by Gail Dines
Breasts play a big role here as men have become accustomed to getting aroused to large, silicone-enhanced ones, and their girlfriends’ seem small and uninviting by comparison. Pubic hair has become a big turnoff, especially today when many young women in the real world are removing it, so a woman who has “ungroomed” hair is less desirable. Josh told me how over the years the type of woman’s body he likes has come to resemble porn performers in that he likes them “shaved, oiled, and well-toned.” I asked him how he would feel if his girlfriend didn’t match up, to which he replied, “I would think that she didn’t take care of herself . . . that she needed to make herself look good, not just for me, but for herself also.” Also disappointing is that these women do not behave like the women in porn—they are not begging for rough sex, nor do they respond orgasmically to every touch.
Many of these men don’t want to think of their girlfriends in the same way they think of porn women, but they find it increasingly difficult to separate the two. Robert explained that he had used porn for years but when he started going out with his girlfriend he decided to “stop using porn altogether. I got rid of my movies and cancelled my memberships for the Web sites. I thought it would be that easy, but it’s not, I still think of porn a lot and it feels like I am sort of cheating on my girlfriend.” There are times when men come to speak to me with their girlfriends in tow, and she is more often than not baffled by his desire to introduce porn into their sex life. She feels that the relationship needs more time to develop; he thinks it needs more porn. After one lecture a boyfriend and girlfriend came to speak to me about his porn use. She was very upset that he wanted to bring porn into the relationship. His comment to me and her was “We don’t have to watch it a lot, just enough to give us some ideas.” His girlfriend didn’t respond so I asked her how she felt about this, to which she replied, “I feel cheap. I know he watches porn and I don’t mind it too much, but I don’t want it to come into our relationship. I don’t like it when he wants me to do certain things he saw in porn. I can tell what these are just by the way he acts.” The intimacy, igniting of senses, and connections developed when skin meets skin are all either absent or overridden by the industrial product that these men have come to depend on for sexual pleasure. Trained by the porn culture to see sex as disconnected from intimacy, users develop an orientation to sex that is instrumental rather than emotional. No wonder one man described pornography as teaching him “how to masturbate into a woman.”8
What is new over the last five years or so is college-age men telling me about their addiction to pornography. I used to be somewhat skeptical of the addiction model, thinking that it was a way for men to avoid taking responsibility for their porn use. However, I am not the only one to hear this, as therapists are increasingly seeing men who are addicted in the clinical sense. The Portman Clinic in London, a well-known treatment center for a range of addictions and behaviors, has reported that its “casebook has shifted significantly in recent years, for one principal reason: Internet pornography.” According to the director of the clinic, Stanley Ruszczynski, “The number of patients who are either addicted or otherwise adversely affected by it [pornography] is ‘phenomenal.’ Referral letters mention it regularly, and if they don’t the patient will often mention it during his assessment.”9 Similarly, sex therapists Wendy Maltz and Larry Maltz discuss in their book on the harms of porn how therapists are increasingly seeing porn addicts become a major part of their practice. They found both in their practice and from interviewing other therapists that “what used to be a small problem for relatively few people had grown to a societal issue that was spilling over and causing problems in the lives of countless everyday people.”10
The men I speak to at colleges who are addicted do indeed end up in serious trouble; they neglect their schoolwork, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression. They know that something is wrong, feel out of control, and don’t know how to stop. While men may share their favorite porn stories, they don’t tend to talk to each other about their addictive use, which further adds to their feelings of isolation. Ted described his addiction in this way: “I never thought I would become so dependent on porn for sex. I can’t get away from it, even though I know that this is no longer just a phase in my life. It feels more permanent and I don’t know how to stop it.” Eric came to me in tears, saying he was scared and felt “like such a loser” for watching so much porn. I asked him how much he used and he responded, “Before class, after class, and recently I have been staying in my dorm room all night watching. I am worried about how much I have been watching lately, and how much time I spend on porn sites.” Another student told me, “I try to stay away from porn but I just keep going back on the computer. I tell myself that this will be the last time, and then the next day it starts all over again.” This seems to be such a problem on some campuses that the counseling center is now offering support groups for such men. Whenever I hear these stories, I feel both sad for the men and outraged at the porn industry for hijacking the men’s sexuality to the point that they feel so out of control.
Some of the worst stories I hear are from men who have become so desensitized that they have started using harder porn and end up masturbating to images that had previously disgusted them. Many of these men are deeply ashamed and frightened as they don’t know where all this will end. Phil told me, “Sometimes I can’t believe the porn I like. I feel like a freak,” and Anthony sees it as a “slippery slope I never thought I would slide down. I never thought of myself as a guy who would like the really hard-core porn, but that’s what’s happened to me.” Some speak of moving toward more violent images while others have become increasingly interested in bondage and even child porn. Because accessing child porn is illegal, many of the students said that they had not actively gone searching for it but had accidentally come across it while surfing porn sites. This had piqued their interest, although most of the men I spoke to are very disturbed by their sexual interest in these pictures.
Students are not the only group becoming bored by and desensitized to porn images of adult women. In interviews I did with seven incarcerated sex offenders, aged from their late thirties to early sixties, all said that the quality and quantity of their porn use changed drastically after the introduction of the Internet. Prior to the Internet, they would regularly use pornography (of adult women) but after the introduction of the Internet, they began to use it compulsively, some of them even losing their jobs because of it. For this group of men, the regular gonzo pornography became boring, and they moved into more violent, fetishistic pornography, often that which looked like overt torture. When this also started to become boring, most of the men moved into child pornography. Some accidentally came across child porn while surfing porn sites, and others sought it out to masturbate to something other than the usual porn. The average length of time between downloading the first child porn and sexually assaulting a child was one year. Most men told me that before becoming addicted to Internet porn, they had not been sexually interested in children.11
One of the men, Jim, who was in prison for raping a woman, talked at length about his love of violent pornography. He said he needed to see a woman in pain in order to get aroused. This was true also for his actual rapes in the real world; he said that he needed to see his victim terrified in order to complete the rape. Jim had started using his father’s Playboy from an early age but soon graduated to violent porn, looking for that which focused on torture and rape. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that most men are like Jim—however, I’ll never forget that Jim, in a tone that suggested no remorse, admitted candidly to me that using porn before a rape “got me in the mood.”
The connection between porn and rape is without a doubt the most debated and most controversial question of porn’s effects. Some argue that porn causes men to rape, while others counter that sexually aggressive men seek out more violent pornography and would rape with or without th
e visual stimuli. Studies, however, suggest that there is a link between porn consumption and violence against women. Neil Malamuth, one of the most well-known psychologists studying the effects of porn, and colleagues reviewed a broad range of studies and concluded that “experimental research shows that exposure to non-violent or violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and in actual aggression.”12 Moreover, in their own study, Malamuth and his fellow researchers found: “When we considered men who were previously determined to be at high risk for sexual aggression . . . we found that those who are additionally very frequent users of pornography13 were much more likely to have engaged in sexual aggression than their counterparts who consume pornography less frequently.”14 What needs to be pointed out here is that the pornography the men in this study consumed was in magazine form and tended to be soft-core (Playboy, Penthouse, Chic), with Hustler being the most hard-core. Today, Hustler magazine is tame compared to the violence in mainstream gonzo porn. It would seem that contemporary porn, with its body-punishing sex, would have an even greater effect as it shows women actually enjoying being brutalized.
The studies provide some indication of effects, but what I find most compelling are the stories I hear from women who were raped by men who used porn. These women don’t need scientific data to tell them that some men who consume pornography will rape. In some of these women’s experiences, pornography was actually present at the time of the rape, as the men made them study it to see how to play out the sex activity they wanted. This scenario is most common in child rape, where pornography is used as both a grooming tool and an instructional manual. After all, what better way to explain to a child how to perform sex than showing her pictures of it? And afterward, in many cases, the perpetrator took pictures of the child naked to both terrorize her into silence with the threat of showing them to family or friends or to add to his stash. Over the course of my lecturing, I have had at least twenty women come up to me after the presentation, with looks of utter dread on their faces, to tell me that they were sure that they were going to see pictures of their own childhood rape appear on the screen. The depth of trauma suffered is apparent in this anxiety, as I don’t show child porn in my lectures, and in reality, it is highly improbable that I would have found one specific picture among the millions floating around. But laws of probability don’t mean anything to a traumatized individual, who is certain that her rapist is omnipotent and that pictures of her will absolutely, without doubt, surface.
And then there are the women who have been raped as adults by boyfriends, husbands, teachers, priests, doctors, colleagues, and strangers, who either made them act like the women in porn or told them about their porn use as they raped them. I have heard from wives who were forced to put a centerfold over their face as their husbands raped them; girlfriends who, during the assault, had to moan just like the woman in the movie; women who thought they could trust a male friend only to be drugged and raped while the camera was recording; and students who went to fraternity parties and were gang-raped by the brothers as a porn movie was playing in the background. Traveling the country, I have heard just about every possible way that porn is used against women, children, and some men. I have listened to stories of lives devastated by men who use porn, and for these survivors, porn is not a fantasy but a nightmarish reality.
How porn is implicated in rape is complex and multilayered. Clearly, not all men who use porn rape, but what porn does is create what some feminists call a “rape culture” by normalizing, legitimizing, and condoning violence against women. In image after image, violent and abusive sex is presented as hot and deeply satisfying for all parties. These messages in porn chip away at the social norms that define violence against women as deviant and unacceptable, norms that are already constantly under assault in a male-dominated society. In most mass-produced images a woman has no bodily integrity, boundaries, or borders that need to be respected. Combined, these images tell us that violation of these boundaries is what she seeks out and enjoys. This is one among many rape myths that porn disseminates to users. Embedded in porn are numerous other myths, all of which seek to present sexual assault as a consensual act rather than an act of violence. One way to illustrate this is to select examples from porn that reinforce the myths:15
RAPE MYTH: Women don’t know their own minds; men know better what women really want and need sexually.
PORN EXAMPLE: “Lystra is homesick and wants to move back to Korea. Professor Lawrence . . . knows what’s best for his best students—like his cock inside her moist, little hole.”16
RAPE MYTH: A woman might not want it at first, but once she gets a taste of hot sex, she can’t get enough.
PORN EXAMPLE: “Katie was a bit reluctant at first but after two hard cocks stretched her tight ass wide open she screamed with joy.”17
RAPE MYTH: Women are by nature sexually manipulative.
PORN EXAMPLE: “Jaclyn Case is pretty smart about how she tricks boys into coming over and giving IT to her. She’s also pretty specific about how she wants her pussy serviced.”18
RAPE MYTH: Women are sluts who get what they deserve.
PORN EXAMPLE: “Gia is a nasty little whore that can’t seem to get enough cock. We make sure this slut gets what she deserves and more!”19
RAPE MYTH: All women are whores at heart and want to be fucked by any available man.
PORN EXAMPLE: “Vanessa might seem like a sweet girl, but deep inside, she’s a whore wanting big white dick.”20
Not every man who uses porn will swallow these rape myths whole. To argue such a point does not account for the variations that exist among users and would reduce the effects debate to one effect—rape. But what anti-porn feminists are saying is that such myths promote a culture that will affect men in myriad ways: some will rape but many more will beg, nag, and cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts, and more still will lose interest in sex with other human beings. Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner’s looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom. Whatever the effect, men cannot walk away from these images unchanged.
One way to think about effects is to turn the question around; rather than asking how porn affects users, we could ask, Under what conditions would the images in porn not have an effect? In other words, what do men need to be exposed to in order to counter the stories in porn? In media studies we ask similar questions when discussing how to immunize people to the constant flow of consumerist ideology that is paired with capitalism. Often the answer lies in providing people with a counter-ideology that both reveals the fabricated nature of consumer ideology and offers an alternative vision of the world. A counter-ideology to porn would similarly need to disrupt and interrupt its messages, and it would have to be as powerful and as pleasurable as porn, telling men that porn’s image of women is a lie, fabricated to sell a particular version of sex. This alternative ideology would also need to present a different vision of heterosexual sex, one built on gender equality and justice. Few men are exposed to such a feminist ideology; rather, most men (and women) are fed the dominant sexist ideology on a daily basis to such a degree that gender inequality seems a natural and biologically determined reality. Porn not only milks this ideology for all its worth, it also wraps it up and hands it back to men in a highly sexualized form. In the absence of a counter-ideology, this pleasurable sexist ideology becomes the dominant way of thinking and making sense of the world. While porn is by no means the only socializing agent, thanks to its intense imagery and effect on the body, it is a powerful persuader that erodes men’s ability to see women as equal and as deserving of the same human rights that they themselves take for granted.
Chapter 6. Visible or Invisible
Growing Up Female in a Porn Culture
Women are much more understanding and aware of their true purp
ose in life than ever before. That purpose, of course, is to be receptacles of love; in other words, fuck dolls.
—Max Hardcore, pornographer
Fashion also is taking more aesthetic cues from porn, including the growing popularity of genital piercing and shaving, which was popularized by adult film actors.
—Reed Johnson
At a lecture I was giving at a large West Coast university in the spring of 2008, the female students talked extensively about how much they preferred to have a completely waxed pubic area as it made them feel “clean,” “hot,” and “well groomed.” As they excitedly insisted that they themselves chose to have a Brazilian wax, one student let slip that her boyfriend had complained when she decided to give up on waxing. Then there was silence. I asked the student to say more about her boyfriend’s preferences and how she felt about his criticism. After she spoke, other students joined in, only now the conversation took a very different turn. The excitement in the room gave way to a subdued discussion of how some boyfriends had even refused to have sex with nonwaxed girlfriends, saying they “looked gross.” One student told the group that her boyfriend bought her a waxing kit for Valentine’s Day, while yet another sent out an e-mail to his friends joking about his girlfriend’s “hairy beaver.” No, she did not break up with him; she got waxed instead.