2007-08-01 16:48:46
In the end, porn doesn t whet men s appetites it turns them off the real thing.
At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most
famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of
pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we
did not limit pornography, she argued before Internet technology made that
prospect a technical impossibility most men would come to objectify women as
they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino
theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely
follow.
The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had,
Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as
David Amsden says, the wallpaper of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?
She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold,
pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private
pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did
become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is,
how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training
and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The
onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real
women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as porn-worthy. Far from
having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere
flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up:
They can t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman with pores and
her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that
goes beyond More, more, you big stud! ) possibly compete with a cybervision of
perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak,
utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer s least specification?
For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or
celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in
human history, the images power and allure have supplanted that of real naked
women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.
For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual mission
creep of how pornography and now Internet pornography has lowered their sense
of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in
the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the
actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who
wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If
there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty
enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy,
but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple
lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream
consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest,
missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense
of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters
had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse
was not hot enough. Now you have to offer or flirtatiously suggest the lesbian
scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to
be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the
Brazilian bikini wax just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women
have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.)
Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new
millennium, a vagina which, by the way, used to have a pretty high exchange
value, as Marxist economists would say wasn t enough; it barely registered on
the thrill scale. All mainstream porn and certainly the Internet made routine
use of all available female orifices.
The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids
boast of learning to strip from professionals; the cool girls go with guys to
the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to
tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses la Britney and Madonna.
But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated or
is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn
industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship
between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your
appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to
fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people
are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.
The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on
their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they
can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn
offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is
like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them
in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about
loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young
women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that
this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don t know is how to
get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.
So Dworkin was right that pornography is compulsive, but she was wrong in
thinking it would make men more rapacious. A whole generation of men are less
able to connect erotically to women and ultimately less libidinous.
The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral
one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to
rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an
athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the
stimulant equals diminished capacity.
After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is
Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you
associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over
time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of
ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to
turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.
Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding
female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are
maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the
time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to
discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these
cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women
turned on to one another over time to help men, in particular, to, as the Old
Testament puts it, rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy
thee at all times. These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they
know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong
family.
And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an
Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans
and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana
has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. Can t I even see your
hair? I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. No, she demurred
quietly. Only my husband, she said with a calm sexual confidence, ever gets
to see my hair.
When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the
bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her
husband the kids are not allowed the sexual intensity in the air was archaic,
overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than
any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I
thought: Our husbands see naked women all day in Times Square if not on the
Net. Her husband never even sees another woman s hair.
She must feel, I thought, so hot.
Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had
talked about the effect of porn on relationships. Why have sex right away? a
boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. Things are always a
little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone, he said. I
prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it s going to
happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.
Isn t the tension kind of fun? I asked. Doesn t that also get rid of the
mystery?
Mystery? He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied:
I don t know what you re talking about. Sex has no mystery.