Pornified Read online

  Meanwhile, pornographers have crossed over into the mainstream media. Hugh Hefner recently appeared in commercials for fast-food chain Carl’s Jr. Jenna Jameson, the porn star who reportedly earned more than a million dollars in 2002, wrote a bestselling book entitled How to Make Love Like a Porn Star with former New York Times reporter Neil Strauss. In addition to her own Web site, Jameson makes regular TV appearances and writhes in music videos, and has appeared in Hollywood films such as Analyze That and—surprise, surprise—Private Parts, a Howard Stern vehicle. Ron Jeremy, the star of more than 1,800 X-rated films, has become a recognizable brand outside the X-rated film aisle. He starred in the WB reality show The Surreal Life and in his own documentary film, Porn Star—The Legend of Ron Jeremy, and has cameoed in mainstream films such as The Rules of Attraction, Detroit Rock City, and Killing Zoe. These days, Jeremy tours shopping malls and makes regular appearances on the university lecture circuit, where he is typically met by thousands of adoring fans, many of them teenagers charmed by his retro-cool “Starsky and Hutch” style. He also shows up at wet T-shirt contests, rock concerts, and other live and televised entertainment events. Kids love him. In May 2004, the ex-porn star was treated to a VIP pass at Disney World in Orlando, where he was mobbed by “clean-cut dads and moms and their kids [who] took turns snapping pictures with him all day,” according to local reports.5

  While pornography has seeped into mainstream culture, the images that remain confined to the porn world have become increasingly intense. Old school defenders of pornography may not be familiar with the direction in which Internet and DVD-era pornography has gone. They might not understand the infinite possibilities offered by online pornography and the intoxicating effects of the anonymity, accessibility, and affordability of the Internet. They have most likely not watched recent hardcore videos, such as Gag Factor 15, the latest in a popular series of pornographic movies in which the action takes place in a room full of men in head scarves and masks holding photos of torture from Abu Ghraib. They probably haven’t heard the sound track of such a film, in which one man screams nonsensically in what is supposed to be Arabic while another translates, “We will do to your women what you have done to our men—you degraded our people, now we’ll degrade yours. The streets will spill over with spit!” They probably have not continued to watch as the film shows the men standing over a woman dressed in military clothes and dog tags shouting, “I was only following orders!” Or seen the penultimate move where one of the “Arab” men brandishes a sword and threatens to slice off the girl’s head before the film’s true climax, multiple oral sex scenes in which the girl is shown to choke on genitalia and semen.6

  Pornography itself has changed radically over the last twenty years, but outdated ideas about pornography have gone unchallenged and so-called eternal truths have been perpetuated without protest. Back in the seventies and eighties, pornography was a topic of much discussion. Both men and women debated its merits and harms, its legality and morality, its inevitability and its outcomes, but by the late nineties, the debate quieted down. In Christian corners and enclaves of the social Right, outcry occasionally emerges and is ignored by the mainstream as so many Puritans in search of the next Salem. Elsewhere, when talking about pornography today, one hears complacencies and certainties such as:

  • “Porn is harmless; it’s just looking at pictures. What’s wrong with fantasy?”

  • “If we women want to be naked and be proud of our bodies, what’s the problem? We’re in control, and it’s our choice.”

  • “All men look at porn. It’s human nature—men are biologically programmed to be visually stimulated.”

  • “If you believe in civil liberties and freedom of the press, you’ve got to be in favor of porn.”

  • “Women are objectified everywhere—advertisements, movies, fashion magazines. Pornography is no different—and there’s nothing that can be done about it anyway.”

  • “Only scumbags use pornography. Who cares what a bunch of lowlifes do?”

  We hear these arguments all the time. We hear them from men who do not view pornography themselves and from women who would be appalled to find out their boyfriends watch pay-per-view porn in hotels while traveling on business. We hear them from parents who would shudder to know their ten-year-old sons are clicking on Internet porn when they’re allegedly doing homework.

  Americans are nonetheless confident they already know everything there is to know about pornography. After all, pornography has been around in one form or another for as long as “the oldest profession” has been in working order. Men have always looked at pictures of naked ladies. Women have in turn often tried to sneak a peek at naked men (albeit somewhat more of a challenge). And couples have looked at other naked couples doing things they may or may not have wanted to do—or wondered what they were missing if they didn’t.

  It’s difficult, therefore, to approach a subject like pornography from a fresh perspective. Both men and women have so many preconceptions: a person is either for pornography or against it, a prude or a player, a religious fanatic or a radical feminist, Larry Flynt or Andrea Dworkin. There is no middle ground on the playing field of consumers and abstainers, civil libertarians and Comstockian curmudgeons. Yet framing the debate in terms of distorted polarities ignores the vast middle ground where pornography plays a significant and growing role. One need not be a prude or a religious zealot to experience revulsion at the sight of certain pornography, just as one need not be a depraved pervert or a lefty activist to use pornography.

  The fact is, none of the current assumptions reflect how pornography really affects people and their relationships—and to continue to abide by them would mean ignoring an issue that is transforming most Americans’ lives. Instead of relying on political posturing and abstract arguments, I have sought answers to some simple questions: Who uses pornography and why? What do men see in it? Are more women indulging? How does pornography affect people? Will looking at online pornography at age nine affect boys and girls when they reach sexual maturity? What is the impact of a pornified culture on relationships and on society as a whole?

  Countless other books have treated the supply side—the subject of pornography itself: the images and the industry, the players and the played with, the production values and profitability. This book will leave that subject alone. Only when it is relevant will I dwell on the particulars of pornography itself. Instead, this book discusses the demand—who uses pornography and how—and why it matters even to those who do not use pornography. This story is about how pornography’s growth, ubiquity, and acceptance are affecting American society, told through the words and lives of the people who know it best: pornography consumers. To find out the private stories that people suspect but never hear, experience but never talk about, I interviewed more than a hundred people (approximately 80 percent male) about the role pornography plays in their lives. Perhaps surprisingly, men were quite willing to open up about a subject they rarely get to discuss seriously and at length. Both men and women were often relieved to have the opportunity to explore issues that are usually swept under the bedsheets.

  While the scope of such qualitative research can never claim to be fully representative of all Americans, the people interviewed were expressly chosen to provide a broad spectrum. They ranged in age from twenty-one to fifty-nine; most were in their twenties and thirties. They were heterosexual (a whole other book could be written about gay pornography, an opportunity I leave to others). The men and women interviewed were otherwise diverse—ethnically, geographically, socioeco-nomically. They were from a variety of backgrounds and religions, educations, and occupations. No “profile” of the pornography user emerged because pornography cuts across all swathes of society.

  In addition, I commissioned the first nationally representative poll of Americans to deal primarily with pornography. Unlike other polls referred to in this book, many of which were online surveys, this poll actually reflects what the spectrum of A
mericans think; the poll is weighted demographically and geographically to represent the actual ethnic, age, and socioeconomic composition of America. It’s the first poll to ask many important questions, such as: Does pornography improve the sex lives of those who look at it? Is using pornography cheating? Do you believe all men look at pornography? How does pornography affect the children who view it? This poll, conducted by Harris Interactive, will be referred to throughout the book as the Pornified/Harris poll.

  My point is not to outline a comprehensive overview of pornography users in America but to use individual stories to illustrate key themes and trends, and back them up with solid quantitative data. The comments of one interviewee were often repeated by multiple interviewees, but rather than reiterate exhaustively what I heard, I chose to highlight prevalent themes through a sampling of individual stories that were typical or representative. Few subjects are more private than sexuality, and pornography in particular is a sensitive topic. For this reason all of my interviewees have been given pseudonyms and any identifying characteristics have been obscured in the pages that follow; their words are rendered just as they spoke them.

  I will show, through real-life experiences and evidence, how and why all of us—men and women, users and nonusers, advocates and foes—must rethink the way we approach pornography. The pornification of American culture is not only reshaping entertainment, advertising, fashion, and popular culture, but it is fundamentally changing the lives of more Americans, in more ways, than ever before. We are living in a pornified culture and we have no idea what this means for ourselves, our relationships, and our society.

  1

  A Guy Thing:

  Why Men Look at Porn

  If dominant wisdom holds true, then all men look at pornography. In an essay in Glamour magazine entitled, “Why Nice Guys Like Online Porn,” the anonymous author “Jake” claims, “The world is made up of two different kinds of guys: those who are turned on by porn and those who are really, really turned on by porn. If a guy tells you he’s impervious to smut, the truth is: for reasons moral, religious or masochistic he has chosen never to look at it; he is afraid of his own sexuality; or he’s lying.”1 Like Jake, most men who look at pornography believe that every man—liberal, conservative, uptight, married, or religious—looks at pornography. And nearly every man in America probably has at some point.

  But is it true that all men look at pornography, at least occasionally, throughout their lives? Ethan, a twenty-seven-year-old music executive, is a typical porn consumer. When asked his opinion on pornography, he immediately says with a laugh, “I love porn. I think it’s fantastic.” He started looking at it in seventh grade, when he stumbled across a stack of magazines belonging to a friend’s divorced father. After that, he turned to pornography regularly, beginning with print, upgrading to video and then DVD, and ultimately going dot-com, especially after getting broadband at home. These days, Ethan logs on every day for about twenty minutes, when he’s bored at work, or feels like goofing around. He and a group of about ten guys—“a bunch of lecherous friends in the industry”—will e-mail one another good porn gathered during their Internet forays. Funny Web sites, really hot girls, celebrity porn, sick stuff. The strangest things can be found when you’re surfing. Working in the music business—not a traditional corporate environment, he emphasizes—it’s no big deal to have porn playing on your computer. Once, a female colleague walked into Ethan’s office and noticed explicit pornography beaming out from his screen. “I said, ‘Check it out!’ and she laughed,” he recalls. “She thought it was pretty amusing.” At home, he pops in a pornographic DVD about three times a week. Every morning, he listens to Howard Stern; he particularly enjoys when porn stars are on the show. For Ethan, pornography is a natural part of life. Men, he explains, are visual beasts and overtly sexual people. They’re built for porn.

  Reliable figures are hard to come by, as many people are reluctant to admit to their usage even with the anonymity of a phone or online survey. But some statistics give an inkling. Discretion notwithstanding, pornography is demonstrably a popular pastime. In an online survey of 10,543 Americans by the Kinsey Institute, only 3 percent of respondents said they had never looked at pornography.* Only 20 percent of respondents said they had looked at pornography before but hadn’t looked at least once in the past month. That leaves 77 percent of respondents looking at pornography at least once in any given thirty-day period. Of these, 58 percent said they looked at least once a week and 19 percent looked at least once every day. When they do look, they frequently spend a lot of time. One quarter of those who looked in the past month had spent at least six hours doing so. A number of polls have looked specifically at Internet pornography. A nationally representative Zogby poll in 2000 reported that 32 percent of men and 11 percent of women said they had visited a sexually oriented Web site.* Younger Americans were more likely to visit such sites: 37 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds compared with 22 percent of thirty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds. Of those who visited such sexually oriented Web sites, nearly half were in committed relationships.

  Women frequently ask, What is it men like so much about porn? I know lots of guys are into porn, some men say, but I don’t understand the appeal. Only those who look at pornography understand their reasons for doing so, and at first, many of them have a hard time giving an answer. But when offered an opportunity to think it over, nearly all open up and divulge the appeal—how and why they started looking, the ways they respond to different kinds of pornography, the physical and emotional benefits they derive from it, and how it makes them feel. Most have never had the chance to freely discuss what lies behind their pornography preferences, and it’s only while talking about it that many begin to learn the answers themselves.

  For Ethan, pornography is all about seeing what he would like to do in real life—not about abstract fantasy. Because he’s “in touch” with his sexuality, Ethan knows what he likes. Mostly, it’s young women, between the ages of eighteen and twenty, blondes. “I’m a big fan of the schoolgirl look and the thigh-high stockings, which I guess go hand in hand,” he says. He likes his women to be athletic—not too skinny. He’s an “ass man” when it comes right down to it. “Oh and Jenna,” he says. “Love Jenna.” He pauses and adds, “Jenna Jameson, obviously.”

  Woman-on-woman porn, one of Jameson’s specialties, is something he’d love to experience live. He also seeks out depictions of oral sex, especially “cum shots.” The charm of pornography is its depiction of women who are over-the-top enthusiastic about sex. “Women in porn tend to act like sex is earth-shattering, even though in reality, sex isn’t like that all the time. Unfortunately …” he adds, with a chuckle. Like other men who enjoy pornography, Ethan not only seeks enjoyment from pornography, he allows pornography to open up new worlds to him, teaching him about sex and his response to it, providing him with the means for sexual release, a way to fantasize about sexual opportunities he cannot enjoy in real life, and a safe and friendly arena for self-validation. Mostly, however, Ethan discusses pornography the way most men do: it’s fun.

  And more men seem to be having a good time of it. There has been an explosion in online sexual activity. A 2004 poll of 15,246 men and women conducted by MSNBC.com and Elle magazine documented that three-fourths of men said they had viewed or downloaded erotic films and videos from the Internet.* (Forty-one percent of women did as well.) One in five men had watched or sexually interacted with someone on a live webcam. Three in ten admitted they go online with the intention of “cheating on their girlfriends or wives,” be it via pornography, online dating, or sex chat rooms. But not everyone said they looked at porn. In the same poll, the one in five men who said they abstain from Internet pornography expressed the following reasons for their disinterest: one-third said they had no need to seek out women on the Web—they already had a fulfilling sex life; one in four felt that using Internet pornography would make them feel disloyal to their partner; an additional one in
four said Internet pornography violated their moral beliefs; and pragmatism ruled the remaining 27 percent who said that Internet pornography clogged their computer with too many pop-ups and cookies. It wasn’t worth the hassle.

  Several companies track pornography usage online, avoiding the potential for underreporting characteristic of self-reported polls. Each month, Nielsen Net//Ratings tracks usage; for example, in October 2003, one in four Internet users accessed an adult Web site, spending an average of seventy-four minutes per month—and that doesn’t include time spent on amateur sites. (Nielsen admits they are capturing only a fraction of actual pornography consumption.) According to comScore, an Internet traffic measuring service, 70 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old men visit a pornographic site in a typical month—about 39 percent more than the average user. These young men comprise about one-fourth of all visitors to pornography online.2 The numbers for those in their twenties and thirties run nearly as high: 66 percent of all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four look at Internet pornography every month.