Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality - Gail Dines

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality by Gail Dines

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Gail Dines’ Pornland is the first book I’ve read about pornography and I think it was an excellent place to start. Using very clear language and thought-provoking analysis, Dines breaks down porn in ways that I found convincing and accurate. Admittedly, my personal layperson thoughts about porn and its effects on popular culture, business, sexuality, race and gender were often quite similar to Dines’, though obviously in a less-informed, critically organized and researched form. Pornland has confirmed and expanded my own thoughts and concerns about pornography, which I guess makes me a biased reader inclined to read her book with less critical rigor than I should. But I didn’t read this for a class or to become a pornography scholar; I read it as a thoughtful, concerned citizen who believes pornography might best represent everything wrong with modern society.

Dines’ historical account of when porn was first brought into the mainstream via Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler illuminates how the porn industry operated then and now first and foremost as a business intent on making the highest profits possible. As a business, it represents everything wrong with capitalistic business practice, for it focuses solely on profit margins at the expense of people – profits supersede the interests (health, safety, well-being, etc.) of both the consumer (mostly men) and the employees (female performers). They are selling an industrially manufactured product from the assembly line, where churning out as many units as possible is the order of the day. This mass-production method debases people and sexuality, reducing them to mere objects and mechanics. No deeper social, emotional, psychological, or spiritual connection is desired.

According to Dines, the industry works really hard to sell its product and garner customers. How porn is advertised to the public is crafty indeed. Playboy capitalizes on their sleek, debonair approach, which has served Hugh Hefner quite well. The sleazy humor used by Hustler claims porn consumers are greasy white trash when in fact their main consumer isn’t that at all; nor is founder (and millionaire) Larry Flynt. When it does portray itself as a prosperous celebrity occupation, as with porn star Jenna Jameson, it conveniently omits any indication that being a porn star is actually a terribly miserable occupation. Porn survives, like so much of consumer business today, by advertising their product in an intentionally deceptive package – basically, they lie to us. Since people are always influenced by the culture in which they live, it is no wonder we begin listening to and believing porn’s messages, which come in all forms: Cosmopolitan and Maxim magazines, child clothing lines designed to make prepubescent girls “hot” and “sexy,” Carl’s Jr. ads containing messages so sexually explicit you wonder if food even entered the advertisers’ minds, or music videos of scantily-clad divas writhing around in some form of orgasmic ecstasy. These are a few examples of how porn has seeped into our culture. Sex sells, and porn has taken full advantage of this fact, with their primary objective being money and rabid consumerism.

21st century consumerism has reached terminal levels of gluttony, with porn being one of the grossest transgressors and supporters of rabid consumption. The point of the product is to get you to consume more and more, and with pornography addiction numbers piling up it seems that the industry has been wildly successful. What Dines successfully shows is how the harsh treatment of women, the open and unapologetic racism, pseudo-child porn’s manipulation of women to look younger, to name but three, all show that pornography, in a very real and rather literal way, consumes people. People are the product and while these raw materials are abundantly available, due to their savage exploitation their shelf life is very short.

Dines’ descriptions are vivid and explicit, pulling few punches as to the aggressive, racist, sexist, sadistic aspects of the industry. She also doesn’t avoid naming large corporations benefiting from porn – amazon.com & google.com are getting quite a bump from searches and sales; hotel chains like Marriott and Holiday Inn generate quite a sum from providing porno movies. And Dines points out the flaws in arguments that porn isn’t so bad because it can’t be proven that watching porn causes men to rape women – like rape is the only crime against women worth caring about. She is (rightfully) an unapologetic feminist who argues that feminism is about gender equality, which is completely absent in porno movies, and that so-called female sexual liberation celebrated by Cosmopolitan and Sex and the City is actually about pleasing and being subservient to men – something that would make those second waves feminists who fought for sexual liberation roll over in their graves.

Dines’ arguments and analysis show contemporary society to have reduced sex to nothing but the physical appearance and performance, with the brunt of the pressure and pain put to women, though men are obviously damaged by this reductive view as well. I'll add that this is true at my own university, BYU, which claims and at least appears to not have a porn or promiscuous sex problem to the degree of other universities, which is not to say there isn’t a problem – there is, but hopefully to a lesser degree than elsewhere. BYU has (unacknowledged) problems with sexist attitudes and beliefs that exist within the porn industry in more radical form. But women still aren’t spared the suffocating pressure to be physically attractive – the hot and sexy factor is still a huge determinant in whether a woman gets dates and is accepted into male circles. Women constantly have to live up to the expectations of the men (and strangely the expectations of other women) around them, which naturally leads to the problems Dines addresses: eating disorders, unnecessary plastic surgery, excessive exercise, depression, poor grades and general feelings of inadequacy.

In conclusion (“finally!” you exclaim), Pornland is an excellent read. My only wishes were that the book’s conclusion discussed solutions to combating pornography in more detail. As it was, the conclusion was mostly an advert for the group Stop Porn Culture, which she helped found. And I had wished for some discussion about what she felt a healthy sexual relationship entailed – the book after all is about “how porn has hijacked our sexuality.” Aside from brief statements about sex being wonderfully important for strengthening a couple’s relationship, there is no in depth assertions of what couples can do to have a healthy, porn-free relationship. People need positive reasons to pursue the type of relationship I believe Dines wishes people to have. Identifying and proving that porn isn’t good for us is an important message, and she does it really well, but some encouragement on the other end would have made this already good book that much better. But as it is, this is a fine examination and condemnation of pornography.

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A Visit to Tiny Telephone

Tiff and I were fortunate enough to attend John Vanderslice's special performance with the Magik*Magik Orchestra at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The concert included the entire White Wilderness album, a lovely collaboration between JV and Magik*Magik, just released this year. They also performed orchestral versions of many JV songs from his backcatalogue. It truly was a unique concert experience, and though I seem to say that with every Vanderslice show I see, this concert really did stand apart from those other fine shows. But the memories didn't end with the concert, for near the concert's end Vanderslice invited the audience to a free tour of his recording studio, Tiny Telephone, the following morning. Naturally, Tiff and I wanted to go, and since we had the whole next day available to us, we went. (Luckily, it didn't take much to persuade Mom to come with us.)

  John Vanderslice - Sea Salt by IndieRockReviews 

The tour of Tiny Telephone was a wonderfully memorable experience for a few reasons. First, it further solidified my deep admiration for John Vanderslice as a musician and person. He's a good person with remarkable talent; the genuine article, as they say.

Second, I learned a lot about sound and recording that I hadn't really thought about much before. Sound is cool and recording an album is a really complex process - at least it is when you wanna do it well. Tiny Telephone encourages analog recordings rather than digital, and for good reason: too much of digital recording is crap. New digital technology should be awesome, but most of it isn't. Unfortunately, our new technology has mostly made studio recording lazier, which only encourages lazy listeners - we get used to hearing poor quality recordings and lose our ear for good sound.

Third, I was charmed by Vanderslice's account of the development of Tiny Telephone and the small community of artists neighboring the studio. According to him, the neighborhood used to be a lot more dangerous than it is these days. The change came in part because of the small artist community that filled in the collection of shabby-looking back alley buildings where Tiny Telephone is located, inviting a much safer atmosphere. Additionally, the once-dangerous park next to Tiny Telephone received a skate park from the city, which has helped reduce crime. Maybe other parts of the country have gotten over the stigmas against skaters and the narrow beliefs that artists don't contribute to society, but in my community some of these naive beliefs still prevail. But the neighborhood where Tiny Telephone resides seems to show that artists can do a lot for a community and having skate parks (and other similar community amenities) doesn't increase crime, it reduces it because kids,and adults, have a place where they can gather and engage in constructive activities rather than wander around with nothing to do but get in trouble. This story was a modest example of community action to improve the neighborhood; something we could all benefit from.

There's much more I could say about my visit to Tiny Telephone. But for now I'll just show off some of the pictures I took while there. Vanderslice was kind enough to allow me to snap some photos and I was rather happy with the results.

Note how much the dude in sunglasses looks like T-Bone Burnett.

Thanks to Mom for taking this picture.

 

For more on our visit to Tiny Telephone, check out Tiff's post at The Art of Place.