The Purity Myth (12 page)

c h a P ter 4

the porn connection

“It is commonly believed that mainstream pornography is represented by the centerfolds

in today’s men’s magazines. In fact, that is precisely what the ACLU and the sex industry want us

to think. But if a man were to go into the sex shops on Times Square or in other large cities in the United States, he would find very few depictions of normal heterosexual activity. Instead, he would see a heavy emphasis on violent homosexual

and lesbian scenes. . . . Amazingly, there is a huge market for disgusting materials of this nature.”

f o c u s o n t h e f a m i l y
1

on mtv’s show
I Want a Famous Face,
nineteen-year-old Sha told the camera that she wanted to look like Pamela Anderson so she could pursue a career as a
Playboy
model. During the show, viewers watched as Sha under- went surgery to get breast implants, lip implants, and liposuction on her chin—all so she could have that
Playboy
look. Sadly, Sha’s story is a dime a dozen; the mainstreaming of pornography is influencing young women across the country. Pornish pubic hair (or lack thereof) is inspiring a gen- eration of women to take it all off. Porn star Jenna Jameson’s book,
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,
spent six weeks on
The New

York Times
bestseller list. There’s even a reality television show on E! that fol- lows the lives of Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy
Bunny girlfriends.

There is little doubt that pornography is pervasive in America—from In- ternet porn to porn star shirts for preteens, we’re simply inundated with it. But while this “porning of America”* is vastly more present than the virginity movement and its cultural output, the latter actually relies on the former for its survival. You can’t have purity without perceived impurity, after all. The virginity movement’s success—its ability to appear relevant, even—depends on its having a social evil to rail against. Movement leaders
need
pornography in order to justify the extreme nature of the purity message they’re pushing. Pornography and purity may make strange bedfellows, but they’re sharing sheet space all the same.

Naturally, porn culture raises serious questions and concerns about the oversexualization of women and girls (as discussed in Chapter 3) and the so- cietal effects of pornography’s being so readily accessible and so much more hardcore than past porn. But the virginity movement is using what could be a progressive conversation about women, men, and sexuality to carelessly push a regressive agenda. Instead of focusing the discourse on porn itself, the movement simply declares that
everything
is pornographic—teen clothing styles, books, television shows, even teaching students about birth control. You name it, it’s pornographic and inappropriate. By taking on porn in this narrow way, the virginity movement’s answers are similarly simplistic: Stop

having sex. Stop porn. Be pure.
†

By further promoting the virgin/whore dichotomy, the movement also

• As it was referred to by Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott in their book,
  The Porning of America.
  

  † And send our organizations money to fight the good fight against obscenity!
  

• 82
  the Purity myth
  

  inadvertently ensures that young women
  will
  engage in porn culture—be it through
  Playboy
  pencil cases,* Girls Gone Wild, or simply thinking that porn is “cool.” By erasing any nuance and complexity from conversations about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn’t seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there’s no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives.
  

  Most important (as evidenced by the quote starting off this chapter), the issues the virginity movement is concerned with
  aren’t
  those that have to do with helping women. They don’t care about sex workers’ rights or the objecti- fication and dehumanization of women that some porn peddles in. They care about maintaining the sexual status quo: Men are men, women are subservi- ent and chaste, and sexuality is shameful.
  

  a P o r n e d a m e r i c a
  

  When I was in college, my then-boyfriend Mike told me how he first encoun- tered pornography. His parents got the Playboy TV channel on cable, and because he had a television in his room, it wasn’t long before he discovered the joys of softcore clips and montages of naked women. Today, a teen boy will more likely come across “2 girls, 1 cup”
  †
  than find his parents’ dirty-magazine stash. To put it mildly, pornography is not what it used to be.
  

  While the porn film
  Deep Throat
  —which was released in 1972 and
  

  

• Yes, these exist.
  

†
A porn clip that became an Internet phenomenon, “2 girls, 1 cup” features two women defecating into a cup, eating the excrement, and throwing up into each other’s mouths.

jessica valenti
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received accolades from reputable media, like
The New York Times
—is often credited as the beginning of the mainstreaming of pornography, Sarracino and Scott write that it was
Playboy
magazine, founded in 1953, that really changed the culture. Before that, porn was cheaply made, illicit, underground, and seedy, but with its quality publishing style,
Playboy
marked a shift in the way Americans viewed pornography.

Shame—the shame of poverty, transgression, the shame of the outsider— was in a sense encoded into the early presentations of pornography. Shame inhibits identification. We don’ t want to see as “ourselves” those who are

socially, morally, and legally stigmatized. . . . In the case of
Playboy,
readers hefted the slick pages of stunning photographs of wholesome, beautiful girls, intermixed with images of and information about high-end stereo equip-

ment, hip apartments, and sports cars, and thought, consciously or not:

This is me! This is who I am—or who I want to be!
2

Deep Throat,
the plot of which revolved around a woman who discovers her clitoris is in her throat,* had a similar effect in the ’70s. Instead of follow- ing the typical stag-film format,
Deep Throat
ran the length of a normal movie, featured a script with characters and a plot, and had a starring actress—Linda Lovelace. Celebrities admitted to loving the film, and it’s still the highest- grossing porn of all time.

But it was in-home pornography—the advent of videotaped pornogra- phy and the Internet—that created the porn that we know today: increas- ingly hardcore, mainstream, and ubiquitous.
3
Today, estimated annual

* No nuance about male fantasy here!

porn sales in the United States are $10 billion;
4
* in fact, the U.S. revenue from Internet porn alone was $2.84 billion in 2006.
5
Of the approximately 372 million pornographic web pages worldwide, 89 percent are produced within the United States.

Because personal technology—be it a video camera, webcam, or blog— is readily available to most Americans, almost anyone can produce porn in the comfort of their own home. This ease of both making and consuming por- nography has exponentially increased the amount of porn that’s created, as well as the acceptability of pornography as part of American culture. (Thank- fully, this democratization of porn has also meant an increase in feminist- and woman-friendly pornography—more on this later.)

There is no doubt that mainstream
†
pornography, like most pop cul-

ture, is problematic when it comes to the way women are represented and treated. As Robert Jensen wrote in
Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity,
“Pornography as a mirror shows us how men see women. Not all men, of course—but the ways in which many men who accept the con- ventional conception of masculinity see women. It’s unsettling to look in that mirror.”
6

Jensen argues that while mainstream pornography in all forms tends to be misogynistic, it’s reality, or “gonzo,” porn—in which the sex workers acknowledge the camera’s presence—that is most disturbing.

* Porn revenue numbers are often contested because it’s difficult to know how much money is coming in from porn websites, but I’d argue anything in the billions equals pretty damn mainstream.

†
When I write about mainstream porn, I’m referring to the bulk of the commercial porn

industry—not including feminist and pro-woman porn, which, unfortunately, is not nearly as prevalent.

jessica valenti
85

In gonzo, those same [sexual] acts are featured but t ypically are per-

formed in rougher fashion, of ten with more than one man involved, and with more explicitly denigrating language that marks women as sluts,

whores, cunts, nasty bitches, and so on.
7

It’s hard to argue with Jensen’s contention that the majority of gonzo pornography is made with women’s debasement in mind. It’s what Shauna Swartz called “humilitainment” in a 2004
Bitch
magazine article; it’s the kind of porn that revels in coaxing or “tricking” women into having sex, just to spit or ejaculate in their face at the end (as is the case with the popular website BangBus.com, where women are dumped by the side of the road and stranded after they’ve had sex).

“Tagging these disturbing spectacles of deception and abuse with the ‘reality’ label enhances their allure, as it claims to offer consumers unstaged and authentic action,” wrote Swartz.
8
*

Naturally, not all porn humiliates women—there’s a strong feminist porn culture, and mainstream porn that isn’t misogynistic does exist. But in an industry that is constantly looking for the next, biggest, most ex- treme thing (gang bangs where hundreds of men line up to have sex with one woman, and the stomach-churning “2 girls, 1 cup,” come to mind) it’s near impossible to argue that porn culture isn’t affecting American society detrimentally.