Pornland (14 page)

Why, then, do many of these same progressives refuse to engage in a thoughtful analysis of how porn affects the culture? For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”
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Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.

If, then, we replace the “Does porn cause rape?” question with more nuanced questions that ask how porn messages shape our reality and our culture, we avoid falling into the images-lead-to-rape discussion. What this reformulation does is highlight the ways that the stories in pornography, by virtue of their consistency and coherence, create a worldview that the user integrates into his reservoir of beliefs that form his ways of understanding, seeing, and interpreting what goes on around him.

By placing porn use within a cultural context, we can begin to see how powerful it really is. As boys grow up to be men, they are inundated with messages from the media, messages that both objectify women’s bodies and depict women as sex objects who exist for male pleasure. These images are part and parcel of the visual landscape and hence are unavoidable. They come at boys and men from video games, movies, television, ads, and men’s magazines, and they supply them with a narrative about women, men, and sexuality. What porn does is to take these cultural messages about women and present them in a succinct way that leaves little room for multiple interpretations. While there are some media images that can be read in a number of ways (called polysemic in media studies) by different people, gonzo porn, particularly—with its overt contempt for women and incessant story line of how women like to be humiliated and debased—delivers a clear message to men, who have already developed a somewhat pornographic gaze by virtue of being brought up in a society filled with sexist pop culture images.

To say that the way users look at a porn image is, in large part, defined by the culture that they grew up in is to say that the context within which images are consumed shapes the way that meaning is produced. One way to understand this is to compare sexist images to racist ones. This is not to say that sexism and racism are the same, just that images that legitimize different types of oppression can work in similar ways. One particularly racist image was that of Stepin Fetchit, an image developed by Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry that was popular with (white) moviegoers in the 1930s. With his slow mannerisms and his constant refrain of “Yes, massa,” Perry constructed an image of black men as ingratiating half-wits. African Americans protested these images as they viewed them as having very real effects on the way whites thought about blacks. I doubt that African Americans would have been persuaded by the argument that these images were just playful fantasies of white people and that white viewers were sophisticated enough to know that these media images were mere comedic entertainment, and hence they could separate blacks in the media—half-wits—from real blacks—their neighbors and coworkers.

Now, no media theorist would argue that such images alone would make a nonracist white take out a lifetime membership with the KKK; nor would they have an immediate or powerful effect in a society where blacks and whites were already treated as full and equal citizens. However, put these images in a society with a long history of racism, where the dominant ideology is that blacks are lazy, shiftless, violence-prone freeloaders, and you begin to see how the Stepin Fetchit images didn’t change the views of the average white person so much as they delivered to the white population ideas that were floating around in the culture in a form that was compelling, easy to understand—and even easier to get away with. After all, it was supposedly just entertainment.

It is no accident that black civil rights movements have consistently opposed the racist messages—from
Birth of a Nation
to Don Imus—that the media spew on a regular basis. Every group that has fought for liberation understands intuitively what media theorists took decades to realize, namely, that media images play a major role in the systematic dehumanization of an oppressed group. These images never stand alone but are implicated in the broader system of messages that legitimize the ongoing oppression of a group, and their power is often derived not from shifting attitudes and behavior but from strengthening and normalizing the ideology that condones oppression.

If we take these arguments and apply them to pornography, we see that some of porn’s effects might be more subtle than causing an immediate change in attitudes and behaviors. By the time they first encounter porn, most men have internalized the sexist ideology of our culture, and porn, rather than being an aberration, actually cements and consolidates their ideas about sexuality.
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And it does this in a way that gives them intense sexual pleasure. This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable.

Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.

To see just how invisible sexual violence is in pornography, we can go back to Daniel Bernardi’s article. Bernardi is quick to pull apart anti-porn feminists for arguing that porn has any real-world effects, accusing Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon of being unsophisticated scholars who “neglect to think about the weakness of their methodology,” but he then critiques racist images in porn as “colorized hate” that could have a very real effect on the lives of people of color.
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The obvious question here is that if racist porn images can have a detrimental effect on people of color in general, then why can’t images of women—black, white, Asian, Latina—being choked and ejaculated on while being called cunts have a negative effect on women of all colors?

The answer to this is that porn does indeed help to shape the worldviews of men who masturbate to it. I know this first and foremost from the hundreds, if not thousands, of men I have spoken with over the years about their porn use. While there are a slew of psychological studies that support this claim,
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what I find more useful are the many conversations that I’ve had with males after my lectures. These are not self-selected men since the lecture is often mandated by teachers, coaches, or fraternities. It is in these discussions that the complexity of porn use is best captured because the men are speaking organically about their lives in ways that make sense to them rather than responding to a researcher’s predesigned set of questions. Obviously these men are not representative of every man who uses porn, especially as they are aged mainly between eighteen and twenty-four and working toward a college degree, but patterns have emerged over twenty years that speak to the multiple ways that porn affects the real lives of men. The stories I have heard sound very similar to the ones discussed by Pamela Paul—who interviewed a cross section of men—in her book
Pornified,
suggesting that the men who speak to me are not that different from the general population of men who use pornography.
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What I hear most is that these men feel like sexual losers. They thought college would present easy opportunities for sex, assume that other guys are “getting it,” and conclude that something must be amiss with them or the women they are trying to hook up with. They worry they’re not good-looking enough, smooth enough, or masculine enough to score, and since the porn view of the world suggests that women are constantly available, these men are bewildered by rejection. They often express deep shame about their inability to hook up, and this shame morphs into anger at their female peers who, unlike porn women, have the word “no” in their vocabulary.

Given the increasing prevalence of hooking up in the culture, especially on college campuses, these men’s perceptions that other guys seem to have no problem finding sex is not completely inaccurate. Where they seem to lose touch with reality is in the degree to which they assume this is the norm. In the porn world of never-ending sex, every interaction with a woman—be it a student, a doctor, a maid, a teacher, or just a stranger—ends up sexualized. Add to this the stories that men regale each other with about their latest conquest, stories that often sound like the porn movie they just watched, and you have a constructed world of constant male access to every woman a man meets. When the real world doesn’t play out like this, then disappointment and anger make sense.

Hooking up, however, brings its own set of disappointments since the mind-blowing porn sex they were anticipating looks nothing like the sex they are actually having. Because porn has been the only form of sex education for many of these young and impressionable men, they envisioned having the type of sex that they have been masturbating to: exciting, deep-thrusting penetration of the hookup’s orifices that goes on and on, ending in her having a screaming orgasm. The erection needed for this sex is more difficult to sustain than they anticipated as their penis, unlike the Viagra-pumped porn penis, has limits. They are disappointed with what they see as their too-quick ejaculations, their inability to perform over and over again, and their unsophisticated techniques. Adam grew up watching his father’s porn and feels that “porn taught me all I know about sex. My parents never mentioned the word sex at home, and sex ed in school was a fucking joke. I had this image of how great sex would be, both of us going at it for hours. So it was kind of a shock the way the real thing turned out . . . she didn’t [have an orgasm] and I came really quickly.”

With these feelings of inadequacy also come feelings of anger toward the hookup, as she is not as willing as Pornland women to have porn-like sex. Pornland women don’t seem to mind extreme acts, so why is the one lying next to him in bed kicking up such a fuss? The sex she wants is more vanilla, but as a connoisseur of porn sex, he finds this boring. One student told me, “I love porn and I try out the sex on my girlfriend but she isn’t interested. I dumped the last girl I was with because she wanted to keep the sex straight. That’s not for me. If women don’t want to try different things, then I am not interested.” He continued to say that he really wants to give his latest sex partner a “facial” (porn-speak for ejaculating on the face), but she refuses.

What troubles many of these men most is that they need to pull up the porn images in their head in order to have an orgasm with their partner. They replay porn scenes in their mind or think about having sex with their favorite porn star when they are with their partners. Dan was concerned about his sexual performance with women: “I can’t get the pictures of anal sex out of my head when having sex, and I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last anal scene I watched.” I asked him if he thought porn had in any way affected his sexuality, to which he answered, “I don’t know. I started looking at porn before I had sex, so porn is pretty much how I learned about sex. It can be a kind of problem to think about porn as much as I do, especially when with my girlfriend. It means I am not really present with her, my head is somewhere else.”

Some think a way to spice up the sex is by getting their partners to watch porn and act out the scenes; others suggest threesomes, bondage, or S&M. Then there are those who tell me that all they can think about is the porn they plan to watch as soon as the sex is over. Some men have told me that they even cut the sex short so that the woman will leave and he can then turn to porn. Tim told me that one of his “tricks” is to “get her off quickly and tell her that she has to go because my roommate is due back . . . that way I get to have sex and watch a porno.” For these men, it is gonzo movies and not features that are the porn of choice. Jeremy, for example, said, “I watch only certain movies with girls because they like the more tame ones, but when it’s just me alone, then I go straight to the real ones.” Here he clearly sees gonzo porn as more “real” than features.

One pattern I have seen emerge is the way many of these men don’t mind the porn images intruding into their sex lives as long as the sex partner is a hookup. They start to mind when they have met someone they want to forge a relationship with and they are unable to get rid of the images. Try as they may, scenes from their favorite movies come hurtling back as they become aroused. They find themselves comparing their girlfriend to their favorite porn performers, with the girlfriend coming off the loser. Andy put it succinctly: “When we have sex, I try not to think of some scenes from porn that I like, and then I feel guilty because I can’t help myself when I do think about that. I feel like a shit because she doesn’t even know I watch porn.” Tony, voicing a similar sentiment, said, “I hope she never knows what’s going through my mind when we have sex. She’d hate me.”