Psychology | Pornography
What I learned from eight years of pornography? Don’t touch it.
Suggestive sub-heading, eh?
Masturbation — male masturbation — is not a topic to move one’s pulse off the floor.
And that’s what this article is about, really.
That and why pornography isn’t death exactly but the blinding of joy. A worthless pursuit.
Women, well, women and masturbation is a fit topic for the lifestyle sections in a dozen family newspapers, and all the better to excite the casual eyes of a dozy male reader.
An editor can justify its inclusion on grounds of social justice. Due to centuries of male repression, you see, women aren’t terribly good — apparently — at masturbation and are far too embarrassed to ask for help (men never are).
Hence, for feminism and the greater good, 500 words a week, and a stock image illustration of an attractive girl will keep dad’s pulse perky on Sunday — and advance the sisterhood towards full bore masculine sex habits.
But male masturbation? There’s a reason the word ‘wanker’ is a prime insult in English, even if psychologists have been reassuring us for decades that it doesn’t turn hands hairy or make you go blind.
It does make you go blind, of course, just not physiologically.
There is a stigma, but not a bloody one.
The word itself is taken, by consensus, to refer to a man. A woman can’t be a wanker. She can be a bitch, a cunt – or possibly both.
But not a wanker.
Ubiquity is no guard against stigma, even if everybody from educated fleas upwards are doing it.
What is disdained about masturbation is its non-productive nature.
Power grants you sex, and sex means reproduction.
If you have to self-stimulate you are by implication weak, contemptible — unproductive.
There’s a small circulation Marxist-Leninist newspaper in the UK called the Weekly Worker.
Weedy Wanker to its enemies.
And somehow that name is enough; it sums up the impotence and futility of the political enterprise.
At this point, I have to make a pretentious intervention.
I am a pretentious man, unfortunately. Please allow me to feel more intelligent than your for a moment or many moments.
We disdain masturbation because we live under the great, dark Protestant shadow. The shadow says that we must produce. Our salvation is uncertain, but we can feel better for working hard, fructifying and fucking — if it produces children.
There are probably a hundred or so films about what happens to pornographic actors when they leave pornography – but these films are not the end of pornography, only its continuation by other means.
The filmmakers are slightly more respectable than actual pornographers, but their purpose is still to titillate and excite — emotionally, if not sexually.
The question posed in these films is how do these freaks — this how the world regards those involved in pornography, even in the most libertine societies — function in what is still laughably known as the real world.
How do you cope with the knowing glint in the eye of the cashier? And was it a knowing glint in the eye? Did he crouch over a screen last night and was he looking at an image of your legs akimbo ten years ago? How lazy is he? Did he mop up the residue with his underwear before rolling under the covers? Or was he just preoccupied with how he was going to rearrange the biscuit section?
That is what we want to know about. And why? A pornographic actor surrendered their dignity a long time ago. They belong to us now, tearful afterlife and all.
What we know completely we control completely. And nothing is more controlled than an image on the screen. Start. Stop. Fastforward. Rewind to the sweet spot. Repeat.
A person’s self-respect caged in uncountable binary: 010110101 comes out on a screen as dignity fucked for profit.
That describes a great many activities in our society, though none quite so gamey-close to our selves as our sexuality.
Consumers of pornography are spared levels of social obloquy reserved for those that prostitute themselves on film.
Sure, the average pornographic consumer has a poor image. He is — as said — a wanker. He is also, though the stereotype is less common in the Internet age, the-dirty-old-man-in-the-dirty-old-trench-coat.
These men still exist. London’s Soho was once the place to acquire mags, vids, and accessories — and still is today to an extent, although property prices are up, the gays have come over all middle class, and even the sex shops are bright and sterile as a Starbucks.
Here and there the original stores stand. Tutti frutti streamers flutter in door ways without a door; why no door? But there is a door, usually, a buzzer operated security door behind the streamers to screen out premature ejaculators, adolescents — though these are also rare now — and shoplifters.
The streamers make a colourful entrance to the dark pudenda that contains all that could delight the dirty old man.
I saw him last year. I saw him walk into a shop. I saw him and felt pity. He was in his late sixties, I think. What he hadn’t seen in pornography probably isn’t worth talking about, but still he was there — dotage soiled — looking for pornography.
That’s how it will be then, is it? Still gripped by the fire at sixty-seven or seventy-one? Does the body or the Will give you a rest? Genghis Khan is reputed to have impregnated hundreds of women. Go for a walk round Budapest. See that Hungary is a semi-distant cousin convention, not a country.
Once you pop, you can’t stop.
Perhaps, in a less civilised time, my dirty old man would have ravaged the Tottenham Court Road, and carried squealing maidens roped to his mobility scooter down the Bond Street tube station for unforgettable ravishment.
And perhaps not. He seemed like a mild man. He was no crusher of cities or despoiler of virgins.
One never knows.
The more likely explanation — here I must come over all pretentious again — is that pornography is rather like Moby Dick.
If that hasn’t made you titter or spew a little coffee out onto your immaculate — save for the undead semen that lurk on your keys from your last masturbation session. I forget how many hours sperm lives —keyboard, I will be disappointed.
Disappointment is my lot.
Dick jokes are not my speciality, nor any jokes.
I’m actually quite serious about Dick.
What makes pornography a compulsive habit — especially on the Internet — is its elusive nature. Pornography, the ‘right’ pornographic image, can be to sexuality what the white whale was to Ahab: an elusive, inexpressible, and unobtainable object of pursuit.
Remember well, my dears, that Moby Dick also contains a scene where those merry sailors on the Pequod bathe in spermaceti — as warm and lush and moisturising as the finest coconut oil.
And even more delicious when squeezed through the hand, for sperm is not mere water: sperm is tactile, blessed with a high ooze potential.
Our good brother Melville was no stranger to sperm.
Spermaceti is from the whale’s head, of course. It’s quite literally on the brain — for whales, anyway.
Perhaps I am, dear reader, simply an overgrown schoolboy tittering and blushing behind his crib while making tentative scrawls to complete an ever so hairy penis on my desk.
I see what I want to see in what I see. Who doesn’t?
“Pay attention at the back!”
What this Dick-esque quest means is that a man — it is basically always a man— who has been drawn into the hunt for pornography is never really satisfied, especially on the Internet.
He opens a tab.
Buttocks, yes. Breasts, yes. Cunt, yes. Skin tone, yes. Eyebrows, yes. Hair colour, yes. Hair style, ah — now we have a problem. And the legs, well, the legs aren’t quite in the right position.
Next.
And so on from dusk ’til dawn.
And this is before accounting for sexual paraphilia or fetishes.
I have none, though I have sampled BDSM, fat, mature, uniforms, threesomes, transsexual, interracial and so forth with varying levels of interest ranging from none in the ‘transsexual’ category to ‘quite high’ for threesomes (a fantasy for adolescents, according to Graham Greene, who had probably been in a few himself).
My taste is fundamentally conventional, though.
But this is laughable.
My idea of what is conventional is constructed from I have seen on television; what is decried most splenetically in the tabloids; what other people viewed at school — and the telling silences when people occasionally discuss sex in public.
I didn’t find the pornographic representations of black and Asian women sexually attractive*, though as an earnest young Marxist (with strong liberal sympathies) I made a very sincere effort to masturbate over as many races as possible.
My egalitarian efforts in pornography were frustrated — as is so often the case with Marxism and liberalism — by deeper currents in human nature.
My penis is racist, apparently.
Or is it? My meaty world sexual attraction encompasses all religions, races, and creeds.
But perhaps there is something in the very way that races are depicted in pornography that attenuates sexual attraction to those images?
Whose emotional and sexual logic does pornography follow?
I do not know.
I also tried gay pornography, again with no response.
Let us say then that my taste runs to women aged 18–35 with a little lingerie — and that is what I consider conventional.
As for your convention…
Ejaculation before ejaculation is urination
My introduction to sex was a diligent confusion.
I was given a book that explained it all, but at twelve this was all a little premature.
The book came from a trip to America, and was perhaps precipitated by my first exercise in pornographic collection.
I cut out the underwear models from a mail order catalogue and hid the images under my pillow. When my mother came to make my bed, the women fluttered out from beneath the pillow.
The exercise in concealment, furtiveness, and sexual excitement forms early, I think.
Sex education was commenced, though education in sex began somewhat earlier.
Children pick up the game of absence fast. On a family holiday in France aged eight I read on a public toilet wall the word ‘fuck’. I asked my father for an explanation.
“What does ‘fuck’ mean?”
“But what does it mean?”
“What does it mean?”
“Tell me what it means.”
“I want to know.”
“Plleeasseeee.”
And even though I said ‘please’, as I had been taught, he wouldn’t tell me, which seemed particularly unfair.
Parents are usually so delighted when their child learns a new word after all. Now, suddenly, I wasn’t allowed to know.
This was recapitulated five or so years later when my parents and I were shown round the school I was to attend by a teacher.
The teacher pushed open a dormitory door, and ushered us into a room festooned with breasts.
“The boys like to decorate their rooms.”
“Oh, yes,” said my mother.
And there was laughter that made me blush.
Pin ups were only low in pornographic potential — a soft garnish for what was to come.
Skip back with me a few years.
I was telling you about this book — the title just came back to mind — What’s Happening to My Body Book (For Boys).
There must have been a parallel copy for girls. Mine was in blue, perhaps the girls had pink.
The most mysterious element of this book was its discussion of masturbation. The other sections contained strictly biological diagrams about conception and birth.
The authors took it for granted that the reader would have worked out the mechanics — or been shown by someone — so were keen to write reassuringly about how masturbation was ‘perfectly normal’, ‘healthy’ and so on.
But my problem was more elementary: I wanted to know how to do it.
As is often the case with advice books, the authors had been careful to tell the reader everything except what they wanted to know.
Further, the book insisted — this continued to puzzle me when I actually worked out how to masturbate — that the fantasies around masturbation could involve scoring the winning goal in football games or imagining yourself as a favourite football star.
A pudge-ball child, I loathed sport. The idea that someone could be sexually excited by transfiguration into a football star or scoring a goal confused me.
It still does.
Sex was about women. I knew that at twelve, anyway. How could I become stimulated thinking about a football or a footballer?
This aside, the book primed me for wet dreams, which the authors expected to be a major embarrassment.
I waited for the dreams. The wetness. The worry.
Dreams never came, though urination did.
I was so anxious to have a wet dream as the book predicted, and so ignorant about how to masturbate that I simply squeezed my bladder until I urinated.
I was on the wrong track, and no doubt my parents wondered what terrible anxiety disorder or personality regression had provoked adolescent incontinence.
Nothing was to blame, save premature sex education.
Aside from marriage at the earliest age possible — sixteen in most Western societies and as young as twelve in others — there is probably no stable way to introduce us to sex.
And even early marriage will be fraught with confusion, so for the time to come we will be constrained by advice books and lecture bound to the latest orthodoxies in psychology.
Since we cling to our books, manuals, and ‘best practices’ like a geriatric to a bannister large sections of the population will be possessed with the idea that they are doing sex ‘wrong’ — or not by the book at any rate — for quite a while.
I’ve meandered away from pornography.
My school counterposed complete pornographic exposure with complete official ignorance.
Roman Catholic protocol was observed so that when our Personal and Social Education class reached the point in the text book that described contraception the teacher said, “We have to skip this bit. But, for Christ’s sake, if you have sex with a girl use a condom, okay?”
There is much to be said for this approach. We are accustomed to demanding complete transparency in sex education and the more explicit the better.
What about the delicious mystery? What about the longing? What about the erotic confusion?
Ignorance isn’t lost with detailed sex education. The confusion is simply transmuted into another form — but what is lost is the folds, the ravines of sex and the terminal falls contained within.
And so people become rationally confused.
The Dutch and Scandinavians are often see as the models in regard to scientific, rational sex education. This perception has existed for many a year, perhaps centuries. But I am very suspicious of these overly well-adjusted countries.
This is partly connected to the place the Scandinavian countries play for in the social democratic and liberal world drama.
These countries are the utopian counterparts to Cuba and — when it existed — the Soviet Union for communists.
“Did you know that in Sweden they…”
Under actually existing social democracy teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases have been abolished while everybody engages in empathetic, intimate, and non-possessive relationships.
Unlike Cuba, the utopia is probably real.
That’s what’s wrong with it.
The Dutch and Scandinavians do everything so well — they even speak English better than the English — and yet, for all their perfection, these countries are without bite.
Perfection has even rotted their homes.
I stayed in a Stockholm flat owned by a middle class Swedish couple. The place was minimalist, tasteful, and without any garish additions.
They were rich, but not too rich. They were artistic, but not too artistic. Their children had exactly the right amount of toys, enough to stimulate but not enough to spoil.
And the kids probably knew more about English tenses, empathetic relationships, and sex than I do now.
All this is probably why the Scandinavians and Dutch are not going to play a significant role in world history for the next few centuries.
By contrast, I expect great things from the Somalis and Pakistanis. They seem balls out crazy enough to ripple the world.
My great priority in 1999 was to acquire a modem. I was fifteen and not enterprising enough to acquire pornography in any other way.
The boys at school were already making great strokes and had reasonably large caches of pornography salted away on the hard drives of their personal computers.
Pornography was shot through the school email system as well. I once opened my email account to be greeted by a video of a donkey mounting a woman — or was she engaged in fellatio?
Golden childhood days. The mind plays tricks.
The boy who sent that message — round every address in the school — was probably disciplined in an aimless way, though perhaps he has continued the habit into adulthood.
There is spare capacity for this in the work place. As a flustered temp processing visa applications for a university, I found among the local folders a pornographic Xanadu.
Again, ever practical, I thought: “But this is an open office. What can you do with pornography here? If you had your own office perhaps…”
I think, dear reader, that I lack imagination.
The potential for work-based pornographic chain emails is still strong and has not — to my knowledge — been affected by Brexit or secular trends in the economy.
A more sinister event, one that I think about still, was the boy who showed off his collection of flat chested nymphs to all and cumdry. This was not paedophilic material to be sure, but it suggested an inclination.
He would be the right age to have children now, and I often wonder how it goes for his daughters — if he has them.
When the modem — Brrrrrr-beep-beep-brrr, you remember those — arrived and was installed I began my misadventures in pornography. Achingly furtive and exciting was the wait for the all clear: the moment my mother was out at work during the school holiday, shopping on the weekend, or asleep in the earliest morning hours.
Categorisation. That was the first point to notice. I knew about this before I had seen pornography, though how this could be I do not know. That there would be uniforms, blonde, brunette, ebony, BBW, and on and on was no surprise — perhaps it was cued from every smutty insinuation in situation comedy or Carry On films.
Or perhaps the categories were out there, waiting, as substantial and invisible as air.
My use carried on until my last year of university, with occasional gaps, never moving much beyond the patterns established in my adolescence.
Against pornography
Norman Mailer said that there was one event in his life that he would never write about, the time he stabbed one of his wives. What actually broke my use of pornography was nothing so dramatic, but it was a break in a relationship that was grave enough to make me realise quite what a pitiful habit pornography really is. When an activity leads you into action that only leave the bitter aftertaste of self-disgust, well, you know that activity has no merit.
The term “addiction” is overused in our society. Pornography is not, in my view, an addiction. You will not be left with the DTs if you quit pornography tomorrow. It is a habit, and it is a bad habit at that. Habits can be broken and reformed with ease. I did so, simply by resolving to stop and – after two or so relapses over a year – I did so. I just stopped altogether, and I felt better for it.
I haven’t used pornography for about a decade now. And, it must be said, each passing year strengthens my revulsion towards it. Inevitably, given the nature of the Internet, a pornographic image will appear in search results from time to time. My reaction, increasing with every year, is plain revulsion. I do not mean the censorious type of Puritan revulsion that is found among some people. There are people who campaign against sexual activities while sustaining a dank thrill at the thought of those very activities. My view is more plain disinterest accompanied by a certain revulsion. It is simply a case of not needing something unpleasant, as if someone suggested a visit to the dentist as a fun activity for a Saturday afternoon.
What is wrong with pornography is that it saps your power. This is misunderstood by people who moralise about it. Moralising will probably lead you straight back to pornography. We all moralise to an extent, of course; but it is the person who associates pornography with shame and “being bad” who will probably return to it again and again for the masochistic thrill of being “naughty”. Essentially, pornography would be much less interesting to us with it were not moralised about.
When D.H. Lawrence said that pornography “does dirt” on sex he meant, I believe, that pornography is not sexual; it is, in fact, a libel against sex. Sex is virile and active, but pornography is passive and weak. We know that calling someone a “wanker” is an insult because it suggests social isolation and weakness. Pornography is about watching; it is never about doing. The watcher is the weak person, and their thrill is located not in sex but in the second-hand idea of watching other people have sex. The charge is, in other words, indirect and not entirely about sex, which is why pornography produces remarkable fetishes. The fetish is a substitute for an honest fuck.
Pornography is etiolating. Pornography is weakness. As Lawrence observes, it “does dirt” on sex precisely because it removes the potency of sex. It replaces a live partner, a genuine challenge, with an image. The image is completely static and uninteresting. Things are done to it, of course. But the genuinely erotic requires a challenge. Seduction is a challenge. Flirting is a challenge. Engaging a stranger in conversation is a challenge. Sex is a challenge. It is the struggle of man to tame and domesticate a woman. This is utterly lacking in pornography, which is why pornography can never be erotic. The pursuit, the chase, and the power dynamic are the thrilling elements of any sexual encounter. These will never be present in a pornographic film. The potential for the creation of life, the essence of sex, is also absent. You will make nothing. You are powerless when you watch pornography, and you are weak. And its constant use makes a man weaker with women and weaker with himself. And that is the problem, not any putative shame. The healthy creature wants to increase its power. The weak one wishes to shrink back and die.
The idle spilling of seed is a diminution, and perhaps in some dark and antediluvian recess of the mind we know that when we are not with a women something has been wasted. Pornography is unproductive. It cannot generate anything. And nature abhors what cannot generate. It is the occupation of the neuter or sterile person. The vigorous man seeks actual female company for the challenge they present.
My mood improved markedly when I stopped using pornography. I felt more purposeful and productive. And, I think, I began to improve as a person. I am still a complete monster, but my turn from pornography coincided with me taking better care of myself and becoming more adventurous and aggressive. The feeling, quite a liberation, is one I would never give up. To go backwards is not even a question – the idea disgusts me and, above all, seems useless.
Feminism and pornography go hand in hand, I believe. It is feminism, demanding complete sexual liberation, that reduces sex in an egalitarian way to a mere sexual and animal act. Pornography is democratic and egalitarian; it is a form of an anonymous flesh and lowest common denominator categories. This contrasts to genuine love and the erotic, since both these are elite activities. The erotic requires a struggle between masculine and feminine, and it requires there to be a difference between them. This differentiation, completely inegalitarian, is anti-democratic and anti-equality.
There are, of course, feminists who oppose pornography. But I believe they are usually on the road to anti-egalitarian idea. They are people who know that men and women are different, and that life is a matter o struggle. Once this is known, the egalitarian assertions of feminism cannot stand. Pornography is female sexuality unleashed, and it is not a pretty sight. It is exhibitionistic, crude, vulgar, and materialistic. It is interested in quantity not quality. It makes the men who use it soft and feminine, though in an unhealthy way. It is not the softness of a mother’s love that is cultivated, rather it is the softness of a sybarite that is cultivated by pornography.
We should be done with pornography. Ban it. Ban the websites and films. And if you use it, stop. My grounds for saying so are quite simply that life is deeper and more enjoyable without it. But, more than that, it is step towards mastery and power. Those qualities are the essence of life, and it is a shame to be robbed of them for something so worthless.
