by Sara Pascoe
The penis is so fascinating as it can be a source of power and vulnerability. I’m convinced that this relates to both sperm competition and male status. There is also its potential for violence. Pull it out at the urinals, nothing. Pull it out at the bus stop or the children’s playground – pandemonium. The penis is an organ of possibility.
Many of the #MeToo complaints involve being flashed at. It’s probably the most common of the sexual transgressions committed by men. We had an assembly on it at school because so many girls were getting flashed on the way home. There was a repeat offender who lurked by the lake in the park, and another one who waited in the underpass near the library. We knew they were different men because underpass man tried to ejaculate on you. Lucy from my class got it on her skirt and bag and became a school celebrity. In assembly they told us not to worry because flashers never raped anyone. They told us that these men liked to get a reaction, so the best thing to do if you saw an adult man exposing himself was to point directly at his penis and laugh. These penis-waving men wanted us to run away and cry. Empowerment was standing our ground and shouting, ‘Look at that stupid little willy!’
As an adult I’ve been flashed twice and both times failed to suppress my fear. I think if I was prepared, if I knew it was about to happen, I could be assertive. But both times it was unexpected, and I froze. Where is my strident, groin-kicking past self when I need her? Why does my body not believe that these men aren’t dangerous?
What’s this got to do with porn?
I think it relates to the sex differences in the consumption of it. Whereas you would presume that straight women would have evolved to find nothing sexier than a rock-hard dick, there are qualifiers.
There are things to assess. Mate potential and safety, for example. And what about all this dick pic sending now? Surely that proves my point – men like sending them FAR MORE than women like receiving them. Women are very polite. It is one of the first lessons in heterosexuality, complimenting a man on his penis. Like a child with a finger painting. ‘Well done, that is so good, did you do that by yourself? Let’s pop it on the fridge.’ Men like to watch their penis in sex too, they like to watch their penis thrusting. What is that telling them about their own masculinity?
This brings us back to our original question. Is the large human penis naturally selected, sexually selected or a by-product? It may have been slightly sexually selected for, although there is no evidence that smaller than average men have less sex (in evolutionary terms that would equate to fewer offspring). And if it is a by-product, of what? All evidence suggests that it is men who associate respect and masculinity with a larger penis. If being well endowed improved a male’s status in his tribe, that would have led to better food, less conflict, more sexual partners. This in turn would have led women to prefer a largish penis because they subconsciously desired the same status for their own sons.
It is worth us revisiting Pompeii now, the phalluses – and especially the cartoonishly large ones – depicted in the artworks and considered pornographic by the Victorians. Analysis of these paintings, murals and statues reveals an interesting detail. Many of these sexual scenarios had an agenda that was not about titillation but about power. The language of the phallus was to denigrate, to lessen. A politician on his knees with a penis in his mouth was not an illustration of giving/receiving joy but one of debasement. Such a portrayal was comedic and satirical – a high-status person demeaned. Copulation in this ancient Roman art exhibited status; the penetrator was powerful and the penetrated was reduced. This reminds me of the connotations of the language around anal sex when I was a teenager: ‘doing it up the arse’, ‘taking it up the shitter’ spoke not of pleasure but of subjugation and disrespect.
So too, I’m sure you’re already aware, with the language of porn. A huge amount of it suggests not only a power dynamic but diminishment and punishment. Let’s consider a few of the titles as I tell you about a petition I couldn’t sign.
* So many.
† With gay men these are the same people, so as you would expect, there is great fetishisation of penis size and aesthetics in the gay community. They are the connoisseurs, being both owners and appreciative of others.
Shame Waving
I cried when I read Gail Dines’s book Pornland. Dines described the porn she found within one minute of opening her computer, and I’d never heard of anything so horrific. Torture – not consensual Shades of Grey S&M, but acts of hatred upon the female body. In my ignorance that is what I was expecting all porn to be. And it isn’t. All I’ve found in my own research is middle ground. And that’s reassuring – there is loads and loads of middle ground, with extremes at either end.
One extreme is the artists and anarchists, the people who are exploring gender, race, sexuality, disability and power dynamics through filming sex. There is a list of anthologies from these porn makers at the end of this book if you want to find out more. There are also the feminists, people like Erica Lust, Anna Arrowsmith and Cindy Gallop, to name a few, who are sex-positively creating porn that explores female sexuality. They are fighting the misogyny they see in mainstream porn not by attempting to shout it down, but by creating an alternative.
The other extreme is described below on a petition I was sent by a woman I respect and admire. She asked me to sign and retweet it. She wanted more people to see it – could I help her out? I read the petition.
Ann Summers has teamed up with Pornhub for a ‘fun range of sex toys’. But Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, is simply a portal for abuse since a staggering 90% or more of pornography now shows women being sexually assaulted.
This includes violent sex in every orifice often by gangs of men, while they spit on, strangle, hit and humiliate the young women they are abusing. It is about millions of teenage girls crying, sobbing and screaming in pain and fear while they are abused on a daily basis. Or worse.
If there were no camera, the men doing this would be jailed for GBH, assault and rape.
The titles of the videos on Pornhub alone speak for themselves:
‘Unwanted Painful Anal’ (3.9 million views)
‘Noose around her Neck, Real Hanging’ (118,000 views)
‘No Daddy Stop. I’m not Mummy’ (2.5 million views)
‘Human Toilet Girl gets a Stomach full of Fresh Urine’ (71,000 views)
‘Anal Tears’ (1.5 million views)
‘Extreme Brutal Gagging’ (472,000 views)
‘How to Sexually Harass Your Secretary Properly’ (10.6 million views)
When Ann Summers suggests ‘Ways to Spice up the Night’, ‘Bring the Glam’ or ‘Romance is What You Make it’ … is this what they mean? Tell Ann Summers to Dump Pornhub. Sign the petition today.
But I didn’t. I wrote and deleted thirty-nine replies about why I felt unable to sign and share. I couldn’t clarify my thoughts, so I guess I am working through them here instead.
That very first statistic – 90 per cent of pornography shows women being sexually assaulted – is impossible. Firstly, we found out earlier that Pornhub uploaded fifty-four years’ worth of porn in 2016 alone. Who watched all of that and documented what it contained? Seriously. Fifty-four years means no one has watched 100 per cent of it. You can’t complete Pornhub.
I’ve been doing my own research into porn for over a year, I have watched videos on all of the tube sites, and I have to admit something – titles like the ones listed on the Ann Summers/Pornhub petition haven’t come up. There is an algorithm, right? And in what it has suggested to me, there is no puking or anal tearing or Daddy-I’m-not-Mummying. There are a lot of stepsisters and stepmothers, and there is this fake taxi guy who seems so happy to accept sex instead of a fare that it’s no wonder Uber is sending them out of business.
Compiling statistics about porn requires extrapolation. Someone might study twenty-four hours’ worth of content, noting what percentage they consider ‘abusive’, and then report that percentage as representative of a whole site. But wh
o is deciding what is sexual assault? The people running the study, and isn’t that a subjective judgement? The reason I quoted the ‘Harder and Harder’ study earlier is because I agreed with how they were defining aggression. There were other studies that used too wide a range of criteria: ‘assault is aggressive physical contact’, ‘assault is domineering physicality or language’, ‘assault is any contact that could leave a mark or cause physical pain or both’.
This makes spanking assault; this construes many acts that may well be consensual as an attack on a woman’s body. The difference between assault and foreplay is context. Who is deciding that, or rather, can a person viewing porn decide that without asking any of the performers involved?
Spanking can cause pain. What about hair-pulling? Bites? I mean, I’m turning myself on here. Yet those things must have been logged as aggressions on the female body to have arrived at the ‘90 per cent is assault’ figure. What about choking? Choking is a violent way of killing someone, it can be a deadly assault … but it’s also an enjoyable, playful part of many Tories’ sex lives.
So your problem was the statistic?
My problem is with exaggeration, the hyperbole intended to create shock. Like we saw with the Time magazine cover, I think anti-porn propaganda catastrophises, and that prevents a reasoned and reasonable conversation. There are massive discrepancies in reports of how much porn is violent, from as low as 2 per cent up to 90 per cent. This reflects how bias might change what is logged as violent, but also the difficulty of assessment when there’s so much material being produced every year. Hollywood releases about six hundred films per annum, so if you wanted to find out how many of those are violent (answer: loads) at least you could watch them all.
Good luck getting this book into the feminist section.
Another problem I have is with describing the male porn performers as ‘gangs of men’. This suggests that they are criminals, that they have broken down the door and started raping everyone, rather than actors pretending, and I know it’s not really pretending because they are doing those things, but I don’t think the male performers should be vilified. It’s not their idea. These male performers arrive, are briefed, are told what to do, are paid. Exactly the same as their female co-workers. I’m not denying that there is assault and manipulation and rape and battery and all those awful things we wish people didn’t do to each other, but to make it sound as if the men are doing this for their own enjoyment is irresponsible. If the women are victims of coercion, then surely the men are too? Or does having a penis make you an automatic oppressor?
This petition denies autonomy to the women who work in porn. The adjective ‘young’ is needlessly used to make them seem more vulnerable. You only need to read one interview with someone like Sasha Grey to realise that what might look like a person having a horrifically horrible time might not be a person having a horrifically horrible time.
Shouldn’t any conversation about porn reflect the variety of the industry? The titles above were selected to shock and worry us. The language is emotive. The words suggest pain, force, humiliation, as well as paedophilia. When I read those titles, unwanted images appear in my mind. I feel sick. They work on me, those words, I’m not immune.
Sex and violence are connected. The reason that there is violent porn is because violence is a mate-guarding technique in our species – it is how males dominate, depress their partner’s confidence and sex drive, and ensure paternity certainty. I’m not trying to make monsters of men or say that domestic violence is natural. I’m just acknowledging the presence of dominance behaviour. Think about rape in male prisons. It is a place where status and hierarchy are incredibly important for a person’s safety, survival and access to resources. With no women to subjugate, men subjugate each other. The sex is not about sexual satisfaction, although there might be some. The rapists are often men who would not identify as homosexual. It is a dominance behaviour. Similarly in war: men, women and children are brutalised by enemy soldiers. It is a way of destroying, desecrating.
‘Pleasure’ is derived from domination; it rewards a person with dopamine. Domination is a survival tactic like sex and eating. The racism and racial stereotypes in porn contain so many echoes of colonisation. White men punish and disrespect women of every other race with their bodies. Black men are employed to role-play white men’s fear. There is an episode of the Hot Girl Wanted series, where an African American male porn star is directed to throttle a white woman and to ‘go harder’. In the interview afterwards he talks about his softness, how the sex he acts in porn is not the kind of sex he has. He is aware he is performing a racist trope.
An interesting detail is that women apparently search for violent porn more often than men do. The statistics analysed by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in his book Everybody Lies showed that women are twice as likely as men to look for porn involving pain and humiliation, which feature in 25 per cent of their searches, with 5 per cent looking for rape or forced sex (which is banned on Pornhub). Is the female fascination coming from a place of fear? Or because it is more arousing?*
I imagine if you watch a lot of porn you become desensitised to the language, and the content too. I imagine those words lose some of the meaning they have for me, because the viewer has become habituated. When I read ‘extreme brutal’ or ‘unwanted painful’ I wince. ‘Anal tears’, ‘real hanging’ – these are not things I want people to have to experience. I would ban it, arrest everyone, but what if the people are choosing to do that, in exchange for money, because it is their job? Mary knows she is going to be a toilet, Leonie knows she has a rough anal scene – just because I don’t like it, do I have a right to stop them?
If you decide the answer is yes, then please make me prime minister because I will. Leonie and Mary will live in my house, where I can keep an eye on them and make sure no one goes to the toilet on them, and everyone will say, ‘That’s imprisonment and kidnapping, you can’t control people,’ and I’ll say, ‘Make your mind up.’
We live in a free society where, no matter our personal feelings or morality, we do not have the right to limit the behaviour or earning potential of another human. Unless it’s hurting someone. People can use their bodies how they like, even if they choose to do painful things.
But even as I express that I am aware that sometimes those choices are not black and white. I have been learning about how ‘gonzo’ porn is sometimes made with women who have just auditioned. They are given a small fee – no boundaries are discussed. Puking is real, crying and pleading is real. The women ask to stop and are told they won’t get paid. And that is illegal; anyone who does that should be in prison. The women should feel they’d be supported if they reported what happened, they would be believed – but the stigma against the industry and the women who choose to work in it means they don’t. Their assault, their rape is on tape, and people wank to it and – here is the crux – how do you support and protect vulnerable people without inhibiting the rights of others?
I think paying for all porn would legitimise it, and make it easier to police. Why is there not a Netflix for porn? You could pay seven or eight quid a month and know that all the performers were being paid for their appearances, but also that there were some ethical codes being upheld among all the porn makers. I sent out a questionnaire to my mailing list asking if people would watch less porn if they had to pay, and everyone said yes! Is that because of shame and guilt? Why do people think it is morally justified to steal porn? Is that because even those who use it every day are unsettled by the idea of people getting rich from having sex?
I understand that. We have to admit to subconscious judgement and prejudice.
When I watched the original Hot Girls Wanted documentary, I really listened hard to what the women were saying. I was surprised how low the money was: they were getting a couple of hundred dollars for sex. And they were explaining they would rather have sex a couple of times a week and get $500 than work all week in a mall. We’ve all hated jobs. I reall
y, really hated working in a shop. Her sentiments made sense to me, IT FEELS LIKE DEATH, THE DAY LASTS A MILLION YEARS.
The documentary noted how ‘extra’ money was earned by doing certain scenes; the girls did a job that involved gagging and being sick on a penis. I didn’t know that was a thing, that there are specialist websites. They specialise in new girls, who get interviewed and then obviously have to deep-throat or whatever. Their eyes stream with tears and they look so scared, and it is very hard to watch. Although some people clearly do, on purpose. It’s as alien to me as someone who would cum watching people having a car crash or having a piano dropped on them. Intellectually I comprehend all the biology behind it, but emotionally I’m sure nature has got her wiring wrong.
The women said that the male performer was nice beforehand, they got a bit of extra money, they knew they had to look like it was hurting them. I will never get those images out of my mind, I feel scarred by them and how sad they made me. My subjectivity does get in the way because I do not want to do that and I do not want other women to have to do that. I want to give them all the money that scene would pay so they don’t have to do it.
Up to a point I can understand that porn is a form of acting, that sex can be faked through – or that some people can enjoy novel sex with a stranger while being filmed. But only up to a point, and I can’t help my bias.
I am trying to treat having sex like any other job, even if only as a thought exercise – but when the sex becomes aggressive, I can’t feel, ‘That’s a bad day at work, like when I used to work in Tesco’s.’ I couldn’t sign that petition, but I also can’t simply sign off on ‘sex work is work’, even if for some people it is. It is not so simple as sex for money, because of the imbalance of power.