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Boob: A Breast? Or a Fool?
The English language has more than 1000 words that sexually describe women or their body parts. Here are a few:
Babe, nymph, nymphomaniac, bimbo, fox, dog, beaver, freak, super freak, knockout, melons, tomatoes, whore, ho, dumb blond, shapely, pussy, boobs, hussy, slut, buxom, trim, troll, femme fatale, skank, goddess, jugs, bush, poontang, tart, loose, tramp, butch, bitch, Lolita, Betty, sex kitten, temptress, beast, promiscuous.
Sometimes neutral words take on a sexual meaning when they are applied to women. Call a man a professional and you’ll likely envision doctor or a lawyer. But say, “She’s a professional” and “prostitute” may be the first thing that comes to mind.
An author was asked to rename a book title before publication. “The Position of Women in Society” seemed too suggestive.
“It’s easy” sounds like a simple task. “He’s easy,” might denote an easy grader. But say, “she’s easy,” and you’ll likely hear “sexually promiscuous.”
One-time courtesy titles, or even high titles, can take on sexual meanings. “Madam” is a polite way of addressing a woman. She may be the female head of household. But she may also be the female head of a house of prostitution. Mistress – another term for the female head of house – is now associated with adultery. “Lady” is a polite title. But “lady of the evening” is not. Even the highest status a woman can gain, “Queen” takes on sexual connotations when applied to a gay man or a “drag queen.”
And notice how these words are demeaning as well as sexual (“gay” is beginning to overcome the stigma, but there’s a way to go). We could add drama queen and cootie queen to that mix.
Even the term boob, slang for a woman’s breast, is defined in the dictionary as, “a stupid or foolish person.” Odd that something so valued is also degraded. Is the appeal of boobs similar to the draw of a dumb blonde?
What difference does it all make?
In their work in anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf learned that words affect how we see. The Hopi Indians had no words to distinguish among the past, present, and future. And they had a difficult time with those concepts. Skiers are more attuned than most to different kinds of snow: powder, packed powder, corn, ice, slush, for example. Or, we so often use male terms to describe humanity – man, mankind, brotherhood, fellowship – that when people are asked to think of a person, a man generally comes to mind.
Words dig deep into our unconscious psyches, directing how we see ourselves and others. When we constantly hear sexual and pejorative terms describing women, women come to be sexualized and demeaned in our minds.
The language we learn is neither the fault of the men or the women of our society, in so far as baby girls and baby boys both grow up immersed in these words. What’s important is how we use language once we “get it,” and once we get that it matters.
Georgia Platts
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Charlie Sheen: Celebrating a Bad-Boy Who Abuses Women
Charlie Sheen got fired. Until now he seemed to be rewarded more than punished for bad behavior, including a history of violence against women: He shot a fiancée in the arm, he hit a woman who wouldn’t have sex with him, he was arrested for beating a girlfriend, a porn star locked herself in a hotel bathroom as he went berserk, two of the women he married filed restraining orders against him after he issued death threats.
But right now I’m less concerned with Charlie’s behavior than with our own. Why did this abuse bring him greater celebrity than shame?
As Jezebel founder Anna Holmes pointed out in a New York Times piece, offense at abuse depends on the sort of women abused. Porn stars, prostitutes and suspected gold digging wives aren’t sympathetic.
But sometimes violence against women just doesn’t seem like a big deal. Eminem had a huge hit and huge accolades for “Love the Way You Lie,” which highlighted Rihanna singing “I like the way it hurts” as Eminem chanted, “It’s like I’m in flight, High of a love, Drunk from the hate,” while Megan Fox got beaten up in the accompanying video. The song garnered critical acclaim, including Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. In fact, going into Grammy night, he led with ten nominations, including Album of the Year. No one seemed too bothered about eroticized abuse.
Oscar felt pretty hip awarding “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” a few years back. Isn’t “owning,” degrading and beating women all part of the pimping life? But hey, it’s all good, as they say.
Or, Super Bowl audiences sat shocked when Justin Timberlake ripped off Janet Jackson’s bodice, revealing a bare nipple. Few cared that choreographed “slapping around” led to the grabbing and ripping. Abusing women is acceptable. But nudity is horrifying.
Then there’s Smack a Slut Week which runs October 3rd – 7th, and can be celebrated “anywhere you like, by, you guessed it, smackin’ sluts,” as The F-Bomb put it. Just a joke? One study found that men discriminated against women more after hearing sexist jokes.
Even the red hat from Devo’s “Whip It” video, depicting a man whipping the clothes off a female mannequin, is now a part of the Smithsonian collection. Accepted, mainstream stuff.
I won’t even get into the eroticized violence so often depicting women freshly killed in high fashion ads.
My first cue that Charlie had a sadistic streak was a news report that he alerted police to a “snuff” film in which a killing that followed sex looked a bit too real to him. Now, he seems to get off on harming women in real life.
Meanwhile, the rest of us stand by, barely noticing. Or celebrating Sheen’s behavior. He’s a bad boy. It’s a lot of fun, and no big deal.
Georgia Platts
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Sex Objects Who Don’t Enjoy Sex
Sexualizing women can have its perks in the bedroom, with breast fetishes and butt fetishes heightening men’s arousal.
But surprisingly, sexualizing women can have the opposite effect, harming both men’s and women’s enjoyment. And in many ways. Here’s one: self-objectification.
Drowning in “sexy women” images, men and women can both come to see women as the sexy half of the species. So what happens in bed? Because men aren’t seen as especially sexy (at least by comparison) men are focused on women and women can be focused on themselves.
Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at Occidental College, found that some women become preoccupied with how they look instead of the sexual experience. “One young woman I interviewed described sex as being an ‘out of body’ experience,” she said. “She viewed herself through the eyes of her lover, and, sometimes, through the imaginary lens of a camera shooting a porn film.”
Sounds a bit like Paris Hilton: “My boyfriends say I’m sexy but not sexual,” she mused. “Being ‘hot’ is a pose, an act, a tool, and entirely divorced from either physical pleasure or romantic love.”
Heldman feels that girls and women are learning to eroticize male sexual pleasure as though it were their own. She feels they need to explore their sexuality in more empowering and satisfying ways than this vicarious act.
Cultural theorist Jackson Katz has similar concerns. “Many young women are now engaged in sex acts with men that prioritize the man’s pleasure,” he reflected, “with little or no expectation of reciprocity.”
When having sex, these young women may be enjoying themselves, and how nice they look. They may gain a boost to self-esteem as they dwell on their “hotness.” But they’re not enjoying sex.
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Spoon Fed Barbie
Surface appearances can be deceiving, says artist, Yvonne Escalante.
Commenting on the pieces shown here, she reflects,
- Spoon Fed
Baby's Rattle
- Sucker
As a first generation American, Escalante’s father had stressed American identity over cultural ties. Today, her work explores the conflict she feels, caught in the kaleidoscope of identity, gender roles, and societal norms.
Her work can be viewed this month at an exhibit titled, “CONTROL” at New York’s Ceres Gallery.
Here’s what these pieces say to me.
Like most little girls, I grew up spoon fed on Barbie. But not just Barbie. She was an emblem of all that mass media, friends and schoolmates, told me to be. A good shopper. Paired with Ken. Skinny and curvy all at once. The emblem of perfect womanhood, where body defines us.
Oddly, all this spoon feeding can lead to a dearth of feeding of any sort. I’ve gone through phases of not eating like I should, hoping to look like what turn out to be phony photoshopped images that don’t even resemble the starving models who posed for the pics.
What did I know?
Of course, skinny isn’t enough. We must be buxom, too. Which leads to unnecessary, and sometimes life-threatening, surgeries in pursuit of Barbie breasts. At least that’s what happens when boobs define us, creating our worth. For too many women and men, surface is all.
When women are told they must acquire surreal measurements, and when obtaining them is the source of self-worth, the pursuit takes unending time and energy.
Obsessed with diet and exercise, women can become distracted from the rest of life; so much so that (as Naomi Wolf can tell you) advances of the women’s movement can quickly wane. Frantic pursuit of the perfect body removes agitation for power of greater substance.
Hence, the pacifier. Here, called “Sucker.”
Any wonder the exhibit’s theme is “CONTROL”?
This piece can be viewed at “CONTROL,” an exhibition of California women artists presented by The Women’s Caucus for Art at New York’s Ceres Gallery, February 1 – February 26th, 2011.
For more on Yvonne Escalante’s work go to ARTslant.
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Men Have Higher Sex Drive. Why?
While some women have stronger sex drives than some men, generally the pattern goes the other way.
Why is the male sex drive usually stronger?
Researchers at Indiana University say,
Women had a wider range of response, with some loving sex, and others feeling uninterested. Generally, women have more difficulty with arousal for both anatomical and psychological reasons.
Difficulty with arousal won’t likely lead to a strong sex drive. Biology and psychology both seem to play a role. Let’s start with biology.
Sexual Biology
According to Louann Brizendine, author of the books, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, the area governing sexuality takes up twice as much space in the male. And the part that controls desire to pursue is 2½ times greater, and more quickly activated. (This is exaggerated and stereotyped in the accompanying photo.)
Brizendine tells us that when the male brain is sexually activated pretty much everything but thoughts of sex shut down. Women certainly can stay focused, but they are more likely than men to be distracted with concerns about the kids’ lunches, a scheduled business meeting, or whether they’ll be labeled a “slut” the next day.
But Dr. Brizendine’s book has met criticism. Dr. Cordelia Fine is a University of Melbourne professor who specializes in social psychology and neuroscientific research. She points out that 1) neuroscience is in its infancy, 2) you cannot determine whether any particular brain is male or female at the individual level, and 3) brain structure is affected by experience. If a woman’s sexuality is punished and repressed, the parts of her brain associated with sexuality will be affected. If a man’s sexuality is celebrated, his brain will also be affected.
But anatomy could have an effect. A penis must ejaculate on a regular basis to create fresh sperm. A penis is also larger than a clitoris. Both of these things might make its workings more obvious so that boys are more likely to masturbate, and girls are less likely to get to know their bodies and what arouses them. An erect penis also gives men a lot of feedback, while women’s genitals seem to provide less: Men looking at a naked body are much more likely to feel aroused than women doing the same thing. But women’s bodies are also much more sexualized by our culture — that may play a role. And the repression of women’s sexuality in our society may also affect genital feedback to the brain.
Of course, men do have much more testosterone, crucial to sex drive. Even when women and men are both treated with testosterone for low libido, the hormone is less effective in women, according to Dr. Glenn Braunstein of Cedars Sinai Medical Center. But women are more sensitive to the testosterone that they do have.
But in women’s favor, they seem to be more capable of multiple orgasm. Some think women’s sex drive could be innately stronger than men’s for that reason. Who knows?
Sexual Psychology
Because psychology affects biology, I’ve already mentioned that women’s sexuality is more punished and repressed in our culture. Men who have sex have been variously praised as players, studs, Casanovas, Don Juans, and lady killers. They are “high-fived” for “scoring.” But women are called sluts, hoes, whores, skanks… Men sport a cocky cock, while a vagina is called “down there.” Or, women get screwed, rammed, nailed, cut, boned, banged, smacked, beaten, and f’d, in street parlance.
Sexual violence doesn’t help, either, and it’s something that more egalitarian, sex-positive societies lack.
Meanwhile, because women’s bodies are so much more sexualized and sexually revealed, men get far more provocation on a daily basis.
In societies where women’s sexuality is not repressed and not objectified, they greatly enjoy sex and behave in ways that are similar to men.
But in our repressive world, women experience more sexual problems. In fact, nearly half of American women report having experienced some form of sexual dysfunction. University of Texas, Austin researchers reported in Why Women Have Sex that one-third of women, aged 18-23, felt little sexual interest in the prior year. But only 14% of men did. Meanwhile, 30-40% of women reported difficulty climaxing. Among those in a relationship, 75% of men said they always had an orgasm, but only 26% of women did. This difference likely affects how much each gender desires sex, since one is more consistently rewarded.
Interest and enjoyment needn’t be such a problem for women. And culture, more than biology, seems to be the culprit. The University of Texas researchers note that women are easily orgasmic in cultures where women are expected to enjoy sexuality. But they aren’t in places where they are repressed.
While women are taught that they are bad if they like sex too much, men are taught the opposite. The male role casts men as being ever-desirous, which could propel them to live up to expectations.
Meanwhile, both men and women learn to see women as the sexier sex. So men can be with someone who’s very physically alluring. But women aren’t taught to see men in the same way. Men can focus on a breast fetish. What are women supposed to pay attention to? No fetish is attached to the male. No wonder we’re less interested.
Sex also provides one of the few vehicles for men to experience emotional closeness. Men need that intimacy, yet the male role leaves them repressing their emotions. Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, feels that “For men, sex is the connection. Sex is the language men use to express their tender loving vulnerable side.”
So how do women and men come together? Large cultural changes would help. Seeing women primarily as the sexy half of the species doesn’t aid women’s sex drive. It would help women to live in a less sexually repressive culture, while men would gain from a less emotionally repressive society. But given that this is our reality, perhaps both women and men could use some counseling or therapy. Communication and acting from a place of love to accomodate each other would surely help, too.
Sure, some women really take pleasure in sexuality, but the heightened and more widespread enjoyment of our sisters who come out of non-shaming cultures tell us that women could be loving sex a whole lot more.
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Real Women Competing With Porn Stars
Overconsumption of porn is having unintended consequences.
Once upon a time men were hesitant to purchase pornography. Walk into an adult bookstore or movie house? Ring up a purchase with the girl at the counter? Way too embarrassing. But now internet porn is easily available in the anonymity of home. It’s even free. Porn has gone mainstream. Who doesn’t do it anymore?
But porntopia has an unexpected downside. Standards of sexiness are growing narrower. Some men expect their partners to act like porn stars. Sometimes both. Everyone ends up disappointed.
Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training, and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
So said Naomi Wolf after a college campus tour.
In sum: women are now expected to behave like actresses in porn flicks. Emphasis on “actress.” Even porn stars don’t behave that way at home.
And how do the actresses act? It’s male fantasy: It’s all about the guy.
Pamela Paul found something similar in her research for Pornified:
Among men who overconsume porn, real women are now expected to: Howl and moan with delight at the sight of the male member, or in anticipation of oral sex. They must enthusiastically swallow, let their boyfriends ejaculate on their faces and bodies, or maybe be peed upon. Suggesting an interest in lesbianism is always good. And through it all, they’re expected to have quick, easy orgasms. Ideally without much foreplay.
A man named Luis reported,
I’ve broken up with women who wouldn’t perform certain things.
Some recognize the problem. A man named Harrison stated,
I think that a guy’s expectations of his partner might be affected by the images he sees in porn. People’s expectations of their partner’s sexual performance or of what their partners might be willing to do might be unrealistic.
A 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll found that 35% of men felt sex with real woman had become less arousing. Twenty percent said the real thing couldn’t compete with virtual sex.
If women want to compete, they’ll need to become actresses, too. Not so much fun for them.
Women who bed these men end up feeling empty and unsatisfied. After watching porn with her boyfriend, a woman named Cara observed,
The women were all fake. No intimacy, nothing sensual. Even when he and I were intimate, the sex wasn’t intimate.
Perhaps this is what happens when sex objects have sex — and not when flesh and blood human beings have sex.
Distracted by candy, everyone ends up missing something more nourishing and substantive. We miss out on the deep, connected intimacy that brings so much meaning to relationship. Soul needs.
Why act in ways that leave us empty and spiritually wanting? Is he that into you to be worth it? The focus on his pleasure, only, suggests he is not.
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What Happens When You Beat A Sex Object?
Sexualizing abuse
What happens when you beat a sex object? Or hang her? Or rape her? Or hogtie and torture her?
Pop culture is filled with images of women as objects. It’s also filled with images of women as abused objects. But then, the two go hand in hand: Objects have no feelings to empathize with, no lives of their own to interrupt or worry about. They can exist just for sadistic pleasure.
Oddly, I’m not seeking to shame anyone who gets aroused by these images. People tend to unconsciously absorb their culture like a sponge – we all do. Even my women’s studies students and the feminist blogs I read register a taste for this stuff. No surprise that so many find it sexy, our society is so filled with these images.
At the same time, I’m not dismissing the issue. Whether you want to participate or fight it, at least have eyes open and look at the downside.
When I was a little girl I got a children’s book from the library. In one story a woman was punished: She was stripped, placed in a kettle-like contraption with spikes to poke her, and driven through the town in humiliation. That’s my first memory of sexualized abuse.
My second encounter was flipping TV stations as a child, and seeing a man throw a woman over his knee to spank her. Apparently, if I’d flipped through a magazine I could have seen an ad with the same image.
When I got older the Rolling Stones promoted their “Black and Blue” album with a picture of a woman bound and bruised.
At the movies women are killed – in sexy bras and panties – in popular horror flicks. In tamer fare, Scarlett started out resisting Rhett, but ended up enjoying a night of passion as “no” turned to “yes.” In the soaps, Luke raped Laura and they fell in love.
Devo’s “Whip It” showed a man whipping the clothes off a mannequin. The red hat from this video is now in the Smithsonian.
In magazines and billboards we are bombarded with ads depicting violence against women.
Romance novels and erotic tales tell stories of women who are abducted and raped and who fall in love with their captors. Mainstream movies like 9-1/2 Weeks and The Secretary depict women enjoying abuse at their lovers’ hands. Justine Timberlake slapped Janet Jackson around at the Super Bowl before ripping off her bodice. More recently Megan Fox gets beat up in a popular video that you can view over and over again. In the background Eminem mouths “I’m in flight high of a love drunk from the hate,” to which Rihanna replies, “I like the way it hurts.” And then there’s the porn world full of “no’s” turning to “yes.” Or “no” remaining “no,” but that’s sexy, too.
On a feminist website, one woman described the joys of being a sex slave avatar to a dominant man in the virtual world of “Second Life.” Another explained the appeal with the help of a poor understanding of evolutionary psychology: Through evolution, she explained, women have come to want male domination in their relationships.
That’s not really what evolutionary psych says (and I have issues with that field, anyway). How would craving your own abuse, or even domination, be adaptive? Pain is meant to warn us to stop doing something. Women’s genes don’t crave poor treatment. If they did, we’d find eroticized violence in every culture, but we don’t. Egalitarian societies like those of the American Indian (before contact with patriarchy) did not sexualize abused women.
Here are two big problems with eroticizing male dominance and women’s pain: First, women and men can both come to crave the abuse of women in real life. Second, when we make male dominance seem sexy, we become more accepting of male dominance.
Neither of these aid the fight for equality, justice or human rights.
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Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men
Girls are so inundated with sexualized images of women that they learn to see women as sexier than men. Women come to see women through male eyes?
In the bedroom, this can make women’s sexuality a bit convoluted, which I’ll discuss later.
But consider my students:
“Women’s bodies are just naturally sexier than men’s,” my class tells me when I ask why women are portrayed as sex objects.
In this belief, my students are not alone.
A few years back Lisa Kudrow, of Friends fame, told Jay Leno that female nudity is displayed more in movies because, “Who wants to look at a guy?”
Hugh Hefner thinks women are natural sex objects, “If women weren’t sex objects, there wouldn’t be another generation.”
I’ve talked before about how the breast fetish is not natural, but is learned by both men and women. But how do we all learn that women are sexier than men in ways that go beyond the fetish?
Growing up, girls are bombarded with visions of women as sexy, with skin selectively hidden and revealed, the camera focused on those intriguingly concealed parts.
When I was little my mom took me to the Ice Capades. After noticing that the women were half dressed while the men were fully clothed, I asked why. Mom told me that women just have better legs.
Do they? One warm summer day an adult from my church youth group commented, “It’s too bad the guys have the best legs.” (Thanks!) But what is our cultural ideal? Longer, leaner. Young men typically have longer legs, and they don’t have the extra layer of fat that women do. So most young men’s legs come closer to our ideal. Yet we say women have better legs? When I think about it, I actually think men have pretty nice looking legs. But nothing and no one directs our attention to them.
On Dancing With The Stars, women are half-dressed and men are fully-clothed. During an advertisement, the camera lingers on women’s breasts and legs in a Victoria’s Secret display. Next, a commercial for shoes focuses on women’s behinds: See this Rebook ad for EasyTone. Try to imagine the same focus on men’s butts (which actually are pretty attractive)!
Watch a football game and see big, fully-dressed, aggressive guys playing on the field, while scantily clad cheerleaders show off their stuff from the sidelines. In the Bikini Open men sport golf wear while women dawn bikinis. When does Sports Illustrated most focus on women? In the swimsuit edition.
Through it all, the camera gazes at women’s body parts, but not men’s. Telling us what’s important to notice. What’s sexy and what’s not.
Men’s bodies are rarely sexualized outside infrequent underwear ads.
Historically, men have had control of media, and they’ve portrayed what they see as sexy.
Bombarded with these images, girls come to see women as sexier than men. As I’ve said before, when I tell my class that I find a Playboy pinup sexier than a Playgirl pinup, women’s heads nod in agreement.
Meanwhile, when women answer surveys about what they find sexy they say “men.” But when they are wired up, blood flow to the vagina is stronger when viewing an image of a nude woman than a nude man – conscious responses and bodily responses not agreeing.
Oddly, and yet logically, women come to see women through male eyes.
So women come to see themselves as the sexy half of the species. Being sexy has some advantages. It can just be fun, it’s easier to attract mates (consider the success of women versus men in singles bars), and sexiness is a source of power.
But there’s a downside, too, including the narrow construct that leaves so many women feeling they exist outside the “sexy” box, with a drop in self esteem kicking in.
Taken to extreme, some women can become sex objects, taking an unhealthy one-dimensional focus on themselves, feeling that how they look is all that matters. And some men may see them as objects whose sole purpose is to be used for their pleasure.
It ain’t so great to be, or be seen, as mere object.
To anyone who plans to inform me that I am bi, please see this post first (I’m tired of answering repetitive comments): Men Know My Sexuality Better Than Me. And to those who think this means women don’t find men sexy or desirable, see this: Men Don’t Feel Sexy–and It Sucks.
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Bridalplasty: Competing to be Plastic on Reality TV
Brides-to-be compete for plastic surgery on Bridalplasty, which premiered this week on E! The show promises, “each week one lucky bride will … get one piece of her dream body – going under the knife for one of the surgeries off her ‘wish list.” Grand prize is a full-body makeover, just in time for the wedding.
As Jezebel reports, in the first episode contestants covered their “gross” bodies with what were deemed more appealing photoshopped pictures of themselves. The show’s surgeon told one woman, “You have perfect breasts…for doing a breast augmentation.” Next, he marked too-fat areas on size 0 women for liposuction.
One commenter responded with an image:
Really, can you get more objectified than dissecting and judging body parts? Or seeing a woman’s worth primarily in those parts? Then creating some Frankensteinish creature in response?
Some women die in plastic surgery, from infections or complications from anesthesia, as though the shell of the outer self were worth the sacrifice. Surely these women didn’t expect to die, yet they gave up their whole selves in worship of their “parts.”
Continuing the shallow theme, Bridalplasty is as much about sales as anything. Like much of marketing, the show focuses on making women feel bad about themselves so they’ll go out and buy.
You’re size 0? You can still rid yourself of any remaining fat with just a little surgery. You name it, you can buy it: breast implants, liposuction, chin lift, nose job. BUY, BUY, BUY!
Bridalplasty is one big advertisement.
As contest winners were told to “Grab your syringe and go down to the injecting party” I felt transported to a Brave New World where surface is All.
Brave New World brought me an appreciation for delving beneath the superficiality of physical “perfection” and Prozac feel-good, which never scratch the surface into intellectual or emotional depth.
All this focus on physical perfection. Whose notion of physical perfection?
What’s deemed beautiful varies from culture to culture. Tribal societies prefer the equivalent of an A-cup, while parts of West Africa celebrate roundedness — the bigger the woman, the better!
Instead of following like lemmings, why not promote real beauty and create healthy notions that appreciate variety as the spice of life – whether lovely rounded-curvy or AA sexy cute.
The one bright spot? The show’s poor ratings give us hope.
Georgia Platts
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Men Finding Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”
![jenna-jameson[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/jenna-jameson1.jpg?w=230&h=300)
Feminist, Andrea Dworkin, had feared that easy access to internet porn would turbocharge women’s objectification and turn men into wild, raping beasts. But internet porn actually seems to be having the opposite effect, deadening male libido in relation to real women, with men who over-consume finding fewer women “porn-worthy.
This is what author, Naomi Wolf, noticed when students talked about their sex lives during her speaking tours of college campuses.
Others have made similar findings.
Pamela Paul interviewed over one hundred people, mostly men, in her research for Pornified, and found that porn-worthiness was a common concern among those who over-indulged.
One young man talked of his change in perspective:
My standards changed. Women who are otherwise good looking but aren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, longer hair, curvier bodies in general.
I find that when I’m out at a party or bar I catch myself sizing up women. I would say to myself, wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.
Paul went on to cite a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll which found that one in 10 men admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body with exposure to porn.
Meanwhile, 51% of Americans believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look.
Many of the college women Wolf spoke to complained that they couldn’t compete, and they knew it.
Men, she said, learn about sex from porn but find that it is not helpful in teaching them how to relate to real women. She ended with this observation:
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.
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