“Kids…absorb pornography very differently from the way adults do…. Even young teenagers are generally not sophis- ticated enough consumers to differentiate between fantasy and reality…. They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what they’re supposed to do.” “Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with the physical, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner.” It’s sentences like these, taken from a pdf of Pamela Paul’s presentation at “The Social Costs of Pornography” (a consultation hosted by Robert George at Princeton in December 2008) that make me cringe every so often as I listen to her lecture “How Porn is Anti- Sex” on April 8.
I feel the way that I do when- ever some so-called “expert” talks about me or people like me—here, this demographic refers to 15-24 yr olds who have looked at or chanced upon pornography—and makes generalizations that make my jaw drop and my eyes roll.
I am reminded of the time that I turned on a major television news channel and was greeted by the concerned face of a middle-aged white woman (apparently some sort of “expert”) who explained a group of teenage pregnancies in some small town as part of a national trend in teenage pregnancies deriving from popular culture portrayals of having babies as cool. It wasn’t the fact that she suggested that media might give an incorrect impression of baby-making or her suggestion of national trends that frustrated me. What frustrated me was that she made statements like “kids think…” or “teenage girls believe…” that made me wonder what gave her the right to make such gross assumptions about me and other autonomous human beings like me who fell in this demographic. How could she really think that she knew me?
Since such a vague recollection of old-person propaganda does not make for substantive evidence, take, as another example of unwanted preaching, Jack Thompson, a 60-ish year old “activist” and former attorney who concentrated his legal efforts against the “obscenity” of modern culture and whose name sets gamers’ teeth on edge. I grew up around teenage boys who were gamers. Not one of them tried to rape, shoot, knife, or otherwise harm me, as Mr. Thompson continually suggests is the case.
Pamela Paul uses vocabulary as generalizing as that chanced-upon “expert” and looks fearfully close to being as sensationalist as Thompson. Okay, so maybe pornography is a slippery slope. Maybe looking at porn that plays on the Catholic school-girl, flat-chested, hairless, or cheerleader fetishes do lead naturally to child porn. Maybe porn shouldn’t be used privately, without your partner’s consent, to the point where sex with your partner is no longer desirable, enjoyable, or possible.
If you’re not a fan of pornography, then imagine for a moment that you are a casual user who likes to gratify him- or herself with a little girl on girl action once or twice a week. Now listen to what Pamela Paul says about “casual users”: “[porn] desensitizes them, then [casual use] escalates into more extreme and excessive interest. […] It’s scary–the casual user was showing the same effects, just to a lesser degree than the addict was.” By equating casual users – probably the part of her audience that she has a chance of swaying – to porn addicts, Paul is not winning any friends.
To make matters worse, Pamela Paul has an unfortunate tendency to come off as heteronormative and gender-normative. Her original research consists primarily of interviews with straight male porn users and their straight female girlfriends. She looks only at heterosexual couples, and she looks only at male porn users. Her interviews with women are all about how they feel about the effects of porn on their partners.
As stereotypical as Paul manages to sound, though, she presents some interest- ing arguments. I walk into the lecture hall believing that pornography, like masturba- tion, is a personal act of pleasure, which would-be sex-politicians have no right to criticize. I walk out seriously questioning my assumptions. Although there are many points on which I don’t agree with Paul, I can understand her concerns about the prevalence and intensity of porn use today.
Paul answers the title question “How Porn is Anti-Sex” by asserting that:
1. “If you’re jerking off to pornography, then no. You’re not having sex.”
2. “If he’s jerking off 10 times a day, then when he comes home he’s too tired to have sex with his wife.”
3. Pornography “isn’t particularly sexy; it’s a commercial product. (But then again, I also prefer homemade muffins to Hostess.)”
Paul also supports her argument that “porn is anti-sex” with recollections of interviews with men who told her how porn affected their sex lives. She says that her interviewees told her that “they had problems maintaining an erection, some found it impossible to ejaculate in [women’s vaginas] or at all, a lot of women said that men had to watch porn at the same time [as having sex], [and] men got images in their head and couldn’t get them out even when they wanted to.” In her earlier lecture, “How Porn Destroys Lives,” she also asserted that porn “changes what men expect from women” and “ruins relationships.”
Paul worries about youths who see porn and, for instance “the girls think they need to be in vulnerable, crying positions” because that’s how women are portrayed in the porn. She says that women who know that their partners have been looking at perfect bodies all day experience “the feeling of being unshaven and wearing granny underpants.” These women question what it is that the porn stars are offering their partners that they can’t. Porn “undermines intimacy because you’re introducing something else, and it doesn’t just go away.”
She also points out that men will say things like “that’s an enjoyable fantasy, but no, that’s not how I want to relate with a woman,” yet the media to which we are exposed stick in our minds, so that when she asks these men if porn “affects the way that you look at women in the workplace”, she says that “if you talk to them for a while, then they admit” that it does.
According to Paul, the old anti-porn stance in the ‘80s centered around the hypothesis that porn encouraged rape. She says that pro-porners now say, “if porn doesn’t cause rape, then there’s nothing to criticize,” but according to her, “well those men are still dealing with women on a daily basis: wives, daughters, etc., even if they’re not raping them.”
Paul insists that she’s never advocated censorship. However, she does support regulation. In her December 2008 lecture, she claims that “If pornography involved blacks or Jews or any other minority or group, I think that liberals would respond with outrage. But it’s women and there’s been no response.” She realizes that “the pro-pornography movement had a very strong argument that appealed to liberals. It was about the First Amendment, civil rights, human rights.” Paul states that “pornography is a kind of media and it’s also a product—and both of those things are regulated.” She believes that porn should also be regulated, in the same way as aspirin, cigarettes, or R-rated movies, instead of occupying the political gray area that it does now.
Paul uses the heyday of cigarette smoking as an analogy for the current popularity of pornography. “Cigarettes were once extolled by doctors and glamorized in the movies … but once people know that cigarette smoking isn’t very good for you, the consumption “Kids…absorb pornography very dif-started to decline. My hope would be that that would happen with pornography.”
I think that most people, porn us- ers included, can agree that porn isn’t particularly good for you, even if some debate whether it is all-that-bad for you. Yes, porn is pleasurable, but that doesn’t make it healthy. Like smoking cigarettes, drinking any more than two drinks in an hour (the most that your liver can handle before starting to feel strain), eating a bag of chips, or having cake for dinner, porn feels good but isn’t good for you. Just like eating cake for dinner, however, I don’t think that it’s going to kill you (or your figure or your libido) either. I personally believe that porn is not the devil that Paul claims it to be, that it is not the origin of all female objectification, or of all sexual perversity.
Still, porn tends to encourage objectification of its subjects. Additionally, among those of us who occasionally blur the lines of reality and fantasy (quite a few, given the existence of Second Life and the hordes of pubescent girls in love with Edward Cullen), porn also encourages a skewed perception of sex itself. Paul’s unfortunate tendency to sound very biased might not bring this point across very convincingly, but being exposed to staged and airbrushed sexual imagery at a young age definitely affects one’s perception of sex.
A friend of mine suggests a solution that I like much better than Paul’s (which sounds more like a series of accusations with no solution): spread sex education. Teach that porn exists, that it isn’t healthy, and that it degrades those within it. At the same time, teach that it’s not evil, that if used it should be used in moderation, and especially that it does not reflect real life (and can easily get confused with it).
Paul gets a lot of flak for her anti-porn stance. Some of the more incredible critiques, she tells us upfront. Claims that she is a prude, hates men, hates sex, and basically wants men to be shackled by their wives (and I don’t mean as in BDSM).
However, a quick glance at other critiques against her book _Pornified_ reveals that these haters are by no means her only critics. Some one-star reviews on amazon. com point out that Paul left out some of the preeminent scholars on sex addiction in her considerations, that her study is hardly scientific by any sociologist or psychologist’s standards, and that she presents a one-sided, biased argument.
To conclude, I’ll share this excerpt from a review in _Slate Magazine_’s Book Club, written by Laura Kipnis:
“Porn may make a convenient scapegoat for everything that’s appalling in the world these days, but new technologies or genres like Internet porn only thrive when they confirm dispositions already inherent in the culture. […] Paul mistakes a symptom for a cause.”