I've been meaning to write about pornography and men for quite a while, but it's such a big topic that I'm waiting for a free evening, and given the way that Mrs. Buster monopolizes my time, I'm probably never going to get to it. However, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to dissect a woman's take on net porn and its effects on men.
It's not surprising, then, that the debate about whether it might be bad for us has been drowned out by the issue of child pornography. We are naturally more inclined to worry whether child porn images could deprave or corrupt a minority than to draw the same connections about the material that maybe half the people we know are downloading. The more porn we watch, the less interest we seem to have in asking whether it is healthy, for healthy tends to be equated with normal, meaning common, and it is certainly that. Even the question of why we look at porn sounds like a slightly stupid one nowadays, rather like asking why we eat fast food. We look because it is there.
And perhaps it is as simple as that. But for a harmless consumer choice, pornography does extraordinary things to people.
The writer, Decca Aitkenhead, is setting herself up for a tall order here. She states at the outset that it seems silly to talk about the downside of something that "half the people we know" are doing, but she's going to do it anyway. Then she says that pornography "does some extraordinary things to people." Put these two things together, and the rest of the article had better tell us about the terrible effects of this epidemic scourge on society. In other words, if the article ends up with some lame pronouncement on some vague, unmeasurable effect that porn has on men, then Decca Aitkenhead will come off looking rather foolish. (Just so that you're not kept in suspense, it does have a lame ending, and she does look rather foolish.) The moral: don't start your article with a big claim if you don't have the evidence to back it up.
Louis is a professional man in his fifties from the south of England. He speaks beautifully and chooses his words with such care that it can sound as if he is giving evidence in court. He has a highly developed sense of caution, and he needs it because for the past seven years he has been unable to walk down a street without keeping his eyes trained firmly out of danger. He cannot buy a newspaper or magazine, or watch television, for fear of what he might see. If Louis were to glimpse just a picture of a woman wearing a bikini, he says, 'There is no way I could stop myself acting out, and I think I would lose everything.
I becoming so very, very weary of this tired journalistic tactic: go and hunt down the most off-the-wall, extreme fringe case you can find that grabs your readers and almost forces them to agree with you, then make a mighty try to blend this example with the population in general. Writing about domestic violence? Find some saintly woman who was brutally disfigured and tortured by her husband, then claim that all women go through "some version" of this. Writing about logging practices? Find an ugly clearcut somewhere. Writing about access to abortion? Raise the spectre of back alley abortions with coathangers. (And, to be fair, writing about how bad women can be? Find some woman who murdered her husband and then claim that all women are like this. Yeah, I fully expect to read my own stuff years from now and wince. :-)
Louis, although I feel great pity for him, is not "average" or "normal." This is the same stupid argument that was used to justify Prohibition. (A few people can't handle alcohol, so alcohol is evil.) The most ridiculous example of this kind of reasoning must be Halifax's ban on scents (the politically correct term for perfumes and colognes) in public buildings: A few people are allergic, so nobody should wear them. Do I need to mention peanut butter sandwiches in public schools? It's also the stupid argument against casinos. (A few people gamble their lives away, so casinos are a scourge.) Personally, I dislike casinos and would be happy to see them banned again, along with lotteries, but there are better arguments for this point of view that deal with their wider effects on society. If we banned everything that causes trouble for a few people, we wouldn't allow anything at all. The author would be better off making arguments about broader negative effects on society (and specific effects, at that). Concentrating on severely affected individuals shows nothing more than that society is surprisingly diverse. Nonetheless, the author wastes half the article on this kind of sensationalism.
Some where near the middle she turns her attention to the wider population.
Most men who use pornography are not addicts but casual enthusiasts, recreational users for whom the idea of porn as a problem would seem absurd. It was no problem to find candidates who matched this description.
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But most of all it is the volume I marvel at; not just the variety but the sheer repetition. Curiosity can only take you so far, and in crude terms, no one can masturbate indefinitely. Why does Simon surf through such quantities? He looks puzzled by the question, and answers with the comment that 'everyone does it'. But that is an observation, not an explanation. Why does even the casual user want so much?
Psychologists suggest the Triple A Theory - accessibility, anonymity, and affordability - for cyberporn's appeal, but this doesn't explain the inexhaustible appetite for more. A Freudian might say that any sexual object will always be a poor substitute for a person's original but unobtainable object of desire, and that this unfulfillable wish takes the form of an infinite succession of substitutes. Alternatively we could invoke capitalism and its creation of insatiably greedy consumers. But I think Laura Kipniss, an American professor, came closer to the truth, when she wrote: 'Perhaps the abundance of pornography simply resonates with a primary desire for plenitude, for pleasure without social limits. Pornography proposes an economy of pleasure in which not only is there always enough, there's even more than you could possibly want. That has to have a certain grab, given that scarcity is the context of most of our existences; not enough love, not enough sex, or money.'
In a way it's fun to read what women think men see in pornography, just as I'm sure that women read my site and get a good laugh (or angry) about what I think are women's motivations. Just as I'm wont to do, this woman felt most comfortable with another woman's analysis of the "why" behind men's pornography viewing habits.
Let me say first of all that I'm sure that different men look at Internet porn for different reasons. The world is diverse, and I'm regularly reminded that there are many people out there with ideas about the world that are so different from mine that I wonder if we're from the same planet. That said, I can't resist giving my own reaction to this psychologist's analysis of male motivation.
It's a load of crap. "...a primary desire for plentitude..."?!? Where does she get this garbage? Methinks that someone has been too long within the campus limits and needs to get out and talk to more real people. So far as why men need more and more pornography, so far as analyzing myself and asking why women who looked hot last month seem a bit dull now, I must say that the Freudian view, as explained in the quotation, is on the right track. I browse porn maybe twice a month, but I too notice that pictures and video clips that were tittilating when I downloaded them are no longer very interesting. The explanation that rings true with me is a simple one: a picture of a woman is not a real woman. A video of a couple having sex is not the same as having sex. There is visual, and sound, but no touch, no smell, and no physical space involved. Now, this is different from the question of why porn is interesting in the first place. This does not answer "Why porn?" It answers only the question, "Why more porn?"
There is another contributing factor to the plentitude of porn. This will come as a shock to many women, but different men like different women. Yes, I know that women get together over coffee and lament that there is only one standard of beauty and that it's not them, but they forget that this is women's standard of beauty. For twenty years I've heard women whining that the standard of beauty is thin, and as hard as they work, they can't make themselves thin. All of my life my personal standard of beauty has been voluptuous, but I've never met a woman who paid the least attention to my protestations that she was beautiful. If her girlfriends didn't say that she was beautiful, she wasn't... and her girlfriends got their information from the same place that she did: the fashion runways and magazine covers. The mad rush for a feminine beauty standard is, in the end, a female thing. Men like all sorts of women, and the wide variety of women in pornography is proof. Pornography is a product produced (almost) exclusively for men. It's also a purely capitalist market: what has no appeal doesn't sell, and ultimately doesn't get made. Ladies: do you want to know how broad male tastes really are? Take a look at online porn. One caveat, though: physical attributes of women in porn tend to be exaggerated. Breasts are the obvious example: they're unrealistically large in the porn world, but this is because, as I mentioned above, the image has to compensate for the lack of other stimuli. The woman isn't really there, isn't touchable, has no smell, has no presence. So, to compensate, some desirable attribute, like breasts, gets larger in order to replace the missing excitement.
However, the argument still stands: men vary widely in what they like. I like breasts, and have a weakness for dark-skinned women. Other men like alabaster-white skin and long legs. Some men are into no hair. Other men are into hair. On the fringes, some men are into fat, or totally hairless (i.e. bald), or ridiculously enormous breasts, or leather, or latex, or ropes, or... the list goes on and on. The liberating news is that there's room in this fantasyland for you. Far from what your girlfriends are telling you, you don't have to look like a cover girl in order to attract attention. The guy you're pining after may go on line and jerk off looking at plump girls with long hair, and it's the long hair that turns him on. Who knows. The myth that women have complex needs in the relationship and men just want to bang supermodels is a myth invented and maintained by women in order to console themselves over not having a relationship.
Dr Patrick Carnes, who runs the world's leading sexual disorder treatment programme in Arizona, says there is no way of knowing who will have a problem with cybersex. 'This is one of the unique aspects of cybersex. In other sexual disorders it's possible to detect patterns or common points - such as childhood sexual or emotional abuse, or a family history of addictive disorders. Not so with cybersex.' Everyone, he claims, is at risk of becoming an addict.
OK, this is where I get cynical about psychologists. Dr. Patrick Carnes says that everyone is at risk of becoming an addict. Of course he does. He would have to be a fool to claim otherwise. What is he going to say? "Well, I'm running a large sexual disorder clinic, but I don't see that a lot of people will need my services. I figure this is just an isolated thing." This is more facile reporting. News flash, folks: Professionals always claim that there are not enough of them, that the problem they are addressing is more widespread than accepted, and that they should get more money for their work. When's the last time you heard a doctor, a social worker, or a psychologist (especially a psychologist) say, "Oh, I'm really underworked. We don't need as many doctors/social workers/psychologists as we have." Fat chance.
One doesn't even have to invoke malice in order to explain this phenomenon. People in helping professions want to help people. The more people they help, the happier they are. Since psychologists are in charge of defining what constitutes an "addiction" or a "syndrome," they're free to keep widening the definition until it includes everyone. Ever notice that Statistics Canada defines "poverty" in such a way that it could never possibly be eliminated, even if everyone in Canada made so much money that the "poor" were driving around in Mercedes? Do you think that this is an accident? People who want to do good look for good to do, and in a way end up redefining some people as needing help who don't need it, because the helper loves to help.
The only visible group still engaged in fighting adult porn are distressed Christians, who post copious but forlorn reminders all over the net about sin. For a political perspective you would have to search to the very margins of feminist debate.
As one of the Christians, albeit one not opposed to porn, I must say that the "forlorn reminders" talking about "sin" are perhaps badly worded. Non-Christians don't understand "sin." The point is that there are still a few people opposed to pornography on moral grounds. I don't agree with them, but good for them.
As for having to search the very margins of feminist debate, I don't know what rock Decca Aitkenhead has been hiding under. Hasn't she ever heard of Catherine Mackinnon? Ms. Mackinnon is hardly on the "margins." Government policy has been enacted based on her theories.
Feminism has always had a big problem with pornography. The list of their conflicting beliefs on the subject is a long one, but here is a stab at the top hitters:
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Pornography oppresses the women who create the images and videos by turning them into "objects": essentially, by making them non-people who can be bought and sold, and seen in their most intimate moments by men that they don't even know.
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Pornography is a perfectly legitimate business for a woman to be in. It is her choice if she wants to create videos of herself having sex.
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Of course, consuming pornography is the true evil. (So, in a way, it's OK to make the stuff so long as nobody ever looks at it, which sort of defeats the purpose, don't you think?)
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Women are finding more and more that they enjoy looking at images of people having sex. Lesbians have for some time enjoyed pictures and videos of women pleasuring each other. However, this is fundamentally different from the pornography that men look at. The stuff that women look at isn't pornography, it's erotica, which is a totally different thing. (I once read a post by a man who said that he abhorred pornography but was OK with "erotica." Further proof that illogic is not exclusively feminine.)
Here is some evidence. Experiments were carried out on 'normal' men, not addicts, for research by Edward Donnerstein, a prominent academic and author. 'On the first day,' he reported, 'when they see women being raped and aggressed against, it bothers them. By day five it does not bother them at all. In fact, they enjoy it.' Before long they got the feeling that women were to blame for being raped, and actually quite liked it. Even porn which wasn't violent made the men twice as likely to say they felt aggressive towards women.
Here Aitkenhead is on her final approach, coming in for the landing. At the end of all of this fluff, she is finally making her argument that, as I put it above, porn is an "epidemic scourge on society." However, she plumps for another time-worn journalistic tactic: "I found a study!" In other words, after sifting through tons of literature and finding, as she admits herself, very little about how pornography affects attitudes, she finally found one study that reenforces the theory that she had when she started writing the article.
This is not to say that porn turns men into rapists; it doesn't need to, for it trespasses on the mind more subtly. The evidence proves that porn invites its audience to view women differently - as inferiors, as objects, only good for sex. This is the problem with pornography; it alters the way men look at women. There is no 'at risk' profile because it affects everyone - and it even alters the way women look at themselves.
There it was folks. That was the big arrival, the big argument. The only thing worth reading after this were her laments about how easy it is for children to find porn on the Web (which, ironically, is the best argument I know of for controlling it). Far from demonstrating that, as she says, "pornography does extraordinary things to people," she has to resort to saying that it "trespasses on the mind more subtly." What a letdown, having me read paragraphs and paragraphs of waffling only to discover that the Great Scourge is, in fact, "subtle": a conspiracy, a cleverly disguised thing that you have to squint at to see. This is like top-billing "Brutus, the man-eating dog," only to bring up the lights, whip aside the curtain, and reveal... a chihuahua.
I have terrible news for Decca Aikenhead: if this is the great problem with pornography, then there has been another, longer-running scourge in our society, one that has been around for at least a hundred years and has scarred generations of women. That scourge is The Romance Novel. Take a look:
This is not to say that romance novels turn women into emotionally needy, avaricious, duplicitous bitches; they don't need to, for they trespass on the mind more subtly. My experience proves that romance novels invite their audience to view men differently—as providers, as protectors, as commitment objects, only good for romance, marriage and financial support. This is the problem with romance novels: they alter the way women look at men. There is no 'at risk' profile because it affects everyone—and it even alters the way men look at themselves. Few men have truthfully never wondered, when they are standing at the altar, whether a part of them might be impersonating the men they read about in romance novels, who are impersonating men having contrived relationships with women.
Oh, the horror! The horror!
Aitkenhead then spends three paragraphs talking about the dangers inherent in young children finding porn on the Internet, and just how easy it is for them to do so. This, to me, is the true evil of pornography, but Aitkenhead positions these comments as a sort of back-up argument. Her main argument is the one shown above, which is vacuous. I'm sorry ladies: get used to it. We men have suffered with you not loving us for who we are for generations now. Now, when our style of entertainment becomes more openly accepted, you start freaking out.
As a final shot at Aitkenhead, I can't resist parodying her "kicker" paragraph: "'I knew something was wrong in our marriage,' says a man who discovered his wife was using romance novels. 'And I always wondered who she was in love with because it was never me.'"
At the end of all of this, I must point out why women hate porn. All of that stuff above about feminism, all of the stuff about it "changing men's view of women" is a smokescreen for the real reason that women hate the stuff. Simply put, porn is competition. Women's traditional high card is their bodies and their offering of sex. This is not some male chauvinist, Neanderthal view of women. This is quite obviously what women think of themselves. Women constantly try to press the deal: put up with my sometimes-irritating company, and in return I'll give you orgasms. Women going on dates don't read the news to pick up interesting conversation topics; they don't brush up on their molecular biology in order to seem brainy; they instead dress up the package to make themselves look more desirable. More desirable means that he'll give her more of what she wants (romance, paid dinners, comfort, a permanent commitment to the foregoing) because she's "more" of what "he wants." Anyone who thinks that their best bet at getting whatever they want lies in sex appeal will despise competing sex appeal, and photographs of the "best"-proportioned women available from all over the world are nothing if not competition.
