Pornified Read online

  Praise for Pornified

  “A dire portrait of porn’s influence on our lives.”

  —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “A persuasive argument that today’s pornography is not the Playboy centerfold or the Deep Throat of yesteryear…. Paul’s remedy charts a sensible middle ground between restraints and free speech.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Pamela Paul convincingly and sometimes shockingly details the effects on men, women, and children of living in a ‘pornified’ world. Her book should be a wake-up call for parents and should change the way we view—and rationalize viewing—pornography today. As Paul makes clear, porn is not ‘cool,’ or ‘liberating,’ or basically benign. It is a poison eroding relationships between men and women and darkening our children’s horizons.”

  —Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness

  “The great virtue of Pamela Paul’s book is that it deals with pornography at the level of human experience…. A refreshing and utterly correct response.”

  —Commentary

  “This is a quietly forceful book. It helps everyone—from libertarian to moralist—by offering a common ground from which to proceed: pornography is one more alienating product of a consumer culture, and in some ways a particularly lonely one. By definition it is selfish. That doesn’t mean it needs to be banned; it does mean we need to think about what it’s doing to each of us, and to our shared society.”

  —Bill McKibben, author of Enough and The End of Nature

  “Confronts porn head-on.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Plenty to unnerve the knee-jerk ‘free speech crowd’… A major water-cooler book.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Pornified is rife with the tales of Americans experiencing a new level of sexual pathos, filled with snapshots of surreptitious lives: it is as compelling as it is troubling. A provocative book, sure to stir debate and reflection.”

  —Alissa Quart, author of

  Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

  “Pamela Paul has written a brave and important book about the ubiquity of porn and how it shapes what we expect of women, sex, and human contact. It’s enough to make defenders of an unbridled free market and even a few Girls Gone Wild fans think twice about the culture we’re living in, and how we made it.”

  —Margaret Talbot, senior fellow, New America Foundation,

  and staff writer, The New Yorker

  Pornified

  Also by Pamela Paul

  The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony

  Pornified

  How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives,

  Our Relationships, and Our Families

  PAMELA PAUL

  Holt Paperbacks

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  A Holt Paperback® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2005 by Pamela Paul

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paul, Pamela.

  Pornified: how pornography is damaging our lives, our relationships, and our families / Pamela Paul.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8132-9

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-8132-1

  1. Pornography—Social aspects—United States. 2. Popular culture—United States.

  I. Title.

  HQ472.UP38 2005

  306.77’0973—dc22

  2005041760

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  Originally published in hardcover in 2005 by Times Books

  First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2006

  Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski

  Printed in the United States of America

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For M.S.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: A Pornified World

  1. A Guy Thing: Why Men Look at Porn

  2. How We Got Here: Life in the Porn Lane

  3. Me and My Porn: How Pornography Affects Men

  4. Porn Stars, Lovers, and Wives: How Women See Pornography

  5. You and Me and Pornography: How Porn Affects Relationships

  6. Born into Porn: Kids in a Pornified Culture

  7. Fantasy and Reality: Pornography Compulsion

  8. The Truth about Pornography

  Conclusion: The Censure-Not-Censor Solution

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Author’s Note

  Throughout the book, I have recorded and reported speech in the words of the individuals interviewed. I have chosen to use these individuals’ slang, graphic descriptions, and vulgar language because they accurately reflect the way in which people think about and discuss pornography. The use of sexually explicit and crude language is part of the story of how pornography is changing our lives; to avoid such language in Pornified would give less than a full picture.

  Pornified

  Introduction:

  A Pornified World

  What’s a nice girl like you doing writing a book about porn?”

  This was the first question editors asked when I initially proposed this book. And I was asked over and over again. Two months into my research, I was hunched over a worn paperback, making cramped notes in the margins, on a bench outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the well-dressed man seated next to me lean over and peer at the book cradled in my lap. “Why are you reading a book about pornography?” he asked in a gruff midwestern voice. His primly coiffed wife looked up. “A book about what?” she asked.

  I had never discussed pornography with septuagenarians before. I saw myself through their eyes and wondered what they could possibly make of me, a young woman calmly flipping through a book on pornography in the middle of the day, smack out in public. “I’m writing a book about it,” I said, somewhat abashed. “This is just research,” I explained, realizing how defensive I sounded.

  “Are there any girlie pictures in that book?” the man asked, squinting at the pages. I told him it was a collection of essays and he frowned.

  “It’s ruining this country,” muttered his wife. “Just terrible. Pornography everywhere. Not like it was when we were young.” She shifted in her seat and sighed, then suddenly became animated. “Do you remember your uncle Joe?” she asked her husband, nudging his side. “He had those special poker cards, with the naked girls, remember? That’s what pornography was when we were young.”

  “Wolf cards,” her husband responded with a slow smile, pleased at his recollection. “That’s what they were called. Wolf cards.”

  “But it was so much tamer than what’s out there today,” his wife continued. “Nothing like what you have in Playboy or one of those magazines. We just didn’t have that. Kids today are exposed to such awful things.” She fingered her pearl necklace, staring at its clasp.

  “So,” her husband said, turning to me once again. “Pro or con?” I looked at him, confused, and he repeated, “Is it pro or con? Your book, I mean. What are you going to say about pornography?”

  * * *

  For most of my life, I gave little thought to pornography. It was not something I considered relevant to me, nor did I consider it—in the daunting spectrum of social, cultural, and political problems—a particularly pressing issue facing this country. Pornography had played a negligibl
e role in my own life and, I assumed, had little effect on the lives of those important to me. Like many Americans, I believed pornography was no big deal. But on assignment to write about pornography for Time magazine, my eyes were blown wide open. During the weeks spent researching my article, I spoke with dozens of men and women about how profoundly pornography had affected their lives. I talked to male pornography users, female pornography fans and girlfriends of pornography fans, sex addicts and their wives, child psychologists and couples therapists.

  One twenty-four-year-old woman from Baltimore confided, “I find that porn’s prevalence is a serious hindrance to my comfort level in relationships. Whether it’s porn DVDs and magazines lying around the house, countless porn files downloaded on their computers, or even trips to strip clubs, almost every guy I have dated—as well as my male friends—is very open about his interest in porn. As a result, my body image suffers tremendously…. I wonder if I am insecure or if the images I see guys ogle every day has done this to me.” She later confessed that she felt unable to air her concerns to anyone: “A guy doesn’t think you’re cool if you complain about it. Ever since the Internet made it so easy to access, there’s no longer any stigma to porn.”

  A thirty-eight-year-old woman from a Chicago suburb described her husband’s addiction to pornography: “He would come home from work, slide food around his plate during dinner, play for maybe half an hour with the kids, and then go into his home office, shut the door, and surf Internet porn for hours. I knew—and he knew that I knew. I put a filter on his browser that would e-mail me every time a pornographic image was captured…. I continually confronted him on this. There were times I would be so angry I would cry and cry and tell him how much it hurt…. It got to the point where he stopped even making excuses. It was more or less ‘I know you know and I don’t really care. What are you going to do about it?’”

  From the other side, from dozens of men, I heard about how something that once seemed fun was having unexpected side effects. A twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker wrote me an e-mail that said, “I used to view porn online, but I began to find it more difficult to stay aroused when having sex with a real woman. It’s an interesting feedback loop, because I watched porn before I ever had sex, and in the old days, if I was having trouble staying aroused for other reasons (e.g., too drunk), I could visualize scenes from those movies and that would help. But later on, during a dry spell, I discovered i-porn, and the easiness of it made it easy to glut—to the point where now, even though the dry spell is over, real sex has now lost some of its magic. And that’s sad.”

  Much of what I heard was not just news; it was revelatory. There was a story about pornography that had not yet been told, a story many Americans, male and female, don’t realize is unfolding—in front of their eyes, inside their minds, on their family computer—at this very moment.

  But instead of hearing these stories, we hear about the new craze for porn-star-penned memoirs and for the latest pornographic movies, TV shows, and Web sites. Still, no widespread public outcry. Men and women who came of age during the sixties, seventies, or eighties, or whose experience with pornography date to those eras, think of pornography in terms of gauzy centerfolds, outré sexuality, women’s liberation, and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Back then, the lines between softcore and hardcore pornography were clear and distinguishable. Mainstream nudie magazines differed fundamentally from the tawdry interiors of adult stores and even from the pages of Hustler magazine. You could easily limit your consumption by selecting the desired publication. Likewise, the lines between the pro-pornography and the anti-pornography forces were distinct. To be for pornography was to stand in favor of civil liberties, sexual liberation, and science. Opposition to pornography was considered repressive, reactionary, and anti-sex. Dislike or disgust with obscenity could simply be reduced to some form of religious superstition, sexual shame, or fear.

  Scroll back to the fifties, when pornography was relegated to dusty newsstand corners or to run-down adult theaters on the wrong side of town. Or even to the eighties, when pornography was surreptitiously obtained on videocassettes via mail-order catalogs or watched in the back rooms of video stores. People were ashamed of, or, at the very least, embarrassed by, the prospect of being caught looking at porn. It just plain wasn’t considered nice to look at dirty pictures. (Of course, pornography’s secretive nature contributed to its allure.) When confined to certain all-male circumstances—bachelor parties, army stints, auto garages, prep school dormitories—pornography gained a level of acceptability, but even then, it carried with it a tinge of embarrassment.

  Today, pornography is so seamlessly integrated into popular culture that embarrassment or surreptitiousness is no longer part of the equation. How many eleven-year-old boys or girls would be ashamed or amazed to discover a copy of Penthouse or Hustler when the Internet regularly features full-motion pornographic banner ads, e-mail boxes overflow with messages marked XXX, and Christina Aguilera chants about the delights of being “dirty”? Would Playboy have the power to shock, scare, or confuse a preteen girl today? Would it even have the power to titillate a preteen boy, exposed to the “everything but” covers of men’s magazines that bray from the local newsstand—magazines that would have once been considered softcore pornography but today have slipped into the mainstream media? Would it surprise in a world in which pre-teens read CosmoGirl! rather than Young Miss magazine? In a world where Monica Lewinsky is yesterday’s female headline rather than Mary Lou Retton? In a world in which sitcoms like Friends make regular unmasked references to pornography, a far cry from the occasionally ribald—but couched—humor of Laverne & Shirley?

  The all-pornography, all-the-time mentality is everywhere in today’s pornified culture—not just in cybersex and Playboy magazine. It’s on Maxim magazine covers where even women who ostensibly want to be taken seriously as actresses pose like Penthouse pinups. It’s in women’s magazines where readers are urged to model themselves on strippers, articles explain how to work your sex moves after those displayed in pornos, and columnists counsel bored or dissatisfied young women to rent pornographic films with their lovers in order to “enliven” their sex lives. It’s on VH-1 shows like The 100 Hottest Hotties where the female “experts”—arbiters in judging the world’s sexiest people—are Playboy centerfolds (the male experts are pop stars and journalists), and on Victoria’s Secret prime-time TV specials, which attracted a record nine million viewers in 2003. Softcore pornography has now become part and parcel of the mainstream media. The majority of men interviewed for this book did not consider Playboy—once the epitome of the genre—to even be pornography at all, because it doesn’t depict actual sex acts. “True” pornography today is confined only to the hardcore.

  Pop music is intimately connected with the pornography industry as today’s pop stars embrace and exalt the joys of porn. Eminem, Kid Rock, Blink 182, Metallica, Everclear, and Bon Jovi have all featured porn performers in their music videos. Trying to keep up, Britney Spears, Lil’ Kim, and Christina Aguilera emulate porn star moves in their videos and live concerts. Pornography has not only seeped into televised music videos; musicians have crossed over into the adult film industry. Rock musicians regularly date porn stars, cameo in their movies, and invite them backstage. Rolling Stone, hardly a staid publication, notes, “Until recently, public fraternizing with a porn star was pretty much a no-no; now it lends the musicians an aura of danger and intrigue.”1 Rap artists and hip-hop stars such as Snoop Dogg (“Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle”), Ice T (“Ice T’s Pimpin’”), and Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz have all created pornographic videos. VH-1 offers a show called Porn to Rock and Rap, in which, its Web site breathlessly describes:

  The worlds of music and porn link together perfectly. In the rock world, porn stars are seen as trophies, adding a coolness factor to a rock star’s image. In the rap world, porn is another way rap stars can be entrepreneurs and make their paper. The stars in each genre of music go about it differently,
but they all have learned that porn and porn stars are a GOOD thing. We will examine the history of the marriage, the current slew of musicians involved, and get behind the scenes of this interesting arena.

  According to a report by Black Entertainment Television, “The Making of Sex Hop,” the link between hip-hop and pornography began a decade ago when DJYella of NWA made a pornographic film in 1994. “I set about to change things,” Yella explained matter-of-factly to Adult Video News. “By putting my name on it and associating it with rap, I’m bringing porn to the mainstream.”2

  Pornography has not only gone mainstream—it’s barely edgy. On the recent fiftieth anniversary of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, seventy-seven, was treated like an elder media statesman, with a front-page profile in the New York Times Arts section and a Christie’s auction of his personal memorabilia. A coffee-table book of porn star portraits published in the fall of 2004 featured essays by literary luminaries from Salman Rushdie to A. M. Homes and was accompanied by a documentary special on HBO. A wave of porn-infused fare is putting pornography on a par with family entertainment. Mainstream cable channels like HBO offer up series such as G-String Divas and Cathouse. A reality show hosted by porn star and California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey, Can You Be a Porn Star?, launched on Time Warner’s InDemand in 2004. On Bravo, a reality show called Private Stars features five men locked in a house with five porn actresses. The men are judged on sexual performance with the winner awarded a contract by a producer of pornographic films; the show crossed the Atlantic after a successful run in Europe and the U.K.3

  Pornography is taking on Hollywood, too. In Regency Pictures’ 2004 film The Girl Next Door, a love story unfolds between a teenage boy and his porn star neighbor played by Elisha Cuthbert, who played a teenager herself on the hit Fox TV series 24. The film celebrates pornography—its producers, its fans, and its very existence—even as it portrays its starlet as eager to escape the shame and degradation of the industry. Stars keep signing up for Hollywood’s take on porn, keen to replicate the indie cool of the 1997 film Boogie Nights. Jeff Bridges recently joined an ensemble cast for the indie comedy Moguls, about a small town banding together to make a porn film—an update of The Full Monty? As Brian Grazer, whose 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat looks at the first pornographic film to move into the mainstream, explains, “We’re experiencing in a much grander fashion porno chic. I think it’s now entering the mainstream in a much more pervasive way than the fad surrounding Deep Throat. If you’re going to spend the time or money to make a movie and you want it to be sexually charged, you’re forced to go further because we’ve become somewhat sexually desensitized. Every poster and television ad, you get on the Internet and it’s clogged on pornography. I think if a filmmaker wants to have impact or shock you—and that’s what movies have to do—you have to find original images that shock.”4