Why are women so drawn to problem pages? Ever since I was young, I have recieved some kind of freakish enjoyment from other peoples problems. Unfortunately, I haven't grown up just yet. While reading one of my magazines, I came across yet another problem page. One problem titled, 'He looks at Porn', my first reaction to this was, oh my your world must be coming to an end. I read the problem, and it was the usual kind of thing. This ladies husband was accessing the 'evil' internet and getting off on porn. This woman was both shocked and appalled at this terrible show of disrespect to her. Was she not good enough for him? She ordered him to stop, which he said he would, and then the most appalling thing of all happened. Yes, you guessed it, she found he was capable of lying too, and he continued to use his porn, just behind her back! I have to say I was slightly bemused by this little problem. Maybe our society over time has just become more accepting of sex, and as a young person, I know longer see the point in hiding sex, or being ashamed of my sexual needs. People watch porn. People get off on porn. So what? To use the old nutshell, we all do it, right? Obviously there are many arguments about Porn, and there are many areas in which porn is wrong. However, a guy getting on his pc, and looking at porn, in a relationship or not, is that so bad? It is just a sexual fantasy world? There are arguments that it is degrading to women. Maybe. I don't see anyone with a gun to these ladies heads though. I don't see them shying away from the money, or the attention they recieve. So is it really doing them all that harm? It's making women sexual objects? Some would argue that sex is a womans biggest asset. It all comes down to that long held battle of the sexes. Men are physically stronger, men are often viewed as the dominant sex, yet something in their pants drives them forward, and women know this. Hence, sex is their biggest asset.
In its hardcore form, pornography is now accessed in the UK by an estimated 33% of all internet users. Since the British Board of Film Classification relaxed its guidelines in 2000, hardcore video pornography now makes up between 13% and 17% of censors' viewing, compared with just 1% three years ago, a rate of growth that is being cited as a causal factor in the recent bankruptcy of Penthouse, at one time the very apotheosis of porno chic but in recent years little more risqué than Loaded. In the US, with the pornography industry bringing in up to $15bn (£8.9bn) annually, people spend more on porn every year than they do on movie tickets and all the performing arts combined. Each year, in Los Angeles alone, more than 10,000 hardcore pornographic films are made, against an annual Hollywood average of just 400 movies.
All this shows is my atttude to porn is quite realistic for the times we are living in. Porn is becoming more and more acceptable. Maybe because it is no longer something that you reach the top shelves for. It is now considered 'cool'. Not something to shy away from. I mean, you can get porn sent straight to your mobile phone now, if that isn't moving with the times I don't know what is. There is a wide spread sense that anyone who suggests pornography might have any kind of adverse effect is laughably out of touch. Coren and Skelton, former Erotic Review film critics, focus on their flip comic narrative, scarcely troubling themselves with any deeper issues. "In all our years of watching porn," they write, in a rare moment of analysis that doesn't get developed any further, "we have never properly resolved what we think about how, why and whether it is degrading to women. We suspect that it might be. We suspect that pornography might be degrading to everybody."
Channel 4's documentary Hardcore, shown a few years ago, told the story of Felicity, a single mother from Essex who travelled to Los Angeles hoping to make a career in pornography. Arriving excited, and clear about what she would not do - anal sex, double-vaginal penetration - she ended up being coerced into playing a submissive role and agreeing to anal sex. Felicity - the vicissitudes of whose own troubled relationship with her father were mirrored by the cruelty of the men with whom she ended up working - eventually escaped back to the UK. Now this raises other questions about porn. Is pornography, as most these days claim, a harmless masturbatory diversion? What about people that get addicted to porn. That view the world through 'porn tinted glasses'. What about more profound effects? How does it affect relationships? Is it addictive? Does it encourage rape, paedophilia, sexual murder? Surely tough questions need to be asked.
According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the word "pornography" dates to 1864, when it described "the life, manners, etc of prostitutes or their patrons". More recently, it has come to signify material, in the words of Chambers, "intended to arouse sexual excitement". There is a general consensus that porn is a harmless past time for men. That they simpley use it to deal with their sexual needs, they don't put much thought into it, and it is only animal instinct, where can the harm be in that? Unlike women, porn has always been related strongly to males. It is expected that young boys will hide porn magazines under their beds, it's all part of growing up isn't it? Their sex education if you like. The thing I find most interesting about this is the relationship porn has with women. The vast majority of porn, gives you submissive women, willing to fulfill your every need, with little talking back. They will do what you like. In a society where women are becoming more dominant. Who have their own needs, and aren't afraid to tell you what they want, is this simpley an escapism for men. Who unable to compete in the real world, return to the sticky pages of a magazine, or a computer to get what they really want. A woman that asks nothing of them, and gives them everything they want. Surely that has to be part of the attraction. Which would suggest that it isn't only animal instinct that draws men to porn, but something alot deeper.
Si Jones, a 39-year-old north London vicar who regularly counsels men trying to "come off" pornography, admits that, for him, too, it was his introduction to sex. "As a teenager, I watched porn films with my friends at the weekend. It was just what you did. It was cool, naughty and everyone was doing it." Set against today's habit of solitary internet masturbation, Jones's collegiate introduction to porn seems peculiarly sociable. Today, boys no longer clandestinely circulate magazines after school; nor do they need to rummage through their fathers' cupboards in search of titillating material. Access to internet pornography has never been easier, its users never younger, and the heaviest demand, according to research published in the New York Times, is for " 'deviant' material including paedophilia, bondage, sadomasochism and sex acts with various animals". There seems to be something quite seedy about internet porn. That it is too easy. Because of the rising popularity of porn, and the easiness to get hold of it, it also makes it alot easier to abuse, and that's where the problems arise.
At its most basic level, pornography answers natural human curiosity. Adolescent boys want to know what sex is about, and porn certainly demonstrates the mechanics. David Morgan, consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London, which specialises in problems relating to sexuality and violence, describes this phase as "transitional, like a rehearsal for the real thing. The problem with pornography begins when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full-time place of residence." Morgan's experience of counselling men addicted to porn has convinced him that "the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else."
For most men, the way pornography objectifies sex strikes a visceral emotional chord. Psychotherapists Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon, in their book Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life Of Boys, suggest that objectification, for boys, starts early. "By adolescence, a boy wakes up most mornings with an erection. This can happen whether he is in a good or bad mood, whether it is a school day or a weekend ... Boys enjoy their own physical gadgetry. But the feeling isn't always, 'Look what I can do!' The feeling is often, 'Look what it can do!' - again, a reflection of the way a boy views his instrument of sexuality as just that: an object. What people might not realise when they justly criticise men for objectifying sex - viewing sex as something you do, rather than part of a relationship - is that the first experience of objectification of sexuality in a boy's life comes from his experience of his own body, having this penis that makes its own demands."
Which brings me back to the point of this article. The lady on our problem page. Does all this suggest she has a right to be annoyed at her husbands need for porn? He has a sexual partner, right there in front of him, yet he needs to sit in front of a pc to fulfill some of his sexual needs. Is this just showing his capability to restrict emotion from his sexual needs? And is that right? That is obviously what is upsetting his wife. Yet is that just the way he learnt to view sex. That he does fulfill part of his sexual needs in emotion for his wife, but he also needs another side to it. That is more raw, and more animal like. Simpley because that's how his first sexual views were formed. Can't he have both? Where do women stand on this? Women it would appear have been sexually retarded for so long. It is only now that they are starting to compete on a similar playing field to men. I sometimes feel women are batting out of their league with that though. Do we really want to be that like men? Sure, we have sexual needs too. We should be able to do what we like, and we do. However, in my opinion, our views that sex should be in the confines of a loving relationship, old fashioned as it may be, stands correct in my opinion.
Some couples watch porn together, as some sort of way of making it okay. They want to be adventurous. Nothing wrong with that, but is there not a line that shouldn't be crossed? Psychoanalyst Estela Welldon, author of the classic text Mother, Madonna, Whore, has treated couples for whom such scenarios spiralled out of control. "A lot of men involve their partners in the use of porn. Typically, they will say, 'Don't you want a better sex life?' I have seen cases in which first the woman has been subjected to porn and then they have used their own children for pornographic purposes." When couples use porn together - a growing trend, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by - there is, says Welldon, "an illusory sense that they are getting closer together. Then they film themselves having sex and feel outside themselves. This dehumanising aspect is an important part of pornography. It dehumanises the other person, the relationship, and any intimacy." Porn can takeover, the feelings a man can have for a woman, sometimes may not be enough compared to the sexual arousal he feels when looking at porn. So when his need for porn takes over, what happens then?
Lost in a world of pornographic fantasy, men can become less inclined, as well as increasingly less able, to form lasting relationships. In part, this is due to the underlying message of pornography. Ray Wyre, a specialist in sexual crime, says pornography "encourages transience, experimentation and moving between partners". Morgan goes further: "Pornography does damage," he says, "because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships." There is a suggestion that porn is about control. That the user has complete control of the situation, there are no 'strings' attached to this situation. The user is completely in control. They can get what they want, when they want, and how they want. John-Paul Day, a 50-year-old Edinburgh architect in his first "non-addictive" sexual relationship, the experience of being a small boy with a dying mother drove him to seek solace in masturbation. He says he has been "addicted" to pornography his entire adult life. "The thing about it is that, unlike real life, it is incredibly safe," Day says. "I'm frightened of real sex, which is unscripted and unpredictable. And so I engage in pornography, which is totally under my control. But, of course, it also brings intense disappointment, precisely because it is not what I'm really searching for. It's rather like a hungry person standing outside the window of a restaurant, thinking that they're going to get fed."
Day, who has attended meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous for 12 years, says, "Pornography is central to my own sex addiction in as much as sex addiction has to do with the use of fantasy as a way of escaping from reality. Even in my fantasies about 'real' people, I am really transforming them into pieces of walking pornography. It is not the reality of who they are that I focus on, but the fantasy I project on to them."
This is where the lines become blurred. Porn can become addictive, but can't everything? If you do start to have an obsession about porn, then that is bad? Well an obsession about anything isn't really that healthy, but suggesting that everyone who looks at porn becomes obssessed is just silly. Lets look at the extremes though. People that take porn them steps to far. In its most severe form, this can lead to sexual crime, though the links between the two remain controversial and much argued-over. Wyre, from his work with sex offenders, says, "It is impossible not to believe pornography plays a part in sexual violence. As we constantly confront sex offenders about their behaviour, they display a wide range of distorted views that they then use to excuse their behaviour, justify their actions, blame the victim and minimise the effect of their offending. They seek to make their own behaviour seem normal, and interpret the behaviour of the victim as consent, rather than a survival strategy. Pornography legitimises these views."
One of the most extreme examples of this is Ted Bundy, the US serial sexual murderer executed for his crimes in January 1989. The night before his death, he explained his addiction to pornography in a radio interview: "It happened in stages, gradually ... My experience with ... pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality is that, once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction, I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder, something which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far ... It reaches that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if, maybe, actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it."
Bundy, as damaged as he was, stopped short of blaming pornography for his actions, though it was, he believed, an intrinsic part of the picture. "I tell you that I am not blaming pornography ... I take full responsibility for whatever I've done and all the things I've done ... I don't want to infer that I was some helpless kind of victim. And yet we're talking about an influence that is the influence of violent types of media and violent pornography, which was an indispensable link in the chain ... of events that led to behaviours, to the assaults, to the murders." In the understated words of Wyre, "The very least pornography does is make sexism sexy."
Obviously, Ted Bundy is an extreme, and I think that's the point of this whole article. Porn isn't wrong. Just too much of it isn't right. Which as I've already said is the case with most things in life. Happy masturbating people, but if you see yourself getting off on the sight of pigs mating, you've gone too far!