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

by Pamela Paul

  But the prevalence of pornography, and in particular its surge and transformation over the past ten years, simply cannot be adequately explained by evolutionary psychology. The standards of pornography itself often belie such theories. For example, despite the evolutionary psychology myth that men are necessarily more sexually voracious and aggressive than their female counterparts, women in pornography are frequently portrayed as sexually insatiable. They are often the aggressors, wantonly tempting men, indifferent to emotion, and apt to bed multiple partners of both sexes. As Dolf Zillmann notes in his studies on pornography, “The massive exposure of men to portrayals of women as sex-crazy creatures who move from partner to partner is thought to make women seem unworthy of attention and care in an enduring relationship.”5 Is it biology dictating pornography or the porn itself that conveniently adopts male-centric beliefs about women’s role and inherent worth? Even if pornography didn’t send conflicting messages about the “nature” of man, no convincing evidence supports the idea that men are naturally predisposed to, or may even require, pornography. Those who conflate looking at pretty pictures with masturbating to pornography usually have an agenda behind their theories. They have something to prove.

  Being Progressive about Porn

  But it’s not just unreconstructed chauvinists, evolutionary psych theorists, and those who believe God created porn for man who are out to prove pornography’s legitimacy. In today’s polarized cultural debates, supporting pornography has become the default liberal, moderate, and civil libertarian position. Speaking out against pornography has become a reactionary cause rather than a progressive one—even though acceptance or approval of pornography shouldn’t be any more an indication of one’s liberal bona fides than denouncing it should be of proving one’s conservatism.

  The drawing of political battle lines over pornography dates back in large part to two conflicting federal reports designed to study and address the issue. In 1968, the United States President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography was charged with understanding the effects of pornography “upon the public and particularly minors and its relationship to crime and other antisocial behaviors.” After two years of research, the commission issued a report that concluded, “In sum, empirical research designed to clarify the question has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults. The Commission cannot conclude that exposure to erotic materials is a factor in the causation of sex crime or sex delinquency.”6 The Nixon administration promptly denounced the report. Sixteen years later, the Reagan administration commissioned what later came to be known as the Meese Report (for the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography), which came to the exact opposite conclusion. Pornography, the Meese Report explained, leads to sexual violence, rape, deviation, and the destruction of families. Yet while the earlier report exonerating pornography was widely distributed and published by a commercial press, the Meese Report was difficult to track down, unpublished commercially, and immediately distorted and vilified in a popular pro-pornography book published by Penthouse and distributed on newsstands everywhere.

  As a result of these two contradictory reports, many Americans, especially liberals and moderates, came to the conclusion that the first report was accurate while the second was politically motivated hackwork, created by religious zealots to crack down on the absence of family values and promulgated by a man who was himself under investigation for corruption. Who was he to talk? While there may well be some truth to the political motivation behind the second study, concluding that the results were therefore inaccurate unfairly distorts the report’s findings. In truth, the second report contained a good deal of valuable, nonpartisan data from reliable academicians and social scientists. Jennings Bryant, a liberal professor of communications and the coauthor with Dolf Zillmann of one of the major studies depicting the harm wrought by pornography, witnessed the rampant politicizing of his study’s conclusions and recommendations; in the years that followed the study’s release, he became the target of vicious attacks by pornography supporters. Meanwhile, social scientists who supported pornography were co-opted by the pornography industry and ferried about to pro-pornography lectures and conferences worldwide.

  Regardless of the motivations behind and differing conclusions of each of these two major reports, it’s hard to argue against the fact that both reports are outdated. The first report was generated back when Playboy didn’t even include full-frontal nudity and before most hardcore magazines had been launched. Penetration shots were rare. Hustler, for example, wasn’t created until four years after the first presidential commission issued its final report. Not only was the magazine world relatively tame at the time of the 1970 report, but both it and the Meese Report were written before cable television, the VCR, and especially the Internet took pornography to a whole new level. Furthermore, the 1970 report’s goals were narrow—trying to forge a link between pornography and sexual violence—without exploring the vast area of influence that stops short of violence. There was no effort to study or document other negative effects of pornography on men, women, or children, an area that the Meese Report took up to a greater, though still far from complete, extent.

  In the wake of the two reports and their distortion in the popular media, pornography became a politically progressive cause, a convenient tool in the culture wars. Pornographers successfully fomented a bogus fight between Victorian prudishness and modern sexual freedom that has been taken up by everyone from libertarians to Web-heads to feminists to liberal Democrats—and the battle line hasn’t budged for decades. As Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer at advertising agency Euro RSCG Worldwide, noted in January 2004, “It’s a way to prove your liberalness not to be freaked out by porn.”7 The next generation of pornography consumers has been effectively won over, often unaware of the political machinations that preceded this new “consensus.” Today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings view “their” pornography as something to defend against government intrusion. An undergraduate student at the University of Houston recently complained in his school newspaper about former attorney general John Ashcroft’s efforts to combat pornography by claiming the effort was there only “to satisfy the fraction of Americans who think Michael Savage isn’t crazy.” He ends with the exhortation, “Let Ashcroft know what you think of his priorities: Go rent Debbie Does Dallas and enjoy it.”8

  Not surprisingly, given such politicization of the issue, Americans’ points of view on pornography these days often lines up with their political philosophy. While people identifying themselves as Republicans or Democrats show little difference in their opinions about pornography, those who self-identify as liberal are more likely to support pornography than those who consider themselves conservative. For example, liberals are more likely than conservatives to believe that pornography improves people’s sex lives and less likely to believe that pornography changes men’s expectations of how women should behave. In the Pornified/Harris poll, 54 percent of conservatives say pornography harms relationships between men and women, and 39 percent see pornography as cheating, compared with 30 percent and 15 percent, respectively, of liberals. And when it comes to measures to control pornography, conservatives are more likely to advocate reforms: 45 percent of conservatives believe that government should regulate Internet pornography so that kids cannot access X-rated Web sites, compared with 32 percent of liberals who champion such measures. To condemn or even question pornography these days is, ironically, seen by liberals as a sign of closed-mindedness.

  Moreover, in our pornified culture, pornography is typically seen by the Left and by libertarians as a right and a vindication. Pornographic Web site links are included on hipster blogs alongside serious and offbeat news stories—just another form of infotainment. Online, men fulminate over any attempts to “suppress” their right to pornographic freedom and academics dissect the “sex positive” aspects o
f pornography. At the hip private club Soho House in New York, members can work out to a selection of pornographic DVDs provided by the gym library, and watch them on screens attached to their treadmills for everyone else to see. Pornography is viewed as another form of cool entertainment, and people should be allowed to amuse themselves as they please. “Porn is where hip hop was ten to fifteen years ago,” Cobe Chantrel, vice president of marketing at Hollywood talent management company The Firm, has said. “It’s very rock and roll. There’s a rebellious, edgy attitude to it.”9

  But were pornography truly so sexually liberating, there would be little that is outre or taboo about it all. Hypocrisy and guilt still dominate sexuality in many ways, and pornography isn’t the cure for Puritanism or the sign of its defeat—it’s an emblem of its ongoing power to isolate and stigmatize sex. A truly liberated society would be one in which there were no need to “rebel” via commercialized images of sex. And pornography is hardly revolutionary. Indeed, porn may be the ultimate capitalist enterprise: low costs; large profit margins; a cheap labor force, readily available abroad if the home supply fails to satisfy; a broad-based market with easily identifiable target niches; multiple channels of distribution. Pornography is big business, and it’s out to protect its interests against what it sees as excessive governmental and societal interference. The industry even has its own lobbying arm, whose head, a former defense industry lobbyist, told 60 Minutes, “Corporations are in business to make money. This is an extremely large business and it’s a great opportunity for profit for it…. When you explain to [legislators] the size and the scope of the business, they realize, as all politicians do, that it’s votes and money that we’re talking about.”10 Pornographers distort pornography into an issue of progressivism and civil liberties precisely because they have millions of dollars of profit on the line. The industry—which likes to position itself as just another all-American enterprise trying to earn an honest dollar despite government interference, excessive regulation, and taxation—isn’t any different from any other large corporation, be it Halliburton or GlaxoSmithKline. The idea of “progressive” Americans lining up to defend a notoriously corrupt and abusive industry would seem implausible.

  But there’s more to the pro-porn rebellion. The latest wave of pornography crusaders is not only railing against moralizing on the part of the government and organized religion, the argument that dominated the family values-obsessed eighties. Nor is it just about a libertarian or free-market fight against government regulation. Today, pornography advocates are also and perhaps equally rebelling against what they view as the excesses of liberalism and feminism of the early nineties, in particular, the extremes of political correctness. Defending pornography seems to have become a way for people who think of themselves as progressive, liberal, and open-minded to revolt against the close-minded, PC police of university campuses and corporate human resources guidelines. Denouncing pornography is akin to mocking what is derisively referred to as “sexual correctness.”

  But no matter how distasteful knee-jerk political correctness may be, it’s hard to ignore the equally illiberal nature of porn itself. Certainly, it’s hard to find anything more retrograde, repressive, or closed-minded than the sexual clichés peddled by pornography. Rather than a mark of escape from the past, the dominant morality of pornography reeks of Puritan and Victorian prudery; it creates a world populated by virgins and whores, by women who are used and shamed for being sexually voracious. Their degradation is deserved, according to the prim sexual vision of the pornographer. Even when the woman isn’t overtly degraded, she is deemed less than the man watching her by dint of being paid to please him sexually in a public forum. Even when pornography is made specifically “for” women, as in the case of “indie” magazines like Sweet Action, the model often replicates that experience, unthinkingly substituting men’s bodies for women’s along the same old porn patterns. In pornography, sexuality frequently accompanies or provokes disgust and hatred—something to be done quickly, and just as quickly disposed of. In the world of pornography, sex is generally dirty, cheap, and—in the end—not much fun. Surely it is this pornified version of sexuality that deserves denigration, mockery, and rebellion.

  Pornography: A Right or Wrong?

  But rather than fight for people’s right to speak out against pornography, Americans have instead fought for the right of pornographers to distribute their product without regulation and for consumers to lap it up unhindered. “Isn’t it our right to look at and read and masturbate to whatever we want?” has become a rallying cry. “What right does the government have in our bedrooms?” Businesses have made a fortune by linking pornography with civil liberties, arguing that to use pornography is to turn one’s nose up at the Ed Meeses and the hypocritical reactionaries. They’ve managed to equate the use of pornography with a defense of the Bill of Rights, convincing an entire generation that pornography is not only okay, it’s the American citizen’s right. Today, according to the Pornified/Harris poll, 23 percent of Americans believe that whether one likes it or not, people should have full access to pornography under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Democrats were only slightly more likely (24 percent) than Republicans (20 percent) to take this position. Not surprisingly, those of the baby-boomer generation and younger are nearly twice as likely to believe pornography is protected speech than Americans age fifty-nine and older, and men are more than twice as likely as women to consider pornography a political right.

  The major pornography lobbying group calls itself the Free Speech Coalition, much in the spirit of anti-environmentalist groups that adorn themselves in leafy labels like the Blue Skies Society to obscure their true agendas. The rhetoric of the pro-pornography movement also bears a striking resemblance to the gun rights movement. Each popularizes the idea of a Big Brother federal government tyranny out to strip Main Street citizens of their fundamental rights. Just as the Second Amendment was never intended to encourage the sale of semiautomatic military weapons to ex-cons, the First Amendment was never meant to sanction the dissemination of speech that is free of social merit, artistic quality, or political purpose. In a country obsessed with the Founding Fathers and their vision, little thought is given to what they would make of the current application of the Constitution’s free political speech.

  In the fight for freedom of porn, Larry Flynt—who once yelled at the Supreme Court, “Fuck this court! You’re nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt!”—positions himself as the Martin Luther King, Jr., of free speech, waging a battle for civil rights by endlessly contesting obscenity prosecutions on the basis of the First Amendment.11 He conveniently has the right set of enemies to rally his followers to the “liberal” cause. By going up against people like the Reverend Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, Flynt has turned himself into a martyr for supposed progressivism and “true” patriotism. The cover of Flynt’s book Sex, Lies, & Politics: The Naked Truth features him posed in front of an oversized American flag. Meanwhile, his magazine Hustler has depicted violent and senseless forms of hardcore pornography, with one infamous spread depicting a woman shaved, raped, and apparently killed in a concentration camp-style setting.12 Those who refuse to play along with Flynt’s constitutional ploy are ridiculed as reactionary and prudish. Yet even free speech advocates like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who originally intended to lend his signature to a joint letter in support of Flynt against obscenity charges, withdrew his offer after viewing a copy of Hustler. “I’m not sure this was quite what Jefferson had in mind,” he noted at the time.13 Flynt isn’t the only businessman eager to equate his enterprise with constitutional freedom. The Playboy Foundation, for example, bestows an annual award loftily entitled the “Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award” to high school students, lawyers, journalists, and educators who protect Americans’ right to free speech. Certainly people like Bill Maher and Molly Ivins, both recipients of the twenty-fifth anniversary award, deserve recognition for their efforts to promote fre
e political speech, but the irony of an organization that disregards the rights of women giving such an honor is lost in the limelight of the celebrity-studded event. Those who defend pornographic images that denigrate women would be loath to defend Little Black Sambo books or Nazi artwork. But such hypocrisy and oversights are ignored on today’s political battlefield over porn. Just what are we willing to tolerate in the name of “tolerance,” and why?

  Rather than deal with the reality of pornographic material, there is a willful attempt on the part of pornographers and their defenders to portray pornography as something it clearly is not: a useful sexual education tool, a harmless form of recreation, open communication about sexuality. Lawyers for the ACLU frequently refer to “speech about sex” or “sexually oriented expression” instead of “pornography” when fighting measures intended to curb pornography. They argue that children will be prevented from accessing harmless and informative content about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases, that adults will be unable to read sexual material, such as sexually explicit essays or how-to guides on increasing sexual desire or skill. In the aftermath of the Child Online Protection Act’s defeat by the Supreme Court, Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s associate legal director, said, “By preventing Attorney General Ashcroft from enforcing this questionable federal law, the court has made it safe for artists, sex educators, and Web publishers to communicate with adults about sexuality without risking jail time.”14 Perhaps sex educators, artists, and legitimate Web publishers were unfairly included in COPA’s targeted web, but many legal experts disagree with that analysis. And were that the case, the law could have been rewritten so as to confine its targets to pornography proper, allowing other sexually explicit forms of art and information to flourish. Instead, the law’s opponents, including the ACLU, rushed to defend the right to free speech but neglected to differentiate between pornography and other forms of “sexual expression.” As a result, what was once considered harmful, obscene, and dangerous is now exalted as free political speech. To call it “educational” or “speech about sex” smacks of legalistic semantics and intellectual dishonesty.