What’s porn really like?

“Rule #34: If you can imagine it, it exists as Internet porn” ¹

Porn has come a long way since Playboy. It’s almost possible to feel nostalgia for the days when pornography meant magazines featuring soft-lit, bare-breasted models or films of ‘lovey dovey’ love-making on a bed.

“The internet is really really great… FOR PORN!
I’ve got a fast connection so I don’t have to wait… FOR PORN!
There’s always some new site… FOR PORN!
I browse all day and night… FOR PORN!
It’s like I’m surfing at the speed of light… FOR PORN!
The internet is for porn!
The internet is for porn!
Why do you think the net was born?
Porn! Porn! PORN!”
Avenue Q musical ²

The internet changed everything, just as the porn industry suspected it would. It conceived of a where porn images and videos could be streamed directly into every single home, bypassing the awkwardness and inconvenience of having to buy top-shelf magazines, videos or DVDs from sex shops, or late-night satellite channel subscriptions. Analogue porn was “hushed, hidden and private. It was something you did in secret.” ³

The porn industry didn’t just fuel the innovation of internet technology, it drove its wide-scale adoption. As Professor Gail Dines of the non-profit organisation Culture Reframed observes, the explosion of the porn industry has to do with the fact that, thanks to the internet, porn is suddenly ‘affordable, accessible and anonymous.’ Today, anyone with an internet connection has access to a free buffet of limitless porn. ⁴

But the problem with watching other people having sex is that, thrilling as it may seem at first, ennui kicks in and after a while it seems dull. After all, the thing that makes sex interesting is the emotional connection it gives us to another actual person but that doesn’t translate well onto the screen. Instead, the strong hit of sexual arousal porn gives us loses its potency over time and we find ourselves seeking out more novel, extreme and hard-core content. When that happens, online porn is very obliging: the combination of fiercely competitive market forces and virtually no regulation means that virtually anything goes.

“As more and more pornographic images become readily available, it takes much more to scratch one’s sexual itch… that leads to the necessity for extremism.” ⁵Mark Shrayber, Jezebel

There are only so many ways to have sex – or so you might have thought. But online pornography has pushed the boundaries of possibility to the limit. Extreme, hard core, violent material which would once have been banned, refused classification or relegated to niche genres, is now commonplace in mainstream pornography.

This has meant that many of the social norms and taboos that once ringfenced our behaviour have been unended and our deepest, darkest fantasies are laid bare. Women are slapped about, choked, gagged, strangled, ejaculated on (or made to drink a cup of semen), tortured, penetrated by three men at once, gang raped, and generally subjected to every kind of insult and humiliation.

Alongside the commonplace and popular themes of violence, sadism and masicism, online pornography also serves up themes centred on coercion and non-consent, sexual activity with children, leaked sex tapes, incest, racism and paedophilia. There’s sex that involves urination, defecation, vomit and menstrual blood.

“Porno services the ‘polymorphous perverse’: the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it.”Martin Amis, Rough Trade ⁶

You name it, it’s out there. Not all of it is legal, and much of it goes against porn sites’ own terms and conditions, but the porn industry knows that it’s essentially unregulated. The sheer volume of online child abuse material means that law enforcement is stretched to breaking point and simply doesn’t have the resources to go after anything else.

The kind of extreme, violent sex frequently depicted in porn obviously wouldn’t be acceptable in real life. But that’s the point: many of us imagine that porn isn’t “real.” We enjoy it as a form of escapism, a way to indulge our fantasies and shrug off the constraints of social acceptability and “political correctness” in order to connect with our deepest, darkest desires.

We dive into this dark water and believe that we can come back out again, untouched. We know the difference between fact and fiction and are certain we would never actually act these things out ourselves. Porn gives us a hit of illicit sexual pleasure, the thrill of crossing boundaries but with no harm done in the real world. Pure, guilt-free arousal.

Except that it’s not. Even though we see it as pixels on the screen, pornography isn’t simply make believe. It’s acted out by real men and women. What’s more, when we watch this stuff, it doesn’t just stay in a separate ‘porn box’ in our brain. Research shows that the images impact us deeply and affect our most intimate relationships. With tens of millions of hits per day, porn’s influence spills out to our communities, enforcing deeply harmful social prejudices and cultural practices.

Case Study

Rob Zicari (Rob Black in the industry) once owned Extreme Associates, a company that produced violent porn so graphic that many in the industry ostracized him. In 2009, after a six‐year legal battle, he and his wife Janet Romano (who directed porn under the name Lizzey Borden) were sentenced by US federal authorities to one year and a day in prison for distributing obscene materials.

Black recently granted an interview with journalist Richard Abowitz (2013) who asked him:

‘If I understand, you are saying the things the industry marginalized you for filming before going to jail, mixing violence and sex, that approach is routinely filmed now?’ Black answered: Yes. Not only some: that is what the industry is today. The industry is Extreme Associates. The industry is what I did. But they pushed it even further.

They pushed it to the point where you can’t defend it. Because what I did was fantasy. I was able to preach it as a movie. It is a guy in a costume. Now you have companies that do it in the guise of BDSM. You put a girl on a dog chain and chain her to a wall and then keep her there for two days and take a cattle prod and electrocute her and do all this under the guise of a documentary. You are taking the element of the movie out. Now, you are doing torture. You are taking the fantasy out. Now all of the sudden it’s let’s do this under the guise of BDSM. (Black in Abowitz 2013: 1)