Due to our busy schedule, we had to postpone the June discussion group to 24 July and this time we read the 2010 book Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality by Gail Dines.
We didn’t really prepare or note down any discussion points for this one. David opened the session by saying that he felt that the book was better than he expected in the sense that he felt that Gail Dines at times comes across somewhat dogmatic or black & white on her social media account. He felt that Pornland however was very different and praised it as a great introductory book not just into the history of the US porn industry, but also for Dines’ use of examples in highlighting the exploitation, racism, sexism and misogyny in porn.
Whilst Dines’ explores a number of pornographic themes in detail, it would have been interesting to understand her thoughts on a number of themes that were not addressed in the book and how she feels they fit into the wider pornographic landscape she layed out. Björn felt that one obvious omission was MILF (mother I’d like/love to fuck) pornography popularised in 1999 through the first American Pie film or other pornography focussing on older rather than younger women.
Seeing that the book came out in 2010, Chris reflected on how much worse things have gotten in terms of accessing pornography, particularly through social media channels like TikTok, Twitter (‘X’) and the like. We considered the technological developments that had fast-tracked the proliferation of online pornography in the last 13 years in a similar vein to how Dines had done in the book. Nowadays of course many more people had smartphones with much larger data plans and most services had an app. These factors and the rise in mobile phone use in younger people all means that pornography can be accessed faster, more often and of course at younger ages. On that point Robbie pointed out that there was no structure that has been put in place, by governments or service providers / businesses to limit access to pornography. As an example he mentioned the ease of finding pornography on services like Twitter. We also considered other technological advances like robotics and AI, which in turn have led to developments like sex robots, something that is explored in detail in Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance by Caitlin Roper (another book on our long list of books to read).
Despite agreeing that it was an excellent book Robbie felt that for him the book wasn’t providing enough context (i.e. how do the 420 million porn pages, 4,2 million porn sites and 68 million search requests for porn daily (p.47) relate to the total number of pages, sites and search engine requests. Robbie felt he would also have appreciated a definition of pornography that everyone knew exactly what we were talking about. He pointed out that we all know what hardcore porn is, but wondered where does it start.
In chapter 7 ‘Racy Sex, Sexy Racism: Porn from the Dark Side’ it seems that Dines for the first time acknowledges and observes that what is missing from porn are the faces of the men. She makes this point when talking about an Asian porn performer called Rick:
A little later in the chapter Dines says:
These two excerpts may point to one appeal of pornography that the book did not clearly focus on, namely how the application of the male gaze hooks men in. One has to wonder whether part of the power of pornography is that it mainly utilises one of the three perspectives of the male gaze in the majority of scenes involving sex: that of the male character(s) within the film’s representations. In other words porn is filmed from a first-person perspective much like a FPS (first-person shooter) video game, which might be one of the reasons why porn is so ‘appealing’ or ‘addictive’ for men. Whilst watching porn they are not simply watching men having (often abusive, violent and degrading) sex with women, they are watching / imagining / fantasising themselves doing that and hardwiring that straight into their brains ‘reward system’. To many this will sound like an extreme point of view and perhaps it is, so let’s think a bit further on that using Dines’ analysis from the later chapter ‘Children: The Final Taboo’. In this chapter Dines explores the links and similarities between pseudo-child pornography (PCP) and child pornography. One of the things that really stood out in that chapter was Dines’ description of how PCP that includes penetrative sexual activity contains:
Together with a number of other observations Dines made in the book about how pornographers focus on depicting the women as ‘complicit’ in the usually brutal penetrative sex (i.e. enjoying it, wanting it, needing it, screaming for more etc.) these two factors might make a powerful contribution in men’s justification that this complicity is reality. Not only because it is easier, but also because the first-person view of what is going on makes men much more personally and closely involved and to believe that that was anything but consensual might create so much cognitive dissonance that denial (i.e. believing the woman or girl consented, is complicit etc.) is the only solution.
From a personal point of view, as men who have used pornography Robbie was struck by Dines’ descriptions of desensitisation where men had moved to more violent and more abusive porn, the fetishisation of young looking women in pseudo-child pornography or even child pornography. It was something that he felt he did not recognise in his own use of pornography, which led to questions about what causes this desensitisation in some men and why this is something that may not apply to all men. We also spoke about porn culture and how this has infiltrated all aspects of our lives that are full of sexualised and objectified women and girls. Björn noted how whilst almost all of the descriptions of sexual acts in the book felt uncomfortable and off-putting to him due to their overt objectification and violence, some felt neutral or in some way more appealing. He pointed out that the context of these descriptions having some sort of pull and likened it to how his reaction to romantic or sexual scenes in mainstream films very much depends on the visual representation and the context. Reading the book made Björn realise how much his mind had been primed by years of watching pornography and living in Pornland. How the fact that women are usually seen through an opportunistic, exploitative, coercive and / or objectifying man’s gaze is something he had grown accustomed to and trained himself to respond to in a sexually aroused way. Of course we all have a responsibility on how we respond to that and what we do with that arousal. At the same time, understanding the mechanisms behind it and being able to let go of some of the shame this is attached to will in the long run facilitate change.
The discussion then took a bit of a side-track, departing from the content of the book, to us wondering what would be the most effective way to combat the porn industry’s reach and impact. Whilst we recognised he importance of research into pornography and pornography use by children in shaping legislation, education and this in turn informing the curriculum we are also aware that this would not necessarily result in relationship & sex education that is anti-porn and against the exploitation of women and girls. Recent concerns surrounding inappropriate sex education and parent’s lack of insight into what their children are being taught exemplify this.
At this point in the discussion Chris raised the important question whether kids are actually more likely to listen and to be influenced by a teacher who is teaching ten lessons for 1 hour a week as part of a curriculum or whether children will be more influenced by the views, opinions and behaviours of their peer groups and any online groups and communities they may be part of. When put like this, we recognised that the impact a curriculum will have is probably quite limited, especially when bearing in mind that quite a lot of young people will already have been influenced and shaped by their peers by the time the first lesson takes place.
In terms of sex and relationship education, Björn felt that this always seems to be lagging too far behind what is actually going on in children’s lives. He pointed out that even in 1998/1999 when he had unbridled access to internet pornography already, this was simply something that no parent, teacher or other adult ever talked to him about. What is worse, it seems that things have not moved on. When reflecting on an event where Björn and Chris spoke to boys and girls from a number of different schools, he said that quite a few young people pointed out that the schooling they are getting on this subject simply isn’t relevant as it is outdated and their knowledge is already beyond what is being taught. Chris also reflected on the difficulty on getting pornography onto a curriculum as there would very likely be an outcry from parents – despite the fact that 10% of 9-year olds and 27% of 11 year-olds have seen pornography. It seems perhaps that we as adults are too uncomfortable to talk to our children about it.
Continuing on the education Robbie feels that there may be mileage in educating children of the negative and vert real side-effects of watching porn, like erectile dysfunction. Chris agreed that this kind of approach, appealing to the self-interest of men and boys, could be a real game changer and much more effective than the focus on the exploitation, subjugation and abuse of women in porn which could be perceived as a much more moralistic standpoint.
Björn also wondered about the additional value of educators like Gail Dines (USA), Daniel Principe (Australia) or Laura Bates (UK) coming to schools and talking to children and young people about these and other issues. Children and young people may be much more likely to listen to an outside adult, who is able to talk and engage with the kids in a different way and who is only there for that. Talks and events like that are likely to reduce the discomfort young people probably feel asking questions of a teacher who they are going to see for the next few years and who maybe even lives in the same town they do. Also, educators and speakers will seem as having much less of an agenda than teachers. Again of course, the question of how much one or a couple of talks is a complex one, but it might be a welcome addition to the school curriculum. Chris added that in terms of getting children to speak and discuss sexuality it may also be helpful to enable anonymous discussions, where children can really talk about what is going on for them.
After the discussion about children, David posed the question of how we felt about the legislation approach in terms of combating pornography. Did we think that this would actually be helpful and effective. We quickly agreed that in a lot of ways people who really wanted to watch it could find a way around it. When Chris brought up the fact that some hotel chains do not allow access to pornography via their TVs or WiFi networks, Robbie rightfully said people could just watch it on their phones using mobile data. David felt that legislation affecting the accessibility of pornography would put some very effective obstacles in place and also would send a powerful cultural message that pornography and the abuse and exploitation of women and girls is not the default. Björn agreed that this would probably be initially the most effective in reducing consumption of porn and used the example of how new legislation in Virginia led to Pornhub closing down in that state with the pornographers scrambling to mobilise porn users to get that law overturned.
Robbie raised the problem of the Free Speech Coalition (p. 142) that Dines highlighted in the book and that lobbies on behalf of the porn industry. In 2002 they were successful in changing a law on child pornography so that the definition only covers images involving someone who is actually under 18 (rather than it also applying to images involving someone who appears to be under 18) and how this has enabled the rise of PCP and ‘opened up another market / fetish’ and more women for pornographers to exploit. Robbie felt that it’s quite a difficult playing field for individuals and groups to try and reverse or challenge a ruling like that due to the amount of money the porn industry has behind them and we briefly discussed the idea of government involvement again and how for instance counties like China are very good at controlling what people can and can’t access. However, when governments get involved there are often fears of this going to far and ‘civilised’ countries like the UK or the USA becoming dictatorships. Using these kinds of concerns to justify doing nothing however is a red herring. Governments always make us do things we do not want to do, like pay taxes, drive at a certain speed, not drink before a certain age etc. By allowing scare tactics of ‘government control and dictatorships to shift our focus, we might actually be taking our attention away from one of the most efficient solutions available to curb the porn industry – do government tells us – pay taxes etc. Again the example of Virgina.
From there our discussion moved on to the question of whether any form of objectification is per se ‘bad’ and if not where the line is. Lingerie catalogues? Erotica? Is there such a thing as feminist pornography? This of course is a huge subject where a lot of different aspects have to be taken into account, like consent but also the intent of the material. Is it for instance relational or transactional – i.e. are people for instance filming each other making love in an equal, respectful and consensual way and someone is looking at this without money being involved or is it something that is transactional where the women and men are paid and the user pays to ‘get off’ and the content is geared to whatever enables the user to do so. This part of the discussion was quite difficult and we did not really come to a conclusion regarding the question if all objectification is bad. What we did recognise is that once objectification, sexualisation, sexual exploitation and pornography are out there and accepted in the way they are it’s pretty impossible to undo all of that and that in the certain climate men will probably use whatever there is for their sexual gratification. In terms of feminist porn, there are of course books and films out there promoting this. Chris was not sure that this genre was a possibly acceptable genre of pornography, whilst David pointed out that if there is a sort of ‘approved porn’ the appeal of that will go away and men will get fed up looking for ‘new’ and ‘more exciting’ porn, because a lot of the appeal of pornography is its forbidden angle. Björn agreed and wondered whether this was also to do about the power that is so embedded in pornography. The men being able to get what they want regardless the cost and nobody being able to tell them what they can and can’t do or what is wrong and what is right.
The meeting ended on a somewhat somber note with Robbie pointing out that the conclusion to the book felt rather depressing. Dines had very little to offer besides education, small group organising and getting more men involved and there was little to inspire hope. It makes you wonder whether this was part of the reason that drove Dines to write this book. To show people how big this juggernaut is, how we’ve allowed it to seep into every aspect of our lives and how hard it now is to put this powerful genie back into its bottle.
We didn’t really prepare or note down any discussion points for this one. David opened the session by saying that he felt that the book was better than he expected in the sense that he felt that Gail Dines at times comes across somewhat dogmatic or black & white on her social media account. He felt that Pornland however was very different and praised it as a great introductory book not just into the history of the US porn industry, but also for Dines’ use of examples in highlighting the exploitation, racism, sexism and misogyny in porn.
Whilst Dines’ explores a number of pornographic themes in detail, it would have been interesting to understand her thoughts on a number of themes that were not addressed in the book and how she feels they fit into the wider pornographic landscape she layed out. Björn felt that one obvious omission was MILF (mother I’d like/love to fuck) pornography popularised in 1999 through the first American Pie film or other pornography focussing on older rather than younger women.
Seeing that the book came out in 2010, Chris reflected on how much worse things have gotten in terms of accessing pornography, particularly through social media channels like TikTok, Twitter (‘X’) and the like. We considered the technological developments that had fast-tracked the proliferation of online pornography in the last 13 years in a similar vein to how Dines had done in the book. Nowadays of course many more people had smartphones with much larger data plans and most services had an app. These factors and the rise in mobile phone use in younger people all means that pornography can be accessed faster, more often and of course at younger ages. On that point Robbie pointed out that there was no structure that has been put in place, by governments or service providers / businesses to limit access to pornography. As an example he mentioned the ease of finding pornography on services like Twitter. We also considered other technological advances like robotics and AI, which in turn have led to developments like sex robots, something that is explored in detail in Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance by Caitlin Roper (another book on our long list of books to read).
Despite agreeing that it was an excellent book Robbie felt that for him the book wasn’t providing enough context (i.e. how do the 420 million porn pages, 4,2 million porn sites and 68 million search requests for porn daily (p.47) relate to the total number of pages, sites and search engine requests. Robbie felt he would also have appreciated a definition of pornography that everyone knew exactly what we were talking about. He pointed out that we all know what hardcore porn is, but wondered where does it start.
In chapter 7 ‘Racy Sex, Sexy Racism: Porn from the Dark Side’ it seems that Dines for the first time acknowledges and observes that what is missing from porn are the faces of the men. She makes this point when talking about an Asian porn performer called Rick:
“the porn performer goes to great lengths to conceal his racial identity. In every still image on the site he hides his face, sometimes to the point of chopping off the top of the picture, or even blocking out his head. In the movies, his face is buried in the body of the woman…or the camera is held at an angle that conceals his face. Although it is the norm in heterosexual porn to minimise the images of the male performer, perhaps for fear that the sight will make the viewer uncomfortable while watching (and possibly enjoying) another male become aroused, this site takes it to an extreme.”
Gail Dines – Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality (p. 132-133)
A little later in the chapter Dines says:
“black men are more reduced to their penis than any other group of men.” Gail Dines – Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality (p. 136)
These two excerpts may point to one appeal of pornography that the book did not clearly focus on, namely how the application of the male gaze hooks men in. One has to wonder whether part of the power of pornography is that it mainly utilises one of the three perspectives of the male gaze in the majority of scenes involving sex: that of the male character(s) within the film’s representations. In other words porn is filmed from a first-person perspective much like a FPS (first-person shooter) video game, which might be one of the reasons why porn is so ‘appealing’ or ‘addictive’ for men. Whilst watching porn they are not simply watching men having (often abusive, violent and degrading) sex with women, they are watching / imagining / fantasising themselves doing that and hardwiring that straight into their brains ‘reward system’. To many this will sound like an extreme point of view and perhaps it is, so let’s think a bit further on that using Dines’ analysis from the later chapter ‘Children: The Final Taboo’. In this chapter Dines explores the links and similarities between pseudo-child pornography (PCP) and child pornography. One of the things that really stood out in that chapter was Dines’ description of how PCP that includes penetrative sexual activity contains:
“techniques aimed at authenticating the supposed consensual loss of virginity.”
Gail Dines – Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality (p.149)
Together with a number of other observations Dines made in the book about how pornographers focus on depicting the women as ‘complicit’ in the usually brutal penetrative sex (i.e. enjoying it, wanting it, needing it, screaming for more etc.) these two factors might make a powerful contribution in men’s justification that this complicity is reality. Not only because it is easier, but also because the first-person view of what is going on makes men much more personally and closely involved and to believe that that was anything but consensual might create so much cognitive dissonance that denial (i.e. believing the woman or girl consented, is complicit etc.) is the only solution.
From a personal point of view, as men who have used pornography Robbie was struck by Dines’ descriptions of desensitisation where men had moved to more violent and more abusive porn, the fetishisation of young looking women in pseudo-child pornography or even child pornography. It was something that he felt he did not recognise in his own use of pornography, which led to questions about what causes this desensitisation in some men and why this is something that may not apply to all men. We also spoke about porn culture and how this has infiltrated all aspects of our lives that are full of sexualised and objectified women and girls. Björn noted how whilst almost all of the descriptions of sexual acts in the book felt uncomfortable and off-putting to him due to their overt objectification and violence, some felt neutral or in some way more appealing. He pointed out that the context of these descriptions having some sort of pull and likened it to how his reaction to romantic or sexual scenes in mainstream films very much depends on the visual representation and the context. Reading the book made Björn realise how much his mind had been primed by years of watching pornography and living in Pornland. How the fact that women are usually seen through an opportunistic, exploitative, coercive and / or objectifying man’s gaze is something he had grown accustomed to and trained himself to respond to in a sexually aroused way. Of course we all have a responsibility on how we respond to that and what we do with that arousal. At the same time, understanding the mechanisms behind it and being able to let go of some of the shame this is attached to will in the long run facilitate change.
The discussion then took a bit of a side-track, departing from the content of the book, to us wondering what would be the most effective way to combat the porn industry’s reach and impact. Whilst we recognised he importance of research into pornography and pornography use by children in shaping legislation, education and this in turn informing the curriculum we are also aware that this would not necessarily result in relationship & sex education that is anti-porn and against the exploitation of women and girls. Recent concerns surrounding inappropriate sex education and parent’s lack of insight into what their children are being taught exemplify this.
At this point in the discussion Chris raised the important question whether kids are actually more likely to listen and to be influenced by a teacher who is teaching ten lessons for 1 hour a week as part of a curriculum or whether children will be more influenced by the views, opinions and behaviours of their peer groups and any online groups and communities they may be part of. When put like this, we recognised that the impact a curriculum will have is probably quite limited, especially when bearing in mind that quite a lot of young people will already have been influenced and shaped by their peers by the time the first lesson takes place.
In terms of sex and relationship education, Björn felt that this always seems to be lagging too far behind what is actually going on in children’s lives. He pointed out that even in 1998/1999 when he had unbridled access to internet pornography already, this was simply something that no parent, teacher or other adult ever talked to him about. What is worse, it seems that things have not moved on. When reflecting on an event where Björn and Chris spoke to boys and girls from a number of different schools, he said that quite a few young people pointed out that the schooling they are getting on this subject simply isn’t relevant as it is outdated and their knowledge is already beyond what is being taught. Chris also reflected on the difficulty on getting pornography onto a curriculum as there would very likely be an outcry from parents – despite the fact that 10% of 9-year olds and 27% of 11 year-olds have seen pornography. It seems perhaps that we as adults are too uncomfortable to talk to our children about it.
Continuing on the education Robbie feels that there may be mileage in educating children of the negative and vert real side-effects of watching porn, like erectile dysfunction. Chris agreed that this kind of approach, appealing to the self-interest of men and boys, could be a real game changer and much more effective than the focus on the exploitation, subjugation and abuse of women in porn which could be perceived as a much more moralistic standpoint.
Björn also wondered about the additional value of educators like Gail Dines (USA), Daniel Principe (Australia) or Laura Bates (UK) coming to schools and talking to children and young people about these and other issues. Children and young people may be much more likely to listen to an outside adult, who is able to talk and engage with the kids in a different way and who is only there for that. Talks and events like that are likely to reduce the discomfort young people probably feel asking questions of a teacher who they are going to see for the next few years and who maybe even lives in the same town they do. Also, educators and speakers will seem as having much less of an agenda than teachers. Again of course, the question of how much one or a couple of talks is a complex one, but it might be a welcome addition to the school curriculum. Chris added that in terms of getting children to speak and discuss sexuality it may also be helpful to enable anonymous discussions, where children can really talk about what is going on for them.
After the discussion about children, David posed the question of how we felt about the legislation approach in terms of combating pornography. Did we think that this would actually be helpful and effective. We quickly agreed that in a lot of ways people who really wanted to watch it could find a way around it. When Chris brought up the fact that some hotel chains do not allow access to pornography via their TVs or WiFi networks, Robbie rightfully said people could just watch it on their phones using mobile data. David felt that legislation affecting the accessibility of pornography would put some very effective obstacles in place and also would send a powerful cultural message that pornography and the abuse and exploitation of women and girls is not the default. Björn agreed that this would probably be initially the most effective in reducing consumption of porn and used the example of how new legislation in Virginia led to Pornhub closing down in that state with the pornographers scrambling to mobilise porn users to get that law overturned.
Robbie raised the problem of the Free Speech Coalition (p. 142) that Dines highlighted in the book and that lobbies on behalf of the porn industry. In 2002 they were successful in changing a law on child pornography so that the definition only covers images involving someone who is actually under 18 (rather than it also applying to images involving someone who appears to be under 18) and how this has enabled the rise of PCP and ‘opened up another market / fetish’ and more women for pornographers to exploit. Robbie felt that it’s quite a difficult playing field for individuals and groups to try and reverse or challenge a ruling like that due to the amount of money the porn industry has behind them and we briefly discussed the idea of government involvement again and how for instance counties like China are very good at controlling what people can and can’t access. However, when governments get involved there are often fears of this going to far and ‘civilised’ countries like the UK or the USA becoming dictatorships. Using these kinds of concerns to justify doing nothing however is a red herring. Governments always make us do things we do not want to do, like pay taxes, drive at a certain speed, not drink before a certain age etc. By allowing scare tactics of ‘government control and dictatorships to shift our focus, we might actually be taking our attention away from one of the most efficient solutions available to curb the porn industry – do government tells us – pay taxes etc. Again the example of Virgina.
From there our discussion moved on to the question of whether any form of objectification is per se ‘bad’ and if not where the line is. Lingerie catalogues? Erotica? Is there such a thing as feminist pornography? This of course is a huge subject where a lot of different aspects have to be taken into account, like consent but also the intent of the material. Is it for instance relational or transactional – i.e. are people for instance filming each other making love in an equal, respectful and consensual way and someone is looking at this without money being involved or is it something that is transactional where the women and men are paid and the user pays to ‘get off’ and the content is geared to whatever enables the user to do so. This part of the discussion was quite difficult and we did not really come to a conclusion regarding the question if all objectification is bad. What we did recognise is that once objectification, sexualisation, sexual exploitation and pornography are out there and accepted in the way they are it’s pretty impossible to undo all of that and that in the certain climate men will probably use whatever there is for their sexual gratification. In terms of feminist porn, there are of course books and films out there promoting this. Chris was not sure that this genre was a possibly acceptable genre of pornography, whilst David pointed out that if there is a sort of ‘approved porn’ the appeal of that will go away and men will get fed up looking for ‘new’ and ‘more exciting’ porn, because a lot of the appeal of pornography is its forbidden angle. Björn agreed and wondered whether this was also to do about the power that is so embedded in pornography. The men being able to get what they want regardless the cost and nobody being able to tell them what they can and can’t do or what is wrong and what is right.
The meeting ended on a somewhat somber note with Robbie pointing out that the conclusion to the book felt rather depressing. Dines had very little to offer besides education, small group organising and getting more men involved and there was little to inspire hope. It makes you wonder whether this was part of the reason that drove Dines to write this book. To show people how big this juggernaut is, how we’ve allowed it to seep into every aspect of our lives and how hard it now is to put this powerful genie back into its bottle.
