The Adventures of Anti-Porn Girl: Episode The Second, Part I
Because of the sensitive nature of this topic, I'm posting it in a cut.
It's the next installment (part the first of episode the second) of the Adventures of Anti-Porn Girl.
Two weeks ago I woke up to two men talking about porn. Jon and I have a radio alarm that wakes us up for our 8am class on MWF and we have it set to 101.9, "The End." We do this mostly so that we will have the motivation to get up right away to turn it off. It's certainly not the way I'd prefer to wake up, but it works.
So on this show are these two men - one whose name is apparently "Chunga," and his sidekick from the studio, Sammy or Stevie or Jack or whatever (who basically says "yeah, I know, seriously" or, "you are crazy, man, crazy!" to everything Chunga says). This particular morning Chunga threw out this jarring fact (with the appropriate obnoxious irreverence): 1 in 5 iPhone users regularly view some form of porn on their cell phones. I couldn't find the actual statistic, but I'd be hard pressed to doubt it's at least somewhat accurate, especially since 11 out of the most frequented 15 iPhone websites are porn sites (that stat is not linked, as I'd rather not link porn from my own blog).
Chunga then asked his sidekick if he'd ever "looked at boobs" on his iPhone. The man was hesitant to admit either way. Finally he said no, he'd never looked at porn, though he did record a video of a large-bosomed female in the checkout at Walmart on his iPhone.
Now, I don't exactly expect "Chunga in the morning" to deliver my daily dose of faith in humanity, but I was still surprised by the talk. Chunga's sidekick wasn't exactly comfortable with these social cues, but (like a good sidekick, I suppose) didn't question.
I've already blabbed my own biases, but I've been rattled by the pervasiveness of porn (and, as the Chunga episode relates, the nonchalance surrounding it). This isn't a can of beets sitting on the shelf in the grocery store that I can walk by and simply say, "no, that's not for me." It's slithering into acceptability and widening its wake of influence.
Face it, We're Pornified
Every second, there are approximately 28,258 internet users viewing pornography. Did you miss that? 28,258 people at this second are hooked up to their computer screens, not spending time with their kids, making love to their spouse, helping with the dishes, doing their homework, calling their parents, eating their beets, taking out the trash, or playing with the dog. Every second 272 new Internet users are searching for adult terms. Those are new searches, every second. Almost two million new searches an hour. Yuck.
An even eerier statistic, though, is that 116,000 of those (every hour) are unique searches for child pornography.
But just because people are linking up more and more to view pornography via the Internet doesn't mean it's getting shoved under the rug. Instead, the cultural currency has shifted. It's trickling down into the very way we view ourselves. Pamela Paul of Pornified writes:
Not only is pornography itself more ubiquitous, the entire culture has become pornified. By that, I mean that the aesthetics, values, and standards of pornography have seeped into mainstream popular culture. Young girls brazenly pose in pornographic ways on their MySpace pages, even creating porn-like videos of themselves gyrating and preening before untold numbers of strangers.
Porn is everywhere, and we're ok with it, or at least we're told to be. Some psychologists argue it's even good for you - and some counselors (even religious ones) recommend pornography for failing marriages.
Yet some argue that, rather than helping individuals with their sexual intimacy, pornography actually makes the sexual experience less unitive. It substitutes individualized masturbatory stimulation for the physical communication that should happen between partners during sex. The screen is too distracting. So while partners are able to increase the amount of individual stimulation they feel, they are not necessarily stimulated by each other any more than they were (and perhaps are culturing themselves to be stimulated by anything but their sexual partners).
But All the Cool Girlfriends Are Doing It
Some women are adamant that pornography is fun and no big deal inside of a committed, loving relationship. Paul interviewed several women of this kind in her book. In an interview about Pornified, Paul relates:
There was one woman who said to me, "I'm totally fine with porn. I think it's fun, I look at it, my boyfriend looks at it." Half an hour into our phone conversation, she tells me that her boyfriend and she do not have good sex, that this is the first time she's had a bad sexual relationship, that he looks at porn all the time, and that now she's considering getting breast implants. This is someone who seemed very bright and cheery about pornography, but if you scratch beneath the surface, you find out that's not at all the case.
To answer your original question, given that everything was shocking to me--and I don't consider myself a naïve person--I was shocked by the fact that so many men and women say that porn can help people sexually, that it helps them open up, that it's fun and harmless, but at the same time men who were fans of pornography were reporting that their sex lives were damaged. They had trouble maintaining erections, they were having trouble having intercourse with their wives, they simply couldn't enjoy real human sexuality any more. These men had programmed themselves to only sexually cue to computerized, commercialized pornography
Will the reign of pornography wreak havoc on the safety of the citizens of the world?
Will the people of Earth ever escape Pornography's evil clutches?
Will Anti-Porn Girl be able to save the day?
Tune in and CLICK HERE for part II of this Episode to find out the fiendish fate of our citizens!