Pornography

Of course, women are well-acquainted with the hairless aesthetic, the operatic moans — but at least in my social circle, it’s like it’s been learned largely through cultural osmosis. Take my friend “Megan”: She has a penchant for drunkenly making out with girls at bars — a hallmark of our generation — but she doesn’t watch porn and has little awareness of, or interest in, the kind of content that is out there. Several of the women who responded to my call on Twitter for interviewees on the subject said they’d had very little exposure to porn. (Keep in mind that these are people who follow me on Twitter; they are relatively progressive, sex-positive sorts.) Nadia, a 25-year-old New Yorker, tells me: “I’ve actually never watched porn before (besides really graphic porn in a museum exhibit that was not at all appealing). Part of me is curious, but part of me is also a little uncomfortable,” she said in an e-mail.

Certainly, there are plenty of women who watch porn — clearly, I do — but reliable statistics are hard to come by. A 2003 Nielsen report estimated that a robust 30 percent of visitors to adult websites were women, while an ABC News poll found that only 10 percent of women had watched online porn — ever. What remains unquestioned is that — from Playboy to YouPorn — pornography is a men’s market.

Among the young coast-dwellers I spoke with, it’s considered a given that men watch porn. Unsurprisingly enough, every guy I interviewed openly copped to regularly watching porn (anywhere from two times a day to two times a month, but most fell somewhere in between); in fact, I was a little taken aback by their openness about how often they watched porn. I approached with all sorts of disclaimers — “I understand if you aren’t comfortable talking about this, it’s totally OK if it weirds you out” — but they unanimously saw the question as rhetorical. Finding porn on your boyfriend’s computer is no longer a revelation — it’s a “no duh.” In fact, one female friend put it to me this way: “I would be more concerned if a guy I was dating didn’t watch porn than I would be if he did.”

Men may be open about the fact of watching porn — a fact that’s impossible to ignore these days — but that doesn’t mean that young dudes are forthcoming about what kind of porn they watch. “Monty” (note to self: Do not let friends choose their pseudonyms), a San Franciscan in his early-30s, tells me that he and his girlfriend “loosely discuss it but not with a bunch of detail or specifics.” She makes no big deal of the fact that he watches porn. “It’s something we assume is happening, and we are pretty OK with keeping that part of our sex lives separate,” he says. “I think there is something powerful, and slightly self indulgent, about keeping porn to myself.”

In the hetero world, online porn largely remains a male domain, and many guys prefer it that way. In a joking conversation with one of my guy friends, I mentioned the charmingly named porn site YouJizz.com. His eyes widened and he looked taken aback, maybe even exposed: “You know about that?” He knows that I’ve written about the adult industry, that I’ve interviewed porn stars, and yet he seemed genuinely surprised. Indeed, these very popular sites seem designed to repel women — to send them literally running from the room — what with the endless talk of “sluts,” “whores,” “bitches” and worse. Maybe without the perceived judgment of female eyes, it feels like a safer space to explore fantasy.

My friend Christopher, 30, only mentioned the subject to his girlfriend after I asked him about it. That prompted her to ask him about his porn-viewing habits, then he became bashful and she became concerned: “What could be so bad that you wouldn’t want to discuss with me?” They had a verbal tug-of-war that ended with Christopher, as he says, “shuffling to the bedroom and putting my head into the pillow.” After a little introspection, he concluded, “I’m just embarrassed because I hold onto old misconceptions about porn — that watching it makes me a pathetic Internet loser who either can’t get laid or prefers fantasy sex to reality — and I don’t want her to think that about me! I am a viable suitor!” And he told her all of this “in a harried brain-dump, like I’m ripping off the Band-Aid,” he says.

Interestingly enough, a large part of his nervousness came from his girlfriend’s comfort with the subject. “I am aware that she would be quite comfortable discussing [porn] and I am intimidated by her confidence; it makes me feel uncool and repressed by comparison.”

Similarly, a 27-year-old woman living in New York who preferred to remain anonymous told me by e-mail that she’s tried to casually bring up the subject with her boyfriend, but he’s shied away from the conversation. He admits to watching porn, but he’s uncomfortable going into any detail. “I think he’s more uncomfortable talking about it than I am,” she said, noting that she doesn’t watch porn herself. “I actually wouldn’t mind a little more openness on this topic, because I think it’d be interesting to learn more about what he likes and what he fantasizes about. But since he doesn’t seem eager to share, and since I know what it’s like to feel a little shy about sex, I don’t push the subject too hard.”

Porn may be more present and popular than ever — but, clearly, sexual relationships are still filled with shyness, fear and vulnerability. Which is to say that, fundamentally, sex really doesn’t change all that much.

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

ABC’s Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, “For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you’re about to meet may be deeply disturbing.” We’re then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, “the Ryan Gosling of porn.” Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business “has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls.”

That’s right, pornographers are “targeting” your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: “Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?” It’s not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn — there must be some cute “boy next door” tricking them into it.

It isn’t that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids — male or female — using porn as sex-ed. It’s not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess’ piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, “Nightline” manages to make it sound like they’re being taken advantage of by porn the predator.

I would embed the video below, except ABC has disabled embedding. Maybe they distrust how their fear-mongering will be received in the the wild west of the Internet. You can find the clip here.

“In the dead of night, alone at home, the loneliness sometimes becomes unbearable,” writes one man. “There aren’t many places to go in the middle of the night, and most of those choices don’t necessarily ensure any kind of reasonable human interaction.” Another man explains, “Nobody talks to me, nobody cares what I say. I’m a 24-year-old drone who wastes his days sitting at a computer reviewing spreadsheets that don’t really matter,” he says. “I just want to talk to someone who cares, and $1 every 3 minutes is a lot less than $250 an hour for a therapist.”

It isn’t just sad sacks looking for companionship — although there are plenty of those — it’s also men who harbor intense resentment toward women: “I’m old in years – 61 – even though I’m an 18-year-old at heart, and I like to think this is my revenge for all the beautiful women in the world whom I can’t approach, whom I can’t get, this idea that I can have some young beauty dance and smile at me any time I want.” There are also the guys who are happily married and simply enjoy the occasional entertainment of beautiful, naked women.

Reading these letters, you become acutely aware of the vulnerability in their wanting, the dependency of their desire. This isn’t an accident: Breslin, who for years lived in the San Fernando Valley covering the adult industry, says she was never interested in the real stars of porn — the women. As she wrote for the Good Men Project, “Stripped of their clothes by the medium, stripped of their dignity by the nature of their work, and stripped of their pride by the all-seeing, unblinking eye of the camera that followed their every desperate thrust, Porn Valley’s working stiffs offer a peek behind the curtain of masculinity at manhood laid bare” — and so too do the men of the latest “Letters” project.

Breslin spoke to me by phone from her apartment in Chicago about Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs, what she’s learned about male desire and why feminist debates about the sex industry drive her nuts.

You seem particularly interested in men’s role in the sex industry. Why do you think that is?

To me, the sex industries are this great petri dish for discovering what drives people, because you get to see them behave in extreme ways. A lot of the focus is on the women, though, because that’s more titillating. Often times, people studying or writing about sex work are men, and they’re more drawn to questions like, “What kind of woman does this? What is her life like? What kind of female mind does it take to be able to sell her body for sex?” I’ve always been very interested in men and trying to figure out how the male mind works, and sex work seemed like a way to really find that out. The sex industry is like the private X-rated Disneyland for men. In the sex work world, men get to do things that are socially unacceptable, whether that’s getting fucked in the ass or being ruthless sexually, so the analogy I like is the Wizard of Oz — I always want to see what’s behind the curtain.

Sometimes it seems like every stripper, every call girl, every sex worker of every stripe has a blog — but johns and strip-club regulars? Not so much. You hit on the fact that the stories of sex workers themselves might be more titillating, but why else aren’t we hearing from the men?

Well, I think there’s a taboo these days around men talking openly about their sexual fantasies or their participation in the sex industry. Right now, it’s quote-unquote not OK for a man to have sex with a prostitute or to be married and go to a strip club, and that’s partly due to political correctness and partly due to feminism that those things are pathologized.

Speaking of feminism and pathology, a recent Slate piece about the misogyny of porn moguls like Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner rubbed you the wrong way. You responded on your Forbes blog by arguing that porn simply shows male desire as it is. I wonder, how did your years in Porn Valley change your view of men?

I know a lot about sex work, but I feel like I also got a great education in men. The main thing was that it made me more sympathetic toward men. When you’re on the set of a gang bang and there’s a hundred guys all fucking one woman, you actually see that it’s not just a bunch of animals. You see how complicated it is to be a man — you know, you’re supposed to be big and strong, but you also have these desires and conflicted feelings. Ideally, anything laid bare will invoke compassion, and that’s what it made me feel. Like a friend of mine says, “You see men as they are and you love them anyway.”

What about how your experience reporting on sex work influenced your view of feminism? You’re often critical of feminism, especially where it intersects with the sex industry.

When it comes to sex work, a lot of the time feminism gets it wrong. They sit at one extreme or another. First, feminism as a movement took the stance that sex work is bad and inherently exploitative of women. And then there’s this movement in the last 10 years or so that, no, sex workers are empowered and they’re in control of their bodies and they’re feminists too and we should support that. Both of those are just radical positions and, in my opinion, any radical position is going to be inherently wrong. There are women in the sex industry who are completely fucked and strung out on drugs and being exploited and being victimized. And there are also women like Nina Hartley who are born to do sex work and are high functioning and understand themselves and how to function in that world.

My main problem with feminism and sex work is that the majority of feminists talking about sex work are in the academy. They took women’s studies classes and 99 percent of what they learned about sex work is, like, on the Internet or from one porn star they met once. If you have something to say about it, you should go into that world and study it and get to know those people and spend time there. Instead, feminism is just manufacturing abstractions about what sex work is, and they’re too chicken to go in and really explore the industry. So for the most part, feminism can’t tell me anything about sex work because they’re too busy posturing as feminists to find out what that world is really like.

It’s funny because, as you know, I emailed you when I was an aspiring journalist in college and I asked you for advice on how to end up doing what you were doing at the time, which was reporting on the realities of the industry. You were totally supportive but you were also like, look, whatever you do, don’t go to Porn Valley. Your exact words were, “It’s a meat-grinder for the human condition.”

I mean, studying the sex industry is really challenging work. It’s hard to be a sex worker, it’s hard to inhabit that world and it’s also hard to study it and be around it, because it’s brutal. It’s not, in my opinion, a business like any other. These are people whose jobs are to stick part of their body into somebody else’s body, or have somebody else’s body inside of their body. That’s tough work.

That’s part of why not a lot of women have written about it. The payoff after you’ve spent time writing about or working in the sex industry is your understanding of human nature is unrivaled. You just see people flayed. You see what impulses really drive us. It was hard for me for several years to come back from that. Once you’ve seen humanity laid bare, there’s a time when you kind of want to unsee it, go back to living in Cinderella land.

It’s always complicated. It’s never black and white. It’s never all misogynist or all feminist. It’s complicated because it’s a business that reflects our interior, and the interior is always conflicted and at war with itself.

Your friend’s line – the one about seeing men as they are and loving them anyway – resonates with me. I was drawn to the world of Internet porn as a curious post-pubescent girl in an attempt to figure out what boys and men wanted, and later as a journalist writing about sex. It was so much darker, and so much more complicated and foreign, than I could have imagined it would be. For a long while I struggled to reconcile my affection and love for men with the reality of what I found out there in the ether.

The sex industry can be really ruthless and brutal. If you’re around that enough, you start to wonder if everybody’s impulses are really base and everyone’s either trying to fuck or kill each other. You don’t see the flipside of healthy nuclear families and dads who mow the lawn on the weekends and swimming lessons in the toddler pool. Over time, I’ve been able to have a yin and yang attitude about it, which is that that darkness is always there, but there’s also this other part of it that is about lightness.

The thing I would say most male porn stars have in common is that they desperately want women to love them. I did a TV pilot years ago that was gonna be about my life as a sex writer and when we were done wrapping the pilot, the executive producer and I had lunch and he said, “So what is the porn industry really about?” And I said, “What do you think it’s about?” He said, “Love,” and I said, “Yeah, that’s right.” It’s like I wrote in the Forbes post, the story is that the guy always gets the girl. Women are exalted, and sometimes the misogyny you see is actually a reaction to intense desire. It’s a challenge to be able to hold those seemingly contradictory ideas in your head at the same time — you know, “I totally want to possess this woman because I love her so much, but at the same time, being ruled by that desire makes me want to kill her.” And that’s how you end up with crazy gang-bang videos.

Getting back to the latest “Letters” project, what have you learned from it so far?

The “Letters” projects have been of varying success, but I love it as a genre because I find the letters very endearing. I’m always kind of surprised by how enamored men are by women. What I see as a sub-context in the latest project is how much power the stripper has. She’s the focus. It’s not about a guy manipulating some woman to get what he wants, it’s about, “I have to pay to get this girl to even pay attention to me and when she does, she gives me the thing that I want that I can’t get at work and I can’t get from my wife and can’t get by myself,” and I think they’re sort of awed by that.

That gets back to that common theme of love –

I think the other piece of it is the loneliness. They’re starving for human connection. I think our female desire is for emotional connection to transcend that inescapable loneliness of being a human being, and theirs is physical, so they go to these places where someone will touch them.