by Pamela Paul
The appeal of voyeuristic pornography like Girls Gone Wild, a franchise of videos featuring young women—mostly college girls on spring break—drunkenly baring their breasts to cheering crowds, is to capture all those missed opportunities. “GGW gives you all the breasts of all the girls you never get to see,” Austin explains. “You would never get to see every shape of breast in your lifetime in real life, but now you can.” Austin, who has never had a serious girlfriend but would like to get married someday (“If you asked me at a party, I’d probably say something like ‘If it happens, it happens,’ but in secret, I think it would be really romantic to get married. I’ve thought about my imaginary wedding and what I might say in my vows”), says pornography relieves the stress of not having a girlfriend. When he feels horny he starts to worry: “Why don’t I have a girlfriend? When will I get one? When is my life going to come together?” Austin says that “masturbating to porn brings all that into perspective. I realize that my horniness got mixed into a lot of emotions, and once I have that release, it dissipates. It definitely relieves insecurity.”
Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies pornography, says it appeals to men because it delivers without requiring any effort. Most men, Jensen says, use pornography as a means to sexual release without the typical real-life requirement of love and affection.18 In other words, pornography explicitly offers men the option of sex without risk, without vulnerability, without the potential to be hurt. Psychotherapist David Marcus attributes the appeal to men’s fear of experiencing emotions; pornography offers a vacuum in which such emotions are unnecessary. “Many men tend to be cut off from their emotions and overly reliant on the rational. They’re very logical people and they have trouble doing well with emotions. Pornography is the perfect outlet.” Zach, the twenty-three-year-old Web site developer, has a theory: most guys who are really into pornography are probably shy and don’t date much. He thinks they’re intimidated by real women and have a hard time relating to the opposite sex. Internet nerds are probably more into pornography than most guys; they tend to be social rejects or shutins. “Come to think of it,” Zach admits, “I’m probably describing myself.” Zach’s sexual experience has been fairly limited. He hasn’t had a relationship for more than a year and, while he can discuss his porn habits freely, is loathe to admit how long it’s been since he had sex. “It’s pretty pathetic,” he says ruefully. “I have trouble making friends and getting dates. I move around a lot for work and it’s hard to maintain relationships.” It’s not always easy to move from acquaintanceship to intimacy.
The beauty of pornography is that there are never any hiccups in courtship. Nobody fails to get an erection, the woman doesn’t have trouble achieving orgasm, nobody fears their gut looks too big or they’re sweating too much or they can’t catch their breath. If a man tries to take a woman from behind or tie her up or asks her to spank him or ejaculates on her body, the woman doesn’t wince or object or ask questions. In pornography, no one needs to make pillow talk. There’s no expectation that a man will tell a woman he loves her, or to get up and make her breakfast. Nobody gets genital warts or heaven forbid the AIDS virus. Nobody gets pregnant or wants to get married or tries to pin down a date for next weekend.
And porn can serve as a refuge. The desire to use pornography may stem directly from trouble in a man’s relationship and contributes to it as well. Take a regular guy with no previous sexual problems. He’ll be fine with his partner early in the relationship, as he is falling in love, but then finds himself experiencing some performance trouble: difficulty maintaining erections and control. He starts to feel a certain amount of anxiety in his sexual relationship with his partner. Worries about what kind of man he is. So he begins masturbating to pornography or ups the amount he’s already been viewing. It’s easy. Nobody is asking, “Honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” There’s no need to confront anything even remotely unpleasant. There’s no one else to satisfy. And that’s a huge relief. He feels more virile, more sexually potent. He can get used to this—and he does. Now, when and if he turns to be with his partner, sex is even more difficult than it was before. She’s tough by comparison. And pornography certainly didn’t help matters; he didn’t learn how to please her or how to communicate better with her. His sexual dysfunction worsens.
Thus, pornography can be too safe, too easy. For Sandeep, the surgeon in Houston, pornography is often all he needs, satisfying the desire to have sex rather than stimulating it. It’s been a while since Sandeep has had a serious girlfriend. Occasionally, he’ll get depressed about not being married yet—thirty-one already and so many of his friends wed!—though he has come close to asking three different women he dated. Part of the problem is he’s busy with work—so busy that “luckily” he’s often forced to put the pornography away. There just isn’t the time, and it may well be for the best. “God forbid I sat around spanking off to porn all the time. It’s all about fantasy and you can’t just live in fantasy all the time or you lose perspective on reality.”
It helps for Sandeep to get out into the real world, to interact with real women and either “score” or be rejected. “You’ve got to have that visceral experience one way or other or you just lose the ability to interact normally with women you’d otherwise want to go out with, or at least be in a sexual situation for real,” he says. Fortunately, Sandeep gets the real thing fairly regularly—having succeeded in his profession and created a full social life for himself in Houston, he’s managed to have about fifty or sixty sexual partners in his thirty-one years. Not all the sex has been great, but when the real thing fails to satisfy, Sandeep conjures up images from pornography in his head. “There are times when I’ve been so utterly bored while having sex with a woman, I’ll think of porn to hasten things along.”
Still, he admits, “I’ve found myself feeling like I’d rather just spank off to porn instead of going out. Usually, it’s related to having been rejected by a woman in real life. When I have some kind of emotional investment in a woman, being rejected by her leads to a lack of confidence.” Pornography becomes a cause and a symptom. If Sandeep gets down or worries that he’s not going to be successful asking a woman out, he’ll just sit home and watch porn. It helps with the physical frustration of not having the real woman, even if not with the emotional component. Yet, over time, pornography can build his frustration. “If I don’t go out and have real sex, it feels like I’m going to burst,” Sandeep says. “I’ve actually thought using pornography might have a negative effect on how I cope emotionally,” he says. “But I can’t really see it. I do know it’s not positive though.” Sometimes pornography serves as a warning. “If I’m looking like eight or ten times a day, I realize I need to do something to build my confidence level back up,” he says. “I’ll go to the gym or go out and eventually find some woman who seems eager to talk to me. That’s always the first step to getting laid and feeling better about myself.”
I Can Get a Porn Star
In the meantime, pornography makes a lot of men feel a lot better about themselves, even if only on a short-term basis. Divorced, with two kids and no college degree, William, the thirty-five-year-old legal clerk, sees himself as unlikely to attract the kinds of women portrayed in pornography. At five feet seven and 170 pounds, he’s a little overweight (“I’ve got a spare tire going on”). He doesn’t have any illusions about why pornography works for him. “I’m looking at women I don’t have a shot with,” he explains. “The fantasy is that I could actually get them.” It’s a convenient ego boost.
Unlike women in real life, the girls in pornography seem willing to share themselves with a man. At least in William’s experience, real women aren’t nearly as into sex. Of course, the porn star is a conscious if elaborate fantasy, requiring several leaps of faith. The first leap is believing—if only for a fleeting moment—that the woman in pornography wants the viewer. Even if only in a corner of the brain where reason doesn’t enter and imagin
ation dictates all, a man needs to suspend disbelief (No, she’s not just an image. No, it’s not just because she’s getting paid) in order to believe she sees something in him others haven’t seen before. It’s the same corner of the brain where adolescent girls fantasize that members of their favorite band would actually date them rather than the supermodels they’re photographed with. If she just shuts her eyes she can reach a place where it doesn’t matter that she’s only fourteen and he’s thirty-two, that she spends her days at a suburban high school and he lives in London, that she has never met him and likely never will. The fantasy is pure irrationality, but it can feel very real.
In the porn fantasy, a guy is no longer the tech geek nobody liked in junior high school or the awkward college student lacking in social skills. In his mind’s eye—despite a paucity of dates and a sexual history confined to the girl from math class—he has always gotten the woman he wants. She gives him that essential validation that everyone, man and woman, craves. He tells himself it’s a fantasy, that she’s just an image and the real woman behind it may hate men, or be addicted to cocaine, or be dating the cameraman. But he can close his mind to those inconvenient facts, if only for fifteen minutes.
The women in pornography exist in order to please men, and are therefore willing to do anything. They will dominate or act submissive. They can play dumb or talk back, moan quietly or scream, cry in anger or in pleasure. They will accommodate whatever a man wants them to do, be it anal sex, double penetration, or multiple orgasms. The porn star is always responsive; she would never complain about a man being late or taking too long to come. Her hair never gets trapped under his elbow and her thighs never tire. She’s easily aroused, naturally and consistently orgasmic, and malleable. She is what he wants her to be. She’s a cheerleader, a nurse, a dominatrix, a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a teenager, your best friend’s mother. She is every woman who was ever out of your league. She’s the girl next door, the prom queen, the hot teacher, the supermodel, the celebrity. She is every woman who ever did the rejecting. She used to be a lesbian, she used to be frigid, she used to be afraid of sex. She is every woman who cannot be had. Now she loves sex, she can’t get enough of it; she can’t get enough of sex with you. She is every woman who should appreciate you. The women in pornography are undiscriminating—it doesn’t matter what you look like, if you’ve got bad breath or can’t keep an erection. She certainly doesn’t care about occupation, reputation, or history. Each encounter begins anew, meeting as welcome strangers and parting with gratitude.
Of all the requirements for enjoyable pornography, men most commonly cite the appearance of a woman’s reciprocal pleasure as key. She has to seem as if she’s having fun; she should be smiling, welcoming, and at ease, and she should make the viewer feel that she’s doing what she does because she wants to—not because she’s being paid. Even when the sex acts depicted are clearly made to look nonconsensual or painful, most men (there are exceptions) insist that she not seem too distraught by the appearance. It should at least be clear—if she’s crying or wincing—that she’s only acting. “The women in porn tend to act as though the sex act is earth shattering every time, even though realistically speaking, it’s not like that all the time,” Ethan says. “But it’s still fantastic—that enthusiasm really appeals to me.” Asked if his wife is enthusiastic about sex, he says in a lackluster voice, “Yeah, I guess so.” But he goes on to say, “The women in pornography are just different, though, and that’s the appeal. I like the whole innocence vibe of young girls. The tautness of youth, tighter and clearer skin, the bright faces.” His wife, Candace, is already twenty-nine years old, a good decade past his ideal.
It’s Just a Fantasy
Of course, pornography should be put into perspective, fans insist. “It’s not like I would ever date a porn star seriously,” Ethan explains. “They’re not the kind of women you could bring home to your mother. My mom would go out of her mind seeing me date a slut, a girl with no moral compass whatsoever. Plus, I’m a pretty jealous lover like most guys. If I knew she was going to be off with some guy making a porn movie, that would drive me crazy.”
Ethan will be sure to talk to his own children someday about pornography. “I would make sure my son understands that these women are objectified and treated in ways on video or film that no human being in real life should ever be treated,” he says. His daughter, he hopes, won’t see pornography until high school. “I would teach my daughter that acting the way women do in pornography is not the way to please a man in real life. I would make sure she understood that the value of a person stems from within.” He will tell his daughter that when boys look at her that way, they’re objectifying her; they’re seeing her as a piece of meat. She shouldn’t abide by that. She should be the one to dictate how they see her so they don’t value her purely for sex. If Ethan’s kids found out that he looks at porn, he would be sure to explain that he loves their mother for many other reasons beyond the physical. That he doesn’t see their mommy as just a disposable outlet for his sexuality.
Candace, after all, is nothing like the women in pornography. By and large, Ethan explains, women in porn are treated like receptacles for men. They’re not in a position of control. Weaker men than he might be inclined to be affected by such images. Perhaps some men, those who would be predisposed to view women in a certain negative light, might have their ideas reinforced by pornography. The key, in Ethan’s mind, is recognizing the fantasy. It’s different from the way women are portrayed elsewhere in the media. After all, in a commercial advertisement, the situation is kept in the realm of reality. “We know we’re seeing a car that we don’t really need, but we see the car in an environment we can relate to. In porno, the situations are so far outside the norm. No man is going to answer the door and find a woman there in a Girl Scout outfit, ready to have sex. Most men—at least the smarter ones—can tell porn is pure fantasy.”
Of course, fantasies still matter, Ethan allows. If a guy were looking at violent rape porn, that would be different. “His fantasy could become a reality,” Ethan explains. But what about Ethan fantasizing through pornography about being with another woman—couldn’t that become a reality, too? “Yes, but my adultery fantasy is less harmful. If it came true, it would be horrible for me and for my wife, but it would be much more horrible if some guy who looked at rape porn’s fantasy came true.”
Yet even Ethan has trouble keeping it all in perspective. Ethan could even see himself becoming addicted to pornography since “it’s just so pleasurable to look at and there’s so much of it out there.” He loves being able to admire a new girl every day, never having to see the same girl twice. “I’ve noticed that I find myself thinking more sexually about women I see on the street after I’ve had a prolonged exposure to porn,” he admits. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been in a monogamous relationship for so long and so I’m inclined to really check out other women, or if it’s because I’ve seen so much porn.”
Some men fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality, or slip slowly into failure. It’s not difficult, considering that women in pornography are equated with sexual pleasure, yet men continue to get sexual pleasure with women in real life, too. How can the women really be so different, and who will hold men to seeing that difference? And for men who don’t have much contact with women, the women in pornography become all he knows. At least that’s what thirty-five-year-old Gabe thinks. A couple of guys living in Houston who Gabe first met online have a “porn problem.” Both are in their twenties, both are overweight, both live in the Houston area, and neither leaves his house very often. Gabe describes them as social outcasts who spend all their time online, twenty-four hours a day, looking at porn. “I have no idea why they’re like this,” Gabe says. “I don’t think either of them has ever had a girlfriend or been with a real woman sexually. They never learned to interact with people.” In Gabe’s experience, it’s hard to pull them away from their porn, and whenever he convinces them to go out, th
ey’re chomping at the bit to get back home. “I guess if you look at something every day for two or three years, it becomes part of your daily routine and starts to affect you.”
But doesn’t Gabe look on a daily basis? Hasn’t he been spending twenty hours a week with it for the past five years? “Yeah, I guess I use porn as much as they do, but I don’t do it to masturbate,” he explains. “I go online for fun. It’s just kind of snowballed into a hobby.” Besides, Gabe is careful. “There have been times when I thought I shouldn’t look at it so much,” he admits. He’ll give himself a thirty-six-hour break when he won’t go anywhere near the Internet. For the past two or three years, he’s tried to provide himself a break every few weeks, to get his focus back on reality. Plus, his girlfriend of eight months doesn’t like him looking—not that she knows how often he does or that he provides links to Web sites for money—but when she’s seen him looking at porn, she’s made comments. “Why do you have to look at other women?” she’ll ask, or “Are you done yet?” He tells her he doesn’t have to look at other women, but that it kills time.
