Vagina (31 page)

The your-vagina-smells-bad shame of the douche ads of the 1960s has been replaced with cheery faux empowerment language for yet another invented product, but is “hoo haa” and “froo froo” (I couldn’t help thinking of the characters from the children’s television show
Teletubbies,
brightly colored infantile creatures named Tinky Winky, Ditsy, Laa Laa, and Po)—or even “muff,” “kitty,” or “yum yum”—as far as we want to get on our “lady garden” journey?

Elsewhere in the recent tabloid or popular press, other girl-power approaches to the naming of the vagina have surfaced: Marian Keyes, the popular Irish novelist, called her vagina, hilariously, the “growler.” An American tabloid reports that Jennifer Love Hewitt, the star of the hit television show
The Ghost Whisperer,
“vajazzles” her “vajayjay”—that is, puts crystals around it—before a big date.

Why speak out in a media context and offer more positive names for the vagina? Naming in public is different from private action—it has an element of the political; naming constructs reality. And just as women have suffered quietly for centuries, so now they understandably wish to assert the right to name in ways that are affectionate, or charming, or at least not quite so awful.

There is gain and loss in how these apparently empowered women name the vagina: for the better, the vagina is no longer the abyss, or the gateway to hell; for worse, neither is it any longer very powerful, let alone the center of the universe.

Alarming or dismissable or “cute,” vaginas are now everywhere in the culture, like wallpaper, but the magic and power of the vagina are almost nowhere in Western culture or Western naming—or are very hard to perceive.

According to anthropologists, some people in Sri Lanka believe that with the arrival of electric light, ghosts, with their omens, fled. In Ireland, some people say that the fairies, with their blessings, have retreated in the face of modern life. In our contemporary lexicon, the vagina has been similarly denuded of its mystery, no longer haunted by ghosts and demons, nor any longer charmed with magic.

12

The Pornographic Vagina

There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed.

—Rock musician John Mayer,
Playboy

N
ot only has the vagina lost some of its magic: the men who are engaged with the vagina are losing some magic of their own. It is becoming clear that a plethora of vaginas on call makes some men slightly crazy, and not in a good way; porn, now ubiquitous, is, it appears, rewiring the male brain.

An increasing problem for the vagina, and the whole life of the woman who owns that vagina, is that porn affects men neurologically, to their detriment. There is evidence that it is also habituating many men to become bored with “the Goddess Array”—the many gestures and caresses women’s autonomic nervous systems (ANSs) need—and to fast-forward past it.

“Ordinary” sex is no longer stimulating enough to many men who are heavy porn users. So there is a trend toward anal (often violent anal) penetration and anal climax as the “goal” of the sexual action.

I began to realize what a systemic problem this might be turning into when I spoke on two very different college campuses within a space of a couple of months. At a liberal, anything-goes Massachusetts state college—after a discussion focused on the campus culture of drunken anonymous sex, colloquially called “hooking up”—an anguished student health counselor stood up and asked me what I could do to help her with a terrible problem she was seeing: the number one medical issue young women presented in her clinic was, I was amazed to learn, anal fissures.

“Anal fissure” is the euphemism for anal tearing, an injury that young women can sustain in the unskilled, often drunken, impersonal, sometimes unsafe sex that is common in a “hookup” culture. These young women had repeatedly told the counselor that young men on campus expected that kind of sex because of porn, and that they felt obliged to make themselves available for it accordingly, especially if they wanted a “hookup” to turn into a potential date or relationship down the road.

The following month, I spoke at a buttoned-down, highly religious Mormon university in the Midwest. Another anguished student body health counselor stood up and asked me what I could do to help her with the number one health issue young women presented in her clinic—anal fissures. On that campus, there was strong social pressure for girls to maintain their virginity until marriage. Young men were urging anal sex to the young women as a way to have sex, while still preserving the young women’s “virginity.”

I am not stigmatizing anal sex for consenting adults who know what they are doing (though pelvic tearing of any kind is not good for the female or male neural network). But there is increasingly substantial evidence that the ubiquity of and ease of access to contemporary pornography—which has turned away from the kinds of caressing and stimulation that turn women on, demoted the vagina, and emphasizes often violent penetration—promotes the kind of lovemaking that increases the sexual and emotional dissatisfaction of women—dissatisfaction that we saw in the 1997 and 2004 national sexual satisfaction surveys. Male exposure to pornography (and, increasingly, female exposure to it) has increased in amounts so meteoric as to be scarcely meaningfully measurable since the
Hite Report on Female Sexuality.
Female sexual satisfaction, and sexual honesty about female needs, have decreased. Could there be a connection?

If, as the study reported above in the
Daily Mail
suggests, in any group of one hundred couples, 85 percent of the men think their female partner has reached climax—but only 61 percent of the women have actually done so—could it be that porn’s often bizarre or theatrical representation of female sexual response could be leading many men to misread their own intimate situations?

The danger here is not just about how men’s consumption of pornography may affect their perceptiveness about the signs of female desire, arousal, and satisfaction in the immediate sex act. Pornography also appears to be presenting another less obvious, though major, problem to heterosexual women as well: the evidence is in that chronic masturbation to porn sexually desensitizes men overall. When many women react instinctively against their male mate’s porn use, they may feel irrational—especially as our culture has a “relax and enjoy it,” or “it’s harmless,” or even “it’s positive; it spices up your sex life” attitude to porn consumption. But, in fact, recent data show that the exact opposite turns out to be the case: pornography leaches men’s virility, and watching it is now confirmed to be potentially addictive for many men who have a vulnerability to this kind of addictive response in general.

A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man. Currently, the general assumption is that what happens in the male brain as a man masturbates to porn is no one’s business but his own. But in fact, neurologically, what happens to a man’s brain at that moment is eventually likely to have a negative effect on his body and thus on his partner’s body—and then on her brain as well. Women are not wrong if they react instinctively—often jealously—against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities. The more attuned a man is to masturbating to porn, the less sexual vigor he may have, eventually, for himself or for his human lover.

In 2003, I wrote an essay in
New York
magazine called “The Porn Myth,” which pointed out that therapists and sex counselors were seeing a correlation between the rise in porn use among healthy young men and a rise in impotence issues and problems with delayed ejaculation in the same group.
¹
These young men, who had no organic or psychological reason to have problems with virility, were, their physicians and therapists reported, having trouble sustaining erections; and ejaculations were often difficult for them to achieve, or were delayed. The hypothesis among these experts was that heavy porn use was progressively desensitizing these men sexually. The science behind this anecdotal evidence was not yet fully established.

After the article’s publication, I was flooded by distressed—and distressing—e-mails from men who reported that what I described had happened to them. They were distraught. They wrote to me that, over time, they felt a need to watch more and more porn to achieve arousal at all; they felt less and less choice about whether or not to use it; and they were experiencing escalating sexual difficulty in bed with their girlfriends or wives, to whom they had previously been very attracted. These men were a perfectly “normal” cross section of people with no apparent axe to grind; they had no ideological objections to porn use in general, and were not “crusaders”—they were just suffering, and frightened. What really struck me about their e-mails was that haunting sense many had of a loss of choice; these were often men who were perfectly in control in most or all other areas of their lives, and they were writing to me about feeling themselves to be at the mercy of something in their lives over which they felt powerless.

Since that piece was published, a great deal of new data on the effect of pornography on the reward system of the male brain have accumulated, which explains these men’s self-reported sexual unhappiness and loss of virility more concretely. Masturbating to porn delivers a strong short-term dopamine boost to the male brain, which, for an hour or two afterward, lifts men’s mood and makes them feel good in general. This effect works along the same neural circuitry as, say, gambling or cocaine use. But, just as gambling and cocaine use can trigger addictive behavior, so can porn use when it becomes part of what Dr. Jim Pfaus calls “an OCD-type response” of chronic masturbation to porn that researchers are finding to be not uncommon.
²
This may sound like Victorian language, but researchers on male porn addiction describe “OCD-type chronic masturbation” to porn in which men feel compelled to masturbate many times in succession, or finally lose interest in other aspects of their lives and feel no ability to constrain their need to view porn in the context of compulsive masturbation.

Dr. Pfaus explains the neuroscience of porn addiction:

[W]ith each ejaculation, as with orgasm, you are turning on refractoriness. You’ve got the hit of opioid, serotonin, and endocannabinoid. This produces ecstasy, satiety, and sedation. With each successive ejaculation, for chronic masturbators, the inhibition gets stronger—because of the increased serotonin—making it less likely for these men to achieve another erection, much less another ejaculation. To counteract this, these individuals require access to stimuli that will activate increasingly their SNS [sympathetic nervous system]. That is why people who chronically masturbate to porn habituate to erotic material and need more and more intense imagery that more arrestingly activates the SNS. The reason this happens to some people and not others is the frequency of use. It’s like smoking or drinking—occasional use is fine, but frequent or neurologically chronic use can get you addicted. And addiction is always a risk of use at all. The danger here is “chronic” and the OCD nature of the masturbation. It’s not the porn per se but its use in chronic or obsessive masturbation. The addiction is not actually to the porn but to the orgasm and the predictability of the reward.
³

Add to that picture the fact that some men (and women) are born with what is called by those who treat porn addiction “a dopamine hole”: their brains don’t produce reward with the same efficiency as other brains, so they are much more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn (and other stimulants) more easily. This situation can make some men who have this vulnerability impotent, or suffer delayed ejaculation, after consistent masturbation to porn. But in other men, this vulnerability, combined with high levels of masturbation to porn, can affect sexual impulse control. Some unfortunate men can suffer from
both
problems as a result of their dopamine dysregulation.

As with any addiction, it is very difficult, for neurochemical reasons, for an addict to stop doing even very self-destructive things that allow him to get that next reward. A man with dysregulated dopamine processing, chronically masturbating to porn, might become more addicted to sex chat lines than other men, or engage in other kinds of sexual acting-out that he is ashamed of and wishes to control. But far more seriously, in terms of our focus here, masturbation to porn can lead men in general to develop sexual “habituation” problems—desensitization that leads to problems getting hard and staying hard, or problems with ejaculation. The more vaginas a man masturbates to in an unmediated, online, click-through format, the more habituated to this stimulus he will become, and the less able he is to engage in the sustained, patient, slowly arousing attention to “the Goddess Array” that “deep orgasm” for women requires.

As biologist Robert Sapolsky explained in his book about the biology of desire and satiation,
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:

Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity. . . . Our tragedy is that we just become hungrier.

Thanks to the way our brains work, chronic over-stimulation fails to satisfy; it can leave a person nearly insatiable [ for more levels of stimulation]. Someone may find himself wondering automatically about every woman, “Would she engage in . . . ?” Also, any resentment that arises from the mismatch between his virtual reality and his physical reality may raise doubts about his partner/union, making him uncharacteristically irritable and self-absorbed. He’ll focus on what his relationship doesn’t offer, not on what it does. Nor does dissatisfaction necessarily stop there. Humans tend to project such feelings automatically onto other aspects of life as well . . . sadly, distorted perception born of neurochemical dysregulation can make a person extremely resistant to understanding what’s really driving him or what would ease his misery. His limbic brain has him firmly convinced that only his drug of choice will restore his good feelings.