Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  A lifetime later I can assure you that this was regular hardcore, a male-and-female couple performing doggy-style vaginal penetration. Quite tame compared to what I have seen while researching for this book – I’ve seen people fist themselves!

  This is how lil’ baby Sara went from never having seen porn to having seen two seconds of porn. I glimpsed a thrusting thrust and lowered my eyes like the Brontë sister I was. My reaction was physiologically and emotionally intense. I was embarrassed, face hot as I stared at the carpet, isolated, because everyone else was talking normally, not going bright red and having a breakdown.

  I already knew I was prudish. I’d run away if there was kissing on Neighbours or EastEnders. I couldn’t sit and watch people getting off with each other. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about it, what facial expression I was supposed to pull. Interested: oh how intriguing, those characters are kissing. Impressed: wow, their tonguing technique is excellent. Precocious: all humanity is art.

  Even now I’ll skip forward through kissing or sex scenes in whatever I’m watching. I’M THIRTY-EIGHT but my brain responds, ‘Uh-oh – this is private, I shouldn’t be looking.’ Unless there’s fisting, of course, in which case I’m all eyes.

  Earlier we considered the change in how humans mated, how we’ve evolved from multi-partnering into our current state of relationships and monogamy, with the occasional infidelity, and the need for privacy. I wonder if my lifelong aversion to kissing in films is related to our species having sex in private?

  I feel the same about toilet stuff, I can’t watch a character on the loo. Defecating in private is another universal, cross-cultural behaviour. When I see it in a programme, I get a disgust response as though it was real. How much of this is learned, or is it hardwired instincts about propriety? Thinking about this I’ve realised that so much of visual media is voyeurism – actors pretending they can’t be seen, characters believing they’re ‘alone’ – and I’m far too suggestible because I feel like a peeping Tom. Like I’m invading their privacy.

  My reaction doesn’t feel like a choice. Back in that hotel room I hated that they’d put a sex film on, I hated that it EXISTED. I wanted to lecture everyone about how penises should be respectful and kind to any orifice willing to admit them. My oratory would remind those present that a party was for moaning about our boss and asking ‘Who’s up for archery?’ not for watching a woman be exploited.

  Isn’t that patronising?

  To assume every woman in porn is exploited?

  Yes.

  That is what I believed then. It is a position of well-meaning ignorance. I worried that these women were unhappy people with no self-confidence and that we should ‘protect’ them, or ‘save’ them. Without having spoken to a single porn performer, without having read an interview or listened to anyone at all from that industry, I had a position I believed was ‘informed’ because of feminist literature. But actually I was prejudiced.

  There is a fallacy that all women who work in porn are ‘damaged’, victims of abuse or addicted to drugs. This fallacy stems from a presumption that no one well-adjusted and perfectly sane would choose to have sex for money, would choose to have that sex filmed and publicly disseminated.

  This kind of opinion demonstrates how we can believe we are being empathetic and kind, but in fact we are making women’s lives more difficult. This wish to ‘protect’ women from ‘exploitation’ is built on our cultural morality that sex without love is bad, that there is something precious about sex which means anyone having it outside of a relationship is ‘broken’. We don’t view the men in porn that way, even though they’re there too and BEING PAID EVEN LESS.

  All because of the imbalance in parental investment. All because the female body can get pregnant and morality will not let us forget it, will not accept that sex is an activity performed by the body, like tennis or ju-jitsu. Actually some people can accept that and argue their case vehemently. I am trying so, so hard but cannot.

  If sex is just an activity, can you do it with your parents, like tennis or ju-jitsu? No, because incest was selected against in our evolution. It causes genetic malfunction, it reduces the health and ability of offspring. We have a modern-day morality against incest that is built atop a deeply ingrained, evolved mating tactic, so—

  SO, what I think I’m trying to say is that we have to decipher what is cultural conditioning and what might be deeper. We are quick to judge multi-partnering women because of the millions of years of evolution that reinforced pair bonding for the sake of offspring. Infidelity in our species is kept secret in order not to threaten those pair bonds. A porn actress is flagrantly violating two of our inbuilt ‘rules’ – sex in private and fidelity for paternity certainty – hence my unbidden unease about her profession.

  I’m not saying I have any right to that unease; I’m trying to understand where it originates from. I can intellectualise and know she is doing a job. But I cannot feel the same about that job as I do about hairdressing or bus driving.

  If the earliest female humans learned these survival tactics:

  1) Be wary of men from new tribes

  2) Pair with a male who can protect you

  3) Only copulate hidden from view in order not to excite/incite unwanted males

  then this would explain why contemporary women are concerned when they see women not practising these tactics. Do we subconsciously believe these women are behaving riskily and are in danger? And is that how we persuade ourselves that our negative treatment of porn actresses comes from a place of compassion rather than judgement?

  Or jealousy.

  That’s what feminists get accused of. We’re all so ugly and frumpy and no one would even rape us. I promise my opinion back in 2001 wasn’t because the women in porn were all more beautiful than me, it was because I thought they were being hurt.

  In the hotel room I had this strong reaction, and I believed I was right. But I didn’t say anything because I knew everyone disagreed with me. It’s like the story about the king† and the well. There’s this place and it has a well, and someone, probably an imp or a wizard, poisons it. All the people of the kingdom drink the poison water and go doolally, start seeing dragons and fairies and saying stuff that doesn’t make sense. The palace has its own water supply because of inequality, so the king never drinks well water. He has a filter tap and one of those fridges that can make its own ice cubes. The king is now isolated by his sanity. He knows everyone is mad, he’s seen it happen. But the king’s subjects, they all understand each other because they’re living the same reality. The king knows that the sky is blue and he knows that the grass is green, but because he’s outnumbered, he is wrong. Eventually the king decides to walk down to the well and have a drink so that he may see the same green sky and dragons as the people he owns. It’s a great story; such a shame it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

  At the party, I was the king only person who felt uncomfortable about the porn. ‘This is adulthood,’ I thought. ‘Being grown-up means watching people get stoned and not crying when they put on videos of aggressive sex.’ I weighed up my options and announced to my colleagues that I had an uncle who was FBI and carried out random drug tests on family members. I had to go, the passive smoke would show up in my hair. I’m an exceptional liar.

  We’ve all experienced this. We believe something so completely, are convinced of our own ‘correctness’, but we find ourselves alone or in a minority. I’m not a well-drinker, I don’t pretend to agree with things – but also, and maybe I’m a coward, I don’t tell other people what to do. I leave and write a book eighteen years later.

  I went back to my room feeling nauseous and terrible. I didn’t know how to express myself about the porn film. I didn’t know what to say to my friends the next day. I thought I needed to stick up for women, but I had no idea how. This became irrelevant because the next day 9/11 happened and the events were so huge the mind couldn’t comprehend them. It was a communal experience; everyone in the
hotel gathered in the bar to watch Channel One together. Theoretical archery was cancelled. I didn’t know what to feel about exploding planes and falling bodies and some people in the world hating other people because of where they lived or their religion or their governments. The guests were guessing what had happened, who was behind it. Some were blaming Israelis, Robbie Williams’s dad said it was Scientologists, but I knew the truth – it was all pornography’s fault.

  This is how the mind creates narrative out of events and emotion. For me, 9/11 and porn became interconnected. It wasn’t conscious. Images of planes crashing into towers combined with close-ups of penile penetration came to be symbolic of all the things that scare and confuse me.

  Freudian.

  So Freudian it’s boring.

  * This is something I bring up on panel shows to make myself sound interesting. It’d be great if one quirky odd thing was enough – if that was your personality. I could have retired at twenty. ‘I have my anecdote, now leave me alone.’

  † A male queen.

  One Man’s Porn Was My Bottom

  In 2003 I had a boyfriend called James. He was my age, we’d met at school. He got emails every week from something called Anal Digest, which contained links to anal sex videos. I thought about the title a lot – was it a pun? Because the anus does digest, or at least it excretes after digestion. WAS IT A PUN? Did the staff at Anal Digest know what they were doing, or had they forgotten the two meanings of the word ‘digest’? Surely a pun shrinks any boner? I never asked James what he thought about the name because he didn’t know I checked his emails, it was one of those really healthy relationships.*

  James never asked me to look at porn with him but was open about using it. He had posters of glamour models on his wall; he bought FHM and thought it was funny. He was softer and gentler than most of my other male friends; he once wrote a poem about an eagle. He regularly pestered me for anal sex, and I said no.

  Over the time we were together, he did what I knew from my friends was common: he tried to get anal sex ‘by accident’. This is when someone attempts to put their penis in your butthole, coupled with some bad acting. I could tell what he was trying to do from the concentration on his face. His plan was to enter my bum so quickly I didn’t notice, then by the time I realised I’d be too busy appreciating the incredible sensation to stop him.

  James absolutely believed that if I would just let him put his penis in my rectum† I would really enjoy it. I absolutely didn’t want to, I found the idea gross and distasteful. Linguistically, whenever any of our friends had talked about ‘fucking someone up the arse’ it was redolent of denigration. The ultimate in subjugation. I did. Not. Want. It.

  At the beginning of our relationship this was a small conversation. James got me to watch a documentary about a couple trying anal together for the first time. They talked about their concerns, positions, techniques to make sure it didn’t hurt the woman. They went off screen and tried it, and then talked jubilantly to the camera afterwards. Great, good for them, I still wasn’t going to do it. James’s friend Lauren was really into anal. He used her enthusiasm against me, as evidence – if she liked it so much, then I would too. But I didn’t want to do it.

  For his birthday we went to Amsterdam. I paid for it with my student loan cheque,‡ which was supposed to cover my university fees. James liked to smoke drugs and I liked to make him happy. The holiday was predictably rubbish because we ran out of money on the first day and the Anne Frank museum made me cry for forty-eight hours. Our last day we floated in poisoned silence after bickering rows. I didn’t want to go out. He went out on his own, while I had a bath and wondered how to pay for university. James returned that night, cheerful: we could make it all better. ‘I’ve decided what I want for my birthday!’ he exclaimed during the holiday I’d bought for his birthday. He emptied a plastic bag onto the bed. Some sachets of lube, rubber beads and a black dummy-shaped contraption. James waved his arm over his bum treasures like a magician’s assistant.

  I didn’t shout. It’s too horrible arguing on holiday because you’re stuck with the bastard. I went for a walk. I tried positive thinking – ‘At least Anne Frank didn’t have a stupid boyfriend who wanted to put his dick in her arse’ – but you can’t pretend anyone who died the way she did was lucky. Anne didn’t have time to get an awful boyfriend, a basic human right. Or maybe she was lesbian and was denied the chance to realise her sexual destiny, or maybe she was sexually fluid and would have written about it so clearly and comprehensively she’d have saved us decades of repression and stupidity? Poor Anne Frank, poor me from the past, poor us all really. I know you are thinking, ‘At least you broke up with him as soon as you got home.’

  You’d think.

  I reflect now as a wizened thirty-eight-year-old and see lube-gate as a deal-breaker, a sign of mutual misunderstanding. We should have gazed together at the butt-opener nestling on the hotel bed and agreed: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make each other happy.’ If there are a million universes, a million dimensions inhabited by a million alter egos, I hope that in one of them I have a decent amount of self-esteem. In this universe, James and I stayed together for several years.

  The second time I saw hardcore pornography was during my second year at university when I came home from a lecture and found James and my flatmates in bed together. They weren’t having sex, the three men were sitting in a row on a single bed, a duvet over their laps and legs, watching a porno on a small square telly. They’d paused the video when they heard me come in, so what I saw on the screen was frozen. A young black woman naked and screaming. She had tears on her face. This was not an expression of feigned erotic joy.

  This time I didn’t quietly leave them with their well water, I had a tantrum none of the boys could understand. I did not express myself clearly because I couldn’t. I was too frustrated. It was so unfair. How could I make sense of a world where nice men, people who felt bad if they trod on a snail, who stroked dogs outside shops, who played games with their nephews, who made soup from scratch if someone had flu – how could they also do this? I wasn’t jealous, I wasn’t ‘insecure about my boobs’ like James suggested. This wasn’t prudery. The boys thought my problem with porn was that I had a rubbish body and couldn’t compete with the woman they were watching. But I didn’t want to compete, I wanted to protect her. Why weren’t they concerned if the pain on the woman’s face was real, why didn’t they care?

  Porn is pretend.

  Yes, yes, absolutely, sometimes people are pretending. Sometimes they’ve agreed to be in pain for money. Sometimes the person gets sexual enjoyment out of pain, that does happen. But sometimes they are just in pain. Sometimes they’ve had boundaries pushed, they’ve been tricked, manipulated. There is so little discernment in the people who watch porn about what they are watching.

  Maybe I’m a silly prude who can’t watch people kissing, but the other end of the spectrum is my ex-boyfriend not caring if a porn actor’s tears were authentic.

  My difficulty with James and my flatmates was: why do some men treat the women they know in a respectful, protective way and simultaneously treat others as objects? I felt they were watching abuse. Perhaps even rape—

  That’s about you.

  YES, you’re correct. We see things not as they are but as we are. I did not want to have anal sex while crying so I assumed that no one else wanted to either. Hence my difficulty in being objective about sex work. I get it wrong. I believe it must be so awful because it would be so awful for me.

  It WAS awful for me, actually, because James did keep trying to put his penis where I didn’t want it and he made me bleed and got aroused when I cried. So there you go: he was cruel, I blamed porn.

  While researching this book I went into a school to watch the Great Men Initiative run a workshop with boys about pornography. A teacher prepped the male volunteers about the students by describing their religious and cultural backgrounds. ‘We’re doing this for the girls really,’ she
explained. The Year 10 and 11 girls had written an open letter to the headmistress. It said that they needed the teachers to talk to the boys about the porn they were watching. ‘Plus we’ve had female students missing school,’ the teacher added, ‘because they’re in hospital with anal injuries.’

  Straight into the top ten Worst Sentences I’ve Ever Heard.

  Perhaps the first thing that should be taught in sex education is that the anus is not a self-lubricating organ: ‘Welcome to class, kids, sit your dry bumholes down.’ The skin of the anus is delicate and full of nerve endings; thrusting can be dangerous. To prevent injuries and accidents we have to balance the fantasy fiction of porn with mundane information. No morality or value judgements, just neat packages of truth that equip people to make safe decisions. Even with all the explicit sex on the internet there is so much confusion. In one of the workshops I observed, a thirteen-year-old boy asked, ‘Does anal sex hurt?’ The workshop leader was embarrassed and said, ‘You should ask a girl.’ A different boy took over assuredly: ‘If you get them horny enough you can do what you like.’ There were murmurs of agreement among the students, the topic was changed and the question remained unanswered. After the children left, I brought it up with the workshop leader. ‘It’s a new session, we don’t have all the answers yet,’ he responded. But boys have bumholes, was my point. ‘If he wants to know what it feels like to have something inside, he should experiment on his own body—’

  ‘We can’t tell children to put things in their anus,’ the responsible man reminded me. And I suppose that’s true. I suppose that’s why no one wants untrained people like me giving sex education. ‘Welcome to class, kids, sit your dry bumhole on this nice cucumber.’