Millennials like Deanna, the generation born between 1981 to 1996, and those in Generation Z, born in 1997 or later, manage an omnipresent concentration of sexist representations of women along with the combined challenges of trolls, harassment, assault, internet pornography, hookup culture, dating apps like Tinder, and “dick pics”—a completely new cultural norm. Consequently, many struggle with low self-esteem, internalized sexism, misogyny, pressure to be perfect, jealousy, insecurity, stalking, assault, and a lack of romantic intimacy, and blame raunch culture for, if not always creating, at least exacerbating these problems. Teresa, who is 21 and Latinx, summed up what many others observed: our porn nation is a bleak land for women. She said, “Girls just have to be skinny. You have to have big tits, a big ass, and basically you’ve got to be stupid.” For 20-somethings, raunch culture is culture. Born just as the internet began to occupy more and more of our daily experience, Deanna, Brian, Makenzie, Randall, Bonnie, Teresa, and a whole cohort of youth are maturing into adulthood absorbing a steady stream of hypersexualized representations of women in advertisements, music videos, social media, television shows, and movie plots. What effect might this have on how they perceive gender relations? As the folks I interviewed describe in the following chapters, this parade of impossibly thin but curvy, sexy, almost naked female bodies lowers women’s self-esteem, heightens their self-consciousness, and complicates their ability to perceive and prioritize their sexual desires.
Like Kayla, Abigail believes that an important element of raunch involves socializing women to be physically and intellectually submissive to men, in short, to look fuckable and stay quiet: “Not only is everything put on us to change us and the way that we look, but we’re also told to be quiet about it and it doesn’t matter what we think—that what others think is what’s most important.” Emily, who is 23 and black, concurred that raunch culture socializes women to be passive and compliant. She said, “They think all women need to look a certain way and be completely submissive, not having a voice or any power. If you have an opinion, it’s looked down upon.” Bitchy women have opinions. Better for women to be bimbos and sex dolls, to fry bacon and wash trucks in bikinis, to care only that men find them hot, to, as Teresa noted, “be stupid.”
How Internet Pornography Ruins Sex
I remember the first time I saw pornography. It was the summer of 1985. I was 18 years old and had just completed my first year at Oberlin College.
My stepfather’s new job had moved the family from coast to coast, from Framingham, Massachusetts, to Milpitas, California. It was a little bit of a boring summer for me, too short a period to make any real friends, and completely out of context with the rest of my life. I worked as a cashier in a record store for minimum wage and, newly vegetarian, ate a lot of bean tostados from Taco Bell. My favorite recreation was to ride a ten-speed bike to the trails in the California hills and hike alone. Capering along the paths, I felt like a woodland sprite, chomping on fresh fruit grown in our backyard while drinking unconcernedly from the clean streams flowing all around me (miraculously, I never contracted giardia).
I don’t recall ever seeing any other people during these hikes, and it never occurred to me to consider my safety until I came across a pornographic magazine all alone in the woods. Some flapping pages on a rock aside one of the streams caught my eye as I danced along the trail.
Curious, I descended to the water to investigate. It was hardcore pornography, 1985-style, not glossy Playboy centerfolds, but many photos of naked people and penetration. I really don’t recall the specific images so much as the feeling of being repulsed by the photos and suddenly, acutely aware of how alone I was in the woods. Some man (I assumed) had brought this magazine to this secluded spot, presumably to masturbate. I quickly scanned the area—was he still around, watching me find it? I didn’t spot anyone and, thoroughly creeped out, swiftly left the park. I returned to find my bicycle vandalized, the front wheel stolen off it while I had been away.
That was the last time I hiked alone in the California hills, or even hiked at all in Milpitas. I left the following week to return to college, but I know I wouldn’t have returned to the trail alone, polluted as the place had become by the threat implied in the images I had seen: women are objects to penetrate, and I was a woman, ergo, I was vulnerable.
The ease of accessing internet pornography means that most children see pornography much younger than I did. Studies find that over 95% of children have seen pornography before age 18.’ Some cite 11 as the average age of first viewing. A recent analysis of male consumption of pornography found that 59% of men look at porn weekly and 49% first viewed it before age 13. Two-thirds of those I interviewed saw pornography for the first time online, between the ages of 11 to 13, and some even younger than that. Makenzie first saw pornography when she was seven years old. She explained that she had spent that summer playing with other children in her subdivision. One day, when she was over at her best friend’s house in the computer room, a nine-year-old neighbor boy began searching “big boobs” and “saggy boobs” on the family computer.
Up popped internet pornography. Makenzie said she “was in shock and went home to tell my mother everything.” This was in 2005, a time when internet pornography was widely accessible, but before the release of the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, and the Kindle Fire in 2011.
Although most machines allow parents to filter the content and “lock down” internet access, if a parent neglects to do this, children may accidentally see pornography as they click links and videos on their mobile devices. Julia, who is white and 46, shared that she found a dozen hardcore porn videos downloaded onto her nine-year-old daughter’s Kindle Fire.
Julia explained:
We had given her a Kindle and I had not put any controls on it yet. There were a dozen hardcore porn videos downloaded on it, the same one 12 times. I went to her search history and it started off with something on YouTube, “Justin Bieber hugging a fan,” and then you get those thumbnails on the side, and from that it stair-stepped to this porn video. I erased all of them. It wasn’t very long, it was five minutes, but I remember thinking, “Is she searching these terms?” It went from Justin Bieber hugging a fan to Justin Bieber giving a fan a kiss, to Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, it’s how these YouTube videos get categorized. There are thumbnails on YouTube, and you can access videos that are similar to it. It was this progression and so I thought, “Yeah, this is how they hook you in with Justin Bieber, who is marketed for kids.”
Technologies of Pornography
As I discussed earlier, radical feminists have been critically analyzing and condemning the representation of women in pornography for over 40 years, well before internet pornography and the introduction of the handheld device.’ As decades of feminist research and analysis substantiates, the majority of pornography is both sexist and misogynist: it demonstrates hatred for women while normalizing women’s sexual submission and service to men. Most internet pornography cast women as always-willing sex partners turned on by any and all acts, including violent ones.” Of course, one can find violence in some pre-internet porn-and moreover, representations of any group that routinely subordinates them is symbolic violence but, as I will shortly elaborate, it is commonplace to see violence done to women in internet porn. For example, a 2010 study published in the journal Violence Against Women counted acts of physical and verbal aggression in 304 scenes from the most popularly viewed pornography. The data show that 88% of scenes contained physical aggression and 48% verbal abuse.
Egalitarian porn does exist. American producer and director Candida Royalle founded Femme Productions in 1984, and Swedish film director, producer, and screenwriter Erika Lust created LustFilms in 2004, both with the goal of creating pornography centered on female desire. Calling their genre “feminist pornography,” Femme Productions, LustFilms, and websites like Lady Cheeky present women and men more realistically and feature sex acts that women almost universally find pleasurable, like cunnilingus. While I support, and applaud, the efforts of some to create egalitarian pornography, this content does not solve the problem of sexism in internet porn because feminist porn is a niche. Feminist porn sites will not appear at the top of, or in the first page of results, in a general Google search for pornography. A user has to know that feminist pornography exists at all to search for it, and many consumers have had neither the sexual nor gender studies educations to knowledgeably do so, certainly not children and teens. What they will find easily, at best, are acrobatic acts that center male pleasure, and, at worst, porn depicting sexualized violence against women.
Porn Is Everywhere
Considering accessibility, to test how easy it is to find pornography with a child’s search term, I followed the lead of Makenzie’s childhood friend and typed “boobs” into Google to see what might come up in November 2017.
The very first link on the page was titled “Big Boobs (.Y.) Big Tits Official Site.” Clicking on the link, I found dozens of thumbnail videos I might instantly play, all of which were graphic. If none of these pleased me, the site allowed me to search by categories helpfully supplied in an A-Z menu:
Amateur, Anal, Asian, Babes, BBW, Blowjob, Ebony, Group, Hardcore, Latina, Lesbian, MILF, Natural, POV, Solo, and Teen (18+). As I dutifully typed the categories here, I realized I wasn’t entirely sure what “POV” was and clicked on it. The thumbnails featured camera angles of women with eyes bulging, mouths stretched wide barely covering huge penises. While reasonably convinced that POV was short for “point of view,” to make certain, I typed into Google “POV porn.” The website Hamster, subtitled its “POV Porn Videos” category as “Sex from Your Point of View,” with the further description: “Naughty girls suck your dick and demand hard fucking in POV porn videos. Screw the sluts and cum all over them from your point of view at xHamster.”
Consumers are also twice as likely to stream pornography through a handheld device than view it on a computer. This means that people are watching porn in places that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, like in a classroom, the workplace, or a public place. For example, during a layover in the Philadelphia airport in spring 2017 1 grabbed a pretzel dog and paused in a small food alcove to quickly eat it before my next flight. A 30-ish-year-old white man sat down two tables over and began streaming porn that I could both hear and see.
Semipublic porn viewing is also happening in strip clubs. Exotic dancers share that some customers are watching pornography on their phones after they pay a cover to see live naked women.
they pay a cover to see live naked women. 14
Kayla believes that “men are constantly using their smartphones to look up porn.” She explained that they watch porn, “not just at night, or on their computer, or a magazine. Porn is available all the time.” Then, she shared a story:
I remember I was in the process of moving with an ex-boyfriend and we were loading the truck. He had just gone to the bathroom. I went to look at his phone and he had porn on there in the middle of when we’re loading the moving truck. I guess he had gone to the bathroom and was looking at porn before, during, or after he was taking a poo. I said, ‘Well there’s porn on your phone,” and he was like, “Oh shit.”
Among the people I interviewed, most believe that “all” men and “many” women watch internet porn, as Dylan, who is white and 28, explains:
“Almost everyone I know watches it. I would say that a lot of women that are my age watch it and 100% of the men. Everyone down the line. It’s an unspoken guy rule, everyone jacks off every day.”
Statistics that substantiate how many men and women view internet pornography are hard to generate, and vary widely. However, it is possible to track the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of users of a specific site like Pornhub, the largest pornography-sharing website on the internet.
In 2018, 71% of Pornhub’s users were male and 29% female. Consumers made 33.8 billion visits to Pornhub and viewed 207,405 videos per minute.
Pornhub videos received 141,312,502 votes, more than the number cast in the 2016 US presidential election. The countries with the most overall traffic to Pornhub were the United States at number one, followed by the United Kingdom at two, and India at three. Globally, the six most popular searches were,
in order: “lesbian,” “hentai,” “MILF,” “stepmom,” “Japanese,” and “mom.” Pornhub parses the data by country, age, gender, device, time spent per visit, even operating systems and web browsers.
Gonzo Porn-Not 1970s-esque Sexy Plumber and Bored Housewife Plots
Contemporary pornography can be roughly separated into two categories: feature films and gonzo. Feature films mimic the conventions of regular movies with a plot and characters. Some, like the 2005 feature Pirates XXX, pornify a mainstream movie, in this case, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. In contrast, gonzo porn, described as wall-to-wall sex scenes, has only the barest semblance of a plot (if that), a low budget, and promotes its content as “real.” Because gonzo porn is much cheaper to make and produce than feature porn, that’s most of what someone searching online for free porn will find. Tube technology in the mid-’00s hastened the creation and dissemination of free porn as sites like YouTube (created in 2005) permitted users to share content. Researchers also began documenting an increasing amount of violence depicted in internet pornography at this time. One of the more chilling moments recorded in the 2007 Media Education film The Price of Pleasure is an interview with a pornographer at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas who, when queried about the amount of violence in internet pornography, responded wryly, “The future of porn is violence.”
Gonzo showcases sex acts that women in general do not enjoy—like facial abuse and anal sexiand others that are bizarre and “body punishing”—like double penetration. Double penetration is a sex act in which two men penetrate a woman at the same time, one in her vagina and one in her anus. “Double vag” and “double anal” refer to two penises entering one orifice or the other at the same time. Besides uncomfortably (or violently) stretching the physical limits of a woman’s body, double penetration extends the number of people who usually have sex together.
Most people have sex by themselves (masturbating), or with one other person, not two. Further, any double penetration means there are two men with their penises touching or very close to one another, an unusually homoerotic act in a culture that still demonizes male same-sex behavior. Gonzo porn also systematically layers brutality into the performers’ sex by repeatedly showing women able and eager to endure grueling physical acts —e.g., “naughty girls suck your dick and demand hard fucking” —while directing male actors to spew verbal abuse at women in the scenes. “Dirty slut, ugly whore, dumb bitch, nasty cunt” are phrases commonly said in gonzo pornography by male to female performers. “Screw the sluts and cum all over them” was the description of the Hamster POV website content seen on Google before one even clicked on the link.
Much feminist research and analysis on pornography focuses on the sexist representations of women as always-compliant sex dolls. Less is written about representations of men in pornography who often play the role of sadistic brute-violent, menacing, selfish, and abusive. The “Money Shot” episode from the documentary series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On (2017) shows how producers create these problematic representations of men and masculinity. The episode profiles Jax, an African American male porn star. We see him at work, behind the scenes, doing an interracial porn scene with Kylie, a white woman. Jax seems sweet, sensitive, and good-natured throughout the episode, smiling easily, and behaving carefully and gently with Kylie when they work. Jax is much bigger and older than Kylie: he is large and muscled, and looks to be in his early to mid-30s, while Kylie is 18 years old and petite.
The viewer observes Jax become uncomfortable during a scene when the producers direct him to do faux violence to Kylie. He is repeatedly told to “choke her,” and “smash her face, be rough with her,” and to put his fingers in her mouth, pull it open, and make a “mean face.” As far as one watching can tell, Kylie is not physically hurt, but she is posed in ways that mimic violence, and directed to assume expressions of fear. Meanwhile, Jax performs the character of a violent, dominating brute. The viewer learns in an aside that “Jax doesn’t like to do rough scenes. He’s a more passionate, romantic kind of guy.” Regardless of Jax’s or Kylie’s preferences, the end result is in the hands of producers who create another derivative regurgitation of sexist and racist stereotypes dished up for those who want to masturbate to interracial porn in which a “black guy roughs up a white teen.”
hexafu 