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How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society

Welcome to raunch culture in the 2020s—when the United States has devolved into a Hustler fantasy. Naked and half-naked pictures of girls and women litter every screen, billboard, and bus. Pole dancing studios keep women fit while men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on buses, planes, and trains. Christian pastors compliment their “hot” wives from the pulpit, and we have whole television programs devoted to “the girlfriend experience”—a specialized form of prostitution. People are having sex before they date, and women make their own personal porn to share on social media. Rape and pedophile jokes are commonplace, and those who don’t like them are considered prudish. Instagram users measure their self-worth by chili pepper emojis that indicate they are hot and sexy.

In short, raunch culture matters because it is sexist, not because it is sexy. It sets expectations that women dress provocatively and appear always “up” for sex while encouraging everyone to sexually objectify women.

Toxic Masculinity

Hegemonic masculinity, more colloquially referred to as toxic masculinity—a set of practices that promote the dominant social position of men, and the subordinate social position of women-fuels raunch culture. Toxic masculinity socializes men to use female bodies as currency to enhance their alpha status among men. In turn, raunch culture reinforces toxic masculinity, especially men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. For example, among the 67 people interviewed for this study, Makenzie, who is white and 19, exclaimed, “It makes me sick to listen to people talk!” Six or seven time a day she hears men say things like, “She’s hot, I’d do this and this to her.” Makenzie clarified, “It’s not ‘I would love to take her out, or get her something to eat,’ it’s an ‘I would love for her to suck my dick’ kind of thing.” She further illustrated:

I had a criminology class last semester. The guy that sat in front of me and one that sat beside him would talk the whole time about a few girls on the other side of the classroom. They thought they were hot and wanted to do stuff to them. I heard one of them say he had a girlfriend, and that she wouldn’t be happy about it, but it wouldn’t matter.

Like Makenzie, Jordan, who is white and 20, observed her “guy friends” as well as male acquaintances, family members, and strangers casually and continuously sexually objectify women. With words pouring out of her in a fountain of rage, Jordan shared:

I don’t know how many times I see people check other girls out, how many times I’ve caught people looking at me. I can tell that they’re checking me out and it’s very uncomfortable. I believe you might look around and think, “Oh that person is attractive,” or you might think they’re pretty, but don’t check out their whole body and stare at them. I had this one guy friend, and we did not stay friends long, because any time we went somewhere he was always checking out girls and their butts. I’m like, “Are you serious? Why are you doing this?” And he would try to laugh it off and be like, “You’re just jealous because I’m not doing it to you,” and every day he did this, all the time, comparing girls’ butts.

There’s times I’ll be out in public, I’ll be leaving a restaurant and a guy will hold the door open for me and I’ll kind of glance back and I know he did it just to check me out. It’s really disrespectful. I’m even more disrespected that they think I’m dumb enough to not realize what they’re doing because I look back and I see it. Every day I literally see men objectifying women even on their way to class, anywhere you walk, like it happens all the time.

Girls and women negotiate overt sexual objectification of the kind Makenzie and Jordan described as well as online misogyny. Angelina said that it is typical for men on the Tinder dating app to rapidly proceed from saying hello to requesting sexy photos. Many send an unsolicited dick pic as “encouragement.” Angelina, who is white and 20, said that even when she politely refuses to share provocative pictures, many respond with a nasty comment like, “You’re too fat to fuck anyway.” Such toxic masculinity is visible in individual lives, media entertainment, and the behaviors of those on the national stage. Perhaps you noticed Americans elected a man whose idea of an “entertaining” weekend is having himself, pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, and 28 young women flown to Mar-a-Lago Golf Club.

Raunch culture encourages feelings of “aggrieved entitlement” in some men, while social media provides opportunities for like-minded boys and men to form communities built on misogyny, like the “incels.” Incel is short for “involuntary celibate,” describing men who find it difficult to have sex with women because they believe themselves to be unattractive and/or socially awkward. Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people in California in 2014, and Alek Minassian, who killed ten people in Toronto in 2018, both self-identified as “incels.” Kevin, who is white and 43, directly linked raunch culture with this form of toxic masculinity in his interview, saying,

“I think the hyper sexuality of raunch culture feeds into hyper masculinity and creates this dangerously potent cocktail of what I should aspire to be, and a level of frustration and self-loathing when I can’t obtain these things.” Randall, who is white and 29, illustrated this mixture of misogyny and entitlement to women’s bodies when describing his high school friend Phil who, Randall said, “only dates ‘super thin women,’ and not ‘fat bitches,” no matter that Phil is himself unkempt and pudgy.

Origins of Raunch Culture

During our interview Valerie observed, “It’s [raunch culture] everywhere but you don’t realize. All of a sudden, we’re learning there’s names for these things and that there was a time that this wasn’t. There’s always been some sort of sexualization in culture, but it’s never been this bad, we just don’t realize it.” Actually, Valerie is mistaken, but it’s not surprising she thinks this given her experience. There has not always been a sexualization of culture, nor has the US always been a porn nation, although people have dealt with manifestations of patriarchy for approximately 4,000 years. While valuing women for their youth and beauty is long-standing, the idea that women should make themselves sexy for men emerged in the 1920s in the United States. Sociologist Lisa Wade explained that the cultural shift from courtship (taking place in a woman’s home under the watchful eyes of her mother with the goal of marriage) to dating (social activities outside the home with a range of partners) favored the “buyer.” Going out required funds that women lacked so thus was born the practice of men paying for women’s company. Since the goal in dating, as opposed to courtship, is to go out with many different people, women in the 1920s needed to signal their appeal in a new way to men, and they did so by suggesting a degree of sexual availability.

Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s introduced widespread progressive social change. Among these was the sexual revolution-the relaxation of moralistic attitudes about premarital sex facilitated by the invention of the birth control pill,? New reproductive tools allowed women greater sexual freedom. As the decades passed, those invested in women’s subordination used the internet (among other means) to co-opt and convert the energy, dynamism, and freedom of the sexual revolution into the pale, watered-down, frankly oppressive simulacrum that is raunch culture.

Technological developments in the dissemination of pornography aided this sad devolution from liberation to raunch, with new media platforms leading the United States, and other Western cultures, into greater and greater sexualization. Indeed, raunch culture, as we now experience it, was not possible before the digital revolution. New technologies pushed pornography and sex workers from the fringes of the culture to its center.

Finally, raunch culture also marks a media shift from the sexualization of women’s bodies as something done almost exclusively to women, to an activity also done by women. Messengers of pornification tell consumers that “hip” women, like Kylie Jenner for example appreciate being seen as sex objects because it is “good” to show off one’s sexiness.

Media outlets reinforce this by portraying those women who strike pouty poses and say they enjoy showing others how hot they are as the most stylish. Constantly told that this state of affairs is empowering for women, both women and men enforce the rules of raunch. individual choices based on consent.”

Two, raunch culture is sex-negative because it promotes appearance over pleasure. Looking hot, not feeling good, is the end goal. Beauty scholars like Renee Engeln find that the more women and girls attend to their appearance, even when the goal is body empowerment and positivity, the more distressed they feel. The women I interviewed illustrated this, explaining that the heightened body consciousness promoted in raunch culture makes them feel unattractive, unhappy, and unworthy—and this inhibits their experiences of sexual pleasure. For example, Nicole, who is white and 24, said that she feels self-conscious about the way she looks when she is having sex. She explained, “I am thinking about how my thighs look fat from this angle, and I’m not in the moment.” In any case, women’s actual sexual pleasure is irrelevant within raunch culture, which instead markets the following hegemonic sexist narrative: it’s empowering to be a live sex toy for men. Compounding this, much of what young people learn about sex comes from contemporary internet pornography, which represents sex through a violent, narcissistic, male gaze.

Three, raunch culture enables rape culture, a culture in which rape and sexual violence are common and attitudes, norms, practices, and media normalize, excuse, tolerate, and condone sexual violence. Pornification desensitizes consumers to the hypersexualization of women and girls as Brian, who is white and 25, noted. He said, “It’s perfectly normal for guys to comment on women’s bodies on social media. Nothing bad is happening to the guys who are doing it and then years of that can lead to attitudes like ‘She was dressed a certain way, so I smacked her ass.’” Julia, who is white and 46, argued that there is a thin line between appropriating someone visually and appropriating them physically. She explained, “If your body is there for me to look at, it’s there for me to consume. You owe me this, or I have a right. It’s not only objectification but ownership of women.” Angelina echoed Julia, “Men and especially young college men are so used to viewing women through porn and social media that they then see women as accessible and objectified. There is a blurring of lines between consensual versus coercion.” Thus, as I illustrate throughout this book, raunch culture is also sex-negative because it facilitates rape culture.

Social Location in Raunch Culture

How one is positioned within raunch culture affects one’s experience of it.

Those who transitioned into adulthood with fewer screens in their lives and fewer oversexualized representations of “normal” are less aware of the content of new media and more concerned with mortgages, families, and the demands of work. Abigail, who is white and 20, illustrated this when discussing her grandmother’s relationship to raunch culture. Abigail said,

Several young people I interviewed shared that when their parents and grandparents did encounter manifestations of raunch culture, in a commercial or movie for example, they tended to interpret the representations within the framework of individualism and blame the women. For example, Thomas, who is white and 20, quoted his grandmother who, when watching women twerking in a music video, commented: “Well, I can’t believe a young girl would be dancing around and dragging like that, that’s uncalled for,” or when seeing a Carl’s Jr.’s commercial, “Why does that woman need to be in a bikini to eat a cheeseburger?” Like Thomas’s grandmother, Angelina speculated that her parents would criticize women’s hypersexual dress and behavior and not see the inequality present in raunch culture.

While religious identification and participation can be a respite from raunch silene, ese coat evive religious argues against hypers regulating women’s bodies. For example, some conservative Christians advocate “purity” (engaging in sexual behavior only in a heterosexual marriage) and “modesty” in women’s dress. Relatedly, Muslim fundamentalists position women who cover themselves completely in burqas as most pious and Hasidism, the most orthodox branch of Judaism, strictly regulates members’ dress and sexual behavior. Just as some may resist raunch with religion, others resist conservative religiosity with raunch. It’s logical that those rejecting a fundamentalist religious tradition might find relief in the overt sexiness of raunch. I interviewed a young woman who began stripping for just this reason: to rebel against the control her parents and church exerted throughout her childhood and adolescence.

The problem is that raunch culture and conservative religiosity are two sides of the same coin. They are both patriarchal cultures of conformity that seek to control women’s bodies to be either completely seen or completely hidden, determined not by a woman’s personal preference, but in service to men’s desires.

As I explore in greater detail in the following chapters, race and sexual orientation also complicate one’s experience of pornification. For example, the hypersexualization of women of color in the West predates raunch culture. The subjugation of black women stretches back into the antebellum South, in which it was legal for white male owners to rape black slaves.

White supremacy justified this violence by constructing those of African descent as animalistic and oversexed, a stereotype still plaguing African Americans in the 21st century. Stephanie, who is black and 50, noted this in our interview. She said, “It did not take raunch culture for black women’s bodies to be exploited like this. It always has been. We already know that: the myth about the oversexed African American woman. As a woman who has actually dated white men, I’ve been told what they expect from me.”

Slut stigma also attaches more easily to black and brown bodies than white ones in a racist society, motivating some people of color to be careful and “conservative” in their sexual expression, as Christina, who is Latinx and 26, explained:

Raunch culture with Latinas, it’s a hidden mess. I’ve seen more white cis women participate in it. I know literally one Latina girl who participates. In my experience, it has been mostly white women, or white people. I think it’s a culture thing. The culture frowns upon that. We are very conservative when it comes to sex, especially in Latino culture. In my experience, to participate in that, one, your family disowns you, and, two, you’re putting shame in the last name. You’re putting shame into the family as a whole.

Similarly, in her study of the college hookup scene, sociologist Lisa Wade found that students of color were less likely to participate in hookups than white students, with many seeing hookups as a “white thing.” To a woman of color already oversexualized as a “jezebel” or “hot Latina,” keeping her shirt on may feel more powerful than taking it off. Further, men of color face more severe sanctions than do white men for perceived or actual sexual aggression, especially toward white women.

One afternoon, I was asked to read a monologue from a play, set in the 1950s, about a girl who refuses to join her schoolmates in a bomb shelter.

The girl runs across the playground convinced that the world is about to end. Pleading to the sky, she asks God why she can’t live longer. She confides in him that she wants to make love at least once before she dies.

She continues on, talking about how she needs to know what it’s like to have her legs parted and a man enter her. I finished the reading to stunned silence and then applause. Afterward, I was congratulated by my classmates who, one after another, commented on how brave my performance was. My teacher had pushed me toward the subject I most feared: sex.

We worked like dogs throughout the picture, filming twelve to fourteen hours a day and completing the whole project in just ten days, which I was told was unheard of in legitimate films. Then the Roger Corman machine went to work quickly editing and completing the film. They wanted to get it out as soon as possible to benefit from the ongoing publicity around the Traci Lords scandal.

Not of This Earth opened in a theater in Westwood only four months later, and people said Corman and Wynorski had done the impossible, putting an ex-porn star in theaters across mainstream America. The Hollywood Reporter’s review read, “The answer is yes. She can act.” I was ecstatic and thought I was finally on my way to leaving the past behind for good

Fueled with a newfound confidence, I agreed to promote the film. Corman and Company jumped at the opportunity, setting up several interviews in the days to come and taking full advantage of the press’s desire to speak to me. Having no experience with the press or doing interviews, I trusted all the wrong people, agreeing to speak to Hard Copy and A Current Affair about my past as long as they focused on my present life and the new movie. I spoke candidly about my struggles with drugs, pornography, and the pain of recovery-really deep issues that I had never shared before. And I got knocked flat on my butt.

Both programs broadcast footage from the illegal porn films, showing clip alter clip of explicit photos with the smallest blockers allowed on prime-time television to cover my private parts. They referred to me as “the porn princess” and claimed I’d starred in more than a hundred porn movies, as if twenty weren’t enough. They even interviewed people from the porn world who either didn’t know me or barely knew me, and they all swore I was some kind of child genius who’d deliberately plotted to destroy them.

How could I have been so stupid? God, it hurt. And the worst part was my mother knew about the new movie and the TV interviews, and I was sure she’d seen it all. Once again I’d screwed up, shaming myself and my family in the process.

I was a wreck, and it nearly drove me back to drugs and out of the film business for good.

For the next few months I existed in a transitional prison. Tabloid photographers were still staking out my apartment, so I closed every blind, locked every window, and was glad I lived on the second floor.

Peering through cracks in the blind one day, I searched the trees closest to my balcony for men with cameras. I had a full day’s schedule and couldn’t wait any longer, so I made a mad dash to my Camaro in the garage.

Reaching the car door, I was almost home free when they appeared out of nowhere.

“Come on, guys,” I pleaded, “give me a break.” I struggled with my keys, modeling portfolio, and the morning’s coffee, my patience wearing thin.

“The movie closed ages ago!” I yelled. “I’m old news.”

Ignoring my misery, they snapped away. There must have been four or five of them pushing at one another to get to me. In addition to the tabloid guys there were the autograph hunters. Those vultures were the worst. Pissed that I refused to sign nude photos, they thrust explicit penetration shots in my face in retaliation. “How about this one,” one said, presenting a photo of my young face with a penis stuck in my mouth. The guy just laughed.

I wanted to rip his eyes out.

I roared away in my car, cursing at people as I made my way through traffic. Was this shit ever going to end?

nothing. It had been his idea. People magazine ran the photo with the caption “Guns and Poses” that implied Slash and I were an item. I was amused, Although Slash wasn’t my new boyfriend, I did secretly like him.

He was a rock star and I was intrigued. It was exciting playing a part in the early days of Guns n’ Roses, even if I was only there as a press stunt. It was the kind of energy that sucked me in, and I couldn’t resist saying yes when Slash asked me out and scribbled his address on the back of an empty cigarette pack.

The following afternoon at five, I arrived at Slash’s rundown apartment above Sunset Boulevard. Evidently rock stars don’t get paid much, I thought as I stepped over the smoldering cigarette butts embedded in the carpet outside his door. Knocking softly, I wondered what I was doing there.

Could this go anywhere or did he just want sex? It had been a year since my fling in Canada and I wasn’t interested in a one-night stand. This bizarre guitar slinger was kind of sexy. Perhaps this could be something more?

He answered the door looking like he’d just woken up and smelling faintly of last night’s booze. He had company, another one of the guys from the band. He apologized for running late and invited me to have a seat while he and his friend went into the back room to finish up their business. I was settling into the sofa, feeling uncomfortable at being alone in Slash’s living room, when something cool slid across my back. I turned around and there, slithering across the back of the couch, was the biggest snake I’d ever seen in my life.

Freaking out, I jumped up and ran out of the apartment as fast as I could.

I hate snakes!!!!!!!!!!!!

By the time I got home my fascination with Slash was a thing of the past.

My brief glimpse into his world was enough to make me realize he wasn’t for me. It was a little too fast, what with the snake, cigarettes, and rock and roll. I wanted a simpler life. He left a message on my answering machine saying he was sorry he had kept me waiting, thinking that was why I had left, and asked me to come back over. I didn’t return the call, and I never told him about my encounter with his slithery friend. Instead, I chose to simply remain a fan of one of the greatest guitar players of our time.

the pornification of america

traci lords: underneath it all – 3