by Pamela Paul
So many women and all so easy; a man tends to gorge. And once he’s seen a thousand bare bottoms—no matter the variety of form and function—they start to look the same. Men pummel through woman after woman, plunging into an inevitable cycle of diminishing returns. In one study by James L. Howard, Myron B. Reifler, and Clifford B. Liptzin, cited in the 1970 federal report on pornography, men who were shown pornographic films for ninety minutes a day, five days a week experienced less sexual arousal and interest in similar materials with the passage of time.6 What initially thrills eventually titillates, what excites eventually pleases, what pleases eventually satisfies. And satisfaction sooner or later yields to boredom.
Even porn stars get boring after a while. That’s the way it’s worked out for William, the thirty-five-year-old legal clerk from Missouri. Sometimes he’ll find something “weird” or “different,” but, increasingly, it feels like more of the same. After looking at pornography for more than twenty years … well, it’s lost its novelty. “It used to be more fun looking for the right thing,” he says. He enjoyed the challenge of finding just the woman to pique his interest. “But I’ve been on the Net since 1983, and these days, I can find what I want with just a few clicks.” As a consequence, William still likes to look, but the searches are shorter and the end result not quite as sweet.
Gabe, the Houstonian who works in the oil and gas industry, noticed a similar effect when he started scoping out pornography for money. At first, the job was enormously time-consuming; he would spend most of his day at work gathering material. With time, he learned the best places to look and the task became streamlined. He searches, finds what he needs, forwards it to the sites, and he’s done. Performing his online duties has taken its toll on Gabe’s appreciation. “Often, I feel bored,” he says. “I used to get really excited when I looked at porn. But nowadays, it’s just the same poses, the same type of girls. The only time I get excited is when I see something I’ve never seen before or someone who’s particularly attractive, but that’s rare.”
How can something so exhilarating turn into such a bore? It starts off with a bang. There’s the preamble: stimulated by something—a woman in the office, an advertisement, a thought that crosses a man’s mind, the recollection of previously viewed porn—and full of pent-up sexual frustration and desire, he decides to check out some porn. With the first glimpse, there’s that strange combination of titillation and aggravation. The image is good, but not quite right. He barrels on with impatience, flipping through the pages of the magazine or scrolling from one hyperlink to the next, aroused by not yet enough, no, no, no, until there. That’s it. The excitement reaches its limit; he masturbates and is relieved. Then he comes down. The effect wears off. He is sated, a little tired. Rather than feel nostalgia or warmth or attachment to the image, he is done with it. And it was just like the last time. And likely will be largely similar to the next time, too.
Kevin, a thirty-two-year-old photographer in Colorado, has gone through periods of porn use and disuse. While Internet pornography was exploding at the turn of the millennium, Kevin was living with his fiancee. He missed out on the early hullabaloo. But after breaking off the relationship in 2003, he fell into heavy consumption. For the first time, he looked at online porn, about five or six hours a week. The more time alone, the more free time, the more porn. “I had just bought this new computer, and started to look every other day. I was way into the discovery of what was out there.” Oh, had he missed out. “In the beginning, online porn was super-awesome, this world of discovery,” Kevin says. For months, he consumed on a near-daily basis. His Internet sessions would start with a casual dip into nature photography—for work purposes. In search of inspiration and ideas, Kevin would explore the great outdoors online. But it was always a progression, further and deeper into natural bodies, nudity, women. “I would want more and more,” he explains. “It wasn’t enough to just see bare breasts, it had to be bottoms and then it had to be couples, anal and group sex, multiple men and multiple women, bisexual porn.”
“It was such a time-killer,” he says now. But Kevin’s excitement waned, then died altogether. Maybe he was getting too old. Maybe it had just been too much. “Ultimately it was just boredom. I was merely going through the motions.” At first he felt great after his pornography fests, but he began to feel “gross” afterward. His worldview started to skew and—deadly for a photographer—his sense of the sublime faded. “It was just fucking with my head too much,” he says of Internet pornography. “More than anything else, it was making me jaded. I wasn’t finding pleasure in the little things, either with women or with life in general. Things that used to be erotic bored me.”
Despite the physiological tumult stirred up by an encounter with porn, certain vital emotions are bypassed altogether. Pornography contains little in the way of kissing, hugging, caressing, or holding—all the supposedly “feminine” aspects of sex that, stereotypes aside, can be key experiences for men as well. No one is ever vulnerable or insecure in pornography; there are no reassurances or exchanged intimacies.
Pornography is a sure thing because the women involved don’t exactly demur; it also means the implicit reward of being able to get the coveted woman is absent. She knows nothing about him—his quirks or his traits, his romantic history or plans for the future. But she doesn’t like him despite all of this; she “likes” him in the absence of all this. Something about the achievement of pornography leaves men feeling somehow slighted, as if they were hoodwinked into believing something they know to be false, as if they cheated on a test and got away with it. There’s an emptiness to the accomplishment. While the absence of a real woman in pornography may be welcome, it also eliminates the presence of a real man.
The inevitability of pornography can ultimately quash desire. It’s not just the sameness of the poses, acts, and attitudes on display, but the risk-free ease of their acquisition. There are rarely hiccups along the way; never the awkwardness of the ill-fitting condom, the bedsheet that escapes the mattress corner, the woman’s failure to achieve orgasm, the man’s premature ejaculation. Nothing remotely veers from the automated path to pleasure, not even momentarily. Ultimately, there is the same ending, with no suspense whatever along the way. For this reason, many men say pornography simply can’t compete with the real thing. It’s intrinsically one-sided: empty-calorie sex—no risk, no effort, no reciprocity, minimal and ephemeral reward. Every once in a while, perhaps not so bad. Every day? Try eating at McDonald’s on a daily basis.
Upgrade, Downgrade, More, More
It’s the human condition, it’s the American weakness—the desire for more, bigger, better—damn the consequences. More stuff, cheaper, easier, more exciting. In order to make that momentary gain last longer, in order to get back that sexual zing, in order to go even deeper, men go back for more pornography. Better porn. Edgier porn. Just a click away. Pornography researcher Robert Jensen has observed, “Pornography, without emotional variation, will become repetitive and uninteresting, even to men watching primarily to facilitate masturbation. So pornography needs an edge.” First, Jensen explains, in the 1970s and 1980s the edge was created through anal sex; when that no longer did the trick, so-called gonzo porn became the edgier genre—with double penetration and multiple oral sex performances the main features.7
Since adolescence, Tyler, now twenty-one, has spent about half an hour daily with Internet pornography. His viewing patterns have been consistent. His tastes, however, have changed. “At first, I was happy just to see a naked woman. I was like ‘Wow!’ each time I saw a really hot girl. But as time has gone on, I’ve grown more accustomed to things,” he explains. “I look for more and more extreme stuff.” He began to search out hardcore material; close-up penetration shots became de rigueur. He developed specific interests. For example, he has “a thing” for dominant-submissive porn. “I like it when the girl is really submissive, I’m embarrassed to say.
“It’s become more severe as time has gone on,”
he continues. “Which is weird because it doesn’t correspond to how I am with an actual woman. I’m gentle, very concerned about how the woman is doing. But for some reason, with porn, in order for me to get excited, I need to notch it up one level. It’s got to be more extreme. Seeing women demeaned is somehow a turn-on.” Not all pornography, he points out, is demeaning to women. After all, sometimes the woman is dominating the man. “But I think most men like the portrayal of women as submissive.” And not every kind of submissive pornography is a turn-on. “The women in bukkake aren’t actually enjoying it—they’re crying while the men come on their faces,” he explains. “If the woman is crying then it seems like it’s not her personal choice to be treated that way, she’s not genuinely wanting it as much as she should be. It seems like it’s not consensual, like it’s a rape or forced sex.” The difference in the woman’s attitude is key. “I like it when the woman is being dominated but she appears to be enjoying herself. She’s got to really want to be treated that way. Then it’s a huge turn-on.” With the endless spectrum of Internet porn, Tyler has begun enjoying types of pornography he never thought he would. “Recently—I’ve got to be in the mood for it—I’ve found that I like to see a guy pissing on a girl. I didn’t think I would like it,” he says. “But I can get into it.”
Advocates aren’t shy about extolling pornography’s enticing effects. The first step is usually an increase in viewing—more times logging online or clicking the remote control, prolonged visits to certain Web sites, a tendency to fall into a routine. In a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll, nearly one in four men admitted they were afraid they were “overstimu-lating” themselves with online sex. In fact, that routine is an essential ingredient in the financial success of high-tech porn. Wendy Seltzer, an advocate for online civil liberties, argues that pornographers should not be concerned over piracy of their free material. According to Seltzer, “People always want this stuff. Seeing some of it just whets their appetite for more. Once they get through what’s available for free, they’ll move into the paid services.”8 And once they’ve indulged in more quantity, they want more quality—meaning more action, more intensity, more extreme situations. As porn director Jerome Tanner explained to Adult Video News, “People just want it harder, harder, and harder because … what are you gonna do next?”9 The impetus to find harder-core fare affects the entire industry. Says Sharon Mitchell, a former porn star, “It’s multiple penetrations, it’s fisting, it’s all about unprotected anal sex. A few people still do vanilla regular sex, but for the most part, it’s as kinky as they can get and as much as they can push it as possible. That’s the majority of the porn that’s out there.”10 In the same Elle-MSNBC.com survey, 37 percent of men admitted that Internet pornography pushed the boundaries of what they find erotic.
Particularly on the Internet, men find themselves veering off into pornographic arenas they never thought they could find appealing. Those who start with softcore develop a taste for harder-core pornography. Curiosity beckons the user to click deeper within a site, perhaps paying for something, even if only to know what the paid portions of the site offer—like picking up a copy of Hustler just to see what the fuss is about, back in the pre-Internet eighties. The illicitness, the total un-P.C.-ness of it all, the very idea that debasing and degrading images of women and sex are easily available can be quite enticing. So a man figures, why not, what could be the harm, and takes a look. He never knows what he might find. It might be a turn-on, after all.
Desensitization and Dissatisfaction
Sometimes the fantasy world of pornographic women provides a negative image rather than a positive one. Thomas, a tech-support staffer from Seattle, dislikes much of what pornography depicts. “There’s a lot of strange stuff out there. Bestiality, child porn, rape. Men shitting in women’s mouths. Things that approach snuff porn. I never seek that stuff out but occasionally they appear.” When he sees it, he feels nauseated and finds it hard to shake the imagery from his consciousness. Once, Thomas saw an image—“a horrific picture”—that seared itself into his brain. It showed an extremely obese woman wearing a bikini with a caption that said, “Find a fold and fuck it.” “I think I started losing hair that day,” Thomas says. He has no idea who looks for this kind of thing, but notes, “They say the scary people look just like everyone else, so it could be anyone. As The Shadow says, ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?’”
Men who view a lot of pornography talk about their disgust the first time they chanced upon an unpleasant image or unsolicited child porn. But with experience, it doesn’t bother them as much—shock wears thin quickly, especially given the frequent image assault on the Internet. They learn to ignore or navigate around unwanted imagery, and the third time they see an unpleasant image, it’s merely an annoyance and a delay.
Rajiv was surprised to discover how, with online pornography, the rest of the world went much further than he ever imagined. He saw things that not only turned him off, they outright disgusted him. “There’s a lot of weird shit online,” he says. “Much of it seems focused on degradation and humiliation and that really turns me off. For me, it’s not a fantasy to watch a guy pissing on a girl.” On the Internet, Rajiv saw gangbangs. Violence. Scatological porn. He got upset by what he came across accidentally online. Things were different when he had his first exposure to pornography. It was “so tame”—all about women on a beach rolling around naked or touching themselves in the rain. It was sensual and erotic. But online pornography was often the opposite of what he came to think of as sexy through the pornography of his youth. “If I were a kid today, I’m sure I would have started looking online immediately upon hitting puberty,” he says. “But I wouldn’t want my son to get his first exposure online. There’s so much fucked-up shit on there that I think it could be damaging. Women who are forced to drink a glass filled with semen or who get pissed on or who are deceived by men. My fear is that he would connect those kinds of images with getting aroused and would feel the need to treat women in his own life that way. Or that he would infer that such behaviors are normal. After all, this sort of thing does seem normal online. There’s nobody on these Web sites saying, ‘Guys, you shouldn’t treat women like that,’ so there’s no accompanying voice of reason.”
For years, experts and communities debated whether or not viewing rape as depicted in pornography can cause men to rape women. The research data on this question have been notoriously unreliable. However, how men perceive men who rape is demonstrably affected by their consumption of pornography. In the final session of the Zillmann-Bryant experiments with college students, participants were asked to read a newspaper report about the recent rape of a hitchhiker. The crime was described in the report, but the criminal sentence was not revealed. Students were then asked to recommend a sentence for the convicted rapist. Men who had viewed massive amounts of pornography recommended significantly shorter sentences for the man who committed the crime. Men in the “massive exposure” group recommended an average of 50 months’ imprisonment for the rapist, while men who had not viewed the films recommended 95 months. (By comparison, women who had been in the massive exposure group suggested 77 months’ imprisonment, compared with an average of 143 months recommended by those who had not been shown pornography.) Men who viewed massive amounts of pornography were also less likely to support women’s causes in general and were about three times less likely to favor the expansion of women’s rights. Overall, men’s compassion toward women seemed to diminish under the influence of pornography. Repeated viewings of women debased in the vacuum of pornography apparently hits home. And the pornography they viewed was tame by today’s Internet standards.
Pornography leaves men desensitized to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life. Men find themselves upgrading to the most intense forms of pornography, glutting themselves on extreme imagery and outrageous orgasms. Eventually they are left
with a confusing mix of supersized expectations about sex and numbed emotions about women. Zillmann describes this “satisfaction dilemma of pornography”:
What has been labeled “pornotopia” tells [men] what joys they might, could and should experience. As pornography features beautiful bodies in youthful, at times acrobatic, sexual interactions during which nothing short of ecstasy is continually expressed, consumers of such entertainment are readily left with the impression that “others get more” and that whatever they themselves have in their intimate relationship is less than what it should be. This comparison, of which pornography consumers may or may not be fully aware, is bound to foster sexual dissatisfaction or greatly enhance already existing dissatisfaction.11
Interestingly, because negative effects of pornography were demonstrated so definitively in Zillmann and Bryant’s study, researchers have had a difficult time getting new studies past academic boards monitoring the use of human subjects. If a study’s effects are known to be detrimental—and there is no proof the damage can be permanently reversed—ethics boards will refuse to allow a similar study to go forward. How could a university allow itself to so clearly harm students and other subjects under the auspices of social science research? Thus subsequent researchers were unable to get new projects approved. Luckily, the data provided by the Zillmann and Bryant study are thorough and solid; the only thing outdated about the study’s conclusions is the pornography itself and the amount consumed. Today, men who use Internet pornography typically reach the usage levels of the massive exposure group of this experiment, and the material they look at tends to be more hardcore.
“Porn has a tendency to numb people’s sensibilities toward sex,” Harrison, the graphic designer, explains. “Like violence, it feeds off basic human impulses. It’s so primal, there’s a reason people get drawn in.” And just as countless studies have shown that violent films and videos affect individuals’ attitudes toward violence, pornography can make men accustomed to the heightened attractiveness and carnality of all-out porn sex, turning plain old real sex into a distant second. “Those experiences you watch in porn are just not consistent with Average Joe who meets Average Woman,” Harrison says. “And I think a guy’s expectations of his partner might be affected by the images he sees in porn. People’s expectations of their partner’s sexual performance or of what their partners might be willing to do might be unrealistic.”
