by Неизвестный
A single twenty-something graphic designer told me he would find himself in bars, berating himself over the way he scanned potential dates. “I’d be saying, ‘No, her breasts are too small, she’s not worth it,’ then wonder, ‘Who have I become? Why am I judging women like this?’ ” After months of rampant use, he had to “restrict” himself in order to regain perspective.
A twenty-eight-year-old man explained,“I used to view porn online, but I began to find it more difficult to stay aroused when having sex with a real woman. . . . During a dry spell, I discovered iPorn, and the easiness of it made it easy to glut to the point where now, even though the dry spell is over, real sex has lost some of its magic.”
When they are having sex with real women, such men need to conjure images they’ve viewed in pornography in order to maintain their level of excitement. Other times, they want to focus on their partner, but find their minds filled with pornographic images instead—like getting a bad song trapped in their heads.
Men also told me that they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would have once considered appalling—bestiality, group sex, hard-core S&M, genital torture, child pornography.
They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit the pornography fantasies they consumed onscreen. Their daily interactions with women became pornified. Their relationships soured. They had trouble relating to women as individual human beings. They worried about the way they saw their daughters and girls their daughters’ age. It wasn’t only their sex lives that suffered— pornography’s effects rippled out, touching all aspects of their existence. Their workdays became interrupted, their hobbies were tossed aside, their family lives were disrupted. Some men even lost their jobs, their wives, and their children. The sacrifice is enormous.
Nor is it only the most violent hard-core pornography that damages how the male users view women, including their wives and their girlfriends. Because pornography involves looking at women but not interacting with them, it elevates the physical while ignoring or trivializing all other aspects of the woman. A woman is literally reduced to her body parts and sexual behavior. Gary Brooks, a psychologist who studies pornography at Texas A&M University, explains that “soft-core pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with soft-core pornography is that it’s voyeurism—it teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.”
But pornography doesn’t just change how men view women—it changes their lives, including their relation to pornography. The first step is usually an increase in frequency and quantity of viewing: more times logging online or clicking the remote control, prolonged visits to certain websites, a tendency to fall into a routine. In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, nearly 25% of men admitted that they were afraid they were “overstimulating” themselves with online sex.
In fact, routine is an essential ingredient in the financial success of high-tech porn. Wendy Seltzer, an advocate for online civil liberties, argues that pornographers should not even be concerned about piracy of their free material. “People always want this stuff. Seeing some of it just whets their appetite for more. Once they get through what’s available for free, they’ll move into the paid services.”3 And once they’ve indulged in more quantity, they want more quality—meaning more action, more intensity, more extreme situations. The user’s impetus to find harder-core fare helps the entire industry.
Particularly on the internet, men find themselves veering off into forms of pornography they never thought they could find appealing. Those who start off with soft-core develop a taste for harder-core pornography.
Men who view a lot of pornography talk about their disgust the first time they chanced upon an unpleasant image or unsolicited child porn. But with experience, it doesn’t bother the user as much—the shock wears thin quickly, especially given the frequent assault of such images he encounters on the internet. He learns to ignore or navigate around unwanted imagery, and the third time he sees an unpleasant image, it’s merely an annoyance and a delay. At the same time that such upsetting imagery becomes more tolerable, the imagery that had aroused him becomes less interesting, leading the user to ratchet up the extremity of the kind of pornography he seeks, looking for more shocking material than he started with.
THE WOMEN’S MARKET
Having won over such a significant chunk of the male market, the pornography industry is eager to tap into the other potential 50% of the market: women. A number of companies are increasing production of pornography made by and for women, and the industry is keen to promote what it likes to view as women’s burgeoning predilection for pornography. Playgirl TV announced its launch in 2004 with programming to include an “erotic soap opera” from a woman’s point of view, a 1940s-style romantic comedy with “a sexual twist,” and roundtable discussions of “newsworthy women’s topics.”
In recent years, women’s magazines have regularly featured a discussion of pornography from a new perspective: how women can introduce it into their own lives. While many women continue to have mixed or negative feelings toward pornography, they are told to be realistic, to be “open-minded.” Porn, they are told, is sexy, and if you want to be a sexually attractive and forward-thinking woman, you’ve got to catch on.
Today, the pornography industry and our pornified culture have convinced women that wearing a thong is a form of emancipation, learning to pole dance means embracing your sexuality, and taking your boyfriend for a lap dance is what every sexy and supportive girlfriend should do. In an Elle magazine poll, more than half of the respondents described themselves as “pro-stripping” (56%), and said that they weren’t bothered if their partner went to strip clubs (52%).
Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies pornography and teaches sexuality classes at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says, “Twenty years ago, my female students would say, ‘Ugh, that’s disgusting,’ when I brought up pornography in class. The men would guiltily say, ‘Yeah, I’ve used it.’ Today, men are much more open about saying they use pornography all the time, and they don’t feel any guilt. The women now resemble the old male attitude: They’ll sheepishly admit to using it themselves.” Women’s attitudes have merged even more closely with men’s.
The internet measurement firm comScore tracked close to thirty-two million women visiting at least one adult website in January 2004. Seven million of them were ages thirty-five to forty-four, while only 800,000 were over the age of sixty-five.4 Nielsen NetRatings has found the figures to be somewhat lower, with ten million women visiting adult content websites in December 2003.5 In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC. com poll, 41% of women said they have intentionally viewed or downloaded erotic films or photos, and 13% watched or sexually interacted with someone on a live webcam.
Yet as much as women are touted as the new pornography consumer, they still lag far behind men. The sensational headlines do little to reflect the reality of most women’s experiences. Statistics belie the assertions of the pro-porn movement and the go-go girl mentality espoused by female pornography purveyors.
While some polls show that up to half of all women go online for sexual reasons, the percentage of women who say they do is likely exaggerated by the inclusion in the definition of “adult” internet content of erotica, dating, and informational sites, areas to which women are disproportionately drawn compared with men. Others feel that admitting they don’t look at pornography at all is akin to affixing a “frigid” sticker to their chastity belts; better not to come off as uptight. Many women tracked through filtering programs visit pornographic sites by accident or out of curiosity, or are tracking down their male partner’s usage.
Some attribute the rise in female consumption to an increased supply in pornography for women. That may be part of the reason, but there’s more at play than a simple increase in supply—something has to explain the increased deman
d. Broader societal shifts in men’s and women’s roles in relationships and a corresponding swing in women’s expectations and attitudes toward their sexuality are driving women to pornography, too.
NOT A HARMLESS “GUY THING”
Many women try to treat porn as merely a harmless “guy thing,” but they are profoundly disturbed when they are forced to come to terms with the way porn changes their lives—and the lives of their boyfriends or husbands. They find themselves constantly trying to measure up to the bodies and sexual performance of the women their men watch online and onscreen. They fear that they’ve lost the ability to turn their men on anymore—and quite often, they have.
One twenty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore confided, “I find that porn’s prevalence is a serious hindrance to my comfort level in relationships. Whether it’s porn DVDs and magazines lying around the house, countless porn files downloaded on their computers, or even trips to strip clubs, almost every guy I have dated (as well as my male friends) is very open about his interest in porn. As a result, my body image suffers tremendously. . . . I wonder if I am insecure or if the images I see guys ogle every day has done this to me.” She later confessed that she felt unable to air her concerns to anyone. “A guy doesn’t think you’re cool if you complain about it,” she explained. “Ever since the internet made it so easy to access, there’s no longer any stigma to porn.”
A thirty-eight-year-old woman from a Chicago suburb described her husband’s addiction to pornography: “He would come home from work, slide food around his plate during dinner, play for maybe half an hour with the kids, and then go into his home office, shut the door and surf internet porn for hours. I knew—and he knew that I knew. I put a filter on his browser that would email me every time a pornographic image was captured. . . . I continually confronted him on this. There were times I would be so angry I would cry and cry and tell him how much it hurt. . . . It got to the point where he stopped even making excuses. It was more or less: ‘I know you know and I don’t really care. What are you going to do about it?’”
For many wives and girlfriends, it becomes immediately clear that the kind of pornography their men are into is all about the men—about their needs, about what they want—not about their women or their relationships or their families. It’s not surprising a woman ends up feeling second-rate. Not only does pornography dictate how women are supposed to look; it skews expectations of how they should act. Men absorb those ideals, but women internalize them as well. According to the nationally representative Pornified/Harris poll, commissioned for my 2004 book, most women (six out of ten) believe pornography affects how men expect them to look and behave. In fact, only about one out of seven women believes pornography doesn’t raise men’s expectations of women.
Men tell women their consumption of pornography is natural and normal, and if a woman doesn’t like it, she is controlling, insecure, uptight, petty, or a combination thereof. The woman is demanding. She is unreasonable. He has to give up something he’s cherished since boyhood. She’s not supportive. She blows everything out of proportion. If it weren’t for this attitude of hers, the relationship would be fine. For a woman to judge pornography as anything but positive is read as a condemnation of her man, or at the very least, of his sexual life. Discomfort with pornography also becomes a woman’s discomfort with her own sexuality.
Still, the Pornified/Harris poll found that only one-fifth of Americans believe pornography improves the sex life of those who look at it. Indeed, two-thirds of respondents to this nationwide poll believe looking at pornography will harm a couple’s relationship. And not surprisingly, half of Americans say pornography demeans women. Women are far more likely to believe this—58% compared with 37% of men. They are much less likely—20% compared with 34%—to believe that pornography isn’t demeaning.
Of course, with increased viewing, the arousing effects of pornography become less obvious over time. While 60% of adults age fifty-nine and older believe pornography is demeaning toward women, only 35% of Gen Xers—the most tolerant and often heaviest users of pornography—agree.
NOT A SOLO ACTIVITY
In other words, despite appearances, pornography isn’t precisely a solo activity. As interviews with men and women attest, it plays into how people approach and function in relationships. Whether a couple watches together, or one or both partners uses it alone, pornography plays a significant role not only in sex but in a couple’s sense of trust, security, and fidelity. As Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis, Missouri, says, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways—and nobody outside the sexual behavior field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.”
Not knowing whom to turn to when their boyfriends turn away from them and toward pornography, many women write in to magazine advice columnists for help or ask for support in online forums. Female-oriented internet communities (chat rooms, bulletin boards, online forums, etc.) teem with discussions on the subject. Every week, advice columnists across the country address the issue; presumably many similar letters go unanswered in print.
Just one example: A woman writes to a local newspaper, “We’ve been together five years, lived together half that time. We have a loving, happy relationship. Recently, I discovered via the computer that he’s fascinated by hard-core pornography, lots of it. When confronted, he said I have no right to be upset, though he’s aware it offends me; he insisted I let it go. He’s still spending hours looking at this and I’m disgusted. . . . I’ve tried to discuss how degrading and controlling this seems to me, but he’s not willing to give it up. I know many people think it’s harmless, but it’s making me question whether I’m willing to continue a relationship with someone who can disregard my feelings so easily.”6
The Pornified/Harris poll found that overall, 34% of women see men using pornography as cheating in absolutely all cases. Yet only 17% of men equated pornography with cheating. Indeed, most men who use pornography tend to see pornography as not cheating: A man has his needs, and he’s fulfilling them in a way that prevents him from cheating on his wife with a real woman. According to the Pornified/Harris poll, 41% of men say pornography should never be considered cheating. Only 18% of women felt the same way.
Once she’s discovered his pornography, what next? Psychotherapist Marlene Spielman says when a woman finds out about a partner’s pornography habit, the result is usually a back and forth of very strong emotions. The woman typically feels hurt, angry, and betrayed. Confronted husbands often begin with denial before confessing the truth, followed by a big fight, blaming, and accusations. He may accuse her of driving him to it; she might point to his avoidance of problems in the relationship.
In the 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, one in four divorced respondents said internet pornography and chat had contributed to their split. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a gathering of the nation’s divorce lawyers, attendees documented a startling trend. Nearly two-thirds of the attorneys present had witnessed a sudden rise in divorces related to the internet; 58% of those were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online. According to the association’s president, Richard Barry, “Eight years ago, pornography played almost no role in divorces in this country. Today, there are a significant number of cases where it plays a definite part in marriages breaking up.”
The five lawyers from the office of matrimonial attorney Marcia Maddox are always working on at least one case involving pornography. In one, a wife found her husband’s internet pornography while she and their daughter were working on a school project. Horrified, the woman hired a computer technician, who discovered a trove of hard-core pornography on the hard drive. The couple ended up getting a divorce; the mother was awarded sole custody.
The fact is, Maddox says, “Using pornography is like adultery. It’s not legally adultery, which requires penetration. But there are man
y ways of cheating. It’s often effectively desertion—men abandoning their family to spend time with porn.” Often the judges find that even if children aren’t directly exposed to a father’s pornography, they are indirectly affected because their fathers ignore them in favor of porn. Visitation in such cases may be limited.
Mary Jo McCurley, an attorney who has practiced family law in Dallas since 1979, agrees. In the past five years, more and more cases are brought forth in which a husband’s pornography habit is a factor. “We see cases in which the husband becomes so immersed in online porn it destroys the marriage,” she explains. “Not only is it unsettling for the wife that he’s using other women to get off, but it takes away from the time they could spend together as a couple.”
In divorce cases these days, enormous amounts of time and money are spent recovering pornography from computers. “You can hire experts who specialize in digging through hard drives,” McCurley says. “There are people who have made a profession out of it. It’s become quite common in Texas divorce.”
BAD FOR TEENAGERS
The statistics are frightening, but even more appalling are the effects of pornography on the next generation. According to a 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, seven in ten fifteen-to-seventeen-year-olds admitted to “accidentally” stumbling across pornography online. Girls were more likely than boys to say they were “very upset” by the experience (35% versus 6%), although 41% of youth that age said that it wasn’t a problem.
Statistics show nearly all—if not all—teenagers are exposed to pornography one way or another. A 2004 study by Columbia University found that 11.5 million teenagers (45%) have friends who regularly view internet pornography and download it.7 (Incidentally, teenagers with a majority of friends who do so are three times more likely to smoke, drink, or use illegal drugs than are teens who have no such friends.)