Porn Generation

by Ben Shapiro

  A porn connoisseur, Jaz owns over three hundred vintage porn videos, from the “bad old days of one-camera, stationary shots” to slick, thinly woven porn movies (“where there’ll be a group of guys staring at two girls making out on a beach, and devise a way to get in on the action”). Jaz made his own, low-budget amateur porn flicks for awhile in the late 1980s: “I’d ask the girls from the club to come to my house. I’d pay them $50 bucks to do a solo act or $100 each for girl on girl action.” He also claims to be one of the first people to come up with the idea of using regular people to make porn—“real people, not professional actors or actresses. I submitted the idea to some people in the business, but they basically said ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ Then a few months later, the amateur adult film becomes a huge part of the adult industry.”

  Isn’t porn exploitative of women? “That’s feminist bulls—,” he growls. “These women are making a living for doing something they enjoy. And men and women are watching something they enjoy. What’s the problem? Look, this whole exploitation thing is garbage. Of the millions of adult movie rentals every year, studies show most were watched by two people. Forty-seven percent of these rentals are made by women in couples or women alone. The overall stat shows that 500 million videos are rented each year. If 47 percent are rented by couples that means nearly 250 million are being rented by women or couples. Well, Reagan’s 1984 election was considered to be a landslide with 54 million votes. And these figures don’t include adult video sales, cable TV viewings, Internet sales, or adult theatre attendance.”

  Jaz dismisses the idea that a skewed vision of male patriarchy plays a negative role in pornography. It’s interesting to note that the feminist movement has become increasingly schizophrenic on this issue. For some, the porn industry is pure exploitation. For others, the newly found women-for-porn fad is merely female sexuality leaping out of the closet. I’m of the mind that porn is exploitative for different reasons. Some girls unify the two views, as does “Sarah,” a former University of Washington student. Sarah says that if a man thought less of her for stripping, he’d be a “real asshole”—yet she admits that “I’m always in the position of feeling objectified. Why shouldn’t I get paid for it?”16

  Porn says women are the embodiment of sex—but the best relationships are supposed to be about more than sex. As “Max,” Sarah’s University of Washington boyfriend, told the campus newspaper, “There’s a tension between my appreciation [of watching Sarah’s naked cavorting] and the dehumanizing aspect.”17 Porn degrades the men who view it, and the women who allow themselves to be degraded by it.

  I ask Jaz what he thinks of youngsters being exposed to sexual images. “I don’t think it’s incredibly damaging for young people to see ‘adult material’ within reason of course. I first saw Playboy magazine, which I do not consider porn, by the way, at ten years old and it didn’t screw me up. Look, seeing images you’re already imagining isn’t damaging, is it? For instance, you can’t tell me—not you, or any other straight guy—that you don’t dream of having two women in bed at the same time. So what’s wrong with seeing that happen? . . . But in any case, porn isn’t being marketed to kids, and I’ll say this, that the Internet is pretty loose, which needs more policing.”

  What are the girls like, I ask? Why do they get into the business? “Most of them are pretty typical girls. At one time in the seventies they used to be aspiring actresses who couldn’t make it in the legit film business, but now they’re drawn by the allure of the cash. As a stripper, they walk into the club, get naked, and get $500 the first night. But that’s also part of the problem. With all that expendable cash, lots of young strippers get into drugs. When I was managing the clubs, I would toss a girl at the first sign of drug use.”

  I ask what seems to me to be one of the more important questions: What do these girls think about sex? If they’re willing to sell their bodies and souls for some easy money, what does “making love” really mean to them?

  “It’s a job, with the added benefit of living out a fantasy of making men take on the role of the subservient. It’s nothing deeper than that,” Jaz explains. “But that’s the life of the stripper, nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘porn star.’ Porn actors are another animal. Like apples and oranges they are nowhere near the same. The truth be told, porn actors and actresses are doing what they love and earning a paycheck, paying taxes, et cetera. They are public fornicators make no mistake about it. Period, paragraph, end of story. And who are you, or anyone for that matter to pass judgment on them? You don’t know them or the reasons why they do what they do. As I said, I’m no mind reader, so I can’t answer for them. But I will say they are enjoying their jobs. As I would too, if I could do it.” This isn’t any surprise to me by this point in the conversation; after all, I’ve just been informed that these talented men and women are all about “c—ing on cue.”

  The porn industry is skewing younger and younger. It’s the college-aged who are being targeted by the porn industry—and used by it. Girls Gone Wild is a symptom of a larger disease. At Indiana University, a film crew from the California-based Shane Enterprises taped several students engaging in sex acts with porn actresses. Between twenty and thirty students signed releases to appear in the film—and according to Shane Enterprises, university students invited the company there to film.18 The artistic masterpiece: Shane’s World No. 32: Campus Invasion.

  Larry Flynt went so far as to start a whole magazine, Barely Legal, devoted to photographing girls just over eighteen. One click into the site, the viewer receives titillating pictures of teenagers in lesbian poses, with the captions: “From the homeroom to the bedroom, these young cuties are eager to please and try everything,” “Sweet and cute but not innocent,” and “Barely eighteen and ready for some action.”19 The viewer also gets an unending stream of pop-up ads leading to various teenage porn sites. Some of the girls in the pop-ups don’t look more than sixteen—and even if they’re overage, they’re certainly not telling viewers to lay off the youngsters.

  “Certainly the porn industry is geared more toward college students these days,” Jaz says. “Poor old fat, ugly Ron Jeremy wouldn’t last ten minutes in today’s porn industry. When an actor hits forty, he’s through, and that’s if he’s lucky. The strippers and actors are all in their early twenties.”

  The Britney Spears phenomenon came about because of her Catholic schoolgirl, faux virgin routine. And though Jaz and other industry spokesmen maintain that no underage girls slip through the cracks—even if these girls aren’t underage, they pose as if they were. Aren’t there guys looking at fifteen and sixteen year old girls as sex objects now?

  “Yeah, I guess it happens,” Jaz admits. “I’m no pervert but I do date younger women, all of legal age by the way. I feel I have to say that because your readers may misconstrue my statements. One friend of mine is Hyapatia Lee, who is today in her mid-forties. As I understand her story she started at the age of sixteen or seventeen. She has controlled her entire career, like the vast majority of adult film stars, and today is retired with a huge bank account, and no desire to suck off the government tit of welfare or Medicare.”

  I ask him whether the porn honchos are driven by profit, or by something deeper. “I’d say it’s 90 percent profit,” he explains, “but for many of them, the cause goes along with it. They have to justify themselves somehow. If you’re a prude or a moralist, this ain’t your business. Or maybe it is but you just don’t know it yet.”20

  The net

  The Internet is easily the most prolific porn producer in the world, even if the quality of the porn is “low-class” in Jaz’s words. Even as a porn proponent, he admits that the Internet porn industry needs more regulation.

  As of 2002, the National Research Council reported that there were 400,000 sexually explicit websites on the net. N2H2, a Seattle-based software company, reports far more: 1.3 million, 1800 percent more than in 1998.21 The Internet Filter Review places the number at 4.2 million websites encom
passing 372 million web pages, constituting 12 percent of the total number of websites on the internet.22 Type in the term “porn” on Google.com, and you’ll get a nearly infinite number of 149,000,000 hits. Easy misspelling of search terms often leads straight to porn. If you type “teen” into a search engine, you’ll get teen magazines. If you type in “teeen,” you’ll get porn. Type in “Hun,” as in Attila the, and you’ll likely get thehun.com, a yellow pages for porn. More famously, if you type whitehouse.gov into your search engine, you’ll get the White House. Type in whitehouse.com, however, and you’ll get a porn site.

  Online porn is certainly a moneymaker. The National Research Council report stated that cyber-porn garners over $1 billion per year, and could soon grow to $5 billion.23 The porn industry in general takes in $57 billion worldwide and $12 billion in the United States per year—more than all the combined revenues of pro football, basketball, and baseball franchises, as well as the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

  Kiddie porn generates $3 billion each year.24 There are at least 100,000 child pornography websites available on the Internet.25 Also available: incestuous porn, bestial porn, and with extreme commonness, “virgin” porn—for those guys who like to pretend that their fetish girls really haven’t done anything before taping a hard core sex video. “Schoolgirl” porn is especially typical—from “first-time lesbian” schoolgirls to “orgy” schoolgirl porn. The “college roommates” idea is also big; lesbian porn between co-eds is insanely popular. The idea that the porn industry doesn’t push men to look at fifteen- to eighteen-year-old girls as sex objects is ridiculous.

  Unfortunately, the Internet isn’t just the most prolific porn producer—it’s also the easiest place to find porn. Registering for nearly anything on the net guarantees that you’ll have porn spam in your e-mail box—including everything from “WANT A BIGGER PENIS?” to “ASIAN SCHOOLGIRL FUN!” There are 2.8 billion daily pornography e-mails circulating around the Internet, 8 percent of the total number of daily e-mails.26

  Here’s the newest weapon: Instant Messenger (IM). You can be sitting online on AOL, MSN, or another IM service, when suddenly you receive an instant message from some gal asking you to check out her webcam (a camera set up to film people, often in compromising positions). With e-mail spam under attack, the IM spamming, also known as “spimming,” is the new wave. As PC World reported, “The number of IM spam messages will triple [in the year 2004], from 400 million to 1.2 billion, according to the research firm the Radicati Group . . . IM spammers are developing sophisticated software which automatically sends messages—which are mainly touting pornography—to millions of users, and which can automatically change screen names when the user blocks an IM attempt.”27

  Think your child is safe from online porn if you don’t give him a credit card? Try again. Hard-core porn pictures are available all over the Internet, and children don’t even have to pretend to be eighteen to see them. Over 70 percent of porn sites offer free images and stories to draw people into the site, and there are any number of search engines that will help kids find these pictures.28

  If you spend any amount of time on the Internet, it’s difficult not to find yourself in the midst of a hard-core porn site—and if you do, you can’t easily leave. A practice called “mousetrapping” means that by clicking out of the site, you’ll be hit with a virtually endless series of pop-up ads for other porn sites, and the only way to stop the flood of pornography is to shut the window or turn off the web browser.29

  More and more people—specifically men (72 percent of visitors to porn sites are male30)—are being drawn into the world of web porn. Whereas the non-Internet porno man would have to go to the darkened section of his local video store, or stroll to his nearest newsstand to browse the blacked-out magazine section, it’s oh-so-easy to simply click on a web link. All it takes to stash the porn is a quick minimization click. You can do it from work or from home.

  And they do. According to 2003 IFR statistics, there are 72 million worldwide visitors to porn websites annually. Twenty percent of men admit to accessing porn at their place of employment; forty million U.S. adults regularly visit porn sites. Ten percent of adults admitted to internet sexual addiction. Most shockingly, religious communities have been hard hit by the problem of Internet porn. A full 53 percent of Promise Keeper men stated that they had viewed porn in the last week, and 47 percent of Christians said pornography was a major problem in their home.31 In a 2003 poll, 34 percent of Today’s Christian Woman’s online newsletter readers admitted to intentionally accessing Internet porn.32 A Zogby International poll conducted for Focus on the Family in 2000 showed that 25.9 percent of American men and 16.7 percent of American women said it was either very or somewhat likely they could find sexual fulfillment online. 18.68 percent of Christians said the same thing.33 A survey by Christianity Today magazine found that 37 percent of pastors admit to struggling with pornography.34

  Internet porn doesn’t only affect adults. Kids are the hardest hit by the Internet porn hurricane. The average age of first Internet exposure to pornography stands at eleven years old. The largest consumers of Internet porn are kids aged twelve to seventeen. The statistics are incredible: 80 percent of fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds report having had multiple exposures to hard-core porn, and 90 percent of eight- to sixteen-year-olds report having viewed porn online, most while doing their homework. 35

  Kids are victims of sexual aggression online, as well. Nearly 24 million children aged ten to seventeen were online regularly in 1999; one in four had an unwanted exposure to pictures of naked people or people having sex in that year. Seventy-one percent of those kids experiencing unwanted exposure found it while surfing the web, and 28 percent received it while opening e-mail or clicking on links in e-mail or IMs. Only 17 percent of incidents occurred wherein the youth knew he or she was entering a porno site.36

  A full 89 percent of sexual solicitations toward youths are made in chat rooms; 20 percent of youths have received sexual solicitations.37 One in thirty-three children aged ten to seventeen received an aggressive sexual solicitation (a solicitor who asked to meet them somewhere, called them on the telephone, or sent them regular mail, money, or gifts); one in seventeen was threatened or harassed.38 Many of these “sexual solicitations” were propositions for “cybersex,” wherein participants describe various sex acts, often while masturbating.39 The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children stated in a June 2000 report that in the year 1999, there were at least 785 “traveler” cases, where a child or adult traveled to physically meet with someone he or she had first encountered on the Internet.40

  The kids aren’t telling their parents, either. Only a quarter of youths who encountered a sexual solicitation or approach told a parent, and only 40 percent of those who experienced “an unwanted exposure to sexual material” informed a parent.41

  Online porn is the direst threat to moral attitudes toward sex today. Availability has thrust perversion and depravity onto computer screens around the country, free of charge—and those weak enough to click once may end up refreshing their screens rather often. As Dr. Kerry Hollowell puts it, “what was once a rather isolated problem has become a widespread crisis based on three factors uniquely related to Internet use: accessibility, affordability, and anonymity.”42

  The cheap and easy porn found online means setting unattainable standards for real-life sex. It means devaluing sex to a merely physical act. As Dr. Ursula Ofman, a Manhattan-based sex therapist, told NewYorkMetro.com, “It’s so accessible, and now, with things like streaming video and Webcams, guys are getting sucked into a compulsive behavior. What’s most regrettable is that it can really affect relationships with women. I’ve seen some young men lately who can’t get aroused with women but have no problem interacting with the Internet. I think a big danger is that young men who are constantly exposed to these fake, always-willing women start to have unreal expectations from real women, which makes them phobic about relationships.”43
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  Without any leadership or restriction by society, the situation spirals ever downward, with no end in sight.

  Porn in the public square

  Porn has hit the mainstream—and hit it big. In 1953, Hugh Hefner sprung onto the scene with Playboy and a nude Marilyn Monroe centerfold. In the words of Professor Jeffrey P. Moran of the University of Kansas, “More literary and mainstream than cheap ‘girlie’ magazines, more overtly sexual than its ancestor, Esquire magazine, Playboy sprang from Hefner’s conviction that millions of American men, at least, were ready for a more public expression of sexuality. Hefner’s creation was to have the same ripple effect as [Alfred] Kinsey’s books in shifting public discussion toward greater sexual frankness . . . Even as the public culture grew more overtly sexual, the moral unity among family sociologists, family life educators, sex educators, and other authorities on sex was beginning to crumble.”44

  Now, of course, Hefner is hailed as an influential mainstream figure. The Washington Post calls Hefner an “icon.”45 Anderson Cooper of CNN lauds Hefner as “the granddaddy of all playboys, the seventy-seven-year-old who still puts the play in player.”46 He’s a “champion of free speech” according to the New York Post,47 a “sexual pioneer” according to the Boston Herald.48 Hef is so mainstream that in 2003, he even did a raunchy commercial for burger chain Carl’s Jr. The aging Hefner, bearing a strong resemblance to the Crypt-keeper in silk pajamas, looks directly into the camera and tells the audience: “People always ask me: ‘Hey, Hef. Do you have favorites?’ I tell ‘em, ‘No—It’s not about that.’” Three young hotties then explain Hefner’s philosophy. “He can have anything he wants. I don’t know how he makes the choice,” says Side O’ Beef #1. “I feel for Hef. It’s so hard to choose,” avers Side O’ Beef #2. “I don’t know how he does it,” marvels Side O’ Beef #3. Cut back to Hefner: “I love ‘em all. It just depends on what I’m in the mood for.” The commercial then pictures Hefner biting into a burger while the announcer intones: “Because some guys don’t like the same thing night after night.”