Viewpoint
Heather Mallick
Porn is in the air that we breathe
Last Updated: Friday, November 28, 2008 | 6:09 PM ET
By Heather Mallick CBC News
Porn has gone mainstream.
It's all around us in advertising, movies, video games, DVDs, pay-per-view TV, subscription websites, cellphone downloads, newspaper and online classified ads, hotel rooms, doll costumes, those weird erotica shops in suburban malls and many odder places.
Madonna performs during a concert in Toronto on July 18, 2004. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press) It influences the way we dress, how we talk and what we will put under the tree this Christmas.
Porn is our "cultural wallpaper," say two sensible Pennsylvania English professors who have written The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go From Here, a new book that has received far too little media attention.
The authors, Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott, are almost excessively fair-minded, which is why they didn't title the book Porning in America, or Porn Again, or even High-Fructose Porn Syrup (as I would and I'm a feminist).
You can have a sense of humour about something vile or about something harmless and almost ridiculous but it is difficult when it's a bit of both.
Porn is so much with us in our daily lives that we don't notice it; this must be why the U.S. culture wars are being fought over gay marriage rather than the fact that pornography has made its way into the language, media visuals and even our sexual behaviour at office parties and in bed.
Yearly porn profits worldwide are estimated at $97 billion. But porn has intruded into so many parts of our day that the dollars can't even be counted. All this to compensate for a bit of human loneliness!
Pro-sex
The professors are careful to say that they are "pro-sex" and not either pro- or anti-porn. Me, too. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me. But they show us the real cultural landscape and it's a shock.
Erotic imagery has been with us since we stood on two legs, the authors point out, although the history of how the West created its own pornography is fascinating.
American porn had its start with bored soldiers during the Civil War. It modernized itself with dirty (and extremely violent) horror comics after the Second World War, was gentrified by Playboy magazine and then achieved what the authors call "the normalizing of the marginal."
Was this by chance? It's human nature that we never know when to stop. First, porn imitated us and then we imitated porn, the authors say.
Buttered porn
Hard-core porn went mainstream in the U.S. in 1972 with Deep Throat. Shot for $24,000, it earned more than $600 million worldwide.
That was a big year for porn, unveiling Behind the Green Door and then Last Tango in Paris, which glancingly referred to anal sex. Once the movie-going middle classes were giggling over butter as a lubricant, there was no stopping porn.
From then on, mainstream culture became increasingly sexually explicit and misogynistic.
We knew early on what Madonna's crotch looked like up close, even before she produced an entire coffee table book about it. Snoop Dogg popularized hard-core rap, daughters started demanding Bratz dolls (dressed like hookers) and glittery abbreviated stripper clothes, sons began raping and killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto.
And then ordinary homely adults, far from pornworld, changed the way they looked at themselves.
'That's because they're real'
Breast implants are one thing. "Your breasts feel weird," Steve Martin told a childlike Sarah Jessica Parker in L.A. Story. "That's because they're real," she replied.
That was in 1991, practically pre-history. But implants grew huge, as did the demand for tummy tucks, thong underwear, fake orange tans, and heads of hair so heavy they swing like gongs. Lipstick was frosted, then frosted and wet. It was the porn-star look.
Men didn't escape. Men's Health pushes "flat-belly foods." It teaches men to be heavily muscled but in a feminine way-they should apparently look like very hard women-with yeast-puff muscles and "six-packs" and those strange man-breasts with nipples pointing down, all contained in shiny hairless skin.
This is one reason I won't condemn the porn look on feminist grounds. It is equally harsh on men. Without even going on a porn site, I can see online paparazzi photos of Jude Law naked. What's next? Italy's geriatric Silvio Berlusconi, the playboy PM? Who wants that?
Fashionable infantilism
Female porn stars have hairless bodies and pouty lips. They look like children, except children don't have huge breasts.
These women don't have protruding nipples either, which clears up one mystery: why are stores selling so many padded bras, even for women who need no padding? To conceal nipples, which teenagers are now trained to regard as gross.
This way, women with lips puffed out by injections or by lipsticks that irritate and swell the skin, and without the fussy focus on their sexual organs, take on a fashionable infantile look. (Did I mention that Law is entirely hairless?)
We move from absurd to sinister, where every TV news anchor team is aiming for the porn-star look and where a 2006 moisturizer ad presents what looks like semen spilled on a woman's face.
Online porn set the tone at Abu Ghraib, with porn constantly available to unsupervised, stressed, tired soldiers who re-enacted sex fantasies on their prisoners.
I could go on, especially with the newest "humiliation porn," but it will make you feel unwell. We have been sexualized full-time.
"A person, female or male, young or old, is divested of all other qualities, intelligence, spirituality, a sense of humour, athleticism, compassion, talent, and reduced to an outward husk," Sarracino and Scott say in this book.
The body as weapon
Porn has broken down notions of privacy, so that civil liberties' advocates now argue that women in skirts shouldn't complain when men secretly photograph their crotches on the subway and post these photos online. In public, you have no expectation of privacy, they say.
What they are really saying is that there is no time and place when we are not sexual.
But here's the puzzler. Our lives are so much better in this sexed-up era. Men and women are friendlier; we are on each other's side more; we have better sex; we hate real-life violence as much as we ever did.
What bothers me is that this massive and rapid change in how we view our bodies — containers, art, weapons, tools — has gone so unremarked.
There are magazine articles about kids' sexy Halloween costumes. There are toneless columns about museum exhibits of Gunther von Hagens' plastinated corpses. We see a thousand photos of the new flappers, Paris Hilton et al, and we can read, if we choose, about their labia.
The professors describe "vivisection porn," the tamest bit being tiny cameras on dildos that film internally.
Journalists, if not sociologists, should have been putting these bits of derangement in context as they happened, as we learned to yawn. Instead it was left to these two worthy academics to tell us that sexuality is changing at impossible speed, 0 to 60 in a split-second, making their book almost out of date the month it was published.
The professors are right. Porn is in the air we breathe. It isn't right or wrong but it is a fact and attention should be paid.
