Beyond The Raincoats: The Porn Consumer In Mainstream Media

Beyond the raincoats: The porn consumer in mainstream media Porn Cultures Conference Leeds, June 2009 Dr Karen Boyle, University of Glasgow, [email protected]

Dirty? Old? Men? “Mike likes to get a particular computer station in the back corner of the 24 hour internet café he visits often – more often than a man without a job can afford. The cubicle feels familiar and is marginally more secluded than others that line the walls. Late at night, which is when Mike usually arrives, the café is not busy or bright as during the day. He finds his spot, logs on and starts looking at pornography. And sometime he’s still there 24 hours later. ‘They have snack food in the place, and that’s all I feed myself on – a soft drink, a packer of chips,’ he says…. Mike…. believes he’s addicted to pornography …. [and that] his dependence on porn is impacting on his ability to lead a normal, balanced life.” (From The Sunday Age, quoted by McKee, Albury & Lumby, 2008: p.24)

‘The media’ in The Porn Report “According to a Roy Morgan survey, and similar surveys in other Western countries, about 33 per cent of adult Australians use some kind of sexually explicit materials – videos, DVDS, magazines or on the internet. That’s about five million people. Yet when was the last time you heard anybody admitting in the media that they use porn themselves? While millions of Australians quietly live their lives and use pornography, the only people we hear from in public debates are church leaders, social scientists, politicians and commentators – people whose claim to expertise on the issue is the very fact that they themselves don’t watch porn, aren’t friendly with anybody who watches porn, and don’t know anything about the everyday use of porn. This isn’t seen as a problem, In fact, it seems to be the first qualification you need for speaking about porn in public. The only porn users you ever hear from in the media are people who call themselves ‘addicts’ and are trying to stop using it.” (McKee, Albury & Lumby, 2008: p.25)

“Speaking for themselves” ‘Of course you can never take interview responses on face value. These consumers might be liars (they might know that porn is hurting their marriages but don’t want to say it.) They might be stupid or deceived (they might think that their partners like it, but in fact they don’t). But asked to choose who knows themselves better – the people we spoke to, or an academic who’s never met them – we’re going to give the benefit of the doubt to these consumers, at least until we get any convincing evidence to the contrary.’ (McKee, Albury & Lumby, 2008, p.40)

My argument • Address – The porn consumer doesn’t have to be visible on screen or on the page for the reader/viewer to be interpolated (hailed, addressed) as a porn consumer. Indeed, the invisibility of the porn consumer can actually normalise porn consumption in particular ways.

• Representation – No one stereotype, but rather a variety of ‘types’ which serve different narrative, generic, ideological functions dependent on context.

Lads’ mags readers as hard core consumers • • • •

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Reviews of hard core films and internet sites (Front magazine). Special offers (Loaded online offering 250hrs free access to playboy.co.uk), prizes and gifts (Front’s payment for readers’ letters is DVDs from Digital Playground). An assumed knowledge of, and interest in, porn stars, producers and distributors (e.g. Front’s interviews with Ron Jeremy & Sasha Gray). Working in the sex industry is presented as any reader’s dream job (e.g. ‘This man is paid by an upmarket whorehouse in Chile to vet all potential employees, sleeping with six women a month. Is that a dream job or what?’ Loaded, July 09) An assumed familiarity with different kinds of porn and an invitation to use their knowledge of porn to contribute to the magazine (e.g. Loaded’s regular ‘Pornalikes’ feature). Pages of ads for pornography (on DVD, online, direct to your mobile), sex chatlines and escort services. Online links to porn sites (from Nuts homepage to Horny Teen Videos in two clicks).

Sexualising humiliation and violence against women • “‘I could murder a prostitute,’ muses Ashley without a hint of irony.” • This is from a first-person description of travelling to the Ukraine with Spurs’ football fans and follows the ‘blokes’ being evicted from a strip club for their drunken behaviour. (‘Insane in the Ukraine’, Loaded, May 2009, p.90)

 ‘A hunter on safari comes across a naked woman stretched out on the ground. He says ‘excuse me, are you game?’, ‘I sure am’, she replies with a saucy wink. So he shot her,’  (‘Jokes of the Week’, Zoo, 24-30 April 2009, p.36)

Docuporn’s generic address to the porn consumer • • •

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Mirroring porn’s obsessive focus on the female body. An invitation to the viewer to enter the world of commercial sex (e.g. “come over the hills and through the bush to Porno Valley”). Scale of the industry as legitimation (e.g. the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley is “the production powerhouse behind the roughly 700,00 adult videos rented by Americans every year” according to Porno Valley). Consumption is generic not individual and the relative invisibility of on-screen consumers reinforces this point: there is nothing complex about the motivation to ‘buy’ pornography, it is ‘natural’. Emphasis on women’s waiting and boredom and their desire to sell sex: an invitation to the viewer to take up the position of the ‘john’ or porn consumer. Withholding porn’s signature shots but offering tantalizing glimpses and enough information to locate the ‘real thing’ (video titles, web addresses, brothel locations). As TV critic Gareth McLean (2001) puts it, “After all, in what is quite literally showbusiness, it pays to advertise.” Adverts for subscription services and chatlines on commercial television. Sex and humour as alibis disguising the inequities of the transaction: it’s not about commerce it’s about sex, and we can be ironic and self-depreciating about it.

See Karen Boyle “Courting Consumers and Legitimating Exploitation: The Representation of Commercial Sex in Television Documentaries.” Feminist Media Studies, 8 (1), pp.35-50 (2008).

Representations of the porn consumer in mainstream media •

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The disturbed consumer is one whose consumption is abnormal, newsworthy, horrific. They can be found in factual genres (news reporting, current affairs), fictional crime genres (CSI, Prime Suspect, The Shield), horror (8mm) and the boundaries between production and consumption are sometimes blurred. The comic consumer is affable, laddish, sex-obsessed, often immature but nevertheless sometimes self-aware and self-depreciating (e.g. Friends, Men Behaving Badly, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother). A variation on this theme would be the horny teen (e.g. American Pie, Road Trip, but also The Sex Education Show ‘v’ Pornography). The matter of fact consumer: porn and other forms of commercial sex as an unremarkable fact of a particular kind of homosocial lifestyle (e.g. The Sopranos; first person accounts of porn consumption in lads’/ men’s magazines – such as Grub Smith’s column for FHM – or in the performances of male comics or presenters). The (celebrity) connoisseur: accessing women in pornography as a marker of status, a certain kind of distinction or celebrity (e.g. by gaining access to the Playboy mansion; acquiring a specialist collection of – or knowledge of - rare pornographic materials; gaining or consolidating one’s public profile by dating a porn star or glamour model). The fan: his consumption may be ‘abnormal’, but it gives him more direct access to the women of pornography (e.g. Porn: A Family Business) and allows him to ‘make his own’. The producer as consumer: through his own porn consumption he identifies a gap in the market – he is a visionary, a rebel, pushing the boundaries of the permissible (e.g. The People ‘v’ Larry Flynt). The consumer as producer is the ‘ordinary guy’ version of this (e.g. Zack & Miri Make a Porno; The Girl Next Door). The female consumer (e.g. the text accompanying pictorials in lads’ magazines; Sex and the City at the Playboy Mansion). The queer consumer (e.g. Queer as Folk [especially the US version]).