by Pamela Paul
Finally, Tyler figured that what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. He told Betty he wouldn’t look at pornography anymore, but looked anyway. He didn’t feel particularly guilty. “I think it’s okay if a guy just looks at it on his own,” he explains. “Besides, even if she didn’t believe me, I knew that I was always thinking about her when I looked at the porn.”
Still, he worried that Betty would find out. For a month, he kept it secret, but then decided to take a stand. He told her that she needed to realize pornography wasn’t a risk or threat to her. He told her that she had to let him do what he wanted to do. After seventeen months together, the two finally broke up. Moving forward, Tyler doesn’t expect to have this kind of problem with a girlfriend again. Pornography is something Tyler wants in his life; ideally, he wants a girlfriend to be into it, too. “I’m old enough and mature enough to know what I want from a woman,” he says. “If a girl is going to give me an ultimatum like that, then we’re just not going to be in a relationship. I plan to bring up pornography very early in my next relationship. That way, if it’s an issue, we just won’t go anywhere.”
For many men, there’s the troublesome intrusion of dealing with another person’s feelings or values—women who question their use of pornography or who might disapprove of it if they knew. When Jacob, the journalist who subscribed to the Playboy Channel, first moved from Washington, D.C., to New York, he started dating Carina. Carina not only didn’t like pornography, she was actively opposed to it on personal and ideological grounds. Jacob, who brought some of his videos with him when he moved, was flabbergasted by her attitude. Though he found some of her arguments compelling, he had trouble with how she arrived at her conclusions. She told him that pornography was harmful and he found himself agreeing, but conditionally. He would find himself arguing, “Yes, I realize it’s harmful. But how harmful is it in the grand scheme of things?” Where was the proof? He had trouble believing, for example, that all women who posed in pornography had been sexually abused, as Carina claimed. There had to be exceptions, he figured. Carina’s sweeping statements were hard to swallow.
“It was a challenge,” he recalls. “I took her ideas seriously, but it was hard to think of something that had seemed so natural as wrong.” Pornography had been part of his sex life since his teen years. Giving up on it wasn’t something he felt ready to do or wanted to do. So he continued to use pornography behind Carina’s back. He never told her and she never asked. Jacob was happy with their sex life and they stayed together for a year and a half. But throughout their relationship, Jacob felt as though he was lying to Carina. He knew she believed he had stopped using pornography. He knew how upset she would have been to find out the truth, and he felt guilty the entire time.
Of course, for some, the taboo of pornography is the lure. For religious, moral, or personal reasons, they feel they shouldn’t look at pornography—and that’s part of the fun. But the bad-boy titillation can wear thin and even backfire. Men, no matter their backgrounds, can find themselves struggling with guilt and shame over pornography. It could be associated with a strict religious upbringing or it could be a product of growing up during the “Free to Be You and Me” seventies, when boys imbibed some of that decade’s feminist messages. Even for men who protest to the contrary, pornography doesn’t always sit well with their larger beliefs about women.
Why is pornography so complicated, Harrison found himself wondering. On the one hand, pornography is a great idea, and he certainly enjoys it. Pornography helps people explore their tastes and their fantasies. In cases where someone is repressed, pornography may help him tune in to his own sexuality, to accept feelings once thought of as naughty. “Porn helps them open up psychologically or sexually,” Harrison says.
On the other hand, pornography carries a lot of negatives. For one thing, there’s the guilt. Raised Catholic and practicing intermittently, Harrison doesn’t have any religious convictions against porn, but he admits to having “moral questions.” As a child, he was taught that pornography and promiscuity were wrong because they devalued sex. Those ideas took root early in his mind and are not easy to get rid of. But today he calls his feelings against pornography “humanistic.” “I’m not an absolutist about it,” he explains. “There’s a reason pornography has been around for as long as it has and is so popular. But there are a lot more negatives to porn than there are positives. I can’t deny having moral convictions against it. I’ve seen porn do a lot of harm.”
Kevin, the thirty-two-year-old Colorado photographer, saw those negative influences develop in his own life. Back in college, Kevin used pornography as a “stimulant,” but it had a downside: “Porn absolutely encouraged the casual hookup,” he recalls. “I would never have pushed women to have sex the way I did back then had it not been for the amount of sex I could look right in the eye through porn. I became this asshole I didn’t want to be because I didn’t care about women.”
But in his early thirties, he found he was back to pornography and back to problems. There was the question of time, first off. The average user looks at computer pornography for more than an hour a week and Kevin was no exception. Indeed, online pornography had eaten up several hours a week for the past year and a half. He hadn’t had a relationship since his fiancee broke off their engagement. He hadn’t been getting out as much as he wanted. And he began to feel bad about himself. “I don’t think there are any taboos in my sex life,” he says. “Nor do I feel like there are any taboos in porn or stripping. Yet somehow, I began to feel guilty about all the porn I was looking at.” At first, this semi-practicing Episcopalian thought it was religious guilt, but he realized that wasn’t the real problem: “I just felt like I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing. Like porn was a secret I wasn’t comfortable keeping. It felt like I was telling or living a lie.” The feelings of discomfort were in part related to his family. After his brother suffered an emotional breakdown in high school, Kevin’s family fell apart as well, and then was slowly rebuilt. The experience changed the way Kevin approached many things in his life. From then on, Kevin decided, no more secrets. If he experimented with drugs, his parents would know about it. If something was wrong in his life, Kevin would tell his family. Successes, failures, fears, problems—everything needed to be on the table. His family flourished under the new system. “My filter for knowing the way I want to lead my life became, if I don’t feel comfortable talking about something at the family dinnertable, then it’s questionable,” Kevin says. And pornography … it was questionable.
The Blur
Harrison increasingly worried that he was spending too much time with porn. “I would be looking at it for hours before I realized how much time had gone by,” he recalls. “I was spending way more time than I wanted to.” A pattern developed. Often he would go online late at night. It somehow seemed appropriate. He would log on, see something he liked, find a link. Curious, he’d click on it, linking and leaping, pausing and bounding, site after site after site. “I was so turned on, so enjoying the act of tracking it down that I would sort of lose myself.”
Once he realized how much time had passed, he felt awful. So much time wasted. What was he thinking? Porn was interrupting his daily schedule. He would be late to appointments. He wasn’t going out as much as he wanted. Shouldn’t he be spending this time looking for more work? Or a girlfriend? Harrison was conflicted. On the one hand, looking at pornography was enormously gratifying. After masturbating, he felt relaxed, sated. But he felt guilty as well. “When you realize you’ve spent so much more time than you intended, you feel like you’re losing control,” he explains. “You’re not paying attention to what you’re doing. Then I started noticing that porn began affecting my thoughts with regard to my day-to-day life. That’s when it started to bother me. That’s when I realized it wasn’t healthy necessarily.”
After Harrison shut down the computer and tried to go to sleep, pornography would slip into his mind. He would lie in bed as images scrolled throug
h his head. “You begin to feel like you’re losing control of your thoughts.” Waking up from a night of pornographic dreams, he felt disoriented. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of what was happening, but that he just wanted to get away from it. Somehow, the boundaries between his fantasy life and his waking life—even his sleeping life—had blurred.
This went on for months. He wasn’t accomplishing enough during the day and he wasn’t getting good sleep at night. Harrison decided to get the situation under control. “I’ve got to curb this,” he said to himself. At first he thought he would never look at online pornography again. But he soon realized that was unrealistic. What he needed was a change in attitude. “I decided to stop obsessing over it and stop letting it take control over me,” he says. “It sounds kind of weird to say that, but that’s how I looked at it.” At times, he worried he had become addicted to pornography; it didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. “The feeling of losing control set off red flags in my head.”
So he cut back. These days, he tries to limit his online sessions to a couple of times each week. He has also become more purposeful about pornography: he masturbates every single time, whereas before he would occasionally just look for kicks. When he finds himself spending too much time online, he’s awash in guilt, which he hopes strengthens his resolve to cut back. There has been some improvement. He has a new girlfriend, and thinks his sexual performance may be recovering. He’s getting better at maintaining an erection. If he concentrates hard, he can keep porn from popping into his head while he’s in bed with her. Still, on occasion, he finds himself slipping. Harrison hasn’t discussed any of this with his girlfriend. “I’m afraid to tell her because I don’t think she would approve of my looking at pornography at all.”
Losing control happens, men say, when pornography not only conflicts with their personal and social obligations, but when it affects their sense of self. Realizing that pornography wasn’t something he wanted to share with his family was a revelation to Kevin. Everyone knows that everyone looks at porn, he figured, so what was the problem? Why did he feel as if he had to hide the fact that he looked at it too? He didn’t know the answer. But he knew his use felt “shady” and he wasn’t comfortable letting his family know about it. When he was in a relationship, looking at pornography didn’t trouble him as much, but something about his solitary habit was worse. “I associated the way I was using porn with some creepy guy home alone on a Saturday night, jerking off.” Sometimes, logging off from Internet porn, he felt like “a sicko.”
He also felt that his attitude toward women was colored by pornography. After a year of recovering from his broken engagement, Kevin finally started dating again. “It’s not that I had some kind of attitude like, this pizza girl is going to ring the doorbell and we’re going to have sex, or anything,” he says. “But I just didn’t feel like I was coming into a new experience with a very open or positive attitude. I didn’t feel comfortable going out on a date.” In Kevin’s mind, masturbating to computer pornography was equivalent to “going to bars randomly to have sex with whomever.” He didn’t feel as though he could have a relationship while maintaining his habit. “It feels like cheating,” he says. “It is cheating. Intimacy is a big part of a relationship for me, but how could I be intimate with a woman if I were looking at all these other women?” And he felt as if he was falling into the bad habits of his college years: he was going on dates just so he could have sex. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself.
In 2003, Kevin decided to log off permanently. Looking back on his pornography binge, Kevin realizes pornography was wrapped up in a bad period in his life. His fiancee had left him and he was lonely. “I was feeling really shitty about myself and needed a substitute,” he recalls. “I began to feel really gross. It would be a gorgeous sunny day outside and here I was sitting inside, looking at porn on the computer.” He cut down dramatically, stopped drinking as much as he had been, and started exercising again. “I don’t know if porn was an addiction for me,” he says. “I don’t think so. But it certainly was a depressant.”
Many men find that pornography in the aggregate becomes a downer. Its aftermath, while relaxing, eventually brings melancholy. Even men who love pornography look down on men they see as loving pornography just a little too much. Pornography not only objectifies women, explains Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis, it eventually becomes self-objectifying. “A man starts to feel like a computer himself when he realizes that he’s dependent on computer images to turn him on,” Schwartz says. “You may be making love to your wife, but you’re picturing someone else. That’s not fair to the woman, and it’s miserable for the man.” The key, according to Schwartz, is for men to recognize that the more they focus on pornography, the less satisfying they’ll find their partner, and the less satisfied they’ll be with themselves. “The metaphor of a man masturbating to his computer is the Willy Loman of our decade. In a sociologist’s terms, it’s anomie—the completely lonely, isolated man having sex with an imaginary airbrushed woman on a computer screen. It’s truly pathetic, even tragic.”
Even men who frequent strip clubs talk about how “pathetic” the guys who hang out there seem. “Losers.” “Desperate.” Lonely, overweight, repeatedly divorced men, leering over a third Johnnie Walker at women they could never bed on their own; the women, in turn, concealing their distaste in an effort to wheedle more money. Men who look at pornography from a comfortable online or television distance deride the image of the “scumbag” characters who frequent adult bookstores. “Seedy,” they call the places. “Full of weirdos and misfits.”
To realize that, even in your own shiny, high-tech, private way, you are one of them, or not too far off, is an unpleasant awakening—one most men prefer to avoid. They tell themselves they’re not like that. They would never stoop to visit an adult bookstore. They only go to strip clubs—high-class ones, the best—for kicks, with a group of men, or with their willing girlfriend or wife. They realize the women are getting paid. They’re no fools. Yet the charade can wear off. In the 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll, 15 percent of men said their online habit made them feel sleazy. Seven percent had been caught or reprimanded for looking at online pornography or personals during work hours. They may be spending too much time escaping from reality, and not enough time in reality. It’s no man’s fantasy to spend more time virtually than viscerally.
4
Porn Stars, Lovers, and Wives:
How Women See Pornography
Aaliyah, a twenty-five-year-old public relations manager from Houston, likes pornography and approves of it, though her appreciation wasn’t instantaneous. Her earliest exposure was on homecoming night in high school. A friend’s date had a porn video and, feeling kind of bored, the group decided to watch it together. “To us, it was gross,” Aaliyah says of the reaction among the girls. “The camera was right in there up close and we didn’t see anything but the sex act.”
In college, Aaliyah discovered more appealing pornography. At the large Texas university she attended, groups of female friends would gather to watch a porn movie in their dorm. Mostly, they thought it was funny. Sometimes they would e-mail pornography back and forth for laughs, though now that they all have careers and use work computers, they abstain. These days, Aaliyah looks at pornography on her own, about once a month—online, on cable, or on DVD. She likes movies that have a story; there has to be “a point” to the film. But most are primarily geared toward guys. She considers many to be too low budget; many plots are terrible; black porn is cheesy. “I like it when it’s realistic,” she explains. “I don’t like things like bondage or very aggressive sex or anything that I feel is demonizing women. That’s just brutal. I would never watch anything like that.”
Aaliyah usually watches when she’s not dating anyone. A practicing Southern Baptist, she would like to get married and have kids some day, but lately she’s had no love life at all. “There’s nobody to
date,” she laments. Watching pornography alone may be fun, but it only increases her desire to have sex and to meet someone. “I’m very strict about the type of guy I want,” she says. “The kind of guy who would make a porn movie isn’t the educated kind of guy I want to be with.” Not all men are into porn, in her opinion, perhaps just 70 percent. “No way did my father have porn in the house,” she says. “My mom would have killed him.” Aaliyah figures men still use pornography more than women do—maybe 30 percent of women watch. Her best friends all look at it. But in Houston, the churchgoing people she knows have a negative view of pornography. Some of her friends from church would probably be offended if they knew she indulged. “A lot of people think porn is a bad thing,” Aaliyah says, “but I think there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Traditionally, women have seen something wrong with pornography. It was considered low class, uncouth, “dirty.” Society encouraged women to frown upon porn and to berate—albeit futilely—their men for using it. Or to turn a blind eye on their boyish digressions. Women certainly weren’t expected to look themselves.