dirty B y
M i c h a e l
M .
H u gh e s
Is porn When I was 9, I saw my first images of naked women in a moldering Playboy a friend found stashed in the woods. Before that initiatory game-changer, the hottest material I could get my hands on was the J.C. Penney catalog, the women’s underwear ads in my mother’s Redbook, and the naked African woman in the wellthumbed copy of Born Free in my elementary school library. Now, a kid clicking on a link in a spam e-mail can stumble upon material that my bosses on the Block were legally forbidden to show. (If you’re familiar with the infamous viral video clip involving two women and a plastic cup, you know of what foulness I speak.) The “think of the children!” moralizers, with their warnings of apocryphal middle-school orgies and “rainbow parties,” have been guilty of hyperbole, but there’s no denying that my Playboy in the woods now seems as quaint and nostalgic as an episode of Leave It to Beaver. Adolescents today are often more porn-savvy than their parents. The hardcore stuff, once confined to a few downtown blocks, has escaped; we all—most of us, anyway—smell like porn. I can’t help but wonder what this unprecedented eruption of dirty imagery is doing to us. Pornography has never lacked for critics. Back in the 1980s, second-wave feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon argued that pornography served as an extension of rape and promoted violence against women. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, religious conservatives fulminated that porn incited lust and led the unwary into pedophilia. The scientific data is a mixed bag, but even advocates have a difficult time dismissing the downsides: relationships destroyed by compulsive cybersex, children exposed to age-inappropriate material, endemic abuse of women by an unscrupulous industry. Those who fret about economic productivity can marvel at the amazing statistics that online pornography generates: According to one cybersex researcher, 70 percent of the Web’s massive adult site traffic occurs during the 9-to-5 workday. That’s a lot of people peeking at naughty pictures at work. But other damage may be more subtle, a reflection of how the tropes and culture of pornography have invaded the non-porn universe. A friend of mine, a professor at a Maryland university, told me how a student confided to him that he couldn’t ejaculate inside his girlfriend because all of the porn movies he’d watched ended with the men ejaculating on the women. Paradoxically, living in a sex-drenched pornotopia may well be making us less sexy. Few mortal men can keep up with the on-screen (and carefully edited) megastamina of priapic porn stars hopped up on Viagra, and both sexes can feel inadequate when a partner desires an obscure, embarrassing, or impossibly acrobatic act, or can’t get aroused without a behavior or kink acquired from online grazing. With
36
urbanite july 09