Young People and Pornography

Negotiating Pornification

M. Mulholland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137332936
• eBook ISBN: 9781137326195
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mulholland offers a scholarly, yet wholly accessible, critical engagement with young people's negotiation with the pornification of culture. This work foregrounds the affective dynamics in young people's institutional and everyday sexual peer cultures.

Chapter 1

Shifting Boundaries: Panic, Porn, and Young People

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.

—Heidegger 1971, 154

Introduction

In the very beginning stages of writing this book, my daughter Gracie and I had a conversation that both unnerved and fascinated me. Just before falling asleep, she started to worry that she would never meet Hannah Montana. Since the age of four she had been enamored by this star, watching her 30 minute show about a “regular” teen girl transform into a secret superstar persona. Concerned about teen life being marketed to five to seven year olds, I nonetheless participated in this moment of stardom, sometimes with a sense of pure enjoyment while singing, dancing, and performing Hannah. During this pre-sleep conversation, however, I realized something very serious was happening. My girl was deeply concerned that she meet Hannah, and if this occurred, “would she like me?” I explained that Hannah was not “real,” she was, in fact, a bit of advertising magic (Williams 1980) “like what happens in movie tricks and advertising.” Indeed, I put it to her that if she met Hannah, she might not like her. This alerted me to the powerful position of certain forms of cultural representations in my young girl’s life, representations that were hegemonic in their expression of “teen,” “cool,” “girlhood,” and “emerging teen sexuality.” It also alerted me to how young people like my daughter make sense of the barrage of images circulating their world. In the context of media debates raging about the increasing sexualization and “pornification” of this child celebrity in the form of semi-nude photo shots, and pole dancing (see Barnes 2008)–the ways in which my daughter was personalizing the star, bringing Hannah home “as real,” and investing a large sense of her five-year-old sense of self in this star was unnerving. At the end of this book, an increasingly raunchy Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) very much lives in our home, alongside a seemingly endless cohort of sassy new teen stars.

Around the same time as these bedtime musings, a set of conversations with school teachers similarly enthralled and unsettled me. It seemed a trend was emerging whereby young girls were giving blowjobs to boys who were not boyfriends, as a form of fun and entertainment. This trend was also noted by Curtis and Hunt (2007) who pointed to a “Fellatio Epidemic” whereby fellating friends or strangers was very common in the US community under examination. The girls, it seemed, saw it as no big deal and a bit of fun. In addition, parents were describing to me a practice wherein it was common for both girls and boys to send pictures of their genitals and other sexual poses through phones and the internet to their partners. While I wondered if these “epidemics” were indeed so common, and whether such trends differed across race, class, and gendered contexts, this set of accounts honed my interest in raunchy and pornographic practices of sexuality among young people.

In addition to the above, I had for some time been interested in pornography itself. The ease of access to all forms of pornography made possible on the internet, increasingly used by young people (Flood 2007; Knudsen, Lofgren-Martenson, and Mansson 2007; Livingstone and Bober 2005), reinvigorated this interest. So too did the release of The Porn Report (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 2008), the first comprehensive analysis of the production and consumption of pornography in Australia. Growing up in a Catholic household, sexuality had always been dark, forbidden, enticing, and secret. From a very young age, sex was construed as something that only occurred in “normal” acceptable situations, namely heterosexual marriage. And even in this sanctum of the normal, good sex would be restrained and sanitary. When as a teenager I first viewed pornography, I felt repulsed, stimulated, and anxious. In retrospect this pointed to a fascination and anxiety with “the secret” being public, “in my face,” and out of control. As argued by Foucault:

What is it that we demand of sex, beyond its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent? What is this patience or eagerness to constitute it as the secret, the omnipotent cause, the hidden meaning, the unremitting fear? ([1976]1990, 80)

Now at 39, I still retain a sense of marvel at the ability of pornography to produce anxiety and challenge borders.

Porn Anxiety: A Worrying Illicit

These personal reflections and observations point to a nexus of impressions that inform this book. The relationship between young people, the power of sexualized representations, and the role of pornography reside in an anxiety attached to ideas of what is “normal.” As stated above in terms of my own personal experience, pornography is a touchy subject. A reaction occurs whether people fall into the category of “porn savvy,” are mildly interested, or run a mile from the mere mention of it. As argued by McKee et al.:

Pornography not only stirs our bodies, it stirs our ethical and political selves. Pornography draws out our beliefs about gender and sexuality, race and class, power and self-hood. Pornography is about much more than just sex. Whatever you think of pornography, whether you consume it or abhor it, or both, it is now a highly visible part of our world and one we all need to discuss and deal with. (2008, 22)

Currently, pornography is bigger business than Hollywood, and is “consumed as quickly as it is produced” (Attwood 2006, 79). The production of pornographic material includes a broad range of film, print, and on-line media. In 2012, pornography revenues worldwide accounted for $14 billion dollars annually (Morris 2012). This figure has more than doubled from the $8 billion spent in 1996 (Juffer 1998). The sheer enormity of pornography is astounding, and prompted Williams (2004) to agree with Frank Rich from the New York Times (2001) that pornography is “no longer a sideshow to the mainstream . . . it is the mainstream.”

Indeed, pornography is an important focus for serious and sustained intellectual interrogation of the kind being undertaken in this book because it entices certain kinds of reactions. It is an unnerving cultural moment, an unsettling, that asks us to reflect on the ways we view sexuality more generally: What is good sex? What is bad? How do these ideas affect us? What is my position? How do contemporary cultural representations of sexuality, for example, the case of young people and internet porn, “penetrate and control everyday pleasure” (Foucault [1976]1990, 11). What happens to sexuality when the perverse and illicit are so easily accessible? We react to porn because we react to questions of sexuality more generally and as such pornography is a pivotal feature of sexuality in cultural life.

Contemporary Trends: Sexualization and Pornification

The anxiety elicited by pornography is fundamentally linked to notions of the “normal.” The normal is constructed in relation to the illicit, and vice versa. Tracking the position of the illicit in social life and the ways in which the illicit has functioned across different social contexts and historical periods thus becomes paramount. For example, in a 1973 paper titled “Youth and Pornography in Social Context,” Berger, Simon, and Gagnon stated that “levels of exposure to pornography are seen to be low (not exceeding the number of pictures in a year’s issue of Playboy, or a single deck of sexually explicit playing cards)” (1973, 279). Ten years on, at a time when debates raged about the increasingly pervasive genre, Rubin visualised the cultural valuation of sexual acts as a circle with inner and outer layers. Heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, pornography-free, and privately enacted behaviors occupy the charmed inner layer. Positioned in the outer layer, pornography is positioned as the scary other of good, charmed sex. Gayle Rubin’s work was a major contribution in the 1980s Sex Wars, during which debates about issues such as pornography raged over questions of “good” and “bad” sex.

Reflecting on Rubin’s circle in the 2000s, 20 years on, it seems to me something significant is happening to the normal and the role of pornography as illicit. Recent sociological work elucidates this, pointing to some shifting trends in late modernity with regard to contemporary forms of intimacy, relationships, and sexuality (Attwood 2006; Bauman 2003; Bernstein 2001; Giddens 1992; Hochschild 2012; Jackson and Scott 2010; Plummer 2003). As Attwood argues (2006, 78), “the study of sex has . . . been subject to dramatic change since the last quarter of the twentieth century.” Contemporary models of the normative differ greatly into the early twenty-first century, compared to constructions of good sex firmly positioned in family, embodying heterosexuality, monogamy, privacy, and procreation (Hawkes and Scott 2005; Rubin 1984). In its present form, Bauman (2003, xii) argues that love is liquid, characterized by individualization, impermanent bonds, insecurity, and disconnection, whereby “connections are entered on demand, and can be broken.”

Connected to the individualization of love and relationships is the construction of sex as “self-pleasure—as indulgence, treat, luxury, right” (Attwood 2006, 87). Within what Giddens (1992) calls “plastic” structures of sexuality, intimate relationships are increasingly individualized, and as Attwood rearticulates, sexual encounters are reconfigured “as a highly individualized form of hedonism, which is pursued through episodic and uncommitted encounters and forms of auto-eroticism” (Attwood 2006, 80). Attwood also maintains that in the context of liquid love and plastic sexuality, the postmodern individual sees sex through a kind of “consumer sensibility.” This cultural turn is similarly noted in postfeminist reflections about the sexuality empowered “new girl” (Gill 2009; McRobbie 2004b). Sexual desires, activities, and relationships become choices wherein “choice,” “consent,” and “variety” become important principles in shaping sexual subjectivities. Explored in detail in Chapter 8, Jackson and Scott (2010) similarly articulate a scenario in which sex is rationalized, whereby an imperative exists to achieve the best sex possible. As such:

These qualities mark out a quite specific sensibility of sex which is linked to the broader conditions of our social world; the injunction to be authentic, spontaneous, involved, hedonistic, a sensation-seeker, and yet to maintain control of our sexual selves; to self-fashion, remain detached and forever open to offers. (Attwood 2006, 89)

Set within the context of these changes, an emerging body of research points to the sexualization and pornification of culture. Literature on sexualization argues there has been a “mainstreaming of sex” in Western culture, underpinned by the shifts occurring in late modernity (Attwood 2009; McNair 1996, 2002, 2013). In Mainstreaming Sex, Attwood (2009) argues that sex has become more visible, commercially viable, and commodified. As discussed here, sex has also become a form of life styling and pleasure seeking within this new form of what McNair labels “striptease culture” (McNair 1996).

Connected to sexualization, pornification provides an ideal point of departure for this book. Explained in detail in Chapter 4, pornification more specifically describes a trend whereby a pornographic aesthetic increasingly characterizes mainstreamed sex and is a phenomenon that elicits both academic and popular interest. In their anthology Pornification, Paasonen, Nikunen, and Saarenmaa (2007, 1) argue that “as a set of styles, scenarios and conventions, the pornographic cuts across media culture.” As a trend, it concerns itself with the anecdotes beginning this chapter—increased access and availability of porn through the internet, the normalization of pornographic styles across all forms of media (e.g. pole dancing Hannah Montana), and pornographic performances of sexuality (e.g. “The Fellatio Epidemic”). This leads Attwood to argue:

We respond to our culture’s “incitement to discourse” about sex with a kind of weariness; the explicit has become so familiar and sexual transgression so mainstream. (2006, 80)

In the face of these contemporary trends, and the emergence of an apparently pornified culture, I start out by asking: Has the explicit actually become so familiar? What happens when the illicit attains a publicness? Does this publicness mean that anything goes? How do shifts in late modernity set the scene for these trends? Has porn become normalized? In short, this book is fundamentally concerned with a possible reorganization of sexuality due to the changing nature of the illicit.

Pornification and Panic

Pornification and sexualization have engendered a significant set of “sex panics” about the changing nature of sexuality, and in particular an apparent destabilization of borders. This trend represents a contemporary expression of the wide-ranging sex panics that have recurred over the centuries in the modern West. As will be argued in Chapter 4, fears about a pornified culture have become particularly intense, and as such it is useful to explore how sex panics represent a form of moral panic (Herdt 2009). In 1978, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies traced the emergence of “mugging” as a social phenomenon, arguing it was articulated as a “newfound” phenomenon, in very much the same way “pornification” is now construed as “new.” As argued by Hall et al. (1978, 1), constructing mugging as a worrying new trend, society made possible a reaction to mugging in ways that induced moral panic that comes to “perceive crime in general, and mugging in particular, as an index of the disintegration of the social order.” This disintegration was attached in very particular ways to youth, who were “condensed into the image of mugging.” In 1972, Cohen also accentuated the connection between moral panics and youth culture, famously arguing that “Mods and Rockers” came to symbolize deviance, social disorder, and destabilization through which they were “seen through the eyes of the societal reaction and in this reaction . . . appear as disembodied objects” (25).

The ways in which all manner of social trends work as an “index of disintegration” are similarly traced by Showalter (1992) in Sexual Anarchy. Along with Hall et al. (1978) and Cohen (1972), she argues that crises which emerge around the fin de siècle precipitate a particular set of anxieties because of the social and historical significance we place on the end and beginning of eras, imbued with death and rebirth motifs. Debates surrounding sexuality since the 1970s typify such a crisis, and it is at times of crisis that particular fears are provoked around borders, wherein “threats of sexual anarchy [generate] panic and backlash” (Showalter 1992, 4). Beginning at the close of the century and continuing into the twenty-first, sex panics around pornification and sexualization mark an equally significant “longing for strict border controls” (4).

In the face of this panic, I contend that contemporary panics are centrally concerned with a reorganization of borders, throwing up the following questions: What are the panics concerned with? How and in what ways are panics about borders? What is the aim of such border control? And in particular, how is border control attached to ideas of the normal?

Pornification, Panic, and Young People

The panic engendered by pornification is particularly concentrated on young people, who are “condensed” within this framework in much the same way as “youth” were attached to mugging, crime, and deviance (Cohen 1972; Hall et al. 1978). This is because a volatile and dangerous set of relationships has always existed between “childhood,” “sex,” and “risk” in Anglo-European culture (Egan 2013; Egan and Hawkes 2010, 2012; Lindsey 2005; Scott, Jackson, and Backett-Milburn 1998). As this book will argue, panic and fear serve the purpose of regulating and managing the sexuality of children, hinging on the ways in which childhood was socially constructed in the first instance (Aries 1962; Cunningham 2005; Egan 2013; James, Jenks and Proust 1998; Jones 2009; Lesnik-Oberstein 1998; White and Wyn 2004). In Aries’ classic study (1962), he argues that the concept of childhood emerged in the context of newly emerging models of family, based on middle-class values and the construction of private life. It also hinged on the development of mass education, wherein children were to be trained and educated according to the requirements of industrialization. In contrast to pre-eighteenth-century models, the role of family took on a moral dimension, wherein it was the duty of parents to civilize, educate, and regulate childhood. “Child-as-Centre” of family life was crucial to the development of modernity, and as such the Anglo-European world became obsessed by “the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood” (Aries 1962, 411). As argued by Egan and Hawkes (2010, 2012), Aitken (2001), and Robinson (2008), this obsession was virulently focused on regulating the sexuality of children, as will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2. Indeed Foucault famously argued that

the sexualization of children was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of the race (precocious sexuality was presented from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth as an epidemic menace that risked compromising not only the future health of adults but the future of the entire society and species). ([1976]1990, 146)

It is important to note at the outset that this book is not concerned with young people, youth culture, or the construction of childhood per se. Egan and Hawkes’ work (2010) is an excellent contribution to this end, tracing the “sexual child” in relation to the norm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Shifting Boundaries: Panic, Porn, and Young People
• Chapter 2 Fictions of the Normal
• Chapter 3 Fictions of the Perverse
• Chapter 4 A New Normal? Pornification, Panic, and the Public Repositioning of Perversities
• Chapter 5 Young People, Knowledge, and Power
• Chapter 6 LOL: Porn as Parody
• Chapter 7 Respectable Illicits: Maintaining Control
• Chapter 8 Agency, Institutional Blindness, and Vocabularies of Choice
• Chapter 9 Public, Private, and the New Terrain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index