by Pamela Paul
Scenarios like this turned Rajiv on so much that they enhanced his real sex life. For example, when he was dating his college girlfriend, if he was having a hard time ejaculating because he had too much to drink or was tired, he would think of this scene, or a similar one. He never had a problem getting or maintaining an erection—but ejaculating within a reasonable amount of time was difficult. At these times, pornography helped him along.
The Rush
Excited is one of the first words that come to mind when men describe how they feel while looking at pornography. The physical act of masturbation alone is enough to fuel the experience. When a man looks at pornography and masturbates, he undergoes all the giddy physical sensations of sexual release. Adrenaline rushes through his veins. His brain releases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin—all powerful neurotransmitters associated with feelings of pleasure. Testosterone surges. It’s a potent high. There’s also the thrill of the hunt. And the surge of voyeuristic pleasure in observing and fantasizing once the sought-after object is found.
Tyler, a part-time computer science undergrad student and Web developer, lived out his entire adolescence in the age of the Internet. From the moment he hit puberty, pornography has been online. His first peek at hardcore was when a friend showed Tyler his older brother’s online cache. “He had a thing for cum shots,” Tyler recalls. That was back in the fifth grade, when Tyler was living on a military base in California. These days Tyler goes on the Internet at least once a day to masturbate, always at night, and then sometimes in the morning if he doesn’t have an early class. “I’m very focused when I get into porn mode,” he says. “It’s like I experience this rush, this whoosh of excitement that drives me on.” Once online, he’ll plow through Web sites quickly. Click, click, click, download, and move on. “I throw a lot of sites out because they’re not good enough, not wild enough, not crazy enough,” Tyler continues. “I’m always looking for the right site. Finding it is part of the fun.”
Female friends are amazed by Tyler’s involvement with pornography. They’ll say to him, “Wow, you look at Internet porn once or twice a day!” But he doesn’t understand the fuss. “If you look at polls online, it’s more often a couple times a week for most people,” he explains, and then adds sheepishly, “Once a day is a little much. But it’s definitely not compulsive because it’s not like I don’t do other things, like go to school or go to work.” It’s just so available. “Your partner in porn never says no. And if you’ve broken up with your girlfriend or if you’re in a bad relationship, that can be a huge help.” But it does seem to leave him wanting more. Like gambling, you get hooked on an unattainable fantasy, “because when you’re done with the porn, there’s still no woman right there with you, so you just want to keep going with it. And going. I guess that can lead to compulsion.”
In the fall of 2003, one of Rajiv’s friends mentioned a pornography blog called Fleshbot, which offers links to a myriad of Web sites. He decided to check it out. His dating life had dried up completely, work was slow, and sitting at the computer at least made Rajiv feel as if he was doing something. Online pornography was a completely different ball game from the movies he had watched intermittently since college. With movies, there was always a beginning and an end. In the online world, pornography was “an odyssey.” He was captivated. “Online porn is an infinite exploration,” he says. “There’s this sense that not only could I discover all these new and interesting things, but that I could always be able to find exactly what I wanted.”
For Rajiv, that meant women who looked different from the women in porn movies. Those women had seemed a bit too fake, too altered by surgery and implants. But on the Internet, image galleries offered visitors a choice between porn stars, teens, voyeurism, and other targeted tastes. Rajiv discovered the genre of “average girls”—women who looked like someone he might meet and have sex with, the occasional pimple, oversized thigh and all. “They seemed more real, and that was exciting to me,” Rajiv explains. The Average Girls always looked cheerful and happy to have sex. They seemed friendly and realistic and, above all, enthusiastic—ideally, the way women acted in real life.
“I don’t want a woman who is submissive and lets me be the boss,” he says. “I want a woman who is as into it as I am and I want to be able to please her.” With porn, Rajiv fancied himself the “stud who can please women” and that was part of the enjoyment. “I respect women and the idea of porn that degrades women repulses me. Porn where it’s all about the guy, and the woman is just a sex object, isn’t appealing to me at all,” he says. “I like sex to be egalitarian.” Pornography had become a lot more interesting online.
In a landmark experiment conducted twenty-five years ago—still one of the most thorough, balanced, and powerful studies on pornography—Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann showed just how watching pornography alters viewers’ perceptions of sexuality.3 Eighty college students at a large northeastern college were divided into four test groups. Three groups were shown a variety of short films over a six-week period and asked to evaluate the films for their production values. The first test group, deemed the “massive exposure” group, was shown six explicitly sexual films per viewing session, about forty-eight minutes of exposure each week, or about thirty-six films over the course of the experiment. The second, “intermediate exposure” group was shown three erotic movies and three nonerotic movies per session, eighteen erotic films in all, or about two hours and twenty-four minutes of pornography over the six-week period. The third, “no exposure” group was limited to nonpornographic fare, asked to watch thirty-six regular movies, containing no sexually explicit content. Finally, the fourth group, the control, was shown no films whatsoever during the six-week period, which took place between 1979 and 1980.
The erotic films that subjects watched were far tamer than much of today’s hardcore fare. All sexual acts portrayed were heterosexual and consensual. The films’ sexual activities were confined to oral, anal, and vaginal sex, and none involved coercion or the deliberate infliction or reception of pain. The nonpornographic films were entirely devoid of sexual references or behavior.
Three weeks passed. At the next session, members of all four groups were asked to estimate the prevalence of certain sexual behaviors in America. Their opinions were solicited on everything from the percentage of sexually active adults to the percentage of Americans performing particular sexual acts. Without exception, the more pornography the subjects had viewed over the six-week period, the more likely they were to believe others to be sexually active and adventurous. For example, the “massive exposure” group believed on average that 67 percent of Americans engaged in oral sex (a fairly close approximation of the norm), compared with the 34 percent of those who had not been shown any pornography three weeks earlier. Those who had viewed “massive” amounts of pornography believed that more than twice as many adults had anal intercourse than did those who viewed no porn (29 percent versus 12 percent). The same applied for less common sexual practices. The massive exposure group believed that three in ten Americans engaged in group sex, compared with slightly more than one in ten estimated by the no exposure group. Pornography viewers also estimated that roughly twice as many people engaged in sadomasochism and bestiality; according to their assumptions, 15 percent of Americans practiced S&M and 12 percent had sex with animals—gross overestimations of actual sexual practices, according to all available data.
See the Girl, Play with Her
Harrison, a graphic designer who studied art in college, believes men are inherently visual and this drives their approach to porn. “If you want to call it superficial, fine,” he says. “But for men, the visual experience of sex is very important, which is why men get drawn into pornography.” Women, Harrison believes, are more sensual; they require a full sensory experience, and are more likely to be aroused by the look-touch-talk-hear of flirting than by watching porn. In fact, Harrison postulates, for men the equivalent of flirting is looking at pornography. Whe
n a woman is flirting with a guy, she’s enjoying the fantasy that this guy really likes her; when a man looks at porn, he’s fantasizing that the woman he’s looking at really likes him.
The porn star is a blank slate on which each observer can graft his own recipe for reciprocal lust and pleasure. Beyond that, there’s a certain vagueness to the women portrayed; she is literally the “object” of whatever kind of affection a man wants to bestow. Zach, the twenty-three-year-old unemployed Web site developer, checks out women online every couple of days. He’ll flip through pictures, rarely lingering on one girl for more than fifteen or twenty seconds. “For me, the girls in porn aren’t any specific girl—they’re just a girlish image,” he explains. “You enjoy it, but you don’t get attached to it.”
Like most men who use pornography, Zach says it has no effect on the way he views women in real life. The idea is laughable to him. “The women are completely different from the women in the real world—and they have nothing to do with each other.” Unlike advertising, pornography doesn’t change men’s minds, he says. Here’s the difference: Advertising is trying to influence you. Porn isn’t. Advertising pulls a lot of dirty tricks, whereas porn is straightforward. Moreover, advertising is in people’s faces, whether they want to see it or not. With pornography, on the other hand, people can decide whether they want to view it. They’re prepared for it. Because people choose to see pornography and it’s only showing something people already know exists, it can’t in Zach’s view possibly change their minds. “The kinds of men who are affected by porn already have something wrong with them,” Zach explains. “But I don’t think it’s had any effect on me.”
Zach likens the women in pornography to the person behind the counter at McDonald’s. “I realize the guy behind the counter has a whole life—that he’s not just an object or a tool,” he says. “He’s got his interests, hopes, family, etc. But when I’m at McDonald’s, I don’t care. I just want my Big Mac.” Of course, if Zach were ever to see the McDonald’s guy on the street, he wouldn’t treat him like a tool or an object; instead, he would say hello. “I know the girls in the pictures are real people but I just want to get off and get on with my day. I view them as tools to help me get what I want while I’m looking at porn, but if I met them on the street, I’d deal with them as real people.”
The difference between real women and the women in pornography is crystal clear to him: “In porn, the women are objects and I see them that way. But if I met those women in real life I wouldn’t see them like that. After all, in real life, a woman has her hobbies and interests. But you don’t care about that when you’re looking at porn.”
When opponents of pornography talk about the ways hardcore pornography affects men, the focus is on violence and rape. But there are other, more subtle ways in which pornography operates on a man’s psyche. In the Zillmann-Bryant experiments, men and women who were exposed to large amounts of pornography were significantly less likely to want daughters than those who had not. Who would want their own little girl to be treated that way? Who would want to bring a girl into such a world? It’s not just hardcore porn, either. According to a large-scale 1994 report summarizing eighty-one peer-reviewed research studies, most studies (70 percent) on nonaggressive pornography find that exposure to pornography has clear negative effects.4 Gary Brooks, a psychologist who studies pornography at Texas A&M University, explains that “softcore pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with softcore pornography is that it’s voyeurism—it teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.” According to Brooks, pornography gives men the false impression that sex and pleasure are entirely divorced from relationships. In other words, pornography is inherently self-centered—something a man does by himself, for himself—by using other women as the means to pleasure, as yet another product to consume.
The word objectification smacks of 1970s feminism and outdated ideology. Yet interestingly, it tumbles unbidden out of men’s mouths while discussing pornography; even porn’s biggest fans readily admit that pornography treats women as objects. As an act of pure visualization, pornography legitimates, accentuates, and provokes men’s emphasis on the visual—whether they have a biological predilection toward such behavior or not. Because pornography involves looking at women but not interacting with them, it elevates the physical while ignoring or trivializing all other aspects of the woman. A woman is literally reduced to her body parts and sexual behavior. Not surprisingly, half of Americans say pornography is demeaning toward women, according to the 2004 Pornified/Harris poll conducted for this book. Women are far more likely to believe this—58 percent compared with 37 percent of men. Only 20 percent of women—and 34 percent of men—think pornography is not demeaning.
With increased viewing, pornography becomes acceptable and what once disturbed fails to upset with habituation. While 60 percent of adults age fifty-nine and older believe pornography is demeaning toward women, only 35 percent of Gen-Xers—the most tolerant and often heaviest users—agree. For example, after years of heavy viewing, Harrison noticed a shift in his perspective. At first it was subtle. “It’s kind of silly,” Harrison says, “but my standards changed.” The women he used to find attractive no longer seem quite as attractive. “Women who were otherwise good-looking but weren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, blonder hair, curvier bodies in general. Just better-looking overall.” It’s not, Harrison explains carefully, as if before he got into Internet pornography he would have dated certain women and now he turns them away because they’re not porn-star material. It’s not that simple. But he’s noticed a change in his appraisal: “I find that when I’m out at a party or a bar, I catch myself sizing up women.” The feeling troubled him. “I would say to myself, ‘Wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.’”
You’ve got to keep these two worlds separate, Harrison told himself. Women in pornography are different: “There’s that age-old claim that porno objectifies women and I agree with it. Women in porn become viewed as sex objects or sex tools. But it’s worth noting that the same applies to men in porno. Everyone involved in porno is just an object.” As a result, he says, pornography inherently cheapens sex. “These images, while they are titillating, are also devaluing our perception of what sex means between two people.”
As Harrison points out, women are not the only ones who suffer. In the porn world, men tend to find themselves placed in the role of playboy or gigolo, the superficial stud whose status is attained according to the quantity and quality of women he beds. Most men would not elect to be judged in this way, particularly not those men who look at pornography because they aren’t attracting women in the real world. Nor would men who fear their penises aren’t large enough or who can’t stay erect on demand for hours on end want to be judged. Most men do not, in the real world, measure up to the image pornography requires. In a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll of 15,246 Americans, 13 percent of men confessed that viewing sex online caused them to worry that they might not satisfy their partner’s needs. One in ten said they need to do more to keep their partners sexually interested, and 8 percent admitted that after viewing online porn, they felt bad about their own bodies.
Despite its premise of relieving tension, pornography often creates tension for men, leaving them increasingly insecure, with the need for continual validation through ongoing conquests. Pornography, with its mutual objectification and teenage mentality, can bring back the worst of adolescent fears about manhood (with its requirements for youthful vigor and a boundless constitution). This mounting tension then leads to the search for temporary relief—and a more intense drive toward more porn.
You’ve Seen 1,000 Women, You’ve Seen Them All
It’s n
ot easy to turn me on anymore. And that’s not a good thing…. I thought about why it is that I don’t often look twice when a nearly nude 20-something walks by me in a restaurant. Or sometimes at night, when, on that rare occasion I have a woman in bed next to me waiting for me to make a move, I fall asleep.
Could I have erectile dysfunction? Have I been really tired for the last year?… No, those weren’t it. What had my turtle in his shell?
Pornography.
I first saw porn in my middle-teen years. It started with the late-night … programming. Then came the Internet e-mails…. It’s more than five years later, and I am immune to all of it…. I have seen everything—things I did not, know the human body could do or wanted to do…. When all is said and done, I have built such a high immunity to sex that the whole idea of it is demystified. There are no secrets. There are no subtleties—the subtleties that can tease a person to arousal. Nope. Not here.5
