It’s a word I think you’re going to hear a lot in coming weeks. And it’s the name of a new book, more completely titled Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families by Pamela Paul. I wrangled and read an advanced reading copy over the summer, but came away unimpressed. This, despite agreeing with some of the book’s import. Why? Because of what the book fails to do.
First, though, some background…
In various forms, pornography’s been a part of my life starting from the day a neighborhood girl showed me her father’s stash of girlie mags. I was in the third grade and found an instant fascination with what I saw, and, indeed, throughout much of my childhood, pornography informed me about women’s bodies and the varieties therein and hinted at adult sexuality. Granted, the near wasp waisted, flat bellied, big boobed woman was an ideal even then, but I wasn’t aware of that predominant preference until I was in my tweens. Before then, I was amazed that this was what came of female body as it matured.
Later, lovers would share their pornography with me and, rather than be put off by it, I enjoyed its arousal potential. Certainly, at times, I wasn’t comfortable with the body ideals I saw there, but every time I complained about it, my lovers would point out deviations from the body ideal, remind me that they enjoyed and preferred my body — the real thing — over the image, and, above all else, that they appreciated both my openness and willingness to incorporate pornography into our sexual sharing.
It was a rewarding enough experience that I still pick lovers who openly express an innate appreciation and attraction to me, and I use porn in both my masturbation and my sexual sharing. I still enjoy porn, especially in its newer, freer online incantation. But I’m also aware that what I see is far more explicit now than what I looked at as a child, teen, and young adult. And video has supplanted print in the media equivalent of a landslide.
I wonder how hardcore video porn might be informing today’s youth. I know it’s a markedly different beast than the soft-core print stuff I saw in my childhood. I never saw people touching, let alone fucking. Even in college, the most explicit stuff I saw were women perched to engage in girl-on-girl — but only perched for it. No heavy petting, no outright sucking or fucking. In fact, neither woman could obscure the nudity of the other. If a tongue so much as aimed itself at a nipple, it was never shown to actually touch it. Much was left to the imagination because full frontal nudity was still ground breaking in and off itself. Now, kids see everything and I know one of my son’s early porn moments included seeing facial pictorals. (He asked about it, wanting an explanation.)
Then, too, porn culture and porn celebrity tends to hail the Barbie doll body made real. Really, compare any major porn star and the Barbie doll body and you seen a similar sculpture. It seemed at its most intense in the 1990s and only with the influx of porn from other parts of the world and the rise of fetishistic niches are we seeing a greater variety of bodies on the web. Still, walk into any porn convention or “erotica” consumer show and you’ll see the perpetuation of porn Barbie.
Yes, I worry about how that such sculpted perfections imprints itself on social and individual’s expectations. I wonder if men turn away from woman who has real bodies because porn perfection has made too indelible a mark in their minds. I wonder if women are increasingly seeking that perfection themselves via the surgeon’s knife because they’re too anxious about their shortcomings to consider the possibility that there’s some partner somewhere who would like them the way they are — or that they have a right to demand appreciation as is.
While Paul’s book does address some of my longstanding concerns about pornography, it doesn’t break any significant new ground. If anything, it seems to consolidate and codified all the hype and hysteria surrounding online porn and sex addiction that we’ve seen from the moment web access went to a flat rate, later exacerbated by the swift downloads of broadband. It only continues old, longstanding arguments against pornography, updated to reflect modern technology. It breaks no new ground or offers any new insight into pornography and its uses.
It simply argues that, in all its permutations, porn is bad, cannot be used in any solitary or shared beneficial way, and needs censure.
Censure, not censor. That’s Paul’s ultimate solution to how she perceives the problem. Begin a grassroots movement where people enlightened against porn’s affects simply abstain from consuming it which, ultimately will lead to its slow demise. Kill the demand through consumer enlightenment, then watch the supply wither.
I’m sorry but raising the consciousness of the consumer public is simply a new spin on an old outrage. And because the book completely dismisses lifelong positive experiences like mine — and because it utterly fails to acknowledge any healthy consumption of pornography — it’s almost impossible for me to buy into its touchy/feely just-don’t-do-it solution.
It’s just not enough.
