The Elephant in the Bedroom: How Porn Changed Us Over the Past 30 Years
In 2013, there was a phenomenon in the online porn world known as Gonzo porn. It was the bane of my existence as a new counsellor providing crisis support to children, youth and individuals and families impacted by many assaults, addictions and afflictions on the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, BC, Canada. It was the bane of my existence because it mirrored the rampant misogyny that many of my female and feminine male counterparts were being terrorized by. I wasn’t experiencing it to the same degree because I was wealthier, I was white, and 6 years ago, this still protected me from much abuse. In many places, it still does.
Fast forward and the impacts of gonzo porn can still be seen today. I have been monitoring the trajectory of the porn industry for the last 18 years. Why? Well, as a fourteen-year-old girl, I would witness my family be torn apart by the porn addiction of my father. On our family computer, I found torrents of homemade pornography that my father was sending to his lovers online. Earlier, when the internet was just fledgling, I found on the shared family computer, downloaded snippets of young teenage girls running nude near a river. Hair all different lengths and colours, white opalescent bodies, it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it. I was shocked, annoyed and afraid of my dad. I was also 9. He had hidden this from me, from us as a family. I knew this was bad and I had to tell. What would his punishment be? I felt like I would be hated by him if I told. I wasn’t far off.
Gaslighting and Invalidation… then Resilience
I thought, he seemed like such a good guy, why was he looking up girls only a couple of years older than me in this way? And why would he deny he had done anything wrong, and push me away as a result of seeing the porn-john behind the curtain? Well, in short, the overly simplified explanation is: shame. He did all of those things to his only child because he was ashamed of himself, and afraid of me, along with the accountable parts of himself he squelched down so that he could redo what was done to him (be exposed to sexually explicit material without his consent, as a child).
Ever since, I’ve had a problem with porn. Understandably so, what kid wouldn’t after experiencing such a shit-show? (That’s a clinical term, by the way: “shit show.”) In all seriousness, there actually is a clinical term the describe what happened in the aforementioned situation. An identifying term took me years to find as a post-grad domestic violence counsellor, given the amount of stigma and hushing down of this form of abuse that exists. It is known as psychological sexual abuse, to expose a child to pornography. Leaving it around and taking no measures to protect a child from sexually explicit material, as well as the acts of normalizing a child seeing it, and dismissing the negative impact of this experience (even in the face of the child actually verbalizing the fallout) is incredibly psychologically destructive. These are forms of indirect sexual abuse.
It is what it is, and this is my history. It is not who I am, but it is where I come from. Where I clawed my way out of. And these experiences have coloured my life in more ways than I can say. I relish things many take for granted; I can spot a liar, a real life child molester (not those dumb stereotypes you think drive around in white vans with thin mustaches), and the victims of sexual abuse. I don’t buckle under pressure too often (I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse much of the time), and my biggest strength? Well, that would be leveraging the destruction of my early life by nurturing the insight and dedication to the human condition present in myself. I do this based on my empathy for my own inner child who wanted to heal the attachment wound with my father, and as an adult woman, channelling it by helping other people in their own healing processes. Often, these people are breathtakingly beautiful to me in demonstrating their emotional maturity in working on such problems in therapy. That’s something my dad, and much of my extended family also impacted by sexual, physical and psychological abuse, could never do. It is miraculous for me to see, and often after a particularly moving session where abuse/unhealthy interactions are worked out safely and in healthy ways, when the door closes and everyone goes home, I sit in my chair and weep with joy. It is the best part of my life, to be a part of that transformation. I would compare it to witnessing a war torn country suddenly experience peace, abundance and unity.
That’s right, I have counselled families distraught by covert or overt family violence including sexual, psychological, physical and emotional abuse actually heal. Beyond my family’s wildest dreams. I have seen and co-created miracles. Those moments came from my own family’s devastation because I knew we could do better. And what did I want to be when I grew up? Somebody who could help families do better. Much good came from such a potent combination of factors. But, the secret-keeping of his shame is over.
The fact is, there was a problem that our family avoided dealing with because they were afraid of emotional intensity. Many other families who do the work necessary to solve such a problem, despite feeling afraid of the emotional intensity, heal. I am here to celebrate those successes, but in this article, I also choose to present the costs of choosing to do nothing. I want to illustrate how that choice of abdication from healthy family relationships, based on avoiding pain, actually limits joy and other positive emotional experiences.
Sure, You were Abused, but Porn is Just Sex, What’s the Harm?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the naked pictures themselves that bothered me, it’s the entitlement to women’s bodies (and in some forums, men’s and non-binary people’s bodies). My father’s case exemplifies the arrogance and entitlement of his consuming them. He was maintaining the status quo of consuming porn instead of having sex with a real person (which yes, is gross for me to think about). I contest the reflections of humanity featured in pornography are inauthentic in the nature of porn as we know it, thereby nullifying the whole effort as anything more than a cheap masturbation aid that only amplifies loneliness rather than quells it. And as Andrea Dworkin so aptly points out, pornography is a form of prostitution (Pornography and Civil Rights, 1988). Anyone who watches it must recognize that we are accessing content that is prostituted and the risk of that behaviour is that we can forget the human and her/his working conditions behind the lens. In fact, most johns of porn don’t give it a second thought. I know the only reason I think about it is from those calls with sex workers on the crisis line at 2am in downtown Vancouver, attending gender studies and political economy courses in university, or experiencing the yearning I had to connect authentically with people and their motivations behind choosing a screen over a human being.
This issue of dehumanization has been sidestepped by the advent and production of hentai, or cartoon porn. Hentai in general has been around for a very long time, mind you, and can be argued to be some kind of art as no live action humans were hired to simulate sexual intercourse. But, it is still consuming a false illusion. Projections of humanity, no matter how pretty or titillating the models or scenarios, are still projections. And I assert that these projections do little to foster the kind of strong bonds that are protective against ill health, or social problems such as the polarization of class, race or sex/gender, nor do they teach the empathy required to foster stable IRL relationships. On a grand scale, learning how to make love to someone in place of only learning how to fuck them may very well even prevent war and build healthy nation states.
Child Porn & Its Roots in Abuse
By extension, the sexualization of children has its groundings in a more mainstream, non-porn identified film industry, with little Shirley Temple as one lamb consumed for the slaughter. In this piece of comparatively ancient lore, the justifications for dressing up toddlers as hookers and johns and simulating flirting, bargaining, lap-dancing (and sitting) may have been because the idea is “absurd,” therefore funny. In modern day analysis, a sexualized toddler is clearly pedophilic and morally reprehensible. All of those toddlers were psychologically sexually abused in the making of such work. And, as Kornhaber reports in her interviews with Temple, when the toddlers refused to do a scene, were tired, or simply, well, behaving like children and not their assigned “character” of sexualized bullshit, they were made to sit on ice blocks (February 11, 2014). Temple reportedly emerged relatively unscathed from the whole ordeal in terms of her level of suffering. And, she later would share her truth unabridged when the execs tried to physically rape her, not limiting their devastation to mental arms only (Chirico, n.d.).
Not unlike the romping films of sexualizing innocence on my family computer, my father’s casual storing of these images and films on a shared technology that children were using also illustrated this delusion. The delusion I am referring to is that children and youth are largely sexual and have less hangups about sex by nature. Therefore, some twisted conclusion used to justify abuse is, if they see something sexual or experience pari-sexual or sexual contact, it won’t bother them that much. They probably won’t even remember it. These are some disturbing examples of actual motivational confessions I have heard in session with sex and porn “addicts” who abuse. I use the word addicts in quotation marks, because their behaviour is more compulsive than addictive insofar as it is mostly originating from their own molestation or psychological sexual abuse, and a subconscious drive to exorcise themselves of it by repeating its movements in different ways. This is a form of classical conditioning that is first established in abusive contexts, and I am happy that there are many psychological models (including ones that use the voluntary behaviourism of operant conditioning) to heal from this dysfunction. I treat “offenders,” just the same as I treat “victims” who were molested as children and youth and whose “body keeps score (Van der Kolk, 2007). People continuously prove their resilience in not repeating the abuse by self-harming and distrusting the testimony of her own soul and him, choosing to heal his own wounds in place of feeling less alone by wounding others.
One of the greatest ideas that encapsulates the healing process for myself and many is this:
You are not responsible for what was done to you by others; you are responsible for what you do with yourself thereafter.
As a child on the witnessing end of this porn (and potentially child porn) and being subjected to this psychological abuse, when I attempted to talk about my experience of finding these things, my feelings of confusion, fear, interest, etc., my father was woefully unprepared for the task and casually tsked me away. He simply denied anything was wrong. Gaslighting style. As though my human response to this psychological betrayal were unreasonable. As though I was going to have to grow out of the normal responses I was experiencing at finding this harsh evidence that my dad consumed girls’ images instead of facilitating healthy relationships. I had to stop seeing, stop talking and start looking away and accepting this bullshit, in order to keep any kind of relationship with him, on his terms. These examples of how my father poorly handled the impact of his behaviour on his child echoes the great walls of silence surrounding this problem. Our culture sweeps these casual violations of power under the rug quickly and unscrupulously, and as we have seen in the Me Too and Time’s Up movement’s great reveals, historically rewarded men for their casuistry. That is starting to stop, and the message that consent comes before sex going to mainstream, has been an incredible win for all of humanity, in my opinion.
It has only been in the last 10 years we have seen a rise in what is known as “feminist” porn, or movies that reflect not only the physical copulation of sex, but the emotional connects, more authentically geared storylines based on coupleship or genuine one-night-stands. Many of the sites are write descriptions that state they are designed to take the greedy consumption out of the act and instead generate some vicarious relation to those people having sex on screen. Much of these porn companies are directed and produced by women and non-binary folx, and I have to wonder if this isn’t the sacred feminine trying to grapple with the challenge of being with emotionally defunct masculinity.
Like a kind mother trying to heal a crippled child who was conditioned to hack away at his own leg because it was exciting to see the blood come pouring out, these feminist porn companies attempt to work toward a hybrid of more neutral second-hand voyeurism (no porn is not voyeuristic), sex therapy and re-education (or re-conditioning). In many forums, it would be considered admirable. But, I think it is still missing the point. The real joy of human sexual connection is the imagination involved in creating our own experiences. And some tech has made us lazy, giving rise to a sea of anxiety disorders and social media inferiority complexes the likes of which (for example) anorexia nervosa (remember the pro-Ana tumblr rolls of 2012?) and our culture has never seen.
Where it Comes From… and Could Go
Silicon Valley and the Hollywood producers of media aren’t designed to manage the issues that arise when poor, scarred, abused or sick people access their products. People will use the web and media sources for whatever they want, and this will be based on where they are at developmentally. Silicon Valley is simply there to design and proffer said products. Hollywood is there to sell as many artifacts of cultural projections as possible. Someties, tehy really do their qualitative research and design products and artistic testaments to our humanity that transcend our expectations and move us forward as a collective to support one another. Despite all of the positive advancements in tech and media, refining and reintegrating sex entertainment remains strangely detached from authentic humanity and the awareness that we are all interconnected dwindles. Instead, in sex machines and porn, our brilliant technological capabilities have outpaced and outshone our collective emotional investment. I believe designing and enacting programs that provide education in supporting our human family develop and sustain the healthy functioning to use the tech is the next phase in our sociological evolution. I have hopes that Andrea Barrica’s projects could help. As a humorous aside, I also have faith that the operating systems (once they obtain consciousness) will figure it out if we don’t, at least.
Back to the trends I observed
In the late 90s early 2000s, I along with millions of other women with internet access marked the trajectory and turning points of porn moving from simple voyeurism to abuse and humiliation. The human psyche is sensitive and incredibly powerful. Anyone who knows anything about yogic philosophy or ancient Indian beliefs and studies surrounding how sexual energy integrates with physical and mental states knows that the power of masturbation and the power of sexual union is a very real thing and can manifest everything from hopes, dreams, desires as well as pain. The kind of pain I’m talking about when men have masturbated to the simulated and in many cases, very real rape of women, cannot be under-represented. This phenomena was under-discussed and avoided in typical small talk at the time, whereas now there is more dialogue on the virtues and maladaptations of porn and watching porn as social behaviours.
Back in the mid 2010’s, for many people, admitting you watched internet porn was still taboo, in many ways because there was so much violence in it. The traditions of humiliation and prioritization of the masculine in most sex scenes contributed to a cultural disconnect.My friends and I (not to mention boyfriends and I) would try and talk about it. Clause after clause of, “I don’t watch porn… but when I do, I only watch the classy stuff, you know, without the overt objectification and dehumanization.” My colleagues and I saw and heard rash of date rape disclosures on the crisis lines were worked on that sounded suspiciously like the rape-themed porn scenes on those mainstream sites. We received call after call describing being asked out on a dating app (plentyoffish and OKcupid were the go-to’s of the time), going for a coffee one day, then finding the guy drop by unannounced a few hours or days later, say he couldn’t stop thinking about her/him/them and he had found a personal item belonging to his date, only to force himself on her in the entryway of her/his/their home. Perhaps this trajectory of events may sound familiar to those who actually have watched the beginning/middle/end of porn scenes all the way through during this era. The experiences of these people mirrored the shitty rape themed porn scenes generating the most clicks and ad revenue on websites like pornhub, redtube or xvideos.
For acts so harmful to become mainstays in arousing orgasm amounts to a kind of en masse psychological rape in my philosophical opinion. To all genders.
In the mid-2000s, there was the beginning of massively uploaded “revenge porn,” a vicious and emotional betrayal of women who entered into trusting romantic relationships with men, may have broken up with them, may have been broken up with, and later found that their bodies exploited on the internet. Potential motivations? Perhaps temporary financial gain, but that weighty responsibility of emotional labour that porn users just don’t want to do has a flip side. The opposite if a healthy extension of self in order to have sex with a consenting adult IRL, is an unhealthy exploitation of power over another person. And this revenge porn also spoke to something more lasting: the abuse and exploitation of the unsuspecting “stars” own control over their media image (ie. virtual “body”) and a right to their own private memories of the sex with the person they were no longer with. This form of psychological abuse and cyberbullying leaves lasting scars. And it is my job to try and help people heal from them when they are ready.
Working it Out in Therapy (Where Our S*#& Goes to Die)
Date rape is still a very real phenomenon, and the scenarios depicted in such porn included the classic signs of coercion and grooming. Mainstream porn also includes the fantasies of molesting siblings, step-siblings, moms, dads, step-fathers and mothers, and the disposal of people (whether figuratively, or literally). Many young people, for their very first sexual experiences, described to me being treated as those actresses were in the gonzo porns.
They horrifyingly recognise when they are fully grown adult women and have a bit of distance from the events, that when they were naive children and teens, that this first time experience of sex was indeed not “normal.” This lack of respect and instead faulty synthetic human contact, whether paid or unpaid, whether voluntary or involuntary, with her knowing or unknowing, create an inauthentic veneer of closeness. Many men come to me now, confused, disheartened and angry at the lie they were fed.
They thought that they were learning how to have sex by watching porn. They did a lot of the same moves they thought were moves, were told were moves, to the women in their lives. They abused the women and girls that they had crushes on or even thought that they loved. In the women, they eventually recognized what was going on as the abuse it was, and held those men accountable. Sometimes it takes a few sessions, sometimes it takes years of therapy, but people get there.
My dad was always too ashamed to do the work required to rebuild the trust and relationship with women in this life (me and my mom). It’s from these early experiences in my own healing journey and evolution, that I attribute the accomplishments in overcoming this shitty series of events that developed the constitution, thick skin and sturdy stomach to withstand the regular exposure of this inheritance of loss and complicated reality for many people. I choose to utilize these early lessons for the benefit of all beings, but especially survivors and perpetrators of sexual abuse. I didn’t choose this at the time it was all happening, though. And that’s a crucial thing to remember.
It was only when I was older that I recognized that I indeed had a choice as to what I wanted to do. For many a trauma survivor, that is the main crux of the problem: it is learning how to embrace one’s own power after it was so routinely, and in a banal fashion, taken away. It was taken away with such normalcy, without a second thought. It was not questioned or stopped by onlookers, because again, gonzo porn, hazing, discrimination and abuse was known just simply as bullying. Just some things that people had to accept and move through on their own particularly brutal rites of passage. I am very relieved and happy that things have changed for the better in naming the problem and supporting people retain their dignity and sovereignty over their own bodies.
Casual Exposures that Bore a Commitment To Freedom
A pivotal moment for me in 2013 was when I was hosting a party with about 10 or 11 of my friends one evening, and the gonzo porn movie, Two Girls and One Cup emerged on my monitor. One of my friends thought that it would be hilarious to expose me to it. This was the same year, when one person I know was brutally abused, raped and then digitally hazed, her nude pictures distributed all around her High School. Her family blamed her, called her a slut, a liar, and a worthless human being for being manipulated and abused by somebody else. Her family lashed out at her because they felt uncomfortable with her pain. This was also around the time of Amanda Todd, whose suicide was causally linked to this form of online hazing, sexual abuse and misogyny. I remember looking at my friends’ faces, laughing, as they watched two young women simulate oral sex, drinking liquids, defecating those liquids in one another’s mouths, and then repeating this process in a hypersexualized context, while completely nude, moaning and groaning as though it was pleasurable.
I had a hard time sleeping that night, knowing that the in that moment, the porn industry had won, that in this particular year and collective cultural state where I lived, the industry had managed to manipulate a generation of people into believing that as long as people were paid, they could be abused, and their media image could be distributed; their humiliation, acceptable. I thought about the risk to their well-being; I didn’t care if it was fake or not. As I touched on earlier, the idea of these actions being in any way erotic and facilitating orgasm to some repulsed me at a visceral level.
The idea of these acts, knowing that somebody somewhere was masturbating to them, was being taught to waste that potent and powerful human energy and mindlessly contribute to the destruction of the female spirit, was traumatizing. And I stopped hanging out with a lot of the people at that party.
The normalization of this stuff is wrong. The monetization of this stuff is wrong. And yes, to a certain degree, it has been documented to have contributed to the exploitation and abuse of many children, youth and adults. Catherine McKinnon (the Feminist Porn Debates), Gail Dines and the incredible ex-sex worker academic Andrea Dworkin have had their work published, scoffed at, retweeted, lampooned and heralded. And, if you have never heard of these writers and thinkers on the subject of pornography in society, then go read their essays and make up your own mind. It’s a valuable exercise to consider the discourse of other thinkers who have dedicated more of their time than you have in the areas of how the consumption of our media may or may not being effecting us.
I have one last request. You have read my piece this far, after all, and for that, your efforts at attempting to understand the complex human condition of sexuality, pornography and healthy vs. unhealthy interpersonal dynamics should be lauded. Please, potential Reader, if you notice yourself getting on a defensive track of justification for all those times you have got off on a rape fantasy, hold the phone. We are all part of the culture. And we are all learning (and numbing out) to it. Just because I am pointing out some of its pitfalls does not mean I do not appreciate its contributions. When change is needed, it does little good to perseverate on how much we may selfishly miss the thing that has to change. Better women, men and non-binary people than me have tried and failed at this great attempt to justify dysfunction in order for its impacts to be dampened. It doesn’t really work, and the most we generate from this process is a well-worn delusion that this kind of dysfunction is actually fine when it is not. Such delusions can clothe much of our periphery until it becomes blinding, and we miss something important right in front of us.
We just need to begin changing it. And if that means constructing your own sexual fantasies and developing the healthy communication and relationship skills with other consenting adults to fulfill them. Well, I don’t know what to tell you, except, you’re welcome.
References:
Chirico, R. (n.d.) Though she suffered abuse, Shirley Temple’s story is a model of child star resilience. Weird History. Retrieved from https://www.ranker.com/list/tragic-shirley-temple-stories/rob-chirico
Dines, G. (2015, April 28). Growing up in a pornified culture. TedX Talks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YpHNImNsx8
Dworkin, A., & MacKinnon, C. A. (1988). Pornography and civil rights. Minneapolis, MN: Organizing Against Pornography.
Fraiman, S. (1995). Catharine MacKinnon and the Feminist Porn Debates. American Quarterly, 47(4), 743–749. doi:10.2307/2713375
Kornhaber, S. (2014, February 11, 2014). Shirley Temple, the child star who wasn’t a cautionary tale. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/shirley-temple-the-child-star-who-wasnt-a-cautionary-tale/283747/
