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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— December 2009 - January 2010
The ready availability of pornography and sexual imagery
desensitises men to real women
n a o m i w o l f
the other night, I saw Andrea
Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous
in the eighties for her conviction that opening
the floodgates of pornography would lead men
to see real women in sexually debased ways. If
we did not limit pornography, she argued—be-
fore Internet technology made that prospect
a technical impossibility—most men would
come to objectify women as they objectified
porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a
kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES
and other kinds of sexual mayhem would
surely follow. The feminist warrior looked
gentle and almost frail. The world she had,
Cassandra-like, warned us about so passion-
ately was truly here: porn is, as David Amsden
says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was
she right or wrong? She was right about the
warning, wrong about the outcome. As she
foretold, pornography did breach the dike that
separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit
from the mainstream public arena. The whole
world, post-Internet, did become pornogra-
phised. Young men and women are indeed
being taught what sex is, how it looks, what
its etiquette and expectations are, by porno-
graphic training—and this is having a huge
effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into rav-
ing beasts. On the contrary: the onslaught of
porn is responsible for deadening male libido
in relation to real women, and leading men
to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-wor-
thy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed
young men, young women are worrying that
as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get,
let alone hold, their attention. Here is what
young women tell me on college campuses
when the subject comes up: they can’t com-
pete, and they know it. For how can a real
woman—with pores and her own breasts and
even sexual needs of her own (let alone with
speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big
stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision
of perfection, downloadable and extinguish-
able at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly
submissive and tailored to the consumer’s
least specification?
For most of human history, erotic images
have been reflections of, or celebrations of,
or substitutes for, real naked women. For the
first time in human history, the images’ power
and allure have supplanted that of real naked
women. Today, real naked women are just
bad porn. For two decades, I have watched
young women experience the continual “mis-
sion creep” of how pornography—and now
Internet pornography—has lowered their
sense of their own sexual value and their
actual sexual value. When I came of age in
the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able
to offer a young man the actual presence of
a naked, willing young woman. There were
more young men who wanted to be with naked
women than there were naked women on the
market. If there was nothing actively alarming
about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic
response by just showing up. Your boyfriend
may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could
move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty
“…college girls
are expected to
tease guys at
keg parties with
lesbian kisses à
la Britney and
Madonna”
Also in this section
Irish thinking
Paul McCartney
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES
— December 2009 - January 2010
Pornography
years ago, simple lovemaking was considered
erotic in the pornography that entered main-
stream consciousness: When Behind the Green
Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, mission-
ary-position intercourse was still considered
to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am , and mine is the last female
generation to experience that sense of sex-
ual confidence and security in what we had
to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete
with video porn in the eighties and nineties,
when intercourse was not hot enough. Now
you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—
the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face
scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to
be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the sur-
gically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini
wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the
-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the
twentysomethings have all been trimmed and
styled.) Pornography is addictive; the base-
line gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium,
a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a
pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist econ-
omists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely
registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream
porn—and certainly the Internet—made rou-
tine use of all available female orifices.
The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer
outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of
learning to strip from professionals; the “cool
girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even
ask for lap dances; college girls are expected
to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses
à la Britney and Madonna. But does all this
sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has
been liberated—or is it the case that the rela-
tionship between the multi-billion-dollar porn
industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appe-
tite has become like the relationship between
agribusiness, processed foods, supersize por-
tions, and obesity? If your appetite is stim-
ulated and fed by poor-quality material, it
takes more junk to fill you up. People are not
closer because of porn but further apart; peo-
ple are not more turned on in their daily lives
but less so. The young women who talk to me
on campuses about the effect of pornography
on their intimate lives speak of feeling that
they can never measure up, that they can never
ask for what they want; and that if they do not
offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to
hold a guy. The young men talk about what
it is like to grow up learning about sex from
porn, and how it is not helpful to them in try-
ing to figure out how to be with a real woman.
Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep,
sad silence descends on audiences of young
men and young women
alike. They know they
are lonely together, even
when conjoined, and that
this imagery is a big part
of that loneliness. What
they don’t know is how to
get out, how to find each
other again erotically,
face-to-face.
So Dworkin was right
that pornography is com-
pulsive, but she was wrong
in thinking it would make
men more rapacious. A
whole generation of men
are less able to connect erotically to wom-
en—and ultimately less libidinous. The rea-
son to turn off the porn might become, to
thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a
way, a physical, and emotional health, one;
you might want to rethink your constant
access to porn in the same way that, if you
want to be an athlete, you rethink your smok-
ing. The evidence is in: greater supply of the
stimulant equals diminished capacity. After
all, pornography works in the most basic of
ways on the brain, it is Pavlovian. An orgasm
is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable.
If you associate orgasm with your wife, a
kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time,
will turn you on; if you open your focus to an
endless stream of ever-more-transgressive
images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will
take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual
images does not free eros but dilutes it.
Other cultures know this. I am not advocat-
ing a return to the days of hiding female sexuality,
but I am noting that the power and charge of sex
are maintained when there is some sacredness
to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many
more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that
leads them to discourage men from looking at
pornography. It is, rather, because these cul-
tures understand male sexuality and what it
takes to keep men and women turned on to one
another over time—to help men, in particular,
to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with
the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee
at all times.” These cultures urge men not to
look at porn because they know that a powerful
erotic bond between parents is a key element of
a strong family. And feminists have misunder-
stood many of these prohibitions. I will never
forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who
had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When
I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and
T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could
not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and
curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your
hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in
there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my
husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence,
“ever gets to see my hair.”
When she showed me her little house in a
settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom,
draped in Middle Eastern embroideries that
she shares only with her husband—the kids are
not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was
archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a
feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have
ever picked up between secular couples in the
liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands
see naked women all day—in Times Square if
not on the Net. Her husband never even sees
another woman’s hair. She must feel, I thought,
so hot. Compare that steaminess with a conver-
sation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked
about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why
have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair
and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are
always a little tense and uncomfortable when
you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I pre-
fer to have sex right away just to get it over
with. You know it’s going to happen anyway,
and it gets rid of the tension.” “Isn’t the ten-
sion kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also
get rid of the mystery?” “Mystery?” He looked
at me blankly. And then, without hesitating,
he replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking
about. Sex has no mystery.”
This article was originall published in New York magazine,
and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
“Being naked is not enough;
you have to be buff, be tan
with no tan lines, have the
surgically hoisted breasts and
the Brazilian bikini wax—just
like porn stars”
Heritage
–
,
House pub stood on Wood
Quay - where Dublin’s Civic Offices now stand.
It vividly reflected the Romantic movement
that swept across Europe in the latter part of
the th Century. Its allegorical tale of consti-
tutional politics was depicted in flamboyant
style through the us of external stuccowork.
The two main figures who figured on the facade
were Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan. It
was built in and demolished in .
Dublin Civic Trust has published a series of
essays about it and is hosting an exhibition of
artefacts from the building.
Wood Quay, c. 1900
