From Jekyll to Hyde:

How the porn industry

grooms male consumers
 Most men and boys are not sociopaths; they are
capable of empathy and consideration for others in at
least some parts of their lives.

In contemporary mainstream pornography marketed

to heterosexual men and boys, aggressive, hostile,
and humiliating acts against women are normal and
commonplace.

Most men and boys consume such pornography, and

many consume it habitually.

Therefore: Porn consumers must be groomed to accept

sexual dominance and sadism against women.
 QUESTIONS:
• Do consumers experience ethical qualms upon
encountering (and masturbating to) certain
pornographic materials?
• How do they manage their own ethical doubts and
concerns?
• How do pornography producers and distributors quash
consumers’ ethical qualms, to ensure that they will
continue buying and using pornography?
 Recent content analysis of 50
top-selling/renting porn films:

• 89% of all scenes contained aggression

(verbal and/or physical)
• average of 11.52 aggressive acts per scene

- Wosnitzer and Bridges (2007)

 Desensitization and escalation
“Personally, I like face slapping and I’m sure many people think that
crosses the line and is misogynistic. They’re probably right but I am
really desensitized to it and I really love to watch the rough
aggressive sex.” [Taylor Von Bailey, 6/109]

“I need things that are a little more perverse, a little more

dangerous to get the good feeling I’m after. Even just thinking:
This is bad or This is really bad, can pump me up. And nowadays
it’s not hard to find hard-core with people slapping, choking,
cutting, urinating, and even vomiting on someone. I know it’s not
a good idea to watch that stuff, but I keep getting pulled in for the
high.” [James, a college student, quoted in Maltz and Maltz, The Porn Trap, 89]
“I’ve skimmed through Whipped Ass and Hogtied and
some of Water Bondage and I’m almost blown away.
For some reason I’ve been digging on this kind of stuff
lately . . . . Maybe I’m just jaded to standard porn fare.
This is an interesting change.” (ChodemasterJ, 1/18/09)
“The feminist critique asks a simple but
devastating question of men: ‘Why is this
sexually pleasurable to you, and what
kind of person does that make you?’ . . .
That [question] takes us way beyond
magazines, movies, and computer
screens, to the heart of who we are and
how we live sexually and emotionally.”
- Robert Jensen, “You Are What You Eat:
The Pervasive Porn Industry and What It
Says About You and Your Desires” (2002)
Bandura’s model of moral disengagement:
Alter one’s perception of . . .
• the conduct itself (“it’s not wrong; it’s right/necessary”)
– moral justifications
– palliative comparisons
– euphemistic labeling

• the conduct’s detrimental effects (“it’s not hurting anyone”)

– minimize, ignore, or misconstrue

• one’s responsibility for those effects (“it’s not my fault”)

– displace or diffuse responsibility

• the victim(s) (“they don’t matter; they like / deserve it”)

– blame, dehumanize
- Bandura (1998, 2003)
 “Snowman872” asks . . .
“I found an interesting article on porn today on the web. . . . Basically, Dr.
Jensen viewed 15 recent porn flicks including raincoater titles such as
‘Blowbang #4’ with Dynamite and couples titles such as Vivid’s
‘Delusional.’ He skillfully describes the contents of two titles and then
raises some interesting questions . . . .
Dr. Jensen writes at length why porn made him feel sad and suggests that
porn is offensive to notions of humanity (marked by compassion, passion,
solidarity, and self-respect, the ability to love and the willingness to
struggle). . . . Any thoughts on these issues and questions?”

http://www.raincoatreviews.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1644
[accessed June 2, 2009]
 “Caphill” responds . . .
• “Dr. Jensen needs to stop overanalyzing . . . It’s just porn . . . There’s a lot more
important shit going on in the world that threatens mankind and humanity than
whether guys whack-off to a gangbang video.”
• “. . . just basic natural reaction if you ask me. I don’t watch a porn and ponder
what society tells me about sex and being a man. I watch, my dick gets hard, I
jerk off, end of story.”
• “who says that the women in these scenes are getting absolutely no pleasure from
what they’re doing? . . . Women are sexual too, let’s drop that bullshit idea.”
• “Dr. Jensen is a douchebag, who has never been laid, and never will . . . [he] was
probably jerking off like a madman while researching these 15 porn films.”
• “I’ll question the humanity of rapists, murderers, terrorists, but a guy watching a
porn . . . I think they’re pretty human.”
• [after description of Blowbang #4] “I may have to check this vid out! :lol”
 Complications:
• Differences from contexts such as war, genocide,
corporate malfeasance, etc.:
– no “authority excuse”
– no occurrent pressures or needs (such as one’s livelihood)
– no professional identity or role
– ethical conflicts re. feelings, emotions, desires, identity

• The consumer must both IDENTIFY and

DISIDENTIFY with the perpetrator(s).
• The consumer must believe BOTH that the abuse
he’s watching is “real,” and that it isn’t.
 Power of dehumanizing labels:
Subjects “overhear” experimenter describing students
from another college:
– “seem nice”
– “animals”
– [not labelled]
- Bandura, Underwood, Fromson (1975)

“Those shocking the so-called ‘animals’ shock them more and more
over time. . . . That rise in aggressive responding over time, with practice,
or with experience belies a self-reinforcing effect of aggressive or violent
responding: It is experienced as increasingly pleasurable.” (Zimbardo)
In 95% of all instances of aggression,
the “recipient response” was neutral or
pleasure.
 GodsGirls
(“alt” pin-up site)

“WARNING! Did we mention that things have gotten a

little racier around the site since you last logged in? You
can now see long time favorites like Catra and Stiletto
doing things that no one ever thought would be done on a
site like GodsGirls. Of course, we're still keeping it classy
but some girls want to push the boundaries of class now
and then. . . . Members were surprised (in a good way!)
when sets like this started going live on the site.”
 “Interpreting” the image(s)

“Jaclyn Case looks like

she loves that juicy cock!”
“We pretend to listen to the barker shouting
about women, but that is not the draw. What
brings us back, over and over, is the voice in
our ears, the soft voice that says, ‘It’s okay,
you really are a man, you really can be a
man, and if you come into my world, it will all
be there, and it will all be easy.”
- Robert Jensen (2007, 33)

The trick:
You are a man, but you’re not a monster.
Are you man enough?
“Breast slapping, Yes or No?”

• “it’s stupid”
• “A HUGE NO . . . I hate when there’s slapping in any movie”
• “it’s a no for me”
• “not my cup of tea”
• “I find it annoying”
• “I think it looks stupid and more than a little misogynist”
• “does nothing for me”
- AdultDVDTalk forum, accessed 6/2/09
 On the other hand . . .

“I say yes for sure. Lots of the girls seem to enjoy it. . . .
I think it’s very sexy and tabboo and it really turns me on.
I highly doubt it would be so damaging to a girl’s implants
to cause them to explode but I guess you really never know
until it happens.”
[Taylor Von Bailey, 5/24/09]

“It’s nice to see some replies that are positive . . . . I was

starting to think something was wrong with me for admitting
I like it.”
[Jettyman, 5/31/09]
 Drawing the line

“I hate most of the aggressive misogynist stuff, but tit

slapping is a turn on if done right.” [10000 days, 5/15/09]

“Physical abuse in general, be it tit-slapping, face-slapping,

choking, gagging, drowning, etc doesn’t really do anything
for me. Some playful spanks though are ok, but I don’t need
to see red bleeding welts or anything.” [EvilMonkey, 5/14/09]
Discussing Max’s oeuvre
“It was always my understanding that you
could tell alot about a man by what turns him
on. If the types of things Max that does to the
women in his videos gets you off than it’s
obvious you have no respect for women and
shouldn’t be anywhere near women or young
girls. . . .

HA HA HA HA - I’m kidding guys!!!!”

- Dangerboy, 10/29/03
 Anonymity / Deindividuation
“Anything that makes a person feel anonymous, as if no
one knows who he or she is, creates the potential for
that person to act in evil ways -- if the situation gives
permission for violence.” (Zimbardo 2004, 29)

• subjects in the deindividuation condition delivered

twice as much shock to “victims”
• deindividuated subjects increased shocks to both
“pleasant” and “unpleasant” victims over the course
of the 20 trials
No one will
ever know . . .
Content analysis of internet rape sites
• Men’s bodies are “only partially shown, if at all . . . . In
many of the sites, the perpetrator is an invisible man --
neither shown nor alluded to in the text [describing] the
rape.” (698)
• “the majority of the sites do not discuss or display any
particular identity, relation to the victim, or social
position of the perpetrator. The ones that imply some
status typically make the perpetrator anonymous in
other ways, such as hiding behind masks, wearing
uniforms, or using a camera angle that reveals only a
body part such as a hand.” (699)

- Gossett and Byrne (2002)

Jake Malone’s “Fuck Slaves 3”
(AVN review, August 2008)
Self-fragmentation
 “The key to understanding how Nazi doctors came to do
the work of Auschwitz is the psychological principle I call
‘doubling’: the division of the self into two functioning
wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. . .”
(Robert Jay Lifton, 1986)

– “perceived by the perpetrator as a form of psychological survival in

a death-dominated environment”
– avoid guilt by disavowing the second self that does the “dirty work”
– “an active psychological process, a means of adaptation to
extremity”
– “became a shared psychological process, the group norm, part of
the Auschwitz ‘weather’”

“[D]oubling is the psychological means by which one

invokes the evil potential of the self. . . . To live out the
doubling . . . is a moral choice for which one is responsible,
whatever the level of consciousness involved.”
 “Auschwitz self” depended on:
• PSYCHIC NUMBING: “radically diminished feeling . . .
not experiencing psychologically what one was doing”
• DEREALIZATION: “divesting oneself from the actuality
of what one is part of, not experiencing it as ‘real’”
• DISAVOWAL: “the rejection of what one actually
perceives and of its meaning”

“As they lived increasingly within that language—and they

used it with each other—Nazi doctors became imaginatively
bound to a psychic realm of derealization, disavowal, and
nonfeeling.”
 The pains of porn users
• Isolation, damage to one’s sexuality and
relationships:
– “become unable to experience sex other than as a
machinelike voyeur who spasms now and then”

• Fatigue, depression, intense anxiety:

– “I don’t think I even thought about [my symptoms] as
possibly being related to porn use until I went to prison
and actually experienced some relief.”

• Damage to integrity, self-worth:

– “One man shook with tears telling us
porn had turned him into a ‘pervert’
and a ‘visual rapist.’”
It’s hopeless; you can’t control it.