Pornland
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Another organization founded to provide the industry with a socially responsible image is the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection. Formed in 1996, the association sells itself as a “non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating child pornography from the Internet. ASACP battles child pornography through its CP reporting hotline, and by organizing the efforts of the online adult industry to combat the heinous crime of child sexual abuse. ASACP also works to help parents prevent children from viewing age-inappropriate material online.”31 Meanwhile, in 2002 the Free Speech Coalition lobbied successfully to change the law on child pornography to allow the industry to use women who, while eighteen years of age, actually look much younger. In an example of utter hypocrisy, Hustler is one of the members of the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, the same Hustler that runs Barely Legal and advertises itself as “the world’s #1 teen magazine with the largest collection of teen sweethearts found anywhere.”32
Similar to other businesses, the pornographers go to great lengths to study and understand the psychology of consumer behavior. Although there is still very little actual research conducted on porn consumers, Jack Morrison has written articles for AVN that draw from a range of areas in an attempt to build a knowledge base about consumer behavior. In one notable article, Morrison discussed the work of Dr. Al Cooper, a Stanford University psychologist, who focused on cyber-sex addiction. The most exciting finding, according to AVN, is that 20 percent of porn surfers are addicts, and in a true capitalist approach, the article has a heading called “Exploiting the Data.” Here Morrison writes, “I have three specific recommendations for adult Webmasters, each of which has the potential to add millions of dollars of extra revenue to the online adult industry. Some of these recommendations may seem to be controversial, but these techniques are used in mainstream business every day.” Morrison suggests the following: In order to secure the ongoing revenue from such consumers, adult Webmasters should make it substantially easier to indulge that behavior. The most effective way to do this is probably to include links to additional pay sites/paid content inside your own pay site. This is done on a few sites which have “pay-per-view” elements, but in most cases, links to additional sites are exterior, either as an exit to the tour or in the exit out (at which point the consumer has probably had an orgasm and is thus less likely to buy another paid membership). The goal should be to keep the consumer within the Website and sell additional memberships for additional materials.33
In another article, Morrison interviewed a dozen top porn webmasters about their best marketing practices. He came up with a list of twenty-nine, including creating a spokesperson for the site, starting a Yahoo! discussion group about the site, creating more free sites, and starting a newsletter for consumers. Getting into even more detail, he adds a basic rule: “Top Webmasters spend around 50 percent of their time on getting traffic to their sites, 20 percent of their time on content development (graphics, site appearance, updating members areas, building free sites, etc.), and 30 percent on general business issues (looking at statistics, communicating with other Webmasters, following up on contacts from trade shows, maintaining relationships.)”34 As porn continues to grow, the research on consumer behavior will most likely become more sophisticated and, no doubt, more exploitive.
Clearly, pornography has become big business, stepping more boldly into national and international markets and wielding direct political and legislative influence. The power of the industry continues to be magnified by the trend toward increasing ownership concentration and the emergence of larger, well-capitalized firms with brand names and extensive operations. Moreover, the industry’s links to mainstream finance, media, and communications chains provide it with powerful allies. As the porn industry’s clout increases, so too will the pornographization of our society.
Chapter 4. Grooming for Gonzo
Becoming a Man in a Porn Culture
The awkward truth, according to one study, is that 90 percent of 8-to-16-year-olds have viewed pornography online. Considering the standard climax to even the most vanilla hardcore scene today, that means there is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.
—Details
One of the arguments I hear regularly is that it is perfectly natural for boys and men to like porn. Males are more visual, so the argument goes, and they need more sex than women, so porn is simply a way to satisfy a biological urge. What proponents of this argument miss is that it is anti-male to believe that there is something essential in men that leads them to desire porn, gonzo or otherwise. What feminists argue is that men are socialized by the culture into a specific type of masculinity that makes porn both normal and pleasurable. If we take seriously the notion that we are all cultural beings, then we need to think about the ways that boys become men and how this process creates a consumer base for porn that is degrading to women. What became clear when feminists started to explore male socialization is that although the type of masculinity a boy adopts will depend on multiple factors such as religion, race, and class, the dominant masculinity today is, as Robert Jensen argues, one in which “men are assumed to be naturally competitive, and aggressive.”1
But as Jensen and a whole host of researchers show, there is nothing natural about boys being shoved, coerced, seduced, and manipulated into conformity the second they enter a world brimming with gender expectations and assumptions about how real men have to be strong, powerful, and unemotional. From parents, schools, peer groups, sports and, of course, media, boys are taught that any deviation from the norm will result in swift punishments, the worst of which is being called “a girl.” Few insults carry as much weight and few insults do as much damage to both boys and girls, since the boy is being told that the worst thing he can be is a female.
This has profound effects on the emotional lives of boys as they are, as psychiatrist James Gilligan argues, “taught that to want love or care from others is to be passive, dependent, unaggressive, and unambitious or, in short, unmanly; and that they will be subjected to shaming, ridicule, and disrespect, if they appear unmanly in the eyes of others.”2 To be “unmanly” is, of course, within our gender binary system, to be feminine, and here lies the essence of gender socialization for males: they need, at all times, to distance themselves as much as possible from anything constructed by the culture as feminine. The feminine hence becomes feared—and that which we fear, we also learn to despise.
This is damaging to boys on many levels, not least because they are children who need the love and emotional connection of caregivers, most of whom today are still women, in order to develop a healthy emotional life. But to survive in this world of masculinity and all the bullying and jockeying for power that comes with it, a boy needs to learn how to disconnect from his own emotions and those of others. Public displays of fear, empathy, and sadness—indeed, anything that suggests vulnerability—are dangerous for many boys as the alpha males of the pack are only too happy to provide a lesson on what happens to boys who fail to show sufficient manliness. This leads to many boys becoming emotionally stunted as they reach adulthood because they have learned to wear the mask of masculinity that hides their deeply felt emotions. This mask may feel like a poor fit to a young boy, but after wearing it for many years, the mask begins to mold to his skin, and after a while, it becomes almost like a second skin.3
Helping to reinforce masculinity are the massive media and toy industries, which seem to be cemented in gender apartheid. In 2008, on a trip to Toys “R” Us with my nieces and nephews, aged between eight and thirteen, I couldn’t believe how much the store had changed from when I used to go with my own son a decade earlier. While there was some gender division among the toys in the 1990s, today the store has an almost tangible gender barrier down the middle. One half was full of toy guns, knives, swords, wrestling figures, and violent computer games, and the other half magically turned pink with princess dresses, dolls, makeup, and hairdryers. My two nephe
ws walked out with the latest wrestling figures, and my two nieces each had a pink Barbie hairdryer and a pink makeup bag, all bought by their loving feminist aunt. I did try to steer them to the few gender-neutral items, such as jigsaws and board games, but was stopped short by the look of disgust across all four faces.
When we arrived home, my nephews eagerly unwrapped their toys as they watched Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig playing alpha male James Bond. With his ruggedly handsome face, rock-hard body, smooth delivery of lethal violence against his opponents, and bevy of beautiful women falling over him, Craig must have seemed like a very appealing role model for my nephews, reared on pop culture. I watched their faces as Craig, now on the receiving end of the violence, was being tortured—by having his testicles whacked with a carpet beater, no less. Rather than showing pain, he responded with sarcastic quips and sneering put-downs. I wondered what my nephews were taking away from this scene and how it fit with all the other gender lessons they had learned.
Studies show that today’s children, especially boys, live in a media culture that is awash in violence. The Henry J. Kaiser Foundation lists the following statistics on its media violence fact sheet:
• Nearly two out of three TV programs contained some violence, averaging about six violent acts per hour.
• Fewer than 5 percent of these programs featured an anti-violence theme or pro-social message emphasizing alternatives to or consequences of violence.
• Violence was found to be more prevalent in children’s programming (69 percent) than in other types of programming (57 percent). In a typical hour of programming, children’s shows featured more than twice as many violent incidents (fourteen) than other types of programming (six).
• The average child who watches two hours of cartoons a day may see nearly ten thousand violent incidents each year, of which the researchers estimate that at least five hundred pose a high risk for learning and imitating aggression and becoming desensitized to violence.4
Alongside television’s steady diet of violence is an enormously profitable video game industry, which generated worldwide over $26.5 billion in 2007. While many of these games depict images of hypersexualized violence, one of the worst, and most profitable, is Grand Theft Auto. When GTA IV hit the market in April 2008, on its first day of release it sold a record 2.5 million units in North America. Sociologist Matt Ezzell describes some of the scenes from a video montage of GTA IV called The Ladies of Liberty City: Very Bad Things. These scenes focus specifically on the sexual interactions between Niko, the protagonist of the game, and women, most of whom are prostitutes and strippers.
The Ladies of Liberty City opened with graphic images of women stripping, pole-dancing, and giving the protagonist a lap-dance. The next scene showed Niko shooting a woman in the middle of the street. It went on to show Niko picking up prostitutes. . . .
He approaches one woman who says, “I’ll suck your cock real nice.” “Get in,” he replies, before driving her to a baseball field. Once parked, he says, “You get what you pay for, right?” The woman sits on his lap. As they bounce up and down, the woman squeals, “Fuck the shit out if it! Yeah, you nasty fucker!” They finish, and Niko says, “Life is strange, don’t you think?” The woman gets out of the car and walks away. As she does, Niko pulls out a gun and shoots her several times. You can hear her scream as Niko says, “Stay down or I will finish you off !” She does not get up.5
These sorts of messages targeted at boys help shape the ways they develop their masculine identity. As boys turn into men, these messages are in turn absorbed into their sexual identities, and the more media they are exposed to, the more they become desensitized to the visual depiction of violence, no matter how brutal or sexualized that violence is.6 In this emotional economy, porn is appealing; it offers men a no-strings-attached, intense, disconnected sexual experience, where men always get to have as much sex as they want in ways that shore up their masculinity. The sex acts are always successful, ending in supposed orgasm for both, and he is protected from rejection or ridicule since in porn, women never say no to men’s sexual demands, nor do they question their penis size or technique. In this world, men dispense with romantic dinners, vanilla sex, and postcoital affection and get down to the business of fucking. In porn, sex is the vehicle by which men are rendered all powerful and women all powerless; and for a short time a man gets to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands.
For some men, especially those who are overconformists to masculinity, gonzo is going to be instantly appealing because they can easily identify with the male performer’s show of extreme masculinity and violence. However, it would be a mistake to assume that all men instantly and easily take to gonzo porn since that would assume that all men are similarly socialized into a more violent masculinity. Men who adopt a less “manly” type of masculinity may well be turned off by watching a woman being called a cunt as she is roughly penetrated by any number of men, so pornographers, being the savvy businessmen they are, develop techniques to groom reluctant gonzo viewers. While these techniques vary, what they all have in common is the way they render away the humanity of women in porn.
How Porn Socializes the Users: The Bitch Loves It
The first and most important way pornographers get men to buy into gonzo sex is by depicting and describing women as fuck objects who are deserving of sexual use and abuse. It is especially important for the pornographers to shred the humanity of the women in the images, as many porn users have sustained and intimate relationships with women in the real world. Even though we live in a culture that devalues women, men still manage to develop loving connections with mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers, and wives. To erode any empathy that many men may have for the women in porn—an emotion that would most likely end up derailing the porn experience as they might feel sorry for her—the porn needs to construct porn women in ways that clearly demarcate them from the women men know and love.
The most obvious technique that the pornographers employ here is to verbally segregate this group of women by calling them cunts, whores, sluts, cumdumpsters, beavers, and so on. In gonzo, a woman is never referred to as a woman; instead, she is reduced to a sexual object. But reducing women to just sex objects is not enough for gonzo, and they are further referred to as dirty, nasty, and filthy. No wonder we never see any kissing or touching in porn. Who would want to kiss or caress dirty, nasty, filthy cunts/whores/sluts?
In porn, sex is framed as not just consensual but as something that the woman seeks out because she loves to be sexually used. This also is a method for lessening any guilt the user may feel as he can reassure himself that she is not being hurt, or if she is, it is what she wants. Take for example the description of “Gauge” on the site Ass Plundering. “Gauge gives a new meaning to the word whore. Any less than 2 guys at once means she won’t be satisfied. Her tight holes need to be ravaged by big cocks at the same time for her to have fun.”7 The images surrounding this text show Gauge being orally, vaginally, and anally penetrated by three men at the same time. One of the images shows a red, raw, and swollen anus while others show her face contorted as she is supposedly having an orgasm. The images and the written text together, as well as the movie, which presents her begging for more, collude to seduce the viewer into believing that no matter how cruelly her body is being treated, she belongs to a special breed of women that enjoy sexual mistreatment.
Similarly, on the British Bukkake site, the text reads, “If you like horny bitches that like to drench themselves in hot jizz, this is the site for you. These girls know how to do it up right and you’re guaranteed to get off when you see their dripping faces full of cum.”8 These women (or rather, “horny bitches”) are not, according to the text, being coerced by anybody to participate in acts that most girlfriends or wives would absolutely refuse to do. Rather, we are told that the “horny bitches” are different from the women the user knows because they actually seek out and enjoy
being debased.
The process of dehumanizing a group as a way to legitimize and justify cruelty against its individual members is not something that porn producers invented. It has been a tried and trusted method adopted by many oppressors; the Nazi propaganda machine effectively turned Jews into “kikes,” racists defined African Americans as “niggers” rather than humans, and homophobes have an almost limitless list of terms for gays and lesbians that strip them of humanity. Once the humanness of these individuals is collectively rendered invisible by their membership in a socially denigrated group, then it is that much easier to commit acts of violence against them.
In porn, the women’s lack of human qualities often results in men’s inability to see just how violent the sex act is. No matter how cruel the sex, the one question I can always count on hearing from a man after my presentation is, “Women enjoy what they are doing, so why is porn a problem?” Of course, these men have no empirical evidence to support this, just their observations of the porn that they masturbate to. When I ask them if they would like to see their wives, girlfriends, or sisters in this position—in an attempt to humanize the porn performers—they are quick to respond that their loved ones are different from the women in porn; their women would never “choose” such a job. The image these men seem to have of women in porn is of a woman accidentally stumbling onto a porn set one day, and realizing that this is what she has been looking for all her life. That these women are acting, and may have come to porn not so much through choice but due to a lack of alternatives is rarely considered because this premise threatens to puncture the fantasy world created by both pornographer and user.