sexual activity either (1) Not an obstacle to their ability to achieve sexual pleasure, or (2) A factor that can enhance their sexual pleasure.” The optimistic way to read the contemporary market demand for cruelty in pornography is that men and boys have been so desensitized to women’s suffering that they are not bothered by the cruelty. This is a frightening development by itself, with serious implications for the present and future of relations between the sexes. If present trends continue, heterosexual sex—at least that which is represented as such in the commercial sex industry—would seem to be growing increasingly impersonal, and men’s pleasure increasingly linked to displays of masculine power and dominance. In other words, transforming the rape culture could become even more of a difficult challenge than it is at present.
The more pessimistic assessment is that some men’s sexual pleasure is actually enhanced by the mistreatment and degradation of women. Sadly, there is a wealth of documentary evidence which suggests that the producers of porn are quite conscious in their attempt to provide men with an outlet for their anger and feelings of sexual aggression. Consider the words of Max Hardcore, a popular porn director and actor whose name calls up over one million hits on Google. In an interview with Hustler magazine that is recounted by Robert Jensen and Gail Dines in their book Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, Hardcore said, “There’s nothing I love more than when a girl insists to me that she won’t take a cock in her ass, because—oh yes she will!” He described his trademark as being able to “stretch a girl’s asshole apart wide enough to stick a flashlight in it,” and went on to say that he doesn’t hate all women, just “stuck-up bitches.” The porn performer Amanda McGuire told this story about him in Icon magazine: “He has made girls cry and lots of girls puke—that’s not unusual. I was there once when he throat-fucked a girl so hard she puked and started bawling.” Hardcore, whose work has been referred to by porn reviewers as “pseudopedophilia” because of how he dresses up his “actresses” to look like young girls, explained the challenges he faces making his films. “It’s pretty easy to get a slut to spread solo for the camera,” he said. “And quite a different matter to get her to take it up the ass and puke up piss.”
In spite of these sorts of statements by men in the industry, its defenders—including women such as the “thinking man’s porn star” Nina Hartley—downplay or even deny that porn culture is saturated with misogyny and sexism. They point to the small percentage of porn written and produced by women, or they emphasize the growing popularity of “couples porn,” which is typically less misogynistic and abusive than the majority of products that are aimed at the predominantly male market. However, veteran porn director and actor Bill Margold comes right out and admits what he and so many other pornographers are trying to do:
I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they can get even with the women they can’t have. We try to inundate the world with orgasms in the face.
Examples like this of the sort of open misogyny and woman-hatred that comes out of the mainstream pornography industry still have the potential to shock young women, because due to the segmentation of the porn market, many of them have never been exposed to it. Dines says that her women students who think they know what’s out there in porn are often devastated to learn what their boyfriends consider “normal.” This is because the guys are more likely to use the “gonzo” porn referenced above to masturbate by themselves—with effects on their sexuality that we have not yet even begun to understand.
BOYS AND PORN
Three young white men were convicted in March 2005 of sexually assaulting an intoxicated sixteen-year-old girl in the summer of 2002 in Orange County, California. The central piece of evidence in the trial that gained national notoriety was a videotape of the crime made by the defendants. The then-sixteen- and seventeen-year-old men had made a twenty-one-minute video of them shoving a Snapple bottle, lit cigarette, apple juice can, and pool cue into the vagina and anus of the unconscious victim. One of the young men, whose father was then the assistant sheriff of Orange County, had proudly shown the video to some acquaintances, some of whom thoug
ht the girl was a corpse and called the police. Many media discussions of the crime and trial took their cues from the defense lawyers’ offensive strategy, and focused on the actions of the victim. According to R. Scott Moxley in the OC Weekly, the lawyers for the young men called the girl—named Jane Doe for the court proceeding—a “slut” and a “whore,” who loved giving “blow jobs” and enjoyed “doggy-style” sex. They claimed that she dreamed of becoming a porn star and had staged the entire episode in order to get them to gangbang her on film. With so much attention fixated on Jane Doe’s morals and motives, there was little room to discuss the heart of the case: the morals, motives, and mindsets of the young men. What were they thinking as they molested her? How could they be cruel enough to rape and degrade this girl, and brazen enough to videotape the entire thing and then brag about it? What did those actions say, not about the character of the girl, but about their characters, and the values of the white-affluent culture that produced them? What did this case reveal about young men’s attitudes toward women’s sexuality? What did it say about sexual norms in male culture, and the role of pornography in establishing or maintaining those norms? Is it so hard to believe that “normal” boys could videotape a grotesque gang rape when porn sites that brag about “invading privacy to the limit” and feature “Gym Cam, Locker Room Cam, Up-Skirt Cam, Toilet Cam, and the Infamous Gyno Cam” are just a mouse click away and part of millions of boys’ sexual socialization?
The Orange County gang-rape case was far from an aberration. Over the past decade there have been numerous criminal cases, some of which made the national news but most of which did not, that involved boys and young men who videotaped sexual activity with girls and then shared it with their friends. In a number of these cases, the young men involved were normal, primarily law-abiding kids who did not see anything wrong with what they had done—until they were held accountable. For example, an eighteen-yearold soccer star and high school honor student in Ohio was charged in 2001 with posting nude pictures of a girl in an Internet chat room. He posted the pictures the same night that a seventeen-year-old girl had changed her clothes at his home. He called the incident a practical joke, but was charged with unlawful use of a minor in nudity-oriented material or performance, which is a second-degree felony. Interestingly, in 1999 the U.S. Justice Department formed a partnership with the Information Technology Association of America to educate people about computer responsibility in the Internet age. One goal of the program was to help children and young adults develop an “awareness of potential negative consequences resulting from the misuse of the medium.” This seems like a smart initiative, because everyone knows teenagers—like adults—have a tendency to sometimes act without thinking. But any serious attempt to help boys think through their decisions about how to treat girls has to examine those places in male culture where sexist and abusive behavior is presented as normal and masculine and even expected—and where there are no real consequences for hurting people, including through Internet pornography. Even hit Hollywood films present this attitude, such as American Pie, where the main character arranges to videotape himself having sex with a Czech exchange student and broadcast it by web cam to his friends watching in another room. When American Pie was released in 1999, critics hailed it as good clean fun. Practically no one mentioned that one of the main plot points turned on the lead character’s stumbling attempts to commit an unforgivably cruel and sexist act—the type of act that ruins lives when it happens in the real world.
Girls and women suffer the most harm from a culture awash in misogynist pornography, but boys and men are hurt, too. It is important to discuss this hurt both for pragmatic reasons, and out of genuine concern for these boys and men. In order to stem the tide of cruelty, callousness, and brutality toward girls and women that is now mainstream fare from the porn industry, men and boys in sufficient numbers will need to make the decision to stop paying for porn magazines, videos, and Internet porn sites. Some men will be motivated to give up their porn habits as they develop a greater sensitivity to the damage that eroticized cruelty does to girls and women—inside and outside the porn industry. But altruistic concern for harm done to women cannot motivate anywhere near as many men and boys as enlightened self-interest. In other words, if they can be shown that porn hinders rather than facilitates a healthy sex life for men, there is at least a chance that enough men will reject it to truly make a difference. But unless heterosexual men perceive that they have a personal stake in a sexual culture that is not dominated by the cartoonish version of sexual fulfillment created by middle-aged businessmen in windowless studios in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, it is hard to see how the current trend toward greater acceptance of sexualized brutality will be reversed in coming generations.
It is clear that the men who own and run the pornography industry will do anything to girls and women in pursuit of massive profits. But it is also true that they do not have much regard for boys and young men. If they cared about boys and their longings for intimacy, love, and sexual connection with girls, then why would they relentlessly sell them an endless supply of videos, magazines, and websites that heap scorn on girls and women, and reduce them to a set of orifices to use up and discard? As Dines and Jensen write in an article titled “Pornography Is a Left Issue,”“Take away every video in which a woman is called a bitch, a cunt, a slut, or a whore, and the shelves would be nearly bare.” In the cold and exploitative world created by hardcore pornographers, who are heterosexual boys supposed to have relationships with? With the cum-guzzling sluts who are forced to drink gallons of cum? The big-titted bitches who they can fuck in every hole? The dirty little sluts who want to get their pussies drilled by various farm animals? It is no coincidence that the porn industry does not want boys to establish real intimate connections with girls, because then who would purchase their product?
It is not fair to blame boys (or girls) for being seduced by the porn world’s promise of sexual excitement and pleasure. Technological progress—especially home video and the Internet—have made it possible for them to access the most graphic sexual images with the touch of a button. For many boys going through puberty and adolescence, the temptations of porn are irresistible. After all, it promises a kind of sexual gratification with no strings attached—and no chance of rejection. In pornography, even unattractive and unpopular boys can have sex with beautiful girls. Pornography is also so mainstream now that many kids are unfazed by it. In the digital age, it is all around them: online, on cable, video, chat rooms. Porn is now available on cell phones. It is also a common plotline on TV shows such as Friends or The OC; and many MTV and BET videos look like porn videos. In fact, several rap stars now produce their own porn videos. With porn images all around them, many young Americans simply see it as an unremarkable feature of the cultural landscape.
But this has come at a cost. Because there is so little sexual content in media that is not pornographic, and because there is so little quality sex education in schools, pornography fills a void for millions of sexually inexperienced kids. What they see in pornography helps to establish a template for “normal” sexual behavior that they then feel pressure to emulate. They might not initially be drawn to pornography because of all the misogyny and brutality, but that is what they are getting from the stories being depicted in most mainstream porn today. I heard a story from a rape prevention educator about a question one of his colleagues received from a ten-year-old boy during a presentation. The boy had walked into a room where his older brother was on an Internet porn site, and saw on the screen a man shoving a pool cue into a girl’s vagina. The young boy wanted to know: do girls like that sort of thing? A colleague of mine recounted this story: At the college where she teaches, a male and female student, both virgins, had sex for the first time. When the man was about to reach orgasm, he withdrew and ejaculated on his partner’s face. They both thought this was the way normal people are supposed to have intercourse. Neither of them was aware that this pract
ice derived not from “real life” but from pornography, where it had developed as an aggressive act by men to express contempt for the women they had just conquered.