Equally, the thirty-one-year-old New York journalist, whose mother attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising groups and didn’t own any makeup, was observing teenaged girls walking the streets in jeans that exposed their “butt cleavage” and tops showing “breast implants and pierced navels alike.” Those women were, moreover, cheerfully stripping for the Girls Gone Wild videos, going to strip clubs, and buying the memoirs of porn stars Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords, which both graced the New York Times bestseller list. “When I was in porn,” Lords admitted in 2003, “it was like a back-alley thing. Now it’s everywhere.” How, Levy wanted to learn, had the “tawdry, tarty, cartoon-like version of female sexuality” of a Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton come to be ubiquitous and promoted as progress for women in a post-feminist world? “Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual,” she writes, “and because the only sign of sexuality we seem able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture.” Barbara Walters interviewed Hilton for her television special The Ten Most Fascinating People of 2004.
“Raunch culture,” as Levy calls it, may be hardest on adolescent girls. Blitzed with images of how to be “hot,” young women, already prone to insecurities, have a difficult time distinguishing the fake from the real. Their mothers, at least, could summon an era when the politics of feminism were ascendant. Not so for their new-millennium daughters. “They have never known a time when ‘ho’ wasn’t part of the lexicon,” Levy contends, “when sixteen-year-olds didn’t get breast implants.” Nor do most teens yet possess the sense of irony needed to negotiate a cynical, commerce-driven pop culture. This is their reality, and too often they accept it at its false-face value.
If Female Chauvinist Pigs offers a PG-13 critique of the mainstreaming of pornography, Pornified heads with grim determination for the xxx shelves — or, better, the websites. “Porn Inc.,” Pamela Paul points out, evolved from a multi-million dollar business in 1975, flashing its wares in selected grotty movie houses around the United States, into what is currently a multi-billion dollar international industry. While a few porn palaces still blink their come-ons and all but a fraction of the pay-per-view movie sales in hotels are “adult” in content, and while Americans spent upwards of $4 billion on video pornography for home use, the digital proliferation of porn on the Internet is where the colossal profits are being made. In Paul’s view, Internet porn is also where the lasting damage is being done.
“Old school defenders of pornography,” she writes, “may not be familiar with the direction in which Internet and dvd-era pornography has gone.” When an entertainment analyst is asked to define “acceptable adult programming” for specialty cable TV, his list includes penetration, oral, anal, and group sex, along with lesbian and gay sex. Such material, the analyst admits, “used to be called pornography, but a lot of that has become socially acceptable now.” What is pornographic these days? The bar, needless to say, especially in cyber-porn, has nowhere to go but up. “Pregnant women become pornified,” Paul reports, “their naked torsos wrested from personal Web sites onto ‘pregnant porn’ Web sites, incest becomes fetishized, child pornography blends with adult pornography into an ageless ‘teen porn’ middle ground. Any sense of taboo dissipates in a free-for-all porn world.”
Much of Pornified is devoted to cyber-porn addiction. Paul’s broad focus is on men and boys, by far the biggest junkies. Interviewing American males with names like Harrison, Gabe, and Ian, she learns how obsessive cruising on the Internet wreaks havoc on their conceptions of women and sexuality. They become impatient with their real-life partners and grow numb to the pleasures of conventional sex. “Pornography leaves men desensitized to both outrage and to excitement,” Paul writes, leading to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of their own lives. By definition, addicts crave more junk. With cyber-porn those cravings encourage greater expansion of the global “pornotopia”: more gonzo group-sex sites from Russia, wilder teen stuff from Japan. Addiction, Pornified contends, leads cyber-viewers to extreme forms of sexual debasement, which in turn deepens the addiction.
For all its moral outrage, Pornified advocates a tempered “censure-not-censor” response, the aim being to move society away from viewing pornography as “hip and fun and sexy” and toward recognizing it as “harmful, pathetic, and decidedly unsexy.” Here, one suspects, is the Rubicon none of us should seek to cross. What cyber-porn permits isn’t so much boundless tawdry choice and glum stimulation as too effortless an absolution from the reality of what is being observed. Flickering across a million monitors in a hundred countries at this very moment are not tales taken from Debbie Does Dallas or Another White Trash Whore, but images of women and men most of whom are performing lewd sexual acts before a camera because they are poor, damaged, or have been coerced into doing so. It shouldn’t be so easy to ignore this while pleasing ourselves.
Pamela Paul does not include sex-industry workers in her survey, and Ariel Levy refers to them only briefly, noting as a “clich_ that bears repeating” that most women who make sex films were themselves the victims of sexual abuse. Based on conversations with experts, and too freely lumping prostitutes with porn actresses of all schools, she puts the figure at between 65 and 90 percent. She also cites a 1998 study titled “Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” It concludes that two-thirds of prostitutes suffer from symptoms identical to those of post-traumatic stress disorder — twice the percentage as of American soldiers returning from the war in Vietnam. “There is something twisted about using a predominantly sexually traumatized group of people as our erotic role models,” she writes, thinking perhaps of Jenna Jameson, whose book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, details her being gang-raped in high school and sexually assaulted as an adult. “It’s like using a bunch of shark attack victims as our lifeguards.”
In two recent novels, the identity of those shark victims varies according to generational conceptions of how pornography does its damage. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake offers a traditional portrait of abuse. Porn has supplanted intimacy in the novel’s devastated near-future setting. “Executions were its tragedies,” Atwood writes of this world, “pornography was its romance.” Oryx, first sighted by her would-be lover on a kiddie-porn site, is abused starting at a young age, and her eerily flat recounting of the experience is definitely a clich_ that bears repeating: “Whatever it was, you had to do it, and you did it because you were afraid not to. You did what they told you to do to the men who came, and then sometimes those men did things to you. That was movies.”
“It wasn’t real sex, was it?” her friend asks, clinging to the illusion that maybe no harm is done during these encounters. “It was only acting. Wasn’t it?” To this, Oryx replies: “But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.”
Britain’s Helen Walsh’s debut novel, Brass, posits a complex new kind of victim. Millie O’Reilley is a bright but jaded Liverpool university student whose impulses are those of a “female chauvinist pig.” The opening scene alone, where Millie pays for rough lesbian sex with a teen prostitute in a graveyard, is both scandalous and revelatory. This young woman, raised by a professor father in the 1990s, is no more sensitive than the most brutish male. “I manipulate myself hard and selfishly,” she says of the encounter, “the whore becoming nothing but a body. A cunt in a magazine.” Millie admits that she, too, sees females as objects rather than as humans; she sees them “through the eyes of a pornographer.” Though Walsh, who is just twenty-eight, isn’t explicit, her character is offered as both victimizer and victim — a distinctly twenty-first-century casualty of porn.
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