Pornland (3 page)

Some may argue that assault is too strong a word, but if we analyze what is actually going on in a gonzo scene in a way that speaks to the experiences of the woman in the movie, then we get some insight into what is happening to her as a human being. A living, breathing person is being penetrated in every orifice by any number of men—men she most likely has no real emotional connection with. Their penises are often longer and thicker than average, and they are sometimes fortified with Viagra, since penetration without ejaculation has to go on for some time.
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Her body, like ours, has real physical limits, yet the goal of the movie is to see just how far these limits can be pushed. At some point during all the pounding, her vagina will become sore, her anus raw and swollen, and her mouth will ache from having large penises thrust in and out for an extended amount of time. As this is occurring, she is being called every vile name under the sun. During this bodily assault, which even the industry admits is taking its toll on the bodies of the women,
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she has to look like she is enjoying it, she has to tell the men penetrating her that she loves their big cock or whatever, and finally she has to lick the semen as if she loves the taste.

When the movie is done, she will get up from the bed or floor, go to the bathroom to wash off the sticky substance and check her orifices to see if any damage has been done. She also will need to ensure that she does not have any of the diseases or ailments for which she is now high risk, given what her body has just been through. These include, according to the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, the following: HIV; rectal gonorrhea; tears in the throat, vagina, and anus; chlamydia of the eye; and gonorrhea of the throat.
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And she will endure all this again and again until she is either too worn out to continue or is disregarded by the industry in favor of “fresh meat,” of which, it seems, there is never any shortage.

Men who go looking for porn are often already aroused as they anticipate their soon-to-be-had orgasm. Clearly, in this state they are not in any mood to start doing a critical deconstruction of how the woman is being treated, but it truly doesn’t take much observation to notice that her body is being used in ways that appear to be painful and degrading. Few of the women are seasoned actresses, and many are not able to conceal their discomfort and pain as they are being penetrated by multiple penises. Some of the women look exhausted and defeated by the end of the scene.

As porn becomes more extreme, and the woman’s body is treated in harsher ways, one wonders how users manage to sustain an erection. No doubt there are some who enjoy watching women suffer, but I honestly do not believe that the average man is a woman-hating sadist. This is indeed the image of men the pornographers generate, but it is one that, ironically, given our man-hating reputation, feminists reject since we have never believed that men are born misogynists. And those of us who have male children refuse to accept that the little boy we birthed, fed, bathed, nurtured, and love came out of the womb with a homing device for GagFactor.com.

If we refuse to accept the easy answer that men have a natural predisposition to get off on hurting women, then we have to look to the culture for answers as to why some men seek out and enjoy gonzo. We have to ask, What is it about male socialization and masculinity that helps prepare them—or, I would say, groom them—into seeking out and masturbating to such images? The answers do not lie within individual men; rather, they are found in the culture that we all live in. Porn is not something that stands outside of us: it is deeply embedded in our structures, identities, and relationships. This did not happen overnight, and there is a story to tell about how we got to the point that mainstream Internet porn has become so hateful and cruel.

We begin the investigation with a history of the porn industry that focuses on the ways that
Playboy,
Penthouse,
and
Hustler
provided the economic and cultural space for today’s hard-core porn. Chapter 1 specifically looks at how the competition among the three magazines pushed the envelope on what was considered “acceptable” mainstream porn in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, there is a whole new range of agents pushing porn into the mainstream, and chapter 2 takes a look at some of the major individuals and companies that have succeeded in sanitizing porn.

Arguing that porn is mainstream goes beyond noting the way the images have infiltrated our lives to include an analysis of how porn has seamlessly been woven into mainstream capitalism. Chapter 3 takes a close look at what it means for the porn industry to be part of a wider corporate structure and how many mainstream industries such as hotels, banks, and cable operators make large sums of money from the porn industry. The need to create markets and offer consumers something different explains in part why porn is always on the lookout for some new bizarre sex act. What it doesn’t explain is how men can be aroused by such images of women being dehumanized and debased. Chapter 4 argues that to answer this we need to look at the ways that men are socialized by the culture and the porn industry, since both have an image of men as aggressive, unfeeling, and disconnected from their emotions and from other people.

What happens to men who use porn? This is without doubt the most hotly debated issue in the discussion of porn. Rather than rehash the whole debate or delve into the numerous studies by psychologists, in chapter 5 I look at how images affect the way we perceive reality and why, given what we know about media effects, it is incorrect to argue that men walk away from porn unchanged.

Men are not the only group to be changed by the porn culture. Girls and women, while not major consumers of porn, are inundated with pop culture images that just a decade ago would have been seen as soft-core. Chapter 6 looks at how the image of femininity thrown at girls and women has become increasingly narrow, to the point that a “hot” body is the only one that meets very strict cultural standards. Some groups have celebrated this hypersexualization as empowering for women, but I argue that this is pseudo-empowerment since it is a poor substitute for what real power looks like—economic, social, sexual, and political equality that give women power to control those institutions that affect our lives.

Pornographers, always trying to add extra sizzle to gonzo sex, have developed a number of niche markets. One very lucrative niche features people of color, the topic of chapter 7. Not a genre known for its subtlety, porn produces and reproduces some of the worst racist stereotypes of past and present. Given that most of these films are made for a white male audience, the question here is, How do sexualized racist images shape the way users think about race? Another niche that is popular is called pseudo-child porn because although it uses women who are eighteen or over, they are actually made to look much younger. Chapter 8 illustrates how by using the props of childhood—socks, school uniforms, teddy bears—pornographers invite the user into a world where the sexualization of children is normalized.

The conclusion asks what is to be done about this pornographization of our culture. No easy answers jump out as obvious since this is a problem that has deep roots in the way our society is structured. Ultimately, to fight this juggernaut we will need collective action. Individual solutions are important, but social change never happens on the individual level. The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty. The only solution to this is a movement that is fierce in its critique of sexual exploitation and steadfast in its determination to fight for what is rightfully ours.

Chapter 1.
Playboy, Penthouse,
and
Hustler

Paving the Way for Today’s Porn Industry

Porn has entered the mature years. . . . It’s no longer naughty, underground. It’s an up-front, in-your-face business, as much a part of the pop culture as anything else. We’re in a different phase of our pop culture.

—Paul Fishbein, publisher of
Adult Video News

The
Playboy
bunny is everywhere, on pencils, watches, handbags, lingerie, sunglasses, socks, and even hot-water bottles. It is without doubt one of the most highly recognized logos in the Western world and has made Hugh Hefner and
Playboy
household names. While
Playboy
did not invent porn, it did bring it out of the backstreet onto Main Street; for this it holds a central place in the story of how porn became entrenched in our culture.
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Hugh Hefner presented himself to the public as a playboy partial to wearing pajamas, but he was actually an incredibly savvy businessman with a knack for tapping into and exploiting the cultural themes of post–World War II America.

Before
Playboy,
pornographic magazines were not circulated through mainstream channels of distribution, so access to them was limited. Post
Playboy,
it was a very different world after Hefner eroded the cultural, economic, and legal barriers to mass production and distribution of porn. Just one step behind Hefner came Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of
Penthouse
magazine, who pushed the envelope even further. However, it was a strip club owner from Kentucky who mapped out just how far a pornographer could go and still have access to mainstream channels of distribution. Larry Flynt, a skilled businessman, made
Hustler
magazine a household name in the 1970s. Although their inaugural products now seem tame by comparison, through their battle to outdo one another, Hefner, Guccione, and Flynt groomed Americans into accepting today’s hard-core Internet porn.

Building a Porn Industry

Playboy
was an overnight success story, with circulation growing from 53,991 in its first month (December 1953) to 175,000 by its first anniversary issue. By 1959
Playboy
had a monthly circulation of 1 million. In its heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Playboy was an enormous company, with sales of over $200 million and more than five thousand employees.
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Clearly, as Michael Kimmel argues, “
Playboy
struck a nerve with American men,” and many books have attempted to describe exactly what that nerve was.
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To explore the
Playboy
phenomenon and the magazine’s role in laying the groundwork for the contemporary porn industry, the magazine has to be historically located in the economic and cultural trends at work during the 1950s, which at different times and to varying degrees contributed to
Playboy
becoming the lifestyle-pornographic magazine of choice for the upwardly mobile, white American male in the postwar years.

Historians agree that the 1950s were a time of enormous change in the United States, both economically and culturally. They point to the economic boom, the baby boom, the growth of suburbia, the pressure to marry at an early age, and the push toward consumption as a way of life as trends that, while not being specific to the 1950s, were nonetheless magnified in that decade.
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Playboy
occupied an ambivalent place in relation to these trends—it celebrated some as good for the country while condemning others as harmful to American men. It was its uncanny ability to pick and choose among these trends that made
Playboy
a success not only with readers but also, eventually, with advertisers.

Hefner was clear about his target audience from the very beginning. He wrote in the first issue of
Playboy,
published in December 1953: “If you are a man between 18 and 80,
Playboy
is meant for you. . . . We want to make it clear from the start, we aren’t a ‘family’ magazine. If you are somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to the
Ladies’ Home Companion.
”
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For a magazine to clearly state that it was not “a family magazine” in the 1950s was close to heresy. According to social historian Stephanie Coontz, it was during this period that there was an unprecedented rise in the marriage rate, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, and divorce rates declined. From family restaurants to the family car, “the family was everywhere hailed as the most basic institution in society.”
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The mass media played a pivotal role in legitimizing and celebrating this “pro-family” ideology by selling idealized images of family life in sitcoms and women’s magazines, while demonizing those who chose to stay single as either homosexual or pathological. The most celebrated sitcoms of the period were
Leave It to Beaver,
Father Knows Best,
and
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The ideal family was white and upper middle class, with a male breadwinner whose salary supported a wife and children as well as a large home in the suburbs. The primary roles for men and women were seen as spouses and as parents, and the result was a well-run household populated by smart, well-adjusted kids.

The print media also got in on the act, carrying stories about the supposed awfulness of being single.
Reader’s Digest
ran a story entitled “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are to Be Married,” which focused on the “harrowing situation of single life.”
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One writer went so far as to suggest that “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.”
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In the 1950s, “emotionally warped” was a coded way of saying homosexual, and indeed many single people were investigated as potential homosexuals and by extension Communists, since the two were often linked during the McCarthy years.
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This pressure on men to conform not only to the dictates of domestic life but also to the growing demands of corporate America had its critics in the popular media. Some writers pointed to the conformist male as a “mechanized, robotized caricature of humanity . . . a slave in mind and body.”
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According to Barbara Ehrenreich, magazines like
Life,
Look,
and the
Reader’s Digest
carried stories suggesting that “Gary Gray” (the conformist in the gray flannel suit) was robbing men of their masculinity, freedom, and sense of individuality.

While pop psychologists criticized the corporate world for reducing American males to “little men,”
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it was women in their roles of wives and mothers who were essentially singled out as the cripplers of American masculinity. As Ehrenreich has argued, because “the corporate captains were out of the bounds of legitimate criticism in Cold War America,” women were the more acceptable and accessible villains.
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Described as greedy, manipulative, and lazy, American women were accused of emasculating men by overdomesticating them.
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Probably one of the most woman-hating books of the time was Philip Wylie’s
Generation of Vipers,
first published in 1942 and reprinted after World War II. For Wylie, wives were the cause of men’s problems because they controlled the home with an iron fist and worked their spouses to death in order to enjoy a life of leisure. As Wylie so eloquently put it, “It is her man who worries about where to acquire the money while she worries about how to spend it, so he has the ulcers and she has the guts of a bear.”
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It was during these woman-hating, pro-family years that
Playboy
hit the newsstands. Picking up on the themes of the 1950s,
Playboy
editors, from the very first issue, defined single women as menaces to the
Playboy
reader since they were out to trap him into marriage and bleed him financially. Indeed, the first major article in the first issue of
Playboy
was called “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.” Bemoaning the good old days when alimony was reserved for “little floosies,”
Playboy
editors wrote, “When a modern day marriage ends, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame—it’s always the guy who pays and pays and pays and pays.” Echoing Wylie’s assertion that women had taken over America, the article continued, “A couple of generations ago, this was a man’s world, nothing could be further from the truth in 1953.”
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This was a theme that
Playboy
was to express repeatedly in its early years.
Burt Zollo, writing in the June 1954 issue, told
Playboy
readers to “take a good look at the sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-dominated street in this woman-dominated land. Check what they’re doing when you’re out on the town with a different dish every night.” For those men who had been lucky enough to escape marriage, Zollo warned them to beware of June, the marriage month, since “woman becomes more heated, more desperate, more dangerous.”
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Dangerous women were also the focus of Wylie’s article “The Womanization of America,” published in
Playboy
in September 1958. Starting from now-familiar themes, Wylie accused American women of taking over the business world, the arts, and, of course, the home. It was the home, according to Wylie, where men especially ceased to be men: the “American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-nursery, dreamed up for women by women, and as if males did not exist as males.”
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According to
Playboy,
the position of American men continued to deteriorate; by 1963, an article in the magazine claimed that the American man was being worked so hard by his wife that he was “day after day, week after week . . . invited to attend his own funeral.” This state of affairs could not continue, according to the writer, William Iversen, because “neither double eyelashes nor the blindness of night or day can obscure the glaring fact that American marriage can no longer be accepted as an estate in which the sexes shall live half-slave and half-free.”
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While the anti-woman ideology of
Playboy
was not new, what was new was the way it was tied in to an anti-marriage position; American wives were beyond salvation, they had been given too much power and the only solution was to refuse to conform to the ideal of domesticity. However, simply telling men not to conform by staying single would not have been enough in the 1950s, since nonconformity was taken as a sign of either homosexuality or social pathology. What was needed was an alternative to “Gary Gray,” an image of a man who refused to conform but was still considered a man. This man worked hard, but for himself, not for his family; he was actively heterosexual, but with lots of young, beautiful women ( just like the ones that populated the magazine), not with a wife. Such a man, Zollo informed readers in the June 1954 issue of
Playboy,
did indeed exist and he was the “true playboy”: the well-dressed, sophisticated guy who could “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.”
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Playboy
was to become the manual for men who aspired to be playboys, and these men, born and raised in a time of material deprivation (the Great Depression and then the Second World War) and sexual conservatism, needed all the help they could get to learn how to become a big-spending, upmarket consumer of goods and women.

Part of
Playboy
’s overnight success can be explained by the lack of competition, since the men’s magazine industry was dominated by magazines that specialized in what was referred to as “blood, guts and fighting.”
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After the war, this industry enjoyed record-breaking profits, with sales increasing 62 percent from 1945 to 1952.
21
At the time there was some concern over the increasingly violent content of these magazines. Naomi Barko, for example, writing in 1953, complained that men’s magazines were dominated by “war, big-game hunting, women, speed sports and crime,” a world in which “jobs, families, careers, education and civic problems are never mentioned.”
22
What these magazines offered, Weyr argues, was an escape from suburban life, but one based on danger and adventure, rather than sex.
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The print pornography market at the time was dominated by cheap, under-the-counter pinup magazines, the type that few men would feel comfortable displaying on their coffee table. Hefner was well aware that the financial potential of such magazines was limited in the 1950s, and, moreover, he did not want to create just a “porn” magazine; rather, he wanted to develop an upmarket lifestyle magazine that would have the pornographic pinup as its centerpiece. This was the core of the magazine, but unlike the other porn magazines of the time, this pinup would be delivered to the readers in a package that celebrated the upper-middle-class bachelor life, the type of life that the 1950s male dreamed of leading, be he a college student, a married man living in the suburbs, or an upwardly mobile corporate male.
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