by Pamela Paul
There have been periods when Gabe spent so much time with pornography that he wasn’t doing any work at all in the office. He wasn’t going out. He wasn’t spending as much time with his two kids from his first marriage. Every night he would go home straight from work and go on the Internet. One week, he stayed online 24/7. At the end of seven days, he was exhausted. Then, after meeting the two porn shut-ins, Gabe got worried. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh hell, this is what you could turn into,’” he recalls. “I made the decision right then and there. I thought you’ve got to shut it down, at least every once in a while. I’ve got to focus on my real life.”
2
How We Got Here:
Life in the Porn Lane
When did pornography start to insinuate itself so thoroughly into people’s everyday lives? When did porn become so ubiquitous and why? The chicken-and-egg conundrum pops up: Is pornography’s enormous growth propelled by increasing demand or does the growth of available pornography in the marketplace spur people on? The answer is likely a bit of both. For suppliers, technology has created new and profitable means of distribution. For users, increased distribution means pornography is available in ways never before: cheaply or freely, with anonymity and unlimited access. Moreover, given the growing consumption—online, in homes, on TVs, beamed into cell phones, watched in cars, forwarded via e-mail—the rest of our culture has scrambled to catch up, if only to catch our attention. America has porn on the brain. For any kind of media or entertainment to grab our attention away from pornography, it’s got to be good, sexy, hot, exciting, dangerous, illicit, fun, titillating, new, more, more….
We’re only beginning to recognize the implications of the growth in pornography and the pornified society’s impact on the individuals who live in it. We’re only starting to grasp the extent to which the technology revolution of the past two decades has transformed the way in which pornography is produced and consumed. Those who argue that pornography has been with us since cavemen first drew fornicating women on earthen walls ignore the vast discrepancies between a world in which pornography was glimpsed on the sly, where naked girls were glanced at on the faces of nudie poker cards, and today’s culture, in which pornography is omnipresent, accepted, and glorified, and on an incessant advance. Furthermore, poet David Mura notes:
Attributing pornography’s growth to demand by individuals ignores what we know by experience: if one walks down the street and sees ten images of women as sexual objects, one may certainly be able to reject those images; yet it is also true that one will have to expend a greater amount of energy rejecting these images than if one saw only five or two or none at all. Assuming that human beings have only a limited amount of energy, it is obvious that the more images there are, the harder it will be for the individual to resist them; one must, after all, expend energy on other activities too…. The greater the frequency of such images, the greater the likelihood that they will overwhelm people’s resistance. This fact is known, of course, by all those involved in advertising and the media, and is readily accepted by most consumers—except when it comes to pornography.1
Our resistance is already down. Pornography has proliferated and the market is scrambling to stay abreast, unaware and unquestioning. More men consume more pornography at ever younger ages; women accommodate and attempt to keep up. How people use pornography, how they feel about it, the ways in which it works in their lives, sexual and otherwise, are rapidly transforming. The ups and downs, the coming and going, the staying online, and the occasionally agonizing ecstasy of it all—whichever way one uses it, and whether or not one ignores it, pornography is powerful stuff. And there’s more to it than just fun and fantasy. To understand why requires a look at how the pornified culture evolved and where it’s taking us.
“It’s Just a Healthy Fantasy”
Dave can’t imagine anyone having a problem with his interest in porn. He first saw pornography when he was ten years old, back in 1980. The U.S. Olympic hockey team had just beaten the Soviets at Lake Placid and Ronald Reagan was the new president. Paul McCartney was busted for pot possession and the owners of the famed disco nightclub Studio 54 were sentenced to prison for tax evasion. The hit musical Grease closed on Broadway, the Police topped the charts, and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff dominated the bestseller list. It was the year of The Empire Strikes Back and Ordinary People.
But at that time, Dave was more captivated by the private world he found hidden away in his father’s closet: the latest issues of Penthouse, Playboy, and Hustler. Even at that age, Dave was far from a sexual innocent. He recalls finding a copy of Nancy Friday’s collected female fantasies a couple of years earlier and flipping through his parents’ The Joy of Sex, fascinating to a prepubescent boy. But this was his first encounter with pornography. And he liked it right off the bat. Soon thereafter, the family got its first VCR. In follow-up forays into his parents’ bedroom, Dave discovered a stash of porn videos tucked amid his father’s videotapes. He began to sneak peaks at films like Behind the Green Door and Taboo when his parents weren’t around. He never told them about what he found and he was never caught. “I don’t think it caused me any harm,” he says of his age-ten encounter with pornography.
Given his father’s supply, Dave never had to stray far if he got the urge for porn. Indeed, he only had to buy magazines for himself on one occasion, and that wasn’t until years after he left his childhood home in Ohio. Pornography was readily available around the dormitory at his Ivy League university, too. Occasionally, someone would rent a porn flick and the guys would hang out at a “porn video party,” popping in a videocassette when a group gathered. It was all fairly casual.
But after graduation there were no longer videos lying around and nobody to pop in a cassette and no father’s closet through which to pilfer. Dave purchased his first and last pornography at a dingy adult storefront shop in Manhattan, after he moved to the city to take a job in finance. He chose a plastic-wrapped packet of three high-quality glossy magazines that displayed a photograph of two women having sex with two men on the cover. On the flip side was a photo of a woman sucking on an ejaculating penis. Dave paid for the shrink-wrapped package, got home, and opened it up to find similar hardcore images inside. He flipped through his new trove of pictures and masturbated. Whenever the urge struck again, he would pull out the packet. That single batch of photographs lasted the next four years.
All guys look at porn, Dave says. Those who don’t look are just afraid of getting caught. Or maybe, he theorizes, they’re the kinds of people who have made a conscious decision not to look at pornography because they’re really religious or really uptight. After all, there’s no way pornography would not appeal to all guys. “I think it’s natural for men to be curious and interested in sex, same as women,” Dave says. “And porn is an easy way of sating that craving for sex.”
Dave estimates that at least one-third of women look at pornography, too, a trend he embraces. “I’m a feminist,” he explains. “I’m more feminist than many of my female friends. I fully believe in the empowerment of women and equal rights and access—politically, economically, and in every other sphere.” In an ideal world, he says, men and women would be treated equally and would have the same or similar approaches to both sex and pornography. In reality, however, “by nature and by nurture” as he puts it, “men think about pornography differently, just as they think about sex differently.”
Sexuality is not demeaning to women, Dave is keen to point out. “If you define porn as images of people having sex, that’s not demeaning. It’s sexual, but it’s not sexist.” Just because a woman is depicted in a sexual way doesn’t make it sexist—if a man can be depicted similarly. “My definition of feminism is equal treatment. That’s why I always switch the situation around in my head: I answer the question ‘Is it acceptable for a man to look at objectified sexual images of a woman?’ by asking myself, ‘Is it acceptable for a woman to look at objectified sexual images of a man?’ and my answer to
both is yes—as long as the viewer understands the difference between fantasy and reality.” Feminism, according to Dave’s definition, has taken women to a healthier place sexually. “I’m encouraged to see women challenging the stud/slut hypocrisy by conquering lots of men and to see women establishing a skin magazine that depicts sexual images of men for women. Some might complain I’m making women ‘sink’ to the ‘low’ level of men, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the way men and women are treating each other becomes unpleasant in an equal way, then they’ll realize it and change their ways.”
Playboy, he concedes, portrays a lot of sexist imagery and ideas. “There’s text in there about women being out to get money from men, and that’s a very sexist notion,” he says. “And I guess the whole idea that women are playthings for men has a sexist tone.” But most guys don’t think about those things when they’re looking at Playboy. Or maybe they do a little bit. “It’s true there’s a subtext,” he concedes. “Just like when kids see violence on movies on or TV.” Dave sighs and tries out the analogy. “If your kids are watching violence on TV and you’re not sitting down with them as a parent and talking to them about what’s fantasy and what’s reality, then they could have a problem differentiating the two.” Images of violence are okay if people think about it critically and recognize that it’s a fantasy, he explains. Of course, some people don’t think critically, and some kids will go out and shoot up other kids at school. But, Dave concludes, while a sexual image has some element of humiliation, if you stop and think about it and recognize it’s just a fantasy, then it can be dealt with in a healthy way.
The Supply: Porn Inc.
How far pornography has traveled—something that used to be considered seedy and hidden is now considered a healthy exercise in fantasy. As Larry Flynt put it in a 2004 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, “The adult film industry in Southern California is not being run by a bunch of dirty old men in the back room of some sleazy warehouse. Today, in the state of California, XXX entertainment is a $9 billion to $14 billion business run with the same kind of thought and attention to detail that you’d find at GE, Mattel, or Tribune Co.”2 Pornography has the technological revolution of the past twenty years to thank for much of its transformation. Whether pornography drives the adoption of technology in the entertainment world or technology spreads porn, a symbiotic relationship exists and expands pornography’s reach with each new upgrade.
Back in 1973, there were fewer than a thousand adult theaters across the country. During the 1980s, Betamax and the VHS marked the first great leap forward. No longer did a guy have to skulk down to the seedy porno theater, hoping he didn’t bump into his ex-girlfriend, wife, or mother—or, God forbid, his boss. Now he could watch pornography in the comfort of his own home. According to the trade publication Adult Video News, in 1986 one in every five videocassettes belonged to the adult category, and 1,500 new adult movies hit the market each year;3 between 1985 and 1992, the business expanded from $75 million to $490 million.4 Today, one in four American adults admit to having seen an X-rated movie in the past year, and $4 billion a year is spent on video pornography in the United States—more than on football, baseball, or basketball. Americans rent upward of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year (about one in five of all rented movies), and pornography far outpaces Hollywood’s slate of 400 feature films with 11,000 pornos produced annually. Total annual revenue estimates for the adult film industry alone run from $5 billion to $10 billion.5 Not surprisingly, Columbia House—purveyor of “12 CDs for a penny” mail-order clubs—is launching Hush, a pornographic video club to sell through direct mail and the Internet in conjunction with Playboy Entertainment.6
The adult film industry is so successful—and attractive to new entrants—partly due to the high profit margins. Selling sex is cheap. Most pornographic films cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to make, a pittance compared with the $150 million budgets of Hollywood blockbusters. Even the highest-quality smut films, like some of those aired on the Playboy Channel, cost only $100,000, a fraction of the cost for an indie film festival effort.
Pornography is an extremely profitable endeavor not only for the producers but for cable operators and satellite television as well. Pornographic programming now accounts for 25 to 30 percent of all pay-perview revenue, about $1 billion in total per year.7 Whereas companies like Comcast and EchoStar have to pay CNN and Showtime for their content with the money they raise from subscriber fees, content from Playboy and other adult channels is provided free, and only a small fraction of the profits from cable subscribers—between 5 and 20 percent—goes to the adult entertainment supplier. In 2002, Comcast reportedly made $50 million off pornographic programming.8 Analysts estimate that AT&T Broadband probably makes between $8 million and $20 million per month on adult entertainment.9 “These companies very much keep it below the radar screen,” explains Michael Goodman, a cable and satellite TV analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston. “But when push comes to shove, adult content can be the difference between making money and losing it. And right now, there’s an awful lot of money being made on it.”10
Television pornography also pays off big in the travel industry for chains such as Holiday Inn, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and Sheraton. Given that half of all hotel guests order pornographic pay-per-view movies, the industry is hot for porn. Such films on pay-per-view comprise 80 percent of in-room entertainment revenue and 70 percent of total in-room revenue. Hotels keep from 5 to 10 percent of the revenue for each $8.95 movie a guest orders (with the remainder going to companies such as LodgeNet or On Command, which provides the programming).11
With so many producers, programmers, and distributors in on the game, the variety of pornographic fare has proliferated. Just as cable subscribers now have their Discovery Adventure Channel and their HBO Zone, pornography fans can choose between Spice Platinum and Hot Zone. Programming has become increasingly raunchy over time. In its early days, cable showed what’s known as “hard R” or “soft X” material, but today, vaginal penetration and anal sex are common elements in adult programming. The harder the fare, the more expensive to watch; viewers are encouraged to trade up.12
The envelope is constantly pushed open wider. In 1998, Playboy bought Spice Entertainment, which consisted of two channels, Spice, which was more explicit than the Playboy Channel, and Hot Spice, its even more explicit cousin. Back then, Playboy distanced itself from the purchase, allowing Vivid Video to control Hot Spice with the option to buy it back, but such skittishness is now passe. Recently, the company rebought Hot Spice with no compunction. They also sought to upgrade their flagship channel. After conducting focus groups in 2004 that overwhelmingly found users eager for more explicit content, Playboy TV launched a cross-channel advertising campaign to battle the “misperception” that Playboy TV was softer than other networks. The new campaign, featuring the tagline “Up for Anything,” aims to appeal to “young men’s attitude about being free with the things they want to do and being a little edgy at times as well,” explained the company’s vice president of marketing.13 Entertainment analyst Dennis McAlpine, of Auerbach, Pollak & Richardson, an investment brokerage house, says most cable operators still don’t want to cross the threshold from “acceptable adult programming,” which he says includes penetration, anal sex, oral sex, group sex, and lesbian and gay sex, to “pornography.” But isn’t anal sex considered pornography? As McAlpine sees it, such material “used to be called pornography, but a lot of that has become socially acceptable now. So it has moved away from pornography. Or, looked at another way, a line of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable has moved a lot more to the explicit side.”14 The door to the free marketplace of porn has swung wide open indeed.
“People Shouldn’t Be Treated This Way in Real Life”
Dave prefers a world in which openness prevails. “I think censorship is always a bad solution because whatever is disapproved of just becomes more sought after, becoming the forbidden fru
it. Moreover, government disapproval of certain speech or images creates implied government support or approval of other forms of speech and images, which can create a form of state-sponsored bigotry and sexism. Rather than censorship, I want a world where people discuss their values with their children and loved ones,” he explains.
Dave plans to extend these values to his own family one day. “If I found out that my daughter or son were looking at pornography then I would sit them down and talk to them about how they felt about what they were seeing,” he says. “I would tell them about how I feel about it. And make sure they knew that what they were looking at was just a fantasy—that what they saw people doing in porn is not how people should act in real life. If my son or daughter watched a porn movie that depicted a woman being brutalized sexually by a man (or a man being brutalized sexually by a woman), I would want to have a conversation with him or her, saying, ‘The way he or she was brutalized was horrible and wrong. I understand if you were aroused by it, as long as you understand that it is imaginary and not the way people should be treated in the real world.’” If his daughter were to tell him she had decided to pose for a pornographic magazine or act in a porn movie, Dave says he wouldn’t oppose it outright. “But I would tell her to think long and hard because whatever she does would be out there in the public eye forever. If your attitude changes later on, there’s nothing you can do. It’s like getting a tattoo.”
Dave hopes to be married someday and have kids. He’s just waiting for the right woman to come along. He has certain standards. If, for example, a woman Dave were dating asked him to stop looking at pornography, that would be a dealbreaker. Or rather, he goes on to explain, it would be if she were “very closed-minded” and had a narrow definition of erotica. What if she told him she were opposed to pornography on ideological grounds or she found pornography derogatory toward women? “I guess it would open us into a larger discussion,” he hedges. He hopes it won’t be an issue. He hopes he and his future wife will enjoy pornography together.