by Pamela Paul
Learning to Like Pornography
Most men clearly remember the first time they saw pornography. For boys on the cusp of puberty, porn is a rite of passage, an entree into adulthood, and a peep into the world of women. In the pre-Internet days, at least, boys often passed around pornography at summer camp and circulated it in the locker room during junior high. It was handed down from uncle to nephew, older brother to younger, father to son, usually around the time a boy hit the age of eleven or twelve. Whether that first glimpse delights or disgusts, most men are quickly socialized to look at pornography as teenagers.
For men now in their thirties, the initiation came through the pages of a magazine. “Whoa, cool, boobies!” recalls one thirty-three-year-old man of finding his first stack of Penthouse in a friend’s attic when he was twelve. “We immediately split them up. I hung on to my precious copy for quite a while.” Another man, now thirty-five, reminisces, “I used to go to my older cousin’s house when I was nine. He had these very explicit magazines, the hardest core you can imagine. I thought, ‘Eww, nasty!’ But soon I got into some pretty rough, wild bondage stuff myself.” For those in their twenties, the earliest experience increasingly occurs online. One twenty-year-old undergraduate student, a physics major at a large university in upstate New York, remembers first encountering pornography when he was fifteen. “It was online, on the family computer. I discovered some great stuff right away—group sex, bondage, voyeurism, exhibitionism. And so many women—white, Asian, Hispanic. I was able to learn what ‘my type’ is by looking around online—thin women with C- or D-sized breasts and long dark hair. Porn gave me a sense of what’s out there and exposed me to the kind of stuff I enjoy in real life. It was eye-opening, a real education.”
Pornography is frequently the first place boys learn about sex and gain an understanding of their own sexuality, whims, preferences, and predilections—their desires filtered and informed by whatever the pornography they watch has to offer. As adolescents, many boys learn through pornography to direct their sexual feelings toward the opposite sex, to explain the source of their desires and the means to satisfy them—lessons traditionally supplemented by sex education, parental guidance, peer conversation, and real-life experience. Whether mediated by outside sources or not, the pornography lesson is nothing if not straightforward; most is geared toward the adolescent mind: simple, primal, hormone-driven, results-oriented, a winnable game. Pornography depicts sex as an easy process that provides a welcome refuge from the tangle of sexual politics teenagers encounter in the real world.
Growing up in Alabama, Sandeep got turned on to porn in the most all-American of ways: in the Boy Scouts. He was twelve years old when one camping trip turned out to be a lot more interesting than prior outings. He quickly learned there were other ways to track down porn—at summer camp, from other boys in junior high. It wasn’t difficult when you knew what you were looking for. Then Sandeep went to college, enrolling at an Ivy League university. Suddenly, pornography wasn’t so cool anymore. Even owning the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was considered a sign of Neanderthal man in the early nineties. “Pornography seemed really gauche at the time,” Sandeep recalls. “I think I even began to see it that way myself.” He laughs. “What a ridiculous Ivory Tower way of looking at things!”
After his porn-free interlude in the Ivy League, Sandeep returned to the South to attend a large state university medical school and snapped back to his old habits. The med school was quite conservative, and as a consequence, professors made an effort to get students to understand that there were many sexual proclivities beyond “married missionary sex.” Sandeep was shocked by how little some of his classmates knew. During sexual behavior class, the professors showed the students a wide range of sex videos. “For doctors,” Sandeep explains, “it’s important to know what people can do.” Sandeep, of course, had picked up his lessons already.
During his post-medical school residency, Sandeep worked one-hundred-plus hours a week. For those three years, he masturbated all the time. “It must have been the stress.” He didn’t get out much. The nurses weren’t interested in the young residents and he didn’t have much of a sex life, let alone a romantic life, with the exception of an intermittent long-distance girlfriend. Instead, he was looking at porn movies almost every day. His tastes veered from “vanilla porn”—good old-fashioned naked girls—to more fetishistic bondage and leather fare. For a while, he had a cable descrambler and watched the Spice channel every night; later, when his cable luck ran out, he rented videos from a store down the block. Nervous about maintaining his privacy, he scoped out the store first, renting only mainstream movies before getting up the nerve to visit the back room. “I just felt kind of weird,” he says. “I don’t want some stranger knowing about me and my sexual proclivities.” On the safer side, Sandeep kept a stash of pornographic magazines on hand, usually Penthouse, but magazines no longer always satisfied him, especially compared with film.
Today, Sandeep works as a surgeon at a hospital in Texas. He usually rents porn videos when he has a day off and not a lot to do. He’s also found new options for seeing women stripped down. Among surgeons at the hospital, it’s common to gather after work at one of the local strip clubs. In Texas, Sandeep says, a lot of business gets done this way. In order not to discriminate, his group at the hospital is always careful to invite female surgeons along. “As a young surgeon, you’re not going to pass up the opportunity to hang out with the older guys after work,” Sandeep explains. “You have to play this game for people to remember who you are.” So far, nobody has objected to the strip club meetings, not even the surgeons’ spouses. “They understand who they’re married to,” Sandeep explains. “They know this is what goes on.” Most of the surgeons who attend are married; most have been married more than once.
Pornography can provide quite an education. In the Kinsey Institute poll, 86 percent of respondents believed pornography can educate people and 68 percent believed it can lead to more open attitudes about (one’s own) sexuality. Many men, particularly those younger and less experienced, use pornography to figure out what women want and expect from sex. In fact, studies show that men learn from and emulate what they see in pornography; experts refer to this as exemplification theory: “Each and every sexual act portrayed in pornography is treated as an exemplar of sexuality…. Thus, to the extent that pornography shows almost all women screaming ecstatically when anally penetrated, for instance, exemplification theory projects the generalization that almost all women outside of pornography will do likewise.”3 In other words, men learn that what goes in porn, goes in the real world.
While some of those lessons might be basic and informative insights into the mechanics of sex, that learning extends as well to ideas such as: all women really want sex all the time, multiple women are better than one woman, women usually want what men want. Men who watch pornography collect other nuggets of wisdom, too: what to say; how to say it. As the anonymous writer Jake explained in Glamour magazine, “The most acceptable and most common word for [a man’s penis], which rhymes with rock, is what they use in porno movies, so most men have been brainwashed into thinking it’s sexy.”4 For many, pornography almost becomes equated with sex.
Learning to Dislike Pornography
Of course, some men dislike pornography or simply don’t find it interesting enough to bother. For Pete, a thirty-one-year-old writer in New York, pornography never caught on. It’s not as if he hasn’t been exposed to pornography. When he was thirteen, he caught late-night glimpses of sexploitation B films on cable outlets such as Showtime showcasing naked breasts and the occasional zip-by full-frontal nudity, but steered clear of actual sex acts. He would see the passing magazine, though nothing more graphic than Penthouse. A couple of times when he was traveling, he watched a porn movie in his hotel. None of it did anything for him.
Pete is neither in favor of pornography nor opposed to it—he simply doesn’t pursue it. He has never even looked at porn
ography online, though he uses the Internet on a daily basis. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he claims; the truth is, he has never bothered. Strip clubs make him uneasy. “I once went to one for a bachelor party and I left after ten minutes,” he says. “It seemed kind of pathetic from both ends of the spectrum—for both the men and the women. There’s this whole charade where the guys are trying to pretend to themselves that the women are really interested in them and that they’re not just paid to act that way, and the women are trying to pretend that the men don’t disgust them. There’s something incredibly lonely and sad about it.”
Three years ago, a girlfriend suggested they watch a video of what she thought of as female-friendly porn. Pete assumed that, like many women, she figured all guys were into threesomes, the film’s theme, and that he would want to watch one on video or would think she was hip for being open to his fantasies. Pete didn’t take her up on it. “It would have made me uncomfortable,” he says. “I don’t want to watch other people having sex when I’m with a woman who I want to have sex with. The idea just isn’t appealing.”
Classically handsome, Pete has never been short of girlfriends and never felt the need for pornography. Even if he didn’t easily capture female attention, he doubts he would turn to it for refuge. True, he’s attracted to many of the women, but so much of what he sees he finds downright unappealing, even repugnant and upsetting. For example, he doesn’t like anything where there’s a power dynamic or it looks like a degrading experience for one of the participants. “There seems to be a whole realm of pornography dedicated to the idea of humiliation and power, subservience and punishment—and that just does not appeal to me at all.”
When asked what kind of man dislikes pornography, most men fall back on the easy—but easily proven false—supposition that only pious men might not look at pornography because their religion counsels them against it. Religious men, of course, look at pornography, too. “At least half of the men in Christian churches struggle with pornography at some level,” says Jonathan Daugherty, founder of Be Broken Ministries in San Antonio. “It’s become the leading factor in divorce.” According to a 2000 survey of clergy members conducted by Christianity Today and Leadership magazines, about 40 percent of clergy acknowledge visiting sexually explicit Web sites.5 Another poll, conducted by Pastors.com in 2002, found that 50 percent of pastors admitted to viewing pornography in the previous year.6 And a 2000 survey by Focus on the Family found that 18 percent of those who call themselves born-again Christians admit to visiting porn sites.7 According to Henry Rogers, a corporate chaplain who studies pornography, between 40 and 70 percent of evangelical Christian men say they struggle with pornography.8 It’s not necessarily the pious who abstain.
The idea that a man simply doesn’t find pornography exciting rarely enters the picture; the notion that a man might not like the way pornography affects him or the role it plays is rarer still. And the concept that men other than Bible Belters, Orthodox Jews, or fundamentalist Muslims might have moral reservations about pornography—whether because they’re married, feminist, progressive, or conservative—strikes men who love pornography as unlikely. Nearly every user interviewed for this book found it hard to imagine a man who didn’t look for reasons other than sexual repression or religion.
Men who like pornography don’t seem to understand men who don’t, and vice versa. Each group suspects the other, in its own way, of being somehow sexually subversive. “How is it that so many of you thirty- and forty- and fifty-year-olds are quite prepared to invest hours and hours and countless dollars in pornography?” wrote TV writer Burt Prelutsky (M.A.S.H., Rhoda, Dragnet) in a recent Los Angeles Times column. “Call it a hobby, a pastime or an addiction, but I’m begging that golf doesn’t even run a close second.” He concludes, “I just never considered sex a spectator sport.”9
Not every man discusses pornography with his circle of acquaintances or even his closest buddies. For many, consumption remains a private matter, assumed but rarely outlined to others, at least not after the raucous tumult of hoots and exchanges during adolescence. Perhaps, as a consequence, men who don’t like pornography aren’t as rare as fans think, or even as unusual as guys who don’t like it suppose they are. In the Pornified/Harris poll, only 27 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “All men look at pornography.” Men were only slightly more likely to agree than women—31 percent versus 23 percent. And men most likely to agree were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, not only the age at which men most often look at pornography, but also the generation most exposed to pornography via the latest technological wave.
Ian, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, sometimes feels like a freak for not being into pornography. Working in the often sex-obsessed music industry, he feels as if his disinterest requires an explanation, even a defense. “I’m probably the odd one out,” he says. “In a strange way, I’m mildly ashamed to be the guy who really has read Playboy for the articles.” As a teenager in boarding school, a filthy dog-eared copy of the magazine periodically made its way around the dormitory. Ian would pick it up for the record reviews. “I have a distinct memory of reading the review for a live Hall and Oates album, but I can’t remember a single woman or pictorial image,” he says. “And I don’t even like Hall and Oates.” The first porn movie Ian saw was Caligula, the mainstream Hollywood film to which Penthouse’s Bob Guccione added several graphic sex scenes. One of Ian’s friends rented the fiasco of a film (“The most controversial film of the twentieth century!”) in the early days of the VCR. Ten-year-old Ian recalls being bored by the sex and enthralled by the violence. That the adult film industry pumps out 11,000 films a year baffles him. Don’t people get bored of the same old thing? he wonders. It’s not that Ian is a prude. He likes to party, enjoys a night out drinking, and is open to sexual experimentation.
Over the course of his thirty-five years, Ian has seen about five pornos, either in group settings or because he needed to view them for work. Part of the problem with pornography, he thinks, is the way such movies are made. A film buff, Ian appreciates good filmmaking: compelling characters, tight scripts, original dialogue. “But in porn, there is no narrative,” Ian says. “They’re not concerned about whether the Swedish plumber actually fixes the washing machine. The outcome is always inevitable.” Nor does Ian find pornography arousing. “In heterosexual pornography, there’s a lot of footage of men’s penises,” he explains. “There’s not a heterosexual man on the planet that would rent those movies if they were called something like ‘This Guy’s Cock’ and yet that’s what you’re seeing.” There’s no way around it, either—in order to show a blow job, you have to show a man’s genitals. “I’m just not interested in seeing some guy’s hairy ass,” he says simply.
Even the way pornography portrays women strikes Ian as unappealing. “There’s this kind of David Cronenberg aspect to it; it’s almost gynecological,” he says. “A woman standing around naked is fine; it can be quite nice. But in pornography, they’ll have the woman splaying her legs, and basically showing you her interior. These women seem to be almost trying to disgorge their intestines through their vaginas. I don’t see why that’s any sexier than looking at a woman’s spleen. It makes me squeamish.
“Sometimes, I flip the question around in my head,” Ian says. “I ask, Why would men be interested in this? Doesn’t it strike them as peculiar that they’re spending half their time watching some guy naked? I don’t understand it. But nor do I understand why so many men will go out in the freezing cold on a Saturday night to watch a sports team lose.” Ian ties his disinterest in spectator sports to his disinterest in porn. “When it comes down to it, I’d rather be having sex or playing football than watching either of them be done by other people. I don’t need some idiot from Penthouse to map out my fantasies for me. I have a pretty vivid interior life.” For example, he gets turned on by passages in novels, not even especially sexual stories, just ones that evoke erotic ideas. He likes to watch certain fe
male news anchors. Tabloid shots of celebrities caught naked sometimes strike him as titillating. “I find odd things to be pornographic in my own way,” he says.
Popular men’s magazines like Maxim and FHM, which Ian considers unequivocally pornographic, offend him above all other forms of pornography. “I think they are far, far more damaging. Because even though Hustler is a hugely offensive magazine and I can understand why women would want to shut it down, it at least, generally speaking, depicts women in a realistic fashion.” But in Maxim, the women are “savagely airbrushed”—people just don’t look like that, Ian explains. “I read an interview with [Hollywood starlet] Jessica Alba in which she talked about how degrading it was to do one of those photo shoots, how she was in absolute tears, but her publicist made her do it, because that’s what seventeen-year-old actresses are expected to do for their careers these days. But I don’t get aroused by it. I find it so fucking vacant.”
Ian has trouble believing that as many men are into pornography as most people seem to think. “I know it’s supposed to be a huge percentage of men,” he says. “But when do people do this? It seems odd to me that porn is supposed to be such a huge part of men’s lives and yet it leaves no trace whatsoever. Personally, I never hear any of my friends talking about pornography or see them watching it. I haven’t been invited to see porn or had someone put on a video in my presence since I was twenty-two. Nobody in my weekly poker game ever mentions it. For all I know, nobody I know watches pornography.” In fact, if one of his friends were to stick a porn DVD into the player in a group setting, Ian thinks it would be regarded as weird. But it’s hard to imagine, since pornography generally passes as an unspoken issue.
