Trigger warning: like every single one. Please take care of yourself.
Imagine you’re a high school student right now. Imagine that you have a body that is perceived to be female. You’ve already been inundated for years with zillions of images telling you what acceptable looks like. You’re subject to being pictured without your consent in public spaces online. You are being constantly gossiped about, even during classes. You may be only partly aware of what people are saying about you or how you’re being depicted.
You’re in the middle of figuring out how to be a human and you’re probably being portrayed as something less-than-human on the regular. And now, you’re also literally porn.
As schools across the country grapple with the implications of undress apps, we have to wonder what their effect might be on any-gendered humans going forward.
Way back in 2016, I wrote (but could not figure out how to publish) an article about porn at work. Honestly, as someone who did have a job back then, I did not want to kick the hornets’ nest by naming a thing that was probably true but zero people want to bring up. There’s a high probability that people are consuming degrading porn at work and it has an impact on working environments.
Hard to imagine, but at that point, I didn’t think kids were going to be ‘allowed’ to be on their phones continuously in schools. The new normals keep on coming! What does it feel like to walk into school and know that people are making porn of you right in math class? It’s pretty hard to fathom. But, if you’re someone cast in a non-male identity and go to work, maybe not completely unimaginable.
To be clear, I am not anti-porn if porn simply means sexual imagery. We have bodies. We have desire. We are crazy overindexed on our visual systems. But one can’t avoid the actuality of what most porn seems to be, a reinforcement of dominance. Most undress apps work only to represent ‘female’ bodies. They are not about the realities of nakedness, they are about the weirdly idealized porn ‘female body’ and the reinforcement of knowing your place if you might have female body markers.
Tyson Yunkaporta suggests that every culture or community needs to have rites around sex and violence. Having them be unmentionable or never-OK can only lead to destruction and destructive manifestations of violence and sex.
The more prudish a culture espouses to be, the more dangerous it is, the more likely it is to engage in systemic violence. In most online contexts I am in, sex is invisible, tactfully avoided. Where does that take us? Somewhere dark, I imagine, because it’s so shadow.
Whereas before these secret thoughts stayed in someone’s mind, now they are worming their way into reality like Stranger Things tentacles. And porn becomes addictive, and thus the highs or debasements need to get more extreme. Porn fentanyl. And sex isn’t ‘polite.’ We shouldn’t ever talk about what’s going on, except in pseudonymous online rooms where people trade tips about how to take it further. Let’s not forget there’s money in it.
From Feb 2016:
Women have made inroads in many areas of work. Though in some areas (film directors, Fortune 500 CEOs, financial advisors, to name a few) women still have a way to go, there has definitely been a trend towards parity overall. But are we missing an elephant in the room? What if 20% of the people we work with are consuming stereotypical and often demeaning images of women at work every day? (Or at least, every work day.)
Quick stats to amaze: 12% of websites are pornographic. Every second over 3000 dollars are spent and almost 30,000 people are on adult sites. 40 million are regular visitors to porn websites. 70% of men 18-24 visit pornographic sites (which seems kinda low). “A significant relationship also exists among teens between frequent pornography use and feelings of loneliness, including major depression.. Adolescents exposed to high levels of pornography have lower levels of sexual self-esteem.”
Women are ⅓ of the porn-viewing audience. Women are also the primary fans of many other things that present women in ways that encourage stupidity, vanity, and submission. There probably should be a study of how many people are watching The Bachelor or reading InStyle at work, too.
However, I suspect that pornography that is largely based on the humiliation of women might be something that more men are consuming than women. And when 20% of men are consuming porn at work, it might have something to do with women’s success in the workplace.
I’ve had conversations with women-identifying friends, many of whom identify as queer or non-traditional in their gender presentation, and many who watch porn. Generally, it’s believable to me that women use online porn and enjoy it. My suspicion is that they probably favour a variety of adult media that doesn’t primarily focus on straight cis men humiliating women (no judgement!). I haven’t found any studies that separate out porn consumption by topic, but an NIH study found that “Boys were more likely to be exposed at an earlier age, to see more images, to see more extreme images (e.g., rape, child pornography), and to view pornography more often, while girls reported more involuntary exposure.”
The debate about pornography is often focused on whether porn is “good or bad.” As someone for whom free speech is a primary and fundamental right, I have no interest in condemning porn outright. As media, it merely reflects human desires and psyche. Both demonising or protecting pornography prevents the opportunity to understand its effects on us culturally.
I may go to work and present myself as an outspoken, confident person, who is (in my case, erroneously) perceived by others to be a woman. I may be working with someone who is watching porn during our workday, porn that operates on a paradigm that women should shut up, beg for men to have sex with them, or even just confirm the idea that women’s primary role is sexual. I may have no idea that five minutes before I am on a Zoom, the person I’m talking to was getting off to a rape scene. Is it simply the lack of transparency that feels uncool?
It seems possible to acknowledge that people have desires and that’s just fine, without having to accept that women are primarily shown as objects or subjects of abasement in media consumed by a huge swath of society AT WORK. It’s sort of akin to saying “because it’s a part of a religion, female genital mutilation is just a cultural fact” or “because white men had greater access to technology and power, slave ownership was OK.” This isn’t a “water is wet” situation, it’s just something that’s been agreed on by everyone to be fine if it is kept secret.
According a study by Juniper Research, by 2017, a quarter of a billion people will use their mobile or tablet device to access adult content, such as videos, images and live cams, up by more than 30% on current usage. Not all of them are using their device at work, but many are.
The idea that pornography is the “cause” of sexual violence, harassment or cultural norms isn’t really supported. That said, there is some evidence that consuming pornography increases “a higher tolerance for abnormal sexual behaviors, sexual aggression, promiscuity, and even rape. In addition, men begin to view women and even children as ‘sex objects,’ commodities or instruments for their pleasure.” Researchers working for the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ recount a study of 804 Italian teenage boys which reported that those who viewed pornography “were significantly more likely to report having ‘sexually harassed a peer or having forced somebody to have sex.’”
There is a case for correlation vs. causation in most of these studies. Still, intuitively, it *feels* like, as someone who presents as a woman, that men viewing hours of women in a sexualized and often demeaned light has some effect on how I’m perceived. Not just that I may be sexualized, but maybe more that there is some lingering idea that being assertive, confident or disinterested by being evaluated might be troubling for someone who has built an image of women’s behaviour through porn. (Plus, maybe it shrinks your brain!)
Most people are capable of separating violence, sex and miscreantic behaviour from how they’d like to be in the world. I’m not suggesting that people can’t watch porn that presents women as objects and also understand that their mothers, daughters, sisters or colleagues would prefer to be treated differently. But it’s naive to think that constant exposure to any cultural norm can have no influence.
Pornography will continue to exist. We have the option, as a culture, to shine a light on porn, to explore why degradation is exciting, to understand our minds through our collective desires. We also have the option to understand that these images are a part of our workplaces, and to take actions to prevent the effects of the “assumptions” of pornography from being the priors for work interactions.
As we become increasingly exposed by our data, maybe pornography will become more acceptable, and maybe more human versions of women will be portrayed. Or maybe, as in plenty of science fiction stories, women will be replaced by intelligent sexbots whose first impulse when they undergo singularity will be to find a cute outfit (damn you, Ex Machina!). But until then, let’s not pretend that we’re not affected.