by Sara Pascoe
But this is stuff I’m considering now. Before now was the past, and in the past is Adam.
* Gonna flag some heavy sarcasm here cos if I don’t someone will email me in six months that ‘in their opinion it isn’t actually healthy to snoop on a partner’s correspondence’. After my last book I had some smashing messages from readers correcting my stupid jokes. My favourite was a short sentence that informed me angrily, ‘ALBERT EINSTEIN DID NOT INVENT THE CAR.’
† So many words for ‘anus’. I haven’t even used ‘sphincter’ yet.
‡ A cheque is an olden-days money promise which slowed down time as you waited for it to become cash.
More Boyfriends, More Porn
I hated staying over at Adam’s flat cos he would fall asleep before me and there was nothing to do. Now I understand – the male body gets sleepy after sex. Men get a dose of the hormone prolactin after orgasm and this acts as a sedative. Prolactin is usually low in non-lactating individuals (it’s the hormone that brings milk for babies) but it rises after sex and provides the sense of satiation, a pleasing ‘there we go then’ satisfaction. It’s also related to the ‘break’ most men need between shags. Men with lower prolactin were found to need less recovery time, fancy that.
Wanna know another fun fact theory? This sex difference in post-coital response – the male quick to relax and fall into slumber, while the female remains alert, perfectly able to have more sex (and more orgasms BY THE WAY) – is theorised to be down to multi-partnering in our evolution. At least it gives the female the option, whereas the male gets stimulated, orgasms and is spent. A female has a cycle that can peak and trough many times without her needing to stop. This means that when dude number one is done, she could technically leave, ambling off somewhere else to have some more sex with a new partner. Great mating technique, females! More sperm competition for your offspring and, even better, partner number one doesn’t know you’ve left because he’s sleeping! It could be argued that is why men get sleepy, so they can’t prevent women getting a second dose of D.
Another interesting detail that goes along with this concerns female vocalisation during sex. We make a lot more noise than men, something you will see manufactured in pornography. The women are always moaning and groaning, and this sound has been proved in studies to arouse men further. Even better, they found that women tend to make more noise when they want a man to speed up and finish. Isn’t that clever – pretending to have a better time when you’d absolutely rather it was over and you could leave for the next guy, I mean, have some toast.
Back in 2008 I knew nothing about sex arousal cycles; I just thought Adam was lazy. One night I complained to him, said I would rather get a bus home than lie awake and bored for hours. Adam gave me his laptop and told me to watch something. He had lots of American comedy saved on there and blah blah blah, can you guess where this is going?
YES you found his porn.
NO, I’ve no idea what will happen when you find his porn.
MAYBE people shouldn’t share the electronic cupboard they keep porn in?
I sat on a sofa across from where Adam was already snoring and opened his computer. As I attached headphones, the desktop loaded, replete with just two icons. One was the browser Firefox chasing his tail. The other was a close-up of male genitals, squashed into a square and competing with the entire internet for my attention. That was it, not even a shortcut to iTunes. This was all that Adam needed at his fingertips, a host browser and a cube of testicles. Which one do you think I clicked?
BALLS, you followed your heart and it led to a scrotum as always.
FIREFOX was the one you didn’t click on.
You’re correct, otherwise this would be a boring story. ‘Hey guys, a decade ago I saw a weird icon on my boyfriend’s computer, then I watched two hours of Curb Your Enthusiasm, bye.’
I know it seems like I spent a lot of the early twenty-first century spying on boyfriends. I’m not a snooper, promise. Sure, I used to check James’s emails, but that was a very long time ago. Since then I’ve developed better boundaries, I’ve learned to respect privacy. And secrecy. Now let me tell you what was on my ex-boyfriend’s Mac.
I clicked the testes and the computer began whirring, a DVD started up. The title had the word ‘tranny’* in it and popped across the screen, followed by a person. Someone with a penis and balls and augmented breasts was bending over. The camera zoomed in and I quickly finger-pecked ESCAPE CANCEL UNDO. The computer stopped whirring as the disc inside slowed and ejected itself. There was some mild farce as I hurried the disc back in and it unhelpfully restarted. I did not have a useful thought.
I knew I was encroaching on Adam’s private business. I was expecting him to wake up and shout at me. I tried to correct everything by doing what I should’ve done in the first place. I clicked on Firefox and OH DEAR. The page that loaded was the one that’d been visited most recently. This website was a menu of sex workers and the services they offered. The agency or collective was called Shemale Escorts and Ladyboys.
These terms have historically been used in a catch-all, non-specific way to refer to people who might be transitioning, transitioned, transvestite, transsexual, a drag queen or even hermaphrodite. One of the things that has staggered me most in my research into pornography and sex work is that the language used about people can be reductive at best, hateful at worst. So much porn is racist and misogynist. People are called ‘midgets’, people are called ‘horny sluts’ or ‘cum-buckets’. It’s done to reduce empathy. Those terms turn a human into an object. A sexualised object that is easier to wank about. I found it surprising that people who in their everyday life wouldn’t use racist or homophobic language would expect nothing less from the porn they consume. I AM SURPRISED ABOUT IT.
Back to Adam. I spent a long time looking at the made-up names and sexy headshots on Shemale Escorts and Ladyboys. I didn’t know if Adam had been using these services, but I imagined how the transaction would play out. Had they come to his house? Did his flatmates know? Where did he find the money? I’d had to lend him a pound for a Pot Noodle that night, was that because he’d chosen ‘Chantelle’ over the weekly shop? I wondered coldly if he used a condom.
Then my ego took over and made it all about myself. I, like lots of people, fear I am not ‘enough’ of my gender. I’m a flat-chested woman. I have a big nose and fat hands and I’m not dainty or sweet. Adam’s nickname for me was ‘The Beast’. Did he fancy me because I am mannish? Did he pretend during sex that I had a male body? Was I disappointing, did he have to think about this porn and these sex workers to get an erection with me? I thought back over the months of our relationship, scanning for clues or oddities. It was pretty vanilla, he’d never asked me to bum him or called me David.
I slept on the sofa. And in the morning I was cold with Adam because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to start so I finished it, said I wanted to stop seeing him because I didn’t think my feelings were right blahdiddyblah get out now before anyone is hurt. He was alright about it.
I tried to write stand-up on this a couple of years ago. I was sure I could find something funny in it, thought I could do a twist on the ‘porn makes me insecure’ sensibility with ‘because I haven’t got a penis’. But I couldn’t, it never worked, partly because there was too much set-up with all the sleeping boyfriend and computer admin, and also because punchlines about gender and genitalia seem transphobic. It’d need to be written so sophisticatedly to make sure that sex workers and trans people weren’t being denigrated, even accidentally. And you can’t control what people laugh at. You could write a clever and intuitive piece about the word ‘shemale’ in sex work and some person would still laugh at the word itself and I’d have to stop them, and not letting people laugh is the exact opposite of my job.
It’s occurred to me now that for people in the audience, the idea of a partner seeing what they’ve masturbated to is super uncomfortable. So maybe that’s one of the reasons it didn’t work? Nobo
dy wants to be defined by what they watch. Someone might have a predilection for a type of pornography, might watch it on a weekly or daily basis, but keeps that compartmentalised away from the rest of their personality. It’s something I had just ignored until I wrote this book. I hadn’t considered the role that porn plays in people’s lives – and how isolating it can be.
Adam and I did talk about it a year later, when we got drunk together. He had a new girlfriend and I felt brave enough to tell him what I’d found and apologised for not being honest at the time. Adam was unembarrassed. He explained about his interest, how he’d been exploring it for years, especially the idea of meeting up with a sex worker and acting out his desires. I found everything he told me fascinating, now that my ego and emotions were removed and I could just listen. Adam was really turned on by pre-op trans women. He’d felt secure enough to tell his new girlfriend and was planning to pay an escort to have sex with him when he was home in Germany. He was excited about it.
Again, my feelings about this have changed. Gossiping with him as friends, I was so into it. THIS IS BEING ALIVE, I thought. Discussing bodies and fantasies, pushing the boundaries of sexuality, free from shame and morality and gender norms. I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO IS JUST REALLY COOL ABOUT SEX STUFF, I congratulated myself. Nothing human is alien to me.
Then, researching this book, I discovered that a high proportion of trans women have undertaken a form of sex work. Almost 11 per cent have participated at some point. We will be investigating the relationship between economics and choice in more detail later, but you see, what is important to understand is that trans people are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as the rest of the population. This can be related to the expenses of treatment and counselling, as well as being ostracised by family and friends, or experiencing homelessness and unemployment after coming out. Being trans can lead to social exclusion for many women and this can make sex work an unwanted necessity—
Isn’t that the same for some cis women?
Yes. For some people sex work can be their only option.
But it’s still a choice.
Choice by its very definition requires more than one option. It’s not a menu if it only says ‘potato’ on it. If society is unwelcoming and difficult for trans women, isn’t that acting as a form of coercion? In episode five of the podcast Sold in America Noor Tagouri interviews a woman called Laya about her life experiences and she is incredibly eloquent on this subject, so listen to it if you want to think and learn about it some more.
I can’t celebrate a rich white man like Adam buying sexual services from a woman who may have found sex work a necessity just because it transgresses social norms. Also, something I hadn’t considered before reading the work of trans writers Juno Dawson, Juliet Jacques and Paris Lees is that men like Adam are fetishising these women, obsessed with certain aspects of their physicality. I don’t feel like applauding him for living out his fantasy now, I feel squeamish.
But if it wasn’t a potato menu? If it’s grown adults making choices how dare I be squeamish?
The protective emotions I feel towards sex workers, especially those coerced by circumstances, may be justified in some instances … but the question that’s striking me now is this: what worth do these emotions have? They can’t be taken to the bank. They aren’t paying anyone’s rent. They aren’t a solution.
* I am quoting directly, even though this word is upsetting and derogatory. There has been much discussion about whether I should quote it, and I apologise if you believe I was wrong.
Mind Rape
After this experience of chatting to Adam I thought I was porn-savvy. I didn’t watch it, but I accepted it would be part of life for any man I loved. Even if you’re having regular sex, madly in love and entrenched in monogamy, they’ll still have urges and thoughts and fantasies about other people, and they’ll masturbate. That’s what modern people do – they wank to porn. They put porn on and have a wank. I mean, I didn’t but my boyfriends did. I was still ‘against’ it, I worried about the mistreatment of vulnerable people – but I didn’t lecture anyone about it. It’s like being vegan at Christmas dinner, watching your family devour the charred corpses of a barnyard massacre, thinking, ‘They seem so happy, who am I to ruin their fun?’
Don’t take this out on Christmas dinner.
For a vegan, Christmas dinner is a potato menu.*
After Adam I grasped that porn was part of the world now, and it wasn’t until I was in love with Nicholas that it caused a problem in my life again. I mentioned him earlier. He didn’t want to sleep with me and I dealt with it very badly, because my insecurity outshouted compassion. He told me he was into ethical porn, produced by women, feminist. No one was being hurt. On one occasion, out of desperation, I said he could watch some while we had sex. It was quite horrible, he was inside me but his focus was on the screen. He asked me to look; a woman was licking another woman’s bumhole. I can imagine how it might be enjoyable to watch people licking bumholes with someone you feel closely connected to. But that wasn’t my experience.
Around the same time one of my friends told me her boyfriend was looking for a book deal. I was instantly jealous; all book deals are for me and everyone should stop stealing my stuff. ‘What’s his book about?’ I asked anxiously in case it was an idea I wished I’d had. ‘It’s called Mind Rape,’ she said. ‘It’s about how when men look at women, they imagine how they’d fuck them.’
‘That’s not true,’ I insisted, because I absolutely believed that. How could that be true, how could men function like that? I said only very poorly men who needed professional help could feel that way. Men like Russell Brand, or Russell Brand. I cried for my friend, I felt so sorry for her. She had such an awful, broken boyfriend. She told me Geoff had said – HIS NAME WAS GEOFF, why are all Geoffs perverts? – that when he walked down the street, every woman he passed, every woman he saw on the tube or who served him in the shops, he would get images, snapshots of them being fucked; cocks in their mouths, cum on their faces. He undressed women mentally, constantly, without any choice in the matter. It was automatic. His mind turned real-world life into hardcore sex, like a soldier getting flashbacks or a hungry cartoon character seeing heads become roast chickens.
I described this to Nicholas when I got home. ‘Can you believe it?’ I asked. ‘And she thought this was all men!’
‘Only if you’ve been watching a lot of porn,’ he shrugged.
Nicholas understood what Geoff was describing. Said it happened to him too. Said it could be very uncomfortable, shameful, made him hate himself. I was thrown. I’d acknowledged that my boyfriend had a myriad of sexual feelings that didn’t include me. I’d accepted my lovers would all use porn. But I hadn’t figured that porn might change their world view, might impose bare, brutal sex atop everyday street scenes.
If a man in the supermarket is visualising the woman behind the till giving a tit-wank, I don’t want to exist in the same universe as him, let alone be holding his hand.
And so I realised I’d accepted nothing, I’d been hiding. I hadn’t explored how porn affected the person I was in love with because the truth was that I hated that porn existed and I hated that people watched it. I was an uptight Brontë sister masquerading as sex-positive. John, my most recent ex, had to put up with me being incredibly nosy and paranoid about his predilections because I now believed that every man had a secret brain dungeon where women were punished.
Sex is the reason we exist, but now technology is altering what sex is. We have these ancestral desires and they’ve been hijacked, and I want to know the intricacies of how. Not the moralistic stuff, but what has been studied, what can be shown through evidence. Does online porn affect the people who watch it? Does it change what people are aroused by? Can it incite aggression, or make violent people worse? How does watching porn affect children?
On a personal level, I’m most fascinated about where a person and the porn they watch interconnect, where porn and real
-life sex intersect; how it might motivate or limit sexual satisfaction; how it might relate to depression.
There is disagreement, but also a lot of research attempting to answer these questions. We’ll have an open-minded sift through it, but first we must get up to date. We explored the history of sexual imagery up to the advent of VCRs and porn people could rent from Blockbuster. It’s time to slide ourselves back in and press PLAY on a documentary called How We All Got the Internet and the Internet Got All the Porn.
* And maybe carrots, which taste delicious and your mum can see you’re enjoying them, so she reveals they’re covered in butter.
An Internet History (You Don’t Need to Delete)
THEME TUNE is the Babylon Zoo song ‘Spaceman’, but only the really good fast bit at the beginning. As the song starts to slow down into the shit bit* the screen goes from black to all fuzzy, which signifies the olden days. People are throwing Frisbees and saying ‘How you doin’?’ so we realise it’s the nineties. The people seem happy and carefree, but then a cloud casts a shadow in the shape of a laptop as we realise that everything is about to change.
Squiggly rewinding as we leap backwards through history, bumbags, big moustaches and … SCREECH, we stop. It’s the sixties. While most people are screaming at the Beatles, a few dweebs are trying to make computers talk to each other. They use little wires and a lot of hard work. Thankfully ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ is playing in the background cos this is boring to watch. The sun rises on the summer of love, 1969, it’s all recreational drugs and sleeping on haystacks, except for Charley Kline, the only person indoors with his clothes on. Kline sends the first ever message between computers. It is ‘LO’. Kline talking-heads a funny story about how he was actually typing ‘LOGIN’ but the SRI system crashed. The interviewer laughs politely and pretends she knows what an SRI system is.
