Gail Dines - Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

PORNLAND

How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

Gail Dines

Beacon Press

Boston

For David and T, the loves of my life

Contents

Paving the Way for Todays Porn Industry

Mainstreaming Porn

The Big Business of Porn

Becoming a Man in a Porn Culture

How Porn Seeps into Mens Lives

Growing Up Female in a Porn Culture

Porn from the Dark Side

The Final Taboo

Preface

Howard Stern regularly features porn on his show, and for this he was the second-highest paid celebrity in the world in 2006; Hugh Hefners life, with his blonde, young, and embarrassingly naive girlfriends, is the topic of the hugely popular The Girls Next Door on E! Entertainment; retired megaporn star Jenna Jameson has written a best-selling book and appears in numerous popular celebrity magazines, and Sasha Grey, the new, more hard-core Jenna Jameson, is featured in a four-page article in Rolling Stone in May 2009 and appears in a Steven Soderbergh movie. Kevin Smiths movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno is warmly received by movie critics; pole dancing is a widely popular form of exercise; students at the University of Maryland show a porn movie on campus; and Indiana University invites pornographer Joanna Angel to address a human sexuality class. I could go on, but these examples illustrate how porn has seeped into our everyday world and is fast becoming such a normal part of our lives that it barely warrants a mention. The big question is, What are the consequences of this saturation for our culture, sexuality, gender identity, and relationships? The answer is that we dont know for sure. One thing is certain: we are in the midst of a massive social experiment, only the laboratory here is our world and the effects will be played out on people who never agreed to participate.

The architects of the experiment are the pornographers, a group of (mostly) men who are out to maximize their profits: to create markets, find products that sell, invest in R & D, and develop long-term business plans. In short, and as this book will show, they are businessmen from start to finish, not innovators committed to our sexual freedom.

Porn is now so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become synonymous with sex to such a point that to criticize porn is to get slapped with the label anti-sex. As I travel the country giving lectures on the effects of porn, the insults thrown at me by some people are telling: they range from uptight prude to uncool, old-time man-hating, sex-policing feministthe type of feminist who supposedly screams rape every time a woman and man have sex, the kind of feminist who has been derisively referred to as a victim-feminist because she supposedly sees all women as sexual victims incapable of enjoying sex.

But what if you are a feminist who is pro-sex in the real sense of the word, pro that wonderful, fun, and deliciously creative force that bathes the body in delight and pleasure, and what you are actually against is porn sex? A kind of sex that is debased, dehumanized, formulaic, and generic, a kind of sex based not on individual fantasy, play, or imagination, but one that is the result of an industrial product created by those who get excited not by bodily contact but by market penetration and profits. Where, then, do you fit in the pro-sex, anti-sex dichotomy when pro-porn equals pro-sex?

To appreciate just how bizarre it is to collapse a critique of pornography into a critique of sex, think for a minute if this were a book that criticizes McDonalds for its exploitive labor practices, its destruction of the environment, and its impact on our diet and health. Would anyone accuse the author of being anti-eating or anti-food? I suspect that most readers would separate the industry (McDonalds) and the industrial product (hamburgers) from the act of eating, understanding that the critique was focused on the large-scale impact of the fast-food industry and not the human need to eat and the pleasure the experience of eating yields. So, why, when I talk about pornography, is it difficult for some to understand that one can be a feminist who is unabashedly pro-sex but against the commodification and industrialization of a human desire? The answer, of course, is that pornographers have done an incredible job of selling their product as being all about sex, and not about a particular constructed version of sex that is developed within a profit-driven setting.

I want to make clear that when I talk about porn, I am referring mainly to gonzothat genre which is all over the Internet and is today one of the biggest moneymakers for the industrywhich depicts hard-core, body-punishing sex in which women are demeaned and debased. As someone who has lectured on college campuses for over twenty years, I have witnessed a seismic change in the way porn has come to shape young adults sexuality. Before the advent of the Internet, it used to be that some men sporadically used porn when growing up; it was the more soft-core type of porn, and they often had to steal it from older males, most likely their fathers. Increasingly, what I hear from students is that men today regularly (often daily) use the gonzo type of porn, and many have now become accustomed to its hard-core scenes. What seems contradictory is that for all their increased porn use, men today are also generally more responsive and interested in engaging in thoughtful discussion and reflection after my lectures.

In these conversations, I hear something I never used toconcern and anxiety from young men. These guys have just heard a lecture on the effects of porn, complete with an explicit slide show, and they are beginning to recognize how porn has shaped how they think about sex. While past generations of men who used porn had limited access to the material, this generation has unlimited access to gonzo porn. Nowadays the average age for first viewing porn is just eleven years. This means that, unlike before, porn is actually being encoded into a boys sexual identity so that an authentic sexualityone that develops organically out of life experiences, ones peer group, personality traits, family and community affiliationsis replaced by a generic porn sexuality limited in creativity and lacking any sense of love, respect, or connection to another human being. Many times I feel profoundly sad after speaking to these young men.

I have a college-aged son, and I couldnt stand for the pornographers to set up camp in his sexual identity. When he was entering his teenage years, we talked candidly about the use of porn and its potential effects. I told him that as he was getting older, he would most likely come across some porn, and he had a choice to look or not to look. I said that should he decide to use porn, then he was going to hand over his sexualitya sexuality that he had yet to grow into, that made sense for who he was and who he was going to beto someone else. Why, I asked him, would you give anyone something so valuable and precious, something that ultimately is yours, not theirs? When I look out at the men in the lecture hall, they remind me of my son, and I feel outraged that they are caught in the crosshairs of this predatory industry, one that has a huge financial stake in habituating them to a product that dehumanizes all involved.

While men tell me their stories of porn use, women have stories of their own. Most college-aged women I speak with have never seen gonzo, but their sexuality is increasingly shaped by it as the men they partner with want to play out porn sex on their bodies. Whether their sexual partners pressure them into anal sex, want to ejaculate on their face, or use porn as a sex aid, these women are on the frontlines of the porn culture. Some capitulate, some negotiate, and many are confused as to why the men they hook up with, date, or marry are always trying to push the sexual envelope.