Pornland
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Making Hate: Porn Sex and the Destruction of Intimacy Through my experience lecturing on pornography for over two decades, I have found that most women and some men have an idea of pornography that is twenty years out of date; what comes to mind is often simply a Playboy centerfold. It’s crucial to be aware of the images that are now considered ordinary in mainstream Internet pornography. The usual way I show my audience how hard-core the industry has become is through a PowerPoint presentation featuring snapshots from well-traveled sites. I use words rather than pictures here, but I need to add that however extreme the scenes I describe sound, my descriptions are nothing compared to actually viewing porn.
Because commercially produced Internet porn is mainstream, easily accessible, and cheaply available, I have decided to focus on it here. As the Internet has become the dominant distribution system, it is now the main channel by which most men, especially young men, access porn.3 To ensure that this is an accurate reflection of all porn available on the Internet, and not one that focuses on only the most excessive, I started my search by typing “porn” into Google and clicked on some of the sites that appeared on the first page.4 After clicking around for a few seconds I was directed to hundreds of sites that offered a whole range of sex acts, many of which show one woman and multiple men. Some of the most popular acts advertised and depicted during my quick search are • vaginal, anal, and oral penetration of a woman by three or more men at the same time; • double anal, in which a woman is penetrated anally by two men at the same time; • double vagina, in which a woman is penetrated vaginally by two men at the same time; • gagging, in which a woman has a penis thrust so far down her throat she gags (or, in the more extreme cases, vomits); • ass-to-mouth, in which a penis goes from a woman’s anus to her mouth without washing; and • bukkake, in which any number of men ejaculate, often at the same time, onto a woman’s body, face, hair, eyes, ears, or mouth. In some of these movies, the men ejaculate into a cup, and the “money shot” is the woman drinking the semen mixture.5
To discern what a curious user would find if he wanted to look at porn without paying for site membership, I randomly selected some images to click on and stayed only at Web sites offering a free tour or sample video. I started by clicking on OnlyBestSex.com, which advertised itself as having a free porn search engine for “Sex Videos and Hot XXX sites.” On that site was an ad for Gag Me Then Fuck Me, featuring image after image of women being orally, anally, and vaginally penetrated by from one to three men. The introductory text on the site reads: “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off ! This is not another site with half-erect weenies trying to impress bold sluts. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would really like to do. We make them gag till their makeup starts running, and then they get all other holes sore—vaginal, anal, double penetrations, anything brutal involving a cock and an orifice. And then we give them the sticky bath!”6 Viewers can click onto any number of sample videos, which act as teasers for longer movies. The one advertising “Laura” tells the reader: “The last thing we needed here was a vomiting girl—but this time it was close. Stopping is not our style, so she was grabbed by the head and facefucked as if there was no tomorrow. She tried hard to swallow, but there was too much muck, and the bitch had no real choice but to take it all. And of course her love tunnel looked like a train passed through!”
A few more clicks and I was at GagFactor.com owned by JM Productions, a much-talked-about site in the porn trade magazines. When I clicked on it I was invited to “Join us now to Access Complete Degradation.” On the site are hundreds of pictures of young women with penises thrust deep into their throat. Some are gagging, others crying, and virtually all have faces, especially their eyes, covered in semen. The user is bombarded with images of mascara running, hair being pulled, throats in a vicelike grip, nostrils being pinched so the women can’t breathe as the penis fills the mouth, and mouths that are distended by either hands pulling the lips apart or penises inserted sideways. Below each set of pictures are “quotes” by the male porn performers. Some examples are • “Watching the transition from civilian to cumbucket is an amazing thing to watch.”
• “Stupid, stupid whores. Gotta love ’em!”
• “I love turnin’ the screws on these dumb whores!”
• “It’s true, getting throatfucked keeps you skinny cuz all that snot that comes out of your face burns calories.”
• “I’m not sure what’s wrong with these girls but I am thankfull [sic] for their existence.”
As a way to promote its movies, Gag Factor provides twenty-to thirty-second free clips. One of the trailers I clicked on listed the following biographical details of the woman: name: Scarlett
age: 24
status: Long Since Vanished “Scarlett” is blonde, dressed in revealing Victoria’s Secret–type underwear, and has a viselike contraption digging into her neck and head. The short clip opens with Scarlett sitting on a toilet having a penis thrust down her throat while the man attached to the penis manipulates her head back and forward using the handles on the vise. He drags her off the toilet onto her knees while he continues to thrust viciously into her mouth. You watch Scarlett from above begin to gag, eyes bulging, and as she tries to pull away to breathe, the man pulls the vise toward his penis with greater force so she can’t move. As all this is going on he is screaming at her: “Get off the fucking toilet, get your ass on your knees, right motherfucking now. . . . I am a fucking psychotic motherfucking bitch . . . fucking you till your fucking mama comes from the grave.”7 The intensity of the images and words made these twenty seconds of video feel like twenty minutes to me.
After a few more clicks I was at the Anal Suffering site, which promises, “Every week, we’ll bring you a new Suffering Slut. Weak, Destroyed, Agonizing in Anal Pain and Totally Fucked Up right in her ass. And you’ll have all the glory of watching them.”8The pictures and free clips do indeed show women grimacing in pain as they are being forcefully anally penetrated by one man, and often vaginally by another at the same time. Other similar sites show close-up images of women’s red and swollen anuses, allowing the viewer to linger on the damage. On one site advertising the movie Anally Ripped Whores, the text reads: “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want and we’re giving it to you. Chicks being ass fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.”9
From there I moved into the teen porn genre, which lists movie titles such as Teen Hitchhikers, Teens for Cash, Teen Dirty Slut, Soaped Pink Teen Pussy, and Petite Teen Hard Fuck as well as the whole subgenre of babysitter porn, which includes Banged Babysitters, Cute Babysitter Riding Cock, Fuck the Babysitter, and Gag the Babysitter. Predictably, there are hundreds and hundreds of images of young-looking women with small breasts and shaved vulvae, wearing adolescent markers such as school uniforms, braids, and bobby socks while hugging stuffed animals or sucking popsicles. The text on the Fuck the Babysitter site reads, “Naughty Babysitter Knows What She’s Good for: sucking cock and drinking cum.” Many of the free sample films show the “teen” being initiated by a much older man into what is supposedly her first sexual experience.
This is just a smattering of what’s available online to any person who is minimally computer literate.10 As noted, boys see their first porn on average at eleven years of age, and by then most have computer skills sophisticated enough that they can access any of the sites described above.11 For the uninitiated, the scenes I have just described might seem like outliers from the extreme end of the industry, but unfortunately these images are all too representative of what is out there on the Internet and in mass-produced movies. In one of the few studies that have been conducted on the content of contemporary porn, it was found that the majority of scenes from fifty of the top-rented porn movies contained both physical and verbal abuse of the female performers.12 Physical aggression, which included spanking, open
-hand slapping, and gagging, occurred in over 88 percent of scenes, while expressions of verbal aggression, calling the woman names such as bitch or slut, were found in 48 percent of the scenes. The researchers concluded that “if we combine both physical and verbal aggression, our findings indicate that nearly 90% of scenes contained at least one aggressive act, with an average of nearly 12 acts of aggression per scene.”13
Even some in the porn industry are beginning to critique the violent and degrading images that are now part of mainstream Internet porn. For example, veteran porn producer Holly Randall, one of the few women producers in the industry who has had some success, wrote: “With high-end productions pushed to the side to make way for amateurish, extreme content, we created a market for what I call the Porn Olympics. . . . Now it was a question of how far you could push the envelope: how many men can you have sex with in one film, how many dicks can you fit in your orifices, how many ways can you eat cum? In the attempt to one-up the last guy, scenarios I couldn’t even dream up became, well, somewhat normal.”14 Most of the acts Randall is talking about are found in a subgenre of porn called gonzo by the industry.15 Often referred to as wall-to-wall because it contains sex scene after sex scene with no attempt at a plot or story line, this type of porn is, according to a 2005 article in AVN, “the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it’s less expensive to produce than plot-orientated features.” The features also sell well, but what makes gonzo so profitable is that it is, according to the same AVN article, “the fare for the solo stroking consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get off on the good stuff.”16
The AVN article itself cuts to the chase, as getting off is, after all, what porn is all about. But what it ignores, and for good reason, is the range of messages men imbibe as they masturbate. Porn, like all other images, tells stories about the world, but these stories are of the most intimate nature, as they are about sexuality and sexual relationships. When men turn to porn to experience sexual arousal and orgasm, they come away with a lot more than just an ejaculation because the stories seep into the very core of their sexual identity. To suggest otherwise would be to see sex as just a biological urge, removed from the social context within which it is developed, understood, and enacted in the real world. No biological urge exists in a pure form, devoid of cultural meaning or expression, and in American society, porn is probably the most visible, accessible, and articulate teller of sexual stories to men.
Porn Stories
For all of its millions of images, themes, and pseudo-plotlines, the story gonzo porn tells about women, men, and sex is amazingly consistent. This is because porn images are produced by an industry and are hence scripted, formulaic, and genre-bound representations. As much as pornographers would like us to think that they are just capturing people having sex, in reality, the images are carefully crafted and choreographed. Consumers of porn have certain expectations as to how the story will unfold, and the more a movie, television show, or indeed any text follows a set pattern, the less ambiguity there is in the storytelling. This in turn means that the consumer is more likely to come away with the messages that the producer intended, and less likely to decode the story in some idiosyncratic way. So what are the stories porn tells the user?
The messages that porn disseminates about women can be boiled down to a few essential characteristics: they are always ready for sex and are enthusiastic to do whatever men want, irrespective of how painful, humiliating, or harmful the act is. The word “no” is glaringly absent from porn women’s vocabulary. These women seem eager to have their orifices stretched to full capacity and sometimes beyond, and indeed, the more bizarre and degrading the act, the greater the supposed sexual arousal for her. The women who wander through this world are, whether they know it or not, all whores by nature, as they all have a price, often as low as a few bucks (as in “Every bitch will suck cock for a few dollars” or “This slut will do anything for rent money”). Even though these women love to be fucked, they seem to have no sexual imagination of their own: what they want always mirrors what the man wants. This may explain why women in porn spend enormous amounts of time giving men oral sex, yet they rarely expect or demand reciprocity. Actually, the only demands they seem to make involve asking the man to thrust harder and harder.
In the porn world, women are never concerned about pregnancy, STDs, or damage to their bodies, and are astonishingly immune to being called cunts, whores, cumdumpsters, sluts, bitches, hot slits, fucktubes, squirty skanks, and stupid hoes. They seem comfortable with the idea that their partner(s) views their sexuality as something unclean (as in “dirty cunt,” “filthy little whore,” or “nasty cumdumpster”) and often refer to themselves in these ways. Indeed, women of the porn world seem to enjoy having sex with men who express nothing but contempt and hatred for them, and often the greater the insults, the better the orgasm for all involved. This is an uncomplicated world where women don’t need equal pay, health care, day care, retirement plans, good schools for their children, or safe housing. It is a world filled with one-dimensional women who are nothing more than collections of holes.
The story pornography tells about men is actually much simpler. Men in porn are depicted as soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want. These men demonstrate zero empathy, respect, or love for the women they have sex with, no matter how uncomfortable or in pain these woman look. Probably the most peculiar thing about porn-world men is that they even lack the ability to express arousal, because no matter how erect their penises are, they exhibit none of the signs we normally associate with sexual excitement. The only time the men moan, grunt, or writhe is when they are about to ejaculate; the rest of the time they methodically thrust their penis into the woman’s orifices with a look of deep concentration on their faces. This can get very bizarre, especially in an oral sex scene where a stoic man gags a woman by thrusting his penis deep in her mouth, yet she is the only one having orgasmic responses. And when porn men are done, they are really done—there is not the slightest show of postcoital intimacy with the woman they have just ejaculated onto.
In a world populated by women who are robotic “sluts” and men who are robotic studs, the sex is going to be predictably devoid of any intimacy. Porn sex is not about making love, as the feelings and emotions we normally associate with such an act—connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection—are replaced by those more often connected with hate—fear, disgust, anger, loathing, and contempt. In porn the man makes hate to the woman, as each sex act is designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation. Whether the man is choking her with a penis or pounding away at her anus until it is red raw, the goal of porn sex is to illustrate how much power he has over her. It is what he wants when, where, and how he wants it, because he controls the pace, the timing, and the nature of the acts.
The power that men have over women in porn sex is encoded into the sex acts and the physical and verbal abuse that accompanies them. Oral sex is more often than not played out with him standing up and her on her knees; in this superior position he can control the pace of thrusting by holding onto her face and/or neck in a viselike grip. When a woman pulls away from the penis in an attempt to catch her breath, he intensifies the thrusting, causing her to gag even more. Vaginal and anal penetration often take place with her lying on a bed, sofa, or table while he again stands above her, a good position to look her in the face and tell her just what a disgusting whore she really is. If he has his hands on her body, they are not there to caress or fondle, but to either hold her down or stretch an orifice so that her body becomes that much more accessible and vulnerable. That she is a mere object is clear in many scenes where men will suddenly grab a woman and pull her down on a sofa or to the floor so he can position his body above hers as he ejaculates onto her face or into her mouth. In some cases this is so rough that she lands on the floor with a thud and has to quickly rearrange her body so the viewer gets a bird’s-eye shot
of the semen being squirted on her.
What seems surprising at first about gonzo porn is how few scenes there are with multiple women and one man, especially as for many men, having sex with more than one woman is a time-worn fantasy. When there are multiple performers it is usually one woman with any number of men. If porn is indeed about dominance and degradation, then it makes sense that the woman will be outnumbered since multiple men penetrating her suggests powerlessness. Should the tables be turned and there be more women than men in the scene, then there is always the possibility that the women, outnumbering the man, are the ones who hold the power.
Scenes where a woman is multiply penetrated also reveal the way in which much of gonzo porn is about seeing just how far you can push a woman’s body before it is injured. A vagina or anus that has two penises in it is vulnerable to tearing and prolapse. A penis thrust deep into the throat can also cause damage, as can a penis thrust in sideways so the woman’s mouth is stretched to almost inhuman proportions. The volume of porn produced today means that a frenzied competition has begun, as producers not only push the sexual envelope but place their women actors at higher and higher levels of risk in the process. In this race to the bottom, the fantasy cruelty of porn spills over into the real world.
One of the most degrading acts in porn is called the “money shot,” where the man ejaculates on the face or body of the woman. This usually marks the end of a scene and is central to the construction and marketing of the porn movie. While this has been a staple of porn for many years, recently it has taken a new turn in gonzo: the woman either drinks the collective ejaculate of any number of men (bukkake) or holds it in her mouth and the camera lingers on the ejaculate dribbling down her chin. Another relatively new twist is “cum swapping,” where a woman passes the semen into the mouth of another woman. There are now porn movies that specifically focus on this, as Cum Swapping Bitches and Cum Swapping Cheerleader, as well as movies that promise to show women swallowing the semen.