Pornland (22 page)

I would suggest here that IP is not so much a peephole as a peepshow into what whites think is real black sexual behavior. White men get a bird’s-eye view of “authentic” black sex at work. The Blacks on Blondes text above perfectly captures, albeit in an extreme form, the image of a white man, sexually caged by his race, peeping at uncaged, uninhibited black men performing sex in a way that really pleases slutty white women. The white man watching this, or indeed any IP movie, gets to shed his whiteness and identify with a group of men who seem to be tailor-made for porn. As the white man unzips, he steps out of the socially constructed cage of whiteness and into a thoroughly debauched world of huge, semen-filled black penises out to rip, tear, pummel, and hammer white women into the utter subordination of becoming a fuckee.

While this debasing of white women might well intensify the sexual thrill for the white user, it has real-world implications for the black community. All forms of oppression, be they gender-, race-, or class-based, require a system of beliefs that justify why one group has power over another. This justification process often comes in the form of negative images of the targeted group as somehow less human than the group in power, and it is this less-than-human status that makes them especially deserving of exploitation, abuse, and degradation. In porn, all people are seen as less than human because everyone is reduced to genitalia. But for whites, this is not presented as a condition of their whiteness, since in our society, whiteness is colorless and hence invisible by virtue of its power status. For people of color, however, it is their very color that constantly makes them visible as a racialized group as they carry the marker of “difference” on their skin. This is why it is impossible in porn for a person of color to have just a vagina or a penis, as their genitalia are always going to be racially visible as “Asian Pussy” or “Black Cock.”

The pornographic images that meld the racial with the sexual may make the sex racier, but they also serve to breathe new life into old stereotypes that circulate in mainstream society. While these stereotypes are often a product of the past, they are cemented in the present every time a user masturbates to them. This is a powerful way to deliver racist ideology, as it not only makes visible the supposed sexual debauchery of the targeted group, but also sexualizes the racism in ways that make the actual racism invisible in the mind of most consumers and nonconsumers alike. This is why Don Imus got fired, and why the pornographers get rich.

Chapter 8. Children

The Final Taboo

I believe that most men here will never want to accept the possibility that the young teen trend is grotesque because it will say so much about them. If you know that something is harmful and wrong and you still become aroused then what does it mean about who you really are as a man?

—Miss DeRay, porn performer, director, photographer, Adult DVD Talk

In the March 2006 special edition of
Vanity Fair,
thirty-year-old Reese Witherspoon is photographed looking wide-eyed and innocent in a girl’s party dress. In her left hand she is holding a little girl’s doll. Also in the magazine is a photo of then twelve-year-old Dakota Fanning wearing makeup, an off-the shoulder evening gown, and a “bed head” hairdo. Three years later,
Vanity Fair
carries pictures of a scantily clad fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus with a “fuck me” look on her face. One year after that, in July 2009,
Elle
has a picture of Cyrus in a short black dress and thigh-high black boots. She is spread across a table with her legs apart as she looks seductively into the camera. These four images exemplify a visual landscape that has become so ubiquitous that we hardly glance twice when we see sexualized childified women and sexualized adultified children.

As we become more desensitized to images of hypersexualized young women, the fashion industry has tried to capture our attention by sexualizing young girls. A pioneer of this type of advertising was Calvin Klein, who, in the early 1980s, used the fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields in ads for his jeans with the famous tagline “Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In the mid-1990s Klein ratcheted up the imagery by using mostly underage teenagers in poses that looked so much like actual child pornography that the Justice Department started to investigate him for possible violation of the law. Klein escaped prosecution, only to come back a few years later with ads for his children’s underwear line that featured prepubescent boys and girls wearing only underwear. This time Klein was forced to pull his ads almost overnight due to public outcry.

As pop culture begins to look more and more pornographic, the actual porn industry has had to become more hard-core as a way to distinguish its products from those images found on MTV, in
Cosmopolitan,
and on billboards. The problem for pornographers is that they are quickly running out of new ways to keep users interested. So one of the big questions they have to grapple with today is how to keep maximizing their profits in an already glutted market where consumers are becoming increasingly desensitized to their products. The solutions for them are the same as for all capitalists: find innovative ways to expand both market shares and revenues in existing markets, bring in new customers, and find new market segments and distribution channels. Thus the major task for the porn industry is to keep looking for new niche markets and consumer bases to open up and exploit while staying within the law, or alternatively, working to change the law—an option that the now-mainstream pornography industry increasingly employs.

The main body charged with lobbying lawmakers on behalf of the porn industry is the Free Speech Coalition, an organization that, although founded in 1991, had to wait till 2002 for its first big legal victory, the case of
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.
Here the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the coalition when it declared the 1996 Child Porn Prevention Act unconstitutional because its definition of child pornography (any visual depiction that appears to be of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct) was ruled to be overly broad. The law was narrowed to cover only those images in which an actual person under the age of eighteen (rather than one that simply appears to be) is involved in the making of the porn, thus opening the way for the porn industry to use either computer-generated images of children or real porn performers who, although eighteen or over, are childified to look much younger.

Following the Court’s decision, there has been an explosion in the number of sites that childify women, as well as those that use computer-generated imagery. In the former category, the pioneer was Hustler’s
Barely Legal
porn magazine, which started in 1974 and is now a popular Web site and video series, with
Barely Legal
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released in February of 2008. Hustler is owned by Larry Flynt, a multimillionaire who is known in the porn world for being a risk taker and somewhat of a maverick. It is not surprising that it took the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision to open the gates to this new genre, since prior to then, sites such as Barely Legal were vulnerable to prosecution, and few pornographers had either Flynt’s money or his will to fight a legal battle. Now that the chance of prosecution has been eliminated, sites with childified women have sprung up all over the Web.
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Consequently, more users have the opportunity to masturbate to pseudo-child pornography (PCP), images of “girls” being penetrated by any number of men masquerading as fathers, teachers, employers, coaches, and just plain old anonymous child molesters.
2

Because pornography that uses children (those under eighteen) is still illegal, PCP sites that use adults (those over eighteen) to represent children are never called child pornography by the industry. Instead, almost all of those sites that childify the female porn performer are found in the subgenre called “teen porn” or “teen sex” by the industry. There are any number of ways to access these sites, the most obvious one being Google. Typing “teen porn” into Google yields over 9 million hits, giving the user his choice of thousands of porn sites. A number of these hits are actually for porn portals where “teen porn” is one subcategory of many, and when the user clicks on that category, a list of sites come up that runs for over ninety pages. Moreover, teen porn has its very own portal, which lists hundreds of sub-subgenres such as Pissing Teens, Drunk Teens, Teen Anal Sluts, and Asian Teens.
3

Even though these sites are also becoming increasingly popular with porn users, with nearly 14 million Internet searches for “teen sex” in 2006, an increase of 61 percent in just two years, and 6 million Internet searches for teen porn, an increase of 45 percent over the same period,
4
there is very little research on either the content or the effects of such sites. One of the main reasons for this could be that those who research the field of child pornography and child sexual abuse prevention have been overwhelmed by the flood of real child pornography that accompanied the growth of the Internet. Since an actual child is used in the making of such imagery, there is an urgent need to track both the producers and consumers of such pornography and to infiltrate the many international child porn rings that swap thousands of child pornography pictures in the relatively safe and anonymous space created by the Internet. To get some idea of the scope of the problem, one Internet ring that was raided in 1998, called the Wonderland Club, operated in over twelve countries, and to join, each prospective member had to have at least 10,000 child pornography images to swap.
5

Obviously, compared to such a mind-boggling level of actual child abuse, researching PCP images appears less pressing since the women involved are at least eighteen and hence, according to the law, no actual crime is taking place. But if we shift our attention away from production and toward consumption, then we can begin to ask questions regarding the possible effects that PCP and actual child pornography may have in common since both aim to sexually arouse men with images of sexualized “children.” If, as researchers argue,
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real child pornography is used by some men to prepare them for actual assault on a child by both arousing them and desensitizing them to the harm done to children, while at the same time offering a blueprint of how to commit the crime, then is it not possible that PCP sites could play a similar role? The answer to such a question depends to a large degree on just how successful the PCP sites are in constructing a reality for the user that he is in fact masturbating to images of sexualized children, and not of adults, since he presumably goes to these sites with the goal of gazing at females who look or behave somewhat differently from the thousands of females that populate the regular porn sites. So the first step in developing an analysis of effects is actually an investigation into how PCP sites borrow, employ, and mobilize symbols, codes, conventions, and narratives that are found in actual child pornography. It is only after developing such a map of content that we can begin to ask questions about the ways PCP images leak into the real-world attitudes and behaviors of users.

Developing a Map of Content of PCP Sites

To explore the linkages between PCP sites and actual child pornography, it first makes sense to develop a classification system for the former from the typologies developed to classify the latter. One of the most popular of these, according to Tony Krone, a well-known researcher in the field, is a five-point typology of child pornography.
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Using this typology not only helps to distill the thousands of PCP sites into a workable number of categories, it also provides a way to understand how users may seamlessly move between the two genres.

The five categories of child pornography described by Krone are

1. images depicting nudity or erotic posing, with no sexual activity;

2. sexual activity between children, or solo masturbation by a child;

3. nonpenetrative sexual activity between adult(s) and child(ren);

4. penetrative sexual activity between adult(s) and child(ren); and

5. sadism or bestiality.

While there are PCP sites that fall into all five categories, the vast majority fit into categories 2, 4, and 5. The acts, narratives, and visual techniques of the PCP sites in 2, 4, and 5 are drawn from the adult genre of pornography, since solo masturbation, penetrative sexual activity, and sadism (not bestiality)
8
are common types of sex acts in mainstream pornography. What follows is a descriptive analysis of those PCP sites that fall into each of the three categories and a discussion of how the sites move from being relatively nonviolent (images of girls masturbating) to images of girls being used sexually in ways that are sadistic and abusive.

Type 2: Sexual activity between children, or solo masturbation by a child

The competition for customers is fierce in the porn industry since the user has a wide range of sites, themes, images, and narratives to choose from. Pornographers know this, so they attempt to pull the user in quickly by giving sites names that are short, to the point, and unambiguous. It is therefore not surprising that many of the sites in this category actually have the word “solo” in the name, along with a word that cues the user into the youthfulness of the females depicted: Solo Teen, Solo Teen Babe, Sexy Girl Solo, Solo Cuties, Solo Gals, Solo Teen Girls. When the user clicks on any one of these sites, the first and most striking feature is the body shape of the female porn performers. In place of the large-breasted, curvaceous bodies that populate regular porn Web sites are small-breasted, slightly built women with adolescent-looking faces that are relatively free of makeup. Many of these performers do look younger than eighteen, but they do not look like children, so pornographers use a range of techniques to make them appear more childlike than they actually are. Primary among these is the use of childhood clothes and props such as stuffed animals, lollipops, pigtails, pastel-colored ribbons, ankle socks, braces on the teeth, and, of course, school uniforms. It is not unusual to see a female porn performer wearing a school uniform, sucking a lollipop, and hugging a teddy bear as she masturbates with a dildo.

Another technique for childifying the woman’s body is the removal of all the pubic hair, so the external genitalia look like that of a prepubescent female. What is interesting is that over the years, this technique has lost much of its signifying power as it is now commonplace in porn for women to remove all their pubic hair. One of the results of this is that today, virtually every female porn performer looks like a child, a shift that in itself is cause for concern because porn users who are not looking for pseudo-child images are nonetheless exposed to them when they surf the porn sites.

For all the visual clues of childhood surrounding the women in PCP sites, however, it is the written text accompanying the images that does most of the work in convincing the user that he is masturbating to images of sexual activity involving a minor. The words used to describe the women’s bodies (including their vaginas)—“tiny,” “small,” “petite,” “tight,” “cute,” “teeny”—not only stress their youthfulness but also work to separate them from women on other sites. Most striking is how many of these PCP sites refer to the female as “sweetie,” “sweetheart,” “little darling,” “cutie pie,” “honey”—terms of endearment that starkly contrast with the abusive names the women on other sites are commonly called, such as “slut,” “whore,” “cumdumpster,” and “cunt.” The use of kinder terms on PCP sites is a method of preserving the notion for the user that these girls are somehow different from the rest of the women who populate the world of porn in that they are not yet used-up whores deserving of verbal abuse. This would explain why so many of these Web sites have the word “innocent” in their name—Innocent Cute, Innocent Dream, Innocent Love, and Petite Innocent.

The reason why girls are portrayed as not yet sullied, soiled, or tainted by sex on these sites is because the underlying offer here is witnessing their loss of innocence. One fan of this genre, writing to Adult DVD Talk, calls this a “knowing innocence,” which he defines as “the illusion of innocence giving way to unbridled sexuality. Essentially, this is the old throwback of the Madonna and the Whore. Therein lies the vast majority of my attraction to this genre.”
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This fan, and indeed many others, if their posts are to be believed, makes clear that for him, the pleasure is in watching the (sweet, cute, petite) Madonna being coaxed, encouraged, and manipulated by adult men into revealing the whore that lies beneath the (illusionary) innocence. The pornographers reveal their understanding of the nature of this pleasure when they guarantee that the “girls” the users are watching are “first timers,” having their “first sexual experience,” which, of course, leads to their “first orgasm ever.” The Solo Teen site goes so far as to promise, “Here you will only find the cutest teen girls. . . . Our girls are fresh and inexperienced and very sexy in an innocent kind of way.”
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It is thus no surprise that most of these sites advertise “fresh girls added each week,” since using the same performer twice would cut into the sexual excitement of the viewer. How, after all, does one defile an already defiled girl?