Student Porn Compilations
In 2013, five young women in my sex industry class decided to do their own content analysis and illustration of contemporary porn for their group project. They did a Google search of “porn” and “sex,” and chose to feature videos from the first page of results. The students explained that they did not hunt down “the worst stuff”-torture porn and bukkake, for example—but instead followed the lead of researchers examining the content of the most viewed pornography. The final project featured video footage of eight clips of gonzo pornography interspersed with screen shots of still advertisements that they said “bombarded them repeatedly” while they worked on the compilation. We watched it the final week of the semester.
The class knew one group had chosen to make a pornography compilation, and we had been curious what they would find and create. We expected it might be difficult to watch, but the compilation was even worse than we imagined.
The collection of videos evidenced a stunning amount of violence against women. For example, one clip spotlighted a woman enduring “facial abuse.” Also called “face fucking,” facial abuse is pornography that features rough oral sex in which a male performer violently gags a woman with his penis while spitting on, slapping, and insulting her. The students shared that this particular video had been immensely popular, receiving over 200,000 likes. In another, a man anally penetrated a woman in an office while calling her ugly and a dog, telling her to “bark like a dog,” which she immediately did. Each video had been uniquely demeaning to the actors, presenting the male performers as menacing, huge, and brutal, and the female actors as willing objects, aroused by abuse with the exception of a racist rape scene which featured six black men entering a house and forcefully raping a white woman.
Act Like a Porn Star in Bed
Many who participated in this study observed that internet pornography is influencing what people think is sexy, as well as how they have sex.
Women get it in their head that they have to have violent sex for it to be pleasurable or for men to like them. Every woman I know, at least one of their partners has gone too far or made them uncomfortable, or wish they wouldn’t be so rough.
Approximately half of the women I interviewed shared stories of men engaging, or asking to engage, in sex acts that seemed to come “directly from porn” including: men choking, gagging, spanking, spitting on, and slapping women, double penetration, anal sex, facial abuse, the male orgasming on a female body or her face, handcuffs, threesomes, and men asking female partners to call them “daddy.”
Heather, who is white and 22, described two friends who recently broke up with new boyfriends because of “borderline physical assault” during sex involving acts taken from pornography. Heather explained that, before then, her friends hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that their partners were watching porn: “It’s just porn, you know,” Heather repeated, mimicking a shrug. That changed when the boyfriend of one tried to penetrate her anally without obtaining consent, and the boyfriend of the other “gagged her when she was performing oral sex really aggressively.” Abigail, who is white and 21, also shared that her last two partners asked her to do sex acts straight from porn. She said,
from porn. She said,
Guys expect you to do certain things in bed that you don’t really want to do, or even think sounds good, but they think that it’s normal. Especially when I came out as pansexual, they expect me to do certain things. They’ll ask me if I’m okay with threesomes even though that’s not a thing that normal, monogamous people do. And I’m just like, “Why would my sexuality automatically put that out there for you?” Or they think that even if you don’t want threesomes with another girl, they’ll be like, “Well can another guy join in? And we can do like, double anal or double vaginal.” I don’t want anything near me that is going to in any way hurt me. I know that that’s painful, like it has to be painful. I think that, for them, that’s real sex. That’s how real sex should be.
Tara, who is white and 19, said, “Porn gives guys the wrong impression and encourages almost a dominance, like the guys should be abusive and controlling. I used to have a boyfriend who, his goal from the beginning of when we started dating was to get me to do anal, and I think that had something to do with porn.”
Older women also discussed the impact of internet pornography in their relationships. Julia, who is 46, talked about pornography in the context of Christian evangelical expectations of sexual behavior. Evangelical culture discourages women and men from having sex before marriage, and frames pornography use as sinful. At the same time, religiosity rarely buffers one completely from mainstream culture. Julia observed that Christian men who have not had sex but watched a lot of pornography had unrealistic expectations of women. She said, “They get frustrated, ‘What do you mean I have to work for 15 minutes to get you aroused? What do you mean you’re not going to orgasm if I fuck you really hard? What do you mean you’ve got pubic hair?’ It’s [porn] an unrealistic portrayal of what men and women do during sex that poisons face-to-face intimacy.” Lauren, who is white and 39, described how pornography complicated her sex life when she was dating a man ten years younger. Her story illustrates what may ensue when negotiating sexual kinks in the era of internet porn. She narrated:
There was a point where I was a little bit into spanking, and figuring it out, and it was fun. At some point he and I had this disagreement. We were having a text conversation and making up.
He was still sort of annoyed, and then we were playing with that dynamic a little bit. He said he wanted to spank me and I was fine, and then he brought it a step further. I said, “What else would you want?” and he said something about “fucking my mouth.”
When I see it on porn, I think that woman is gagging and her eyes are tearing up because she’s gagging and it’s not a comfortable thing. It was something I know he’s seen. I was like,
“You understand that that’s actually a very uncomfortable thing for me, that’s a very different dynamic than a consensual fun spanking, you making me gag just because of something you’ve seen and incorporated from your porn.”
seen and incorporated from your porn.”
He was ten years younger than me. I felt like I was constantly being like, “Okay, this actually doesn’t work for me, like that’s what this is.” He got it, he did, he’s a good person and didn’t have anything other than porn to masturbate to and watch, just hang out and watch, not even to masturbate. Just have it on, as entertainment.
Lauren demonstrates maturity and self-awareness about her own desires and boundaries, as well as insight about her partner’s perspective, in this story.
As Layna’s story below illustrates, young women still learning who they are and what they like, and who want to please young men, may not yet have the tools to express themselves.
A Latinx and Pacific Islander 20-year-old woman, Layna described a friend’s sexual assault that mimicked a porn scene. Her friend “Fran” had had a “threesome” with two football players at a frat party. Layna narrated,
“Fran was so drunk and she went in a room with this one guy and started giving him oral. Then she said that this guy just came out of nowhere and started hitting it from the back, another guy.” In other words, another fraternity member entered the room and penetrated Fran vaginally without any discussion of consent while she was giving oral sex to someone else.
Layna explained, “She didn’t show that she was upset about it, but she did show that it was like, ‘What the fuck?’ She didn’t give them the okay to double-team her like that. It literally sounds like an episode in a porn thing.” When I asked Layna why Fran didn’t say, “Stop, get off me, who are you?” etc., Layna said, “She just continued and got out of there as soon as possible. She has that image of being a fun party girl.”
Male Sexual Dysfunction
Abigail confided that both of her last two boyfriends had difficulties “finishing because they weren’t looking at porn. Right now with the relationship I’m in, we’re working on it and trying to figure out how to satisfy him better without having to use that, but it’s hard. [He had been looking at it for ten years.] He started looking at it when he was ten years old.” Abigail also discussed a friend who regulates his porn use in order to orgasm with his girlfriend. Abigail summed up the thoughts of many participants:
It’s become much harder to have sex with a man who is obsessed or addicted to porn because real sex doesn’t compare to what he sees on the screen. It’s harder for men to want real women.
As a result, it makes having real sex harder because they aren’t turned on, or they can’t get off, and it makes me and other women, too, probably, feel inadequate. It reinforces the idea that women aren’t good enough and lowers our self-esteem, which can contribute to eating disorders and unnecessary plastic surgery and all kinds of things. I’m a sex-radical feminist, but even I agree that this level of obsession with porn has pretty much destroyed our sex lives.
Pushing the Envelope
In my interviews the word “desensitized” emerged 50% of the time when discussing both raunch culture and internet pornography. For example, Andrew observed, “I’ve noticed within the last five or six years as porn is much more easily accessible than it used to be, it’s sort of a desensitization, like they need something more than they could find in the past for the same thing.” Andrew shares a house with four other young men and said that they watch a lot of porn. He noticed that his roommates are watching more and more “intense” content in order to achieve a climax. Andrew clarified, “In the past when I was a teenager, the fact that you could find porn at all was like, ‘Oh wow, I found a picture of a naked person!’ But now it’s people getting into progressively more, I don’t know what the exact word would be, intense things.” I inquired what exactly “intense” referred to and Andrew responded, “Well, multiple, 15-guy gang bang stuff and they would be like, ‘Oh wow, that was really intense! Let’s see if I can find something that’s even more.’ And they’ll just keep looking for bigger deals. It’s almost like a badge of, ‘Oh look how cool I am.”” He observed that the more women are degraded in porn, “the more people view it.”
FIGURE 2.2. Advertisement for torture porn website. Source: Punishtube.com
Andrew described one of his friends who he said was “weirded out” that he “can’t get off to the same things anymore.” Pornography researchers confirm Andrew’s observations: seeing the same type of image repeatedly ceases to sexually stimulate the viewer. To reiterate, image producers seek a new edge to attract consumers, and sometimes that edge is an amoral, misogynist, sexualized violence as seen in figure 2.2, which features a torture porn still.
So why has the content of internet pornography evolved toward violence and bizarre sex acts? Psychologist R. Douglas Fields highlights research that finds a biological connection in the brain between violence and arousal, describing it as a “nasty legacy of our primate ancestors.” Culturally, while rates of global violence may be at a historic low, media violence has increased in quantity, and become “more graphic, sexual, and sadistic.” Violence shocks people, and gets their attention, and with attention follows subscriptions and money. In a capitalist society, linking sex and violence in pornography and then walking viewers into more and more extreme content is likely the quickest, and least costly, way to make a profit.
Talking about Pornography—Who Is the “Nasty Whore”?
As I hope is well illustrated in this chapter, internet pornography is a new phenomenon characterized not just by sexist content, but by violent sexist content and previously taboo acts like incest. Most gonzo pornography centers male pleasure while showing men insulting women and roughly penetrating women’s bodies. Instead of ignoring this content, let’s think about it. What does it mean that the words one can easily find in pornography demean women: “dumb slut,” “stupid bitch,” “nasty whore”?
What do you think about the fact that men are making sexual content for other men which entails hiring and directing porn performers to paint women as dirty, sex-crazed, promiscuous, and inferior in order to turn the biggest profit? If anyone could be rightfully dubbed the “nasty whore” in this equation, it’s the pornographers, not the female performers. At the same time, I don’t think there is a malevolent cadre of male supremacists actively conspiring to oppress and abuse women. I think the pornographers are simply following the money. This is an illustration of the technological revolution creating unanticipated consequences: as the porn engine drives the tech engine, representations of human sexuality suffer.
trying to regulate my sex life. You must be really repressed.”
Kayla explained that when she critiques pornography, or sexist elements of popular culture, she is dismissed as “repressed” and too “politically correct.” Kayla shared:
Being politically correct is also seen as shrill, shrewish, controlling and uptight. “Oh you don’t have to be so PC about everything.” If you don’t think rape jokes are funny, or pedophile jokes are funny, or whatever, then you’re uptight. Then people jump to this, “Oh America is so repressed in our sexuality. We need to be like European countries.” And I think you’re taking the wrong lessons from that because, I’m sure raunch culture is a thing over there too because we’re in a global society, but not being repressed does not mean you watch porn all the time on your phone and can’t have a real sexual relationship with a real person. That’s not what lack of repression means. Lack of repression means that we have better sex education, that we don’t feel guilty for having sex before you’re married, that we make people learn what consent means, that we make people learn how to have safe sex, that we give people access to contraception; that’s what lack of sexual repression looks like, not “I get to watch whatever kind of porn I want whenever I want, and you have to be okay with it or you’re a prude.”
Silencing people who critique pornography by calling them prudish or repressed is a patriarchal illustration of doublespeak because most internet pornography itself illustrates repression by relentlessly casting men as selfish sadists plundering female bodies while rendering irrelevant female desire and pleasure. Studies show that millennials, the group that watches the most internet pornography, report having less sex than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers did at the same age.* I speculate that internet pornography and raunch culture play an important role in this. If all I knew about sex was gonzo pornography, I would be scared to have it.
Erotica encompasses both words and images. It situates arousal in the context of a story, a reason why people are having sex, and features mutual pleasure. I also advocate a robust, pleasure-centered sex education curriculum in public schools, and a culture of conversation about sexuality and pornography.
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