Matt P. is a self-admitted porn addict—a “connoisseur,” in fact. His closet is packed with over 50 two-hour “mixtapes,” video collections of his favourite scenes taped from DVD. He watches porn five to seven days a week, and, at the height of his addiction, he spent days at a time hopping from one adult video store to the next in pursuit of the next illicit gem. His preferences are typical: “I guess the best way to sum it up would be ‘barely legal.’”
Matt is also my boyfriend. I’m not thrilled by the idea of him jerking off to women made to look younger than I am, but the cheerleader porn stowed under the mattress is the only indication of his being anything less than a respectful, well-adjusted, stand-up guy. I also have his best interests in mind. I recognize the good porn has done for Matt, a virgin well into his 20s: “I used to be very bitter towards women, and part of getting over that was jacking off to porn,” he says.
According to Bill, the webmaster at pornaddictioninfo.com, Matt is certainly not alone; porn addiction is rising “exponentially.” Furthermore, his (and my) situation could be much worse: “So-called ‘soft porn’ [stops] being enough,” Bill says of addiction. “The addict doesn’t get the thrill he/she needs, so they move on to ‘harder’ stuff. That progresses to ‘kinkier’ fetishes, and then deeper into those fetishes…There is also a tendency for the addict to lose sexual interest in their partner.”
Clearly, whether or not porn has good or bad effects has as much to do with the consumer as with the images consumed. Although there are plenty of websites decrying the dangers of pornography, many of them are owned by right-wing Christian organizations who object to porn on moral grounds, and aren’t so interested in individuals’ struggles with addiction. Bill started his site for personal reasons: he is a recovering porn addict. “It started with the discovery of some porn magazines at a buddy’s house when I was seven or eight years old, maybe even six. I don’t remember ever not wanting to get more porn since then,” he says. “But it didn’t get out of control until the Internet came along, and I moved from a UNIX provider to ‘PPP’ in the mid-’90s.”
The porn industry makes $12 billion a year, and much of that cash stems from the Internet. U.S. video sales and rentals decreased by 15.4 per cent in 2006, while Internet profits increased by 13.6 per cent. A thousand new porn sites pop up on a daily basis. The San Fernando Valley in California, widely considered the industry’s capital, now competes against any would-be pornogarpher with a domain name and a dream. In an article about the fetish site kink.com, New York Times Magazine’s Jon Mooallem pointed out that Internet porn industry types are often “serious- minded, tech-oriented entrepreneurs working outside the influence of the porn establishment.” As they provide for the markets overlooked by big-business, big-name porn stars migrate towards the mainstream. And the mainstream is certainly where porn is headed. Seymour Butts’s TV series Family Business familiarized viewers to adult performers on a first-name basis, and Ron Jeremy has done so many clothed media spots by now that the world has nearly forgotten his cock size.
Whatever your opinion on the merits of porn, multi-billion dollar industries tend not to dry up overnight. If porn’s increasing visibility has one indisputable advantage, it’s the availability for critical discussion. “Porn obviously has significant cultural impact, and its profusion in the culture indicates that it’s not confined to the proverbial dirty old men in raincoats,” says Kay Armatage, a professor at U of T cross-appointed to Cinema and Women’s Studies. Armatage, along with a number of professors across North America including Kassia Wosick-Correa (UC Irvine), Constance Penley (UC Santa Barbara), and Laura Kipnis (Northwestern), is willing to screen sexually explicit (though not necessarily mainstream pornographic) films during her courses. As she points out, sexual content is neither something new, nor something to be ashamed of: “In Western culture there are many classic texts that explore sexuality: notably, The Story of O (Pauline Réage, 1981), the many books by the Marquis de Sade, as well as other ‘popular’ books, e.g., Peyton Place (Grace Metalious, 1957), which everyone read. I found it in my mom’s bedside table.”
In terms of the damage porn causes, the debate seems irresolvable. In 1970, President Nixon’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found no connection between pornography use and violence. Sixteen years later, under Regan, the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (the Meese Commission) found the opposite. A study by Anthony D’Amato, the Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern, claims that rape rates have declined 85 per cent over the past 25 years due to pornography consumption. The Traditional Values Coalition reports that rape rates have increased by 500 per cent since 1960, for the same reason. Whatever side you take, there is plenty of evidence both real and fabricated to give credence to your argument. It seems reasonable to state that porn is neutral; one fantasy is as good as the next, as long as it stays put.
It’s when porn gets attached to something extraneous, however—compulsive behaviour, the wanton pursuit of profit—that things can get twisted. “Pornography, like many other consumables, is a market-driven commodity,” says Judith Taylor, a professor in Sociology at U of T who teaches Feminist Studies in Sexuality. “If you really want to learn about pornography, you should contact someone from the Rotman School.”
Bill noted that a typical sign of addiction is the “escalation factor.” And if popular tastes demand more extreme visuals, the industry will provide them. “It seems each HIV outbreak in the industry correlates to a nihilistic new frontier in porn performance,” Dennis Romero wrote in an article for Los Angeles CityBeat, noting that a 1998 outbreak coincided with the emergence of “D.P. [double penetration].”
In 2004, an outbreak in the porn industry resulting in four infections, a quarantine list of over 50 performers, and the temporary stalling of 30 studios was caused by two factors symptomatic of porn’s rapid expansion: “D.A.” (double anal), and outsourcing. Lara Roxx, then 21 years old, had started her porn career in Montreal only months before contracting the virus filming Split That Booty 2. Her manager had told her that if she insisted on using condoms, she wouldn’t find work. On set she was told that if she didn’t agree to D.A., she wouldn’t be used in the picture. Darren James, the “patient zero” in this case, caught the virus in Brazil, where HIV infection rates are higher and tests are less affordable. (The Brazilian industry relies on condoms, but performers can make more money in American productions if they film bareback.) Like any industry, porn has a bottom line, and to make the most money sometimes performers have to engage in risky behaviour.
And then, of course, there’s the misogyny. “Feminists have been so concerned with keeping the state from censoring [pornography] that we’ve abandoned the discussion of what it produces for individuals and for society,” Taylor says. Few are willing to accept the simplistic Andrea Dworkin/ Catharine MacKinnon conclusion that pornography is violence against women, but watching an “18-yearold” get slathered in ejaculate can really make a girl question her own emancipation. Of course, this is not the only option. According to the New York Times, the “mature woman” genre is in high demand, and its consumers are often men in their 20s who are tired of chirping innocents. Taylor remains sceptical: “If you look at the [ads for escorts in the] back pages of NOW Magazine, you will see that the sex industry has been anticipating the diverse sexual tastes of men for a long time. So, I don’t think a demand for older women is something new, or that meeting diverse sexual needs has corresponded to greater equality or a more expansive popular portrayal of desirability.” Though porn might most often be intended for men, however, it doesn’t mean that women don’t enjoy it. Sex addiction authority Patrick Carnes estimates that around 40 per cent of porn addicts are female. “We don’t have any on our site and I personally suspect that the issue is shame,” Bill says. “Shame is huge with this thing, as you can well imagine.” The assumption is often that men are the only ones with politically incorrect desires, which for women doesn’t make reconciling politics with our sexual tastes any easier.
Unfortunately, mainstream conceptions of female sexuality often include soft lighting and erotic massage. A Google search for “porn for women” yielded predictably dull results: one porn blog included headings like “nipple sucking” and “statuesque naked man.” Another was a joke site featuring pictures of men vacuuming and putting down the toilet seat. How does an industry that caters to every fetish imaginable miss a market consisting of half the population? Pornstars/pornographers Nina Hartley and, particularly, Annie Sprinkle have addressed this. Sprinkle, a Ph.D-holding sexologist, has performed in features ranging from erotica to “transsexual docu-porn” to “classic XXX.” “I think Annie Sprinkle is fantastic, an icon whose website asks viewers to really think about sexual desire and practice,” Taylor says. And there have been grassroots solutions: the Brooklyn-based, female-run Sweet Action magazine features cute, naked, and erect young Williamsburg types.
“Women directors especially have been pushing the boundaries of representation,” Armatage says. “Breillat, Monika Treut, Bette Gordon, Lizzie Borden—taking up new expressions of women’s sexuality in contrast to ‘vanilla feminism.’” Women have also left distinctive marks on porn proper. Boink magazine—“College Sex by the People Having It”—was cofounded by Alecia Oleyourryk, a then-senior at Boston University. Fans of “barely legal” would love Boink’s content, of course, but it’s not for them. Lauren White, a.k.a Raymi the Minx, has received awards for her blog, raymitheminx.com. While the nude photos White originally post probably boosted her readership, she’s the blog’s selling point. “I was an online ‘model’ for 10 months…I had a curtained-off little room with a bed and computer and remote webcam,” she writes over e-mail. “My job was to entice [viewers] to take me private, which is buying minutes to have me to themselves…We would phonesex and they could watch me do my thing. My skin is crawling as I type this right now.” Jerking off to her blog is free, but anyone who does so has to contend with an entire person rather than a gyrating webcam image.
Human beings will use any medium at their disposal to convey sexual messages. Pornography, defined in the most general terms, is a simple inevitability. It conforms to the ideas and carries the moral imprint of whoever happens to control it, and affects the viewer according to his/her ability to think critically through the images presented. Porn’s expansion through the Internet and increasing visibility in popular culture is neither a good thing nor a bad thing overall. For every addiction there is a catharsis. What is good is porn’s emergence as a topic of open discussion rather than a mere bone of contention. The more transparent the industry gets, the more we can critique it constructively, and the more we can explore alternative options.
