At coffee this week, a friend described his habit of viewing pornography as “casual. You know, late at night. It’s just quicker. I spend 20 bucks a month. I used to download it for free, but my computer kept on getting viruses. Everybody does it, more at Yale than at my high school.” He defended pornography on the grounds that it was “unrealistic and harmless. It isn’t just for men. Women enjoy watching and starring in it. Pornography doesn’t hurt anyone. I mean, I am not trying to make a political decision when I buy pornography. Besides, it’s free speech.”
But pornography is not recreational. Experience testifies that pornography is educational, that we mimic it, and therefore absorb its values. Men ejaculating on women’s bodies, men’s hands on the back of a woman’s head during fellatio, pathological belief that the size of a man’s penis is in some important way related to the quality of a woman’s sexual experience, heterosexual women engaging in homosexual acts for the pleasure of a heterosexual man, heterosexual couples discussing whether to try anal sex, hand-cuffs and whips and corsets and clothes being ripped off — these phenomena are not naturally occurring, but learned from pornography.
And the difficulty of pornography is not whether it is bad for women. It is terrible for women, for men and for how we have sex. In terms of content, pornography eroticizes the passivity, subjugation and humiliation of women. Its consumers learn that women want to be penetrated, to be dominated, that women’s orgasms are fraudulent. And mainstream pornography encompasses brutal power dynamics. It took me three clicks of the mouse after searching for “porn” on Google to be in a position where I could purchase pornography from an online adult business that advertised itself as “the most violent rape site” on the Web. And the pornography that is designed for women, usually called “literature,” is equally dehumanizing: Female protagonists are feisty, or virginal, until they meet a big, strong, sexually experienced man, after which they begin a sexual dynamic in which the woman is “tamed.”
These images and this message are not realistic. While the sex that most undergraduates at Yale have is sloppy, sometimes loving, often drunk and non-technical and without plastic enhancements, that these images exist, that undergraduates consume them and uncritically accept this misogyny as a part of mainstream culture, is harmful to us. The context of our own sex lives changes: Men expect oral sex more then they offer it. Heterosexual women consider anal sex something potentially requested of them. Young women feel guilty that they want to live out the images of nonconsensual yet exhilarating sex that pornography has provided. Young men think that they have to penetrate women hard, for a long time, or that they don’t measure up to a sexual ideal. Meanwhile, men can’t want to be penetrated anally without being gay, and lesbians have to endure a rhetoric that treats their sexual activities as an extension of male fantasy.
But it is not just that the consumption of pornography is bad for us, or that images of sex are dirty. Its production is exploitative, and exploitation is dirty. The women who star in it are abused, poor, transient and unprotected by a union. Linda Lovelace, the star of “Deep Throat” — a seminal pornographic film that has defined the conventions of the genre and was the most financially successful pornographic film in history — testified before the Meese Commission in 1986 that “every time someone watches that movie, they are watching me being raped.” Her husband, Chuck Traynor, had coerced her to act in it. But coercion is not simply violent. Acting in pornography is few women’s ideal career; it, like other kinds of sex work, is a more appealing option than continued poverty. Not only is the business poorly paid and often cruel, the work is dangerous. Lara Roxx, a Canadian teenager and porn actress, contracted HIV in 2004 while filming a scene with two male actors. This industry makes profits from sexually violent images, but fails to protect its actors from life-threatening diseases.
There should be a government agency that verifies the age, health, consent and fair wage of actors in pornography, and that no abuse happens on set or in casting. While porn isn’t fair to any of us, and affects our expectations of sex and gender at Yale, there should at least be fair-trade porn. Most Yalies, given the non-political decision, would happily pay a few more cents to make sure that their porn isn’t really rape or instances where a teenage actress is contracting a disease that will kill her, or scenes of exploitation. Destitution, to most Yalies, isn’t sexy.
No, not sexy, just “harmless free speech.”
Chase Olivarius-McAllister is a sophomore in Branford College. She is the political action coordinator for the Women’s Center.