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Hooker
Look in Fashion as Porn Becomes de Rigueur
by
Barbara Sumner Burstyn
Dissident
Voice
November 3, 2003
At
a party at this year's Toronto Film Festival, I suddenly realized 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 over coated
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
characterizations (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 anesthesia 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 is a freelance writer who commutes between
Montreal, Quebec and The Hawkes Bay in New Zealand. She writes a weekly column
for the New Zealand Herald (www.nzherald.co.nz),
and has contributed to a wide range of media. She can be reached at: barb@sumnerburstyn.com. Visit her
website to read more of her work: http://www.sumnerburstyn.com/.
Other
Articles by Barbara Sumner Burstyn
* The
Twisted Logic of Mothers Who Abandon Mothering
* We
Really are Living on the Dark Side of the Moon
* Viagra
for Girls: Medical Light Bulbs Can't Switch off Relationship Woes
* No Room
on the Balance Sheet for Truth or Humanity
* Working to Live has Been Overtaken by Living to Work
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