Why do men get off on seeing women get hurt?
Restlessly pacing the halls of online pornography, sooner or later you see things you wish you hadn’t. You open a door and stumble on a scene of violent intensity in which someone is hurt, degraded and viciously insulted.
You hurry on, but the next room is the same, and the one after that. Instead of an escape, the seductive world of porn starts to feel like a prison run by gangs of angry men for whom the best sex is also the harshest and most punishing.
The brutal side of porn used to reside in the backrooms of porn shops; now it takes pride of place on the front pages of the most popular free sites.
The acts that have been named in the allegations against Jian Ghomeshi — striking, choking, abusive language — are common features of the most ubiquitous porn online. One study found that 90 per cent of scenes on top-rated porn sites contained acts of aggression.
Given the rates of porn consumption (as much as 30 per cent of all bandwidth, or one third of the Internet), it’s safe to say that many people are witness to the kind of behaviour that Ghomeshi is accused of.
U.S.-based sociologist and anti-porn activist Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, tracks the increased violence in porn, whereby scenes of outright abuse and assault are celebrated by a growing number of compulsive users.
Dines studies the ways that porn eroticizes violence and asks the basic question, “Why do men get off on watching women get hurt?”
The term that’s often given to extreme hard-core porn is “gonzo,” and the quickest way to understand the mentality that drives gonzo porn is to visit the message boards where viewers discuss their favourite scenes, such as the forums on Adultdvdtalk.com. To read these comments out of context will make your heart beat faster; they are so hateful, it’s disorienting.
While the porn consumers who comment on message boards are a minority, according to Dines they accurately reflect the essential concern of gonzo, which is to push women up to and beyond their limits of tolerance for pain and discomfort. Viewers want to see the moment when the performer is completely overwhelmed.
Dines, who has been interviewed several times by Ghomeshi on Q (“He was incredibly on my side — it was amazing,” she says, expressing her shock at the allegations), contends that gonzo contributes to addictive porn consumption. “There’s something about that toxic mix of violence and sex that leads to a greater level of habituation,” she says.
The porn industry’s responsiveness to its best customers may help to explain the rise of violent porn, but whatever the cause, few dispute the trend exists, even within the porn business itself. Mike South, a pornographer in Atlanta, Ga., who helped spearhead the first wave of gonzo porn in the ’90s (back when the term referred to personality-driven porn rather than violent porn), is very critical of much of the content now being produced.
South claims the kind of porn that is common today — what he calls “train wrecks,” when the performer passes out, vomits, or otherwise falls apart on camera — would have landed pornographers in jail even as recently as the ’90s. But as the industry grew, the obscenity guidelines receded. Part of the problem, he says, is lack of education about the risks of certain practices.
For example, South describes a time when choking women to the point of unconsciousness became a popular fad. “They thought it was breath play,” he says. “They didn’t realize that when the guy cuts off blood flow to the brain, he’s essentially creating what is very much akin to a stroke. It’s a stupid practice!”
South says he raised hell about it until eventually reviewers started agreeing with him and producers backed off.
South misses the days “when porn was fun” and porn movies still told stories. “Now with gonzo porn, even at its most basic, you’re just watching two nameless people having sex on screen,” he says. “There’s no sense of identity; there’s no sense that they’re even real people.”
According to Dines, even though gonzo porn stopped telling stories, porn itself still tells a story: some women are whores by nature, always ready for sex and eager to do whatever men want, no matter how painful or degrading. They prefer to be treated with contempt, and they have no sexual imagination of their own.
The story porn tells about men is even simpler, as she writes in Pornland: “Men in porn are depicted as soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want.”
Despite how horrifying it sounds, there’s no denying people are drawn to violent porn, and they keep coming back. One possible explanation for the popularity of gonzo comes from the addiction model of porn consumption.
At its most basic level, it suggests porn images give viewers a brief dopamine rush. But just as occurs with substance abuse, the compulsive porn user slowly becomes desensitized and needs a stronger dose to get the same high. That means finding more stimulating material. For some desensitized users, violence provides the extra excitement.
While this theory has been popularized by such sites as YourBrainOnPorn.com, many people take issue with the addiction mode and the narrative it provides. Toronto-based sex and addiction therapist Beth Mares points out that this theory doesn’t take into account the whole picture. “Whatever may be going on in the brain, it doesn’t mean that anybody who uses pornography is going to become addicted by those means,” she says. “People tend to get into obsessions, such as sex or pornography addictions, when they can’t cope with their world.”
Even though Mares and many others are wary of describing addiction in those neurological terms, largely because the research is so new and so limited, she has observed that compulsive porn users often feel a sense of frustration that leads them to search for novelty. When porn ceases to excite, obsessive porn users will look for something more extreme that might excite them more. “But then it loses its impact,” she says. “There’s only so far you can go.”
In this, Dines believes, the porn industry has sowed the seeds of its own destruction. “It’s become so hard-core so quickly that you now have an increased consumer base who are desensitized and bored. They’re always on the lookout for something new: something more extreme, something more bizarre. But there are limits to what you can do. You can’t actually kill her. There’s not much left to do to her apart from kill her, to be honest with you.”
According to Dines, that sense of boredom can also lead to child porn. “One of the things they’re finding is that a lot of the men who are bored and desensitized are turning to children,” says Dines. She clarifies that these men don’t fit any of the standard descriptions of pedophiles, and that they attribute their own shift in behaviour to porn.
Dines interviewed several men who’d been imprisoned for raping children. She asked them why they turned to children later in life, and they all said the same thing: “I was bored. I wanted something different.”
Though both Mares and Dines describe how porn creates a need for extreme stimulation, Mares feels that anti-porn activists exaggerate porn’s impact. “There’s a lot of unsubstantiated talk about pornography leading people to act it out,” she says. Inflating porn’s influence on behaviour can lead to censorship, which Mares believes is detrimental for a democratic society. “You don’t need to regulate what people watch,” she says. “You can have health regulations in an industry.”
Alarmism also threatens the BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) community and those who enjoy consensual kink. Though BDSM practitioners engage in stylized forms of violence and explore the interaction of pain and pleasure, Calgary-based dominatrix Lady Seraphina is adamant that there’s no violence whatsoever in BDSM. “When we talk about consensual kink, there’s pleasure for both partners,” she says. “And where there’s pleasure for both partners, it’s not violent.”
Lady Seraphina asserts a clear distinction between porn and practice: pornography doesn’t initiate, inflate or inflame a person’s interest in BDSM, she says. “There’s no indication that porn and BDSM have anything to do with each other.” Just as people can watch action movies without shooting up a crowd, they can watch violent porn fantasies without acting them out.
Toronto-based sexologist and TV personality Jessica O’Reilly agrees most people can distinguish between fantasy and reality, though she acknowledges that porn-based expectations can sometimes play out in people’s relationships.
O’Reilly, who has a PhD in human sexuality, cites Cindy Gallop’s site Makelovenotporn.com, which was created to counter the unpleasant and demeaning demands that men sometimes acquire from their porn-watching. “I think porn offers very limited, inaccurate representations of bodies and sex acts,” says O’reilly. “It can reframe our erotic scripts to include a more narrow range of acts and bodies.”
O’Reilly is adamantly pro-porn, however, and challenges the idea that the industry is focusing on gonzo. “What I see is a broadening of the porn genres to include feminist and amateur porn,” she says. “Seeing people engaged in sexually explicit activities is really important. I can’t think of any other physical activity in our lives that we practise without observing first. You don’t play football without watching a game.”
For Dines, the real problem isn’t porn’s impact on behaviour but people’s ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. “We’re not born fully formed human beings with all our tastes set,” she says. “We are cultural beings who wander through our society and our culture picking up cues and norms and values, and those shape who we are.” Dines asserts that if porn doesn’t affect people, then everything we know about human behaviour is wrong.
She continues: “If sexuality is constructed via the culture, then arguing that porn has no effect is like saying that advertising has no effect. We accept that the food industry shapes how people eat, and the clothing industry shapes how people dress. Why would the sex industry be any different?”
But no matter how well porn users can defend themselves against porn’s false messaging, everyone agrees children are the least likely to be adept at making the distinction between what’s real and what’s not. Few will celebrate the fact that porn has become the primary source of sex education for generations raised on the Internet, who often encounter porn — and presumably gonzo porn — by the age of 11 or 12.
No one is more pro-porn than Atlanta pornographer South, and even he states the matter very candidly: “There’s just something about the plethora of violent porn that is disturbing to me, particularly when you consider its ready availability to people who are under the age of 18.”
If children are watching hard-core porn, they are likely watching it on a site owned by the world’s largest porn provider, a company called MindGeek. As was reported in a recent article by David Auerbach in Slate, MindGeek operates more than 100 sites with a total bandwidth that exceeds Twitter, Amazon or Facebook.
The company, which was founded by Canadians Stephane Manos and Ouissam Youssef in 2007 and now has offices in Montreal as well as all over the world, owns many of the popular “tube” sites, such as Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube. These sites are very easy to access: they’re free, they rank high in Google searches and they offer an endless stream of new content.
South believes that if companies like MindGeek were forced to put up an age-verification firewall (essentially, requiring a credit card number), as gambling sites have had to do, they would fail.
He doesn’t want to see the porn industry fail, of course. He just wants to see it take responsibility for itself, and to leave behind the violence for a more sex-positive approach.
But for Dines, the two sides are irreconcilable. “My argument is that I’m pro-sex, and that’s why I’m anti-porn,” she says. “You can’t be pro-porn and pro-sex at the same time. You have to pick one.”
Mark Mann is a freelance writer based in Toronto. His essays and feature stories have appeared in Report on Business, Reader’s Digest, The Walrus, Maisonneuve and others. He also reviews the arts for various online publications.
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