Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

by Pamela Paul

  If kids can’t get pornography at home, there’s always the library. “I love the library,” writes Stephen Jones, a fourteen-year-old boy from Washington State, in his home newspaper. “I love to read. I love the Internet service the library provides; but we have a problem. Pornography is available through the library Internet. The library has filters, but as it stands now anyone over the age of 12 can have the filters taken off.”5 A study of the nation’s public libraries in 2000 confirmed the scope of the problem. David Burt, a public librarian, discovered more than 2,000 complaints involving pornography at libraries in 1997 and 1998* (29 percent of the country’s 9,767 public library systems participated in the study). Cases involved children accessing pornography on the library’s computers, situations in which adults exposed kids to pornography in the library, cases in which pornography was specifically left for children, and instances when pornography was left on the printer or computer screen.6 In his study, Burt cites one librarian in Washington who told him, “On Monday of last week a group of about eight to ten teenage boys came to the library and asked if they could get pornography on the Internet. I replied that they could…. Later that afternoon, one of the younger boys (elementary age) said that the big boys had shown some dirty pictures on the computer…. When I applied to work at the library, running a porn shop was not in the job description…. We are supplying pornography to minors without their parents’ permission or knowledge.”

  Kids can also find pornography at school. At Monessan High School outside of Pittsburgh, male students learned some interesting lessons in their social studies class. The thirty-five-year-old teacher, Joseph Fischer, showed boys pornography on the Internet during “free time” that Fischer, who also served as the football coach, allowed students to take during class. Two students alleged that between December 2002 and December 2003, Fischer downloaded pornographic photographs and film clips for the kids’ consumption. It was only after Fischer allegedly assaulted a fifteen-year-old student that other students came forward with their complaints.7 At North High School in Arizona, a student reported witnessing his math teacher, Richard Hutchison, fifty-one, viewing pornography on his computer while in the classroom. Hutchison, also the school’s tennis coach and a nine and a half-year veteran in the Phoenix Union High School District, was given thirty days to fight his firing. Hutchison claimed he visited the site by accident. This wasn’t the first time Arizona’s school system has faced the problem. Every year, five or six complaints roll in, all with the same charge: teachers looking at Internet pornography while in the classroom.8 A history and government teacher at the Tulsa High School for Science and Technology in Oklahoma resigned after three students between the ages of fourteen and sixteen spotted pornographic pictures on his computer. The teacher, Donald Eric Cherry, twenty-seven, quickly hid the pictures, but when students asked to see them again, Cherry complied. Eight of the photographs on his computer allegedly depicted child pornography. Cherry pleaded guilty to three felony counts of exhibiting obscene material and was sentenced to prison. As he explained in court, “I’m very big into escapism and leaving reality behind.” In going to prison, Cherry also left behind a nineteen-month-old daughter.9

  If their teachers don’t show it to them, kids find it on their own. At Richland Middle School in Texas, students learned to bypass the school’s Internet filters and look at pornography during computer class. According to one female student, age thirteen, kids congregate in the back row of the classroom after finishing their exercises in order to look at pornography. The computer teacher has never once tried to monitor their activities. “Everyone tries to tell us there are blocks on it, but half the kids are looking at this stuff on the computer,” she explained. Students would create pornographic screensavers, but simply clicked them off when the teacher walked by. At the same school, another teacher was disciplined for accessing pornography from the school’s computers. All this happened despite the administration’s insistence that their filter system effectively stymied all attempts to access inappropriate material.10

  Statistics show that about half—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 percent) have friends who regularly view Internet pornography and download it.11 The prevalence of teens with friends who view and download Internet pornography increases with age, from nearly one-third of twelve-year-olds and nearly two-thirds of seventeen-year-olds saying they have friends who use online porn. Boys are significantly more likely than girls to have friends who view online pornography: 46 percent of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls say they have friends who regularly view and download Internet pornography, compared with 65 percent of boys the same age; the comparable percentage for twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls and boys are 25 percent and 37 percent, respectively.12

  “Who Would Ever Be Interested in That?”

  Despite his childhood interest in pornography, Charlie’s real sexual experience lagged; ironically, he was afraid of sex and still felt morally conflicted about sex outside marriage. When he married his high school sweetheart, Elise, at age twenty, Charlie was still a virgin. Elise knew of Charlie’s “pervert” reputation, but only in the abstract; she had no idea he looked at so much pornography himself. She didn’t learn about Charlie’s habit until after the wedding. At first, they had sex about once a week, but after a year of marriage, if tapered off. Charlie was still interested in sex with his wife, but Elise’s desire seemed minimal. In order to entice her, Charlie tried to get her to watch porn videos with him and encouraged her to do things he saw on film, which Elise didn’t appreciate. “In truth, I found the videos more satisfying than going through the trouble of having sex with her,” he admits. “But I was never unfaithful.”

  After twelve years of marriage, Charlie discovered the Internet. It was 1997, and Charlie was going to grad school for social work; a friend suggested he visit an adult Web site. He was immediately sucked in. Every night he would go online for hours, preoccupied, he says, “with the hunt for the one piece of porn that would give me that buzz.”

  His tastes changed quickly. He started out with traditional pornography and very attractive women. Then he became interested in amateur women, not even that good-looking. Next he turned to cheerleaders and younger women made up to look like young teens. Then he was all over the map—whatever struck his mood. At one point, he became interested in mature and elderly women. He was curious about bestiality; not any particular animal, just generally. It started off with pop-ups depicting women with animals. “I remember thinking, who would ever be interested in that?” he says. “What kind of person could get off on dogs and horses?” But the direction Charlie was going in, “any kind of sexuality with any type of thing could be a turn-on.” He recalls thinking, “If I’m into things now that I didn’t think would ever turn me on, what could that possibly mean? Where could this go?”

  When Charlie discovered chat rooms, he began to participate daily in chats devoted to a variety of fetishes. Online chats made him feel better about his curiosity and his predilections. “Talking openly with people in those chat rooms distorts your reality,” Charlie says. “I felt like there were plenty of other people who shared my interests and therefore there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with it.”

  Meanwhile, Charlie’s wife, Elise, didn’t have a clue what Charlie was doing. Often she was sleeping when he went online. When she woke up, he would usually tell her he was studying for grad school. Sometimes he admitted he was looking at pornography; other times he would deny it. He never told her what he was looking at specifically and, afraid she would find out, was careful to clean the computer cache each time. Nevertheless, Elise felt hurt, betrayed, and demeaned. Why wasn’t he available not only to herself but also to their family? What’s a mother to say when the kids ask, “Where’s Daddy?” He’s not there to help with homework, go to the zoo, pick up the kids after Softball practice. Running a household with a heavy pornog
raphy user in it takes a toll on family life. But what could she do about it?

  Despite his marriage and family obligations, Charlie—whose early sexual life had been completely defined by pornography—was sliding deeper into porn sex. Charlie doesn’t remember exactly when it happened, but he eventually crossed the gender line. It began in chat rooms, where he started talking to men as well, at first discussing women and couples. “My theory is that all porn is focused on ejaculation,” Charlie explains. “All men talk about the ‘money shot’ and if you immerse yourself in porn, you eventually become obsessed with ejaculation and that can become an attraction in itself. Which then can lead to an attraction to male sexuality.” Charlie purchased a Web camera and communicated and masturbated not only with women and with couples but eventually with other men who were by themselves, too. He would hole up in his home office for hours, corresponding visually with whoever interested him at the moment. If all these other people were into it, how could it be so bad?

  Porn Is Cool

  It’s not easy to shock Judith Coché. “I’ve had my own therapy practice for over twenty-five years,” says Coché, a clinical psychologist who runs the Coché Center in Philadelphia and teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “I feel like I’ve seen everything.” She pauses, and says almost apologetically, “I’m going to say something really strong. I’ve been walking around my practice saying, ‘We have an epidemic on our hands.’ The growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous. And the most dangerous part is that we don’t even realize what’s happening.

  “Frankly, I’m alarmed for today’s preadolescents and teenagers,” she continues. “I’ve been working with a number of kids who are stuck on the Internet. I’ve had two cases recently that blew me away. In one instance, a married couple, both professors, discovered their eleven-year-old daughter using very sexually explicit language in e-mails to her friends. She was discussing her clitoris and describing an incident in which a boy she knew grabbed her by the crotch. Her parents had thought she was completely naive—she hadn’t even had sex education at school yet. They were appalled—and these were well-educated, liberal people. They just didn’t expect their daughter to be aware of, let alone conversant in, these kinds of things. The other case was even more disturbing. Another girl, also eleven, was found creating her own pornographic Web site. When her parents confronted her, she said that pornography was considered ‘cool’ among her friends. Perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea, the girl admitted, but all her friends were doing it. Her parents were horrified.” More boys—often preadolescents—are being treated for pornography addiction, Coché says. “Before the Internet, I never encountered this.”

  According to Coché, the effects of such ever-present pornography on kids who are still developing sexually—or who haven’t even reached puberty—have yet to be fully understood. Coché has talked to parents who have witnessed their sons playing computer games when pornographic pop-ups come onto the screen. “Pornography is so often tied into video game culture and insinuates itself even into nonpornographic areas of the Web. It’s very hard for a twelve-year-old boy to avoid.” As a result, boys are learning to sexually cue to a computer rather than to human beings. “This is where they’re learning what turns them on. And what are they supposed to do about that? Whereas once boys would kiss a girl they had a crush on behind the school, we don’t know how boys who become trained to cue sexually to computer-generated porn stars are going to behave, especially as they get older.”

  Pornography is wildly popular with teenage boys in a way that makes yesteryear’s sneaked glimpses at Penthouse seem monastic. For teenagers, pornography is just another online activity; there is little barrier to entry and almost no sense of taboo. Instead, pornography has become a natural rite and acceptable pastime. One teenage boy in Boston explained recently to the New York Times, “Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?”13 Pornography is integrated into teenage pop culture; video game culture, for example, exalts the pornographic. One 2004 video, The Guy Game, features women exposing their breasts when they answer questions wrong in a trivia contest; the game, available on Xbox and PlayStation 2, didn’t even get an “Adults-Only” rating. (The game manufacturer is being sued because it is claimed that one woman included in the footage was only seventeen and didn’t give her consent to be filmed.)14

  With no one telling them it’s wrong or inappropriate, it’s no wonder kids have become audacious in their consumption of pornography. In 2004, a student at Weston High School in Connecticut tried to take a porn star to his prom after winning a date with her on Howard Stern’s radio program.15 At St. Xavier High School, a prestigious all-boys school in Springfield, Ohio, two students were charged with selling pornographic DVDs on school grounds to thirteen classmates. They were caught when the assistant principal for discipline told a student to tuck in his shirt, causing a concealed DVD to drop to the ground.16

  By the time boys get to college, pornography is more than accepted—it’s exalted. Jim Weaver, a professor of communication and psychology at Virginia Tech, has taught a course on pornography for years. “Young men in my classroom today don’t even understand why we should be talking about it,” he notes. “They see it as harmless entertainment. Their attitude is, ‘It’s a free country and I’ve been watching porn since middle school on the Internet and there’s nothing wrong with it.’ Most recently, students have become radical supporters of pornography. I didn’t used to see that at all from young men. It’s a huge shift in attitude.” At Jacksonville University in Florida, students were reprimanded for installing a stripper’s pole in an on-campus apartment and hosting a party in which drunken freshmen females were asked to compete for a $100 Victoria’s Secret gift certificate by dancing on it while being photographed.17 According to college-age men and women, and recent graduates, at colleges nationwide, guys are known to scribble on their dorm room message boards: “Leave me alone, I’m watching porn.”

  Boys are into porn, and girls, they claim, should be in on the game. At Scarsdale High School, a videotape of two fourteen-year-old female students in a sexual encounter was widely disseminated among the student body. In the film, an off-camera boy urged them on. “Everybody does it these days,” he cajoled. Another onlooker told her to get more “hardcore.” When one girl seemed reluctant to continue, pleading, “Stop,” an off-camera boy called her a prude. “Please, we’ll pay you,” coaxed a second voice. Another assured her if she kept going, she would be “the coolest girl in the world.”18 Lots of girls go along. On Jenna Jameson’s book tour promoting How to Make Love like a Porn Star, the pornography star was surprised by her young female fans. “It does make an impact on me that thirteen-year-old girls are coming up saying that I’m their role model,” she told the Los Angeles Times. A gaggle of eighteen-year-old female fans were in attendance at a reading in Los Angeles. One girl explained, “I just like her because I want to be like—” “A porn star!” her friend interrupted. “No. Sexy and confident,” the first girl explained. “Just, like a cool woman.”19

  Girls who aren’t cool are condemned. In Orange County, California, three teenage boys videotaped themselves having sex with an apparently unconscious sixteen-year-old girl, allegedly assaulting her with a pool cue, juice bottle, juice can, and lit cigarette.20 All the while, a hip-hop song boomed, “We like pussy. We like pussy … Fuck an asshole too….” While the boys took turns putting their penises into her mouth and vagina, one of them held a camera, often rushing in for close-up penetration shots. They used a pool cue to penetrate the girl anally, slapping her stomach in time to the music. Afterward, when they used the cue on her vagina, the girl urinated on herself to the boy’s laughter. “Fuck yeah!” one of them yelled.

  When the case went to trial, the boys’ lawyers tried to bring two porn stars to the stand to testify that the victim could have just been acting out a homemade porn movie.21 Their attorney made the case that the girl had entic
ed “sweet,” “caring,” and “kind” boys into a sexual frenzy. During the trial, one of the defendant’s lawyers referred to the girl variously as “a tease,” “a porn star,” an “out-of-control girl” and “a cheat.”22 The defendants claimed the girl said she wanted to be a porn star—and it wasn’t their fault for believing her. Sharon Mitchell, a former porn star turned sexologist, briefly took the stand to explain that the actions shown in the footage were “consistent with pornography,” explaining that many of the “positions” adopted on the tape are popular in porn films.23

  Girls sometimes complain. In 2004 a thirteen-year-old girl from New Jersey told People magazine that the fact that boys look at Internet pornography makes her feel bad. Of her ex-boyfriend’s interest in Internet pornography she said, “He told me he wanted me to look skinny like the porn girls. He told me I was fat, that I was a hippo.”24 They also sometimes play along. Also in 2004, a sixteen-year-old student was suspended from a high school in Fort Worth, Texas, after she allegedly showed a videotape of herself and other underage students engaged in sex acts with classmates. The boy in the tape was the girl’s cousin; two other girls were fellow tenth graders. When initially questioned by the police, the girl said the videotape showed her getting her hair braided. She faces charges of delinquent conduct and sale, distribution, or display of harmful materials to a minor. Whether she is victim, perpetrator, or a combination thereof will surely be addressed in court.25 In another case, a fifteen-year-old girl in Pittsburgh was arrested for taking nude photographs of herself and posting them online. She depicted herself in various states of undress, performing a variety of sex acts, and sent the photos to people she met online in chat rooms. After the police seized the computer, complete with photos of herself stored on her hard drive, the girl was charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography, and dissemination of child pornography.26 In April 2004, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader at a prestigious private school made a porn video of herself masturbating and simulating oral sex for a classmate crush, who promptly put it online. The three-minute video immediately wended its way through the New York City private school circuit and then onto the Internet, where everyone from extended family to summer camp friends to unknown sexual predators could see it.