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The Pornification Of A Generation
A new book traces the migration of porn
culture from adult theaters to the mainstream—and asks
what that means for kids.
Jessica Bennett
Newsweek
October 7, 2008
The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin
Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to
have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had
begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels,
fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes
protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed
a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife
bought her a different doll, which she was happy with.
Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with
Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers,
these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he
convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as
cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of
course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then,
says Scott, an English professor at a small college in
Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death
match for my daughter's soul."
In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs
for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if
not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it
or not, television brings it into our living rooms and
the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007
study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90
percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14
have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.
But it isn't just sex that Scott is worried about. He's
more interested in how we, as a culture, often mimic the
most raunchy, degrading parts of it—many of which, he
says, come directly from pornography. In "The Porning of
America" (Beacon), which he has written with colleague
Carmine Sarracino, a professor of American literature,
the duo argue that, through Bratz dolls and beyond, the
influence of porn on mainstream culture is affecting our
self perceptions and behavior—in everything from fashion
to body image to how we conceptualize our sexuality.
It's too early to know exactly how kids who grow up in
this hypersexualized environment will be affected in the
long term. But Scott and his coauthor say it's not too
soon—or too prudish—to sound the alarm, and to look
critically at the sexualized culture we're exposed to
every day. The authors don't suggest banishing porn to
back alleys, however. Both grew up when people were
crying out for sexual liberation. And, they contend,
porn certainly played a role in achieving it. But
somehow between then and now, porn themes have gone from
adult entertainment to prime time, seeping into nearly
every aspect of popular culture. Sarracino and Scott
define "porning" as the way advertising and society in
general have borrowed from the ideas and characteristics
central to most American pornography: sex as commodity,
sexuality as overt, narrow views of women and
male-female relationships, bad girls and dirty boys,
domination and submission.
All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to
see examples—if they aren't imitating porn they've
actually seen, they're imitating the porn-inspired
images and poses they've absorbed elsewhere. Latex,
corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn
stars, have made their way into middle and high school.
An ad for Axe shower gel, marketed to teen boys, uses
the slogan "How Dirty Boys Get Clean," while Burton, the
snowboard company, partnered with Playboy earlier this
year on a new line of "Love" boards—complete with
voluptuous cheeks smack dab in the middle of each. The
boards' online description reads: "I enjoy laps through
the park; long, hard grinds on my meaty Park Edges
followed by a good, hot waxing." One of the most popular
kids' videogames, Guitar Hero, features animated rock
stars that stand on a stage with a neon stripper
gyrating on a pole behind them. Strippers have become
cool—unremarkable even.
Celebrities, too, have become amateur porn stars. They
show up in sex tapes (Colin Farrell, Kim Kardashian),
hire porn producers to shoot their videos (Britney
Spears) or produce porn outright (Snoop Dogg). Actual
porn stars and call girls, meanwhile, have become
celebs. Ron Jeremy regularly takes cameos in movies and
on TV, while adult star Jenna Jameson is a best-selling
author.
In July, a Florida defense attorney argued in an
obscenity trial that porn had become so
commonplace—evidenced by the fact that a Google search
for "orgy" is twice as common as one for "apple
pie"—that his client, a porn-site operator charged with
racketeering and prostitution, could not be considered
as behaving outside the societal norm. (The obscenity
charges were dropped, though the defendant was found
guilty of money laundering.) "All you have to do is live
here on a daily basis, and you pick this stuff up
through every medium," says Sarracino, who teaches at
Pennsylvania's Elizabethtown College. "But it's been so
absorbed that it has almost ceased to exist as something
separate from the culture."
The prevalence or porn leaves today's children with a
lot of conflicting ideas and misconceptions, says Lyn
Mikel Brown, the coauthor of "Packaging Girlhood," about
marketers' influence on teen girls. "All this sex gives
a misinformed notion of what it means to be grown-up."
Studies show that kids who consume this kind of sex in
the media inherit more traditional views of gender—boys
as dominant, girls as submissive, in the bedroom and
beyond. (In a survey of 244 high-school students earlier
this year, researchers at the University of Michigan
found that those who frequently viewed talk shows and
prime-time programs with sexualized content endorsed
sexual stereotypes more strongly.) Kids are less likely
to know when and how to express themselves sexually—or
what behavior crosses the border into sexual harassment.
As part of their research, the authors of "Porning"
talked to middle-school teachers who told stories of
girls sending half-nude pictures to classmates they'd
barely met, then strutting around in classrooms in
provocative clothing to reveal what's underneath.
The authors of "So Sexy So Soon" (Ballantine), which
came out last month, believe that part of the problem
for children is that they lack the emotional
sophistication to understand the images they see. Last
year, the American Psychological Association put out a
compelling report that described the sexualization of
young girls: a process that entails being stripped of
all value except the sexual use to which they might be
put. Once they subscribe to that belief, say some
psychologists, those girls begin to self-objectify—with
consequences ranging from cognitive problems to
depression and eating disorders. "It's not as if we get
our ideas straight from porn about what a kiss should be
or what sex should be," says Sharon Lamb, a psychologist
at Saint Michael's College in Burlington, Vt., and a
coauthor of the APA report. "But you do see imitation of
sex that was once found only in porn. It's a kind of
education to kids about what sex is like before they
have a real education of it."
That education involves seeing thousands of explicit
sexual images by the time a person reaches his teenage
years. Experts say that exposure can make real-life sex
a letdown for men driven by porn-style fantasies. In
porn culture, women are overwhelmingly viewed as
sexually rapacious or as victims of verbal, physical or
sexual violence. And young girls, not knowing any
different, may play straight into the watered-down
mainstream versions of those roles. Today, terms like
slut and whore are commonplace among teens. And whether
it's porn or a combination of influences, anonymous,
no-strings-attached-style casual sex, now commonly
called "hookup" culture, has come to be one of the
defining characteristics of a whole generation of teens.
(That culture is the subject of a number of
publications, including this year's "Hooking Up," by
sociologist Kathleen Bogle.)
It's the porn ideal of sex as commodity in a competitive
market—and to see rapper Nelly swipe a credit card
through a young girl's backside in a music video only
reaffirms that notion. It's artificiality as a
replacement for authenticity, the Miley Cyrus-type
plasticity that's become the mainstream, prepubescent
sexual ideal. (Not only has Cyrus been photographed
wrapped in a sheet looking like she just had sex—she
claims she was manipulated by the photographer—but
revealing photos of her, taken by herself and friends,
have also emerged online.) "Both boys and girls are
really confused about what's appropriate," says Brown.
Helping kids make that distinction may be an
increasingly uphill battle. |
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