Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  It’s common to be surprised and/or ashamed by some of what arouses us because it diverges from what we choose to be aroused by. But the ability to be aroused is an animal behaviour that pre-dates our developed consciousness. Our reproductive system is trip-wired, it’s excruciatingly sensitive because our ancestors who were reliably aroused had more children. We carry their ‘getting horny at a stick that looks like a woman’ genes.

  It is these genes and instinctual responses, central to our survival, that are being hijacked by modern technology. You may not be a robot, but you still have buttons and pornography is intended to press them. Human beings are not intelligently designed but pornography is. And millennia of product testing and perfecting have already been undertaken. From cave vaginas to sexy pottery to Xhamster.‡

  The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould used the term ‘spandrels’ to describe characteristics which are a by-product of evolution, rather than being directly selected for. This applies perfectly to the human predilection for porn. Humans evolved an interest in naked people, in sexual signals, in seeking sexual pleasure. But those physiological systems which made us reproductively successful must now contend with the huge abundance of sexual stimuli that surround us on billboards and TV screens and Instagram and, of course in pornography.

  Porn is like doughnuts. We didn’t evolve around doughnuts, they played no part in the moulding of our species, but our predilection for fat and sugar means that they’re delicious, irresistible, and some people eat too many of them. Some people eat so much food that it makes them dangerously ill … this is not a problem our prehistoric relatives had to contend with.

  Is porn making us unhealthy too? That’s certainly the opinion of NoFappers and some feminists, but their approaches differ. The former focus on how porn affects the consumer, and we’ll be analysing studies testing those effects later. Feminists are less concerned with the mental wellbeing and reliable erections of frequent porn users and much more worried about their view of women.

  Let’s critique your classic feminist anti-porn statement.

  Susan Brownmiller stated in 1975 that porn depicts women as ‘anonymous, panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanised objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded’. Gail Dines described the sex in porn as ‘making hate to women’. Andrea Dworkin believed that the essential truth of pornography is that ‘any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men’.

  These are strong accusations and if you watch a lot of porn, I don’t know how you feel about them. There’s an accepted wisdom within second-wave feminism that anyone who watches a great deal of hardcore porn cannot help but have reduced respect for women, another theory we’ll be examining further. But first let us query the usefulness of anti-porn sentiments that assume everyone watching it is heterosexual and a man.

  * Bestselling author.

  † The wings of sanitary towels – they were intelligently designed. You can have that one, God.

  ‡ What is so wonderful about the publishing industry is that every person who proofread, edited or fact-checked this book suggested I add a footnote to explain that Xhamster is a porn site. It is the third or fourth most popular porn site in the world, but it turns out everyone at Faber & Faber is still masturbating to the imagery in Plath and Hughes.

  Hard-on vs Wide-on

  If you had to guess, having learned what we have about sex differences on dating websites and campus pick-ups, would you say that more men than women watch porn?

  Yes

  I said yes, I’m not an idiot.

  You’re correct! Using Pornhub’s 2017 statistics I can tell you that 74 per cent of their users worldwide are male. That’s a big discrepancy. Now, I would love to waste a few hours of your life telling you my personal theories about why women might be less interested in hardcore porn, from its focus on thrusty penetrative sex (unlikely to make most women cum) to our ability to create better fantasies in our minds, but the findings of this next experiment are a better use of our time.

  In 2009 Meredith Chivers attached willing men and women to machines that measured their genital responses to visual stimuli. The subjects were shown homosexual, heterosexual and lesbian porn, solo masturbation and finally bonobo sex. With each video they had to rate how stimulated it made them feel, while their genital responses were also measured.

  The results were quite surprising. Chivers found that men’s physical arousal matched what they self-reported. Straight men got hard at straight porn and lesbian porn, homosexual men got hard at gay porn – this is called ‘category-specific arousal’. The men knew what would turn them on, and it did! While we know that men can have unwanted, unpredictable erections – on buses, at job interviews, while asleep – the erection is still a reliable signal of direct arousal.

  The female subjects in Chivers’s study demonstrated genital responses to all the categories.

  The women often reported that they didn’t feel aroused. They said, ‘No, the gay sex isn’t turning me on; the bonobo sex leaves me dry.’ Meanwhile, below the belt, they had increased blood flow; they were lubricating. The study found that women were not becoming significantly more aroused at the films they did like than the ones they didn’t. They lubricated as much for the bonobo bonking as they did for the lesbians.

  Theories about this are valuable to debate. It’s been suggested that in a chicken-and-egg-type scenario, men may get ‘turned on’ by the feeling of a growing erection. It grows when you think about sex; when it grows, you think about sex. But this is not the case with vaginal engorgement.

  We explored earlier how a female has much to consider about a male’s ‘fitness’ and suitability before mating. It is argued that evolution has put the brakes on her mental arousal process so that she isn’t blindsided. Never so horny that she forgets to consider her safety, and the health and resources of her mate. Perhaps this is the sexual reticence we saw reflected in Clark and Hatfield’s university studies. I’m a woman, I consider myself a throbbing centre of vibrant sexuality – but I also would never go back to a stranger’s flat. I hate being approached by men, I don’t want to speak to them and I have never, ever wanted to sleep with one I’ve just met. I’m not saying that’s true for all women, I’m not saying I’m representative. And actually, I hate this theory, ‘maybe our bodies have slowed our sexual response so we can have better children’. It suggests we’re frigid and maternal, yuck.

  Another theory about the results is that the women were aroused, they just didn’t admit it. The argument is that society’s judgements towards sexual women have led to suppression. That biology has endowed women with a plastic and easily triggered arousal mechanism but we’re in denial about it. So we shake our heads, ‘I’m a good girl, I feel nothing,’ even when we’re engorging like crazy.

  The theory I found most arresting was that vaginal lubrication might have evolved as a self-protection mechanism. Chivers postulated that ‘ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries that resulted in illness, infertility, or even death subsequent to unexpected or unwanted vaginal penetration, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring’.

  Of course we have to wonder about how much rape/forced sex was involved throughout our species’ development … it’s not a pleasant thing to think about. In other animals, we know forced copulation is abundant, but when it’s ducks or giraffes we call it a mating strategy. At what point did Homo sapiens become ‘non-animal’ enough for this mating strategy to become a socially unacceptable crime? Why has the civilising of humanity over the last few thousand years not wiped it out completely?

  While it’s very clever and useful in protecting us, I think it’s annoying that the female genitals lubricate without their owners necessarily feeling aroused. This makes it easier for women to have unsatisfying love lives. We can have sex when we’re not really into it, not turned on enough yet. This automatic lubrication might b
e preventing a revolution in how we understand female pleasure. Imagine if men had a pre-boner stage that was just rigid enough to get it in, but didn’t feel particularly nice—

  Like a shoe horn, but in my dick?

  Thank you for understanding so perfectly. It’s another example of a sex mismatch. The female body has a response to sexual stimuli that is not yet arousal, something that male-bodied people might not understand.

  It preoccupies me that the male body’s sexual response is less complicated because throughout prehistory they have had less to fear from female partners. Women have evolved to compute danger, and some men find that idea offensive.

  When I’m on tour by myself I’ve had trouble with men offering me lifts or wanting to walk me back to my hotel, men who are expressing a wish to protect me or reassure me. They mean well but they don’t understand that they are the danger. There was a man in Southend, he wanted to drive me home and I politely said no. He didn’t understand why I wouldn’t get in his car, why I wouldn’t trust him. He said, ‘I’m not a murderer,’ which is exactly what a murderer would say. When I left the theatre he was waiting in his car in an alley, pulled out and followed me. He was so affronted, and I have to wonder if he knew how scary he was being?

  If I’d got into his car and been assaulted the whole world would’ve said, ‘Why’d you get in his car? You’re so stupid.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, he really promised I could trust him.’ When bad things happen to women the crime is always examined for the victim’s culpability. Why did she wear that? Walk that route? Not lock her door?

  Even though it’s only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don’t know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you – and blamed if we don’t. I think it’s worth bearing in mind how much this might be shaping our sexual response.

  When reading about porn, this thing about men being more ‘visual’ comes up repeatedly. What does that mean? Magnetic resonance imaging experiments have been conducted in search of sex differences between men’s and women’s brains. Researchers from Emory University in the US showed people sexual pictures and monitored their brain activity. They reported that men showed greater activation of the amygdala, a centre for emotion and motivation.

  The results were used as evidence that images stimulated the men more. We’ve already debated how reliable it is to assess brain activity in this way; there’s a huge amount of variation between brains and no study has ever found a clear, down-the-line gender divide. It’s obvious why a ‘men are more visual’ argument is tempting, because then Pornhub’s users being 74 per cent male makes complete sense. But why would evolution have made males more alert to the female body than vice versa?

  Well I’ll tell you. In response to the female human’s concealed ovulation and constant sexual signalling the male human has had to become hypersensitive to the physical cues that signal fertility. WARNING – this is going to sound incredibly un-PC and shallow, but a flat stomach and pert breasts are visual signals that a woman has not already conceived. Thinness and youth are attractive not simply because of the fashion industry and glossy magazines, but because our ancestors used them as indicators of a woman being impregnatable. I’m very sorry, evolution did not care about body positivity and loving ourselves as we are, it only cared about sperm competition and getting everyone up the duff.

  Breasts and bottoms are fetishised in our culture, and the biological explanation underlying this is that these fat deposits on a post-adolescent body are an assurance that this person’s offspring will survive in times of difficulty and famine. The female body breaks down fat deposits to breastfeed her children, which is a) amazing and b) described more fully in my book Animal, which you should read if you haven’t already.

  The curves of a female body tell a story about that woman’s health and fertility, a story which transfixes straight men. Evolution programmed them that way. The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) has been confirmed by scientists as a reliable indicator of a woman’s level of oestrogen. Women described as the most attractive in studies had a WHR of 0.7, and women with 0.7 WHR were found to conceive more easily. I find this phenomenal and infuriating in equal measure.

  It is difficult to relate this to the modern world – we know a person’s worth is not connected to the shape of their body – but the reason certain bodies are sexy is because they are appealing to the ancient breeders in us.

  The reason that women might not need to be so visually aware of men is because men’s fertility window is open for longer. While male fertility does decline with age, they do not have the brutal cut-off kindly served to women by the menopause. Men can father children into their old age, which means their youth is less of a factor in being an attractive mate. It is still a factor, women do assess health, youth and strength in a sexual partner, but in nature, in terms of genetic success those visual signals are less important in a male mate than in a female.

  While I feel this is drastically, drastically unfair, we’ll find balance in this inequality when exploring how important wealth and resources are in male courtship later in the section ‘Ha Ha Ha, We’re All Screwed’ on dating.

  It’s worth noting that if you’re a man who fancies men, or a woman attracted to women, you’re still assessing all these things – youth, health, body shape. Even though we consciously know that same-sex mating cannot create children, the attraction is driven by entirely the same circuitry involved with lust and pair bonding. Writing this book I have wondered if it was concealed ovulation that freed human sexuality. When we evolved out of bright-bottom displays and signalled fertility, our species was no longer dependent on male- or female-specific cues for arousal. The sexuality that has sprawled since is much more fluid in all of us. Maybe we’re all millennials now!?

  Speaking of fluidity, it might interest you to learn that more and more women are watching pornography. According to Pornhub’s statistics, in 2017 the most searched-for term was ‘porn for women’ and female users are growing across every territory (apart from Russia).

  If we trust these numbers, though women still comprise a markedly lower percentage of porn consumers, the fact the figure is rising could be taken as evidence that culture affects sexual expression. That as we become more interested in, accepting and supportive of female sexuality, women themselves become less inhibited. Or it could reflect the fact that the more ubiquitous something becomes, the less shocking or shameful it seems.

  That is a very sex-positive view. There are feminists who would counter-argue that the increase in women looking at porn is due to young women and girls feeling pressurised to perform a certain way for their partners. That they’re watching it for instruction rather than as a source of genuine pleasure. Even if a woman was to say, ‘Excuse me, feminism, but I really enjoy watching porn,’ feminism might say, ‘You just think you enjoy it because the patriarchy has won.’

  I don’t know how to disprove that. It’s like when Freud used to tell people, ‘You’ve got an Oedipus complex, you want to murder your father and marry your mother,’ and they’d say, ‘No I haven’t,’ and Freud would smoke a cigar and say, ‘That’s because you’ve repressed your desires, that means they are even deeper within you.’

  We can all agree that human beings have a gross, weird and wide-ranging sexuality. What I’d like us to investigate now is whether the porn people watch is a reflection of what they’re into … or whether it can CHANGE it?

  You Are What You Watch

  Humans can be sexually aroused by absolutely anything. From women eating excrement to your wife banging another guy, from ugly feet to popping balloons. Fetishes and predilections are not new, but the fresh element, the unknown quantity, is the internet. If sexuality is a plastic, mouldable force – if it is nurture over nature – how worried should we be about the porn we’ve seen?

  The first study I ever read about porn was conducted by behavioural psychologists Rachman and Hodgson in the late 1960s. They showed male participants
photographs of old boots followed by pictures of nude women, all the while measuring their penile tumescence. After repeating this many times, they found the men were beginning to get increased blood flow, aka erections, when they saw the old boots. It’s a sort of Pavlovian sexual conditioning. The men’s bodies started to associate boots with sexual stimuli, the boots became sexual signals themselves … this suggests that porn can change what we get aroused by, doesn’t it? The mind leaps; does this mean that stumbling on child porn will make you a paedophile? Does watching violent porn mean you’ll need to strangle your lovers to get it up? This study confirms everything we worry about.

  Let’s address these worries one at a time.

  Concern One: Porn encourages rapists. Probably the first thing I ever heard about porn and, having felt as I did as a young adult, I believed it without qualification. ‘Men are so stupid,’ I would’ve told you. ‘They see women in porn pretending to like certain things and will go out and force other women to do them.’ There are absolutely cases of rapists who have used pornography – or blamed pornography. Serial killer Ted Bundy said that his sadistic crimes were all the fault of violent porn. He claimed that he started with softcore magazines and was consumed to ‘keep craving something harder, which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far’.