Pornland

by Gail Dines

  With its manipulative “We are all girls together” tone coupled with the wise older mentor approach that promises to teach young women all they need to know to keep “him coming back for more,” Cosmopolitan, like most women’s magazines, masquerades as a friend and teacher to young women trying to navigate the tricky terrain of developing a sexual identity in a porn culture. Cosmopolitan’s power is its promise to be a guide and friend, and it promotes itself as one of the few magazines that really understand what the reader is going through. A promotional ad for Cosmopolitan geared toward advertisers boasts that it is “its readers’ best friend, cheerleader and shrink.”5

  In Cosmopolitan, hypersexualization is normalized by virtue of both the quantity of articles on sex and the degree to which they are explicit. For example, one article instructs the reader, in a somewhat clinical manner, on how to bring a man to orgasm: “While gripping the base of the penis steadily in one hand, place the head between your lips, circling your tongue around the crown. When you sense your guy is incredibly revved up, give his frenulum a few fast tongue licks.” For the uninitiated, the magazine explains that the frenulum is “the tiny ridge of flesh on the underside of his manhood, where the head meets the shaft.”6

  Cosmopolitan is quick to suggest using porn as a way to spice up sex. In one article, entitled “7 Bad Girl Bedroom Moves You Must Master,” the reader is told to take “the plunge into porn” as it “will add fiery fervor into your real-life bump and grinds.” The article quotes a reader who, after watching porn with her boyfriend, evidently ended up “having sex so hot that the porn looked tame in comparison.” The article suggests that if the reader feels embarrassed, she should “drive to a store in another neighborhood, shop online, or go to a place that stocks X-rated.”7

  In the world that Cosmopolitan constructs for the reader, a world of blow jobs, multiple sexual positions, anonymous porn sex, and screaming orgasms (usually his), saying no to his erection is unthinkable. The options on offer in Cosmopolitan always concern the type of sex to have and how often. What is not on offer is the option to refuse his demands since he has (an unspoken and unarticulated) right of access to the female body. Indeed, readers are warned that not having sex on demand might end the “relationship.” Psychologist Gail Thoen, for example, informs Cosmopolitan’s readers that “constant cuddling with no follow-through (i.e., sex) can be frustrating to guys” and what’s more, “he is not going to like it if you leave him high and dry all the time.”8 The reader is pulled into a highly sexual world where technique is the key, and intimacy, love, and connection appear only rarely as issues worthy of discussion. The message transmitted loud and clear is that if you want a man, then not only must you have sex with him, you must learn ways to do it better and hotter than his previous girlfriends.

  That the magazine teaches women how to have porn sex is clear in an article that ostensibly helps women deal with the etiquette of how to behave in the morning after the first sexual encounter. Women are told: “Don’t Stay Too Long.” The article warns women that “just because he had sex with you doesn’t mean he’s ready to be attached at the hip for the day.” Actually, the entire day seems like a long shot—“Bo” informs readers that “I was dating this girl who wanted to hang out the next morning, but after only a couple of hours with her, I realized I wasn’t ready to be that close.” What advice does Cosmopolitan have for women in this situation? “Skip out after coffee but before breakfast.”9

  Media targeted to women create a social reality that is so overwhelmingly consistent it is almost a closed system of messages. In this way, it is the sheer ubiquity of the hypersexualized images that gives them power since they normalize and publicize a coherent story about women, femininity, and sexuality. Because these messages are everywhere, they take on an aura of such familiarity that we believe them to be our very own personal and individual ways of thinking. They have the power to seep into the core part of our identities to such a degree that we think that we are freely choosing to look and act a certain way because it makes us feel confident, desirable, and happy. But as scholar Rosalind Gill points out, if the look was “the outcome of everyone’s individual, idiosyncratic preferences, surely there would be greater diversity, rather than a growing homogeneity organized round a slim, toned, hairless body.”10

  This highly disciplined body has now become the key site where gender is enacted and displayed on a daily basis. To be feminine requires not only the accoutrements of hypersexuality—high heels, tight clothes, and so on—but also a body that adheres to an extremely strict set of standards. We need to look like we spend hours in the gym exhausting ourselves as we work out, but whatever the shape of the body, it is never good enough. Women have so internalized the male gaze that they have now become their own worst critics. When they go shopping for clothes or look in a mirror, they dissect themselves piece by piece. Whatever the problem, and there is always a problem—the breasts are too small, the thighs not toned enough, the butt too flat or too round, the stomach too large—the result is a deep sense of self-disgust and loathing. The body becomes our enemy, threatening to erupt into fatness at any time, so we need to be hypervigilant. What we end up with is what Gill calls a “self-policing narcissistic gaze,” a gaze that is so internalized that we no longer need external forces to control the way we think or act.11

  We cannot talk about the contemporary feminine body without mention of the complicated relationship that most women and girls have to food: we want it, enjoy it, and yet feel guilty for eating it. The need to eat is taken as a sign of weakness, as not measuring up to being a real woman since celebrity women manage to survive on minimal amounts of food. Whenever I am in places where women congregate—the hairdresser, gym, clothes shops—I hear long and involved conversations about dieting. Women recite lengthy lists about what they have eaten, what they intend to eat, and what they need to stop eating. A kind of shame hangs over the conversations as everyone assumes that they are too fat and hence weak willed.

  In her excellent book on body image and food, feminist philosopher Susan Bordo looks at the ways the culture helps shape women’s ideas about what constitutes the perfect body.12 The bodies of the women we see in magazines and on television are actually very unusual in their measurements and proportions, with long necks, broad shoulders, and high waists. Yet because these are more or less the only images we see, we take them to be the norm rather than the exception and assume that the problem lies with us and not the fashion and media industries that insist on using a very specific body type. This is what the media do: they take the abnormal body and make it normal by virtue of its visibility, while making the normal bodies of real women look abnormal by virtue of their invisibility. The result is a massive image disorder on the part of society. Since we all develop notions of ourselves from cultural messages and images, it would seem that a truly disordered female is one who actually likes her body.

  Bordo’s discussion of the way culture shapes notions of the body asks us to rethink the idea that women with eating disorders are somehow deviants. Women who starve themselves are actually overconforming to the societal message about what constitutes female perfection. They have taken in the messages and come to what looks like a very reasonable conclusion: thin women are prized in this culture, I want to be prized, and therefore I need to be thin, which means that I can’t eat. How can it be any different in a world where anorexic-looking women such as Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham, Mary Kate Olsen, and Lindsay Lohan are praised by the celebrity magazines for their “look”? I do not mean to be glib here about the devastating effects of starving one’s body. I have seen many students with a long list of health problems due to long-term starvation. But somewhere in this discussion, we need to see the society as pathological rather than the adolescent girl in the hospital ward who is being diagnosed with multiple disorders.

  Many of the young women I have spoken to who have been hospitalized for eating disorders talk about all the new tricks they learned from
fellow patients for losing weight even faster. Not many talk about their hospitalizations in terms of recovery. While many of these young women end up hospitalized for complex reasons, the cultural obsession with female thinness has to figure in somewhere for most of them. Yet these recovery programs do not have classes on media literacy and cultural constructions of gender or rap sessions on resisting sexist imagery. Instead the focus is squarely on the individual female and her assumed psychological problems, which somehow dropped from the sky. One story that demonstrates the cultural components of this so-called individual disorder is writer Abra Chernik’s experience of having a day out from the hospital, where she is being treated for anorexia.13 Close to death, Chernik goes to the mall and takes a “fat test” at a sporting goods store. She learns she is this week’s winner, with the lowest percentage of body fat, and everyone in the store breaks into applause. Chernik then returns to the hospital, where she is meant to recover with intense therapy that explores her personal problems. Meanwhile, the culture is left intact.

  Understanding culture as a socializing agent requires exploring how and why some girls and young women conform and others resist. For all the visual onslaught, not every young woman looks or acts like she take her cues from Cosmopolitan or Maxim. One reason for this is that conforming to a dominant image is not an all-or-nothing act but rather a series of acts that place women and girls at different points on the continuum of conformity to nonconformity. Where any individual sits at any given time on this continuum depends on her past and present experiences as well as family relationships, media consumption, peer group affiliations and sexual, racial, and class identity. We are not, after all, blank slates onto which images are projected.

  Given the complex ways that we form our sexual and gender identities, it is almost impossible to predict, with precision, how any one individual will act at any one time. This does not mean, though, that we can’t make predictions on a macro level. What we can say is that the more one way of being female is elevated above and beyond others, the more a substantial proportion of the population will gravitate toward that which is most socially accepted, condoned, and rewarded. The more the hypersexualized image crowds out other images of women and girls, the fewer options females have of resisting what cultural critic Neil Postman called “the seduction of the eloquence of the image.”14

  Conforming to the image is seductive as it not only offers women an identity that is in keeping with the majority but also confers a whole host of pleasures, since looking hot does garner the kind of male attention that can sometimes feel empowering. Indeed, getting people to consent to any system, even if it’s inherently oppressive, is made easier if conformity brings with it psychological, social, and/or material gains. Many women know what it’s like to be sexually wanted by a man: the way he holds you in his gaze, the way he finds everything you say worthy of attention, the way you suddenly become the most compelling person in the world. This is the kind of attention we don’t normally get from men when we are giving a presentation, having a political conversation, or telling them to do the dishes. No, this is an attention men shower on women they want sexually, and it feels like real power, but it is ephemeral because it is being given to women by men who increasingly, thanks to the porn culture, see women as interchangeable hookup partners. To feel that sense of power, women need to keep sexing themselves up so they can become visible to the next man who is going to, for a short time, hold her in his lustful gaze.

  Those girls and young women who resist the wages of sexual objectification have to form an identity that is in opposition to mainstream culture. What I find is that these young women and girls tend to have someone in their life—be it a mother, an older woman mentor, or a coach—who provides some form of immunization to the cultural messages. But often this immunization is short-lived. Every summer I co-teach an institute in media literacy, and many of the participants are parents or teachers. Year after year we hear the same story: they are working hard to provide their daughters or students with ways to resist the culture, and in their early years the girls seem to be internalizing the counter-ideology. However, at some point, usually around puberty but increasingly earlier, the girls begin to adopt more conventional feminine behavior as their peer group becomes the most salient socializing force.15 This makes sense because adolescence is the developmental stage that is all about fitting in. Indeed, in a strange way, one becomes visible in adolescence by looking like everyone else, and to look and act differently is to be rendered invisible.

  What many of these young women and girls need to be able to continue resisting the dominant culture is clearly a peer group of like-minded people as well as an ideology that reveals the fabricated, exploitative, and consumerist nature of contemporary femininity. Alternative ideologies such as feminism that critique dominant conceptions of femininity are either caricatured or ignored in mainstream media. Absent such a worldview and a community of like-minded people, many young women speak about feeling isolated and alone in their refusal to conform to the porn culture. The stories are the same: they have a lot of difficulty in negotiating the outsider status that they have been forced to take on. They not only refuse to sex themselves up, they also refuse to have hookup sex, which means that they have a difficult time finding men who are interested in them.

  Hookup Sex as Porn Sex

  One of the most noticeable shifts in girls’ and young women’s behavior over the last decade or so is their increasing participation in what is called hookup sex—those encounters that can be anything from a grope to full sexual intercourse but have the common feature that there is no expectation of a relationship, intimacy, or connection.16 Sex is what you expect, and sex is what you get. In a large-scale survey of 7,000 students, sociologist Michael Kimmel found that by their senior year, “students had averaged nearly seven hookups during their collegiate careers. About one-fourth (24 percent) say that they have never hooked up, while slightly more than that (28 percent) have hooked up ten times or more.”17

  Given its lack of commitment and intimate connection, hookup sex is a lot like porn sex, and it is being played out in the real world. If porn and women’s media are to be believed, then these women are having as good a time as the men. But studies are finding that women do hope for more than just sex from a hookup encounter, as many express a desire for the hookup to evolve into a relationship. Sociologist Kathleen Bogle, for example, found in her study of college-age students that many of the women “were interested in turning hookup partners into boyfriends,” while the men interviewed “preferred to hookup with no strings attached.”18

  Now, it would be a mistake to glorify sex for women in the pre-hookup days, as feminists such as Shere Hite have documented just how unfulfilling sex was with men who were clueless about women’s bodies and sexual desires. But if previous generations of men didn’t understand women’s bodies, then what must this generation of men be like who have grown up on porn? As my colleague Robert Jensen always says, “If men are going to porn to learn about women’s sexuality, then they will certainly be disappointed.” In porn a man just has to have an erection for a woman to be suddenly overtaken by orgasmic responses. Porn sex assumes that women are turned on by what turns men on, so if he enjoys pounding anal sex, then she does too. Little surprise that studies show that men in hookups experience orgasm more often than women, or that they report more sexual satisfaction from the encounters.19

  But not having orgasms is not the only thing women in hookup sex have to worry about. Studies have found that women who participate in hookups have lower self-esteem and higher levels of depression, and they experience regret over the hookups.20 Grello and her colleagues, for example, found that the more depressed females had more sex partners, and the more partners they had, the more they regretted the hookup. The authors suggest that one possible explanation for this is that “depressed females may be seeking external validation from sex. They may be maintaining a vicious depressive cycle by unconsciously engaging
in sex in doomed relationships. Possibly, these females’ negative feelings of self-worth or isolation may increase their desire to be wanted by or intimate with another. Thus, if they sensed a potential romance would result from the encounter, they may have engaged in sexual behavior with a casual sex partner in an attempt to feel better, at least temporarily.”21

  Probably one of the most interesting findings of this study is that males who engaged in hookup sex reported the least depressive symptoms of any group. They also reported feeling more pleasure and less guilt than the females who participated in hookups. One reason for this could be the way that masculinity is socially constructed, since the more sex partners a man has, the more he is conforming to the idealized image of manhood.

  With hookup sex comes, for women and girls, an increased possibility of being labeled a slut—a term that is used to control and stigmatize female sexual desire and behavior. There is, after all, no male equivalent of a slut since men who are thought to be highly sexually active are called a stud or a player—labels most men would happily take on. What it means to be a “slut” shifts over time, as previous generations of women carried the label just for having sex before marriage. But for all of women’s so-called sexual empowerment today, the effects of being labeled a slut are as devastating now as they were in the past. A study by academics Wendy Walter-Bailey and Jesse Goodman shows that these girls and young women “often resort to self-destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation, academic withdrawal, or risky sexual conduct.”22

  Walter-Bailey and Goodman found that the girls most likely to be labeled as sluts are those who “act too casual and/or flaunt their sexuality” as well as those who “flirt too heavily, blossom too early, or dress too scantily.”23 But here’s the problem in a hypersexualized society: conforming to the mainstream norms means girls and young women have to engage in the very behaviors that get them labeled a slut. This is what feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye calls the classic double bind of the oppressed, in that they are faced with “situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation.”24