This means that men are still encouraged, through most pornographic materials, to see women as objects, and women are still encouraged much of the time to concentrate on their sexual allure rather than their imagination or pleasure. No wonder we have seen the rise of the idea that erotic experience will necessarily involve, for women, a performance in which they will be judged visually. When I interviewed young women about their attitudes to sexuality, I was struck by one apparently trivial fact – that all of them agreed that they would never want to have sex if they hadn’t depilated their pubic hair. ‘I would never want a man to see me if I hadn’t been waxed recently,’ said one young woman from Cambridge University, and her friends nodded in agreement. ‘I don’t need to have all the hair removed, but it has to be neat,’ said another. ‘That is definitely tied into porn,’ said another. ‘We know what men will have seen and what they will expect.’
Where the rise of expectations from pornography result just in depilation, that is one thing, but the rise of interest in surgery to change the appearance of the labia is another, far more worrying development. The number of operations carried out in the UK to cut women’s labia to a preconceived norm is currently rising steeply.13 This development has been covered extensively in magazines and television programmes, often in a way calculated to increase anxiety among female viewers. For instance, in an episode of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, screened on Channel 4 in 2008, a young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia. The comments left on the programme’s website showed how this decision to carry out plastic surgery to fit a young woman’s body to a so-called norm made other young women feel intensely anxious. ‘I’m fifteen and I thought I was fine, but since I’ve watched the programme I’ve become worried, as mine seem larger than the girl who had hers made surgically smaller! It doesn’t make any difference to my life, but I worry now that when I’m older and start having sex I might have problems!’ said one girl.14 This idea that there is one correct way for female genitals to look is undoubtedly tied into the rise of pornography. Indeed, one website for a doctor who specialises in this form of plastic surgery makes this explicit: ‘Laser Reduction Labioplasty can sculpture the elongated or unequal labial minora (small inner lips) according to one’s specification … Many women bring us Playboy and say that they want to look like this. With laser reduction labioplasty, we work with women to try and accomplish their desires.’15 If the rise of pornography was really tied up with women’s liberation and empowerment, it would not be increasing women’s anxiety about fitting into a narrow physical ideal.
What’s more, while interviewing people about their experiences with pornography, I began to realise that despite the absence of much public debate on the issue, many women are struggling with the influence of pornography on their private, emotional lives. Even if they did not accept the classic feminist critique that all pornography necessarily involves or encourages abuse of women, many of them were still concerned about the fact that pornography foregrounds a view of sex that can be profoundly dehumanising. In pornography, there is no before and no after; sex occurs in isolation. In pornography, there is little individuality; every partner is interchangeable. In pornography, there is no communication between the individuals concerned; it is all performance directed at the observer. In pornography, there is no emotional resonance to sex; everything happens on the exterior. When people become imaginatively caught up in pornography, this dehumanised view of sex can clearly have real effects on their own relationships.
One day I found myself taking a taxi in a small town in Essex, and ringing on the doorbell in a suburban street, to talk to a self-confessed pornography addict. Jim, a quiet man in his early forties, was embarrassed by what we talked about over the following couple of hours, but also eager to tell a story that he feels is probably less unusual than one might think. ‘I know I’m not the only guy who’s like this,’ he kept saying. Jim first became aware of pornography when he was just five years old. ‘My dad was really into pornography. I was five when I found a copy of his Mayfair. I found it quite captivating, to be honest.’ When he was about seven Jim discovered hardcore European pornography in his father’s wardrobe, and even to this day he can remember some of those first images he saw. ‘I found them quite disturbing. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it of course, because the whole point is that it’s hidden, you know that you’re not supposed to know about it.’ His fascination with what he had found grew and grew. From then on he would get up before his parents woke, before six in the morning, to look through his father’s briefcase and find the porn magazines. ‘Then my dad got a Super 8 projector, when I was about eleven or twelve, and he would hire out porn films – he would lock himself in the dining room to watch them. But the real change came when he got a video, and I persevered till I found the films. I was about fourteen, and I would find them and watch them when I was alone in the house. Constantly.’
At this age, Jim did not have any relationships to set against this obsession. He was going to a boys’ school and never met girls socially. ‘I was obsessed with pornography, I wanted to be pornography, I wanted to live pornography,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t good for me, I can see that now. I knew that even then, I think, but it was an addiction from the start. It had such a powerful hold on me. It had a huge effect on my behaviour with women. I was unable to think of women except as potential pornography. I looked at them in a purely sexual way. I remember one day I was walking to school, I was about fifteen, and I got talking to a girl who must have been about eighteen. I immediately said I wanted to grope her breasts. I had no idea how to interact with women as people.’
Even though Jim did begin to have girlfriends from the age of nineteen, he never managed to shrug off the power of the fantasy world. ‘The power of pornography has continued throughout my adult life. Nothing has really measured up to the world of porn, for me. I’ve seen thousands of strangers having sex. So when I have sex, I am watching myself having sex – it’s a performance.’ For Jim, the constant presence of pornography in his life has, he believed, threatened his ability to sustain intimacy. ‘It has destroyed my ability to have intimate relationships. Its influence on my life has been so destructive. I think my life would have been so different without pornography.’
In his thirties, Jim started a relationship that lasted for seven years. Ali is Jim’s ex-girlfriend; a direct-talking, well-read woman whom I spoke to after I had spoken to Jim. ‘He did tell me about how much he liked porn at the start of our relationship,’ Ali told me. ‘He was very honest in that way – at least he was at first. Pornography was completely new to me then – this was ten years ago. It was before internet porn. But I was ready to see what it was like, you know, if it was so much part of his life.’
Jim used to borrow videos from friends, or buy them, and he and Ali would watch them together in the early days of their relationship. ‘I could see the appeal,’ Ali admits. ‘I could see the high you could get from it. But it wasn’t long before I realised it wasn’t for me. I had been abused as a child. I couldn’t stop myself seeing the connections. I couldn’t stop asking myself whether these women had really consented, and what it had taken them to consent to this, and whether they were getting pleasure out of it. I wanted to know about their backgrounds, and their feelings. I felt very uncomfortable. I talked about it with Jim and we agreed he would try to abstain from pornography.’ When the internet began to be part of their lives, however, he could no longer control his interest in pornography and began to use it again. The relationship finally broke down. ‘Pornography has made him only able to see sex one way,’ Ali says. ‘He has always seen sex as something that has to be performed, not felt. I would say that his addiction to pornography has been the main factor in the breakdown of our relationship.’ Ali believes that there is lit
tle debate of what she has been going through in the world around her. ‘Porn has been so normalised that anyone objecting to it now is just going to be laughed at. I think we need to hear again about how pornography threatens intimacy.’
Ali is certainly not unique in struggling with the impact of pornography in her own relationship. One day when I was visiting a website where parents congregate to talk about parenting and families, I saw a woman I’ll call Lara posting about her worries about her husband’s reliance on pornography. We went on talking privately by email. Lara has been with her husband for seven years, and married for five years. ‘My husband and I had been together as a couple for about six months when I discovered his porn stash,’ she wrote to me. ‘I wasn’t even snooping, it was just in a drawer under his bed. I was shocked, and at first I was just bemused by it – he’d clearly been building this collection up for some time, given the age of some of the magazines.’ As this was in the days before everyone had a computer in their homes, they didn’t have access to the internet. ‘At this point, our relationship was fantastic, we were head over heels in love, had an amazing sex life. I was so in love I couldn’t have walked away if I tried. Eventually I brought it up with him, and he seemed embarrassed and said he hadn’t bought anything for ages, and was going to stop altogether.’ Lara at first believed that they had moved on. They got married and still didn’t have a computer, so it wasn’t an issue to begin with, but when they did get a computer at home the problems began. ‘I was pregnant when I found out that he was looking at pornography online. I caught him at it one evening, and I was really upset. I also found out he was calling sex lines. I was gutted. I started looking at his email to try and find out what he was doing, and my discoveries inevitably led to major arguments.’
At first Lara tried to get her husband to go to counselling, with her, but he refused to do so, and the impact on their relationship grew. ‘As far as our intimacy goes – it definitely has been affected,’ she wrote. ‘I just can’t bring myself to be as close to him as I otherwise would. I always wonder what’s going on in his head – whether he’s thinking about a porn site he saw, a particular female or whatever, when we’re together. He’s very vocal and specific in what he finds arousing and I believe this comes from the type of site he likes using. I try not to let this bother me, but it does.’ Lara has looked at pornography with her husband, but just like Ali, she can’t enjoy it, because of the dehumanisation which seems inherent in it. ‘I think about the females as humans with emotions and lives. I always ask my husband if he thinks their parents would be proud of them, or if he knows these women are probably involved with drugs and prostitution, that this surely isn’t a well-considered career choice? I ask him how he would feel if our daughter grew up to be involved in this industry, and he can’t bear the thought of that. I try to humanise them, to make them something more than a sexual object.’
Lara has tried to confront her husband about his habits, but when they argue, he has tried many tactics, from swearing that he will never again use porn, to telling her to turn a blind eye and mind her own business, to what she calls the ‘old favourite’, that all men do it and it’s nothing unusual. ‘The upshot of all this is that it doesn’t matter what he tells me any more,’ Lara wrote to me sadly. ‘I just don’t really believe him. I have never discussed this with any female friends – I’m too ashamed. I have felt that he is kind of using me when we’re together to act out fantasies that he has seen in porn. I wonder whether he’s fantasising about some female he likes on the internet instead of concentrating on me.’
Women like Ali and Lara are not alone. It is notable that although their partners first became enthralled by pornography before the internet, it was the internet that encouraged these men to reject their partners’ requests that they live out their erotic lives without porn. I do not believe that all pornography inevitably degrades women, and I do see that the classic feminist critique of pornography as necessarily violence against women is too simplistic to embrace the great range of explicit sexual materials and people’s reactions to them. Yet let’s be honest. The overuse of pornography does threaten many erotic relationships, and this is a growing problem. What’s more, too much pornography does still rely on or promote the exploitation or abuse of women. Even if you can find porn for women and couples on the internet, nevertheless a vein of real contempt for women characterises so much pornography.
This is true even of mainstream pornography, let alone all the sites that openly advertise, as many do, images of rape, incest and abuse. ‘I find the internet quite disturbing,’ Jim told me. ‘I’ve been into pornography for years, I’ve seen it all. But the internet has pushed things further.’ Although he has consumed pornography so enthusiastically for thirty years, he is definite that pornography has become far more contemptuous of women than it was previously. ‘Now, porn is way more brutalising than it used to be,’ he tells me. ‘There is this unbelievable obsession with anal sex – pictures with a woman’s arsehole stretched out of all proportion from having sex with two men – that has to be painful. It’s far more demeaning to women than in the past.’ One might think that someone who has seen as much pornography as Jim would not be shocked by anything, but it is clear that he is shocked with the way that the growing acceptability of pornography is putting into the mainstream a dehumanising view of women. ‘People take that for granted now,’ he told me. ‘This guy who lives over the road said, I’ll drop you a DVD – it was all about anal sex, these guys slapping this woman, making her have anal sex with two guys at once and a huge dildo, all up her arse at once. He said, what did you think? I said, it’s really not my cup of tea. He grinned and said, yeah, it’s horrible isn’t it. God, I remember when I saw my first picture of anal sex when I was about sixteen, it was coy in comparison. None of these gaping shots, none of these pictures of what look like a woman in pain. There seems to be such a market for really brutal text, too. The stuff I saw as a kid was what we called hardcore, but the idea in the text alongside was that it was based on mutual consent – mutual pleasure – but what I see now is more male domination.’
Not only is the tone of pornography so often reliant on real or imaginary abuse of women, it is, as we have seen, consumed in increasing numbers by young people who have little real experience to set against it. Jim believes that very young men are beginning to see as normal images which would once have been seen as far beyond the pale. ‘So many guys I know are into it. I play a lot of golf and one day I was there and there were these young guys, fifteen, sixteen, looking at video clips on their phones of a girl having sex with a horse, and one of them says, “she died a day later of internal injuries”. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s the kind of stuff they want to look at. It’s like a bravado, they want to look at worse and worse stuff. When I was a kid what you saw was limited by what you could physically buy on paper. Now it all flashes around so quickly and the taboos have just fallen.’ Jim feels that even for young men who don’t seek it out, the exposure to these images simply changes their attitudes to sex. ‘I think that kind of violence associated with sex lodges in your mind and you never forget it, however much you want to. It’s always there.’
Because the old feminist position against pornography has been so discredited, it often feels as though few people are ready to speak out against pornography. I picked up a real sense of hopelessness from those women who have experienced its negative effects in their intimate lives. Ali, Jim’s ex-partner, has a young son. She worries that what happened with Jim could be repeated with her son. ‘I was first aware that he was looking at pornography when he was fourteen. But how can boys not see it? Unless they make a concerted decision not to look at it, to delete it from their mobiles when it’s sent to them, or from their emails. You’d be making a singular, probably a unique decision. Once someone like Jim was unusual, now every boy has seen all of that. I know what it does to young minds, and now it is more and more prevalent. God knows how we can begin to challeng
e this. Once upon a time kids could experiment, you know, privately, but now all the innocence is lost.’
The tide of pornography is so huge, and so easily accessible, that it often seems impossible to think about turning it back. Yet I don’t think we have to slip into despair. There is this idea that ‘innocence’, once lost, is lost forever, that, as Jim put it, once pornography is viewed, ‘You never forget it, however much you want to.’ It is true that we cannot turn back the clock and wipe pornography out of our individual experience or the memories of our society. Yet there are still ways to move forwards and to create places where the influence of pornography will be resisted. This will entail giving more support to people who are struggling with pornography’s dehumanising effects on their own relationships. Both Ali and Lara feel that it would help them in their own, personal struggles if voices challenging pornography were heard more in the mainstream of the surrounding culture. Lara wrote to me: ‘From some discussions I’ve had online I can see that many wives are struggling with their husband’s porn use. If the mainstream media began talking about porn addiction in the same way as they talk freely about drug abuse, gambling or alcoholism, then maybe my husband would see that he’s not the only man in the world who has this problem and would see that he should deal with it.’ I also heard from teenagers that they wanted more chance to discuss seriously what they are seeing, since they seem to find that this world of pornography is absolutely open to them, and yet is rarely openly referred to.
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 12