Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families

by Pamela Paul

  And then it was all over. By the following decade, the feminist debate over pornography retreated to academia and the legal arena. In the popular culture, women’s magazines rarely discussed pornography. During the early 1990s, it was unusual to run across an occasional mention of erotica. Those who continued to question pornography were labeled “feminazis” and “radicals” by some groups, or “right-wingers” and “bluestockings” by others, depending on the political agenda and persuasion of the name caller. Together, the message was clear: “Stop whining.” Having never properly addressed the feminist quandary over porn, women’s roles in using and producing pornography were no longer subject to debate.

  Instead, in recent years, women’s magazines regularly discuss pornography from a new perspective: how women can introduce it into their own lives. While many women continue to have mixed or negative feelings toward pornography, they are increasingly told to be realistic, to be “open-minded.” Porn, they are told, is sexy, and if you want to be a sexually attractive and forward-thinking woman, you’ve got to catch on.

  Porn Is for Girls

  Popular culture promotes the wild fun and whimsy of the girl who loves pornography. She is Carmen Electra, the MTV icon turned pop phenomenon, whose husband, Dave Navarro, glorifies pornography while she sells exercise videos based on strip club routines. She is Pamela Anderson, Playboy centerfold, who has her own column in the teenage bible Jane magazine. The porn girl is every celebrity who accompanies her boyfriend to a strip club, playing along and plying a few bills to get lap dances herself. “Strippermania!” shouts a headline in Us magazine. “Taking it off takes off in Hollywood! Ask these guys—and gals—about their XXX-tra naughty adventures,” the article goes on, highlighting photographs of fans such as Kate Hudson and Christina Aguilera.

  Back in the pre-”pornocopia” era, wearing a thong meant painful waxing and a wedgie, pole dancing meant emulating a low-class stripper, and taking a man for a lap dance meant tolerating and even endorsing the humiliation of watching your mate cheat. Today, the pornography industry has convinced women that wearing a thong is a form of emancipation, learning to pole dance means embracing your sexuality, and taking your boyfriend for a lap dance is what every sexy and supportive girlfriend should do. According to a 2004 Internet poll conducted by Cosmopolitan magazine, 43 percent of women have been to a strip club; a similar poll by Elle found that 51 percent of the magazine’s online readers had been to a strip club.1 More than half described themselves as “pro-stripping” (56 percent) and said they weren’t bothered if their partner went to strip clubs (52 percent).

  Welcome to romance in the new millennium. In the 2004 teen comedy flick The Girl Next Door, Elisha Cuthbert plays Danielle, a porn star turned girl-next-door crush for an innocent high school senior. As Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times film critic, noted:

  One of the fascinating things about The Girl Next Door is the way it is mainstreaming pornography not only to guys but to a female audience by its adroit casting of Elisha Cuthbert…. Cuthbert has a sweet and appealing demeanor, an innocence that makes her look like your standard porn star the way Macaulay Culkin looks like a professional wrestler. Her persona allows a career in pornography to seem like nothing more than a kicky, kind of daring next step for veterans of Girls Gone Wild—a minimally risky way, less painful than tattooing, to make yourself a desirable date…. The Girl Next Door has the unsettling aspect of a porn industry recruitment film….2

  With the help of such pop culture messages, pornography has become the means to being both the bad girl who seduces the guy and the good girl who gets to keep him, a seductive and instructive combination to teenagers grappling with schoolgirl crushes.

  For adults, the message is more straightforward. A number of companies are increasing production of pornography made by and for women, and the industry is keen to promote women’s burgeoning predilection for pornography. In 2004, Playgirl TV announced its launch with programming to include an “erotic soap opera” from a woman’s point of view, a 1940s-style romantic comedy with “a sexual twist,” and roundtable discussions of “newsworthy women’s topics.” The result is a peculiar blend of go-girl-porn-feminism and male-directed me-tooism. While conducting research for programming development, Kelly Holland, one of Playgirl TV’s executives, noted, “I have to take women at face value when they say they want to see more penises, but I factor in: how much of that is just because they want their MTV, so to speak—their right to media and their right to those sexual images? It’s sort of an expression of their process of sexual liberation. It’s like those rowdy women you see at a male strip club—it’s almost like they’re acting out some male construct of what sexual desire is supposed to look like.”3 Another female-targeted pornography network, Bliss TV, plans to offer pay-per-view and video-on-demand services with shows like Thrust, which will supposedly feature “the Jenna Jameson of men,” and Stiletto, a series set in the fashion industry.

  A growing number of pornography conglomerates have been launched by women. One pioneer, Samantha Lewis, has run Digital Playground, a California-based DVD company that offers films with titles such as Only the A-Hole and Stripped, for more than ten years. According to Lewis, 40 percent of retail sales of their pornographic films in 2004 were purchased by women, double the number of just two years earlier.4 The company’s Web site explains, “With a classy female in the owner’s seat, Digital Playground shatters the porn stereotype, encouraging women and couples to join the consumer pool.” Yet the company’s Web site flashily showcases seven pneumatic models—with nary a man in sight. One of the company’s most popular series, Jack’s Playground, is described as “a collection of Jack’s personal videos … showcasing his uncanny ability to persuade girls to perform sexual acts in front of his camera … real girls so thirsty for fame, they’d do anything.” And this is meant to appeal to female audiences.

  Online, too, women are increasingly in charge of selling themselves. New York-based pornography entrepreneurs Carlin Ross, a lawyer, and Christina Head, a documentary filmmaker, told the New York Times that, for them, pornography is “all about empowering and educating women.”5 The Los Angeles-based pornographic Web site Suicidegirls.com boasts more than 500,000 visitors a month; members are 56 percent female. “Siren,” the online name of one of the Web site’s founders, says Suicidegirls is different from Playboy and other male-oriented pornography, because “what one person finds to be objectifying a woman might not be the same thing to someone else. It’s all up to the women. They decide how they want to be seen. I don’t feel objectified. I make my own decisions.”6 Others can take CAKE. A vaguely conceived Internet- and event-based group, CAKE was founded by Melinda Gallagher and brother-sister team Emily and Matt Kramer as a “feminist” variation on Playboy—“to make female sexuality a public, political movement.”7 They decry Hugh Hefner-style objectification, yet their logo is a nude female silhouette; women are encouraged to strip in front of male party guests and female lap dancers are hired to work their events. Still, CAKE effects a feminist sensibility on its Web site, with blasts at the Bush administration for rolling back reproductive rights.

  Such contradictory messages are espoused without irony by the new feminist porn proponents. Molly, a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker who works as an editor at an erotica magazine that features couples-oriented stories and women-friendly photographs, proudly refers to herself as a pornographer and a feminist. Much porn, she says, is degrading and unpleasant. “I like having a role in creating a form of pornography that reaches me, and being able to represent sex in a positive generous light,” Molly explains. “What I create are better options for enjoyable, consensual, mutually satisfying sex. I feel like I’m performing a service.” Molly shares her work with friends, suggesting what she considers female-friendly forms of pornography, in order to spread the gospel. “I think women aren’t as accustomed to being introduced to porn the way men are by their friends,” she says. “But once I show it to my female frien
ds, they’ve gotten hooked.”

  Copping an Attitude

  Some attribute the rise in female consumption to an increased supply in pornography for women. That may be part of the reason, but there’s more at play than a simple supply-and-demand equation. Broader societal shifts in men’s and women’s roles in relationships and a corresponding swing in women’s expectations and attitudes toward their sexuality are driving women to pornography as well.

  Recent events on college campuses demonstrate the new approach. In March 2003, the University of Alabama hosted a debate between pornographer-multimedia star Ron Jeremy and anti-pornography activist Susan B. Cole. Sounds controversial. Yet students were far from outraged that a porn film star had been elevated to an expert panelist at a university-sponsored event, even on a moderately conservative southern campus. Nor were any feminist activists on campus rallying to Cole’s side. Instead, Jeremy was greeted with cheers from students dressed in T-shirts boasting “I love porn,” while Cole was booed and jeered at by the audience. Despite Cole’s careful insistence that she was not opposed to sex and wasn’t a member of the “sex police,” she was mocked for arguing that pornography exploits women. During the question-and-answer session that followed the panel debate, which was mostly a forum for Jeremy to boast about the benefits of porn and “having a party,” students took the opportunity to ask Cole questions like, “What’s your fucking problem?”8

  Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies pornography and teaches sexuality at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says, “Twenty years ago, my female students would say, ‘Ugh, that’s disgusting,’ when I brought up pornography in class. The men would guiltily say, ‘Yeah, I’ve used it.’ Today, men are much more open about saying they use pornography all the time and don’t feel any guilt. The women now resemble the old male attitude: they’ll sheepishly admit to using it themselves.” Their attitudes have merged even more closely with men’s.

  Kimmel has mixed feelings about the change. On the positive side, he says, women’s embrace of pornography seems to reflect increased sexual agency on their part—the Samantha of Sex and the City role writ large. Yet the new attitude of college women strikes him as disturbing. Female fantasies have changed over the years as a result of pornography and what Kimmel calls the “masculinization of sex.” Compared with ten years ago, women’s fantasies are more likely today to include violence, rough sex, strangers, and descriptions of male physical attributes. As a man who grappled with the feminist implications of pornography during the 1980s and early 1990s, Kimmel wonders how and when female liberation took this abrupt turn. “Personally, I think that for a woman to construct her sex life like that of a man is a rather impoverished view of liberation.” Especially, he says, given the inequality prevalent in most pornography. From Kimmel’s perspective, much of pornography enhances and supports men’s sense of entitlement to look at and objectify women’s bodies.

  But that’s not a particularly hip position. Many women today, particularly college students, consider the production and consumption of pornography a form of “sex-positive activism.” In February 2004, Harvard University officials approved the launch of what the Harvard Crimson termed a “porn magazine”—H Bomb, a student-run publication that includes naked pictures of Harvard students and other sexual content. The female founders of the magazine took umbrage, insisting H Bomb was “not pornographic” but an “outlet” that put a “lighter spin on something that shouldn’t be a restricted or delicate topic at Harvard.”9 Yet when asked if she objected to her magazine being labeled pornography, H Bomb cofounder Katherina C. Baldegg said she did not, adding, “I guess student porn is sort of an underground thing.”10

  Underground or out in the open, pornography is hardly rare on campuses in the new millennium. A Boston University student recently announced the launch of a new magazine, Boink, which she unabashedly declares is “pornography” and claims will be modeled after laddie magazine Maxim.11 Female students at Smith College allegedly host a pornographic Web site, Smithiegirls;* Swarthmore publishes an erotic magazine, Untouchables; and Vassar has Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex. According to Sarah Zarrow, one of the magazine’s student editors, Squirm tries to “explore the area in between not talking about sex and the Playboy-Hustler version of sex,” which sounds reasonable, in theory. 12 Yet Squirm, which is also a campus organization, hosts a porn screening every month including, according to another editor, Per Henningsgaard, “less mainstream” pornography such as “hardcore lesbian porn, porn that depicts S&M, porn in which women are the powerful dominant figure.” As for the print component, he explains, “To titillate people we call [Squirm] a porn magazine, but deep down, nobody on the staff considers it porn. We’re certainly not hardcore porn, which needs to be bound in plastic and have an erect penis…. We’re more of an artistic endeavor than most pornography is. We’re interested in reconceptualizing what porn is.”13

  Attempting to “reconceptualize” or “redefine” pornography and disseminate it once it’s found seems to be the new student project. At Indiana University, students who participated in a pornographic film were disciplined by the university in 2002 for disobeying the school’s code of behavior against lewd, indecent, or obscene conduct. But girl power eventually prevailed. By 2004, a freshman at the school started her own pay pornography Web site, complete with photographs taken in school dormitories. “Keira,” the woman who runs the site, created it at her boyfriend’s suggestion in order to pay for college and family expenses.14 Despite an initial uproar from campus authorities, she was ultimately not charged with violating school policy.

  And why should she have been? What right did the school have to interfere with a girl’s game decision to sell herself if she so chooses? “Keira” and her fellow “new school” feminists believe pornography represents the next stage in female liberation. As Abby Holland, director of Playgirl TV, explains, “Since time immemorial, it’s been okay for men to be in tune with their sexuality. When it comes to porn, traditionally good girls don’t do it. The third-generation feminists—the twenty-somethings—are fully aware that good girls do.”15 By redefining pornography in terms of equal opportunity and getting “in touch” with your sexuality, pornographers get women on their side—and perhaps, incidentally, also help ensure that no liberal academic institution would dare interfere.

  With widespread peer advocacy and silent administrative acceptance, no wonder so many college women are eager to go wilding for Girls Gone Wild, the growing empire of videos, apparel, movies, music, and restaurants based on the premise that women just want to take their clothes off—for men, for free, for fame, for fun. Quite often, they are drunk when they do so, egged on by crowds of men in front of cajoling cameramen and producers, all in the name of spring break. Times Square may have been washed of its seedy adult theaters, but in the spirit of wholesome participatory porn, a Girls Gone Wild-themed restaurant was scheduled to open there in late 2005. Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis, who has continually fought off lawsuits accusing him of everything from underage pornography to deceptive business practices, consistently pleads the First Amendment in his favor and denies all charges. After all, he boasts, “Everybody is doing everything by their own free choice.” Francis doesn’t consider his product to be remotely pornographic. He says his videos are “something that fifteen years ago would have been considered porn, now it’s considered reality video.”16

  She’s Got Porn

  Statistics seem to suggest that women are catching on. The Internet measurement firm comScore tracked close to 32 million women visiting at least one adult Web site in January 2004. Seven million of them were ages thirty-five to forty-four, while women over the age of sixty-five totaled only 800,000.17 Nielsen NetRatings has found figures to be somewhat lower, with 10 million women visiting adult-content Web sites in December 2003.18 In a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll, 41 percent of women said they have intentionally viewed or downloaded erotic films or photos and 13 percent watched or sexu
ally interacted with someone on a live webcam.

  Christina, a thirty-five-year-old mother of two, got started on pornography at age twelve, when she discovered her dad’s Playboy stash. She wanted to compare other women’s bodies to her own, so she sneaked copies to her room. Christina was a precocious young woman in many ways. At fourteen, she lost her virginity (all her friends at Catholic school already had, so she felt left behind). She began experimenting with drugs and alcohol at the same age, around the time of her parents’ divorce, often getting into trouble at school. By eighteen she had moved in with a boyfriend, and at nineteen was pregnant with her first child. After her son was born, Christina and the boy’s father, a nightclub bouncer, had a second child, this time a daughter, before breaking up four years later.

  Despite having two kids under her roof, Christina finally felt free. She went through a “wild” period. “I was just like a man,” she recalls. “I didn’t want commitment, I didn’t want a relationship, I just wanted my booty call. Men loved it.” She didn’t get into another serious relationship until she married at thirty-two, but she divorced her husband, an intermittently employed truck driver, within three years. Now back on the singles scene, she has had an adventurous sex life, with about seventy-five sexual partners, male and female, in total.