Pornified

by Pamela Paul

  More women are installing programs like NetNanny on their computers to limit home computer Internet access to PG-rated Web sites. According to one filtering company, WiseChoice.net, more than half the company’s 3,000 customers are adults who use the software not to block their kids’ access but to keep themselves and other adults from looking.16 Others see the need for a stronger dose of intervention. In the Elle-MSNBC.com poll, one in four women said they were concerned their partner had an “out-of-control habit” with online pornography, and one in four divorced respondents said Internet pornography and chat had contributed to their split. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a gathering of the nation’s divorce lawyers, attendees documented a startling trend. Nearly two-thirds of the attorneys present had witnessed a sudden rise in divorces related to the Internet; 58 percent of those were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online. According to the association’s president, Richard Barry, “Eight years ago, pornography played almost no role in divorces in this country. Today, there are a significant number of cases where it plays a definite part in marriages breaking up.” In an online forum on the Web site Women Online Worldwide, a woman who identifies herself as “anti-pornography” explains:

  A couple of years ago I discovered that the man who had lived with me for ten years, had supported my activism in every way—ideologically, practically, and emotionally—was in fact using Internet pornography himself…. What did I do? Banished him from my life…. No personal relationship is worth more to me than the lives of the women who are hurt and abused in the making or consumption of pornography…. They say pornography is “free speech.” Um … who, exactly, is speaking here? Pornography is men telling lies about women. Pornography kills love and any sense of humanity so that some big fatcat somewhere can make megabucks through hate speech against women.17

  Matrimonial lawyers across the country attest to the growing docket of cases. “Pornography wrecks marriages,” says Marcia Maddox, a Vienna, Virginia-based attorney. Among the five attorneys in her office, there’s always a case involving pornography under way. In one case, a wife found out her husband was involved in Internet pornography while she and their daughter were working on a school project. The two were seated at the family computer together when suddenly a large window popped up depicting a giant penis ejaculating. Horrified, the mother quickly shut down the computer. She then hired a computer technician, who discovered a trove of hardcore pornography on the hard drive. The couple divorced and the mother was awarded sole custody. In another case that also ended in divorce, the husband was regularly using porn on the computer until two o’clock in the morning. According to Maddox, most cases settle rather than go to court because it’s embarrassing for the man’s pornography to come out in public, particularly when children are involved. “I’m sixty-two,” Maddox says. “I didn’t grow up with computers and these cases blow my mind.” The fact is, “using pornography is like adultery. It’s not legally adultery, which requires penetration. But there are many ways of cheating. It’s often effectively desertion—men abandoning their family to spend time with porn.” Often the judges find that even if children aren’t directly exposed to a father’s pornography, they are indirectly impacted because their fathers ignore them in favor of porn. Visitation in such cases may be limited.

  Mary Jo McCurley, an attorney who has practiced family law in Dallas since 1979, agrees. In the past five years, more and more cases are brought forth in which a husband’s pornography is a factor. “We see cases in which the husband becomes so immersed in online porn it destroys the marriage,” she explains. “Not only is it unsettling for the wife that he’s using other women to get off, but it takes away from the time they could spend together as a couple.” In divorce cases these days, enormous amounts of time and money are spent recovering pornography off computers. “You can hire experts who specialize in digging through hard drives,” McCurley says. “There are people who have made a profession out of it. It’s become quite common in Texas divorce.”

  Still, many women equivocate over how to handle their husband’s use, questioning themselves and their feelings. “Dear Abby,” writes one woman from Kentucky, “My husband has run up telephone bills amounting to $15,000…. When I leave the house, he immediately puts our daughters in their rooms and goes online to porn sites or to talk to women. He is taking much-needed money from me and our children to get his kicks. I have begged him to stop, but the problem is getting worse. Should I stick to my word and leave him if he doesn’t quit?”18

  Denial and Rationalization

  Sadly and perhaps not surprisingly, women tend to blame themselves when their partners stray into pornography. “Dear Dr. Ruth,” writes a woman, “I’ve been married for two years now (second husband). My husband seems to be very interested in sex, i.e., Internet pics, magazines, watching Playboy, tele-companions; however, I’m not getting any!… We’ve talked some about it, but I feel that at this point I’m begging…. I love my husband with all my heart. We are raising two teenagers. Sometimes it seems like we’re a great team at being parents, but not at being a couple. What should I do? I am seriously concerned with this problem and need some help.”19

  But rather than be consoled for their distress, women are reinforced in this self-blame—not only by their partners, but also often by advice columnists, sex therapists, and other members of the therapeutic community. Such experts would sooner urge a woman to ignore the problem, stop complaining, or learn to better “understand” her man than to tell the woman she’s normal for feeling the way she does. The days are long past when using pornography was considered denigrating to one’s partner and to women overall. Such ideas have been shuffled aside like a dreadfully un-revivable 1970s fashion trend. Instead, women are told to get with it. One woman, writing to an online sex coach about the trauma of discovering pornographic pictures on her partner’s computer after seven years together, is summarily dismissed and reprimanded: “There is a wise old saying. ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’ What appears disgusting and dirty to you may be your partner’s path to sexual pleasure…. I know that for you and many women who trip over sexy pix of women on their loved one’s computer (or elsewhere), this can be a shock…. It may even trigger reactions such as, ‘Am I not enough for him?… Does he want to be with them instead of me?’ Let me assure you that throughout time, men have been and will be peeking at pictures of pretty women, clothed and naked. Even cave-dwelling dudes probably did this. And typically, it has nothing to do with their feelings for the women in their lives. In fact, perhaps YOU violated HIM by peering into his stash of images, which he may have reserved for his most private moments away from the real woman he likes or loves…. I say let him have his toys. And stay out of his files…. You’re going to have some explaining to do about that deleted file, especially if your relationship matures into a long-term trusting bond.”20

  Thus women are told that their man’s consumption is not only okay, but they’re wrong to get upset by it. And it’s not just men delivering the bitter medicine. “Here’s the hideous truth,” Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll advises a reader distressed over her boyfriend’s habit. “Almost every guy you know is looking at this odious tripe. And the reason? Your man is simply following the plan Mother Nature devised. To ensure the propagation of the species. Ma created a rabid desire in the male beast to gaze at (and poke the blazes out of) naked women…. So if your man watches too much porn (more than an hour a week, in my opinion)… What to do? I love your anti-bourgeois ‘Baby, let’s look at dirty movies together’ idea.”

  Jonah, the S&M fan from Chicago, used to feel terrible about his habit, but now, with the help of therapy, he’s changed his attitude. His therapist, a woman he’s been seeing for several years, tells him there’s no reason to feel guilty; there’s nothing wrong with pursuing his fantasies through pornography. “She’s really encouraging,” he says. “It’s helped me get over the g
uilt.” Nowadays, Jonah is trying to convince himself that pornography is a harmless outlet for perfectly human desires. As he sees it, men are wired to want to have sex with everyone, but social and psychological reality dictate that they can’t. Still, that’s not his fault. He used to feel bad when he walked down the street lusting after every attractive woman he saw; he worried intensely that pornography was affecting the way he viewed women, that it gave him a low opinion of women and corrupted his idea of what an attractive woman could be. His therapist disagreed. She told him pornography had no impact on how he viewed or treated women.

  Jonah used to think pornography got in the way of his sex life; now he views it as an enhancement. He has trained himself to think about pornography while having sex with his fiancee, Stephanie, in order to keep himself excited and involved, and told her what he was doing. At first, it affected her sense of self, as she revealed during couples therapy. But after three years of intermittent impotence, Stephanie is willing to let Jonah do whatever he can to maintain his erection while they’re together. She’s desperate to be sexually satisfied in her relationship, and Jonah thinks pornography helps. What once felt like cheating to Jonah now feels like a boon to his sexuality.

  Meanwhile, women beat themselves up over “driving” their partners to porn. Perhaps it was her own fault: she wasn’t a good enough wife or sexy enough lover. Women married to pornography users echo each other’s pain. A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two from a Chicago suburb says her husband’s pornography made her feel inadequate. Her husband seemed to demand perfection and she felt like a constant disappointment. She didn’t wear the right clothes. She didn’t look right when she wore them. She never performed in bed the way he wanted her to. “I began to feel physically like I was not a sexual being,” she recalls. “I knew I could never measure up, so I couldn’t compete.” She tried watching pornography with her husband. “If you can’t beat them, join them,” she figured. “But I also had this sense I was reaching new lows. I was compromising my own feelings and beliefs.” A teacher from Dallas says that when she found out her husband was using pornography behind her back, she felt sick and angry. “Those women are so unreal,” she says helplessly. “They’re so different from the normal average person. I didn’t measure up at all.” She wondered if it was because she was a bit overweight. “Maybe that’s what drove him to this,” she worried. But then again, even if she were her perfect weight, she would never look like them. She figured she may as well just give up.

  Women tend to reach the same sad conclusion: Porn is inevitable and there’s nothing they can do. Part of the reason men and women come to believe that pornography is so excusable, so natural, so unavoidable stems from what they learned growing up—the lessons their parents taught them, the shrugs and excuses from other adults, the advice and encouragement from friends and peers, and the messages from the media surrounding them during their formative years. Boys who are told that “boys will be boys” become men who are boys. Dads who hand down pornography teach boys a lifelong lesson: Pornography is a natural male imperative. Mothers who pretend not to notice set standards for the wives who follow. Today, a pornified culture reinforces and expands on those messages. And then the next generation comes along.

  6

  Born into Porn:

  Kids in a Pornified Culture

  How does a boy become a childhood user of pornography, grow up to be an adult user of child pornography, and eventually become the father of children who use pornography? Looking back over his lifelong involvement with porn, Charlie feels as if he can spot the signs. His life seemed overly sexualized from a very early age. Growing up, he heard his father make constant references to sex, either overtly or through innuendo. Yet his dad had a poor image of the opposite sex, treating his mother and other women in ways Charlie deems “sexist.” He maintained an authoritarian home with strict rules and discipline. On the outside, Charlie obeyed his father. He became a “stoic and disciplined person.” Inside, Charlie developed into an introverted young man, socially inept and ill at ease.

  Charlie first saw a softcore magazine when he was eight years old, in 1973, at a friend’s house. He turned to hardcore magazines, again with friends, at age eleven. The boys would fool around while gazing at the magazines together, mostly group masturbation. Around this time, Charlie says, he became aware of his father’s video collection. He didn’t actually see his father watching them or view them himself, but he knew they were around.

  Even as a child, Charlie felt that looking at pornography was wrong. His family regularly attended a Presbyterian church. His religious upbringing made him feel guilty about pornography and he fell into a cycle of compulsive behavior and remorse. But despite his doubts, Charlie’s use escalated. He became the school’s purveyor of pornography, buying magazines in bulk and reselling them to guys at school at the time. He earned the nickname “Pervert,” a moniker of which he was proud. Preoccupied with sex, Charlie took to peeping, sneaking glimpses into the girls’ locker room at school and watching his neighbors through the bedroom window at night. At eighteen, he saw his first porn movie at an adult drive-in theater. He didn’t have to wait for another porn flick to roll into town; it was 1983 and the Betamax revolution had begun. Charlie started to rent his movies. He soon learned that he and his father were frequenting the same video rental store.

  My First Porno

  Children come across pornography in a variety of ways. The old-fashioned way is through older peer or family introduction: a cousin, brother, or uncle gives pornographic magazines to a boy on the cusp of puberty, or the boy discovers a relative’s stash on his own. Parents might pass along pornography inadvertently or carelessly. “Dear Amy,” writes a seventeen-year-old girl to the Chicago Tribune advice columnist, “I used my father’s computer and found something very alarming. In addition to an adult entertainment toolbar, I found various pornography sites … most of the sites were teen pornography … I would like to blame this on the male nature; however I can’t get past the fact that my dad is looking at obscene pictures of girls my age. I approached my mom about this, but she just blamed it on the fact that he is a man and men ‘do things like that.’”

  Some parents, especially fathers but mothers as well, actually encourage their kids to pick up on pornography or knowingly look the other way. Christina, the divorced mother of two who subscribes to pornographic Web sites, has a fifteen-year-old son who has kept pornographic DVDs and comic books lying around since he was twelve. His father, an ex-boyfriend of Christina, supplies him with pornography, which Christina allows him to hang on his bedroom walls. Her twelve-year-old daughter thinks the pictures are “gross,” though Christina is fairly certain she has also looked at porn online, mostly out of curiosity. From what Christina has observed, her son has some “pretty far-out tastes”—bondage, girl-on-girl, bukkake, cum shot videos—admittedly far more hardcore stuff than she herself saw at his age. “It doesn’t bother me,” Christina says. “When I was that age, I was just as curious and would be looking through my dad’s stuff.” Still, Christina tries to keep her own pornography out of her children’s reach. She makes sure to erase her Internet history every night after being online. Yet there are no rules, no Internet filters, no discussion.

  Whether parents pass down their own pornography deliberately or inadvertently, whether they try to hide it from their kids or keep it out of the household, children today often come across pornography on their own and don’t necessarily wait for hormones to kick in. They might flip to a cable channel on television, find a public access program, or order a pay-per-view movie. They might discover a video or DVD tucked away in their neighbors’ or older brother’s collection. According to a 1995 study of teenagers in California conducted by Gloria Cowan and Robin Campbell, 83 percent of high school boys and 48 percent of girls said they had seen explicit pornographic videos or films. Three in ten boys admitted to watching pornography at least once a month (compared with one in ten girls). On average, boys
said they saw their first film at age eleven; girls at age twelve. Boys admitted to having seen a dozen pornographic films or videos, while girls saw an average of five.

  Those figures are surely much higher today, with children increasingly discovering pornography on the Internet. According to a 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, seven in ten fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds admitted to “accidentally” stumbling across pornography online. Girls were more likely than boys to say they were “very upset” by the experience (35 percent versus 6 percent). While a majority of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds (65 percent) said they thought viewing such pornography could have a serious impact on people under eighteen, younger kids were more likely to take it in stride: 41 percent of fifteen-to seventeen-year-olds said it wasn’t a big deal. Learning to like pornography online is fast becoming the new norm. According to the Pornified/Harris poll, 71 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds agreed with the statement “I have seen more pornography online than I have seen offline (in magazines, movie theaters, TV)”—which was twice the number of baby boomers who agreed with the statement. More than half admitted it’s hard to go online without seeing pornography. This isn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. A 2004 study by the London School of Economics found that 60 percent of kids who use the Internet regularly come into contact with pornography.1

  It’s easy for kids to come across pornography online, considering the ploys pornographers use to lure them, whether through deceptive URLs or by linking pornographic pages to more innocent content. Pornography has become seamlessly integrated into the mainstream World Wide Web. In a study of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, the U.S. Customs Department’s Cyber Smuggling Center found that searching for innocuous phrases normally used by children (phrases included the name of a popular female singer, child actors, and a cartoon character) elicited a slew of pornography. More than half of the downloaded images were either adult pornography, cartoon pornography, child erotica, or child porn.2 In another nationwide study of children ages ten to seventeen, conducted in 1999–2000, nearly three-fourths of kids’ accidental exposure to online pornography occurred while they were searching or surfing, often through misspelled Web site addresses; exposure through e-mail and instant messaging also ranked high. Of the images encountered, 94 percent were of naked people, 38 percent of people having sex, and 8 percent involved sexual violence.3 A more recent study by Congress found that of the nation’s 70 million Internet pornography users, 11 million—or 16 percent—were under the age of eighteen.4