Pornography and Power

Presentation given by
Prof. Dr. Jakob Pastötter

Good morning.

Pornography and cultural understanding, with particular regard to the power

aspect - this is a very cumbersome title. Basically, it can be said that
pornography, in the broad sense, is actually a cultural product: a cultural
product of our Western, post-industrial society. Primarily, it has to do with
sexuality, of course; secondarily, however, it always has to do with power as
well, with different aspects of power. And we know that this power, which
especially emanates from the media as a whole, and thus also from
pornography as one aspect of the media, starts very early. Let's hope that it
does not start too early: for the Americans it is a standing joke that one of
modern man's symbols of power is actually the remote control, and that one
can instantly tell a boy or a girl by whether a remote control is in the hand.

Now, what kind of power is the power of pornography? First, we can assume
that the pornography medium exercises a multidimensional power, i.e. a
power of definition regarding two sectors: on the one hand, a power of
defining sexuality, and on the other, a power of defining gender relations.

The second power aspect is that of the masses. This may sound a bit "vulgar
democratic", but unfortunately, it is perceived like this - both by adults and
by adolescents: the majority is in the right. Thank God, democracy is a bit
more complicated than that, but the idea is that the masses are right.

A third power aspect we should consider is power through information. What

is interesting is that power through information does not necessarily mean
that this information has to be based on actual knowledge - occupying the
information channels is sufficient.

And finally, as a fourth sector: power through influence. In our discussion we

have just noted that this aspect is in fact the most difficult to classify
scientifically. Still, there are some indications that at least a part of what
constitutes our lives is influenced by the media.

But what is the result of being confronted with so much power due to
pornography? A cultural pessimist would declare: This society is
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disintegrating into a mass of "masturbating monads". Thank God, this does

not seem to be the case – however, prudence may be advisable. We can see
here very well that "successful" socialization through pornography would be
as follows: a child is provided with a remote control in the womb, who then
develops to an adult who turns on the porn channel with a vagina-like remote
control from his armchair. This is a horror vision; I hope this will never be the
case.

Let's start with the multidimensional power of pornography, which is basically

a power of definition. It is a power that is exerted over sexuality. But why
is pornography able to exert any power at all? For, first of all, we have to say
that pornography is a crutch. We all know that what distinguishes
pornography from real sexuality is the fact that it is very limited sexuality; it
is only two-dimensional. Pornography can only be perceived through the eyes
and through the ears. But what makes sexuality so alluring for us human
beings is the fact that it appeals to all our senses; and not only does it appeal
to all our senses, but also to our whole personality. But we actually learn very
little about it. We - like almost all civilizations in the history of man – live in a
culture in which sexual knowledge is not passed on by observation. In almost
all other areas of life we learn primarily by watching someone else doing
something. In sexuality, however, this is not the case.

Besides, if pornography is already a poor crutch for sexuality, then in a

certain sense sex education is even more deficient, because sex education
even does without the pictures. And it is for this very reason that
pornography is so incredibly appealing to children and adolescents: "I do not
need to listen, I do not need to read, I do not need to imagine things through
the abstraction of words, because here I (allegedly) see what reality is like."
And this is signified by the last quote, which you all know: pictures are
stronger than words. This is almost laughable, but it is certainly true. For us
human beings, a picture is always more interesting, more exciting, more
informative than a text or a speech. And this is of course the problem with
sex education: many things have to be left unsaid and also undemonstrated.
For porn producers, there are no such problems.

The power of pornography, however, extends not only to sexuality, but also
to gender relations. Professor Grimm called this the contrast between the
"bitch" and the "cool dude". And it is not an invention of our current porn
discussion. We have known this for some twenty years: our society is
increasingly running out of fathers. And by "fathers" I do not mean biological
fathers, but paternal role models. In practice, only the media perform the
task of showing boys how to behave in their environment - especially towards
women. However strange this may appear at first sight: pornography, with its
few scripts, displays a very clear, very simply structured, and thus for
children and young people (and unfortunately even for some adults), very
attractive male image. For the man is the one who always has control, who
knows what it's all about, who tells the women how they have to behave. Of
course I cannot now dwell on this huge subject of "fatherless society", but we
should keep this in mind: pornography would be much less powerful for our
conceptions of the world if we had more male role models in society.
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Sex educators often argue: "Yes, but in sex everything is allowed - it just has
to be negotiated." The terminology used is negotiating morality. But for the
negotiating of morality I need two things: I must have learned how to
negotiate and I actually need morality. In this case morality does not involve
any kind of Christian values, but it means: concepts of how to conduct
oneself as a human being. This is exactly what pornography cannot supply.
Yet it is attractive, because it reduces men and women to what distinguishes
them most visibly from each other – it is biological reductionism.

So far, I have spoken of power as something relatively unproblematic, but we

must of course assume that power always poses problems as well. - Please
take the trouble to watch those clips thoroughly, and not just once. The first
time, they will simply rush past you. But watch that clip once, twice, three,
four, five times - until you are sick of it, and then pay attention not to the
sexual stimuli, but to the subtle interactions that are taking place between
the actors. Luckily not in every clip, but in very many of those movies, you
will find hostility, humiliation, and revenge, also in non-verbal expressions.
And the interesting thing in pornography is that generally the victim is never
presented as a victim - unless it is a highly artificial sadomasochistic game.
Even the victim will always be presented as a person who is indulging in the
highest delights of lust, which negates the victim role.

We now come to an aspect of power that is a little easier to digest, namely

the power of the masses. I have only listed a single set of statistics: We
see here the porn production in the U.S. Until about the beginning of the 90s
it remained within narrow limits, although already about two thousand
movies were produced every year. In the mid-90s production suddenly
quadrupled. It went up to eight thousand, then ten thousand, until in
2005/2006 a new peak was reached with about 13,000 new full-length
videos. Since then there have been no reliable figures, because the Internet
has also severely crippled the commercial porn industry, which had mainly
relied on the DVDs. Today we have different figures. It should be noted that
for quite a long time Germany was the world's second largest porn-consumer
market. Of course pornography is also a global business; remarkably, China
is listed as the strongest market with nearly 30 billion dollars - even before
the United States or Germany, which is now lagging relatively far behind.
This adds up to a total of almost 100 billion in 2006 - unfortunately, more
recent figures are not available. But you can see: sex sells.

The same applies to consumption. More meaningful than the bare production
or sales figures is of course the pornography's market share of the total
media market: in the year 2003, it amounted to 38 percent.

We come to the third aspect of power: power through information. As I

already said, this does not presuppose actual knowledge - it is sufficient to
control the communication channels. And this is no conspiracy theory: the
dissemination of true or false information has its influence on the
information's recipient. I would like to show you this website, because we
previously saw the statistic about the 13,000 newly produced videos. The
worldwide biggest porn portal is probably xvideos.com. Last weekend – you
can see the figure immediately before the ads - there were 278.637 clips and
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movies. You find everything on xvideos from a length of two up to ninety

minutes, freely available and without any access restriction. According to
xvideos, thousands of new clips are uploaded daily.

Knowledge is not necessarily a prerequisite for the power of information, but

of course, pornography implies a special knowledge. We have a
sadomasochistic clip before us. Sadomasochism is a variant of sexuality,
which is of interest to relatively few people, because it is highly artificial and
because it often requires many years of practice with your partner. But here
a different impression is given: through easy accessibility of information and
through the occupation of the information channels, it is suggested that all
this is totally realistic. As if this sexual variance did not have to be worked
out over months or years with your partner; as if it were something that is
literally just a click away.

We saw a similar video clip before. And the same reduction - I mean, the
visual or audiovisual reduction – of a woman or man to their genital areas is
of course problematic in itself. We do not even need a feminist approach to
speak of reductionism. Here we have another example of so-called fetish
sexuality. This is a form of sexuality that is practiced in real life by a small
percentage of people - probably in the 0.5/0.6% range. Here again it should
be evident: who has such suits? Who really takes the time to practice sex for
hours like that? But because it occupies the information channels, the
impression is given that the neighbors around the corner are doing it too.
Which they may do, but certainly not in public.

I found this a bit weird, although here it looks relatively harmless: fetish-
sexuality literally takes on a murderous aspect when it is combined with self-
strangulation.What happens physiologically is highly complicated, but even
with good control it often leads to death. We know this from the media.
Nearly every time a celebrity was found naked and hanged in a hotel room,
the reason was that he wanted to give himself the ultimate kick. Normalizing
all that by simply making it available is really problematic. As I already said,
these are no special portals, where I only have the possibility to watch things
after entering an access code. This is literally just a mouse click away.

The power of pornography is power through information. In order to be able

to occupy the information channels, the recipient is also required of course.
This is the latest study, produced in the U.S. in January of this year [2010].
Should there still be any doubt that power through information is a very real
power, you see here that within five years the already remarkably high media
consumption of 8 1/2 hours of children and adolescents has now increased to
almost 11 hours. I do not know about you, but this has nothing to do with the
way we formerly grew up with the media. Of course this is also multimedia
use, i.e., you are sitting at the computer listening to music and watching a
video simultaneously. But this obviously means that the impact of the real
world on our lives has extremely decreased.

Some years ago, a Japanese photographer, who had planned to document

children's games in the streets of Japan's villages and towns, abandoned his
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plan. He said children no longer play outside today; children are sitting at
home consuming media.

Let's come to the last power aspect: the power of pornography is also power
through influence on our self-perception. The economist I. C. Macmillan
said: influence is the capacity to not only control the information channels,
but also to control and to change the perception of others.

We could corroborate this very well – and presumably for the first time
statistically - with our sexuality study in 2008. 37.3% of the [relatively small
percentage of] women who consume pornography daily believe that their
partners want them to have genitals like those generally seen in the
pornographic movies. You may ask me afterwards what constitutes the
famous "porn vagina". Surprisingly, we find less impact on the men. But even
among the women with weekly pornography consumption, every fifth woman
is obviously affected by the causality between porn consumption and the idea
that one's own genitals should look the same as those displayed in the porn
movies.

I would like to quote another example, which is taken from the practice of
sex counsellors. Attitudes toward anal intercourse have changed dramatically
in recent decades. What is inconceivable for most people is that when Kinsey
did his studies in the 40s, not even gay men practiced anal sex frequently.
The first changes occurred during the 70s in the gay scene and then,
especially under the influence of the so-called gonzo pornography, also in
heterosexual circles. Suddenly, anal sex seems to have become quite a
common practice. And accordingly, sex counsellors report that not too long
ago the first boys enquired, "How can I persuade my girlfriend to have anal
sex?". Then, a few years later, came the first girls, "How can I dissuade my
boyfriend from anal sex?". Now, the girls come and ask the sex counsellors,
"What pills can I take to prevent it hurting like hell?" All this in a period of
only fifteen years, which began when anal sex was introduced in pornography
as a common sex variant, in the mid-90s approximately.

I have almost finished. We have briefly talked about what makes a man a
man and what makes a woman a woman. When it comes to pornography, a
big difference cannot only be found in children and young people, but
generally women are more interested in chatting and men prefer pictures.
Among other things, as a new Canadian study has shown, this has to do with
the fact that for men the most interesting thing about pornography are the
arousing sexual stimuli. Women, as you may recall from the studies done by
Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch in the 70s, are also aroused
physiologically by pornography, although they affirm in the surveys that they
feel disgust. In fact, they are not aroused by sexual stimuli – neither by the
famous sexy male buttocks, nor by the size of the male genitals, nor by the
female actors' reactions. Women - physiologically, mind you – seem to
respond to pornography's movement. That is, in this case the act of coitus is
the decisive factor. There are different interpretations for that, but we can
state: men respond to pornography in a different way; they respond to
different stimuli in pornography than women.
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All in all, we can assume that there is extreme stimulation of our brain's
reward circuitry; neurophysiological studies have shown this clearly.
Pornography combines at least two stimuli. When we were watching the clips
or even those few pictures, you may have noticed that pornography is not
just sexuality. We are talking about a medium; pornography is always
"artistically" transfigured sexuality. And it is not sufficient to point the camera
at some loving couple. Normally you cannot even see much then, because, as
I mentioned earlier, sex can be practiced easily with eyes closed even.
Rather, certain stylistic elements are used, and here in public, the effect of
those style elements is even stronger than when you are sitting alone in front
of your computer at three o'clock in the morning. The style element is sexual
shock. Things you would never do yourself, things you would not even want
your partner to do, these are presented to you. And this leads to a
particularly strong stimulation of dopamine secretion.

And we should also keep in mind - even when we maintain that this cannot
be of great importance: what you see in porn videos on a single evening, in
half an hour, an hour, or two hours, corresponds to an amount of audiovisual
sexual stimulation that people usually never got in their entire life - even in
sexually permissive cultures. Of course it is reduced to the audiovisual, but
still – is this not a strange development?

Our final question is: what remains to be done? Where there is power, there
is always and inevitably the feeling of impotence. We have just learned from
Professor Grimm that children especially, and young people, are really trying
hard to understand what pornography is. They do not just swallow it; they
really try to digest what they encounter there. And I think we as adults have
to do the same. We must think about what we encounter there, and then act
accordingly. For one thing is clear: capitulating to the incredibly strong power
of pornography is out of the question. Neither should we surrender to our
own helplessness. For both, the power of others and our own powerlessness
will daze us. And we want to remain capable of acting, don't we?

Thank you very much.

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Transcription and translation from:
http://www.mediaculture-online.de/Porno-im-Web-2-0.1714.0.html

About Jakob Pastötter:

Prof. (US) Dr. phil., M. A., Diplomate in Educational Sexology. President of the German
Society for Social Scientific Sexuality Research (DGSS). Sexologist and cultural
anthropologist. Clinical Associate Professor, American Academy of Clinical Sexologists,
Orlando (Florida, USA).

Publications:

Jakob Pastötter, Erotic Home Entertainment und Zivilisationsprozeß. Analyse des

postindustriellen Phänomens Hardcore-Pornographie. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-
Verlag 2003.
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Guest Editor: The Legacy of Alfred Charles Kinsey. Sexuality and Culture 10th
Anniversary Issue (1/2006).

Alfred C. Kinsey: A Much Discussed Scientist of Our Time. Sexuality and Culture 10th
Anniversary Issues (1/2006), pp. 5-14.

Robert T. Francoeur, Ray J. Noonan, and Jakob Pastoetter, Female Sexuality and Health
Today: Challenges to Cultural Repression. CrossCurrents (A quarterly devoted to science,
culture and religion; CrossCurrents Forum, Columbia University, New York), 54 (3/2004).

Associate Editor: The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, New

York and London: Continuum International 2004.

Germany. In: Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond J. Noonan, ed., The Continuum
Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. New York and London: Continuum
International 2004, S. 450-466 (together with Rüdiger Lautmann and Kurt Starke).

Germans. In: Carol R. and Melvin Ember, ed., Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. Men and
Women in the World’s Cultures vol. I. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum 2004, S. 400-
407.

Needle to p6. Sexualmedizin 25 (12/2003), p. 257.

Love and Eroticism: Addition or Contradiction? Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 28
(3/2002): pp. 280–282.

Vietnam. In: Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond J. Noonan, ed., The International
Encyclopedia of Sexuality, vol. IV, pp. 639–691. New York and London: Continuum
International 2001.

Tourism and Sex: Conceptualising of Foreign Countries as (S)exotic. Sexuality and

Culture 5 (2/2001): pp. 107–110.

Pornography as Academic Field of Research. American and German Approaches Towards

the Problematic Field of Research Pornography. Sexualmedizin 22 (9/2000): pp. 247-
250.

Pornography - a Men’s Culture? In: Stadt Burglengenfeld, ed., Männer-Kulturen (pp. 143-
152). Burglengenfeld 1995.

Papers Presented (Selection):

The Sex Traffic. XVIIth DGSS Conference, Lüneburg (24.9.2006)

True Love – Sexuality in Media. Adult Education Center Olching (3.5.2005).

Construction of Sexuality in Islamic Countries. XVIth DGSS Conference, Lüneburg

(27.6.2004).

Trafficking and Political Reactions in the USA and Europe. Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung,

München (8.3.2004).

The Postindustrial Phenomenon of Erotic Home Entertainment and the Civilizing Process.
XVth DGSS Conference, Lüneburg (22.6.2002).
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Socioeconomic Functions of Pornography, or: Why Business with Taboo is Booming? XVth
World Congress of Sexology, Paris (26.6.2001).

The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and the Kinsey Institute for
Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction: Agendas, History, Relationship. Kinsey
Institute, Bloomington, IN (24.3.1999).

Differing Perceptions of Sexuality in Europe and the USA: Conception, Construction,

Consumption. Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, IN (14.12.1998).