Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (8/10)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Pornography Shows What Men Want

'Pornographers... know what to make, and the distributors know what sell,' Susan Cole declares, as if the mere fact that something is on market is proof that the consumers want it and would not choose something else were it available. Are Pintos, Edsels, red dye #2, and thalidomide what consumers wanted? They were on the market and people bought them, so they must have been...

Many of the men in my survey did not often get what they wanted from pornography...

MacKinnon claims that pornography “eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal.” That does not sound like many of the women I have seen in pornography, or the ones the men in my survey said they liked most. MacKinnon wants to pretend that “women feel compelled to preserve the appearance—which, acted upon, becomes
the reality—of male direction of sexual expression, as if male initiative itself were what we [women] want, as if it were what turns us on. Men enforce this. It is much of what men want in women.”

Everyone would like to be served at times, everyone wants to be desired—which requires assertiveness and initiative on the part of someone else. Women whose sexual relationships with men are fulfilling have their needs served by their male partner. If men wanted only power in sex, they wouldn’t experience performance anxiety, impotence, or premature ejaculation (or feel guilty when they do, because these are symptoms of not being able to satisfy one’s partner— or the fear of it. If domination and power were all that mattered to men, they would care only for their orgasm, and not their partner’s. The fact is, many men do care very much about women’s pleasure, both in life and in pornography, where it is the focus of so much attention...

Pornography Teaches Men About Sex
As Laura Kipnis dryly observes, 'The argument that pornography causes violent behavior in male consumers relies on a theory of the porn consumer as devoid of rationality, contemplation, or intelligence, prone instead to witless brainwashing, to monkey-see/monkey-do reenactments of the pornographic scene.”...

Pornography is Addictive
One can sense the same murky insinuations in Peter Baker’s worried declaration that the combined monthly sales of all Britain’s pornographic magazines—from Penthouse and Mayfair to Knave, Fiesta, and Club International—is 2.25 million. Apparently the reader is meant to assume each sale represents a different man, rather than the possibility that a smaller number of men buy multiple magazines. And what if there were 2.25 million buyers 0f pornography in Britain: Could they all be addicts and nascent sex killers? One does not get that impression from the Englishmen in my survey...

Porn Consumers Inevitably Turn to More Violent and Kinky Material
Porn critics positively savor the gruesome details they say are typical of the genre. Women are 'hung by their breasts from meat hooks,' Catherine Itzin assures us. They are 'fucked, tied up, spread-eagled, having ejaculate sprayed over their faces and bodies,' Diana Russell thunders, and 'No one knows what percentage of them are also being beaten up, tortured, rpaed or even killed.' MacKinnon says, 'Electrodes [are] being applied to the genitals of women being called 'cunt' in photography studios in Los Angeles and the results mass-marketed.' Cole assures us that 'men shove bamboo up women's vaginas,' one finds 'a meathook in a woman's vagina,' and women are 'branded with hot irons or gang-raped...' As always, Andrea Dworkin weighs in: 'A woman, nearly naked, in a cell, chained, flesh ripped up from the whip, breasts mutilated by a knife: she is entertainment, the boy-next-door's favorite fantasy, every man's precious right, every woman's potential fate.'

... When critics of pornography actually try to measure the violent content, the results are weak, to say the least. Catherine Itzin approvingly charts the findings of a study of the images on the covers of porn magazines on the east coast of the United States at the time of the Meese Commission. Although intriguing items such as fisting, leg irons, forcible rape, and corpses leap off her chart, their actual incidence in the pornography studied by researchers P.E. Dietz, Paul Elliott, and Alan Sears was negligible. The above items appeared in one percent or less of the material. In contrast, a subsequent study by Dietz of detective magazine covers found that 76 percent involved domination of some kind and 38 percent depicted bondage.

Opponents of pornography also casually assert that violence in pornography is on the rise. MacKinnon writes, “More and more pornography is more and more violent, and arousing,” but she provides no evidence. Russell and Karen Trocki are more sly: in 1993 they wrote, “Pornographic materials and mainstream depictions of women have become increasingly violent in the past two decades,”... Using such a skewed sample to characterize all pornography as violent is as accurate as saying statistics indicate that all Americans may be homosexual.

Palys’s examination of videos between 1979 and 1983 found that XXX videos with explicit sex were far less violent than R-rated ones with nudity and simulated sex. Examples of male domination and graphic aggression were higher in the R-rated videos, but they did not increase over time, and the number of violent scenes in XXX actually fell.

Thompson goes on to cite several studies that suggest MacKinnon, Russell, and anyone else who claims violence has risen in pornography are simply wrong. J.E. Scott and S.J. Cuvelier’s 1987 study of Playboy and Penthouse, covering the years 1954 to 1983, found a “violent” image on one page in 3,000, and four out of every 1,000 pictures, respectively. The rate dropped after 1977. A study by researchers at Reading Uniersity of European pornographic magazines (supposedly “harder” than American or British) up to 1990, found that “violent imagery” declined 42 percent from 1972 to 1979, and a little further by 1983. “Non-violent but demeaning” imagery climbed 23 percent from 1972 to 1979, then declined 19 percent through 1983.

What makes the debate about violence in pornography so tricky is that 'violence' is open to interpretation. What looks like violence to one person may be play to another. When MacKinnon infers a connection between “sadomasochistic pornography and lynching,” it is clear she knows nothing about consensual bondage and S/M, safe words, and the world of people who play at restraint and pain...

“Many women recoil at S/M because it seems to reflect what history teaches them men want most: to inflict sadistic pain on them,” writes James Ridgeway, a journalist and author of Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry. “But the surprise of the commercial S/M scene is that it most often finds men on their knees, abject slaves of their steely dominatrixes. Often cross-dressed in women’s clothing, they clank around in medieval chains, their cocks and balls ingeniously tied up, their bare asses lashed by whips, as they perform housewifely chores.”

In discussing a porn novel called Whip Chick, Dworkin wrote: “The portrayal of men as sexual victims is distinctly unreal, ludicrous in part because it scarcely has an analogue in the real world.” In other words, Dworkin argues that most porn is real to its viewers, but this porn is not...

The late John Preston, a popular author of gay pornographic stories, interviewed “Mistress Holly,” the owner/manager of an expensive brothel near Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, and reported:

'Holly speculated that only 15 percent of the male clients of the House of O were dominant in their sexual desires... They are men who are usually in charge all the time. They are the type who lord it over their wives, play the father role to the hilt with their children, and are probably giving the orders at work, too. They just can’t hold up to that pressure. So they come here and they hand over all their power and all their decision making to the domme.”'...

As a woman once wrote, when she was a child she “liked the sex-and-dominance games, which could be overtly sadomasochistic, because I liked the risk and the intensity. . . .“ Whether she suffered lasting harm because of such play is anybody’s guess: Her name is Andrea Dworkin.

The most extreme form of pornography, and therefore the handiest weapon in the “porn-is-violence” debate, is the “snuff” film, in which a woman is tortured and actually killed on camera for the sexual pleasure of the viewer...

When Snuff surfaced in 1976, feminist protests shut it down in some cities. The film helped to galvanize the antipornography movement into the 1980s. The only problem was that it was a hoax: an old-fashioned horror/slasher flick with some nudity thrown in. When Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau investigated, he discovered Snuff was really a 1971 Argentine movie called Slaughter, to which some extra scenes had been spliced. A story in the New York Times noted that the 'victim' was interviewed by a policewoman, and the authorities concluded, “The actress is alive and well.”...

Given that isolated psychopaths record their crimes in the privacy of their lair for their own pleasure, one cannot assert that such material is manufactured for the purpose of public sale to Dworkin’s “boy-next-door” —who wouldn’t want it in any case. Based on that slim but crucial misconception, however, one finds references to snuff in nearly every book and essay by opponents of pornography, often with no citation of an authoritative source at all...

If snuff films were really on the market, feminists would have hunted them down and held them up for gruesome display. Law enforcement agencies would be jumping for joy to possess the most perfect homicide evidence one could ever hope to put before a judge or jury. Why hasn’t this happened?

As a professor of law who must live or die by her citations, MacKinnon has worked the hardest to provide backup for such claims... Apart from quoting Senator Arlen Specter’s remarks in the Congressional Record as an authority, in several of her books MacKinnon cites a single Orange County, California municipal court case in which a man was convicted of murdering two young girls in the process of making a film. She invariably buries this information in an end note-perhaps because, as she admits, “the film was never found.” But somehow this enables her to insist of snuff films that “They exist,” and 'The intended consumer has a sexual experience watching [them]' (apparently “intended” consumers are as good as real ones)...

Less scrupulous commentators than MacKinnon assert that there are snuff films “priced to make [them] available to Everyman,” and increasingly popular as videos in the American home”[!]...

In 1997, journalist and former Israeli soldier and police detective Yaron Svoray published Gods of Death, the remarkable account of his search for a genuine snuff Film. The trail took him to Thailand, Germany, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and the war zones of Bosnia... A career FBI agent told him, “As far as anyone in the bureau knows, there has never been a legitimate snuff movie ever found.” An officer in the New York Police Department’s child crimes unit said, “I’ve never seen one and I hope I never do.” A 29-year veteran of the Dutch police assured Svoray there was no such thing.

Yet Svoray managed to view a snuff film in a wealthy man’s Connecticut home, and in Bosnia he found brutal video footage of sex slayings by soldiers. I believe he saw what he says he saw. But he clearly shows that such movies are closely guarded by their (probably criminal) owners, not sold to the public, and that the Bosnian footage of rape- killings of women—like the movie made by MacKinnon’s Orange County killers—was incidental to the actual carnage... Yet I suspect that MacKinnon will cite Svoray in her sub sequent books as proof that snuff exists and men want it."

(Continued in next post)