by Pamela Paul
Despite having two kids under her roof, Christina finally felt free. She went through a “wild” period. “I was just like a man,” she recalls. “I didn’t want commitment, I didn’t want a relationship, I just wanted my booty call. Men loved it.” She didn’t get into another serious relationship until she married at thirty-two, but she divorced her husband, an intermittently employed truck driver, within three years. Now back on the singles scene, she has had an adventurous sex life, with about seventy-five sexual partners, male and female, in total.
People just seem attracted to her. Though Christina went through a gawky period in her preteens, she has since become the embodiment of what she calls “a typical California girl”—five feet nine, blond and blue-eyed, and thin with a 38C bust. “At work, men try to talk to me professionally, but they just can’t stop staring at my chest,” she says. “It’s funny.” Male attention has made Christina feel confident about her body, and she considers herself uninhibited and unconventional. Once she even took pornographic photos of herself, though she became wary after an ex-boyfriend sent them out on the Internet. “I was Paris Hilton’ed!” she complains playfully. But that doesn’t stop her from looking online, after work, for about half an hour each night. Christina subscribes to an e-mail service called Cool Sex, through which members send one another links. Subscribers will challenge one another with pornographic Web hunts: Find the most unique and sexy shaves, like photos of heart-shaped pubic hair, was one recent quest. Christina has never met any of the other members, but they have all become “good friends,” bonded around a common interest. People who are into pornography are generally open and interesting types, in Christina’s little black book. “I just find porn really enticing,” she says. “Some of it is raunchy, but in a good way. I like getting off on it when I’m alone and it’s also a great foreplay tool.”
Women like Christina attribute a number of benefits to pornography—it helps them explore their sexual side and broadens their ideas, giving them fodder for real-life sex, including positions, role-playing, and attitudes. In the 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll, 35 percent of women who had viewed adult content on the Internet said it helped them find “more ways to look or act sexy” and 28 percent claimed that it “pushed the boundaries of what I find erotic.” One in four said viewing adult material online helped them talk about what they want sexually and made them feel more sexually positive about themselves. By using pornography, pro-porn women say they gain “ownership” of their sexuality, wresting it from the control of men and debunking traditional notions of women’s passivity in bed. Pornography gives women “a voice” to discuss their own desires.
Denise, a single woman who works at a nonprofit organization, thinks pornography can be liberating and instructive. “It’s a medium that should be completely legal and I don’t have a problem with it,” says the thirty-one-year-old. Having never looked online or watched a pornographic movie, she was intrigued by an old boyfriend’s abundant pornography collection. He lent her a couple of Seymour Butts tapes, which they watched together, but when they broke up, he forgot to ask for them back. “I always say I got them in the divorce,” Denise says and laughs. The first time she watched the movies, she was merely amused. But after repeated viewings she started to masturbate while watching. “I look at them when I want to be turned on,” she explains. “And since my boyfriend now is long-distance, I don’t always have someone here when I’m in the mood.” Her boyfriend knows she watches tapes in his absence, and, she thinks, is turned on by the idea.
“I admit I haven’t seen that much of it,” Denise says. “But the online porn that I saw with an old boyfriend was all girl-next-door types. Their bodies were a lot less threatening to me than the super-thin models and actresses you see everywhere else. I thought it was kind of adorable that he was looking at these cute girls giving blow jobs.” Sexual acts and positions that once seemed taboo became acceptable after Denise saw them in pornography. “I figured if all these movies show anal-oriented things, then clearly it’s turning other people on. I didn’t think that was acceptable until I saw it in porn.”
With women increasingly learning their sexual lessons through the lens of pornography, how women construct their fantasies and pursue their actual sex lives is fundamentally shifting. Yet, on a biological level, women process pornography differently than men. In a 2004 study conducted at Essen University in Germany, researchers used fMRI scanning technology to observe brain activity in men and women as they viewed pornographic films. While both men’s and women’s brains showed activity in the temporal lobes, where memory and perception occur, only women showed activity in their frontal lobes, a part of the brain normally associated with planning and emotion. Whether women were plotting their morning’s errands while watching pornography or having their emotional buttons pushed is not clear. Similarly, whether men get lost in the moment while watching, as is commonly assumed, or are less likely to experience an emotional reaction is also unknown.19
Evidence does indicate that men respond more to visual stimuli than women do, and numerous studies report that men are more visually sensitive when it comes to sexual arousal and fulfillment. Brain scans show that areas of the brain devoted to visuals come into use when men are sexually stimulated; in women, those areas of the brain remain quiet. In a study at Emory University, twenty-eight men and women were shown erotic photographs while an fMRI recorded images of brain activity. In men, the photographs triggered a whirl of activity, particularly in the brain’s amygdala, which plays a key role in basic emotions like fear and pleasure.20 Yet whether that difference is the result of biology or of cultural conditioning has yet to be established, or even explored. According to Stephan Hamman, professor of psychology and lead author of the study, one reason for the response in men could be cultural. Men tend to be inundated with sexual imagery and are possibly more likely to seek it out.21
As much as women want to claim a right to pornography, for most women—even those who partake—pornography is not the same for her as it is for him. Keisha, thirty-three, and her husband, Malik, thirty-six, sometimes look at pornography together, but Keisha thinks what they see is altogether different. “Men take porn more literally than women do,” she says. “They use porn as a way to get hot. For me, it’s entertaining. I’m not necessarily horny after I watch it.” Black porn, she says, is usually just crappy. “It makes me laugh more than anything.” Malik, a police officer, usually picks out the evening’s entertainment. Down at the police station, guys will swap videos, which Malik will bring home with him after work. Recently, he acquired a highly recommended DVD in which a woman travels to the Italian countryside and sleeps with everyone she meets—a homeless guy, an old man in a retirement home. “I was like, ugh, gross!” Keisha recalls. “To think of somebody actually doing that.”
Erotica vs. Pornography
Many of the women who say they are open to pornography are not open to what most men consider arousing. In fact, women are often talking about erotica, not flat-out male-dominated pornography, when they refer to adult material, and are unwilling to label themselves as “anti-porn” out of a reluctance to lose sex toys, lingerie, Nancy Friday, and Anais Nin.
Hannah, a thirty-two-year-old graduate student, makes no bones about her recent interest in erotica. Not having learned to masturbate until the age of twenty-seven, Hannah has found erotica a gratifying revelation. She keeps a small collection by her bed—old sex textbooks, Nancy Friday’s compendiums of female fantasies, erotic stories, an illustrated book of sexual positions with “crazy Japanese illustrations,” a photography collection from the Kinsey Museum. She has one video, a “woman’s porn film” with dialogue and characters.
But a lot of pornography turns Hannah off. Internet pornography is unsatisfying, with the exception of a few independent erotica sites, such as Nerve and Cleansheets. The rest she finds too aggressive, even invasive. “You look for images you want, but end up getting all these images that are repulsive and even offensiv
e to me personally,” she explains. “Women who are clearly under eighteen, women with an emptiness in their eyes, and a hardened, professional sad attitude toward sex.” She cites in particular the bad acting and depressing photography. Women being peed on and having their mouths stuffed with huge penises. “Porn on the Web reflects what so often disappoints me in male-oriented pornography,” Hannah says. Male magazines aren’t much better, but for different reasons. Playboy, with its airbrushing and fakeness, is “deeply boring”; the women are made to look like dolls rather than people. Magazines like Maxim are vulgar. “Women with abs of steel, gorgeous faces, and big round perfect breasts are presented with these lewd schoolboyish headlines,” she says. “It appears that’s what the majority of men in our culture want, and that bothers me. I’m nothing like those women, so it threatens me.”
At the same time that pornography has become a mainstream component of popular culture, erotica has wended its way into suburban living rooms. Companies like Fantasia and Passion Parties are multimillion-dollar businesses that offer Tupperware-style parties selling sex toys and lingerie. In contrast to the pornography industry, which is still largely controlled by men and primarily serves men, the sex-toy industry is dominated by women and caters to female consumers. Passion Parties now employs 3,200 saleswomen, racking up $20 million a year.22
But what is the difference between pornography for him and erotica for her? According to Molly, the female pornographer, erotica is “just a way of marketing porn to women.” As she sees it, erotica “tends to be flowery, more romantic,” but in the end, “it’s just a different take on the same sex act.” Others see a more profound distinction. Gloria Steinem has said that erotica, based on the word eros, meaning passionate love or yearning for another person, is about “a mutually pleasurable, sexual expression between people who have enough power to be there by positive choice.” Pornography, on the other hand, whose root word refers to prostitution, is about objectifying women. According to Steinem, the message of pornography is “violence, dominance, and conquest. It is sex being used to reinforce some inequality, or to create one, or to tell us that pain and humiliation are really the same as pleasure.” Others define erotica by the quality of the imagery. Erotic films have better production values than low-budget pornos; they focus more on story line and plot, using credible characters and actors whose bodies and attitudes more accurately reflect the way women look and behave. The goal of erotica, by this definition, is mutual satisfaction rather than exploitation of women by men.
Viewing some films helps clarify the difference in approaches. Take a typical mainstream pornography video—nothing too kinky or fetishistic—sold off the Internet. Two in the Seat #3, a 2003 release from a company called Red Light District, concerns itself with the escapades of two men and a woman. Claire, the female protagonist, a twenty-year-old and, it happens, three-month veteran of the industry, is asked off-camera what will happen in her scene. “I’m here to get pounded,” replies the pigtailed star. Two men then enter, calling her a “little fucking cunt” and a “dirty nasty girl.” While they doubly penetrate her, anally and vaginally, she braces herself, looking pained, against a couch. After both men spank her reddened buttocks, one asks, “Are you crying?” Claire answers, “No, I’m enjoying it,” to which the man replies, “Damn, I thought you were crying. It was turning me on when I thought you were crying.” Claire asks if he would prefer her to cry and he responds, “Yes, give me a fucking tear.” After one man ejaculates in her mouth, the second tells her to “spit all over my dick, bitch.” She does his bidding, then wipes the excess semen from her face and eats it.23 Presumably, given the popularity of the series, this is an exciting episode for many men; most women, though, would probably not find the scene arousing.
Take it down a notch to “couples porn,” a genre in which porn-star-turned-entrepreneur Candida Royalle specializes. On her Web site, Royalle explains:
I like to call my Femme movies “sensually explicit.”… You’ll find them to be less graphic and lacking in the traditional “money shot,” a staple of most adult films. You’ll also find story lines, good original music and real characters of all ages. Counselors often prefer to use my movies in their work with couples because of their “woman friendly” approach and what they call “positive sexual role modeling.”
One such film, My Surrender, follows the story of April, a woman surrounded by the “tender passions” of couples who come to her in order to be filmed acting out their private fantasies. Yet April, fearful of pain and disappointment, has been unable to find “real intimacy” in her own life. Not until Robert enters her world, determined to break through April’s inhibitions and weaken her resistance, will her “erotic flower” bloom. Viewers are invited to watch to see if Robert will truly make April surrender herself in the way the other couples she films have done. Can April become truly uninhibited like a porn star? The Web site provides a hint, cooing, “Ah, sweet surrender. So delicious. So pure.”
Or, as a male reviewer on the Web site notes of the female-styled fare, “I am not sure it would be that great to sit down to alone. I might want something a little less ‘lovable,’ but for my wife and I it was great to spark up the night.” Other “couples-oriented” pornography seems more geared toward men. The Web site Adam & Eve boasts Group Sex: Pure Ecstasy: “The gang’s all here! It’s a 4½-hour showcase of 9-person orgies, group groping, all-girl box-banging, deep-throat action and anal invasions—plus every juicy variation on the 3-way! See gorgeous groups of fresh-faced babes get it on with some of the horniest cocksmen in XXX. Along the way you’ll witness Nikita Denise … showing off her rear-entry talents … and Brianna ‘No Gag Reflex’ Banks going down on everyone in sight!”
Despite the efforts of female erotica and pornography producers, and the women who enjoy their work, most men do not find truly female-targeted erotica appealing, and the men who do watch them with their partners say they do so only for their girlfriends’ or wives’ sake. For their own arousal, they watch male-oriented pornography on their own. Meanwhile, erotic material for women is more likely and effectively found in mainstream Hollywood films. As pornography scholar Diana Russell notes, the mainstream media have readily adopted much that she would categorize as erotica—sex scenes in R-rated movies, for example. “There’s nothing wrong with arousal,” she emphasizes. “The issue isn’t about being against arousal, it’s arousal to degrading material that is so destructive.” Take Unfaithful, an exploration of a married suburbanite’s affair with a hunky downtown New York book collector played by international sex symbol Olivier Martinez. Throughout the film, the protagonist, played by Diane Lane, is both in control of the situation and emotionally conflicted. There are steamy nude sex scenes, but the focus remains on the woman and the emotional and practical effect her affair wreaks on her marriage.
True male-oriented pornography still offends the vast majority of women. Yet popular culture and the media today conflate the two, referring to them interchangeably. A recent feature by a female journalist in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “The Language of Love” is a good example: “Feminists often decry pornography as evil and based on the objectification of women,” the article begins darkly. The author then goes on to say that “pornography and erotica can play a useful role,” and briefly attempts to differentiate between the two; pornography is “thought of as more hardcore” while erotica “is considered to be softer sexual imagery that appeals to our sensual side.” By the fourth paragraph, the article eliminates the discussion of “pornography” proper, referring only to erotica, and urging women to try out female-friendly fare: “How do you find erotic videos that are female-friendly?” the article asks. “You can always visit your local erotica shop, but any online erotica shop has a variety of options…. There’s nothing shameful about curiosity or exploring your erotic side.”24 The result is that not only have the two ideas—erotica and pornography—become blurred in the public’s mind, but that pornography has become further de
fined into acceptability. Now that mainstream media, from R-rated movies to HBO television shows, regularly depict erotica that used to be considered pornography, those seeking to adopt porn are pushed further to the limits of what they may have once considered acceptable.
Women Who Don’t Like Pornography
Lauren wants to believe that pornography is okay. The thirty-two-year-old mother of two majored in women’s studies in college, and works as an educational consultant advocating progressive education. She and her husband are raising their children as equal partners. “The radical feminist in me wants to like it,” Lauren explains. “And there are parts I do like—that women acknowledge that sex is for sale all over America and they’re getting in on the game. That there is theoretically room for them to be active personal agents.” She pauses and sighs. “But the way that porn plays out is usually pretty repulsive. For the vast majority of women in porn, it’s not a real choice. And as a mother of two girls, married to a guy with a stack of Playboys in the closet, I can’t abide by it. We’re moving next month and those Playboys will not make the move.”
As much as women are touted as the new pornography consumer, they still lag far behind men. The spitfire headlines do little to reflect the reality of most women’s experiences, and statistics belie the assertions of the pro-porn movement and the go-go girl mentality espoused by female pornography purveyors. While some polls show that up to half of all women go online for sexual reasons, the percentage of women who say they do are likely exaggerated by the inclusion of erotica, dating, and informational sites in the definition of “adult” Internet content, areas to which women are disproportionately drawn compared with men. Many women who are tracked through filtering sites are linked to pornography by accident, visit out of curiosity, or are tracking down a male partner’s usage. Others feel that admitting they don’t look at pornography at all is akin to affixing a “frigid” sticker to their chastity belts: better not to come off as uptight.
