Pornland (17 page)

One show that popularized porn culture was
Sex and the City,
a show that supposedly celebrated female independence from men. At first glance this series was a bit different from others in its representation of female friendships and the power of women to form bonds that sustain them in their everyday lives. It also seemed to provide a space for women to talk about their own sexual desires, desires that were depicted as edgy, rebellious, and fun. However, these women claimed a sexuality that was ultimately traditional rather than resistant. Getting a man and keeping him were central to the narrative, and week after week we heard about the trials and tribulations of four white, privileged heterosexual women who seemed to find men who take their sexual cues from porn.

Porn-type sex is a fixture on the show, which regularly featured plotlines about men who like to watch porn as they have sex, men who are aroused by female urination, men who want group sex, men who can get aroused only by masturbating to porn, men who are into S&M, men who want anal sex, and men who are willing to have only hookup sex and not a relationship. In one episode, called “Models and Mortals,” Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finds out that a male friend of hers is secretly taping his girlfriends as they have sex. Rather than being appalled at this invasion of privacy, Carrie is immediately interested and sits down with him to watch the tapes. Later in the show, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) shows some interest in the man, and when she finds out that he tapes his girlfriends, she becomes even more determined to have hookup sex with him. Another one of the story lines of the show was Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) first husband’s inability to sustain an erection during sex. One night Charlotte hears noises coming from the bathroom and, thinking that her husband is crying, she walks in, only to see him masturbating to porn. Shocked at first, Charlotte later glues pictures of herself in the magazines.

These examples show how the
Sex and the City
women capitulated to the pornography that invades their sex lives. In their desire to get a man and keep him, they were willing to do anything, even if they felt uncomfortable. In the episode about urination, for example, Carrie is clearly uncomfortable with the idea, but eventually offers to either pour warm liquid on her partner or urinate with the door open so he can hear her. The idea that these women are independent is undermined by their dependency on men and male approval. At the end of the final season, Carrie is living with an emotionally unavailable artist in Paris and is saved by the equally emotionally unavailable Mr. Big. In the movie released in the summer of 2008, Mr. Big leaves her standing at the altar, but in typical
Sex and the City
style, Carrie eventually forgives him and marries him.

What critics have noted about the show and the movie is the role that consuming products plays in the lives of the women. Media scholar Angela McRobbie notes that the “show functions as a televisual magazine and shop window for the successful launching of shoes, accessories and fashion lines well beyond the means of average female viewers.”
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The
Sex and the City
women are described as being independent not because they refuse to submit to men’s power but because they can afford to buy their own high-end goods. Through the endless buying of goods, the women constructed their femininity, styling and restyling themselves depending on their latest purchase. Their bodies and their clothes spoke to a conventional—albeit upmarket—femininity that was constructed out of the culture’s mainstream images. Nowhere did we see a resistance to the fabricated image; rather, their very sexuality was dependent on the products they consumed. These women looked hot because they were perfectly turned out in designer gear. In one episode, in which Carrie has a first date with Mr. Big, she vows not to have sex with him, but the dress she buys for the occasion says otherwise, and the two do have sex—the dress becoming the marker of her sexuality. The problem with this is that women’s so-called independence became seamlessly meshed with their ability to consume rather than being about a feminist worldview that insists on equality in heterosexual relationships.

Nowhere is this pseudo-independence more celebrated than in
Cosmopolitan,
a magazine that claims to have “served as an agent for social change, encouraging women everywhere to go after what they want (whether it be in the boardroom or the bedroom).” It is hard to see how
Cosmopolitan
helped women advance in corporate America, given that most of the Cosmo girl’s time is taken up with perfecting her body and her sexual technique. But this doesn’t stop the magazine from boasting that “we here at
Cosmo
are happy to have played such a significant role in women’s history. And we look forward to many more years of empowering chicks everywhere.”
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In porn culture empowering women translates into “chicks” having lots of sex, and no magazine does more than
Cosmopolitan
to teach women how to perform porn sex in a way that is all about male pleasure.

With headlines every month promising “Hot New Sex Tricks,” “21 Naughty Sex Tips,” “Little Mouth Moves That Make Sex Hotter,” “67 New Blow-His-Mind Moves,” “8 Sex Positions You Haven’t Thought Of,” and so on, women seem to experience no authentic sexual pleasure; rather, what she wants and enjoys is what he wants and enjoys. While there might be an odd article here and there on what to wear to climb the corporate ladder, the magazine as a whole is all about “him” and “his” needs, wants, desires, tastes, and, most importantly, orgasm. In
Cosmopolitan,
as in much of pop culture, her pleasure is derived not from being a desiring subject but from being a desired object.

Women’s magazines that focus on “him” are not new, as earlier generations were also inundated with stories about “him,” but then the idea was to stimulate his taste buds rather than his penis.
Cosmopolitan
is the contemporary equivalent of
Ladies’ Home Journal
in that it pretends to be about women, but it is in fact all about getting him, pleasing him, and (hopefully) keeping him. For previous generations of women, the secret to a happy relationship lay in being a good cook, cleaner, and mother—for the young women of today, the secret is, well, just being a good lay. If the reader is going to
Cosmopolitan
for tips on how to build a relationship or ways of developing intimacy, she will be disappointed, as conversation only matters in the world of
Cosmo
if it is about talking dirty.

With its manipulative “We are all girls together” tone coupled with the wise older mentor approach that promises to teach young women all they need to know to keep “him coming back for more,”
Cosmopolitan,
like most women’s magazines, masquerades as a friend and teacher to young women trying to navigate the tricky terrain of developing a sexual identity in a porn culture.
Cosmopolitan
’s power is its promise to be a guide and friend, and it promotes itself as one of the few magazines that really understand what the reader is going through. A promotional ad for
Cosmopolitan
geared toward advertisers boasts that it is “its readers’ best friend, cheerleader and shrink.”
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In
Cosmopolitan,
hypersexualization is normalized by virtue of both the quantity of articles on sex and the degree to which they are explicit. For example, one article instructs the reader, in a somewhat clinical manner, on how to bring a man to orgasm: “While gripping the base of the penis steadily in one hand, place the head between your lips, circling your tongue around the crown. When you sense your guy is incredibly revved up, give his frenulum a few fast tongue licks.” For the uninitiated, the magazine explains that the frenulum is “the tiny ridge of flesh on the underside of his manhood, where the head meets the shaft.”
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Cosmopolitan
is quick to suggest using porn as a way to spice up sex. In one article, entitled “7 Bad Girl Bedroom Moves You Must Master,” the reader is told to take “the plunge into porn” as it “will add fiery fervor into your real-life bump and grinds.” The article quotes a reader who, after watching porn with her boyfriend, evidently ended up “having sex so hot that the porn looked tame in comparison.” The article suggests that if the reader feels embarrassed, she should “drive to a store in another neighborhood, shop online, or go to a place that stocks X-rated.”
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In the world that
Cosmopolitan
constructs for the reader, a world of blow jobs, multiple sexual positions, anonymous porn sex, and screaming orgasms (usually his), saying no to his erection is unthinkable. The options on offer in
Cosmopolitan
always concern the type of sex to have and how often. What is not on offer is the option to refuse his demands since he has (an unspoken and unarticulated) right of access to the female body. Indeed, readers are warned that not having sex on demand might end the “relationship.” Psychologist Gail Thoen, for example, informs
Cosmopolitan
’s readers that “constant cuddling with no follow-through (i.e., sex) can be frustrating to guys” and what’s more, “he is not going to like it if you leave him high and dry all the time.”
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The reader is pulled into a highly sexual world where technique is the key, and intimacy, love, and connection appear only rarely as issues worthy of discussion. The message transmitted loud and clear is that if you want a man, then not only must you have sex with him, you must learn ways to do it better and hotter than his previous girlfriends.

That the magazine teaches women how to have porn sex is clear in an article that ostensibly helps women deal with the etiquette of how to behave in the morning after the first sexual encounter. Women are told: “Don’t Stay Too Long.” The article warns women that “just because he had sex with you doesn’t mean he’s ready to be attached at the hip for the day.” Actually, the entire day seems like a long shot—“Bo” informs readers that “I was dating this girl who wanted to hang out the next morning, but after only a couple of hours with her, I realized I wasn’t ready to be that close.” What advice does
Cosmopolitan
have for women in this situation? “Skip out after coffee but before breakfast.”
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Media targeted to women create a social reality that is so overwhelmingly consistent it is almost a closed system of messages. In this way, it is the sheer ubiquity of the hypersexualized images that gives them power since they normalize and publicize a coherent story about women, femininity, and sexuality. Because these messages are everywhere, they take on an aura of such familiarity that we believe them to be our very own personal and individual ways of thinking. They have the power to seep into the core part of our identities to such a degree that we think that we are freely choosing to look and act a certain way because it makes us feel confident, desirable, and happy. But as scholar Rosalind Gill points out, if the look was “the outcome of everyone’s individual, idiosyncratic preferences, surely there would be greater diversity, rather than a growing homogeneity organized round a slim, toned, hairless body.”
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This highly disciplined body has now become the key site where gender is enacted and displayed on a daily basis. To be feminine requires not only the accoutrements of hypersexuality—high heels, tight clothes, and so on—but also a body that adheres to an extremely strict set of standards. We need to look like we spend hours in the gym exhausting ourselves as we work out, but whatever the shape of the body, it is never good enough. Women have so internalized the male gaze that they have now become their own worst critics. When they go shopping for clothes or look in a mirror, they dissect themselves piece by piece. Whatever the problem, and there is always a problem—the breasts are too small, the thighs not toned enough, the butt too flat or too round, the stomach too large—the result is a deep sense of self-disgust and loathing. The body becomes our enemy, threatening to erupt into fatness at any time, so we need to be hypervigilant. What we end up with is what Gill calls a “self-policing narcissistic gaze,” a gaze that is so internalized that we no longer need external forces to control the way we think or act.
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We cannot talk about the contemporary feminine body without mention of the complicated relationship that most women and girls have to food: we want it, enjoy it, and yet feel guilty for eating it. The need to eat is taken as a sign of weakness, as not measuring up to being a real woman since celebrity women manage to survive on minimal amounts of food. Whenever I am in places where women congregate—the hairdresser, gym, clothes shops—I hear long and involved conversations about dieting. Women recite lengthy lists about what they have eaten, what they intend to eat, and what they need to stop eating. A kind of shame hangs over the conversations as everyone assumes that they are too fat and hence weak willed.

In her excellent book on body image and food, feminist philosopher Susan Bordo looks at the ways the culture helps shape women’s ideas about what constitutes the perfect body.
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The bodies of the women we see in magazines and on television are actually very unusual in their measurements and proportions, with long necks, broad shoulders, and high waists. Yet because these are more or less the only images we see, we take them to be the norm rather than the exception and assume that the problem lies with us and not the fashion and media industries that insist on using a very specific body type. This is what the media do: they take the abnormal body and make it normal by virtue of its visibility, while making the normal bodies of real women look abnormal by virtue of their invisibility. The result is a massive image disorder on the part of society. Since we all develop notions of ourselves from cultural messages and images, it would seem that a truly disordered female is one who actually likes her body.