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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn November 3
2003
Hooker look in fashion as porn becomes
de rigueur
At a party at this year's Toronto Film Festival, I suddenly realised
I was surrounded by hookers. From the skin-tight trousers that revealed
a part of the rear anatomy normally reserved for builders to the
skimpy tops that put a smile on my husband's face, these women had
all the requisites - except they weren't prostitutes. They were
average young women out for a good time.
Later, on TV, I caught comedian Bill Maher on the issue. "Over
here, over here, it's me, I'm the real whore," Maher screeched,
portraying the difficulty the genuine hooker is having these days,
distinguishing herself from ordinary girls.
And then it dawned on me. It's about pornography.
Over the cheeseboard at a dinner party, all the men round the
table admitted to accessing porn on the internet. I-porn, as it's
now known, is no longer a secret dalliance. For internet-savvy young
men it's a mainstream activity.
While there's nothing startling about men viewing pornography,
it's the change of status, from deviant to de rigueur that is remarkable.
Gone is the overcoated trip to the back-street purveyor.
Today, accessing porn could not be easier. So I've been doing
an informal survey over the past few weeks, asking all the young
men I know if they have viewed I-porn. Almost all said they had.
Admittedly my sample group - mostly white, employed, reasonable,
middle-class human beings - is not representative of general society.
But that's the point. Porn is now so commonplace as to be openly
acceptable to the group that would have in the past fought hard
to keep it a dirty little secret.
"It's a soft-core thing," said one friend I questioned on the
ethics of his viewing habits. "Female exploitation is the hard-core
scene. I don't know anyone into that."
He might be right. He directed me to a handful of the most viewed
I-porn sites. While there was a lot on display, it was difficult
to work up an outrage.
Instead the images were almost ironic: super-attractive girls
playing up to male fantasy, as if they were spoofing male desire
just because they could.
But here's where it gets interesting. When I-porn first showed
signs of expanding, the industry - today in the United States it's
a $10 billion to $12 billion industry, equal to Hollywood's total
annual box office - commentators warned that men would go off the
rails.
Andrea Dworkin, the feminist activist, predicted the easy accessibility
of porn would lead to sexual mayhem. But she was wrong.
Sexual crimes in general, and particularly stranger-sex attacks,
are on the decrease in the Western world. Meanwhile, in places where
accessible pornography is almost unheard of, sexual crime is still
a big issue.
An expose by a Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, revealed
the horrific fact of South Africa's infant-rape crisis. That country
was depicted as being a "rape-prone" society, and one commentator
described a culture of entitlement to the sexuality of women and
children.
Additionally, a New York Times article this month revealed that
in some French communities gang rape is the highest it has ever
been. The article described traditional, often immigrant, communities
- where women enjoy little respect and boys grow up "hopelessly
confused or ignorant about sex" - as being places experiencing the
most sex-related crimes.
While the problems of endemic sexual abuse are far more complex
than can be covered here, it is possible that pornography is not
one of the drivers. But that doesn't make it harmless.
An article in the New Yorker on the explosion of porn interviewed
numerous young men who all bemoaned their inability to sustain real
relationships and their preference for the easy out of their porn-lives.
Women said the effects of rampant I-porn use by almost all the men
they knew was affecting their intimate lives and causing them to
feel they could never measure up.
And that's where the girls dressed as hookers come in. Porn and
porn characterisations (Britney, Beyonce, Christina, et al) are
setting the standard.
If the multi-billion-dollar porn industry figures are anything
to go by, far more men than we care to admit are being reared on
porn as their predominant sexual diet. In their skewed porn-life
women are always willing, always hot, and they always like it.
So while for real hookers the outfits and attitudes are conscious
tools, things to be discarded at the end of the night, for the average
young woman caught up in the modern dating scene there is little
alternative to appropriating the accoutrements of prostitution (and
more frightening, little consciousness about it).
No wonder the women at the Toronto event were acting and looking
like prostitutes. How else could they engage in the age-old dance
of attraction and mate-seeking?
While the early fears of an avalanche of sexual crime following
in the wake of easily accessible pornography may be proving unfounded,
it's the spread of a different kind of sickness that is most worrying:
the emotional anaesthesia of an active porn-life that damages not
only male perception of women but also women's images of themselves
and consequently all their intimate relationships - perhaps for
life.
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
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Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
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