Vagina (33 page)

I think in my case, giving up porn and visual aids would be difficult and a long journey. I have a feeling it might be years before my sensitivity would come back, if that. Here is for hoping! Thank you for writing this and bringing it not only to my attention but many others’!

I hope the authors understand that women, along with men, use porn to masturbate too. In secret I bet women are pretty close to the amount and severity that men use and maybe that’s why many women need some type of stimulation to achieve anything. Vibrators are the devil and I will be getting rid of mine, that’s for sure.”
¹²

This may not be a rare situation: according to a study published in the
Journal of Adolescent Research,
while nine out of ten young men say they use pornography, so do a third of young women.
¹³

I checked with Pfaus about the reports I was getting from women that porn use and vibrators seemed to correlate to desensitization in them as well; he noted that vibrators desensitize women over time because of a natural habituation phenomenon—the spinal circuit itself habituates to the same repeated stimuli. So truly, for women, porn and vibrator technologies offer no long-term neurobiological substitutes for an attentive, inventive lover or inventive, attentive, imaginative self-care. Technology is creating its own problems.

There are more negative ways in which porn intervenes in and distorts women’s sense of their own vaginas. Labiaplasty—the surgical reconstruction of a woman’s labia—is a major new industry in cosmetic surgery. Natural variation in the folds and arrangement, and even the symmetry, of the outer and inner lips of the vagina is quite extensive among women. It is very common for a woman’s labia to not look remotely like the standardized versions of labia that appear in porn magazines and on websites; consequently, many women who are completely normal think that there is something very unusual, or even deformed, about their “too” long, “too” complicated, or “too” asymmetrical labia.
¹⁴

Dr. Basil Kocur, of Lenox Hill Hospital, a highly principled and accomplished specialist in pelvic floor problems who does “real” licensed, credentialed, medically justified vaginoplasties and pelvic floor repair to help women recover from pelvic floor collapse (the loosening of vaginal walls after childbirth and with middle age, which can involve the collapse of other organs), explained in an interview that pelvic floor surgery is the wave of the future in surgery: the population of women is aging, and more and more women want to reclaim the positive sexual feelings of their youth, and have better pelvic floor function, which can be returned to them with a corrective tightening of the vaginal walls and support of the pelvic floor. (He also warned that there were uncredentialed “butchers” out there, exploiting women’s desires for this kind of reconstruction.) But he also noted that in the last few years, sometimes a patient who is scheduled for a pelvic floor surgery or a vaginoplasty will hand him a page from
Penthous
e or
Playboy
and ask for a labiaplasty as well, so she can “look like that”—when there is absolutely nothing wrong with her labia. He believes that pornography has given many women an unrealistic idea of what their vulvas should look like, because the neat, symmetrical labia of porn models have often been reconstructed surgically themselves.
¹⁵

PORN AND VAGINAL ILLITERACY

In lectures I give that elucidate the distinction between addictive male-centered pornography as opposed to erotica and Eastern discourse that tease out “the Goddess Array,” young women and young men talk very frankly about how the wave of porn around them has short-circuited their sexual and emotional lives. It seems clear from what I now understand about the importance of the female ANS that porn can short-circuit female orgasmic response as well.

Young women are also direct, in these talks, about how the portrayal of female sexuality in porn—and the portrayal of the vagina itself in pornography—has had, in their opinion, a sharply negative effect on their young men’s understanding of vaginas, and on what young men should ideally be doing to women sexually. Porn is leading men to become poorer lovers to women, and, more specifically, training young men to mishandle or ignore the vagina.

A group of young women who spoke to me at what I will call, to protect identities, a community center on the West Coast, were even more concrete: “I get so angry,” said Lisa, a lovely, slight young woman in biker boots and skinny jeans. We were sitting with cups of coffee around a folding table, and as she spoke she whacked increasingly savagely at a coffee spill on the table.

“I had a lover,” she said, “whom I really liked in every other way. But he always wanted to make love with a video on, and he always fast-forwarded the video right to the climax of the intercourse. And I just wanted to take the remote from him and make him watch it all the way through—that is, including the foreplay—or even just
slow it down
.” I was surprised that she did not apparently mind that the video had to be on in the first place. The other young women at the table did not react with any surprise at all to what Lisa was saying. I, of course, being two generations older, was astonished that Lisa seemed to feel the video and its timing mediated what was going to or what could happen to her sexually, rather than her sexuality being inflamed or distracted by the video. But from comments I have heard from many young women (and young men) now, it is indeed the porn video—its timing, its options for activities, its positions—that is the dominant “script” for what is expected between contemporary young Western lovers. Now, for young people, a struggle over porn and even over the remote control often actually
is
a struggle over sexual behavior and pacing.

While we are told we live in a time of sexual liberation, this may only mean more sex, or even just more images of sex—and not better or “freer” sex. For there is a good case to be made that in fact the sophistication of skill sets, and the skill level overall, taught to men, generation by generation, by their culture and by their peers, about how to please women in bed, has gone precipitously downward since the middle of the last century, when public porn became widespread, and when male sexual education went from peer stories and their own experiences with real women to the model presented in the new mass-market medium.

John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,
written and published as pornography in 1748, is full of “the Goddess Array”: it was clearly considered a guide to eighteenth-century men on how to turn women on, and the vagina could not be described with more appreciation in both male and female voices: “[t]hat now burning spot of mine,” Fanny Hill says, describing her own vagina; sexual love “inflamed the center of all my senses . . . the curling hair that overspread its delightful front . . . the powerfully-divided lips of that pleasure-thirsty channel . . . so vital a part of me . . . so strict a fold! A suction so fierce! . . . that delicate glutton, my nether-mouth . . .”

On beholding a lover’s vagina, the male narrator describes

That delicious cleft of flesh . . . a moist inviting entrance . . . delicately soft and pouting . . . Now with the tenderest attention not to shock, or alarm her too suddenly, he, by degrees, rather stole . . . up her petticoats. . . . Then lay expos’d, so to speak more properly, display’d the greatest parade in nature of female charms. The whole company . . . seem’d as much dazzled, surpriz’d, and delighted as any one could be. . . . Beauties so excessive could not but enjoy the privileges of eternal novelty . . . no! Nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut than the dark umbrage of the downy spring-moss that over-arched it . . . a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words . . . with one hand he gently disclos’d the lips of that luscious mouth of nature . . . the soft laboratory of love . . . he awaken’d, rouz’d and touch’d her so to the heart . . . till the raging stings of the pleasure, rising toward the point, made her wild with the intolerable sensations of it . . . as she lay lost in the sweet transport. . . .
¹⁶

Eighteenth-century and early Victorian erotica—which was the equivalent of porn in its day, designed for men, without literary or moral pretensions, for the purpose of arousing them to orgasm—is striking in terms of how much of “the Goddess Array” you naturally find within it. Even though the vagina had been downgraded in public discourse, in private male-consumed erotica, it was still receiving plenty of positive attention. The women in these anonymously published illicit novels are continually deeply kissed, sensuously stroked, passionately caressed and fondled; their breasts and nipples are admired; their vulvas are touched and manually penetrated, kissed, and licked; they are gazed at and described in admiring tones; their own arousal is carefully noted, and their own climaxes are described, with great delicacy and attention. About a third of the description of the sexual activity in general consists of attention to “the Goddess Array” and the pacing does not cast that attention as being part of the dreaded concept of “foreplay,” but as a sensuous, lingered-over and delicious part of the sexual feast itself. Men, writes Cleland, should ply the beloved with a “thousand tender little attentions, presents, caresses, confidences, and exhaust them with invention . . . what modes, what refinements of pleasure have they not recourse to. . . . When by a course of teasing, worrying (stroking), handling, wanton pastimes, lascivious motions . . . they have . . . lighted up a flame in the object of their passion. . . .” Only then may the men seek their own satisfaction. And the female voice in
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
confirms this attention to female arousal: “Kissing me in every part, the most secret and critical one so far from being excepted . . . his touches were so exquisitely . . . wanton, and luxuriantly diffus’d, and penetrating at times, that he made me perfectly rage with titillating fires.”
¹⁷
But on PornHub or Porn.com, there is little of this kind of touching that, two hundred sixty years before the “sexual revolution,” drove Fanny Hill to “perfectly rage with titillating fires.”

The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for “adult” material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at one another—who are consuming sex like any other product and who are rewiring their brains to find less and less abandon and joy in one another’s arms, and to bond more and more with pixels—is a subjugated, not a liberated, population.

It is no wonder that advanced corporate capitalism, which truly liberates neither men nor women, likes porn so much, and allows porn to colonize public space. Virtually nude images that would have been considered fit for
Playboy
in the 1980s are now five stories high in Calvin Klein ads in Times Square, fairly graphic sex scenes are not elided in R-rated movies on planes where children are seated, and porn is visible to children passing newsstands. Internet filters are difficult for parents to understand and install. Porn thus intrudes on the imaginations of children and seeps systematically into mainstream entertainment. Parents are not really free to instill a model of sex into their children’s education that is not
this
model, which got there first and more graphically. There is a great deal of money at stake, but part of the reason that almost no backlash has taken place against the colonization of public space by porn—even though until the 1960s active community debates set limits on obscene material—is that porn addiction abundantly serves the status quo. Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.

Social conservatives have always feared real sexual awakening because erotic aliveness has the power to lead people into other kinds of resistance to deadening norms and rigid political, class, and social oppressions. Eros has always had the potential to truly rouse people, spiritually and politically as well as physically. Porn really is a drug, but it is the kind of drug that diminishes individuality, imagination, and pleasure rather than releasing it. Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness—that is, the wildness—out of sex.

The sexual “revolutionaries” of the 1960s branded porn as being a great liberator of libido—a lifter of repression, a great demystifier of the “shame” of sexuality. But—in the greatest of great ironies—we are discovering that porn diminishes rather than heightens libido over time; that its effect on the phallus is ultimately unmanning and depressive; and that its effect on the vagina is a short-circuiting of the intense erotic potential—which means, also, the intense creative potential—inherent in every woman.

Four

The Goddess Array

13

“The Beloved Is Me”

Seated upon a lotus, with lotus in hand, is Lakshmi, the goddess . . . riding in chariots the goddesses appear . . .

—Devyah Kavaçam, Hindu sacred scripture

How answer you, la plus belle Katherine du Monde, mon très cher et divin déesse?

—William Shakespeare,
Henry V

L
et’s look back again at the 1970s, where the feminism of a Betty Dodson and a Shere Hite, and the market opportunity grabbed by Hugh Hefner and his fellow pornographers in the following decades, “set” our model in the West of female sexuality.