I watch online porn like it’s my job.  In fact, it is my job, believe it or not.  I work as a consultant for a technology company, and my professional responsibilities include rating adult websites for their relevance to search terms.  So, for example, if someone types in “hot librarians naked” (an actual search term that recently led to this blog, according to the ever-helpful Google Analytics), I would look carefully at the sites returned by the search engine to determine if they contained librarians of suitable hotness and nakedness to (ahem) satisfy the searcher.  (Obviously, this blog is not a good match for that search term – at least not yet.  You never know what the future might hold, dear readers . . . )

In the past few weeks alone, I’ve spent upwards of 30 hours looking at pornographic materials.  This is not as fun as it sounds.  I’ve seen some things that I can never unsee (beloved Disney characters in incestuous embraces, several instances of the “Two Girls, One Cup” video, and a seriously disturbing act involving a live octopus).  But overall, I remain, as I was before I took on this project, a feminist woman in favor of porn.

Because I felt like I just wasn’t getting enough porn at work (ha), I decide to do some reading about the state of porn in our culture today, in preparation for this very blog post.  I decided to read two pro-porn books and two anti-porn books, in the interest of fairness.  On the pro side:  Good Porn: A Woman’s Guide by Erika Lust (a birthday present from my partner, because he knows me so well) and The Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn by Violet Blue.  And on the con side:  Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen, and Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families by Pamela Paul.

It should come as no surprise that I really enjoyed the Blue and Lust books, while I wanted to throw the Jensen and Paul books across the room (or out the window, or off of a really big cliff).  I do agree with them about a few things:  for one, that pornography addiction is real, and it can cause serious damage to relationships (as can, of course, any addiction or compulsive behavior).  I also agree that most mainstream porn is indeed extremely misogynistic.  But do you know what I find even more demeaning to women?  Anti-porn crusaders’ tired gender essentialism arguments.

Paul, in particular, is a student of the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus school of logical fallacy.  While she admits that some women do watch and purport to enjoy pornography, she tries to explain this away with some truly maddening gender stereotypes.  Women who watch porn, she argues, just do it to appease the men in their lives; they want to come across as cool and sexually free, not “uptight” or “prudish,” so they force themselves to tolerate pornography.  Or perhaps they do actually enjoy adult entertainment, but not the same content that men are turned on by.  ”When they refer to adult material,” Paul says, “women are often talking about erotica.”  ”True male-oriented pornography,” she writes, “still offends the vast majority of women.”  (Maybe so, but not the women I know.)  Paul also supposes that pro-porn women are just ignorant of the really hardcore pornographic content that’s out there.  ”In all likelihood, many of those who suggest that pornography is about sexual liberation have probably not seen the kind of pornography that many, perhaps most, men find alluring.”

Lady, let me tell you:  I’ve seen it.  I’ve seen it all.  I’d bet good money that I’ve seen more pornography than Pamela Paul, and even some teenage boys.  And there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest:

1.  All men have watched, will watch, or perhaps even at this very moment are watching porn.  There are, of course, some men who are just not that into pornography, but if you meet a guy who says he has never watched porn, he’s a liar.  I don’t have any scientific proof of this, but since Robert Jensen and Pamela Paul got entire books published without scientific proof for their ideas, I feel relatively okay going out on a limb here.

2.  Many women also watch porn, and not for the bullshit reasons that Pamela Paul cites.  This pretty much says it all:

3.  Though the mainstream porn industry gets a lot of flack for promoting only a cookie-cutter, Bleach and Breast Implant Barbie image of female attractiveness, modern pornography as a whole has made room for a vast assortment of different types of women (and men), depicting diverse ideas of beauty and sexual desire.  Pornography is one of the few contemporary entertainment mediums that honestly offers something for every taste and proclivity.  It’s not perfect, of course, but I think there’s something nice about seeing a plethora of body types represented, praised – and, yes, fetishized.

4.  Porn is to sex as romance novels are to love:  completely unrealistic fantasy worlds – fun to visit, but not where you want to live.  The problem is not with the fantasy itself, though, but with people who fail to differentiate between it and reality.  In the case of porn, comprehensive sex education can help with this, by showing people from a young age what “ordinary” sex looks like and how real women respond sexually (hint:  not like Jenna Jameson).

5.  Everyone deserves a private, individual sex life.  I firmly believe that your sexuality is about who you are, not just what you do with other people.  Both Paul and Jensen bemoan pornography viewing as something selfish, a tactic that men use as an escape from dealing with the complex needs of their real-life female partners.  And I say:  yeah, so what?  Who says that sexual expression always has to be about selflessness and sharing and connecting?  Especially when it comes to solo sex (which everyone has a right to, whether in or out of a relationship), selfishness and indulgence are kind of the point.  As someone in a monogamous relationship, I like to think of this as being physically faithful, but mentally slutty (in a good way).  You can’t police the thoughts and fantasies of your significant other, and I don’t know why people try.  Besides, even if your partner doesn’t have a porn habit, that doesn’t mean he or she is thinking of you and only you 24\7 – and it’s unrealistic (not to mention unhealthy) to expect that.

Thus endeth my Pornifesto.  I’m feeling a bit over-saturated on the subject of porn at the moment, but if anyone has suggestions for other books I should check out on the topic (for or against), leave them in the comments.