Archives for category: Women in porn

PORN fiction – a female perspective?

November 29, 2011 //

In this feature length post Ellen, from oneinsixwomen argues from her own experience that while porn fiction may not use real people, it nonetheless can cause just as much real damage to its users.

Pornography can be difficult to define. Are ‘tasteful’ naked photos porn or are they art? Are sex scenes in movies porn? What about if you can’t see any actual genitalia – is it still pornographic? Censors and governments struggle with the definition, but most people seem to agree that it’s largely visual. Photos, paintings, movies, live shows – users participate in porn by watching it. Although the dictionary defines pornography more broadly (‘obscene literature, art, or photography, designed to excite sexual desire’) the average person tends to limit their definition of porn to the visual. And when we’re talking about the damage caused by porn we rarely think of any forms of porn other than visual. It’s difficult to imagine how harm can come from pornographic literature – it doesn’t even use real people, so no one is being harmed. It’s surely a better alternative to the kind of porn that exploits those who participate in it, right?
I spent nearly four years as a compulsive porn user and it was never just the visual that captured my attention. I watched plenty of online clips, sometimes daily, but I also spent many nights reading porn fiction stories, sometimes in addition to movies clips and sometimes on their own. I call it ‘porn fiction’ because it’s not the same as what is commonly known as erotica. The porn fiction that’s online and consumed by thousands of porn users is cheap, crude, amateurish and poorly written. By no stretch of the imagination can it be called literature, and it’s certainly a far cry from the Mills-and Boon-on-steroids that makes up most of the erotica sold in bookstores. This isn’t simply dirty romance literature. Online porn fiction is, at its most innocuous, hard-core porn in written form. It is graphic, detailed and often violent, and I believe it is as damaging as any porn you can watch on your computer.

Like anything else in porn, fiction covers a vast range of material. You have to know what you’re looking for … do you want male/female, male/male, bondage, discipline, male domination, female domination, mind control, forced submission, transgender, gay, lesbian, bi, interracial, humiliation, pain, rape, sadism, gynaecology, or a combination of several of these options? How about something you hadn’t even imagined yet? It’s all there, and more, in incredible detail.

Porn addiction, like any addiction, changes over time. Very few people start with hard-core porn, just as very few people start a drug addiction with large doses of cocaine. Users build up a tolerance, and even things that were firmly in the ‘I would never, ever want to watch that’ category become acceptable over time as we become desensitised and our brain and body needs a bigger, more exciting hit in order to become aroused. This is very normal but most porn users don’t know that, and it can be very confusing to realise you’ve gone from fairly tame pictures to movie clips that once horrified you. How, you wonder, did I move from being disgusted to aroused? I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me I know that porn fiction is part of what helped to desensitise me to things that had previously sickened me.

A large part of the problem with porn fiction is that it creates scenarios you usually don’t find in porn movies. There is more dialogue, for one thing, which is noticeably absent from real movies. Movie viewers don’t want chit-chat, they want action. The dialogue in most movies takes the form of women being called dirty sluts and whores, but that’s about the limit of ‘conversation’. Porn fiction is different. The writers can take their time … but in most cases the dialogue takes the scene to a level that many porn users would not be comfortable watching. It’s one thing to have a brief shot of a woman looking apprehensive or demeaned; it’s quite another thing to be privy to her thoughts, to know exactly what she’s feeling about the situation. And if what she is feeling is fear or humiliation it takes a standard porn situation to a very different place.

Another difference in porn fiction is that it creates scenarios that either couldn’t be filmed or can’t even exist in real life. Mind control is a big sub-genre of porn fiction and it often involves protagonists (usually women) being forced, by some sort of mind control drug or device, into demeaning sexual acts in public places, or forced to have sex with men they hate or who terrify them. In real life we call that torture and rape, but in porn fiction it’s just another mind control scenario. And again, these are not scenes most people would be comfortable watching, but reading it is somehow different.

So what’s the problem here? We’re still talking about fiction, where no one is being hurt. Even regular, non-porn fiction creates intense scenarios that would never happen in real life and we don’t worry about those. It’s just fun and escapism. This is true, but porn fiction is not read in the same way as other fiction. Porn fiction isn’t about escapism or entertainment. It exists to sexually arouse the user and lead to orgasm, in exactly the same way as porn movies or pictures. When porn fiction pushes the envelope – as most of it does – it means that users are becoming aroused by scenes they aren’t comfortable watching. Except of course they are watching these scenes. The imagination is extremely powerful and anyone who’s read porn fiction has visualised those scenes in full detail. When users are aroused by these mind-scenarios, triggered by the written word, they start to need visual stimulation to match the scenes in their head. At least that’s how it was for me, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Reading porn fiction helped to bridge the gap between tamer porn and hard-core, violent porn. The more I read fiction, the more I needed movie clips that were closer to what I’d seen in my imagination when reading. After reading fiction I was willing to cross boundaries that previously I hadn’t wanted to cross. I’ve heard people say that porn fiction is a safe option for porn users because no one gets hurt and it’s not as bad as real porn. I don’t believe that. Porn fiction wasn’t a safe option for me; it was a door into the kind of porn that used to disgust and terrify me.

We’re nearly at the end of 2011 and I haven’t consumed porn in over seven years, but it’s still part of my life. Not because I still watch it or think about it all the time, but because of my memories. I have scenes in my head that might never fully disappear and a lot of them are from porn fiction. I have vivid memories of scenes my mind created and they are as real to me as anything I saw. They haunt me just as much. In some ways they haunt me more, because I know I built those memories myself. I want to think I’m above it, but the truth is my mind is capable of creating detailed, technicolour, realistic porn scenes. I created them, I enjoyed them, I refined them when they got boring, I replayed them over and over in my mind. The fact that I hate them now doesn’t change that. And reading porn fiction helped put those scenes there. It is not a safe, harmless alternative to ‘real’ porn. It may not use real people, but it’s real nonetheless, and it does real damage. I have the scars to prove that.

Copyright oneinsixwomen 2011
Read about Ellen’s first exposure to porn     Another female users story     A wife’s reaction to porn part 1   A wife’s reaction to porn part 2

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Categories Female porn addiction, Porn problems, Uncategorized, Users stories, Women in porn

WHY therapists need to know about porn (part 5)

November 3, 2011 //

Photo by Jascha400d

Concluding this sort series of posts on ‘Why therapists need to know about porn’, psychotherapist Duncan E. Stafford outlines the professional challenge …

There is an increasing realisation in the most informed areas of society that porn addicts are not a homogeneous group – Stephanie and Ellen (in recent posts on PRUK) underline this point. If we add to this the fact that partners (read Helen’s discovery), relatives and even friends can be affected by someone’s use of porn – for example, illegal viewing habits can bring the police to any doorstep affecting everyone at that address – then we begin to see that people seeking help through counselling and psychotherapy with issues around porn use is a very diverse group of men and women each with different questions in relation to porn for the therapeutic space. With just a little knowledge, our profession can inform itself and begin to ease the secret suffering of many users. In an era when there has never been so much sexual imagery in a society (the Internet assures this), it feels odd that as therapists we might shy away from this work and that we make so many presumptions about users (and their gender). As a practitioner working in this area of distress, I witness that porn, cybersex and the difficulties it leads to are currently as difficult to talk about as sex was in the past. As therapists, on an individual basis, hour by hour, if we don’t retreat from the challenges this area raises for us, we might just be constructive for sex, pornography, cybersex and society.

Author biography

Duncan E. Stafford is a psychotherapist, supervisor and author. He offers bespoke training and supervision in this area of work through his private practice in Cambridge, UK. He can be contacted through his website www.counsellingincambridge.co.uk

Reading recommendations for those looking to work with porn

Turned On: Intimacy in a Pornized Society,  D E Stafford, WiTTING Press (2010)

Sex And the Internet, Al Cooper (ed.), Routledge (2002)

Girlvert: A Porno Memoir, Oriana Small, Barnacle Book (2011)

Copyright Duncan E. Stafford UK  2011

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Categories Female porn addiction, internet porn, Psychotherapists and porn, Women in porn

ELLEN’S first exposure

October 31, 2011 //

 PRUK has been lucky enough to make contact with Ellen through oneinsixwomen. Here she writes about her first experience of using porn.

Technically, I suppose, my first exposure to porn was when I was ten or eleven and I found some of my brother’s magazines whilst snooping in his room one afternoon. I remember being fascinated and horrified at the same time. These were photos of women who hid nothing, and their casual boldness scared me because it was so alien to everything I knew. I went back again and again to look at these magazines when there was no one at home. That was my first experience of porn but what I saw later was so different it made those magazines look like fashion mags.

When I was in my late 20s I spent a Saturday afternoon playing card games on my computer. The internet was only accessible via dial up so I wasn’t on there much, but this day I decided to search for more card games. I clicked on a link that said ‘free card games’ and suddenly I was at a porn site. It was that simple. I didn’t go searching for porn; I had never even imagined seeing it. There was no secret craving for porn and I was completely shocked that I’d landed on this site. In truth it was fairly tame. It was photographs only, and at this point I didn’t even know you could watch porn films online; I thought you had to buy videos at a sleazy shop for that. The pictures were rougher than what I’d seen in my brother’s magazines and the women looked … more demeaned, I guess. They seemed more humiliated, more like victims. I understand now that their humiliation was what attracted me. It resonated with my own experiences of being shamed, put down and emotionally abused. I didn’t go to porn because I wanted to see naked women or, later, because I wanted to see women have sex. I wasn’t aroused by the women; I simply identified with their powerlessness, with the way they were treated as worthless objects. It made sense to me.

That afternoon I forgot about the card games. For the first time, I typed the word ‘porn’ into a search engine. I can remember shaking, and my heart was pounding from fear. I felt like I’d crossed a line, taken a step that I couldn’t have imagined ever taking. Obviously I’d seen pornographic images before, in the magazines, but actually typing ‘porn’ into my computer was something very different. I wasn’t looking at something I’d stumbled across accidentally; I was deliberately choosing porn. And making that choice for the first time wasn’t exciting or liberating or fun. It was simply terrifying.

Within weeks, I knew all the search terms that would quickly find me the images I wanted to see. Within months, I’d discovered movies. A little while after that I found porn fiction, where I could read about impossibly degrading acts that couldn’t happen in real life. I had an entirely new language of code words, abbreviations and acronyms. I knew the names of acts that I hadn’t even known existed a few months before. I was an expert at finding what I wanted to see. Finding my chosen content got faster, easier, more streamlined … but it never stopped being terrifying, and I never stopped hating myself for it.

Copyright oneinsixwomen 2011

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Categories Female porn addiction, Porn problems, Uncategorized, Users stories, Women in porn, Young people and porn usage

WHAT if porn killed its users more than emotionally?

October 27, 2011 //

Watching the Porn Recovery UK twitter feed yesterday (26 October) we were struck by a tweet talking about the sad story of Amy Winehouse’s demise and how a coroner was expected to hear that her death was caused by alcohol withdrawal and not as a result of a drug overdose, as was initially reported. The interesting point for us at PRUK is the way this illuminates the difference between the therapy culture that has grown up around drug and alcohol misuse but not around the issues that people suffer with when they become porn dependent. Does it have something to do with the fact that porn does not kill its users physically – even though it certainly can emotionally?

We continued to think ‘But what about the people involved in making porn?’ In particular, what about the men and women essentially risking their lives each time they have sex for money on a film set? In reading Girlvert a porno memoir, Oriana Small’s frank and congruent account of her time working in the hardcore porn industry as Ashley Blue, there are very real reminders of the coercion that can and does take place on porn sets for performers. HIV, Hepatitis C and anal gangbangs aside (one of the most risky sexual ‘performances’), there are frequent infections brought about by working in the sex industry that don’t parallel with excessive consumption of the product. Indeed, watching porn is, ironically, safe sex for the user physically. When Marc, the porn addict in Turned On: Intimacy in a Pornized Society, is confronted by his therapist to think about the female performers of the movies he is watching, he is read a chilling passage about the suffering and humiliation of a porn star who has left the industry. Collecting himself he responds: ‘I’m humbled but I’m glad you read that to me.’  We are left wondering what it would be like if porn was not safe physical sex. Would therapists feel more able to work with the issue if they were seen as potentially saving physical rather than emotional lives?

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Categories Female porn addiction, Men and pornography, Porn problems, Psychotherapists and porn, Psychotherapy, Tips for porn recovery, Uncategorized, Women in porn

WHY therapists need to know about porn (Part 3)

October 19, 2011 //

Photo by Jascha400d

by Duncan E. Stafford (psychotherapist, supervisor and author)

A popular argument made against pornography is that it fosters negative attitudes towards women. While this might seem logical, studies by Baron (1990), Davis (1997) and Barak et al. (1999) all report that there appears to be no significant correlation between exposure to pornography and increased measures of misogynist attitudes. Equally entrenched is the fear that pornography encourages rape. As long ago as 1970, Kupperstein and Wilson in the USA reported on studies from 1960 to 1969 that found, ‘with some exceptions, while pornography became increasingly available, there was an overall decrease in sexual offenses’. More recently, studies from around the world including Landripet, Stulhofer & Diamond (2006) in Croatia and D’Amato (2006) in the USA report similar findings on reported rape. In short, there is still a majority of studies that appear to suggest that as porn use has gone up, rape figures have come down.[1] However, it is worth looking into the detail of some or all of these studies because, although they do well in challenging lay-accepted views about pornography, they also bring to our attention once more the ‘definitions’ problem I raised in Part 2 of this article. Studies on the effects of pornography are reporting on the effects of what sort of pornography? While some might call pornography a marriage saver or an education, I don’t think they have in mind hardcore films like 4 in the pink, Four in the stink, Meatholes or Piss mops. I also find it difficult to see how these sorts of movies foster or support positive views of women (or humanity).

For those interested in rich detail of such material but who do not want to do their own Internet research, the book Girlvert, a porno memoir by Oriana Small (aka porn actress, Ashley Blue) offers a brilliant and exceptionally frank insight into the life of a porn star. Alternatively, for those interested in the effects that porn and cybersex have on users, then my own book Turned On: Intimacy in a Pornized Society offers an equally frank and detailed view of hardcore, pornography set within the framework of a therapeutic encounter.

1 Baron (1990), Davis (1997),  Barak et al. (1999), D’Amato (2006), and Kupperstein and Wilson, Landripet, Stulhofer & Diamond (2006), all in Diamond M., ‘Pornography, Public Acceptance and Sex Related Crime: A Review’ International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32 (2009).

In Part 4, Duncan E. Stafford looks towards working with porn as a therapist.

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Categories counselling, internet porn, Porn problems, Porn statistics, Psychotherapists and porn, Psychotherapy, Uncategorized, Women in porn
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