Pornified

by Pamela Paul

  Women who don’t log on to Internet pornography express a number of reasons for abstaining. In the Elle-MSNBC.com poll, six in ten said they just were not interested in Internet sex sites or didn’t like them, 35 percent said they had no desire or need to look because they already had a fulfilling sex life, 29 percent said it would make them feel sleazy, and 24 percent said they don’t want the pop-up ads and cookies that come with the package. Not everyone wants to be a porn star, particularly women with a greater range of options. In a 2004 survey of 107 female students at California State University, 96 percent claimed they would not participate in a Girls Gone Wild video. And in certain corners, porn star fatigue is setting in. In her February 2004 editor’s letter, Elle magazine editor Roberta Myers championed the new modesty in women’s fashion as a backlash against the ubiquity of pornographic imagery in mainstream culture. Myers noted that such styles will likely be embraced by women “who were just never quite able to find their inner porn star, despite a cultural atmosphere suggesting that not to was to be somehow a sexual failure, a prude, a woman out of touch with her own goddess.”25 Later that fall, fashions for teenagers were noted for reflecting a new preppy modesty.

  Other signs of female protest percolate. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004, ten female students decided to protest against Playboy’s “Girls of the ACC” photo spread by signing up to pose themselves. They then canceled their appointments via a letter to the magazine. The women carefully framed their protest in impersonal terms: “This is not about porn being offensive; that is, hurting our feelings or sensibilities,” they wrote. “It’s about the pornographic videos and magazines, like Playboy, that reinforce women’s sexual objectifica-tion.”26 On campus, fifteen female students gathered to protest the pictorial. (But while the activists took their stand, fifty other female students showed up, decked out for their Playboy appointments.)

  Among women in their teens and twenties, pornography is now openly used, advocated, and celebrated, without the desire for privacy that continues to characterize older generations. Like many college students and recent graduates, Ashley, a twenty-four-year-old who works in advertising in Baltimore, feels alone in her dislike of, and disdain for, pornography. At the Catholic university Ashley attended, men were open about their love of pornography, with videos and DVDs strewn around their rooms and Playboys scattered among their textbooks. Ashley can’t remember a guy’s bathroom that didn’t have a pile of Maxims or FHMs shelved high atop the toilet. Before Maxim, she says, you had to be eighteen to buy Playboy, and doing so was considered embarrassing; today it’s perfectly acceptable to buy magazines with explicit photographs of women on the covers. The Internet especially has made pornography omnipresent among her peers. Male friends gleefully beckon one another to their computers to behold porn of particular interest. Trips to strip clubs are a regular outing. “All the men I know feel like there’s nothing wrong with pornography,” she says. “They don’t even try to hide it.” Instead, guys try to pass it off as something funny. “It’s all very ironic to them,” Ashley explains. “Which I think is a lie. They say they look at it because it’s hysterical and that it’s a hoot to get lap dances. They never admit to using porn for what I think they’re using it for.” All of her female friends act as if they’re okay with it, too, though Ashley doesn’t buy it. But it’s better for women not to complain. “Guys think it’s really uncool for a woman to get pissed off about it.”

  For Ashley, who is a Republican, pornography is not about politics. She believes in free speech and dislikes the mixture of religion and politics that often grips denunciations of pornography. Nor is it about God. She isn’t strongly religious and never goes to church. And she considers herself far from a prude. She lost her virginity when she was sixteen and has had sex with ten other men since, five of them serious boyfriends. Instead, pornography is “personally offensive” to Ashley. Seeing her male friends and boyfriends use it is upsetting. Moreover, as a feminist (“I know that word has negative connotations these days”), Ashley believes pornography is inherently demeaning and objectifying, “impeding the progress of women.” As for feminists who believe pornography should be an equal opportunity enterprise, Ashley considers it wishful thinking. “I don’t think we’re far enough along as equals in men’s minds to get away with the pro-porn stance,” she says. “I think that until men view us as equals, it’s not smart for women to encourage men to objectify us.”

  Playing Along

  Many women learn to objectify themselves. Just as some men observe a shift in their sexual behavior stemming from pornography, women sometimes experience an effect on their own sexual behavior. Valerie, thirty-two, first saw pornography when she was twelve. She would steal her parents’ magazines and sneak glimpses on cable TV. “I have that imprinted in my brain,” she says.

  Valerie, who is single, admits to having an active sex life with more partners than average, though she can’t come up with an exact number. She goes for younger men, artistic types, men with whom her relationship is overtly sexual. “When I’m with a guy and he starts pulling moves from porn movies, it’s familiar to me and that’s exciting,” she admits. “My sense of eroticism has definitely been influenced by similar pornographic forces that men experience, and so I respond to those same attitudes and positions and types. I’ve been brainwashed, too.” But while the sex that results is often physically satisfying, there’s a negative side. “At the same time, it’s icky,” she says, trying to explain. “I don’t just want to become Body A. I want men to feel like they’re with me, Valerie, a particular woman with a particular body and my own unique personality. I want them to be in the moment, as opposed to going through some form of learned behavior. I want it to be our own experience as opposed to an imitation of porn.”

  Because she’s so aware of pornography from her own early exposure, whenever Valerie becomes sexually involved with a man she can easily tell if he’s into porn. Her first such experience was with Bill, a hotshot lawyer. She was twenty-five at the time and infatuated with Bill’s good looks, charming demeanor, and professional ambition. “He was an educated, really smart guy,” she says. “But he was obsessed with porn. He had it all over his apartment, cutouts of women pasted on his walls—and mind you, he’s a lawyer.” Intimidated, Valerie didn’t feel she had a right to complain. But the porn showed up in their sex. “He was really into fucking,” she says. “You know, bright lights on, staring at my body parts, going through the motions.” After a few months, she and Bill went on a trip together and had sex in the airplane bathroom. Afterward, Bill told her that she got “a lot of points” for doing it, but Valerie felt inadequate. “I didn’t feel like I was a sexual enough person for him. And it felt strange that he was giving me ‘points’ for doing this. To me, you get points if you give money to a homeless person or do something meaningful.”

  She tried to get into Bill’s porn-sex style, but the lack of sensuality and romance got to her. It seemed as though he was trying to push her away subconsciously, to keep her at an emotional distance. “I’m sure he thought I was lame and I thought he was scary,” she says. In retrospect, it was strange that Bill, at twenty-six, had clippings of women pasted on his walls. “I mean, girls do that when they’re twelve or thirteen, put up pictures of models and pretty actresses,” she says. “He was acting like a twelve-year-old, very into the beauty of various body parts.” The two remained friends, however, and Valerie wasn’t surprised to hear when, years later, Bill turned to various self-help groups in an effort to get over his “womanizing” ways. “He is finally struggling with his whole commitment issue,” she says. “He has this ideal of what a woman should be, but once a woman becomes available, he doesn’t want her anymore.” Pornography, she hypothesizes, seemed wrapped up in a number of related relationship problems for Bill.

  After dating Bill, Valerie went for a few years in which pornography didn’t seem to influence her male partners as much, though it continued to play out
in her own head. Then the familiar struck. At twenty-nine, she started to date Miguel, a musician. The first night they slept together it was the same old thing: lights glaring, gaping at her body parts, manipulating her into positions popular in pornography so he could admire her. He was aggressive, he was confident, he was following a formula. It was cold. “I almost felt like he was in the sex industry,” she says. “As if we were performing on the porn screen.” Afterward, she turned to him and said, “Do you watch a lot of porn?” He thought she was asking because she liked pornography, too; it was clear he was impressed. “Yeah,” he replied. “What are you into?” Instead of answering, Valerie told him, “I could tell by the way you had sex with me.” Miguel was taken aback. He had no idea a woman could trace his moves back to pornography; he didn’t even realize that was what he was doing. “He just thought it was hot, that he was a stud,” Valerie says. It felt bold for her to mention her reaction after the first time they had sex, but Valerie was compelled to do so. “I felt cheapened,” she says. “It wasn’t as if because he diminished me, I had to diminish him back. I just had to get it out there. I felt so empty after the experience.”

  For other women, the raw sexuality they observe in pornography is something they appreciate in real life. Christina, the thirty-five-year-old who subscribes to Cool Sex, says pornography has broadened her sexual horizons. She graduated from “standard women and men sex” to pornography showing group sex and edgier fare. Open to anything except “really raunchy” stuff—scatological sex, for instance—Christina likes imitating the women in pornography. She collects sex toys and accessories that she’s noticed in pornography, and keeps them by her bed, making sure to lock the door when she’s not home so that her fourteen-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter won’t find them. She often thinks about porn while having sex. “It lights a match to your senses,” she says. “And gives you crazy ideas of stuff to try.” For a while, she and her now ex-husband attended sex clubs together. That ended when he eventually became too obsessive and jealous to watch her having sex with other men, and was physically abusive.

  Most men, Christina finds, are into the fact that she likes pornography, and that helps her relationships. She and her boyfriend of seven months went to a hotel recently and ordered a huge array of pornos. He said, “Man, this is so great. My friends aren’t gonna believe that we’re watching this together and that you enjoy it even more than I do.” His reaction was typical: “Men think women who are a little freaky will have no inhibitions and be super adventurous in bed,” she explains.

  As Christina sees it, her greatest attribute and chief downfall is that she’s a people pleaser. “Especially with dating, I never want to say no. Rather than hurt someone’s feelings, I end up doing what they want.” Her daughter takes after her in this regard, and Christina fears she’ll become promiscuous in order to please men. For Christina, trying to please has meant putting up with things she thinks she maybe should not have accepted. One ex threw food at her and spit in her face; her blue eyes were often black and swollen from abuse. Her ex-husband raped her, forcing her to get a restraining order.

  Pornography can be a tool for women who aim to please. The message to women is clear: Want to be sexy? Want to win that man? Want to make him stay? Look like a porn star, or, at least, enjoy looking at women who look like porn stars. And needless to say, don’t be uptight if your man wants to look. In a 2004 issue of Glamour magazine, in an article entitled, “31 Essential Sex & Love Experiences,” readers are told that watching porn is one of the “ultimate milestones on any relationship resume.” The article advises, “Consider this your happy love life to-do list.”27 A 2004 article in Self, “Jump Start Your Sex Life,” included porn on its “Lust List” of things to do. “It’s true that hardcore porn can be offensive,” the article acknowledges. “But when you select carefully, some of these flicks can also be exciting.” It goes on to suggest spending a few days viewing pornography and then laying off for several months to make the activity “fresh again.”28

  For Keisha, the stay-at-home mom married to a police officer, looking at pornography with her husband is a way to stay hip, to “keep your freak card.”* Keisha explains, “Especially after you have kids, a lot of women become prudish. There’s less time for sex and men get disappointed. They think they married a freak but end up with a prude. If porn is something he likes, he’ll be happy you’re willing to share it.”†

  Other women make an effort to accommodate or incorporate a man’s pornography into their relationship. After their rather dispiriting first encounter and continually unfulfilling sex, Valerie and Miguel tried to improve matters. Miguel, who grew up in a wealthy Puerto Rican family, had a “typically Latin” approach to sex and relationships, according to Valerie. He thought he knew how to please a woman. “He really hated the idea that I felt such an unspecialness when we had sex,” Valerie explains. “I tried to go with it. After all, I had been raised on porn from a young age, too. I couldn’t help but find that kind of carnal sex exciting, and I tried to accept that this was something deep inside me.” They would cuddle afterward and kiss, but it wasn’t the same as connecting during the moment.

  They attempted various solutions. One night, they rented a porn film together. Valerie tried to get into it, continuing to watch while Miguel started making his moves. “It was a total disaster,” she says. “He got mad because I was looking at the movie while we were having sex.” Valerie protested that she thought that’s what he wanted, which escalated into a blowout. “Every time I thought I was being cool, I somehow upset him,” she says.

  “Don’t Pornify Me”

  Most of the time, when it comes to porn, what turns him on turns her way off. One woman’s erotica is the next man’s snoozefest. Lauren, the mother of two from Virginia, says that though she “wants” to be able to approve of pornography as a radical statement of women’s liberation, she has doubts about the way her husband views his Playboy collection. “They irritated me on one level because I’m not sure he necessarily had them for revolutionary purposes,” she explains. “My husband is clearly not using them for that—he’s using them in the totally generic guy way. It’s not necessarily problematic, but it’s not my favorite thing. Certainly, I would prefer he contribute to the National Organization for Women than look at Playboy” In fact, her husband has toted his Playboy collection along in two family moves. “He insists they’re going to be valuable someday,” Lauren says, laughing. “I guess there’s part of him that doesn’t want to acknowledge that contradiction with his otherwise liberal, feminist outlook.”

  Lauren believes men’s and women’s sexuality aren’t that different biologically, they’re just socialized differently. Theoretically, men who are psychologically sound and in good relationships, who like and respect women, could still look at Playboy or a nonviolent form of pornography privately. “Who am I to judge?” she says. After all, her own husband holds views that are supportive of women. “I don’t think that having porn in your life means you’re unable to engage in normal healthy relationships with women.” In fact, she has no idea whether he even still looks at his Playboys. “I’ve never walked in on him,” she says. “Quite honestly, with two kids under the age of two in the house, I don’t know where he would find the time. If he does have time, he ought to be doing the dishes.”

  For many wives and girlfriends, it becomes immediately clear that the kind of pornography their men are into is all about the men—about their needs and about what they want, not about their women, their relationships, or their families. Men aren’t completely in denial, either; they often recognize that their kind of pornography doesn’t exactly reflect well on themselves or on their partners. It’s usually not surprising to either party when a woman ends up feeling second-rate.

  Eventually, Valerie went “to war on the porn thing.” She had her ammunition. When she and Miguel started dating, he had just broken off a five-year relationship with a live-in girlfriend. Yet when Valerie stayed
over in the apartment they had shared, she found a faded girlie photograph pasted inside Miguel’s medicine cabinet. Valerie was fascinated that Miguel’s ex-girlfriend put up with it. She asked Miguel if Edie had minded. “She was totally cool,” he insisted. From then on, every time Valerie objected to Miguel’s pornography, Miguel held Edie up as the exemplary girlfriend. Why should Valerie mind if Edie hadn’t? Couldn’t Valerie be cool, too? Finally, during one heated argument, Miguel told Valerie she should talk to Edie herself.

  So Valerie called Edie, who told her that she and Miguel hadn’t had sex for the last two years of their relationship because Edie felt so bad about herself while she was with him. For a while, she had tried to accept Miguel’s behavior. She even threw him a birthday party at a strip club. But inside she felt terrible. She hated her body, she felt degraded, the sex was no good. After her talk with Edie, Valerie confronted Miguel again. “He needed to understand why Edie stopped sleeping with him, and how his pornography affected women.” When Valerie told Miguel the truth, he lost all color in his face. He had had no idea. Valerie took it upon herself to teach him how his “porn lifestyle” hurt people. It became her mission.

  She was quickly thwarted. One day, Miguel was sick and Valerie took the day off from work to care for him. She ran around buying groceries to make him lunch, but when she came back to the apartment, she saw that far from lying sick in bed, he had been on his computer while she was gone, masturbating away. “I freaked out,” she says. “I felt completely betrayed.” After two years of trying to make things work, Valerie and Miguel broke up. Now she’s trying to change her approach. “I never want to be in the kind of relationship where it’s just physical. I want my lovemaking back.” Part of the problem has nothing to do with the men she dates. “I think I’m creating that carnality myself,” she says. “It’s like a habit I have and a pattern I inadvertently promote. Men respond to my acting so wild and that just encourages them.”