The Entertainment Obsession That Is Behind Our National Porn Addiction
I was heartened this week to see that the New York Times published an editorial criticizing pornography. Christine Emba’s “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness,” which the NYT published on May 19, opens with the story of a woman who set out to have sex with 100 different men in a single day for her documentary titled (quite matter-of-factly) “I Slept with 100 Men in One Day.”
Emba used this anecdote to shock her readers into acknowledging a truth that should be obvious (but sadly, for some might not be): “Porn hasn’t been good for us.” It has led people to do things that are unnatural and harmful simply to get attention. It has distorted young people’s views of sex. It has increased the use of violence even in “consensual” sex acts. And it has desensitized us to other people’s pain. The “normalization of pornographic extremes has made even lurid acts de rigueur,” Emba asserts.
Most of this should be a matter of common sense. The fact that Emba had to repeatedly emphasize that hers was a countercultural message – and that most cultural liberals and even self-described feminists would object to her objection to porn – indicates the depth of the problem. We shouldn’t need to be told that if the pornographic industry is so large that it accounts for 12 percent of all websites on the Internet – and if porn consists of objectification of people at best and violent fantasies at worst – we have a serious problem in our culture.
But as Emba’s editorial points out, for some reason we do need to be told this. What should be obvious is not obvious to us.
The reason, I think, is connected to an issue that Emba doesn’t discuss: our obsession with entertainment. The porn industry – and, before that, the sexual revolutions that led to the growth of the porn industry – was always inextricably linked to the growth of consumerism and new technological developments that increased the range of entertainment. The addiction to greed and a craving to be perpetually entertained led to a voyeuristic interest in titillating material – which, in turn, led to ever more extreme forms of sexually explicit imagery, all in the name of entertainment.
This connection between consumerism, entertainment, and the sexualization of the culture began in the United States at least as early as the 1920s. While we often think of the sexual revolution as a product of the 1960s, it was actually the “Roaring 20s” of the flapper era that first gave rise to the liberalization of sexual mores. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, a new generation of young people rejected the sexual mores of their parents and adopted a new set of values that accepted recreational dating and “petting” as normal and that endorsed a new set of behavioral norms for women that were diametrically opposed to the older image of women as temperance advocates and guardians of chastity.
Many historians have portrayed the flapper culture of the 1920s as a liberating moment for women. Women were now free to cut their hair into short bobs, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol in public. They were free to kiss the men they wanted to kiss without tying themselves down to a marriage partner before they were ready. Most importantly, they could set their own direction in life without having to conform themselves to the confining matronly roles that typified the Victorian period.
But on closer inspection, what many of my students assume was a matter of personal style and self-actualization for the flappers was actually a new conformity to the standards of Hollywood movies, a new phenomenon of the era. As young American men in urban areas (where movie theaters were located) became acquainted for the first time with the glamorous women starring on screen in such racy productions of the era as Rouged Lips, Sinners in Silk, and Women Who Give, they began rating the women around them according to similar standards of beauty. If women in the late Victorian era were judged according to their moral character, women of the 1920s were judged according to their beauty.
Sometimes the judging was quite literal. When the first beauty pageants were launched – including the Miss America Beauty Pageant, which debuted in 1921 – women were measured by male judges, and a numerical score was assigned for each body part: hips, legs, torso, etc.
Even women who did not enter beauty pageants felt they had to pay to enhance their beauty. The national cosmetics industry grew from a $17 million a year industry at the beginning of the 1920s to a $200 million a year industry by the end of the decade. The number of beauty parlors in New York City alone increased from 750 in 1920 to more than 3,000 by 1925.
And because people had begun to think about questions of dating and marriage in terms of personal sexual satisfaction (which was closely linked, in their view, to their partner’s physical beauty), they began for the first time to get divorced if their partner didn’t match their physical expectations. When the historian Elaine Tyler May compared California divorce records from the 1880s with those from the 1920s, she found that the reasons for divorce in the 1920s were quite different from those given forty years earlier. In the 1880s, nearly all divorces occurred because of what we might call covenant-breaking – that is, adultery, desertion, or a husband’s alcoholism or abuse (or a wife’s neglect of the children). But May noticed that the divorce records from the 1920s showed that for the first time, some couples were divorcing because they no longer considered a partner physically attractive or because the person no longer made them happy or met their needs.
The 1920s was a decade of consumerism, and it was likewise a decade of entertainment – a decade that, for the first time, was marked by larger-than-life, gluttonous popular male sports heroes like Babe Ruth or glamorous female movie stars like Greta Garbo – the star of films like Flesh and the Devil and The Temptress, both of which debuted in 1926.
Perhaps none of this could be classified as porn per se, but it was certainly risqué, and it did a lot to cement the connection between erotic imagery, consumerism, and self-gratification. That connection was further cemented with the debut of Playboy magazine in 1953.
There had been plenty of nude photography and erotic art before Playboy, but it was Playboy that brought the nude centerfolds out of the realm of the seedy red-light district shops and into mainstream drugstores and newsstands. Playboy made soft porn respectable. And it did it by linking the visual consumption of photos of female nudes with a glamorous depiction of a life defined entirely by materialistic, urbane consumerism.
In a 1957 issue of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder, published a third-person description of himself that focused almost entirely on what he bought, consumed, and used for entertainment: “His dress is conservative and casual. He always wears loafers. . . . There is an electronic entertainment wall in his office, very much like the one feature in Playboy’s Penthouse apartment, that includes hi-fi, AM-FM radio, tape, and television, and will store up to 2000 LPs. Brubeck, Kenton, or Sinatra is usually on the table when Hefner is working. He is essentially an indoors man, though he discovered the pleasures of the ski slope last winter. He likes jazz, foreign films, Ivy League clothes, gin and tonic and pretty girls – the same sort of things that Playboy readers like – and his approach to life is as fresh, sophisticated, and yet admittedly sentimental as is the magazine.”
The message was clear: Playboy was for the preppy set of readers who spent their money on themselves in the belief that a particular set of clothes, music, movies, and drinks made them suave and sophisticated. Above all, they liked to be entertained – hence, the emphasis on what in 1957 was a state-of-the-art stereo and television system. Was it any surprise that this emphasis on consumerism and entertainment carried over to Hefner’s view of sex – and the view that he conveyed to his magazine’s readers?
“Soft-core” pornography became a lot more lurid in the 1970s, when Playboy was joined by several other major erotic magazines that began pushing the bounds of propriety by printing explicit photos and crude jokes that went well beyond the airbrushed nude centerfolds that had made Playboy a commercial success. In addition, hundreds of adult movie theaters sprang up to begin showing X-rated movies that made Playboy’s early commercialization of erotic imagery seem quaintly innocent by comparison.
These developments alarmed many conservative Christians at the time, but I think that what gave rise to them was a change in entertainment options that may have seemed a bit more innocuous - even though it should not have. By the 1970s, Americans were spending more time than ever in front of screens – and movie and television producers were trying to find an ever-increasing amount of racy content to keep audiences hooked.
This started in the 1950s, when Hollywood, faced with the potential decrease in movie audiences because of the competition of television, began serving up racier fare to entice people to come back to the theater. The Moon Is Blue (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) might seem very tame compared to later norms, but in the 1950s, the sexual references in these films went beyond what could be shown on television and tended to push the existing movie production code to the limit.
In 1966, Hollywood abandoned the production code altogether and replaced it with a rating system. Now there were theoretically no limits on the amount of sex, profanity, or gratuitous violence that could be shown on screen, as long as movie producers used the appropriate rating to warn audiences of the content. As movie producers quickly realized, there were plenty of people who would pay to see an X-rated film – which is why there were 800 adult movie theaters in the United States by 1979.
In the 1980s, pornographic films moved out of the theater and into private homes because of the invention of the VCR. And in the 1990s and afterwards, porn moved onto the internet, where, of course, it still is.
Meanwhile, television raced to keep up with the explicitness now allowed in movies. The rise of cable television after the late 1970s greatly expanded the viewing options for American households, with new possibilities for both entertainment and erotic titillation.
And as the technology expanded, Americans’ addiction to entertainment seemed to continuously increase. By 2010, the average American household watched nine hours of TV every day and spent more than one hour a day on the internet. During the last fifteen years, the number of hours in front of the TV has dropped slightly, but the amount of time per day the average online user spends looking at the internet is now 6 hours and 38 minutes. The average American is also watching the highest number of movies in American history – more than 5,000 over the course of a lifetime, according to one estimate. To a greater degree than at any previous moment in American history, we can instantly access any form of entertainment we want. We’re not constrained by what is showing in our local movie theater or what is available at our local library; we can call up at will nearly anything we feel like seeing.
Given the close historical connection between consumerism, entertainment, and sexual objectification, it shouldn’t surprise us that an era of instant gratification in entertainment has also become an era of extraordinarily heavy porn use, and that the violence and objectification in modern porn have become our culture’s collective moral blind spot. That’s what we should expect, given the last century of sexual revolutions connected to consumeristic self-gratification and the growth of entertainment.
To resist this, those of us who have theologically based ethical objections to porn will need to do more than merely resolve to stay away from inappropriate online content. If we really want to retrain our minds – and encourage those in our churches and communities to do the same – we’ll need to resist the culture of consumeristic entertainment. That doesn’t mean never enjoying being entertained, but it does mean that entertainment should not become our chief pursuit, as it apparently has for so many people. Our souls cannot afford to become addicted to being entertained, because we were created for a higher purpose than simply taking pleasure in our own amusement.
Perhaps the church’s long tradition of cultivating self-denial in order to develop habits of genuine love will serve us well here. Such virtues may seem countercultural – but an antidote to our contemporary culture of self-gratification and consumeristic pleasure-seeking may be exactly what we need to resist the pornographic objectification that has corrupted our collective psyche.
(Note on sources: Most of the historical information in this piece is taken from books on the sexual revolutions of the 1920s and the postwar era. Some of the resources I found most helpful include Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s; Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America; and Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1945-1961).