by Gail Dines
Two weeks after the waxing discussion, I was at an East Coast Ivy League school, where some female students became increasingly angry during my presentation. They accused me of denying them the free choice to embrace our hypersexualized porn culture, an idea that was especially repugnant because, as rising members of the next generation’s elite, they saw no limits or constraints on them as women. Then one student made a joke about the “trick” that many of them employ as a way to avoid hookup sex. What is this trick? These women purposely don’t shave or wax as they are getting ready to go out that night so they will feel too embarrassed to participate in hookup sex. As she spoke, I watched as others nodded their heads in agreement. When I asked why they couldn’t just say no to sex, they informed me that once you have a few drinks in you and are at a party or a bar, it is too hard to say no. I was speechless—these women, who had just been arguing that I had denied them agency in my discussion of porn culture, saw no contradiction in telling me that they couldn’t say no to sex. The next day I flew to Utah to give a lecture in a small college which, although not a religious college, had a good percentage of Mormons and Catholics. I told them about the lecture the previous night and asked them if they knew what the trick was. It turns out that trick is everywhere.
I tell this story because it neatly captures on many levels how the porn culture is affecting young women’s lives. The reality is that women don’t need to look at porn to be profoundly affected by it because images, representations, and messages of porn are now delivered to women via pop culture. Women today are still not major consumers of hard-core porn; they are, however, whether they know or it or not, internalizing porn ideology, an ideology that often masquerades as advice on how to be hot, rebellious, and cool in order to attract (and hopefully keep) a man. An excellent example is genital waxing, which first became popular in porn and then filtered down into women’s media such as Cosmopolitan, a magazine that regularly features stories and tips on what “grooming” methods women should adopt to attract a man. Sex and the City, that hugely successful show with an almost cult following, also used waxing as a story line. For instance, in the movie, Miranda is chastised by Samantha for “letting herself go” by having pubic hair.
What my conversations with college students reveal is how conformity to porn culture is defined by young women as a free choice. I hear this mantra everywhere, yet when one digs deeper, it is clear that the idea of choice is more complicated than originally thought. To talk about women’s free choice is to enter into the tricky terrain of how much free will we really have as human beings. While we all have some power to act as the author of our own lives, we are not free-floating individuals who come into the world with a ready-made set of identities; rather, to paraphrase Karl Marx, we are social beings who construct our identities within a particular set of social, economic, and political conditions, which are often not of our own making. This is especially true of our gender identity, as gender is a social invention and hence our notion of what is “normal” feminine behavior is shaped by external forces.
To illustrate this point, we can look at women’s “choices” in the post–Second World War era. At first glance, it looked like women were eagerly giving up their wartime jobs to go home and look after their husbands and kids; it appeared that women as a group suddenly and collectively chose to return to being housewives and mothers. It was only after that period, thanks to feminist historians and writers, that we found out that what drove them home was a complex set of circumstances that included women being fired or demoted to make room for men, the inability of married women to find employment, the growth of suburbia, and the lack of child care. What, then, appeared as free will were actually economic and social forces that cohered to limit women’s life choices. Not least of these were the media images and sitcoms such as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, which depicted the housewife as the idealized woman: feminine, nurturing, and blissful in her role as cleaner, caretaker, nanny, chauffeur, and nurse. This was the dominant image of femininity that was celebrated and perpetuated by the media. The only problem was that the image was a lie. As Betty Friedan revealed in The Feminine Mystique, many real women were miserable, lonely, and overburdened with the daily duties of holding the family together.1 But media images do not have to tell the truth to be believed or internalized as many women of that era compared themselves to Harriet Nelson or June Cleaver—and found themselves deficient.
Today’s women are not being forced back to the home, but that does not mean that they are not similarly affected by cultural constructions of idealized femininity. In her book on women and pop culture, Ariel Levy asks why women are still conforming to mainstream images of women since, she argues, “Women today have staggeringly different opportunities and expectations than our mothers did.”2 This is true, especially for white middle-class women, but we are still cultural beings who develop our identities out of the dominant images that surround us. The Stepford Wife image, which drove previous generations of women crazy with its insistence on sparkling floors and perfectly orchestrated meals, has all but disappeared, and in its place we now have the Stepford Slut: a hypersexualized, young, thin, toned, hairless, and, in many cases, surgically enhanced woman with a come-hither look on her face. Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver have morphed into Britney, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Paris, Lindsay, and so on. They represent images of contemporary idealized femininity—in a word, hot—that are held up for women, especially young women, to emulate. Women today are still held captive by images that ultimately tell lies about women. The biggest lie is that conforming to this hypersexualized image will give women real power in the world, since in a porn culture, our power rests, we are told, not in our ability to shape the institutions that determine our life chances but in having a hot body that men desire and women envy.
In today’s image-based culture, there is no escaping the image and no respite from its power when it is relentless in its visibility. If you think that I am exaggerating, then flip through a magazine at the supermarket checkout, channel surf, take a drive to look at billboards, or watch TV ads. Many of these images are of celebrities—women who have fast become the role models of today. With their wealth, designer clothes, expensive homes, and flashy lifestyles, these women do seem enviable to girls and young women since they appear to embody a type of power that demands attention and visibility.
For us noncelebrities who can’t afford a personal stylist, the magazines dissect the “look,” giving us tips on how to craft the image at a fraction of the price. They instruct us on what clothes to buy, what shoes to wear, how to do our hair and makeup, and what behavior to adopt to look as hot as our favorite celebrity. The low-slung jeans, the short skirt that rides up our legs as we sit down, the thong, the tattoo on the lower back, the pierced belly button, the low-cut top that shows cleavage, the high heels that contort our calves, and the pouting glossed lips all conspire to make us look like a bargain-basement version of the real thing. To get anywhere close to achieving the “look,” we, of course, need to spend money—lots of it—as today femininity comes in the form of consumer products that reshape the body and face. The magazines that instruct us in the latest “must-have” fashions have no shortage of ads that depict, in excruciating detail, what it means to be feminine in today’s porn culture.
While the fashion industry has always pushed clothes that sexualize women’s bodies, the difference today is that the “look” is, in part, inspired by the sex industry. We are now expected to wear this attire everywhere: in school, on the street, and at work. Teachers, including elementary school teachers, often complain that their female students look more like they are going to a party than coming to school. It is as if we females now have to carry the marker of sex on us all the time, less we forget (or men forget) what our real role is in this society.
Among hypersexualized celebrities, Paris Hilton ranks high. The story of how she was catapulted to the A-list is one all about porn culture. Once a minor-league celebr
ity known mainly for her vast bank account, in 2004, her then-boyfriend, Rick Salomon—thirteen years her senior—released a videotape of them having sex, called 1 Night in Paris, and she instantly became a household name. Thanks to that tape, Hilton is now talked about all over the porn discussion boards as “a filthy slut” who got what she deserved. The fact that Salomon was the one who orchestrated the whole thing (she sued him over the release) does not prevent her from being mocked and derided by porn users and pop culture commentators alike. Over the years, Hilton has been labeled a kind of super “slut”—a term used to demarcate the supposed good girls from the bad. Her antics have garnered a devoted following among girls and young women, as well as massive visibility as one of the most photographed women in the world. Hilton gets away with being anointed as a “slut” because she is fabulously rich; the wealth acts as a kind of upmarket cleansing cream that instantly rubs off the dirt. For most girls and women, however, especially those from the working class, the dirt sticks like mud.
Take, for example, Britney Spears. At seventeen Spears released her debut single, called “. . . Baby One More Time,” which became an instant international success. In the accompanying video, Spears is dressed in a school uniform with a knotted shirt that reveals a bare midriff, socks, and braided hair as she writhes around asking her ex-boyfriend to “hit me, baby, one more time.” Spears later went on to employ Gregory Dark to direct her videos; Dark is a longtime porn director whose films include The Devil in Miss Jones, New Wave Hookers, and Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks. Her meltdowns in public, together with the famous image of her sans underwear, have contributed to a kind of public humiliation: we collectively flog her for her trashy ways, yet we put her on a pedestal for embodying a kind of uncouth hot sexiness. Unlike Hilton, Spears was not born into great wealth, so the attacks on her mothering, appearance, and partying tend to carry a subtext of classism in which Spears is described as a trailer-trash slut who, despite her millions, can’t escape her roots.
Another celebrity who was similarly loved and hated for her so-called slutty behavior was Anna Nicole Smith, a woman whose life was filled with sexual exploitation yet one who was elevated in pop culture to the status of a kind of iconic slut who was willing and happy to sleep, strip, and marry her way to the top. Even in death this woman was trashed, consistently referred to as an “ex–porn star” rather than a woman dogged by poverty and abuse who suffered the terrible tragedy of losing a child. A few months after the overdose death of Smith’s son, Hustler magazine ran a cartoon under the title “Anna Nicole Smith’s Son’s Autopsy.” Two doctors, both wearing white coats splashed with blood, stand in front of a shrouded dead body. One says to the other, “We’ll have to invent a cover story. All the tests conclude he died of embarrassment.” What is startling about this cartoon is not only the contempt it shows for both Smith’s son’s death and Smith’s pain at burying her son, but the way in which the cartoonist understood the degree to which the porn industry turned Smith into the laughingstock of America and how this must have affected her son.
People not immersed in pop culture tend to assume that what we see today is just more of the same stuff that previous generations grew up on. After all, every generation has had its hot and sultry stars who led expensive and wild lives compared to the rest of us. But what is different about today is not only the hypersexualization of mass-produced images but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female. Today’s tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalized the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim, and downright boring. Today, a girl or young woman looking for an alternative to the Britney, Paris, Lindsay look will soon come to the grim realization that the only alternative to looking fuckable is to be invisible.
One show that popularized porn culture was Sex and the City, a show that supposedly celebrated female independence from men. At first glance this series was a bit different from others in its representation of female friendships and the power of women to form bonds that sustain them in their everyday lives. It also seemed to provide a space for women to talk about their own sexual desires, desires that were depicted as edgy, rebellious, and fun. However, these women claimed a sexuality that was ultimately traditional rather than resistant. Getting a man and keeping him were central to the narrative, and week after week we heard about the trials and tribulations of four white, privileged heterosexual women who seemed to find men who take their sexual cues from porn.
Porn-type sex is a fixture on the show, which regularly featured plotlines about men who like to watch porn as they have sex, men who are aroused by female urination, men who want group sex, men who can get aroused only by masturbating to porn, men who are into S&M, men who want anal sex, and men who are willing to have only hookup sex and not a relationship. In one episode, called “Models and Mortals,” Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finds out that a male friend of hers is secretly taping his girlfriends as they have sex. Rather than being appalled at this invasion of privacy, Carrie is immediately interested and sits down with him to watch the tapes. Later in the show, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) shows some interest in the man, and when she finds out that he tapes his girlfriends, she becomes even more determined to have hookup sex with him. Another one of the story lines of the show was Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) first husband’s inability to sustain an erection during sex. One night Charlotte hears noises coming from the bathroom and, thinking that her husband is crying, she walks in, only to see him masturbating to porn. Shocked at first, Charlotte later glues pictures of herself in the magazines.
These examples show how the Sex and the City women capitulated to the pornography that invades their sex lives. In their desire to get a man and keep him, they were willing to do anything, even if they felt uncomfortable. In the episode about urination, for example, Carrie is clearly uncomfortable with the idea, but eventually offers to either pour warm liquid on her partner or urinate with the door open so he can hear her. The idea that these women are independent is undermined by their dependency on men and male approval. At the end of the final season, Carrie is living with an emotionally unavailable artist in Paris and is saved by the equally emotionally unavailable Mr. Big. In the movie released in the summer of 2008, Mr. Big leaves her standing at the altar, but in typical Sex and the City style, Carrie eventually forgives him and marries him.
What critics have noted about the show and the movie is the role that consuming products plays in the lives of the women. Media scholar Angela McRobbie notes that the “show functions as a televisual magazine and shop window for the successful launching of shoes, accessories and fashion lines well beyond the means of average female viewers.”3 The Sex and the City women are described as being independent not because they refuse to submit to men’s power but because they can afford to buy their own high-end goods. Through the endless buying of goods, the women constructed their femininity, styling and restyling themselves depending on their latest purchase. Their bodies and their clothes spoke to a conventional—albeit upmarket—femininity that was constructed out of the culture’s mainstream images. Nowhere did we see a resistance to the fabricated image; rather, their very sexuality was dependent on the products they consumed. These women looked hot because they were perfectly turned out in designer gear. In one episode, in which Carrie has a first date with Mr. Big, she vows not to have sex with him, but the dress she buys for the occasion says otherwise, and the two do have sex—the dress becoming the marker of her sexuality. The problem with this is that women’s so-called independence became seamlessly meshed with their ability to consume rather than being about a feminist worldview that insists on equality in heterosexual relationships.
Nowhere is this pseudo-independence more celebrated than in Cosmopolitan, a magazine that claims to have “served as an agent for social change, encouraging women everywhere to go after what they want (whether it be in the boardroom or the bedroom).” It is
hard to see how Cosmopolitan helped women advance in corporate America, given that most of the Cosmo girl’s time is taken up with perfecting her body and her sexual technique. But this doesn’t stop the magazine from boasting that “we here at Cosmo are happy to have played such a significant role in women’s history. And we look forward to many more years of empowering chicks everywhere.”4 In porn culture empowering women translates into “chicks” having lots of sex, and no magazine does more than Cosmopolitan to teach women how to perform porn sex in a way that is all about male pleasure.
With headlines every month promising “Hot New Sex Tricks,” “21 Naughty Sex Tips,” “Little Mouth Moves That Make Sex Hotter,” “67 New Blow-His-Mind Moves,” “8 Sex Positions You Haven’t Thought Of,” and so on, women seem to experience no authentic sexual pleasure; rather, what she wants and enjoys is what he wants and enjoys. While there might be an odd article here and there on what to wear to climb the corporate ladder, the magazine as a whole is all about “him” and “his” needs, wants, desires, tastes, and, most importantly, orgasm. In Cosmopolitan, as in much of pop culture, her pleasure is derived not from being a desiring subject but from being a desired object.
Women’s magazines that focus on “him” are not new, as earlier generations were also inundated with stories about “him,” but then the idea was to stimulate his taste buds rather than his penis. Cosmopolitan is the contemporary equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal in that it pretends to be about women, but it is in fact all about getting him, pleasing him, and (hopefully) keeping him. For previous generations of women, the secret to a happy relationship lay in being a good cook, cleaner, and mother—for the young women of today, the secret is, well, just being a good lay. If the reader is going to Cosmopolitan for tips on how to build a relationship or ways of developing intimacy, she will be disappointed, as conversation only matters in the world of Cosmo if it is about talking dirty.