Melinda Reist - Big Porn Inc

In the end I found a confidential online counselling service dedicated to women whose partners are involved with habitual Internet porn the most helpful. My long screeds of email message would be carefully responded to with insightful understanding and practical suggestions. Whoever you are out there who wrote replies to my emails, often frenetically tapped in the small dark hours, I thank you.

I have no time whatsoever for those who see pornography as liberating or empowering to women’s sexuality as this is absolutely not my experience at all. The distress caused sleepless nights, lots of crying, a constant feeling of being on edge, an anger that was all consuming.

A while on now, is it better? Carefully reassembling a relationship, mourning and accepting what has been lost, trying to make some parts anew, takes much time and patience. I still have enormous anger. Anger at him for, as I see it, being so easily drawn in to it. Some of my anger has, as I come to understand the psychology of porn viewing more, moved on to the industry. Yes he was responsible for his actions, but the industry is so slick at inveigling its way in. It toys with the masculine mind as our culture has made it. It quickly becomes a habit, desensitising, a siren pulling men in to dare to look at increasingly edgy images. Secret, exciting, elicit, nefarious. All the elements necessary to relationships – care, respect, responsibility, empathy, are not only deliberately negated in porn, but alternative reassurances and flatteries are subliminally implanted in their place.

Yes, my partner promised not to view again, and has kept to that. But only after a long period can I relax and trust him again. In the early days of abstinence, although he declared he did not need porn, and invited me to search his Internet history any time, the hidden cache files still told the truth of glimpses at porn here and there. So shifting the habit was not as easy as he had declared. The topic is sensitive and raw still. If it resurfaces in our conversation, he often has another newly minted justification to offer that is supposed to convince me of the innocuousness of the porn and his viewing of it – never the real acknowledgement of responsibility or the harm to our relationship. I wait for the day he’ll say he thinks he understands and that he’s sorry.

In 2008, Miley Cyrus was photographed for Vanity Fair wearing a bed hairdo, a provocative gaze, and not much else. She was 15 years old. Even though these photos caused a stir at the time, just a year later – when she appeared in Elle sprawled across a table wearing S&M gear – barely a voice of protest was heard. These images, together with the thousands of others that bombard us daily, are part of what media scholars call ‘image-based culture’ [23] 1 For a more extensive analysis, see Jhally (1990). a term used to describe a society in which images have replaced the spoken or written word as the major form of communication. From billboards to 24-hour television, the staple of this image-based culture is the youthful, sexualized female body. Advertisements, movies, TV shows, music videos, and pornography are just some of the ways in which this image is delivered to us, and as we become more desensitized to such depictions, the producers need to ramp up the degree to which the female body is sexualized as a way to get our attention. This has led to an increasingly pornographic media landscape, where the codes and conventions that inform pornography filter down to such a level that the images we now see in mainstream media are almost on a par with those that were found in softcore porn just a decade ago.

As pop culture begins to look more and more pornographic, the actual porn industry has had to trend more hardcore as a way of distinguishing its products from those images found on MTV, in Cosmopolitan , and on billboards. Often called ‘gonzo’ by the industry, this subgenre is made up of acts that are designed to dehumanize and debase the woman with cruel and brutal sex that includes gagging with a penis and multiple men ejaculating onto her face and body. The problem for the pornographers is that consumers are becoming increasingly desensitized to such hardcore porn and are always on the lookout for something new and fresh. Porn director, Jules Jordan, who is known for a particularly violent brand of porn, said that even he is “always trying to figure out ways to do something different” since the fans “are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff” (in Jensen, 2007, p. 70). So one of the big challenges pornographers constantly have to grapple with is how to keep their customers interested.

It is this need to find new niche products that provides insight into why, in 2002, the Free Speech Coalition (the lobbying organization for the porn industry) worked to change the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act that prohibited any image that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” Arguing that the words “appears to be” limited the free speech of the pornographers, the coalition successfully got this ‘limitation’ removed. The law was thus narrowed to cover only those images in which an actual person (rather than one who appears to be) under the age of 18 was involved in the making of the porn. Thus, the path was cleared for the porn industry to use either computer-generated images of children or real porn performers who, although 18 or over, are childified to look much younger.

Since that 2002 decision, there has been an explosion in the number of sites that childify women, as well as those that use computer-generated imagery. Pseudo Child Pornography (PCP) sites that use adults (those people defined by the law as 18 or over) to represent children is never called child pornography by the industry. Instead, almost all of those sites that childify the female porn performer are found in the subgenre called ‘teen-porn’ or ‘teen-sex’ by the industry. There are any number of ways to access these sites, the most obvious one being Google. Typing ‘Teen Porn’ into Google yields over 30 million hits, giving the user his [24] 2 I refer to the user in the masculine since the majority of porn consumers are men. While it is impossible to give an accurate breakdown of male and female consumers, Mark Kernes, senior editor of the pornography trade magazine Adult Video News , stated that “Our statistics show that 78% of the people that go into adult stores are men. They may have women with them, but it’s men, and 22%, conversely, is women or women with other women or women alone.” (Author interview at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas with Robert Jensen, 7 January, 2005). choice of thousands of porn sites. A number of the hits are actually for porn portals where ‘teen porn’ is one sub-category of many, and when the user clicks on that category, a list of sites comes up that runs over 90 pages. Moreover, teen porn has its very own portal, [25] 3 http://www.ultraenlist.com (accessed 18 December, 2007). which lists hundreds of sub-subgenres such as ‘Pissing Teens’, ‘Drunk Teens’, ‘Teen Anal Sluts’, and ‘Asian Teens’.