Early in the HBO series Girls, the guy having sex with the Lena Dunham character tells her, “You’re a dirty little whore, and I’m gonna send you home to your parents covered in cum!” He then chokes her before he climaxes.
“I almost came,” she replies.
In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert laments what porn taught Millennial women. At the turn of the millennium, porn had infiltrated pop culture. Jenna Jameson’s, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, made the New York Times best-seller list. Pamela Anderson’s sex tape was among the first videos to go “viral.” The aesthetics of porn influenced fashion, music, and cinema. Young women took notice and were convinced that their sexualization was empowering. Britney Spears in the video “…Baby One More Time” took the porn trope of the sexually precocious schoolgirl mainstream.
The “sex-positive” ethos of the era branded the pornification of the culture as “liberating” and “empowering.” Others discern a more malign influence. Feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex writes, “Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” For Gilbert’s generation of Millennial women, it trained them to see themselves “as objects — as things to silence, restrain, fetishize or brutalize.” She approvingly quotes Andrea Dworkin: “[P]ornography incarnates male supremacy.” As early as 2001, Martin Amis noticed the violence prevalent in porn. (“I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right?” one porn entrepreneur mused.) The sexual scripts enacted in porn were imitated in real life, which in turn were refracted back into popular culture. (HBO’s sex-saturated teen drama Euphoria depicts this dark milieu.)
Religious conservatives predictably deplore porn. Christine Emba in a recent Christianity Today podcast complained, “Pornography is not about real relationships. It does not even attempt to show real love and real respect for the other person. We’re consuming other people’s bodies….The relationship between men and women they’re seeing is often violent and ugly: choking, slapping, hitting, vile language, women treated as objects to be abused.” (When that same publication inveighed against “sex and smut on the newsstands” in 1958 — which was easily obtained by the daughter of a Dutch Reformed clergyman a few blocks from the White House — a magazine containing a story about “a voluptuous wench” was considered objectional material.)
“[Porn’s] teaching men to see women as made for my pleasure, my consumption,” Emba said. But a lot of women haven’t gotten the memo that they should be indignant about this state of affairs. A piece in the New York Times last year disapprovingly noted the surging prevalence of sexual asphyxiation among young people. A 15-year old boy when reporting on the sexual proclivities of his female classmates asked, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” A male freshman at a large Midwestern university noted that “girls expected” to be choked during sex and refusing to comply with their desires would make him a “simp.” A female junior enjoyed the power dynamic at play when choked and the sexual euphoria triggered by oxygen deprivation. When one high school senior complained about getting choked by her boyfriend, her friends derided her sexual tastes as “vanilla.”
Some feminists explain this as a form of false consciousness imposed by porn. “The psyches of my students are products of pornography,” Srinivasan writes in an essay entitled “Talking to My Students about Porn.” As “the first generation truly to be raised on internet pornography,” Srinivasan observes that “sex for my students is what porn says it is.” As one female student asked, “But if it weren’t for pornography, how would we ever learn to have sex?” The sex of “the pornworld” is one “in which slick bodies fuck and are fucked for their own pleasure.” These students then enact the sexual scripts in porn, which Srinivasan synopsizes as “hot blondes suck dicks, get fucked hard, get told that they like it, and end up with semen on their face.” Porn reinforces patriarchal systems of power (in which sex is reduced, in feminist Catherine MacKinnon words, to “fucking”: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object”), which is inherently violent. “Porn is not pedagogy,” Srinivasan concludes, “but it often functions as if it were.”
Australian porn star Angela White has been called “the Meryl Streep of porn.” Her most recent opus is Fuck Angela, a homage to the gonzo porn of the early 2000s. (“I can’t wait to show you what a dirty slut I can be,” she teases.) It’s a five-hour epic that begins with the starlet declaring, “I’m ready to get fucked in the arse,” which she is repeatedly (“I love the way you fucking use me!” she cries out in one scene). The movie concludes with a seven-guy blowbang that finishes with White drinking semen out of a dog dish as guys chant “Slut! Slut! Slut!”
The power dynamics at play may be more complex than they appear on the surface. Porn star Sasha Grey wanted girls to know “it’s OK to be a slut.” Karley Sciortino observed that while Grey’s extreme “whorishness” seems to align with the Madonna/whore dichotomy, she’s actually subverting it:
As the male porn actors take turns fucking her, she bosses them around and demands they fuck her…. Throughout the whole scene she appears to be the person that’s most hungry for sex, as well as the one who’s most enjoying the situation—it literally seems as if she hired the gang of dudes to bang her. As a result, she straight-up hijacks the male gaze, subverting the image of a whore into one of female pleasure and sexual power.
Porn, according to Srinivasan, “shows women hungry for the assertion of male sexual power,” a reflection of patriarchal oppression. But what if porn is instead, as Camille Paglia asserts, a reflection of primal male and female sexual desires: “My position has always been that pornography shows us the truth about sexuality, which connects us to the animal realm of primitive urges….Hence I view pornography as both art and anthropology–an alluring cultural projection that also reveals the hidden compulsions and conflicts of sexual relations in every era.” As the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon showed, contra feminists like Srinivasan, many women are indeed hungry for the assertion of male sexual power. In his essay “Patriarchal Sex,” Robert Jensen succinctly states, “Sex is fucking.” Perhaps the truth is that “the male need to fuck” which he attributes to the structures of patriarchy is reducible to the biological imperative which porn unerringly captures.
For me, the rawness of porn punctured the illusion of sex as an ineluctable expression of romantic love and resonated with my own sexual experience. As M. Scott Peck observed, “In itself, making love is not an act of love.”
Lutheran Guilt 