Dirty Work: Is Porn Bad for Us?

Note: This was originally printed in Urbanite (July, 2009), which went belly-up in 2012. Archives of the magazine are available here.

Last summer, I was at a very tame bachelor party—a bunch of forty-somethings drinking at a bar—when one of us lamented the lack of naked women.

“I’ve got your naked chicks,” one guy said, pulling out his iPhone. He tapped his fingers on the screen and turned it around. In a rectangle of video in his palm, a disturbingly endowed man was performing with a busty, grunting porn starlet.

“Wow,” said the naked-chick lamenter. And then we all realized we were in a bar, watching porn, and the guy with the iPhone turned it off and stuck it back in his pocket. No one mentioned it again.

It’s easy to forget, in our era of cell-phone sexting and adult cable and streaming pocket porn, that it wasn’t always like this. Acquiring pornography, especially the hardcore stuff, was akin to scoring illegal drugs. It required leaving the safety of one’s home, traveling to unsavory places, and mingling with prostitutes, pimps, and drunks.

In the fall and winter of 1987, I spent my workdays in the bowels of the Block, the seedy adult entertainment strip on East Baltimore Street. In the smoky basement of 401 East Baltimore, I sat at an artist’s desk, cutting penises and vulvas out of pornographic magazines and pasting them, with as much artistic flair as I could muster, onto squares of fluorescent cardstock. Across the cramped room, four video editors hunched over their decks splicing together raunchy sex montages, their monitors fast-forwarding and rewinding through endless and varied acts of copulation, accompanied by a soundtrack of grunts, screams, squeals, and dirty talk. For eight hours a day, five days a week, I lived in a world made of porn.

My job was simple. Every morning I’d get a list of titles for my day-glo marquee cards: Asian Anal 3-Way, perhaps, or Shemale Gangbang, or the one I’ll never be able to forget, Hot Poppin’ Mommas (it was aimed—no pun intended—at squirting-breast-milk fetishists). Then I gathered appropriate art from “the files,” a bank of cabinets containing a collection of pages from hardcore magazines and porn movie tear sheets, all organized in its own Dewey Decimal System of deviance, kink, and fetish. After gathering some appropriate photos, I’d take them back to my desk, where I grew adept at cutting out genitalia, mouths, anuses, feet, and even sprays of ejaculate (difficult, as you might imagine). A little glue stick, a rub-on title, and voilá—photomontage pornographique.

The cards served as advertisements for the peep show video booths, and once a week I’d change them to match a new batch of video clips. The booths themselves were sparse—a quarter-operated video monitor, a wooden chair, a trashcan and a roll of toilet paper. A guy I called the “Mop Man” circulated among the booths, mopping the floors with cherry-scented bleach.  I admired the management’s attention to hygiene, but was glad I didn’t have his job.

I also got to decorate the sex toy cases. It was a badge of honor among my fellow paste-up artists to be tapped by our temperamental and volatile boss, Gary, to do the seasonal decorating of the glass cabinets full of sex toys. Valentine’s Day was coming up, and Gary told me to work with the theme. “Be creative,” he said.

I dug through a bunch of boxes of assorted decorations and found some cardboard Cupids and hearts. I traced them, but thickened the arrows and rounded the arrowheads like erect penises. I cut out hearts and pasted layered labia onto them with near-gynecological accuracy, then taped them around the sex toys in a playful tableau. Cute, but sexy. I was proud of myself.

An hour later Gary called me away from my desk and led me upstairs. “This is terrible,” he said, waving his arms at the display cases. “Take it all down. Right now. I’ll get somebody else to do the goddamn decorations.”

Still, for the first few weeks on the job, I enjoyed the over-the-top immersion in the hypersexual sensorium, and I loved the looks on people’s faces when I told them what I did. But the novelty wore off quickly. My roommate remarked that the combination of cigarette smoke and cherry-scented bleach infused in my clothes made me “smell like porn.” In those days, AIDS hung over the Block like a scythe, and I watched several of the local prostitutes as they faded away over the course of weeks and eventually disappeared.

There was a kind of psychological toll, too: The ceaseless barrage of sexual imagery, once titillating and novel, dulled and numbed me to what I’d always understood as sacred and deeply intimate. The mechanics of copulation—insert tab A into slot B—had supplanted the ecstasy; this was sex as commerce instead of communion.

I contemplating quitting, but the money was good: $300 a week, in cash—enough to subdue my gnawing sense of soul rot. Then, one bleak March day I stood in the doorway of a booth, changing the marquee cards, and as I turned to close the door my foot slid beneath me, squeaking on the tile. I almost fell but grabbed onto the door. It took me a second to realize what had happened, and when it did—Jesus Christ, I just slipped in a puddle left by the last guy in here—I knew I would never set foot in 401 East Baltimore Street again. I quit that afternoon.

But I did return, a few months ago, just to see how things had changed. The sex toy cases were gone, replaced by a few sparse magazine racks. The booths were still there, but the marquee cards had been replaced by a DVD menu. I looked around and didn’t see a soul.

* * *

When I was 9, I saw my first images of naked women in a moldering Playboy a friend found stashed in the woods. Before that initiatory game-changer, the hottest material I could get my hands on was the J.C. Penney catalog, the women’s underwear ads in my mother’s Redbook, and the naked African woman in the well-thumbed copy of Born Free in my elementary school library.

Now, a kid clicking on a link in a spam email can stumble upon material that my bosses on the Block were legally forbidden to show. (If you’re familiar with the infamous viral video clip involving two women and a plastic cup, you know of what foulness I speak.) The “think of the children!” moralizers, with their warnings of apocryphal middle-school orgies and “rainbow parties,” have been guilty of hyperbole, but there’s no denying that my Playboy in the woods now seems as quaint and nostalgic as an episode of Leave it to Beaver. Adolescents today are often more porn-savvy than their parents. The hardcore stuff, once confined to a few downtown blocks, has escaped; we all—most of us, anyway—smell like porn.

I can’t help but wonder what this unprecedented eruption of dirty imagery is doing to us.

Pornography has never lacked for critics. Back in the 1980s, second-wave feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon argued that pornography served as an extension of rape and promoted violence against women. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, religious conservatives fulminated that porn incited lust and led the unwary into pedophilia. The scientific data is a mixed bag, but even advocates have a difficult time dismissing the downsides: relationships destroyed by compulsive cybersex, children exposed to age-inappropriate material, endemic abuse of women by an unscrupulous industry. Those who fret about economic productivity can marvel at the amazing statistics that online pornography generates: Seventy percent of the Web’s massive adult site traffic occurs during to 9-to-5 workday. That’s a lot of people peeking at naughty pictures at work.

But other damage may be more subtle, a reflection of how the tropes and culture of pornography have invaded the non-porn universe. A friend of mine, a professor at a Maryland university, told me how a student confided to him that he couldn’t ejaculate inside his girlfriend because all of the porn movies he’d watched ended with the men ejaculating on the women.

Paradoxically, living in a sex-drenched pornotopia may well be making us less sexy. Few mortal men can keep up with the on-screen (and carefully edited) mega-stamina of priapic porn stars hopped up on Viagra, and both sexes can feel inadequate when a partner desires an obscure, embarrassing, or impossibly acrobatic act, or can’t get aroused without a behavior or kink acquired from online grazing. With the emphasis on an unrealistic performance ideal, sex can begin to feel less like pleasurable human interplay and more like taking a driving test.

Are there social benefits to pornography? Clearly, porn-educated adults have an advantage when it comes to the cornucopia of human sexual experiences. While virginal wedding-night fumbling might have a certain nostalgic appeal, the possession of basic sexual literacy is now a given—thanks, in part, to easily accessible adult material. Additionally, the Web has democratized porn itself, at least compared to my days toiling in the basement of the industry; a contingent of sex-positive feminists, including many women sex workers and adult film stars, has turned “feminist porn” from an oxymoron into a lucrative genre.

Some new research even suggests that viewing sexually explicit material is medically beneficial—Newsweek recently reported that viewing porn can boost flagging testosterone levels in men. Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher suggested that regular exposure to erotic imagery could serve as the equivalent of testosterone-replacement therapy.

Although the delivery mechanisms are new, pornography is ancient. Scientists recently unearthed the oldest known artistic representation of a human, the Venus of Hohle Fels—a 35,000-year-old sculpture carved from a mammoth tusk. The figure depicts a woman with enormous breasts and an exaggerated vulva—the Neolithic equivalent of a Penthouse spread, according to some scholars. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine the zaftig Venus getting passed around at a Stone Age bachelor party like my friend’s iPhone. “If there’s one conclusion you want to draw from this,” anthropologist Paul Mellars commented in Nature, “it’s that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years.”

Sp perhaps we should stop thinking of porn as either good or bad, but understand it as complex and morally ambiguous, transcendent and ugly. In other words, it’s just like us.

—Michael M. Hughes