The porn effect

Apropos of the recent death of Andrea Dworkin, Metafilter's symphonik linked to this October 2003 essay by Naomi Wolf in which she suggests that widespread availability of pornography makes men who use it so dissatisfied with actual women and their imperfections and so oriented toward fetish that they lose all ability to relate to others.

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

I find her essay both heterocentric and subtly biased by her generational status. She's analyzing the sexual habits and tastes of a younger generation, and that just won't work, because the younger generation has grown up with electronic media and isn't as fazed by it as my generation is. On the other hand, we might look at Japan, where pornography has long been mainstreamed (see my last post), and where thebirthrate is plummeting and many marriages are sexless. Or so it is reported.

Personally, I simply find it strange that young people use pornography so much. When I was in my first twenty years of adulthood, I took it more or less as a badge of honor that I didn't consume visual porn (photos and movies). At first I vaguely disapproved of it, but in general, I just thought that I didn't need it, having access to the real thing. Why should someone who has an active, energetic sex life need porn? Middle-aged people, now that's another issue.

Related is this speech by Watergate Journo Carl Bernstein (link courtesy Romenesko) in which he decries the coarsening of popular culture, referring to "grotesque values":

"For the first time in our history," he said, "the weird, the stupid, the coarse, the sensational and the untrue are becoming our cultural norm -- even our cultural ideal."