Gender Current Situation Porn Stars Clinical Studies A Conspiracy Damage

Hooker look is in as porn goes from deviant to de rigueur

(NZHerald November 3, 2003)


At a party at this year’s  Toronto Film Festival, I suddenly realsied I was surrounded by hookers.  From the skin-tight trousers that revealed a part of the rear anatomy normally reserved for 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.

Late, 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 cheese board at a dinner party, all the men around the table admitted to accessing porn on the Internet. I-porn, as it’s known, is no longer a secret dalliance.  For Internet-savvy young men it’s a mainstream activity.

While there is still nothing startling about men viewing pornography, its 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 had 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 not 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,”aid one friend I questioned about the ethics of his viewing habits.  “Female exploitation 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 IPorn first showed signs of expanding the industry, the industry - today in the US it’s a 10 billion to 12 billion industry, equal to Hollywood’s total annual boxoffice - commentators warned that men would go off the rails.

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 Iporn 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-million 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 a t the end of the night, for the average young women caught up in the modern dating scene there is little alternative to appropriating the accoutrements of prostitution (and more frightening, little consciousness abut it).

No wonder the young 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?

It’s the spread of of 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.


Sex has harsh consequences  Hooker Look In Women Wear The Dare Is Hookup Culture Bad for Young Women? Women & Performance Anxiety Truth Bites Porn Hooking More Women