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The Porning of America The Porning of America The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott beacon press boston Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 2008 by Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Text design and composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sarracino, Carmine The porning of America : the rise of porn culture, what it means, and where we go from here / Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8070-6153-4 1. Pornography in popular culture—United States. 2. Pornography—Social aspects—United States. 3. Sex in popular culture—United States. I. Scott, Kevin M. II. Title. HQ472.U6S37 2008 306.77—dc22 2008008099 To Tamara, Dante, and Carina Sarracino and Mary Ann, Connor, and Maisie Scott— for their patience, support, and encouragement. Contents Introduction ix 1 Normalizing the Marginal 1 2 A Nation of Porn Stars 31 3 Popping Rosie’s Rivets: Porn in the Good Old Days 49 4 Porn Exemplars: Advancing the Front Lines of Porn 81 5 Would You Like Porn with That Burger? 117 6 The Nexus of Porn and Violence: Abu Ghraib and Beyond 137 7 Women and Porn 169 8 Where We Go from Here 195 Acknowledgments 223 Notes 225 Index 235 Introduction As college professors, we usually write about subjects that we hold at arm’s length: objective, intellectual, dispassionate. But not so in this book. We are very much part of—involved in, living through—the phenomenon we describe as the porning of America. We are American males, husbands, and parents of small children, each of us the father of a girl and a boy. Strolling in the mall last week, one of us came upon something we had before only read about: thong underwear for little girls. The other recently saw his four-year-old daughter, enrapt, watching a television ad for Bratz dolls, which look remarkably like prostitutes.1 Our sons, eight and ten, pretend indiƒerence when such ads appear on their cartoon stations, but we have seen them stealing glimpses, and even ogling, eyes riveted, when they didn’t know they were being watched. How can we, as fathers who are ourselves sexual males, blame them? We too appreciate the allure of the female form and of sex. And we are thankful that our children will grow up in an at- mosphere of sexual freedom that will spare them most of the ig- norance, hypocrisy, and repression of earlier times. If guilt is disappearing from sensuality and sex, along with shame about the human body, we happily wave goodbye to all that. But what is com- ing in its place? ix x Introduction What has in fact already arrived is a culture increasingly being shaped by the dominant influence: porn. Porn has so thoroughly been absorbed into every aspect of our everyday lives—language, fashion, advertisements, movies, the Internet, music, magazines, television, video games—that it has almost ceased to exist as some- thing separate from the mainstream culture, something “out there.” That is, we no longer have to go to porn in order to get it. It is fil- tered to us, in some form, regardless of whether we want it or are even aware of it. If we want porn, the Playboy Channel brings it right into our living rooms. But even if we don’t want it, Paris Hilton, for one, brings it into our living rooms via, for example, a television ad for the fast food chain Carl’s Jr. in which Hilton—it can only be de- scribed this way—performs oral sex on a hamburger. (Shortly after the ad aired, the comedian David Spade remarked that while watching TV he saw a hamburger get to second base with Paris Hilton.) The Internet oƒers literally millions of porn sites to anyone who wants a peek. But it also oƒers peeks if you don’t want them. For example, one of us, in the weeks before Christmas a few years ago, with an eager kid on each knee, made the mistake of Googling “toys.” (And that was in the days when, as is less common now, a closed porn screen automatically launched one or two new porn screens, creating an impromptu video game in which one must click closed pop-ups faster than new ones can open—flashing butts and breasts!—while simultaneously elbowing kids oƒ one’s knees and shouting, “Daddy needs a minute here!”) For that matter, toys themselves have been, if not rendered pornographic, drafted into pornography’s service. Consider again the Bratz doll. The doll pictured here belongs to a line called Bratz Play Sportz, but it is di~cult to imagine any sport—outside of a pornographic video—that dresses young women in uniforms of thigh-high fishnets and stiletto heels (popularly called fuck-me Introduction xi Bratz doll. Kevin M. Scott pumps). Bratz dolls fundamentally redefine girlhood—and lead many parents to feel as if porn is hunting their daughters. Porn is everywhere in ordinary American life in 2008; indeed, in this book we show that porn is a cultural trend aƒecting all age groups, all races, and all classes, and that virtually every aspect of or- dinary day-to-day life is being shaped by porn. It’s not, then, so xii Introduction much that porn has become mainstream, which we often hear, as that the mainstream has become porned. Increasingly in America, we live porn in our daily lives. What are we to make of this development? Are we worse oƒ, for instance, than we were in earlier times, when pornography was consigned to the back alleys of our culture? The question is far from simple. In fact, it serves as a good entry point into the com- plexity of the porning phenomenon. For one thing, those earlier times, sometimes known as the good old days in America, are often sentimentalized. We forget, for instance, that in the nineteenth century boys were commonly told by trusted elders—ministers, fathers, grandfathers—that the sin of “self-pollution” would bring not only eternal damnation in the next world, but physical debility and even insanity in this one. They often sat through blood-chilling lectures that were part of antimasturbation moralist campaigns. Girls, for their part, were informed by their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts that women took no pleasure from sexual intercourse and bore with it simply to produce children. The only women who were exceptions to this rule were prostitutes, whose supposed abnormal sensuality led them to a disgraced life on the streets. Suƒering resulted from such sexual ignorance, repression, and hypocrisy. In 1856 Walt Whitman wrote the first poem in American literature dealing with masturbation, “Spontaneous Me,” trying to reassure young men and women that such irre- pressible urges were completely natural. Porn has always existed in some form in America, and it can be found in all the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. If nothing else, the universality of porn forces us to acknowledge a fundamental reality: men and women are, in fact, sexual creatures. And the more that porn has emerged from the shadows and back alleys, the more directly and honestly we as a culture have had to face our own sexuality and decide what we will make of it. Introduction xiii In America today, porn has blown away most of the old dodges and blinders. There are certainly exceptions depending on where one lives and whether one identifies with a religious faith, but it is more di~cult now than ever before, for instance, to maintain that pubescent boys and girls should never masturbate. Or that we ex- perience sexual desire only with our “one true love,” so that having sex (“making love”) becomes the proof positive of having found the chosen one we were destined to marry. Or that normal women have no sexual urges, a falsehood that has been falling away piece- meal over time—the sexual double standard being one of the last vestiges to begin to totter in our own day. Or, to cite another bit of sexual ignorance only now (when the elderly figure prominently on many porn websites) beginning to crumble: that past a certain age, perhaps sixty or seventy, men and women cease to exist as sex- ual beings. For all the minuses that exist, then, there is clearly a positive side to porn as well. But it’s di~cult to make an overall, blanket judgment about porn because the word itself is so imprecise, so vague, that two people arguing on opposite sides of the question might in fact not even be talking about the same thing. Studying porn for the past few years in preparation for this book, we realized almost immedi- ately that porn is not one thing. Porn is not, to put it this way, a sin- gle color but rather a whole spectrum. Therefore, its influences on the culture are similarly varied and complex. Some porn is clearly, unequivocally damaging, such as child pornography. As parents, we wish we could consign it not just to the back alleys, but to the back alleys of some distant planet.

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