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

by Pamela Paul

  “This is what our relationship had become. Him hiding and me searching. When he was at work, that’s what I’d be doing—looking through his car.” Abby laughs bitterly. “Tell me that’s not unhealthy. There was no trust at all.” She felt dead inside. She couldn’t be intimate with her husband.” ‘Who is this man?’” she would ask herself. “When somebody has this secretive nature, you realize you don’t know them and so how can you give to them?”

  One day, Abby discovered a box of diskettes in the closet. She went through the entire stash and found pictures of little girls. “I was so freaked out, I didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. “At this point, he had stolen women’s underwear and I had found them hidden in his suitcase.” She called Leo at work, screaming with rage. She told him he was lucky she wasn’t calling the police. “It’s no big deal,” he told her, and offered a litany of excuses. Abby was in shock. She went to Barnes & Noble in despair, trying to find books to explain what was wrong with her husband. “I didn’t know what to do or who to call,” she says, sobbing at the recollection. “I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown.” She got back into the car, drove home, picked up the kids from school, went directly to her parents’ house, and told them everything. Her parents were astounded. A week before, they had heard Leo give a sermon in their church. Her father, a retired postal inspector, had witnessed multiple arrests for child porn. Abby’s parents were no innocents, but they had never imagined Leo’s hidden life.

  Slipping into a hide-and-seek world, afraid that a spouse, colleague, boss, or child will discover what he’s up to, the addict withdraws from normal life. “Sex addiction is a mental illness of isolation,” explains Liam. “It’s using something to escape, like any addiction. With pornography, you enter this fantasy world where there are no consequences for your actions.” But the stress of hiding pornography from loved ones can become overwhelming. Just as the gambler flees problems and conflicts, turning to the card table to assuage pain, so does the compulsive pornography user turn to pornography. Hours go missing, basement doors locked, questions left unanswered. Many wives describe their husbands withdrawing physically and emotionally from their families, friends, and communities.

  For as long as he can remember, Miles felt compelled to hide his pornography. Growing up, his parents had told him looking at pornography was wrong; his father called it “poison.” The fear of getting caught, the embarrassment when discovered, the constant hiding weighed on him. Though his wife knew when they met that he looked at pornography, he soon felt it necessary to hide it from her as well. She had watched videos with him when they were dating, but after a while she became uncomfortable, and began to believe his pornography constituted cheating. “It became a game of me sneaking away to look at porn,” he recalls. Before the Internet, he would steal away to video stores and watch movies when she wasn’t around. He was often irritated when his wife proved to be an obstacle. “Other times, I felt guilty because I knew she didn’t approve,” Miles says. “I knew it was wrong, but there was also a fire inside me, and her feelings just didn’t matter enough.” In retrospect, Miles says, his reasoning seemed off. His mind was blurred.

  The Blur

  When an addict tries to stop using pornography, his recovery is as slow and convoluted, as rife with relapses and failures and ongoing challenges as any drug addict or alcoholic. I’ll stop once I get married, the pornography addict tells himself. I’ll stop once I get involved in church. I’ll stop once I start that new job. Once we have kids, I’ll stop. I’ll stop when the kids are old enough to use the computer…. Shortly after Tony, the researcher from San Diego, decided to stop using pornography in 1995, he got Internet access at work. His work made it impossible to avoid going online and he relapsed, despite attending 12-step meetings. “It was all free and could be done privately,” he says. “I didn’t have to go to a store or deal with the social consequences of somebody seeing me. I didn’t have to constantly search for the right videos. Now, anything could be found online. The first porn I had ever seen had been women having sex with young boys and animals. I became obsessed with finding that again.” Losing days and nights to pornography once more, Tony redoubled his efforts at recovery. He got rid of the Internet at home and cut down at work. But two weeks later, he found himself in an adult bookstore. He reinstalled the Internet, but with filters. But it seemed that no matter what he did, something popped up to provoke his compulsion. He’d be watching CNN and an advertisement for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit show would appear. He’d catch a glimpse of Maxim on the newsstand. These days, Tony only watches programs with TiVo so he can fast-forward through commercials, which often border closely on pornography and are liable to send him searching for something harder.

  Cycling through use and abstinence, promises kept and broken, admission and denial, many compulsive pornography users take their wives, families, and colleagues along for a months- or years-long roller-coaster ride of hope and betrayal. After yet another relapse, Abby gave Leo an ultimatum. In May 2003, back together after a separation, Abby was ready to move to another city. For several months, Leo had been working there during the week and flying back home on weekends. They had just put the house on the market. Leo had tried to stick by his promise, but after seven months of self-professed sobriety there was an incident. “My stepdaughter found something on the computer,” he says vaguely.

  Abby remembers that afternoon well. She and her fourteen-year-old daughter were home with the flu while Leo was attending his weekly sex addict meeting. Suddenly, Abby heard a shriek from the family computer room. Her daughter came running into the room screaming. “I thought someone had stabbed her,” Abby recalls. Abby went to investigate the family computer. On the screen were photographs Leo had taken of himself dressed in her daughter’s underwear. “Try explaining that to a fourteen-year-old,” Abby says tearfully. “She was so freaked out. All I could think was, ‘Why did she have to find this?’” Abby told her daughter to go upstairs and pack while they waited for her and Leo’s three sons to get home from school. She then called Leo to confront him with what the girl had found. “I deleted all that,” Leo protested. “There’s no way she saw that.” Abby insisted he not come back to their house. When Abby went up to her daughter’s room, she found her there sobbing, cutting her underwear into tiny pieces.

  Months later, her daughter, consumed with anger, is in therapy. She stopped going out and avoids her friends. How could she tell them, “My dad doesn’t live here anymore because I found pictures of him in my underwear?” Though she viewed her stepfather as a father figure and had lived with him since the age of four, she doesn’t want to see him again. For Abby, this was the breaking point. “I had found gay porn, child porn, and now he’s taking pictures of himself in my child’s underwear. What am I waiting for? How many chances am I supposed to give him? How big a disaster does it have to be? I don’t think this is what God intended for me.”

  Often it takes a real tragedy to compel compulsive users into recovery—the total conflation of pornographic fantasy and the reality of addiction—the end of a marriage, loss of a job, or violation of the law. On a family vacation, Kenneth, the consultant from New Mexico, found himself propositioning fifteen-year-olds. “Whatever denial I had been maintaining, this pretty much blew my cover. I knew I was totally out of control.” Though he managed to leave his daughter alone, he began molesting his children’s babysitters—girls in their young teens. No charges were pressed, but his wife found out. “It pretty much destroyed her trust in me,” he says. “After that, she had a very hard time relating to me sexually. She saw me as a predator.”

  “I know it sounds like an excuse, but I do not think this would have happened had I not been looking at porn. I think there’s a real connection and I feel strongly about it. After a while, the line between fantasy and reality became very blurred to me. Here all these women in my fantasy world were pretending to be anything I wanted. I was in control. My fantasies were their command. Before
long, I got the impression that all that women were interested in was having sex with me.” Kenneth doesn’t want to make excuses. “It doesn’t mean I’m not responsible,” he says. “But using pornography can definitely get men into big trouble.”

  Ironically, Kenneth was a longtime supporter of pornography, not only on an individual level but for society at large. A progressive Democrat, Kenneth considers himself a dedicated defender of civil liberties. He followed Larry Flynt’s battles in court because, he says, “I thought he was fighting the good fight.” He admired Hugh Hefner and lamented any impingements on free speech. “Now I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not that simple. My views on pornography have changed.” He pauses and sighs. “I don’t think prohibition is the way to solve social problems. But we have to find some better way to deal with this.”

  8

  The Truth about Pornography

  Please read and comply with the following conditions before you continue:

  I am at least 21 years of age.

  The sexually explicit material I am viewing is for my own personal use and I will not expose minors to the material.

  I desire to view sexually explicit material.

  I believe that as an adult it is my inalienable right to receive/view sexually explicit material….

  All images and videos within this website are nonviolent. All performers on this site are over the age of 18, have consented to being photographed and/or filmed, have signed model release and provided proof of age, believe it is their right to engage in consensual sexual acts for the entertainment and education of other adults and believe it is your right as an adult to watch them doing what adults do.

  The videos and images in this site are intended to be used by responsible adults as sexual aids, to provide sexual education and to provide sexual entertainment.

  —Welcome page on a pornography Web site

  Once those “21 or older” who choose to comply get inside this Web site, which bills itself as “The Home of the Asshole Milkshake,” it blares, “The most extreme shit you’ll ever see. See why the U.S. government is after us!”1 Viewers are “educated” as to how multiple men can anally penetrate a woman and then force her to drink the ejaculated semen extracted from her own anus. Others can be “entertained” by viewing Forced Entry, a video simulating vivid rape and murder scenes of women. Despite the site’s self-professed renegade status, it does not differ substantially in content or tone from vast numbers of pornographic Web sites, and it’s only a click away from “softer” sites. Moreover, nothing prevents minors from making the transition. In a study by the Pew Internet Research Center, 15 percent of boys twelve to seventeen (and 25 percent of boys fifteen to seventeen) have lied about their age to access a Web site—surely a lowball figure. The Internet and other technologies have changed the rules of the game, obscuring the boundaries between softcore and hardcore, upgrading customers to harder, faster—more quickly than ever before.

  Incidents that muster outrage in the “real world” elicit little response when supposedly relegated to the realm of pornography. In a coffee-table book of photos of porn stars and related essays, Salman Rushdie claimed that, though pornography is particularly popular in Muslim countries due to the segregation of the sexes, a free and civilized society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography. Given the popularity of porn in America, what does this say about our country? Are we sexually repressed or are we free? Moreover, such seemingly liberal observations ignore the similarities between the sexual repression outside pornography and the repression within it. As a prisoner tortured and photographed pornographically at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq explained, “We are men. It’s okay if they beat me…. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.”2 For the prisoner, to be made into pornography—to be pornified—was to be dehumanized; yet when presented in the context of pornography proper, it’s acceptable, even entertaining, for people to be treated as such. In the United States, the outrage over the actions at Abu Ghraib was accompanied by a strange hush regarding the inspiration of those acts and images, which are perpetrated in pornography, in this country as elsewhere in the world, every day. Few people think to question, let alone fulminate over, the messages sent by “legitimate” porn.

  We have entered the twenty-first century immersed in a new pornified culture with little language to describe or decry it. Instead, there is silence, nervous laughter, ignorance, and outdated arguments. We shrug or nod when told that pornography is natural. Masculine. Empowering to women. Harmless. Progressive. Necessary. It’s time to start questioning these assumptions.

  The Porn Imperative?

  A common assumption prevails that pornography is natural, an eternal component of male biology and the human sexual landscape. Advocates cite the “porn has existed since cavemen” argument, pointing to cave wall drawings and early sculptures of naked women to prove the timeless appeal of pornography. Man, we are meant to believe, was born for porn. Yet those sexual representations were paltry, tame, and ultimately insignificant compared with the quality and quantity of pornography available today. An unadorned Greek statue is a far cry from Meat-holes.com, or even Maxim magazine.

  Pornography proponents not only deliberately conflate art and pornography; they equate human sexuality with pornography consumption, drawing a causal link between man’s instinct to look at other people with admiration or desire and his use of pornography. According to such a view, because men like to look at naked women, they will inevitably look at pornography; to be a man is to be a pornography consumer, simply by dint of one’s manhood and sexuality. It’s a view championed in the media and in popular culture. Dan Savage, a sex columnist, has said, “I get a lot of questions from women who are upset because their partners or their husbands look at pornography still or go online and look at pornography and why not just look at them since they’re there. And my answer is always, you know, men look and men will always look. And women look too, they’re just slyer about it. I think, better at it. And if you want to be with someone who doesn’t look at others and lust after others, you should get a dog or girlfriend or a plant or something besides a husband.”3 But there’s a vast difference between sexuality and its artistic representation, and pornography, a commercialized means to arousal. To pretend they are equivalent is nothing short of deceit. And to blithely declare that admiring an attractive woman at a cocktail party and spending hours at the computer using Internet pornography are the same thing is ludicrous.

  Still, the idea that pornography is “natural” and biologically inevitable has its defenders, the latest armed with scientific data. Evolutionary psychologists have joined the cause of tracing pornography back to our genetic ancestors, providing anecdotes about certain subspecies of birds and earlier stages of humankind to prove man’s need for sexual variety and pornographic release. But these true believers in the biological imperative for pornography fail to differentiate between science and culture, between causation and correlation, between cause and effect. “There’s this whole argument that men are more visual than women, but it’s fruitless,” says psychologist Gary Brooks. “It may be partly biological, but men are also taught to be more visual. They’re taught that that’s what it’s about and it’s made worse by pornography, which has a money-vested interest in getting men to think this way. That men need pornographic stimulation is one of the lies pornography has perpetuated.” Boys become conditioned to these kinds of images, according to Brooks. “For example, pornography has made American men very breast-centric. Even though, from a biological standpoint, breast size has no relation to women’s reproductive ability or health status. Evolutionary psychologists argue backwards, trying to explain what already exists.”

  The desire to find a scientific justification for pornography is understandable. In a world in which sex roles have changed dramatically during the past thirty years,
our cultural understanding of masculinity and manhood is in flux. To find some kind of firm grounding might ease the discomfort these changes have wrought. In a culture that has become unsure of how manhood is defined, the closer one comes to The Man Show, Maxim, and the Playboy mentality, the more one’s masculinity is ensured. With women becoming more powerful professionally, financially, and emotionally, pornography is still an arena in which men hold all the chips. Whether they use science or religion to justify their beliefs about pornography, men cling to old stereotypes because they serve their function: “Dear Amy,” writes “Bob from Setauket” to the Chicago Tribune advice columnist in response to a column she wrote that was critical of pornography, “Get real, lady. Men enjoy looking at beautiful women. They are either honest about it, or they lie about it. It is normal and God made us that way. It is an utter turnoff for a man to be told that the only woman he can look at is his wife. Maybe you need to check a man’s point of view…. We are different and we see things different. Accept it.”4 It’s no surprise that many men are more than a little frustrated, even angry, about redefining their role as men and having that role judged by women and by the rest of society.

  It’s easier to say, “I can’t help it. I’m a man,” than to delve into the reasons behind the consumption and proliferation of pornography. Yet human biology and zoology cannot explain it all away. Biology as viewed through an evolutionary psychologist’s lens does little to explain women’s increasing use of pornography, for example. Nor do evolutionary psychologists make an effort to winnow biological roots from cultural influences or to vest culture with the power to influence biology. By claiming something is “natural,” any debate to the contrary is effectively stifled as the antiquated whinging of those opposed to science, biology, and the sometimes unpretty realities of human sexuality.