Pornified

by Pamela Paul

  These are dangerous days for any attention-seeking tween with access to a digital camera or, worse, a webcam. One of the most recent trends in homemade, “amateur” pornography is entrapment porn, in which a man (usually a young man) coaxes a woman into sleeping with him and unbeknownst to her films the episode, posting it later on the Internet. Such footage is often accompanied by commentary in which the successful entrapper makes fun of his victim, mocking both her gullibility and her technique for the amusement and titillation of audiences worldwide.

  It’s not surprising that girls today emulate porn stars in the same way earlier generations gyrated to Madonna. Playboy bunny Pamela Anderson has become someone girls look up to; in addition to her column in Jane magazine, she also stars in a TV cartoon Striperella, in which she plays Erotica Jones, stripper by night, superhero by day. Christina Aguilera titled one of her albums Stripped and its first single “Dirty.” The stripper/porn star look is popular among young women today. Delia’s, the popular mail-order teenage apparel line, sells thongs to tweens emblazoned, “Feeling lucky?” In 2003, girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen spent $152 million on thongs, from Hello Kitty designs to red-hot glitter. Teen girl mall store Hot Topic sells Playboy bunny trucker hats, pajamas, and pillows.27 As Tom Connelly, publisher of the trade magazine AdultVideo News, explains, “I think [Larry Flynt’s name] used to be something pornographic, but now it’s the ultimate in hip, trendy and cool … kids want to wear T-shirts with Hustler on it.”28 Little surprise then that the number of eighteen-year-olds who got breast implant surgery nearly tripled, from 2,872 in 2002 to 11,326 in 2003—a far greater increase than the 12 percent rise in such surgery among adults overall, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

  Like all good marketers, pornographers know it’s important to reel in consumers while they’re young. MTV recently announced the launch of a Stan Lee-Hugh Hefner collaboration, Hef’s Superbunnies, an “edgy, sexy animated series” from the creator of the Spider-Man comic book series featuring a buxom team of specially trained Playboy bunnies.29 Marketers have extended the porn brand to everything from sporting equipment to clothing. Two snowboarding companies, Burton Snowboards and Sims, now offer boards emblazoned with images of Playboy bunnies and Vivid porn stars. Sims boasts that their so-called Fader boards, which feature photographs of Jenna Jameson and Brianna Banks, are their bestsellers. Such boards are clearly marketed to teenagers, who form the backbone of the snowboarding market. Mainstream video games regularly feature pornographic elements. BMX XXX, for example, adds a pornographic sheen to bike stunts and racing. Another game, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, features full-on nudity as gamers live out the player lifestyle, trying to score hot babes. The game’s manufacturers are fighting to obtain an M rating (the equivalent of a movie’s R) in order to ensure being carried at Wal-Marts across America.30 Groove Games and ARUSH Entertainment have developed Playboy: The Mansion, a video game in which gamers adopt the role of Hugh Hefner as they “live the lifestyle” by hosting “extravagant parties” and undertaking “empire-building challenges.” Given that Playboy readers already spend $300 million on video games annually and more than three million readers own a video game system, paying “residents” of the new mansion look to be built in.

  What Kids Learn from Pornography

  “Guys will ask if I’ve gone to first base yet, so I got to figure things out,” a thirteen-year-old boy from New Jersey told People magazine. “If you don’t know they laugh at you. Some guys look at porn out of curiosity and to figure out what they want to do with girls in the future.” In his eighth-grade class, all forty-two students admit to looking at Internet pornography.31

  Some people pose the question: What’s so wrong about kids seeing a couple have sex? Is it wrong for children to see naked women? Not necessarily, but pornography isn’t mere depictions of couples having consensual sex or respectful photography of naked men and women. Those who suggest otherwise clearly haven’t been exposed to much pornography. Pornography, particularly online, offers a very different view of sex from Where Did I Come From?

  Kids also absorb and process pornography very differently from the way adults do. Not only are kids like sponges, as the cliché goes, they are also quite literal. Even young teenagers are generally not sophisticated enough consumers to differentiate between fantasy and reality. What they learn from pornography are direct lessons, with no concept of exaggeration, irony, or affect. According to the 1995 Cowan-Campbell study of teenagers in California, six in ten boys said they had learned “some” or “a lot” from porn. Nearly half of girls agreed. They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what they’re supposed to do. They learn what women “want” and how men can give it to them. They absorb these lessons avidly, emulating their role models. Still, many older kids at least partly recognize the negative side. When asked in a 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 59 percent of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds said they thought seeing pornography online encouraged young people to have sex before they are ready, and 49 percent thought it would lead people to think unprotected sex is okay. Nearly half (49 percent) thought Internet pornography could lead to addiction and promote bad attitudes toward women. In a 2002 nationwide Gallup poll, 69 percent of teenage boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen said that even if nobody ever knew about it, they would feel guilty about surfing pornography on the Internet. An even greater number of girls—86 percent—felt the same way.

  Pornography in all its permutations affects developing sexuality; the younger the age of exposure and the more hardcore the material, the more intense the effects. Even Playboy has “a highly harmful effect on men’s sexuality and ability to be in a serious relationship,” says Gary Brooks, a professor of psychology who studies pornography’s effects on men. “Boys learn to become sexual by masturbating to unreal images of women and in the process lose the emphasis on sensuality and interpersonal connection. Through masturbation, they become conditioned to arousal by these objects, and can lose touch with everything else,” he explains. “Sex becomes something you do in a disconnected way—looking at a person without actually being with that person.” Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with the physical, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner. Instead, they re-create images from pornography in their brain while they’re with a real person. “It’s sad that boys who are initiated in sex through these images become indoctrinated in a way that can potentially stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Brooks says. “Boys learn that you have sex in spite of your feelings, not because of your feelings. Meanwhile, girls are taught that you don’t have intimacy without relationships.”

  The effects on children can be disturbing and devastating. In the spring and summer of 2003, in Ontario, Canada, two boys, twelve and thirteen, and one thirteen-year-old girl decided to play a new game. The kids were good children from solid homes. None had been in trouble before. But what they did together that summer was engage in sexual acts that the police deemed to be “far beyond any normal sexual experimentation that might occur at that age.” The thirteen-year-old boy performed sex acts on a seven-year-old girl he was babysitting. The thirteen-year-old girl also chose her victims from among her babysitting charges, touching them sexually while watching cable TV. The twelve-year-old boy convinced an eleven-year-old girl to engage in mutual sexual petting, along with three siblings, ages eight to ten. When the parents overheard the children talking about their new games, they confronted the kids. Their inspiration? They had learned it via Internet pornography, mostly pop-up ads, and from cable TV.32

  Kids typically learn about the opposite sex through interaction. A boy tells a girl he likes her, but chooses the wrong words or says them in the wrong way and she gets annoyed and tells him to get lost. Lesson learned. A boy shyly and sweetly tells a girl she’s pretty and she’s touched, and even though she’s
not sure she likes him, she blushes and kicks the ground and smiles. Lesson learned. If instead of taking his hopes, fantasies, and ideas to the girl in math class, a boy takes all that bridled sexuality online to a porn star, what is the lesson he learns? No matter what he does, no matter what he’s thinking, the porn star will do what he likes: deliver sexual pleasure. And she is certainly going to do so in a faster, more direct manner than even the most accommodating thirteen-year-old girl would consider.

  Watching pornography, kids learn that women always want sex and that sex is divorced from relationships. They learn that men can have whomever they want and that women will respond the way men want them to. They learn that anal sex is the norm and instant female orgasm is to be expected. “Kids today are going to run into pornography online, not erotica,” explains Aline Zoldbrod, the Lexington, Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist. “They’re getting a very bad model. Pornography doesn’t show how a real couple negotiates conflict or creates intimacy.” For girls especially, Zoldbrod believes pornography, particularly online, is a “brutal way to be introduced to sexuality,” since much of it she deems “rape-like” in its use of violence. When asked in the Pornified/Harris poll what the greatest impact of pornography on children is, 30 percent of Americans said that it distorts boys’ expectations and understanding of women and sex; 25 percent said that it makes kids more likely to have sex earlier than they might have; 7 percent cited the way it distorts girls’ body images and ideas about sex; and 6 percent said it makes kids more likely to look at pornography as adults (men were twice as likely to believe this last as women). Only 2 percent of Americans actually believe that pornography helps kids better understand sexuality. And only 9 percent think it has no impact on children at all.

  Lauren, the thirty-two-year-old mother of two from Virginia, fears her children might learn about sex in a pornographic vacuum. She hopes if she has a son he wouldn’t look at pornography until he is sixteen or seventeen, and only after she has a chance to discuss sex and pornography with him. “Developmentally, young teens don’t have the cognitive ability to put together what porn is and the place it holds in our society,” she explains. “They might fall into traps that an adult could more easily avoid. Pornography could impact what they think about the girl next door or how they relate to girls and women they know.” As for her daughters, her concerns are as great, but different. “I hope my girl has a healthy sexual identity and only sees pornography when it’s age-appropriate,” she says. “I hope she can experience her own sexuality in positive and real ways that are particular to her.” As an educator and parent, Lauren believes it’s her responsibility to talk to her children about the role of sex in society and to put pornography into context. “I don’t buy the idea that you may as well just throw up your hands because you’re not going to be able to change society anyway,” she says of the prevalence of pornography among today’s youth. “You don’t have to have a TV in your house or give your kids access to the computer when you’re not there. That lets parents off the hook. You have to be protective and mindful.”

  Yet many parents leave such potentially uncomfortable discussions to the classroom—where sex education is on the wane. Although students in 89 percent of American public schools took a sex education class as of 2002, one-third of those schools taught abstinence-only education. The Bush administration proposed $258 million for abstinence-only sex education programs in 2005, twice the amount in 2004, and nearly five times the $59 million spent in 1998, despite teenagers’ need, and desire for, more information.33 According to a 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of American teenagers, 69 percent of teens say it’s very important to have sex education as part of the school curriculum, and 21 percent say it’s somewhat important. Only 9 percent believed it was unimportant or shouldn’t be taught at all. As it is, sex education in America rarely touches on the subject of pornography. Although media education is increasingly taught in many curricula, kids aren’t typically taught to put pornography into context.

  In the absence of such education, the onus is on parents to explain sexuality and pornography to their kids. Child therapists advise parents to tell children about pornography at the age when children may become exposed so that they are prepared to handle it. Kids should understand that pornography purports to depict a fantasy and is a far cry from reality. At the same time, kids need to make a connection between fantasy and the real culture and economics of pornography production. A father can ask his son how he would feel if the woman depicted were his mother or sister, so he understands that while pornography projects a fantasy, the women who appear in pornography are real people. Zoldbrod argues that parents must remain available to their children so their kids can come to them with questions about pornography, since kids are bound to discover it with or without their parents’ knowledge or approval. Better to shape children’s responses than to leave them to figure it out on their own. Looking for answers, they’ll likely turn to the Internet.

  The Return of Child Pornography

  Parents not only have to fear their child looking at pornography, they have to fear their child coming across child pornography—or their child becoming an unwitting subject for the next child pornographer. Such fears, once considered paranoiac, are increasingly realistic. For a long time, child pornography was not considered a problem in this country. In 1970, the nation’s first National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography noted that “the taboo against pedophilia” had “almost remained inviolate” and that the use of prepubescent children in pornography was “almost nonexistent.”34 Once child pornography became explicitly illegal and the laws enforced, authorities believed the scourge had been largely wiped out.

  This, however, was prior to the Internet. Between 1996 and 2004, the total number of child porn cases handled by the FBI’s cyber-crime investigators increased twenty-three-fold.35 By 2003, there were more than 80,000 reports of Internet-related child pornography made to CyberTipline, a service provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), up 750 percent in five years.36 According to a November 2003 study by the New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center, 2,577 people in the United States were arrested for Internet sex crimes against children between July 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001; 39 percent were alleged to have violated children and 25 percent were caught through law enforcement stings in which pedophiles set up rendezvous with undercover agents.37 Child pornography is back—and a bigger problem than ever before.

  It’s particularly prevalent on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. According to a federal study of P2P networks such as Gnutella, BearShare, LimeWire, and Morpheus conducted by the Government Accountability Office, a huge quantity of child pornography is readily available through file sharing. In one search, using twelve keywords associated with child porn, the GAO identified 543 titles and file names that linked to child pornography content.38 Kazaa, for example, yielded 149 child pornography images and 44 child erotica images (erotic images of children that do not depict sexually explicit conduct). Since the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children began tracking child pornography on P2P networks in 2001, there has been a fourfold increase in reports, from 156 in 2001 to 757 in 2002.39 NCMEC also found that the number of reports about child pornography Web sites increased from 1,393 in 1998, to 10,629 in 2000, and to 26,759 in 2002.40 Still, such measures do not nearly capture the full gamut of child pornography online. Most users are not so foolish as to label kiddie porn explicitly; established code words such as “Lolita” and “nymphet” guide those in the know.

  Attempts to limit or patrol child pornography have been thwarted in court. The government attempted to expand federal child pornography laws with the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 to include not only pornographic images created using real children, but pornography that depicts virtual or simulated images of child pornography—with cartoons, for example. However, in 2002, the Supreme Court struck down the law, arguing that limiting mat
erial that does not involve and thus harm actual children in its creation is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights. This means that in order to prosecute on grounds of child pornography, authorities must prove that the depictions of children in child pornography are actual children. “Morphed” child porn, for example, which uses images of adults digitally altered to appear like children, doesn’t fall under regular anti-child pornography laws because, it has been ruled, it would limit artistic expression.