Beyond the raincoats:

The porn consumer in mainstream

media

Porn Cultures Conference

Leeds, June 2009
Dr Karen Boyle, University of Glasgow,
K.Boyle@tfts.arts.gla.ac.uk
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
• 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
• 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
• 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]).