The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (17 page)

‘[T]he missionary position – which is generally agreed to provide least direct pleasure to the woman – is by far the least popular form,’ the study noted, contradicting
the idea that the women are in porn as objects on which sex is performed. Instead, they are active participants. ‘Doggy-style sex and woman on top – both of which are generally agreed
to provide more clitoral stimulation for women – are much more popular.’ So, while the study shows that women have fewer orgasms than men, it also suggests that at least they are not
regarded as sexual objects whose pleasure is unimportant.

Violent films are especially concerning to many people, and a lot of the debate about pornography focuses on violence almost exclusively. In this study, however, less than 2 per cent of films
were found to have scenes of non-consensual aggression by men against women. The scenes – there were seven in total – varied from spanking to wrestling. Hardly the violent sadism some
insist is common in adult materials.

A similar study looked at 209 scenes from US films.
⁷⁰
The authors noted that in adult films ‘A significant number . . . had a theme of
intimacy.’ The research found one – only one – scene that could be characterised as ‘extreme sexual deviance’, that is less than 0.5 per cent of the scenes
studied.

Because the majority of porn consumers are men, it caters largely to their tastes. And what do these studies show it to be representing, by and large? Not women who are passive, submissive
recipients of male desire, but women who are initiating and involved. The films that strive to reflect male desire mostly do not include women who are forced or cajoled into sex, but women who
pursue a variety of acts associated with female pleasure. In other words, the films portray enthusiastic partners in sexuality.

It says a lot about the difference between what some people claim men want, and what men really want to watch. There’s an interesting parallel here with my former
work as a call girl – by far the most frequent specific request of clients was that they wanted to go down on me. Men get off on the woman getting off.

When it comes to the porn industry itself, many people assume that directors run the show and that they are profiting from female sexuality. However, the reality is very different. Not only do
porn actresses receive higher pay than their male counterparts, but what happens behind the cameras is nothing like the stereotypes.

It’s interesting to note that while the directors of these films are more often men than women, they don’t benefit much from the traditional method of distributing porn. It’s
not like Hollywood, with millionaire directors scooping the profits. The typical porn production company does not allow for distributing profits to the crew.

Adult companies give directors a single sum to make a movie. What is not spent on actors and production costs becomes the director’s pay, meaning once the film is complete, the director
has no financial stake in it. The result? The cheapest porn movies possible.

Recently this business model has begun to be challenged by directors and actors, and popular, well-known porn actresses. Jenna Jameson, one of the most high-profile stars of porn since the
1990s, has her own website-cum-multimedia entertainment company, ClubJenna, which produces and promotes films and other online content, with the profits staying in-house. ClubJenna’s revenues
in 2005 were $30 million. While it’s hardly the last word in cutting-edge erotica, it helped pave the way for the wide variety of independent porn online today.

Even beyond the household-name porn stars, the internet has been a boon to the women involved. Many are now working in coalition with each other or independently to keep control of the
production, sale, and distribution of films – not to mention the profits. Both male and female directors have flocked to work with companies such as Evil Angel, a distributor specialising in
fly-on-the-wall ‘gonzo’ style films, which splits its profits with the filmmakers.

Independent online erotic sites, run by people distributing their
own images to subscribing members, started early in web history. In 1995, Jen N Dave’s Homepage, a
website run by a couple who were also swingers, launched. They offered amateur porn made by themselves for sale to online subscribers – the site is still going today. Jen, who made her
entrée into internet porn at the age of twenty, is still going as a thirty-six-year-old mother of four.

The early 2000s brought the explosion of the camming phenomenon. As the technology became more affordable, a wide variety of people leaped at the chance to make, distribute, and profit from
their own porn. Today, there are countless independent porn companies, often featuring body types, types of relationships, and fetishes not common in mainstream porn.

There are a lot of cam sites run by bigger production companies, but far more are started and maintained by the models in the images themselves. There is no shortage of outspoken, self-motivated
people in online erotica who have chosen to cut out the middlemen and manage their own careers.

Many people are interested in promoting a new kind of pornography. Kink.com, based in San Francisco, aims to serve sex-positive and kinky communities of every stripe, and focuses heavily on
consensuality. Performers like Madison Young, who works both in mainstream and in queer porn, bring authentic desire and real female orgasms to the screen without compromising explicitness.

There are more people than ever inside the industry who actively identify themselves as feminists producing work for feminists (and anyone else) to watch: Nina Hartley, Annie Sprinkle, Candida
Royalle, Tristan Taormino, and Anna Span to name but a few. And they are not puppets of misogynistic corporations or coerced by manipulative partners. Independent performers who produce and
distribute their material exclusively through the internet are increasingly the norm. The personal is still political, but the politics are of equality through desire.

But really, marketing porn as ‘feminist’ and assessing the personal politics of the actors involved is not the point. The point is making explicit the consensual nature of
performers’ participation in erotic filmmaking. The point is that they are involved and in control of their careers and income, not unwitting slaves to a flesh machine. The point
is that the stereotype of cigar-chomping misogynistic honchos running the show is as fictional as
Boogie Nights
.

Not only does the adult industry offer women better pay as performers, it is also changing in a way that means women are now more able to profit from their work in the long term rather than
losing control of how their images are used. This is certainly a good thing regardless of how it’s labelled.

Even though we can see that disapproval of adult entertainment is based more in assumptions than in reality, it’s a hard attitude for some to shake off. Particularly in
the far right, and feminism.

In ‘Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography’, Ellen Willis discusses feminists who seek to promote ‘erotica’ while condemning ‘pornography’. More than a couple of
recent high-profile feminist memoirs have done exactly this. It’s kind of like the women who would go to tongue-in-cheek ‘burlesque’ performances, but shriek at the thought of
entering a strip club. What’s the difference, exactly? How is it possible to be a fan of one, and despise the other? Just a modern version of the Victorians and their Hicklin Test, if you ask
me.

Willis points out that this kind of hypocrisy appeals to an idealised version of what kind of sex people
should
want rather than what
actually
sexually arouses them. In this view,
vintage pin-ups = good, trashy lingerie = bad. Dita Von Teese is an artist, but the dancers in the local strip club are sad dregs of humanity. Suicide Girls? Approved. Playboy? Evil. And so on.
‘In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to “What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.” ’

Why do opponents of adult entertainment consistently disregard the evidence when it comes to pornography? It’s clear the business financially benefits the women involved, and more and more
erotica is produced independently. It could be because the evidence runs counter to their beliefs, not to mention their aesthetic preferences. And in the culture wars, what the middle class
approves of wins every time.

Media coverage doesn’t help. Many journalists don’t report on the objective research. The coverage tends to be either smutty or
judgemental because,
let’s face it, that’s easier to write. And they are especially prone to the high drama of self-appointed anti-obscenity crusaders who don’t even acknowledge an opposing viewpoint,
much less reference or critique it in any reasoned way. What people hear in mainstream media is usually limited to studies made by people with an agenda against porn.

Examining anti-porn arguments shows that far too many rely not on what is testable and verifiable, but are based instead on the untestable and unverifiable opinions of highly biased,
self-selecting interviewees.

Consider, for example, the writing of anti-porn crusader Gail Dines. Dines, who teaches women’s studies at Wheelock College in the US, is a founding member of the group Stop Porn Culture.
You may not have heard of her, but she’s a one-woman Constellation-Making machine, and something of a phenomenal Evangeliser to boot. Using publicity and conferences to great effect, Stop
Porn Culture is very successful at whipping up media frenzies that are high on emotion and worryingly thin on firm evidence.

Dines’ first book,
Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality
, claims to report the truth about porn, but stops far short of its goal. Conclusions about the effects
of porn are virtually free of objective analysis. Rather than design a study that would pass peer review, Dines relies heavily on reporting people’s gut feelings’ in response to her
1970s-era anti-pornography material.
⁷¹

What’s wrong with gut feelings? Nothing, really. We use them all the time. Gut feelings guide our day-to-day decisions and inform our opinions. Whether you watch erotic films or not is
probably the result of just such a feeling. In fact, if someone objects to porn for the simple reason that they don’t like it, that’s fine. It’s when gut feelings are repackaged
as evidence against statistically sound, peer-reviewed research that there’s a problem. Dines not only opposes pornography, she also has offered herself as an expert for court cases regarding
the sex industry. This is what is so problematic about her approach.

By basing work on feedback from her presentations, Dines introduces a lot of bias. The audience is self-selecting (and therefore biased) since no one would choose to attend who did not already
have some
knowledge of Dines’ opinions. Dines herself admits the material is already skewed to a particular point of view. In terms of being objective, it is a little
bit like showing nationalist propaganda to a BNP meeting then asking attendants on the way out how they feel about immigration.

The result is a carefully curated set of responses from people whose opinions were already decided. In many scientific contexts, this would be unpublishable. But media outlets are happy to
publicise and promote this kind of work. It overshadows the rational, well-designed research showing the reality of the porn trade.

In
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,
⁷²
Dines continues in the same vein, arguing that access to adult material affects not only
individuals, but relationships as well. More and more women look at porn than ever before. So whether there is an effect on partnerships is an interesting and topical question, and one that
deserves good, multidisciplinary, careful examination.

However, Dines makes the case not by conducting studies on couples and their use of porn, but by ‘a compelling, close reading of the imagery and narrative content of magazines, videos, and
marketing materials’. She includes anecdotes about how she feels about those media (negatively, in case that wasn’t immediately obvious).

Why is that a problem? Well, because having an opinion is only part of the picture. I have an opinion about porn – I like it, of course. I know loads of cool people who work in it, and I
think it can be a tool for improving intimacy when you’re in a relationship, and an outlet for sexual desire when you’re not. But it’s not enough for me just to tell you that, and
it shouldn’t be. Bombarding readers with my opinions isn’t the same as producing solid data. People want evidence to inform their own decisions, whatever those may be, and whether they
agree with mine or not.

The assumption that Dines’ interpretation alone is enough is a bit patronising. After all, we’re all experts on the topic of our opinions! Making conclusions this way ignores the
many people actively working in the field of human sexuality research.

Elsewhere, Dines interviewed men in prison who had raped children. Every one of them was a habitual user of child pornography. This
finding is presented not only as
significant but also as demonstrating a cause-and-effect relationship. The suggestion is that looking at porn causes men to rape children.

The problem with Dines’ interviews is that she got the ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ parts the wrong way round. This is a tactic known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and
it’s a common tactic in cargo cult research. The Texas sharpshooter fires his rounds at the side of the wall, and then goes along painting targets around where the shots landed. Surprise,
surprise, he gets a bullseye every time!

Choosing a group of convicted child sex offenders,
then
finding that they had viewed child pornography is Texas sharpshooting at its finest. People convicted of a crime have viewed
depictions of that crime? You don’t say! Heck, I’ll even go so far as to bet that people convicted of gang activity may have listened to hip hop. But it doesn’t mean music causes
gangs.

The Texas sharpshooter approach would be like studying lung cancer patients, discovering the vast majority had smoked, and concluding that lung cancer
causes
smoking. Dines’
interviews tell us nothing about the nature either of pornography or of crimes against children. What it tells us a lot about is the interviewer’s lack of understanding about how evidence
works. But then, Texas sharpshooters have a much lower success rate when their target painting happens the right way round.