by Gail Dines
Notice here that the debate eventually shifts away from actual violence in the real world toward how good at acting the women are. VirginSurgeon has his own line in the sand: as long as the woman is acting like she enjoys it, it’s fine because then the viewer can feel less guilty; that is, as long as he is not “intuned” with her real emotions.
The question here is how did VirginSurgeon, and, to a lesser degree, Another Porn Addict, end up so completely disconnected from women’s pain that they can watch Hardcore gag a woman until she vomits, drench her in urine and then make her drink it, and then have a civilized debate about the pleasures involved in masturbating to such scenes? One key factor leading to this level of disconnection is that porn trains men to become desensitized to women’s pain. As one fan, Anon, explains to Another Porn Addict: “A few years ago I joined Maxhardcore.com to see what all the fuss was about and, while I found a lot of the girls really hot in their teeny outfits, Max’s attitude and actions in a lot of the clips left me feeling shellshock, sickened and dirty. Probably how you felt watching that batch of DVDs. But. Just as porn moves on, so did my tastes, and gradually I realised I was enjoying Max’s extreme scenes more and more—whether thats [sic] corruption or desensitisation I dont [sic] know. All I do know is that I’ve gone from being a one time Max hater to a Max Hardcore fan.”22 Anon’s analysis is borne out by studies that show that the more porn men watch, the more desensitized they become. The words he uses to describe his feelings when he first watched Hardcore’s movies—“shellshock, sickened and dirty”—speak to a powerful negative reaction. Yet he then says his tastes moved on and he began to enjoy the scenes. It would appear that Anon became desensitized to the women’s pain since it is impossible to enjoy Hardcore’s images if you have any empathy for the women. They look so distressed and in such pain that it feels like you are watching actual torture.
From Fuck Dolls to Real Dolls: How Fantasy Meshes with Reality
The loathing and contempt toward women evident in Max Hardcore’s videos might be more overt than in most gonzo porn, but it is only a more extreme version of what is played out on women’s bodies throughout the industry. No surprise, then, that the message boards are filled with users who, like pornographers, refer to women as whores, cunts, and sluts. I was thus surprised when one day I came upon a message board that refers to women as “honey,” “sweetie,” “darling,” “beauty,” and “my love.” How is it that these particular women escape the hate, I wondered.
After some research, I realized that what made these “women” special is that they never complain, never say no, and have three orifices always available for penetration, irrespective of time or place. They don’t grimace when a man ejaculates in their mouth, and their anuses and vaginas have no limits. They have absolutely no needs outside of pleasing men, they ask for nothing, they don’t require dinner or conversation before sex. For their total acquiescence, these women are rewarded with outpourings of love. In fact these women are so loved that men are even willing to marry them as “a nice way to show your devotion to your lady.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these perfect “women” are not human beings at all but life-sized sex dolls.23
I interviewed one of the representatives of the company RealDoll at the Expo in Las Vegas, and he told me, with a straight face, that these dolls are “great for men who want to learn how to be with a woman.” Not only do these dolls make men “feel more confident around women, they also help men to develop relationships.” Advertising itself as the “home of the world’s finest love doll,” RealDoll has been in business since 1996. One of their products will set the buyer back about $6,500, and he will have to wait an average of eighteen weeks to get his doll delivered. The Web site boasts:
Our dolls feature completely articulated skeletons which allow for anatomically correct positioning, an exclusive blend of the best silicone rubbers for an ultra flesh-like feel, and each doll is custom made to your specifications.
We offer an extensive list of options, including 10 female body types and 16 interchangable [sic] female faces. RealDolls are completely customizable, all the way down to the make up and fingernail colors. If you’ve ever dreamed of creating your ideal partner, then you have come to the right place.24
On the site the prospective buyer can also purchase accessories, which include RealDoll clothing, pubic hair patches (“trimmed or natural”), extra wigs, extra tongues, extra eyes, and a labia repair kit.
RealDoll was given a boost in 2007 with the release of the popular movie Lars and the Real Girl. Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, is depicted as a sweet, childlike loner who has difficulty making friends with real people. He orders a RealDoll and takes her around town, introducing her as his girlfriend. During the interview at the Expo, the RealDoll representative told me that the company had served as consultants for the film and that the week it was released, their RealDoll Web site got so many hits, it crashed.
When reading men’s postings on the Doll Forum,25 it often feels like they have indeed found their “ideal partner.” They talk at length about the personalities of their dolls and share what feels like personal details of an intimate sexual relationship. Dollylama’s post on his four dolls’ “style and personality” provides insight into just how real these men take their dolls to be. He starts with his description of Natasha, who is a “a sweet sensual vixen who likes to cuddle and watch movies and . . . loves to loung [sic] around in her black teddy and an old blue silk shirt of mine.” He then compares her to his other dolls, Brandy, Tiffany, and Amber (posting printed as written):
Brandy is a southern trailer girl who loves to watch porn and go down while I play with her nice boobies. Brandy is a little sex maniac with a strong oral fixation she is not big on conversation but she usually has her mouth full.
Tiffany is very quiet and demure. she loves her french maid outfit and white fishnet body stocking. recently she borrowed brandys boots and refuses to give them back. now Tiffany prefers to lounge on the sofa and watch action fliks or sit back and stare at Brandy while she goes to town. Recently she has been sneaking in to my room to get a little more naughty. (I knew it was a matter of time before she would let out her wild side). It is usually the quiet ones that get the most freaky.
Now the girls are all jealous of the newest arrivel Amber Lynne . . . Amber arrieved last night. She quickly found an auburn and blond culrly wigg, black gartered stockings and a white tank top (what is it with girls stealing my shirts?)
Amber kicked Natasha to the foot of the bed and made herselfe at home. Amber has turned into a bohemian artist that like to hogg the bed. I think she is wanting to take over the place as leading laddy. time will tell. . . .
So this is how my girls have developed thier own unique personalitys. each one is very different from the rest. am curious as to how other dolls have made themselves known26
Other men discuss their own particular personality preferences of their ladies, lest you think that Dollylama is the only man to anthropomorphize his dolls.
Owners swap messages about how to dress, clean, make up, and have sex with the dolls, as well as to commiserate when dolls are sent off to be repaired or cleaned. One man waiting for his doll is told that all of the forum members have been through it, and waiting doesn’t get any easier with time but “its [sic] worth every second.”27 The forum is full of pornlike pictures that men take of their dolls. As one owner posts a picture, the others weigh in with words of admiration (“she’s so hot”) and expressions of envy (“you lucky bastard”), and never with negative or unpleasant-sounding postings about the somewhat strange behavior exhibited by an adult male dressing up a doll that he routinely sticks his penis into.
For many of the men on this message board there is a sense that the porn world and the real world have meshed into one, and they have ceased to know the difference between fantasy and reality. It is tempting to see these men as a breed apart from regular porn users, who supposedly do know the difference between the two. But, as we shall see
, the fantasy versus reality debate is itself dogged by the fantastical thinking that men can masturbate to porn images and walk away from them, untouched by the misogyny that makes pornography interesting and unpredictable.
Chapter 5. Leaky Images
How Porn Seeps into Men’s Lives
Porn cannot show rape-fantasy because it might confuse people who will mistake the fantasy for reality.
—Duefuss, Adult DVD Talk
I vividly remember one of the most difficult lectures I ever gave, at a small private Catholic school in the Midwest. It started off on a bad note when the (mostly male) audience members began whistling and stamping their feet as the first slide, of a Playboy cover, appeared on the screen. While speaking, I could hear the male students groaning and shuffling to express their dissent. I finished my lecture and invited questions. A sea of mostly male hands immediately came up from the center of the auditorium, often a sign that the students are angry and have waited till this very moment to let it rip. The first comment set the tone for the next hour, with the accusation that I was a feminist (true) who hated men (not true) and was too quick to blame them for using porn. The blame, they said, lay with the women in porn since they were the ones making megabucks doing something that they liked. I was heavily criticized by the male students for exaggerating the effects of porn; they said that they had used porn and had never raped a woman. No rape, no effect. The hostility in the room was palpable and this led, as usual, to near silence on the part of the female students.
A few days later I gave a talk at a large northeastern state university, and the response was markedly different. I presented my slide show to a crowd of well over five hundred students, who appeared highly engaged in both the lecture and the Q&A discussion. At one point, when a female student was voicing her distress about men’s use of porn, another one shouted that she wanted to know what men get out of using porn, aside from an orgasm. I suggested that maybe one of the hundreds of men in the room might want to answer that. There was a hush and then a lone hand went up. A twenty-something student got up and set the tone for the next ninety minutes, saying, “I am really anxious about speaking, but I have to tell you what has happened to me.” What followed was a heartrending story of his compulsive porn use and his own despair over what felt like an inability to stop using. One of his most poignant comments was how much he looked forward to school vacations since his lack of Internet access at home meant he could get a break from the porn. He sat down, and rather than maintaining an embarrassed silence, men started getting up to tell their own stories about the negative ways that porn had affected them. Although not all compulsive users, these men talked about their feelings of inadequacy relating to sex after using porn. Whether it was their inability to bring their girlfriends to a screaming orgasm, their need to conjure up porn images in order to reach their own orgasm with their girlfriends, their “too small” penis, or their tendency to ejaculate “too quickly,” they were using porn sex as their yardstick—and they all failed to measure up. The discussion ended only when the security guards needed to lock the building for the night.
What made these two presentations unusual was not so much the depth of emotion shown by any individual audience member as the degree to which anger or sadness dominated the collective discussion. I usually get audiences who are more mixed in their responses, so the atmosphere vacillates between the two extremes. Thankfully, some spaces in between are less emotionally charged.
Over the years I have come to understand how and why my presentation stirs up extreme emotions in men. What I do in my presentations is take the very images that users have viewed privately and with pleasure, and I project them onto a screen in a public forum. In the decidedly nonsexual arena of a college auditorium, men are asked to think critically about what the images say about women, men, and sexuality. Stripped of an erection, men are invited to examine their porn use in a reflective manner while thinking seriously about how images seep into their lives.
The men in the small Catholic college dismissed this opportunity to explore their sexuality and it was apparent that, knowingly or not, they adhered to the porn world’s story: pornography is fun and harmless fantasy. My questioning the real-world implications of such fantasy elicited neither interest nor curiosity but a kind of consuming rage that closed down the possibility of reflection, analysis, and reason. The rage was directed at two places, both female—either the women in the industry or me—and it certainly conveyed to all women in the room what happens to those of us who don’t follow the porn party line. Conversely, the men who were concerned about their use seized the opportunity to explore how porn had affected them; the result was a serious and painful reflection of their porn use that left me, and many people in the audience, deeply moved.
I suspect that the reason many men reject the opportunity to ask reflective questions is that they don’t want to end up in pain, despairing about how porn affects their sexuality, relationships, and interactions with women. Moving out of the porn world’s tightly controlled version of reality and into a space where one has to delve inside for an emotional stocktaking of porn’s impact on the body and mind is not easy. For most of their lives, the culture told men that pornography is fun and harmless and all about fantasy.
Many of the men seeking out a one-on-one discussion after presentations tell me that they became increasingly agitated while listening as they began realizing just how their porn use had spilled over into their sex lives, whether with wives, girlfriends, or hookup partners. What they had thought were idiosyncratic problems suddenly looked somewhat different when porn was added into the equation. That pornography has clearly had an effect on men’s lives is not a surprise to those of us who study media images.
Academics who study the effects of media tend to focus on the ways that images construct reality for the viewer. Media scholars accept that images have some effect in the real world. By telling stories, images help to shape how we think about ourselves as gendered beings, as well as about the world that surrounds us. What is of interest is not necessarily the overt message of one particular image but the cumulative effect of the subtextual themes found in the system of images, which together create a particular way of looking at the world. For example, one fashion advertisement may not be that influential in itself, but add up the hundreds of fashion ads that we encounter daily, and you begin to hear a particular story about women’s bodies, femininity, and consumerism. Human beings develop their identity and sense of reality out of the stories the culture tells, and while pornography is not the only producer of stories about sex, relationships, and sexuality, it is possibly the most powerful.
Asking how porn affects its users is to open up the proverbial can of worms. Some argue that porn has no effect in the real world, while others, especially anti-porn feminists, view pornography as material that encourages and justifies the oppression of women. Probably the biggest single argument marshaled against porn having an effect on users is the “Porn is fantasy” claim, which argues that fantasy is in the head and stays in the head, never to leak into the real world of relationships, sex, love, and intimacy. This argument holds that men are not simply dupes who look at porn in a literal sense, taking the images at face value, but rather sophisticated consumers who enjoy porn for the playful fantasy it is, enjoying its excessive transgressions, silly plotlines, caricatured bodies, and over-the-top sexual shenanigans that always end in screaming orgasms for her and copious amounts of semen for him. Afterward, the argument continues, guys go back to the real world, unaffected and unchanged. To argue otherwise, some porn advocates maintain, is to fall into the trap of confusing fantasy with reality.
Indeed, pornography, like most media images, creates a world that, on some level, we know is not true. But it is an enormous leap to say that because porn is not an accurate version of how things are in the world, it then has no real-world effects. Many women, for example, know that the image of the model in the ads is an airbrushed, technologically en
hanced version of the real thing, but that doesn’t stop us from buying products in the hope that we can imitate an image of an unreal woman. No matter how fantastical the images of women are, they do, to varying degrees, affect the lives of most women.1 One powerful example of this effect is the growth of the plastic surgery industry. According to the American Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery, in the last ten years there has been a 465 percent increase in the total number of cosmetic procedures: over 12 million procedures occur annually (for liposuction, face-lifts, the “bionic package”—that is, the tummy tuck, the breast job, the facial rejuvenation). We now spend just under $12.5 billion a year on plastic surgery, and that figure is rapidly increasing.
The main pushers of the “Porn is fantasy” argument are the pornographers and the users, not surprisingly, given that both often have a massive financial and/or emotional investment in it. What is surprising is how many people, even those who don’t like porn, buy this argument, insisting that the carefully constructed images that are formulaically scripted and produced by the multibillion-dollar porn industry belong in the realm of sexual fantasy, not reality. Psychologist Michael Bader, for example, in an article on the effects of pornography, claims: “Pornography is the visual enactment of a sexual fantasy. That’s fantasy—to be distinguished from reality. That’s fantasy—to be distinguished from an intention, wish, or even attitude. A fantasy occurs in the imagination. The imagination is creative, capable of all sorts of tricks and distortions.” According to this position, porn is just fantasy and fantasy occurs in the imagination, which, Bader argues correctly, is creative in its capacity to play with ideas, images, and themes. To provide an example of some of these “tricks” and “distortions” at work, Bader lets the reader into a fantasy he had recently in which he daydreamed that his brother died: “In the daydream, lots of people came to console me in my grief. Now, in reality I love my brother and don’t have a shred of resentment toward him. What I did have at the time was a need for a certain kind of love and attention. The meaning of my daydream was not ‘you wish your brother was dead.’ The real meaning of my daydream was, ‘You’re so guilty about wanting attention that you think the only way you can get it is if you suffer a terrible tragedy.’ The meaning of a fantasy is often the opposite of its plot; whatever the meaning, it’s subjective and can’t easily be inferred from its story line.”2 Using his daydream as his data, Bader informs his readers that it is similarly impossible to know just how men think about women when they are masturbating to porn, since they, like Bader, are using their imagination in creative ways.
