Pornland
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The ejaculate also marks the woman as used goods, as owned by the man or men who just penetrated her. Veteran porn actor and producer Bill Margold explained the money shot like this: “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 get even with the women they can’t have. We try to inundate the world with orgasms in the face.”17 That viewers enjoy money shots is evident by the postings on the Adult DVD Talk forum, a Web site for porn fans.18 Here fans talk about their favorite money shot at length, often giving a detailed account of the scene. Jim 2, for example, tells his virtual friends that “I consider gangbang scenes memorable that end with the girl a total mess, having a huge amount of cum on her face and tits,”19 while The The likes to see “the gag reflex kicking in.”20 Some of the posters make clear that for them, pleasure comes in watching a woman really suffer: “Kaci Starr starts retching/gagging as soon as the first drop of sperm hits her tongue—it’s so great. The best scene for this (and for Kaci getting totally overwhelmed in general) is her amazing scene in Throat Gaggers #10. She actually starts throwing up the cum (and some of whatever she had for lunch! lol) during the cumswallowing portion of the scene. She starts tearing up as she struggles to keep it all down. Wonderful stuff.”21 The money shot would seem a succinct way to deliver multiple messages about the way sex can be used as a vehicle to mark the feminine as all-powerless and the masculine as all-powerful.
I daresay that the sexual acts I have described above are not ones that most women seek out in the real world, nor ones that most men feel comfortable asking their partner to engage in. Conversely, acts that are part of many people’s sexual experience, such as kissing, caressing, cuddling, and fondling, are noticeably absent in pornography. This forces us to ask why men who view porn are so attracted to images that depict types of behavior so at odds with the real world. One obvious answer could be that men go to porn as a way to play out a fantasy, a way to conjure up mental images that are not real but nonetheless pleasurable. But if it were as simple as this, then why isn’t there an equal amount of porn that depicts women and men having great sex that involves deep connection and intimacy, with women having fabulous orgasms brought about by a highly skilled male lover who has an intuitive understanding of women’s bodies? This, too, would be a fantasy for many viewers, but it is clearly not one that porn chooses to represent with any regularity. Instead porn plays out “fantasy” sex that looks more like sexual assault than making love.
Some may argue that assault is too strong a word, but if we analyze what is actually going on in a gonzo scene in a way that speaks to the experiences of the woman in the movie, then we get some insight into what is happening to her as a human being. A living, breathing person is being penetrated in every orifice by any number of men—men she most likely has no real emotional connection with. Their penises are often longer and thicker than average, and they are sometimes fortified with Viagra, since penetration without ejaculation has to go on for some time.22 Her body, like ours, has real physical limits, yet the goal of the movie is to see just how far these limits can be pushed. At some point during all the pounding, her vagina will become sore, her anus raw and swollen, and her mouth will ache from having large penises thrust in and out for an extended amount of time. As this is occurring, she is being called every vile name under the sun. During this bodily assault, which even the industry admits is taking its toll on the bodies of the women,23 she has to look like she is enjoying it, she has to tell the men penetrating her that she loves their big cock or whatever, and finally she has to lick the semen as if she loves the taste.
When the movie is done, she will get up from the bed or floor, go to the bathroom to wash off the sticky substance and check her orifices to see if any damage has been done. She also will need to ensure that she does not have any of the diseases or ailments for which she is now high risk, given what her body has just been through. These include, according to the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, the following: HIV; rectal gonorrhea; tears in the throat, vagina, and anus; chlamydia of the eye; and gonorrhea of the throat.24 And she will endure all this again and again until she is either too worn out to continue or is disregarded by the industry in favor of “fresh meat,” of which, it seems, there is never any shortage.
Men who go looking for porn are often already aroused as they anticipate their soon-to-be-had orgasm. Clearly, in this state they are not in any mood to start doing a critical deconstruction of how the woman is being treated, but it truly doesn’t take much observation to notice that her body is being used in ways that appear to be painful and degrading. Few of the women are seasoned actresses, and many are not able to conceal their discomfort and pain as they are being penetrated by multiple penises. Some of the women look exhausted and defeated by the end of the scene.
As porn becomes more extreme, and the woman’s body is treated in harsher ways, one wonders how users manage to sustain an erection. No doubt there are some who enjoy watching women suffer, but I honestly do not believe that the average man is a woman-hating sadist. This is indeed the image of men the pornographers generate, but it is one that, ironically, given our man-hating reputation, feminists reject since we have never believed that men are born misogynists. And those of us who have male children refuse to accept that the little boy we birthed, fed, bathed, nurtured, and love came out of the womb with a homing device for GagFactor.com.
If we refuse to accept the easy answer that men have a natural predisposition to get off on hurting women, then we have to look to the culture for answers as to why some men seek out and enjoy gonzo. We have to ask, What is it about male socialization and masculinity that helps prepare them—or, I would say, groom them—into seeking out and masturbating to such images? The answers do not lie within individual men; rather, they are found in the culture that we all live in. Porn is not something that stands outside of us: it is deeply embedded in our structures, identities, and relationships. This did not happen overnight, and there is a story to tell about how we got to the point that mainstream Internet porn has become so hateful and cruel.
We begin the investigation with a history of the porn industry that focuses on the ways that Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler provided the economic and cultural space for today’s hard-core porn. Chapter 1 specifically looks at how the competition among the three magazines pushed the envelope on what was considered “acceptable” mainstream porn in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, there is a whole new range of agents pushing porn into the mainstream, and chapter 2 takes a look at some of the major individuals and companies that have succeeded in sanitizing porn.
Arguing that porn is mainstream goes beyond noting the way the images have infiltrated our lives to include an analysis of how porn has seamlessly been woven into mainstream capitalism. Chapter 3 takes a close look at what it means for the porn industry to be part of a wider corporate structure and how many mainstream industries such as hotels, banks, and cable operators make large sums of money from the porn industry. The need to create markets and offer consumers something different explains in part why porn is always on the lookout for some new bizarre sex act. What it doesn’t explain is how men can be aroused by such images of women being dehumanized and debased. Chapter 4 argues that to answer this we need to look at the ways that men are socialized by the culture and the porn industry, since both have an image of men as aggressive, unfeeling, and disconnected from their emotions and from other people.
What happens to men who use porn? This is without doubt the most hotly debated issue in the discussion of porn. Rather than rehash the whole debate or delve into the numerous studies by psychologists, in chapter 5 I look at how images affect the way we perceive reality and why, given what we know about media effects, it is incorrect to argue that men walk away from porn unchanged.
Men are not the only group to be changed by the
porn culture. Girls and women, while not major consumers of porn, are inundated with pop culture images that just a decade ago would have been seen as soft-core. Chapter 6 looks at how the image of femininity thrown at girls and women has become increasingly narrow, to the point that a “hot” body is the only one that meets very strict cultural standards. Some groups have celebrated this hypersexualization as empowering for women, but I argue that this is pseudo-empowerment since it is a poor substitute for what real power looks like—economic, social, sexual, and political equality that give women power to control those institutions that affect our lives.
Pornographers, always trying to add extra sizzle to gonzo sex, have developed a number of niche markets. One very lucrative niche features people of color, the topic of chapter 7. Not a genre known for its subtlety, porn produces and reproduces some of the worst racist stereotypes of past and present. Given that most of these films are made for a white male audience, the question here is, How do sexualized racist images shape the way users think about race? Another niche that is popular is called pseudo-child porn because although it uses women who are eighteen or over, they are actually made to look much younger. Chapter 8 illustrates how by using the props of childhood—socks, school uniforms, teddy bears—pornographers invite the user into a world where the sexualization of children is normalized.
The conclusion asks what is to be done about this pornographization of our culture. No easy answers jump out as obvious since this is a problem that has deep roots in the way our society is structured. Ultimately, to fight this juggernaut we will need collective action. Individual solutions are important, but social change never happens on the individual level. The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty. The only solution to this is a movement that is fierce in its critique of sexual exploitation and steadfast in its determination to fight for what is rightfully ours.
Chapter 1. Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler Paving the Way for Today’s Porn Industry Porn has entered the mature years. . . . It’s no longer naughty, underground. It’s an up-front, in-your-face business, as much a part of the pop culture as anything else. We’re in a different phase of our pop culture.
—Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News The Playboy bunny is everywhere, on pencils, watches, handbags, lingerie, sunglasses, socks, and even hot-water bottles. It is without doubt one of the most highly recognized logos in the Western world and has made Hugh Hefner and Playboy household names. While Playboy did not invent porn, it did bring it out of the backstreet onto Main Street; for this it holds a central place in the story of how porn became entrenched in our culture.1 Hugh Hefner presented himself to the public as a playboy partial to wearing pajamas, but he was actually an incredibly savvy businessman with a knack for tapping into and exploiting the cultural themes of post–World War II America.
Before Playboy, pornographic magazines were not circulated through mainstream channels of distribution, so access to them was limited. Post Playboy, it was a very different world after Hefner eroded the cultural, economic, and legal barriers to mass production and distribution of porn. Just one step behind Hefner came Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of Penthouse magazine, who pushed the envelope even further. However, it was a strip club owner from Kentucky who mapped out just how far a pornographer could go and still have access to mainstream channels of distribution. Larry Flynt, a skilled businessman, made Hustler magazine a household name in the 1970s. Although their inaugural products now seem tame by comparison, through their battle to outdo one another, Hefner, Guccione, and Flynt groomed Americans into accepting today’s hard-core Internet porn.
Building a Porn Industry
Playboy was an overnight success story, with circulation growing from 53,991 in its first month (December 1953) to 175,000 by its first anniversary issue. By 1959 Playboy had a monthly circulation of 1 million. In its heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Playboy was an enormous company, with sales of over $200 million and more than five thousand employees.2 Clearly, as Michael Kimmel argues, “Playboy struck a nerve with American men,” and many books have attempted to describe exactly what that nerve was.3 To explore the Playboy phenomenon and the magazine’s role in laying the groundwork for the contemporary porn industry, the magazine has to be historically located in the economic and cultural trends at work during the 1950s, which at different times and to varying degrees contributed to Playboy becoming the lifestyle-pornographic magazine of choice for the upwardly mobile, white American male in the postwar years.
Historians agree that the 1950s were a time of enormous change in the United States, both economically and culturally. They point to the economic boom, the baby boom, the growth of suburbia, the pressure to marry at an early age, and the push toward consumption as a way of life as trends that, while not being specific to the 1950s, were nonetheless magnified in that decade.4 Playboy occupied an ambivalent place in relation to these trends—it celebrated some as good for the country while condemning others as harmful to American men. It was its uncanny ability to pick and choose among these trends that made Playboy a success not only with readers but also, eventually, with advertisers.
Hefner was clear about his target audience from the very beginning. He wrote in the first issue of Playboy, published in December 1953: “If you are a man between 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you. . . . We want to make it clear from the start, we aren’t a ‘family’ magazine. If you are somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to the Ladies’ Home Companion.”5 For a magazine to clearly state that it was not “a family magazine” in the 1950s was close to heresy. According to social historian Stephanie Coontz, it was during this period that there was an unprecedented rise in the marriage rate, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, and divorce rates declined. From family restaurants to the family car, “the family was everywhere hailed as the most basic institution in society.”6
The mass media played a pivotal role in legitimizing and celebrating this “pro-family” ideology by selling idealized images of family life in sitcoms and women’s magazines, while demonizing those who chose to stay single as either homosexual or pathological. The most celebrated sitcoms of the period were Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The ideal family was white and upper middle class, with a male breadwinner whose salary supported a wife and children as well as a large home in the suburbs. The primary roles for men and women were seen as spouses and as parents, and the result was a well-run household populated by smart, well-adjusted kids.
The print media also got in on the act, carrying stories about the supposed awfulness of being single. Reader’s Digest ran a story entitled “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are to Be Married,” which focused on the “harrowing situation of single life.”7 One writer went so far as to suggest that “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.”8 In the 1950s, “emotionally warped” was a coded way of saying homosexual, and indeed many single people were investigated as potential homosexuals and by extension Communists, since the two were often linked during the McCarthy years.9
This pressure on men to conform not only to the dictates of domestic life but also to the growing demands of corporate America had its critics in the popular media. Some writers pointed to the conformist male as a “mechanized, robotized caricature of humanity . . . a slave in mind and body.”10 According to Barbara Ehrenreich, magazines like Life, Look, and the Reader’s Digest carried stories suggesting that “Gary Gray” (the conformist in the gray flannel suit) was robbing men of their masculinity, freedom, and sense of individuality.
While pop psychologists criticized the corporate world for reducing American males to “little men,”11 it was w
omen in their roles of wives and mothers who were essentially singled out as the cripplers of American masculinity. As Ehrenreich has argued, because “the corporate captains were out of the bounds of legitimate criticism in Cold War America,” women were the more acceptable and accessible villains.12 Described as greedy, manipulative, and lazy, American women were accused of emasculating men by overdomesticating them.13
Probably one of the most woman-hating books of the time was Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, first published in 1942 and reprinted after World War II. For Wylie, wives were the cause of men’s problems because they controlled the home with an iron fist and worked their spouses to death in order to enjoy a life of leisure. As Wylie so eloquently put it, “It is her man who worries about where to acquire the money while she worries about how to spend it, so he has the ulcers and she has the guts of a bear.”14
It was during these woman-hating, pro-family years that Playboy hit the newsstands. Picking up on the themes of the 1950s, Playboy editors, from the very first issue, defined single women as menaces to the Playboy reader since they were out to trap him into marriage and bleed him financially. Indeed, the first major article in the first issue of Playboy was called “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.” Bemoaning the good old days when alimony was reserved for “little floosies,” Playboy editors wrote, “When a modern day marriage ends, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame—it’s always the guy who pays and pays and pays and pays.” Echoing Wylie’s assertion that women had taken over America, the article continued, “A couple of generations ago, this was a man’s world, nothing could be further from the truth in 1953.”15