‘Imagine if Starbucks offered a shot of alcohol with your morning coffee. Then there was beer in the office and at lunchtime we all automatically ordered a bottle of wine rather than sparkling water. If alcohol were that available we’d all start drinking more and any stigma would gradually disappear. And that’s how things are developing with porn.” So says Pamela Paul, the American author of Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families.
Paul has been looking into the effects of pornography on society and her investigation seems incredibly timely. While Britons may lag behind their European counterparts in education and living standards, it was revealed last week that the UK has become the porn capital of Europe, with access to 27 porn television channels. Germany, our nearest rival, has just five.
This represents only a tiny part of a £31.5 billion global industry. As even the most sheltered know, hardcore material is available over the internet, with 25% of all searches seeking to access one of the 1.3m porn websites. It’s also more available in magazines and even marketed directly to our mobile phones.
With so much material around, porn imagery has naturally crossed into the mainstream. It can now be found at children’s eye level on many supermarket newsstands (in magazines such as Nuts and Zoo), and in advertising (last year, for instance, a stereo system was promoted with a woman bound head to foot in black vinyl tape).
It’s there in the lyrics of Christina Aguilera, the styling of Britney Spears and even the poses of mannequins in Madame Tussaud’s (where a waxwork of Kylie Minogue depicts her on all fours with her bottom poking into the air).
So it is not surprising that Paul’s research flags up some shocking findings, including the appeal of porn’s “glamour” image to young girls.
“I found pre-teen girls who were putting pictures of porn stars on their personal web pages and providing links to porn websites,” she says. “I learnt about them through a porn actress who’d published a bestselling autobiography and was surprised when pre-teen girls showed up at signings. They said they saw her as a positive icon.”
Although women have yet to catch up with men (and the material they access is usually much softer core, such as Sweet Action, the independent “porn for women” magazine), Paul found that more women are using porn: 32m women visited at least one adult website in January 2004, according to her study. In a magazine poll 41% of women said they had intentionally viewed or downloaded erotic films or photographs. More than one in 10 had watched or sexually interacted with someone on a live webcam.
These findings support a recent British survey of 1,000 girls, aged 15-19, which found that 63% aspired to be glamour models, while 25% preferred the idea of lap dancing. For many, the erotic lifestyle and look is not seedy but has become aspirational.
Paul also spoke to a group of twentysomething men who had grown up with the internet, “consuming porn literally every day since they were 14. Our sexual cues and desires are learnt during adolescence, and . . . these young men were regularly viewing bestiality and group sex”.
This last point underlines another reality about porn, says Paul. Most people have no idea of what is actually out there: “Baby boomers associate porn with Playboy or page 3.”
Most women also believe that their husbands would never use porn but this could be a misconception, too. More men than ever are using porn and the material they are accessing is becoming progressively hard core. The heaviest demand on the internet is for “deviant” material, including paedophilia, bondage and sadomasochism.
During the course of her research Paul spoke to 80 men. Even those who described themselves as “casual users” were watching as much as one hour of porn on the internet each day.
Although porn consumption among women is increasing, it is clear that many have mixed feelings about it. Many of the conversations that Paul had with young women, even those who used porn, began with “I’m not a prude, but . . .” or “I’m really liberal, but . . .” as if they had to apologise for feeling shocked by some of the things they had seen.
They were afraid to show any concern or anxiety over porn for fear of being classified as “anti-sex”.
“Embracing pornography has become almost a new form of political correctness,” says Paul. “Part of the reason for the change is that the anti-porn voices of the early 1980s, like Andrea Dworkin, were considered to be very extreme.
“When calls began for censorship of porn back then, liberals and moderates became scared that this could be used to censor feminist books. At that stage the tide turned.”
Ever since, Paul believes, many women have tried to accept pornography “by kidding themselves that men look at it simply because they love women”. While this is no doubt true of some genuine “casual users”, the comments from internet chatrooms tell another story.
“Looks like she’s had a few too many sandwiches!” writes one man, while another agrees: “She has no waistline — goes straight down from her shoulders!” And these are just the comments that are fit to print — most are horribly explicit.
How is all this likely to progress? With so much porn imagery having flooded the mainstream, can it go any further — and can it be stopped? Paul believes that the right approach is one of “censure, not censor”.
By stigmatising porn in certain ways — as has been done with smoking — she believes that it could be pushed back out of the mainstream and into the more exclusively adult realm where it used to exist. “In Britain, the government has announced a crackdown on the most extreme websites that mix porn and violence, so that’s a start,” she says.
“And I also think that just increasing people’s awareness of what porn really is can make a real difference. Before Fast Food Nation came out, people never really knew what was in their chicken nuggets.
“Hopefully my book can go some way to exposing the reality of porn and its effects, too.”
