Pornified
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So Why Do Men Like Porn?
Except among teenagers and college-age men, for the most part, pornography isn’t a subject of debate or everyday conversation. Among men, there seems to be a lack of judgment about pornography, except, that is, to condemn those who judge other people’s usage. The consensus is that pornography is just “a guy thing.” It may be biological or it may be cultural, but most agree that it plays a part in nearly all men’s lives.
In a pornified world, pornography has become seamlessly woven into the wake-up routine, the workday Internet break, and the bedtime ritual. It’s part of revving up in the morning and relaxing at the end of the day. It’s a prelude to sex or an alternative to sex. As an accompaniment to masturbation alone, pornography exerts a powerful pull. Ethan, for example, masturbates to porn “all the time” when he’s at home; he has to abstain while he’s at work, for obvious reasons. “How can you even ask what pornography is for?” laughs Christopher, a twenty-five-year-old who works as a customer service representative in a suburb of Dallas. “Isn’t it obvious?” For Christopher, pornography is about sexual gratification, pure and simple. “It’s cheaper than a date with dinner and a movie.” And, the bonus is, while he’s looking for the right pornography to masturbate to, he can find out what turns him on and what doesn’t. It’s easier and less risky to try things out by himself than with a partner, whom he would be afraid of scaring off with some kind of new activity.
Growing up in rural north Texas, it was hard for Christopher to get his hands on pornography. In a town with only 1,000 inhabitants and dry laws still on the books, there wasn’t much pornography for sale at the local convenience store. Occasionally, he landed some magazines, but it wasn’t until the Internet that Christopher’s consumption took off. Luckily, he discovered “the wonders of online porn” early; online at age ten, he was pulling pornography off binary newsgroups and early Web sites back in 1995. “I can remember the days when porn really was openly available on the Internet,” he recalls nostalgically. “There were no warning screens ever. You would just go to Penthouse.com, and bam!—naked people.”
“There’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure,” he explains. “I enjoy watching other people have sex and porn is about seeing other people healthily enjoying themselves.” For Christopher, who hasn’t had a girlfriend in four years, pornography offers a sexual release. When he was having sex a lot, he didn’t need to look as much; but his dating life, he admits, is “not that great.” Granted, he hasn’t been looking his best lately. Being sedentary at his customer service job doesn’t help. He finds himself eating a lot of junk food and could stand to lose twenty pounds or so. Because he’s picky, it’s been a good while since Christopher has found a woman worth his time. “The egotistical reason is that I’m quite a bit more intelligent than most people,” he explains. “My interests are broad, and I don’t have an interest in stupid things like sports or fashion. I like to focus on higher philosophical things and world politics. Not many people can converse on those levels.”
As a teenager in the nineties, Christopher visited professional sites adorned with airbrushed, Playboy-model types. He has since moved away from that, but likes to keep an open mind, cycling through a wide range of Web sites, depending on his mood. “Like when you’re going to a store—do you want vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate ice cream? I’ll sit down at the computer and say, ‘Hmm, I feel like Asian girls tonight.’” As long as the women fall somewhere between Calista Flockhart and Camryn Manheim (“I’m not into fat-chick porn”), Christopher is satisfied. It’s like plucking just the right product from the shelf.
Because his energy starts low in the morning and builds over the course of the day, Christopher has what he calls his daily “session” at night, sitting down at the computer before bedtime. Inevitably, after twenty to sixty minutes of surfing, Christopher finds what it is he’s looking for. “I masturbate pretty much every time,” he says. “Once in a while, I’ll just be bored and go search online objectively, thinking, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting,’ but generally, when I pull up porn it’s with one objective in mind: getting off.”
For most men, pornography is precisely that: an easy way to get off. Men generally masturbate while they’re looking at pornography, or immediately after, unless they’re at work. In the online Kinsey Institute poll, 72 percent of respondents said they used pornography to masturbate or achieve physical release. An additional 69 percent used pornography to sexually arouse themselves and/or others. In a 2001 MSNBC.com poll, three-quarters of online users said they masturbated while looking at sexual content online: 30 percent said they do so sometimes, 20 percent said often, and 9 percent said all the time. Not a single man who looked at pornography interviewed for this book did so without masturbating at least some of the time.
For Zach, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed Web site developer, pornography comes down to two things: getting off and relieving boredom. “Women see pornography a lot differently than men do,” Zach explains. “They think that if a guy is looking at pornography, then that’s the way he wants women to look and act. That guys have some kind of emotional attachment to it.” But according to Zach, guys use pornography as a visual aid. “We see porn the way women view vibrators—it’s a quick way to get off and get on with your day.” Often he’ll go online first thing in the morning, always with the goal of masturbating. “This may creep you out, but that’s what it’s for,” he says. “I don’t think there’s a time when I’ve looked at porn and haven’t masturbated. And I think most guys would say that.” For Zach, jerking off online has become “a habit.” He goes online for pornography every couple of days for about twenty minutes. Or sometimes only five. “Sounds pretty bad,” he says sheepishly. “But sometimes, that’s all it takes.”
Pornography just isn’t that big a deal, Zach insists. “It’s like scratching an itch.” He would never go out and buy a magazine or rent a movie. Since Zach and his friends grew up with the Internet, pornography was never about print or video. It’s too big a hassle. You have to spend money. Somebody could find it lying around. Zach doesn’t even like to go to the trouble of downloading video images; it takes up too much bandwidth and isn’t worth the effort. Generally, he prefers Playboy-style images rather than hardcore raunch. “I’ve come across things I really don’t like, some of it disturbing. Japanese anime often has rape scenes in it, like tentacle rape [a Japanese specialty that shows women being raped by monsters with numerous tentacles],” Zach says. “I saw a picture of a guy holding his ass half a foot open. It surprises me that people can get off on this stuff.”
No matter what men choose to look at, masturbating to pornography isn’t merely something men do when they lack for anything else. Contrary to expectation or myth, not every man who uses pornography is lonely or depressed. Many of the men interviewed for this book have full lives and committed relationships. Those who are married or monogamously attached admit to using pornography either when their girlfriends or wives aren’t around or when their partner isn’t in the mood. But they also use pornography when they’re not in the mood to have sex with their partners—when women aren’t into what they want at that particular moment, do not look their best, or come across as cranky or difficult. They may simply feel the urge to be with someone else altogether.
Men Need Variety
Even if a man is in a relationship and has an exciting sex life with a willing partner, many men say it’s important to feel they’re free to enjoy other women, to act as if they could spread their seed, willy-nilly, among multiple willing partners. And pornography is a world in which promiscuity—often anonymous, usually ephemeral, ultimately superficial—is the norm. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has found that male sexual fantasies have become increasingly shaped by the standards of porn. Two-thirds of male fantasies feature more than one woman, almost always strangers or near-strangers. When talking about their fantasies, men typically describe women’s physical attributes (i.e., “There’s this tall blond woman w
ith …”) and not their other qualities or their relationship to the man himself. The focus is on a woman (or, increasingly, multiple women) serving a man’s sexual pleasure.
Pornography allows all men—single or committed—to enjoy the fantasy of endless variety. “Look,” says Ethan, the recently married music exec, “most men are enthusiastic about sex and want to have it with different women, but they’re married or in a monogamous relationship. Pornography is an outlet to release sexual energies when they’re not in the mood to engage in these activities with their wives or girlfriends. And it’s better than the alternative—cheating.” Indeed, that’s exactly how Ethan, who has been married for seven months, views pornography’s role in his own life. Porn has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his wife, he explains. Pornography provides the vicarious thrill of other women without the threat of actually being with one. He can live out sexual situations, such as multiple women or girl-on-girl voyeurism, that he’d still like to experience but can’t because he is committed to his marital vows. So far, Ethan hasn’t cheated on his wife, though he cheated in earlier relationships. It’s different this time, Ethan insists, and porn helps.
When he married Candace after five years of dating, Ethan made it clear he had no intention to stop or even cut down on his pornography consumption. Candace has been accommodating, even buying Ethan his first porn DVD, Emotions of Jenna Jameson, when she got him a DVD player. “She’ll even watch it with me,” Ethan says proudly. “Not that it turns her on—she’s not attracted to women. But she likes that it turns me on.” Still, Candace doesn’t understand the appeal. She once asked Ethan why he liked to watch it so much. “But we didn’t have a heavy discussion or argument about it,” he says. “She thinks it’s silly, but she’s fine with it.” If she had complained or asked him to stop, that would have been totally uncool with him. If Candace threatened to divorce him over it, he would stop, though it would raise serious questions for him about their relationship. “Any attempt by her to exert too much control over who I am and what I do with my time would be a total infringement on my freedoms as a husband,” he explains. “If she asked me to stop using porn, I’d tell her she’s out of her mind.”
The fact is, Candace, a tall and athletic brunette, doesn’t know how often Ethan looks at pornography. Ethan figures she probably thinks he looks at it a couple of times a week and that it’s best to leave her with that impression. Like many men, he obscures the reality in order, he believes, to protect his partner. “I don’t think she would understand,” he says. “She would probably think I was perverted and oversexed if she knew just how much I looked at it every day.” But then, Ethan would consider her feelings to be irrational; he considers pornography part of being a normal guy.
Men like Ethan often justify their pornographic needs with loosely understood “evolutionary psychology” theories. Men need variety, they say, presenting their own versions of Kiplingesque “just so stories,” arguing that science proves that in order to effectively promote his genes, man has evolved to seek—even require—a large number of female consorts. Looking at lots of women naked is merely a remnant of this Cro-Magnon legacy. It’s only natural. Fidelity and commitment are unnatural, while ogling and bedding multiple women are part of man’s biological imperative. Such theories often characterize men as aggressive and insatiable and women as mere tools for reproduction, a view, not surprisingly, espoused by many social conservatives who see women’s social role as taming the male beast. This antediluvian vision of the sexes also conveniently matches pornography’s palate, which rests on the idea that men need not only a Miss January, but a Miss February and a Miss March as well, a tendency expanded online to include whatever particular sexual proclivity a man wants at any given moment.
I’m Only Looking
With all the pornographic variety available, particularly on the Internet, it’s not surprising that men find themselves “just browsing,” checking out what’s out there. There’s very little to prevent a guy from doing so—he can always click on to another page if someone walks in or delete his browser history. Thirty-five-year-old Gabe, who works in Houston’s oil and gas industry, likes looking at pornography so much he’s made it into a bit of a sideline. At his office, which is 98 percent male, all the men look at pornography during the day. It’s not a big deal. Some watch streaming videos; others scroll through naked poses or read erotic stories. Pornography is so acceptable that Gabe doesn’t need to worry about putting his job in jeopardy. Everyone’s computer screen is easily visible in the large shared room where they all work, and Gabe assumes that his boss has probably looked over Gabe’s shoulder and seen what he’s up to. Gabe doesn’t even bother cleaning the file cache on his work computer.
Pornography has climbed out of the bedroom and slinked into the workplace for many men like Gabe. One 2004 survey by Web-filtering company Cerberian found that 75 percent of people have accidentally visited a pornographic site while at work; 15 percent have done so more than ten times. Forty percent say they’ve seen their coworkers surfing pornography on the job.10 Peeking at pornography during office hours isn’t always an accident. In another 2004 survey by the Employment Law Alliance, one in four workers say they or their coworkers visit pornographic Web sites or engage in sex talk or other sexually oriented Internet activities on their work computers during office hours. Twelve percent admitted that either they or a coworker have forwarded sexually explicit e-mail content to others in the office. Men were about twice as likely as women to pursue such activities. They were also more likely to report being aware of other coworkers’ use of sexually explicit material online.11
But Gabe probably looks more often than most of the other guys in the office—he guesses they spend about one-fourth the time cruising porn he does—because he spends about twenty hours a week working as an amateur “aggregator.” When Gabe first went online in the late 1990s, he was immediately hooked, enjoying the search for the best sites, the hottest women, the most exciting images. He loved being able to track down high-quality material and realized he had a knack for it. So Gabe offered his services as a cyber-sleuth to several pornography portals. He now works freelance for three different sites, scoping out the best links and downloadable videos. The pay is minimal, but Gabe thinks he has a sharp eye and good taste, and he likes when his suggestions prove popular with his Internet audience.
Many men in fact consider pornography to be just another form of media entertainment, something to consume without consequence. It’s like flipping channels on television or strolling through a sports equipment store—checking out what products and information are available. Part of the interest in pornography is the adventure of investigating the netherworlds of pornographic titillation. Why not click the remote control just to find out what’s featured in that pay-per-view feature Naughty Amateur Home Videos: Stripped to Thrill? In the Kinsey Institute poll, 54 percent of respondents said they view pornography out of curiosity, and they figured others did the same: 87 percent believed other people used pornography out of curiosity, too. In the 2001 MSNBC.com poll, 81 percent of men pursued online sexual activities for “distraction.” Pornography can be a voyeuristic journey, a glimpse into other people’s lives, the X-rated version of Us magazine—images to absorb and discard like any other entertainment trifle.
William, a thirty-five-year-old legal clerk from Missouri, masturbates only about half the time; otherwise he’s just “cruising porn,” as he puts it. Often he’s at work, so it’s not as if he can just reach into his pants in the middle of a law office. Mostly, he likes to check out the women and get a sense of what’s out there. “Men are culturally programmed to like porn,” he explains. “We’re raised with women objectified in our culture. You’re just exposed to women as”—he pauses—“not necessarily as sex objects, but as sexual in nature.” It has nothing to do with biology, according to William, it’s just sheer entertainment, part and parcel of the American male culture.
In 1982, during his fre
shman year of high school, one of William’s friends popped in a video at a party—the first time William saw sex in motion. He was excited—and freaked out. Watching with the guys was part of the problem. William doesn’t like pornography to be so out in the open; he didn’t want to witness other men masturbate. It’s all well and good to enjoy porn on your own turf, but William has never rented a video himself or visited an adult theater because it gives him the creeps. “Pornography has always been a private thing for me,” he explains. “It seems really seedy to go to one of those theaters or stores.”
Nonetheless, when William left home to join the navy, he began frequenting strip clubs, which were popular with his navy buddies. A few times a month he would pay for lap dances. But now that he’s out of the service and working as a legal clerk, he’s stopped going. On a recent St. Patrick’s Day, some friends suggested visiting a strip club after an evening of barhopping. But the others were all in their twenties, and William felt “too old for that shit.” He couldn’t carouse all night with strippers when he had to work the next day. He went home. These days, William’s pornographic adventures are confined to the computer. He browses for about ten or fifteen minutes before moving on to another form of online infotainment, celebrity gossip, the news.
Nearly everyone likes to look at pretty pictures; men and women enjoy admiring a beautiful woman, the curve of her body, the expression in her eyes. Artful photography, elegant poses, atmospheric lighting—they’re pleasing, whether they’re in a Hollywood movie or a softcore magazine. Men profess that in this way pornography is often about appreciation, discovering and beholding beauty. But pornography isn’t just pretty pictures, and what men look at when they watch pornography reveals much more about them than just their aesthetics. What they look for, men say, is often about what they wish they could experience in real life. It’s about legitimizing their desires as well as masking their deepest fears and dislikes. For example, woman-on-woman pornography, with luscious lipstick lesbians squealing and oozing femininity while they grope each other, bares only a faint resemblance to real lesbian sex, an activity from which men in the real world are clearly excluded. Pornography allows men to get in on the game and to change the rules in the process. Woman-on-woman pornography also has the advantage that it does not feature men; for men uncomfortable watching other men naked, girlie action is particularly appealing.