How porn has hijacked our sexuality

                              *****warning: discussion of explicit material below*****













Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality is a disturbing and important read - and not for everyone. I'm pretty skilled at skim-reading and glancing over pages but I still accidentally read stuff I wish I hadn't. I'll try to make this post less explicit than the book but, unfortunately, it will still be necessary to mention some ugly stuff and to use swear words. You don't have to read it of course.

The topic of porn is important and complex enough that I'm going to quote quite a lot of what Dines has to say. She begins the book by describing what she found after googling "porn". It accorded with a study that found "if we combine both physical and verbal aggression, our findings indicate that nearly 90% of scenes contained at least one aggressive act, with an average of nearly 12 acts of aggression per scene".1 Dines concludes that porn teaches that women are "always ready for sex and are enthusiastic to do whatever men want, irrespective of how painful, humiliating, or harmful the act is,"2 and men are "soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want."3 She says:

In a world populated by women who are robotic 'sluts' and men who are robotic studs, the sex is going to be predictably devoid of any intimacy. Porn sex is not about making love, as the feelings and emotions we normally associate with such an act - connection, empathy, tenderness, caring, affection - are replaced by those more often connected with hate - fear, disgust, anger, loathing, and contempt.4 

For this to be possible, "[i]t is especially important for the pornographers to shred the humanity of the women in the images, as many porn users have sustained and intimate relationships with women in the real world."5 They do this by having the male performers call the women abusive names, thereby reducing them to sex objects. And women are portrayed as seeking out sex "because [they] love to be sexually used," so lessening any guilt the viewer may feel.6 Dines reaches a disturbing conclusion: "This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable . . . . By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence."7


It gets still more horrible:

At first these images may well be exciting, but the more seasoned user will soon find that porn, because of its formulaic nature, becomes predictable . . . . Missing from porn is anything that looks or feels remotely like intimacy and connection, the two ingredients that make sex interesting and exciting in the real world. Drained of these, porn becomes monotonous and predictable to the point that users need to eventually seek out more extreme acts as a way to keep them interested and stimulated.8

Yet however ugly porn sex is, it is, in some sense, 'successful':

it offers men a no-strings-attached, intense, disconnected sexual experience, where men always get to have as much sex as they want in ways that shore up their masculinity. The sex acts are always successful, ending in supposed orgasm for both, and he is protected from rejection or ridicule since in porn, women never say no to men's sexual demands, nor do they question their penis size or technique. In this world, men dispense with romantic dinnners, vanilla sex, and postcoital affection and get down to the business of fucking.9 

However when men who use porn enter the real world they:

feel like sexual losers . . . . They worry that they're not good-looking enough, smooth enough, or masculine enough to score, and since the porn view of the world suggests that women are constantly available, these men are bewildered by rejection. They often express deep shame about their inability to hook up, and this shame morphs into anger at their female peers who, unlike porn women, have the word 'no' in their vocabulary . . . . Hooking up, however, brings its own set of disappointments since the mind-blowing porn sex they were anticipating looks nothing like the sex they are actually having . . . . With these feelings of inadequacy also come feelings of anger towards the hookup, as she is not as willing as Pornland women to have porn-like sex . . . . What troubles many of these men most is that they need to pull up the porn images in their head in order to have an orgasm with their partner.10 

The attitudes towards women promoted by porn will help push some men to rape, "but many more will beg, nag, and cajole their partners into sex or certain sex acts . . . Some will use women and disregard them when done, some will be critical of their partner's looks and performance, and many will see women as one-dimensional sex objects who are less deserving of respect and dignity than men, both in and out of the bedroom."11

Porn is damaging for women for more reasons than those canvassed above. The porn world means that the "Stepford Wife image, which drove previous generations of women crazy with its insistence on sparkling floors and perfectly orchestrated meals, has all but disappeared, and in its place we now have the Stepford Slut: a hypersexualised, young, thin, toned, hairless, and, in many cases, surgically enhanced woman with a come-hither look on her face."12 Dines continues:

what is different about today is not only the hypersexualisation of mass-produced images but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female. Today's tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalized the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim, and downright boring. Today, a girl or young woman looking for an alternative to the Britney, Paris, Lindsay look will soon come to the grim realization that the only alternative to looking fuckable is to be invisible.13 

This normalisation of porn culture is bolstered by women's magazines which promote - and teach - kinky sex, as well as instructing women not to make too many demands of their men.14 In all:

the sheer ubiquity of the hypersexualised images . . . gives them power since they normalize and publicize a coherent story about women, femininity, and sexuality. Because these messages are everywhere, they take on an aura of such familiarity that we believe them to be our very own personal and individual ways of thinking. They have the power to seep into the core part of our identities to such a degree that we think that we are freely choosing to look and act a certain way because it makes us feel confident, desirable, and happy.15

As it does for men, this capitulation to the porn world brings with it a degree of success - it enables women to be:

sexually wanted by a man: the way he holds you in his gaze, the way he finds everything you say worthy of attention, the way you suddenly become the most compelling person in the world . . . . it feels like real power; but it is ephemeral because it is being given to women by men who increasingly, thanks to the porn culture, see women as interchangeable hookup partners. To feel that sense of power, women need to keep sexing themselves up so they can become visible to the next man who is going to, for a short time, hold her in his lustful gaze.16 

Sadly though, hookup sex isn't what women really want - they want a relationship, and experience regret, low self-esteem and depression when this doesn't work out, as well as the risk of being labelled a 'slut'.17 Yet Dines argues that women have come to believe they deserve nothing more.18

In her conclusion Dines acknowledges that the gargantuan porn industry will be difficult to stop, but commends individuals who take a stand in their own lives. She has started a pressure group which produces resources designed to raise people's consciousness. She advocates a positive vision of "a sexuality that is based on equality, dignity, and respect."19 Dines is not a Christian and nowhere does she suggest that marriage is the best place for this, but it's certainly what comes to my mind.


1 G Dines, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), xxii.
2 Ibid, xxiii.
3 Ibid, xxiv.
4 Ibid, xxiv.
5 Ibid, 63.
6 Ibid, 64.
7 Ibid, 87-88.
8 Ibid, 68.
9 Ibid, 63.
10 Ibid, 89-90.
11 Ibid, 97-98.
12 Ibid, 102.
13 Ibid, 104-05.
14 Ibid, 107-09.
15 Ibid, 108.
16 Ibid, 112-13.
17 Ibid, 114-15.
18 Ibid, 117.
19 Ibid, 164.