Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (15 page)

Anna Span’s view is no longer seen as that unusual. The mainstream media are often keen to pick up on the voices of women who are positive about pornography – including women who work in pornography. For instance, every Saturday the
Guardian
newspaper publishes a section called Work, which contains advice and tips on different careers. One day in 2007 the main interview was with one Daisy Rock, who spoke about her working hours – ‘I don’t stop working, except to sleep or go out’ – the money she earns, ‘anything from £350 to £500’ for a scene, adding up to around £64,000 a year, and that the only drawback of the work she does is that ‘feature films can be exhausting and repetitive at times … much like working on a mainstream movie’.
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In such an article it seems there could be no better career option for an intelligent, hardworking young woman, than to go into hardcore pornography.

Where pornography is glimpsed in mainstream art forms it now tends to be seen as an unexceptional part of women’s as well as men’s sex lives. For instance, in one episode of
Sex and the City
, Samantha stars in her own pornographic video of
herself having sex with her boyfriend; in Adam Thirlwell’s first novel,
Politics
, couples watch pornography together and carefully mimic what they see: ‘Into their domestic repertoire, Anjali and Nana had introduced the sexual practice known as fisting … They did this, led by Anjali, using tips culled from internet pornography’
²
; in a recent mainstream cinema release,
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, the hero seduced the heroine by asking her to star in a porn movie with him. While it’s quite frequent to see this kind of tolerant reference to pornography in mainstream art, it has become rare to find any condemnation of it.

So we now live in a world in which even many feminists have stopped trying to condemn pornography. This has been a huge turnaround in feminist thought. At one point in the 1980s it seemed that the primary energy of feminists was directed against pornography. The classic feminist critique of pornography saw women only as victims of a male-dominated pornography industry that was based on the degradation of women and encouraged violence against them. As Robin Morgan put it in 1974, ‘pornography is the theory, and rape the practice’
³
and as Andrea Dworkin said in 1981, pornography makes men ‘increasingly callous to cruelty, to the infliction of pain, to violence against persons, to the humiliation or degradation of persons, to the abuse of women and children’.
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From the attempts of Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, the American lawyer, to legislate against pornography, to the demonstrations by British feminist groups at Soho sex shops,
⁵
feminists made it known very clearly that they believed pornography was the enemy of liberation.

Yet even at that time there were feminists who dissented from this point of view. These feminists insisted that there was no clear-cut link between pornography and violence against women; although some research suggested that watching pornography encouraged men to hold views that trivialised
sexual violence, other research suggested that consuming pornography actually correlated with less aggressive sexual attitudes and behaviour.
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These feminists said that there was no legislating for sexual desire; what one person saw as arousing and delightful, another might see as exploitative and another as ridiculous.
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As more feminists with differing views joined the debate, it became clear that the classic feminist critique of pornography had left something very important out: it assumed that women never take any pleasure in pornography. This is clearly wrong. There are intelligent women, choosing and thinking for themselves, who do enjoy watching pornography, and some enjoy making it and acting in it too; we can no longer deny the intense sexual power of pornography for women as well as men.

Now that many women have talked openly about the pleasures of pornography themselves, there is no point trying to return to that classic feminist critique that set all women on one side, and all men on the other side, of pornography. For some feminists, this means that, rather than arguing against the very existence of porn, they are looking more for equality within a world already saturated by pornography. Just as with Anna Span, what we tend to hear from feminists now is not so much a desire to hold back the tide of pornography, as the desire to jump right in. For instance, Charlotte Roche, the German author of the novel
Wetlands
, is a feminist who believes that: ‘There is such a nice range for men, they have so much opportunity – porn on the Internet, wanking booths … it’s a big shame that we don’t have that for women.’
⁸
Or as Zoe Margolis, the author of
Girl with a One-track Mind
, has said, ‘If we are to buy in to the sex industry (and let’s face it, objectionable as much of it might be, it’s not disappearing any time soon) then perhaps it is time women started making demands as consumers, rather than just being the providers.’
⁹

I can see why some women are arguing that the way forward
really rests on creating more opportunities for women in pornography, yet I think it is worth looking at why it is that some of us still feel such unease with the situation as it is now. The muffling of dissent about pornography has coincided with a time in which pornography has massively expanded. For a long time I was sceptical about the claim that the internet had really changed people’s access to and attitudes to pornography. After all, people who want it have surely always been able to find pornographic material to suit them, whether they were living in fifth-century Athens or the 1950s. But the evidence I looked at for this book convinced me that the internet has driven a real change for many people, especially younger people. If once upon a time someone who was truly fascinated by pornography might have found, with some difficulty, ten, or twenty, or a hundred images to satisfy themselves, now anyone can click on a single website and find twenty, a hundred, a thousand choices of videos and images, with the most specialist and violent next to the most gentle and consensual.

Statistics now tell a story that is hard to ignore. A survey carried out in 2006 found that one in four men aged twenty-five to forty-nine had viewed hardcore online pornography in the previous month, and that nearly 40 per cent of men had viewed pornographic websites in the previous year.
¹⁰
But it is the prevalence of pornography consumption among children that is most striking. While 25 per cent of children aged ten to seventeen in a study carried out in 2000 had seen unwanted online pornography in the form of popups or spam, the numbers of children who see pornography this way is rising quite quickly, and in 2005 a similar study found that 34 per cent had seen unwanted pornography when they were online.
¹¹
In this survey, 42 per cent of the 10- to 17-year-olds had seen pornography, whether wanted or unwanted – but this has been dwarfed by results found in other surveys. In another study in Canada, 90 per cent of 13- and 14-year-old boys and 70 per cent of girls the same age
had viewed pornography. Most of this porn use had been over the internet, and more than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos ‘too many times to count’.
¹²
While once someone could live their whole lives without ever seeing anyone but themselves and their own partners having sex, now the voyeur’s view of sex has been normalised, even for children. For an increasing number of young people, pornography is no longer something that goes alongside sex, but something that precedes sex. Before they have touched another person sexually or entered into any kind of sexual relationship, many children have seen hundreds of adult strangers having sex.

When I spoke to one teenager who is studying for his A levels and quoted statistics to him that said that the majority of young teenagers have looked at pornography, Luke High laughed. ‘More like a hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘It’s when you’re thirteen and fourteen that everyone starts looking and talking about it at school – before you’re having sex, you’re watching it. I think that those lads’ mags are only read by certain kinds of boys, my friends wouldn’t read them, to be honest, just like they wouldn’t buy the
Sun
. But pornography – it crosses every social class, every cultural background. Everyone watches porn. And I think that’s entirely down to the internet – not just your home computer, but everything that can connect, your phone, your BlackBerry, whatever you’ve got – everyone’s watching porn. Adults have got to know what teenagers are doing, and if you’re caught you get told off. But I never had a serious discussion with a teacher or anyone about it.’

Now that the classic feminist critique of pornography has disappeared from view there are, as this teenager noted, few places that young people are likely to hear much criticism or even discussion about the effects of pornography. But this massive colonisation of teenagers’ erotic life by commercial pornographic materials is something that it is hard to feel sanguine about. By expanding so much in a world that is still so unequal,
pornography has often reinforced and reflected the inequalities around us.

This means that men are still encouraged, through most pornographic materials, to see women as objects, and women are still encouraged much of the time to concentrate on their sexual allure rather than their imagination or pleasure. No wonder we have seen the rise of the idea that erotic experience will necessarily involve, for women, a performance in which they will be judged visually. When I interviewed young women about their attitudes to sexuality, I was struck by one apparently trivial fact – that all of them agreed that they would never want to have sex if they hadn’t depilated their pubic hair. ‘I would never want a man to see me if I hadn’t been waxed recently,’ said one young woman from Cambridge University, and her friends nodded in agreement. ‘I don’t need to have all the hair removed, but it has to be neat,’ said another. ‘That is definitely tied into porn,’ said another. ‘We know what men will have seen and what they will expect.’

Where the rise of expectations from pornography result just in depilation, that is one thing, but the rise of interest in surgery to change the appearance of the labia is another, far more worrying development. The number of operations carried out in the UK to cut women’s labia to a preconceived norm is currently rising steeply.
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This development has been covered extensively in magazines and television programmes, often in a way calculated to increase anxiety among female viewers. For instance, in an episode of
Embarrassing Teenage Bodies
, screened on Channel 4 in 2008, a young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia. The comments left on the programme’s website showed how this decision to carry out plastic surgery to fit a young woman’s body to a so-called norm made
other young women feel intensely anxious. ‘I’m fifteen and I thought I was fine, but since I’ve watched the programme I’ve become worried, as mine seem larger than the girl who had hers made surgically smaller! It doesn’t make any difference to my life, but I worry now that when I’m older and start having sex I might have problems!’ said one girl.
¹⁴
This idea that there is one correct way for female genitals to look is undoubtedly tied into the rise of pornography. Indeed, one website for a doctor who specialises in this form of plastic surgery makes this explicit: ‘Laser Reduction Labioplasty can sculpture the elongated or unequal labial minora (small inner lips) according to one’s specification … Many women bring us Playboy and say that they want to look like this. With laser reduction labioplasty, we work with women to try and accomplish their desires.’
¹⁵
If the rise of pornography was really tied up with women’s liberation and empowerment, it would not be increasing women’s anxiety about fitting into a narrow physical ideal.

What’s more, while interviewing people about their experiences with pornography, I began to realise that despite the absence of much public debate on the issue, many women are struggling with the influence of pornography on their private, emotional lives. Even if they did not accept the classic feminist critique that all pornography necessarily involves or encourages abuse of women, many of them were still concerned about the fact that pornography foregrounds a view of sex that can be profoundly dehumanising. In pornography, there is no before and no after; sex occurs in isolation. In pornography, there is little individuality; every partner is interchangeable. In pornography, there is no communication between the individuals concerned; it is all performance directed at the observer. In pornography, there is no emotional resonance to sex; everything happens on the exterior. When people become imaginatively caught up in pornography, this dehumanised view of sex can clearly have real effects on their own relationships.

One day I found myself taking a taxi in a small town in Essex, and ringing on the doorbell in a suburban street, to talk to a self-confessed pornography addict. Jim, a quiet man in his early forties, was embarrassed by what we talked about over the following couple of hours, but also eager to tell a story that he feels is probably less unusual than one might think. ‘I know I’m not the only guy who’s like this,’ he kept saying. Jim first became aware of pornography when he was just five years old. ‘My dad was really into pornography. I was five when I found a copy of his
Mayfair
. I found it quite captivating, to be honest.’ When he was about seven Jim discovered hardcore European pornography in his father’s wardrobe, and even to this day he can remember some of those first images he saw. ‘I found them quite disturbing. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it of course, because the whole point is that it’s hidden, you know that you’re not supposed to know about it.’ His fascination with what he had found grew and grew. From then on he would get up before his parents woke, before six in the morning, to look through his father’s briefcase and find the porn magazines. ‘Then my dad got a Super 8 projector, when I was about eleven or twelve, and he would hire out porn films – he would lock himself in the dining room to watch them. But the real change came when he got a video, and I persevered till I found the films. I was about fourteen, and I would find them and watch them when I was alone in the house. Constantly.’