In the United States, the porn industry capital, more people are logging on to get off. And the biggest online consumers are people who profess to old-fashioned family values, according to a recent Harvard Business School analysis.

One in three British office-workers surveyed last year admitted to having viewed porn on their computer at work (slightly fewer than the 56 percent who said they'd returned to work drunk after a pub lunch).

Like it or not, blue is all around you. The so-called "pornification of mainstream culture" means the imagery of porn is no longer confined to the top shelf. Porn, with its carnal playfulness, its capacity for damage and its currents of misogyny, crystallises society's broader tensions, pleasures and ambivalence around sex.

Though porn is hardly family viewing, it is moving mainstream. Legal commercial pornography covers the gamut from couple-oriented feature-length films with a semblance of plot and characterisation to the hardcore extremes of "Gonzo" or "wall-to-wall" porn.

Most heterosexual porn revolves around men penetrating women's bodies. In certain hardcore subgenres, female characters simulate discomfort, pain and fear.

Professional porn actresses command substantially more pay if they have fake breasts or agree to anal sex.

However, The Porn Report says women's growing involvement in the porn industry has improved the treatment and representation of women. Co-author Alan McKee, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, says Gonzo is marginal.

Yet New Zealand's porn baron, Steve Crow, believes commercial porn has become increasingly hardcore as consumers have been desensitised and need more for their kicks.

"Today it's Gonzo – all sex. It's straight into the hard sex, it's more explicit and extreme."

Rod Jackson says the market has become more segmented. "You go into your local store and they've got the young, horny just-want-to-get-off section, right through to the Adult you want to watch a movie and it might have some porn in it."

Even more difficult to get a fix on is the scope of so-called amateur porn: home-videos and more or less graphic sexual photos of everyday people posted on the internet.

"They're middle-aged people who are married wanting their 15 minutes of fame, who are game enough to do it," says Jackson.

According to Alexa.com, which tracks internet use, New Zealand's 100 most visited sites include four porn sites. This doesn't count the amateur porn traffic on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Research into men and women's pornographic preferences has thrown up some surprises. The Porn Report found women were more likely than men to prefer pneumatic-breasted, Barbie-Doll actresses. Men tended to go for the more realistic "girl next door" look.

McKee puts it down to women coming to sex imaginatively via romance novels.

"Women are raised to have a 'Mills and Boon' idea about sex, where everybody is beautiful."

Unsurprisingly, women surveyed also showed a strong aversion to porn showing violence, abuse or rape.

This year, Britain outlawed the possession of "extreme pornography", defined as an act that threatens or appears to threaten a person's life, or to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals, or that involves sexual interference with a human corpse or animals.

Opponents complain the new law criminalises innocent people with a penchant for the kinky, likening it to banning alcohol because some people are alcoholics.

Just because a deeply disturbed person may seek out violent porn, they argue, doesn't mean watching hardcore BDSM will prime well-adjusted people to commit sexual violence.

The research into a causal link between violent porn and sexual violence is inconclusive. But anti-porn campaigners argue that degrading portrayals of women feed into a wider misogyny, which can leak into sex and relationships, or even contaminate rape trials with a "she-asked-for-it" attitude.

Stop Demand founder Denise Ritchie campaigns against sexual exploitation of women and children. She says hardcore porn frequently "eroticises men sexually dominating women. Most porn is marketed at men. Go into a shop: it's about men masturbating to women being degraded, being touted as bitches and sluts and hoes."

Therapists say porn can interfere with your ability to sustain real intimacy in a relationship.

Auckland sex therapist Nic Beets says it is possible to blend porn with intimacy, but not common. Where only one person wants to indulge, it requires the porn user to be honest with himself and his partner about why he's doing it, and the partner to control any gut-reaction anxiety so that the couple can figure out a place for porn in their relationship.

Another concern is that porn can distort ideas of attractive bodies and "ideal" sex, although porn defenders argue the plastic bodies and plastic sex of mainstream culture is more influential in moulding expectations.

The people in McKee's survey perceived porn's effects on their relationships and sex life as overwhelmingly positive.

"Porn was making them more comfortable and relaxed about their own sexuality, more open-minded, allowing them to talk about sexual issues with their partner, keeping the sex going in long-term relationships," he says.

But Auckland psychotherapist Kathryn Barriball is cautious. "I'm amazed at the sexual misinformation that people have. We think we're living in sexually enlightened times, we're bombarded by sexual innuendo and imagery.

"But realistic sexual information, realistic sexual conversations? They're not really taking place," she says.

"Porn puts such an emphasis on the physical and the body, but that's only one aspect of satisfying sex. We have bodies – but we also have hearts and minds."

No one has done a comprehensive survey of Kiwi porn habits but research published last year in The Porn Report challenges received wisdom.

Researchers surveyed more than 1000 porn users, and interviewed 50 in depth. Fifty-six per cent of the users were aged 19-35, 77 per cent were heterosexual and 55 per cent were in a monogamous relationship.

Men outnumbered women four-to-one, but the gender gap had narrowed from 90 per cent male in a 1996 survey to 82 per cent male in this one.

More women under 40, in particular, were going x-rated, most typically alone on a DVD on their laptop at home, or with a partner.

Aucklander Sharon Jackson encountered porn at age 12, when she sneaked a Penthouse Forum magazine from her father's wardrobe. Jackson, 43, now vets porn routinely for the swingers' club she runs with husband Rod, 50. The couple also use porn as a sex aid, and sometimes for a laugh.

"I can do without watching it but I can do with watching it and it's enjoyable," she says.

"A lot of women are doing it at home on the internet while their husbands are at work."

More than half the visitors to last year's Auckland sex expo, Erotica, were women. For many, porn's stigma is as passe as Carry-on-Nurse capers.

"It's not something you lock yourself away in a darkened room to do and cringe whenever you hear anybody in the house," says Sharon.

Also ...

Porn Star Culture Gets Young Women Excited

Boston Herald, 10/3/05 - Paris Hilton went from heiress to sex-tape infamy to TV fame, commercial pitchwoman and now to a topless photo on the cover of Vanity Fair, claiming to be sexy but not sexual.

Jenna Jameson turned her career in porn into a best-selling memoir.

These are not good things, argues Ariel Levy, the New York magazine writer and author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture."

"People whose job it is to fake lust shouldn't be held up as our sexual role models," Levy told the Herald during her book-tour visit to Boston.

Yet Levy cited lots of evidence that today's young women have embraced stripper and porn-star culture.

Preteen girls buy thong underwear, their sisters give lap dances and oral sex to boys at high school parties, while young women compete for one bachelor on "harem-style" TV shows. "Girls Gone Wild," after several years, has become mainstream enough for headline writers to use the phrase.

When Levy followed the "Girls Gone Wild" camera crew on spring break, she found plenty of women willing to doff their tops, all for a T-shirt and the promise that their nudity might be seen by millions of people.

What happened to feminism?

"I don't think there was a single moment," Levy said. "A lot of this has to do with rebellion. Nobody wants to turn into her mother."

Mothers of today's teens and 20-somethings grew up during serious feminist times, fighting for the right to attend top colleges and hold top jobs in the 1960s and '70s.

Levy said young women who adopt strippers and porn actresses as role models thinking it is a continuation of the women's movement don't realize that they're merely advancing the objectification of women.

Rachel Kramer Bussel, who writes the Lusty Lady sex column for The Village Voice, said "being raunchy is a quick and easy way for young women to get attention, and I'm sure many of them, especially the younger ones, don't necessarily get the full implications of their actions."

But not everything about so-called raunch is bad, Bussel said.

 When I was little, my friends and I were dressing up as Madonna," she said. "We were singing `Like a Virgin' and we loved Madonna, not necessarily because we wanted to be total sexpots, but because there was an allure to that imagery, that there was something fun and exciting about it. I think that's what a lot of young women are tapping into, and that part is not necessarily a bad thing. But how that message is taken and what women are told their bodies are good for can warp that very joyous feeling into something more sinister."

The key, she said, is for parents to explain the positive and negative aspects of sexuality.

Levy's book is not the only one to point out how American attitudes toward sex and sexuality have changed in the past 20 years. Some authors and critics argue that culture is rebelling against Republican politics or sex-education policies that encourage abstinence.

Alecia Oleyourryk, editor of Boink - the sex magazine by and for Boston University students - said she believes Americans have become more European in dealing with topics that were once taboo and that women are taking more control of their own sexuality.

The third issue of Boink, published last week, displays naked men and women in both straight and gay settings.

"I think that women are recognizing what's been going on for a while, things that were misogynistic, owning them and letting them empower them in some way," Oleyourryk said.

On the other hand, she also acknowledged that repetitive imagery of women as objects in music videos and late-night shows - from "Girls Gone Wild" to "The Man Show" to "The Howard Stern Show" - might have altered expectations for girls.

"Nobody is shocked by something they are used to," she said.

Pornography and Raunch Culture

Seattle Times, 9/26/05 - An elderly woman seated next to me on a recent flight asked about the books I was carrying. I showed her "Pornified" and "Female Chauvinist Pigs," both bristling with bookmarked pages. I hurriedly explained the books were about pornography, not actually the smutty stuff itself.

She patted my arm. "Even if they were dirty books," she said firmly, "no harm in just reading 'em!" We chuckled together, two open-minded civil libertarians in confident agreement.

Well, maybe.

Actually, reading these two books would make almost anyone question her own live-and-let-live philosophy. With its long reach into our homes and workplaces, online pornography is not a hidden indulgence for the few; it's a factor in daily life. It's not a stretch to say it influences the clothes we wear, the language we use, and of course, the sex we have.

If your acquaintance with such matters dates to Playboy centerfolds of distant decades, today's X-rated online offerings as described in "Pornification" are shockers: scatological scenes, rapes, bestiality, pregnant women and children used as sexual offerings. (Such things come up via free access as well as on sites requiring credit cards.)

Even those tempted to invoke the one-person's-porn-is-another's-poetry defense might find themselves rethinking the effect of the raw Web that infiltrates schools, workplaces and bedrooms.

The books differ in how and where they enter into the analysis of pornography and "raunch culture," as Ariel Levy terms it. For Levy, online porn is but one element of a dismaying societal shift in which "female chauvinist pigs" embrace ideals of female sexuality and attractiveness born in strip clubs and blue movies. For Pamela Paul, pornography is a debilitating plague, and its influence on women is one of its many symptoms.

Paul's book is the more unsettling of the two. A contributor to Time and author of "The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony," (Villard, 2002) Paul commissioned a poll and interviewed 100-plus people for this new book, seeking to discover how and why people view online porn, and what effect it has on their lives.

The result is an incomplete and uneven study, but still well worth reading; an alarming, thought-provoking overview of today's cyber-sexual society. Paul falls short when she fails to fully describe the structure of her interviews and poll. She says, for example, that her study focuses on heterosexuals, but it is not clear how she dealt with sexual orientation through her questions. She does, however, convey the remarkable ubiquity and graphic content of online pornography, and initiates intelligent arguments against its toll on children and on satisfying adult relationships.

Who looks at computer porn and why? Men from all walks of life, some women and too many children, says Paul. Some (particularly kids) find it by accident. Most seek it out of curiosity, sexual release, relaxation, feelings of inadequacy or escape.

One man's online habit might be to admire a comely model in passing; another might log on for hours a day to watch women raped or children fondled. No one knows how many users are out there, but any search engine reveals millions of pages of X-rated sites. Even if every site had only a few visitors, the numbers of potential users are mind-boggling.

The "who" and "why" of porn may be too varied to pinpoint, but Paul argues convincingly that once a user has a habit, some patterns are inevitable. "It's the human condition, it's the American weakness — the desire for more, bigger, better — damn the consequences," she writes. "In order to make that momentary gain last longer, in order to get back that sexual zing, men go back for more pornography. Better porn. Edgier porn."

If this ended with users simply spending too much time alone with their computers, we might dismiss them as more pitiful than worrisome. But Paul makes serious points when she quotes several users who describe eerily similar escalations from tamer peeks to hours of harder-core content. She builds a reasonable case that regular porn-viewing inevitably interferes with real-life relationships.

She supports her contention that "pornography leaves men desensitized to both outrage and excitement," offering up several regular porn surfers for whom sexual activity with a live partner became boring, abusive or impossible. It makes sense that even a viewer who only watches scenes of garden-variety intercourse between a man and a woman (no animals, kids or violence) will eventually find the real thing to be, well, not quite the same. More than one of the men Paul interviewed bemoaned the time and effort it took to bring pleasure to a live woman.

Add the tendency for secrecy around the use of Internet porn, and you've got bigger complications. "Most women have no idea how often their boyfriends and husbands look at pornography. Usually, the deception is deliberate, though many men also deny the frequency to themselves," writes Paul.

The subject of pornography's effect on relationships today, and the myriad ways women deal with its role in intimate relationships, is fascinating stuff. Both Paul, and to a greater extent Levy in "Female Chauvinist Pigs," note that the props, language and images of pornographic movies and strip clubs are now firmly part of mainstream American life. Both capture a particularly harrowing trend: the tendency of many young women to accept that their own sexual activities and responses (and those of their male partners) should mirror those seen in sexual-fantasy media.

Levy, who writes for New York magazine, launches her lively, well-reported book with a list of porn-culture influences: G-strings and other skimpy fashion for all ages; amateur flashers on the likes of "Girls Gone Wild"; female Olympic athletes in skin mags, even strip-club influenced aerobics classes, complete with pole-dancing moves as a fat-burning technique.

The result, she says, is "raunch culture," a peculiar convergence of unleashed sexuality in an increasingly conservative era.

"It actually makes perfect sense when we think about it," writes Levy. "Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial. By going to strip clubs and flashing on spring break and ogling our Olympians in Playboy, it's not as though we are embracing something liberal — this isn't Free Love."

Raunch culture, she says, is "about endlessly reiterating one particular — and particularly commercial — shorthand for sexiness."

Just blaming men misses the bigger picture, Levy says. The women's movement has empowered women and provided myriad choices, she points out. Sexuality is a complex business, yet "somehow, we [women] have accepted as fact the myth that sexiness needs to be divorced from the everyday experience of being ourselves."

Levy ponders how this happened, providing a useful commentary on America's ever-shifting views of pornography, with the country's strange bedfellows of Puritans and free-speech principles.

Both Levy and Paul offer worthwhile insights on resisting the raunch factor that's become so commonplace. Levy pushes for improved, straightforward education on sexuality and health for young people, and urges women to do the work of articulating their own values, rejecting cultural practices that don't fit those beliefs. She writes in passionate opposition to those so-called female chauvinists who embrace porn-laden values and culture, only to trade away the very things they seek — freedom and power over their own lives and sexuality.

Paul offers useful thoughts about corralling online pornography, noting successful restrictions used by theaters, hardcore cable programming, even in sales of cigarettes and alcohol. Regardless of one's view on her practical proposals, it's hard to disagree with this insight: The pornography industry, she contends, is a huge, moneymaking business that has "sold America on the idea of fantasy ... inciting us to ignore reality." Read these two books and decide for yourself if that disconnect with reality is as dangerous as the authors contend.

Also ...
Female Chauvinist Pigs - Young Women and Porn

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