The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (18 page)

Evangelisers who object to porn love to talk about the money: erotica is a profitable business, and online content alone is estimated to generate $3000 every minute in
sales.
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That sure sounds like a lot. However, implying that because something is profitable, it must be bad is a strange claim to make. After all, food
is also profitable. When, for example, was the last time you ate something that was completely free?

Even if you grow your own food, you probably buy seeds. From supermarkets to restaurants, our eating habits have long been for sale. An enormous international industry makes huge amounts of
money from every aspect of food production and consumption. But that doesn’t make our food without nutritional or enjoyment value. It doesn’t make your food preferences inauthentic just
because
money’s involved. As a society we’ve outsourced a lot of our food production; it doesn’t mean people stop eating, or stop enjoying what they
eat.

Just because erotica can be a commodity does not make it at odds with real human desire. After all, if it did not arouse, it would not sell. All the talk about the money also fails to take into
account the proliferation of genuine amateur porn created and uploaded to free websites.

And as far as commodities go, well, porn is only a piece of the entire entertainment pie. While most reports emphasise how big and ubiquitous the adult industry is, most of them also fail to
compare it to anything else. Take porn on the internet, for instance. On RedTube (a popular erotic video site), of the many videos available there are only 120 that have attracted over a million
viewers. At first glance, that seems like a lot.

Until you compare it with non-sex videos, that is. On the enormously popular non-porn site YouTube, for the keyword ‘kitten’ there are over 100 videos that have over a million
viewers. About 500 videos tagged ‘Justin Bieber’ have achieved the same status. Even Lego gets more videos with high view counts than on the entire RedTube site.
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Is porn everywhere? In a way, yes. But it’s a small fraction of the entertainment economy, even online.

The money in adult entertainment is dwarfed by the turnover of all other entertainment. In the Premier League of English football, players have an average salary of £1.46 million each.
Porn stars make about £190-£600 per film. Each of the six principal cast members of
Friends
made $1 million per episode in its final series. There has never been a porn film with
a total budget of $1 million . . . much less a cast budget of $6 million plus. Hugh Hefner reportedly plans to buy back Playboy, the largest adult entertainment company, in a deal worth $200
million – or about a tenth of Facebook’s value.

Every time I hear someone bring up the money, I have to laugh. Because let’s face facts: you can make a living in porn but it isn’t exactly minting billionaires.

Critics of porn also talk about the content of the product as if that
reveals how it was made. But assuming that because the actors on screen are doing one thing – a
man being whipped by a dominatrix, say, or a woman engaging in group sex – that this is the relationship off screen is baffling. They’re actors. They’re acting.

‘Pornography has a central role in actualizing this system of subordination in the contemporary West, beginning with the conditions of its production,’ claimed Catharine
MacKinnon.
⁷⁵
Evidence she gave to support this statement? Zero. Instead she assesses the finished films and uses this as evidence of harm done during
production.

There’s a huge difference between porn acting and sexual reality. Using MacKinnon’s logic would be like claiming Bambi Woods, star of the classic 1970s porno
Debbie Does
Dallas
, actually had sex with all 928,000 residents of Dallas in 1978. Of course she didn’t!

Erotica is fantasy. It is not documentary. We know this because an actress playing a submissive in one film might turn up as a happy wife in another. No one assumes regular actors are really the
people they play. It would be silly to think Christian Bale really was Batman, or that Keanu Reeves is actually capable of walking through walls, but even people who should know better assume what
they see in porn is literal reality.

Being concerned about how porn is made is a good idea. But it’s a lot like being concerned about how your clothes are made. It’s impossible to tell from looking at a T-shirt whether
it was made in ethical conditions, or whether people were exploited so you could have a cheap top. A conservative long-sleeved pussy bow blouse might come from a sweatshop. A simple vest could come
from a factory where everyone was treated and paid well. The appearance of the finished product is no indication of what went into it. You’d only know the conditions involved by doing your
homework.

The anti-porn activists have not done their homework. According to them, ‘[T]oday’s mainstream Internet porn is brutal and cruel, with body-punishing sex acts that debase and
dehumanize women.’
⁷⁶

What’s wrong with that statement? Loads. Consider Linda Lovelace, star of
Deep Throat
, the first mainstream porn hit. The film is almost prim by today’s standards. It later
came out that
Lovelace was coerced and abused throughout her career. Contrast that with one of today’s most outspokenly self-determined stars, Sasha Grey. Grey is well
known for her gonzo humiliation scenes, but her career owes nothing to pimps or abusers. There is zero indication in the content of either film to tell you which woman was abused and which woman
wasn’t. And as the adult film industry becomes more mainstream, women like Sasha Grey are more rule than exception.

It’s impossible to know from looking at a film how the actors felt about their involvement. It’s acting, after all – what’s on screen is not the way the people are in
real life. Hardcore scenes can have entirely willing, consenting participants. ‘Vanilla’ soft porn could include people who are coerced, trafficked, or abused. Making conclusions based
on the plot is silly, and no way to be an informed consumer.

So, how do you go about supporting ethically produced porn? In the US, the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988 – often referred to as 2257 – requires proof of age
for everyone involved. Federal inspectors can at any time launch inspections and prosecute infractions. With porn production legal and well documented, it is possible for such laws to exist. If you
want to make and distribute legal films in the US, you have to comply with 2257, no exceptions. With the US an enormous consumer of DVDs and online adult content, a huge amount of material comes
into the jurisdiction of these laws. And that’s a good thing.

Along with 2257, it’s also possible to verify that people working in porn are there willingly. There are blogs, Twitter accounts, and all sorts of media produced by porn actors. It’s
far from a Fairtrade kind of assurance for porn, but for those who are interested, the information is out there. Supporting small studios and solo producers through visiting their sites and buying
their films goes a long way to ensuring the people you see on screen are there because they want to be.

But if the opponents got their way and all porn was illegal, there would be little incentive for filmmakers to make or keep proof of age and consent, since such evidence would be used against
them as evidence of crime. As has happened so often when something
ike this is prohibited, the small, independent producers would inevitably give way to criminal interests.
The porn business has come a long way since the days of Linda Lovelace; let’s not send it back there.

Many porn critics focus exclusively on the women – or to be more specific, on the participants who are
born
women. There are many transgendered people working in
adult films, sex work, and other adult entertainment. Not many anti-porn campaigners seem all that concerned about
their
histories of abuse and coercion (or lack thereof) – in spite of
the statistics showing a higher incidence of job discrimination, assault, and poor sexual health outcomes in this group than among the population at large.
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There also is not much discourse about the men in porn and their place on the totem pole, even though they earn far less than the women. (So much less that straight performers will sometimes go
gay for pay’, with better rates in male-male porn.) The assumption that if a man is getting some’ he’s 100 per cent okay with that is a huge generalisation . . . and surely one
that the fate of Stephen Clancy Hill disproved.

Evidence suggests that while high-profile stars have blazed a trail for the women in straight porn to be increasingly independent and self-reliant, it’s the men working on screen and
sometimes behind the camera in those same films who are really losing out in the business. While the sad and undermotivated end of Stephen Clancy Hill might read like something out of
Boogie
Nights
, it’s important to remember that these are real people working in an industry whose stories are as varied and valid as the rest of human experience.

All the research and public policy in the world, however, seem to have no effect on people who already think porn is bad for women. An interesting thing about humans is that we seem hard-wired
to reject anything we don’t like rather than let our views be changed by hard evidence.

When humans choose sides, few of us stay open-minded to new ideas. We see the proof that we are right everywhere, whether in the area of climate change, or sports teams, or even something as
apparently irrelevant and emotion-free as which bank we use.

Studies have long shown this to be the case when it comes to how people feel about pornography. A 1971 article by Louis Zurcher found that the people who support adult entertainment are
demographically different from those who oppose it.
⁷⁹
Age, religious background, and whether they were predominantly urban or rural all play a part. So it
seems not so much a matter of personal choice as a function of personal history. It’s unlikely many people would change their minds about porn no matter what the data show.

So, when research shows women are in fact not objectified, or demonstrates they can and do take control of their earnings and how their images are used, it’s usually written off without
discussion. This is a shame, because the debate ends up in an apples-and-oranges argument, with one side presenting reasoned evidence, and the other sticking with gut feelings and preconceived
assumptions.

The idea that men copy what they see in porn is simplistic, and the notion that men copy and women don’t is ridiculous. While images can affect and change us, there is no simple
relationship between content and effect. Homage, parody, and humour all make use of the difference. Umberto Eco knew this. Panto actors know it too.

Context is everything. The reinforcement theory of porn viewing and sexual preferences is basically the principle of ‘monkey see, monkey do’. Humans have never been that simple. If
we were, maybe everyday life would be more like a sitcom.

Making adult films inaccessible is not going to change much about social stereotypes or the problems of either men or women. These existed long before mass media. As explained in the chapter on
the sexualisation panic, there is a wide variety of research demonstrating no connection between porn and violence. There’s little suggestion that the conclusion will change. And yet
everything from domestic violence to date rape is unfairly dumped on porn’s doorstep. Scapegoat, anyone?

And while many believe porn has the magical ability to make men incapable of normal sex lives with their partners, why is this not the case for vibrators? Men use porn as a stimulant for the
specific goal of physical release . . . in much the same way as some women use
sex toys. But to date, a public outcry about the proliferation of the Rampant Rabbit has yet to
materialise, and no one suggests that using one makes women hate men. Funny, that.

6

T
he next time you marvel at the powerful functionality of the web – or the next time you take its usefulness for
granted – give a thought to the people and pioneers who helped bring that content to you so quickly.

Who’s that then? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Tim Berners-Lee?

Or was it . . . the adult industry?

Because as strange as it may seem, a lot of the advancements we take for granted, such as secure online payments, streaming web video, and live online chats, were all in some way improved and
brought forward when they were embraced by the world of erotic entertainment.

This, in fact, is no new phenomenon. Porn has consistently embraced new media technology, be it VHS cassette players in every home or the ubiquity of DVDs. In the 1990s,
Penthouse
magazine gave away 2400-baud modems emblazoned with its logo . . . an unimaginably slow and clunky way to connect to the internet now, but crucial then to help drive customers to their online chat
forums.

The makers and distributors of porn didn’t invent these things. And as the masses quickly came to realise all kinds of benefits from the online life, they’re not even the most
prolific users of the technology. That distinction is reserved for now-household names like Amazon, YouTube, and Facebook. But without the early adopters in adult entertainent, it’s entirely
possible we
wouldn’t have these things in the same way or, conceivably, at all.

Why? Well, for the very simple reason that any business venture, no matter how small, needs money to grow. There’s a healthy culture of shareware, freeware, and open-source projects on the
internet; few if any of them are household names. With investment and interest from the porn producers came enough money to improve products and turn new versions over faster. And if you’re
one of the vast majority of people who started using the internet only after commercial sites like eBay and Amazon were well established, then you have porn to thank for the sort of advancements
that underpin their ease of use.