“Pornography hates men. It tells them that they are cruel, pathetic creatures who can sustain erections but not relationships. Porn is based on the premise that men will buy into this image rather than see it for what it is—a cold, calculated strategy to manipulate them into buying billions of dollars of woman and man-hating propaganda.”
—Gail Dines
“Who are the ‘johns,’ those people who buy women and girls in prostitution? Johns are average citizens rather than sadistic psychopaths. They are from all walks of life—doctors, judges, famous actors, and CEOs, as well as construction workers, social workers, and traveling salesmen. Rich and poor, young and old, the men . . . are from every race/ethnicity in the world. Most are married . . . One woman reported that as she was about to perform fellatio on a man in his Volvo, she heard a cry from behind her, turned around, and saw a year-old baby, strapped into a car seat.”
—Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research and Education,
San Francisco, California
It has long been understood that what people do for entertainment—and sexual pleasure—can be shockingly revealing. But until recently, most discussions about pornography, prostitution, and stripping have focused on the women and girls in those industries—who they are, how they got into that life, and what happens to them once they do. These are important areas of discussion, and over the past couple of decades activists and researchers have learned a great deal about the reality of women’s and girls’ lives in the commercial “sex industry”—largely as a result of the courageous testimonies of women who have survived it. But if we hope to prevent sexual violence and other forms of sexual exploitation, we must begin to ask another set of questions: How does heterosexual men’s use of pornography as a masturbatory aid help to shape not only their view of women and girls, but their own manhood and sexuality? What is the influence on boys’ sexuality of early and repeated exposure to the pornography industry’s particular representation of “normal” sex? Is it possible to discuss sexual violence in our society and not talk about the influence in male culture of the $10 billion pornography industry? What is the relationship between the sexual abuse of children and the proliferation of media products that deliberately sexualize young girls— and in some cases boys? How do men treat prostitutes, and what impact does this have on the way they treat their wives, girlfriends, female coworkers, and fellow students? As strip culture seeps ever more visibly into the mainstream, what effect does this have on men’s and boys’ attitudes toward women? What can be done about what seems to be a steady movement away from the idea of sex as mutually respectful? Short of creating our own version of a Talibanlike theocracy, is it possible to reverse the seemingly inexorable societal trend toward the pornographic fantasy of men using women like blow-up dolls?
These are uncomfortable questions, and what makes them even more difficult is that not everyone wants to know the answers. Men have an obvious incentive to change the subject. But it is also true that many women are not eager to find out about what goes on in certain parts of male culture that historically have been off-limits to them, especially when it gets personal and involves men close to them. And who can blame them? The “truth” about some men’s callousness, cruelty, and need for sexual dominance that is revealed in pornography, prostitution, and strip culture is a lot to stomach. Some women carry the added burden of having done things sexually with men to accommodate a man’s pornographic fantasy, which in another context they might feel compromised their integrity. It also must be painful for women to admit to themselves that their fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers are often the very same men who rent videos with titles like A Cum-Guzzling Slut Named Kimberley, pay twenty-year-old strippers for lap dances at “gentlemen’s clubs” on the way home from work, get blow jobs from prostitutes at friends’ bachelor parties, and in some cases travel abroad to have cheap sex with twelve-year-old girls.
The writer John Stoltenberg once said that pornography tells lies about women, but it tells the truth about men. I think Stoltenberg is only partially right. Unless it can be proven that male infants are born hard-wired for sexism, the only truth about men that pornography reveals is that they are products of their environment. Thus if we want to reduce the level of sexual violence perpetrated by boys and men, we need to critically examine the environment in which we socialize boys and establish norms in male culture. This will not be easy, especially since so many men have conscious or unconscious feelings of guilt about how they have objectified women, or perpetuated their oppression through their treatment of them as purchasable commodities. But in order for men to transform their feelings of guilt into something more constructive, they need to do something about the underlying problem. They need to move beyond defensiveness and ask themselves how they can help to change the sexual rituals and norms in male culture that are harmful to women and children. A good place to start this process would be to commit—in private and public—what Stoltenberg calls acts of “revolutionary honesty” about their lives, loves, and guilty pleasures.
In this spirit of revolutionary honesty, I want to come clean about some of my own guilty pleasures. At the very least, I want to make sure that I am not self-righteous or moralizing in this discussion. I do not characterize myself as a “good guy” while other guys who use porn or pay prostitutes are “bad guys,” or irredeemably sexist. I have never had nonconsensual sex or sex with a prostitute, but I am far from prudish. In my teens and twenties, before I was politically conscious about the sexist exploitation at the heart of the “sex industry,” I went to strip clubs and used pornography. But I never saw myself as oppressing women. I denied any connection between my private pleasure and the perpetuation of rape culture. At first I did not know, and then I did not want to know, how badly some men (and women) treat the women and girls in those industries. It was only as I came to hear and read about their life experiences—and reflect on the feminist idea that the high incidence of rape and sexual harassment in the U.S. is linked to the pervasive sexual objectification of women in our society—that I consciously refused to support or condone the commercial sex industry. Still, the effects of my earlier conditioning have stayed with me to this day. For example, I am sometimes aroused by images that I know are sexist and degrading to women. I appreciate the complexity of the human erotic imagination, but I wonder how much my fantasy life—and the fantasy life of tens of millions of my fellow men—has been shaped by the increasingly angry and misogynistic porn that has flooded the culture and our psyches in recent decades. I would never hold other men to a standard which I do not hold for myself. Any man who wants to fight gender violence—and all forms of sexism—needs to be careful not to condemn in others what he refuses to acknowledge about himself. The solution I have found is simply to be honest about my own self-doubts and contradictions. In my work with men, I have found that most of them respect and appreciate this, even if they do not agree with all of my interpretations or conclusions.
Pornography is usually thought of as a women’s issue. But as the sociologist Gail Dines bluntly states, “Men make, distribute, and get rich on porn. They jerk off to it. Tell me why it’s a women’s issue.” Although men are overwhelmingly the producers and consumers of porn, they are nonetheless dramatically underrepresented among the people who take the time to reflect on and discuss its societal function. In fact, millions of men use pornography, but I suspect very few have ever had a serious conversation about it. (Pornography marketed to gay men is a huge industry itself, and many feminist critics—gay and straight—have called attention to the ways in which much of gay porn eroticizes power and control and sexual violence. For the purpose of this discussion, I am focusing on by far the largest segment of the pornography market: heterosexual men and boys.) I know that countless men with whom I have worked over the past twenty years report they had never even heard—much less discussed—thoughtful critiques of the role of porn in men’s lives, and the possible negative affect it has had on their sexuality and ability to connect with real women. Some men avoid this sort of introspection because it is still awkward to talk honestly about sex in this culture, and they are embarrassed. Other men like to shift the conversation about pornography into political arguments about free speech and censorship and away from questions about how boys and men use it, what types of porn they find pleasurable and why, and what affect heavy porn use might have on their feelings about women’s bodies and sexuality. I am certain that part of their motivation for these evasions is personal: if they engaged in serious discussions about pornography, men might have to ask themselves troubling questions about what effect pornography has on how they view themselves, their bodies, and their desires for intimate connections with women.
The debate in this country about hot-button issues like pornography and the sexualization of children in advertising has become so polarized that to the casual observer, there are only two positions: either you are for porn or against it, with no thought given to the complexity of the subject. In real life, people tend to have much more nuanced views of these matters. People in the movements to end sexual and domestic violence are often falsely accused of prudery by the self-described “sex positive” advocates and of being “in bed with the Christian right” if they dare to critique the behavior of “consenting adults.” In fact, over the past couple of decades, pornography has even been a divisive issue among people who call themselves feminists. There are two major camps. Anti-porn feminists take the position that pornography sexualizes women’s subordination, and is a critical factor in maintaining gender inequality. It might not directly cause men’s violence against women, but it portrays men’s domination and control of women as sexy. In practice, the porn industry is also a heartless corporate enterprise which can be quite brutal and exploitative of the largely working-class women (and men)—many of them in their late teens and early twenties—whose bodies provide the main attraction, but whose careers in the unforgiving adult film business—Jenna Jameson notwithstanding—are nasty, brutish, and short.
Pro-porn feminists, by contrast, argue that unbridled sexual expression— even if much of it is sexist and produced by and for men—is in women’s self-interest because one of the cornerstones of women’s oppression is the suppression of their sexuality. True emancipation requires the celebration of women’s right to do whatever they want with their bodies—which includes their right to appear in pornography, strip, and sell sex.
Notably, these arguments about pornography have largely taken place between women.
Until recently, men who have a public voice about pornography tended to fall into one of two categories: conservative Christians or pro-porn enthusiasts. In the former category are men like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Dr. James Dobson, who publicly chastise the purveyors of “obscenity” and “filth,” and who also oppose women’s reproductive freedom, readily available contraception for young people, and school-based sex education. In the latter category are libertarians like Howard Stern who talk endlessly about how much they love porn, along with men in the porn industry itself who write and speak about its positive effects and savagely attack its right-wing and feminist critics.
But as a growing number of men enter the sexual violence prevention field, a new men’s conversation about pornography is beginning to take shape. These men frequently bring an “insider” perspective on the role of pornography in the lives of boys and men. They do not have to debate in the abstract about whether they think the pornography industry is harmful to women. For many of them, the answer flows out of their lived experience and observations of the men around them. There are no formal studies on this topic, but my sense is that a sizable majority of men who have worked in college and community-based anti-rape organizations over the past fifteen or twenty years share the anti-porn feminist view that pornography contributes to the problem of sexual violence, and at the very least desensitizes men to women’s sexual subordination. There is by no means unanimity of opinion among these men about what can be done to counteract the popularity and influence of the porn industry in boys’ and men’s lives. And there are ongoing debates on college campuses and email Listservs about whether all pornography is objectification, and hence bad, or whether the real problem is the misogynistic vision of women’s sexuality and men’s power that the multi-billion dollar porn industry has sold to the public as normal and even liberating. (Note: There are competing definitions of pornography. But to simplify matters, consider the definition Gail Dines uses in her work. Pornography, she says, consists of those materials that are produced by the multi-billion dollar pornography industry. “The industry knows exactly what it is producing,” she says.)
It is also important to note that the vast majority of men in the rape prevention world who are critical of the pornography industry do not object because they think public displays of sex are obscene, but because of the harm inflicted on women and children by sexist displays of women’s and men’s sexuality. In fact, I would bet that most of these men would celebrate uninhibited expressions of women’s sexuality. Their opposition to pornography stems from their belief that most of the magazines and videos produced by the pornography industry actually limit women’s sexual freedom, while setting women up to be sexually victimized by men. The problem is not only that a high percentage of women in porn are sexual abuse survivors, some of whom were coerced into the business when they were troubled or naïve teenagers by predatory pimps and other abusive older men. It is not only the reduction of women to what University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, writing in the Sexual-Assault Report, painfully describes as “three holes and two hands.” It is the way the pornography industry helps to define heterosexual men’s sexuality. Every time a video portrays a scene where a woman asks to be penetrated by a succession of men who ejaculate all over her face as they contemptuously call her a “cum-guzzling whore,” it also portrays men getting pleasure from the sight of that “cum-guzzling whore” getting what she wants, and deserves. It normalizes the men’s pleasure-taking as it sexualizes the woman’s degradation. The idea that consumers of porn can masturbate and have orgasms to that kind of treatment of women and not have it affect their attitudes toward the women and girls in their lives is more a fantasy than anything the most creative porn writers can conjure up.
Mainstream pornography has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. People of a certain age who still associate heterosexual porn with “girlie magazines” and air-brushed photos of big-breasted women shot in soft light on luxurious beds with big pillows would be shocked by the brutality, outright contempt for women, and racism that is common in today’s product. One need not search out the extremist fringe of porn culture to find this. A simple Google search will suffice to see some of the “adult” titles readily available: A Cum-Sucking Whore Named Francesca, Rectal Reamers, Brianna Banks aka Filthy Whore #1, Love Hurts, and Ride ’em and Wreck ’em. There are thousands of porn videos that sexualize some of the most racist caricatures of women and men of color, with titles like Big Black Beast, Slaves on Loan, Asian Fuck Sluts, and Three Black Dicks and a Spanish Chick. The Web is full of porn sites that advertise not just “sex,” but the sexual degradation of women. One such site is called Violated Teens: Cum in and use them, which boasts of “Teens forced to fuck, exploited for hard cash: we do what we want to them and they have to love it.” Consider one of the most popular porn sites on the Internet, called BangBus. Since its debut in 2001, this site has pioneered what has been called “reality porn,” a new genre of “humilitainment” that features what Shauna Swartz in Bitch magazine calls “some of the most violent and degrading porno scenes to hit the mainstream.” BangBus consists of a couple of average guys who drive around southern Florida in a van, “in search of every girl’s inner slut.” What they are looking for—the viewer is led to believe—are young women who will agree to go for a ride with them on the promise that they will be paid a few hundred dollars to do something sexual on camera. The videotape documents the initial pick-up on the side of the road, followed by a brief conversation inside the moving van, where the men convince the seemingly naïve woman to take off her clothes. As the handheld camera rolls, the woman has vaginal or anal sex with one of the guys, or she performs oral sex on him. He then withdraws and ejaculates on her face, as the narrator with the camera shrieks in delight. Then after the sex act, the men figure out some way to get the woman out of the van, in one instance to let her pee, in another so she can wash off in a lake. Once she is outside, they hit the gas and race away without paying her. The men laugh and congratulate each other on another successful “drop off,” as the young woman’s face registers disbelief and then shame as she realizes she has been duped and literally kicked to the curb. The success of this site—which in recent years has drawn huge crowds at the porn industry’s major convention in Las Vegas—has predictably spawned a series of imitators, including a site called Trunked, which boasts, “It’s simple. Throw the bitch in the trunk. If she doesn’t like it, she can get out. Oh yeah. We’re goin’ 55 mph.”
The word “pornography” translates from Greek to mean “writing about prostitutes,” and there is no doubt that just as women’s bodies are the center of attention in heterosexual pornography, most of the people who have written about pornography as a cultural phenomenon have written about how it affects women’s lives. This is understandable and appropriate, because it is primarily the bodies of women and girls that pornography producers use and abuse for profit. But if our goal is to dramatically reduce the incidence of sexual violence, we must turn our attention to the demand side of the pornography question and begin to look critically at the role of pornography in the lives of boys and men.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the concept of rape culture, which starts with the premise that sexual violence is common in our society not because there are so many sick men, but because we socialize normal boys to be sexually dominant and normal girls to be sexually subordinate. The pornography industry is clearly a key area in the culture where “normal” boys learn to objectify and dehumanize girls and women. For example, Diane Rosenfeld, who teaches gender violence at Harvard Law School, says that her students worry about whether the male judge who watched a porn movie last night is taking her seriously at all.
But sexual objectification notwithstanding, Robert Jensen has written that people are mistaken in assuming that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it is about sex. On the contrary, Jensen maintains that our culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is really about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. Like many women in the anti-rape movement who have studied pornography, Jensen has spent thousands of hours coding and analyzing the content of mainstream porn videos and magazines. His research focuses on men’s use of pornography, and how that might shape their attitudes toward women or their own sexuality. In his prolific popular writings on the subject, he cites numerous examples as evidence, realizing that people who are not familiar with contemporary heterosexual porn—especially women—can be skeptical about feminist claims that porn is less about naked bodies and “sex,” and more about the eroticization of men’s dominance and control of women. The following extended quotation is from an article by Jensen that was published in 2004 in the Sexual-Assault Report.
One of the ten scenes in the film Gag Factor #10, a 2002 release from J. M. Productions, begins with a woman and man having a picnic in a park. He jokes about wanting to use the romantic moment to make love to her mouth, and then stands and thrusts into her mouth while she sits on the blanket. Two other men who walk by join in. Saying things such as “Pump that face, pump that fucking face,” “All the way down, choke, choke,” and “That’s real face fucking,” they hold her head and push harder. One man grabs her hair and pulls her head into his penis in what his friend calls “the jackhammer.” At this point she is grimacing and seems in pain. She then lies on the ground, and the men approach her from behind. “Eat that whole fucking dick. . . . You little whore, you like getting hurt,” one says, as her face is covered with saliva. “Do you like getting your face fucked?” one asks. She can’t answer. “Open your mouth if you like it,” he says, and she opens her mouth. After they all ejaculate into her mouth, the semen flows out onto her body. After the final ejaculation, she reaches quickly for the wine glass, takes a large drink, and looks up at her boyfriend and says, “God, I love you baby.” Her smile fades to a pained look of shame and despair.
Jensen recounts several similar scenes from a variety of bestselling porn videos, and then concludes that because the vast majority of people who rent or buy these sorts of videos are men, “we have to ask why some men find the infliction of pain on women during sexual activity either (1) Not an obstacle to their ability to achieve sexual pleasure, or (2) A factor that can enhance their sexual pleasure.” The optimistic way to read the contemporary market demand for cruelty in pornography is that men and boys have been so desensitized to women’s suffering that they are not bothered by the cruelty. This is a frightening development by itself, with serious implications for the present and future of relations between the sexes. If present trends continue, heterosexual sex—at least that which is represented as such in the commercial sex industry—would seem to be growing increasingly impersonal, and men’s pleasure increasingly linked to displays of masculine power and dominance. In other words, transforming the rape culture could become even more of a difficult challenge than it is at present.
The more pessimistic assessment is that some men’s sexual pleasure is actually enhanced by the mistreatment and degradation of women. Sadly, there is a wealth of documentary evidence which suggests that the producers of porn are quite conscious in their attempt to provide men with an outlet for their anger and feelings of sexual aggression. Consider the words of Max Hardcore, a popular porn director and actor whose name calls up over one million hits on Google. In an interview with Hustler magazine that is recounted by Robert Jensen and Gail Dines in their book Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, Hardcore said, “There’s nothing I love more than when a girl insists to me that she won’t take a cock in her ass, because—oh yes she will!” He described his trademark as being able to “stretch a girl’s asshole apart wide enough to stick a flashlight in it,” and went on to say that he doesn’t hate all women, just “stuck-up bitches.” The porn performer Amanda McGuire told this story about him in Icon magazine: “He has made girls cry and lots of girls puke—that’s not unusual. I was there once when he throat-fucked a girl so hard she puked and started bawling.” Hardcore, whose work has been referred to by porn reviewers as “pseudopedophilia” because of how he dresses up his “actresses” to look like young girls, explained the challenges he faces making his films. “It’s pretty easy to get a slut to spread solo for the camera,” he said. “And quite a different matter to get her to take it up the ass and puke up piss.”
In spite of these sorts of statements by men in the industry, its defenders— including women such as the “thinking man’s porn star” Nina Hartley—downplay or even deny that porn culture is saturated with misogyny and sexism. They point to the small percentage of porn written and produced by women, or they emphasize the growing popularity of “couples porn,” which is typically less misogynistic and abusive than the majority of products that are aimed at the predominantly male market. However, veteran porn director and actor Bill Margold comes right out and admits what he and so many other pornographers are trying to do:
I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they can get even with the women they can’t have. We try to inundate the world with orgasms in the face.
Examples like this of the sort of open misogyny and woman-hatred that comes out of the mainstream pornography industry still have the potential to shock young women, because due to the segmentation of the porn market, many of them have never been exposed to it. Dines says that her women students who think they know what’s out there in porn are often devastated to learn what their boyfriends consider “normal.” This is because the guys are more likely to use the “gonzo” porn referenced above to masturbate by themselves— with effects on their sexuality that we have not yet even begun to understand.
Three young white men were convicted in March 2005 of sexually assaulting an intoxicated sixteen-year-old girl in the summer of 2002 in Orange County, California. The central piece of evidence in the trial that gained national notoriety was a videotape of the crime made by the defendants. The then-sixteen- and seventeen-year-old men had made a twenty-one-minute video of them shoving a Snapple bottle, lit cigarette, apple juice can, and pool cue into the vagina and anus of the unconscious victim. One of the young men, whose father was then the assistant sheriff of Orange County, had proudly shown the video to some acquaintances, some of whom thought the girl was a corpse and called the police. Many media discussions of the crime and trial took their cues from the defense lawyers’ offensive strategy, and focused on the actions of the victim. According to R. Scott Moxley in the OC Weekly, the lawyers for the young men called the girl—named Jane Doe for the court proceeding—a “slut” and a “whore,” who loved giving “blow jobs” and enjoyed “doggy-style” sex. They claimed that she dreamed of becoming a porn star and had staged the entire episode in order to get them to gangbang her on film. With so much attention fixated on Jane Doe’s morals and motives, there was little room to discuss the heart of the case: the morals, motives, and mindsets of the young men. What were they thinking as they molested her? How could they be cruel enough to rape and degrade this girl, and brazen enough to videotape the entire thing and then brag about it? What did those actions say, not about the character of the girl, but about their characters, and the values of the white-affluent culture that produced them? What did this case reveal about young men’s attitudes toward women’s sexuality? What did it say about sexual norms in male culture, and the role of pornography in establishing or maintaining those norms? Is it so hard to believe that “normal” boys could videotape a grotesque gang rape when porn sites that brag about “invading privacy to the limit” and feature “Gym Cam, Locker Room Cam, Up-Skirt Cam, Toilet Cam, and the Infamous Gyno Cam” are just a mouse click away and part of millions of boys’ sexual socialization?
The Orange County gang-rape case was far from an aberration. Over the past decade there have been numerous criminal cases, some of which made the national news but most of which did not, that involved boys and young men who videotaped sexual activity with girls and then shared it with their friends. In a number of these cases, the young men involved were normal, primarily law-abiding kids who did not see anything wrong with what they had done—until they were held accountable. For example, an eighteen-yearold soccer star and high school honor student in Ohio was charged in 2001 with posting nude pictures of a girl in an Internet chat room. He posted the pictures the same night that a seventeen-year-old girl had changed her clothes at his home. He called the incident a practical joke, but was charged with unlawful use of a minor in nudity-oriented material or performance, which is a second-degree felony. Interestingly, in 1999 the U.S. Justice Department formed a partnership with the Information Technology Association of America to educate people about computer responsibility in the Internet age. One goal of the program was to help children and young adults develop an “awareness of potential negative consequences resulting from the misuse of the medium.” This seems like a smart initiative, because everyone knows teenagers—like adults—have a tendency to sometimes act without thinking. But any serious attempt to help boys think through their decisions about how to treat girls has to examine those places in male culture where sexist and abusive behavior is presented as normal and masculine and even expected—and where there are no real consequences for hurting people, including through Internet pornography. Even hit Hollywood films present this attitude, such as American Pie, where the main character arranges to videotape himself having sex with a Czech exchange student and broadcast it by web cam to his friends watching in another room. When American Pie was released in 1999, critics hailed it as good clean fun. Practically no one mentioned that one of the main plot points turned on the lead character’s stumbling attempts to commit an unforgivably cruel and sexist act—the type of act that ruins lives when it happens in the real world.
Girls and women suffer the most harm from a culture awash in misogynist pornography, but boys and men are hurt, too. It is important to discuss this hurt both for pragmatic reasons, and out of genuine concern for these boys and men. In order to stem the tide of cruelty, callousness, and brutality toward girls and women that is now mainstream fare from the porn industry, men and boys in sufficient numbers will need to make the decision to stop paying for porn magazines, videos, and Internet porn sites. Some men will be motivated to give up their porn habits as they develop a greater sensitivity to the damage that eroticized cruelty does to girls and women— inside and outside the porn industry. But altruistic concern for harm done to women cannot motivate anywhere near as many men and boys as enlightened self-interest. In other words, if they can be shown that porn hinders rather than facilitates a healthy sex life for men, there is at least a chance that enough men will reject it to truly make a difference. But unless heterosexual men perceive that they have a personal stake in a sexual culture that is not dominated by the cartoonish version of sexual fulfillment created by middle-aged businessmen in windowless studios in the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, it is hard to see how the current trend toward greater acceptance of sexualized brutality will be reversed in coming generations.
It is clear that the men who own and run the pornography industry will do anything to girls and women in pursuit of massive profits. But it is also true that they do not have much regard for boys and young men. If they cared about boys and their longings for intimacy, love, and sexual connection with girls, then why would they relentlessly sell them an endless supply of videos, magazines, and websites that heap scorn on girls and women, and reduce them to a set of orifices to use up and discard? As Dines and Jensen write in an article titled “Pornography Is a Left Issue,”“Take away every video in which a woman is called a bitch, a cunt, a slut, or a whore, and the shelves would be nearly bare.” In the cold and exploitative world created by hardcore pornographers, who are heterosexual boys supposed to have relationships with? With the cum-guzzling sluts who are forced to drink gallons of cum? The big-titted bitches who they can fuck in every hole? The dirty little sluts who want to get their pussies drilled by various farm animals? It is no coincidence that the porn industry does not want boys to establish real intimate connections with girls, because then who would purchase their product?
It is not fair to blame boys (or girls) for being seduced by the porn world’s promise of sexual excitement and pleasure. Technological progress—especially home video and the Internet—have made it possible for them to access the most graphic sexual images with the touch of a button. For many boys going through puberty and adolescence, the temptations of porn are irresistible. After all, it promises a kind of sexual gratification with no strings attached—and no chance of rejection. In pornography, even unattractive and unpopular boys can have sex with beautiful girls. Pornography is also so mainstream now that many kids are unfazed by it. In the digital age, it is all around them: online, on cable, video, chat rooms. Porn is now available on cell phones. It is also a common plotline on TV shows such as Friends or The OC; and many MTV and BET videos look like porn videos. In fact, several rap stars now produce their own porn videos. With porn images all around them, many young Americans simply see it as an unremarkable feature of the cultural landscape.
But this has come at a cost. Because there is so little sexual content in media that is not pornographic, and because there is so little quality sex education in schools, pornography fills a void for millions of sexually inexperienced kids. What they see in pornography helps to establish a template for “normal” sexual behavior that they then feel pressure to emulate. They might not initially be drawn to pornography because of all the misogyny and brutality, but that is what they are getting from the stories being depicted in most mainstream porn today. I heard a story from a rape prevention educator about a question one of his colleagues received from a ten-year-old boy during a presentation. The boy had walked into a room where his older brother was on an Internet porn site, and saw on the screen a man shoving a pool cue into a girl’s vagina. The young boy wanted to know: do girls like that sort of thing? A colleague of mine recounted this story: At the college where she teaches, a male and female student, both virgins, had sex for the first time. When the man was about to reach orgasm, he withdrew and ejaculated on his partner’s face. They both thought this was the way normal people are supposed to have intercourse. Neither of them was aware that this practice derived not from “real life” but from pornography, where it had developed as an aggressive act by men to express contempt for the women they had just conquered.
In Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt’s documentary film about hypermasculinity and misogyny in hip-hop culture, he interviews young men outside a rap music event who matter-of-factly identify many of the women across the street as “hoes.” He then walks over and asks the women what they think of being labeled this way. They reject the label and assert their right to wear short shorts and bikini tops in the hot Florida sun. The viewer is left with the sad impression that these women are either oblivious to how some men view them, or they are so beaten down that they expect it and are unfazed. The term “ho” has become such a routine part of everyday conversation that it has lost much of its initial sting. In this context, it is worth remembering that “ho” is shorthand for “whore,” which itself is a colloquial expression for a prostituted woman (or man). So when men (or women) call women “hoes,” they are comparing them to prostitutes. To what effect? As a growing body of research shows, some men treat prostitutes with shocking brutality. According to one study, about 80 percent of women in prostitution have been the victim of a rape. As Susan Kay Hunter and K. C. Reed said in a 1990 speech at a conference sponsored by the now-defunct National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, “It’s hard to talk about this because . . . the experience of prostitution is just like rape. Prostitutes are raped, on the average, eight to ten times per year. They are the most raped class of women in the history of our planet.” Contrary to the Pretty Woman stereotype, most prostituted women are young, poor, and desperate. A large majority are incest survivors. Many of them are women of color. The average age that “women” in the United States are drawn into prostitution is thirteen or fourteen. So the term “ho” is not just a thoughtless epithet. When men (or women) call a woman a “ho,” they not only demean and degrade her. In a sense they send the message to people who know her that she deserves to be treated like a prostitute. In this way it sets her up—like a prostitute—to become a rape victim.
If casual use of the word “ho” sets women up to be rape victims, then it follows that casual use of the word “pimp” sets men up to be rapists. In fact, in the moral universe created by the phrase “pimps and hoes,” the true “nature” of women is that they should be sexually subservient, and the true “nature” of men is that they should dominate and control women. In a world that operates according to the cold and unforgiving values of the marketplace, the only distinction between men is whether they own women or rent them. As the white rap/rocker Kid Rock raps in “Pimp of the Nation”: “There’s only two types of men/Pimps and Johns.” There is no doubt about which one is the true “man’s man.”
Over the past few years, the word “pimp” has become a non-controversial word in popular discourse. From Nelly’s Pimp Juice beverage to the MTV show Pimp My Ride, from guys displaying “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy” bumper stickers on their cars and trucks to men high-fiving each other for that “pimpin’ stereo system you got there, man,” the word “pimp” has not only become a routine part of the language—it has actually become a complimentary term. To what effect? What are the possible consequences of this glamorization of pimps? First, a little reality check. The traditional image of a pimp in this country is an African American street hustler. So casual talk about pimps always has a racial subtext that perpetuates one of the most racist caricatures of black masculinity: They’re sex-crazed jive-talkers who treat their women like shit. But regardless of their race, pimps are criminals who make money off the crass exploitation of girls’ and women’s bodies. (And boys’ and men’s.) Many of them are rapists and batterers. Regardless of how “cool” the image of the pimp has become in mainstream media culture, in real life pimps are incredibly cruel and callous men. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives estimates that 85 percent of prostitutes are raped by pimps. Some pimps are sociopaths. As Kathleen Barry explains in The Prostitution of Sexuality (1995):
Pimps target girls or women who seem naive, lonely, homeless, and rebellious. At first, the attention and feigned affection from the pimp convinces her to “be his woman.” Pimps ultimately keep prostituted women in virtual captivity by verbal abuse—making a woman feel that she is utterly worthless: a toilet, a piece of trash; and by physical coercion—beatings and the threat of torture. Eighty to 95 percent of all prostitution is pimp-controlled.
Let’s be clear. A culture that celebrates pimps is a culture that teaches men that masculinity is about power and control. It teaches them that they are entitled to sell, abuse, and rape women. Of course many men reject that and refuse to accept the one-dimensional caricature of manhood it implies. Still, to the extent that “pimps and hoes” becomes increasingly synonymous in people’s psyches with “men and women,” the fight against sexual violence will be like shoveling sand against the tide.
In 2003, a Los Angeles-based group called Captive Daughters partnered with the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University College of Law to organize the first-ever conference on the demand side of prostitution and sex trafficking. The “demand side” is a euphemism for the men who pay for sex with women and children, either here in the U.S. or around the world. The rationale for shifting the paradigm this way is obvious. It is imperative that the victims of prostitution and sex trafficking—who are typically poor girls and women from Asia, eastern Europe, and Central and South America—get the services they need, including medical care, drug abuse counseling, job training, and a host of other assistance. But these services are often too little, too late. Many of the girls’ and women’s lives are already badly damaged, their family and community relationships severed. On the other hand, without the demand from johns, traffickers’ profits would shrink, and the international prostitution syndicates would either dissolve or move into other areas of criminal activity.
When the focus of attention shifts to the demand side of the equation, a number of relevant questions emerge: Who are the men who buy sex from trafficked women and children? What percentage of them are “normal” guys, and what percentage are sexual predators? In a 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story on sex trafficking, the author, Peter Landesman, said that many formerly trafficked women he talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is “even rougher” than what the girls face in Mexico. One woman he spoke with in Mexico City who had been held captive in New York City said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of “an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex.” Who are the men with this increased appetite, and why do they seek out these types of experiences?
On a practical level, how do they find the prostitutes to service them? In ads for “escort services” and mail-order bride companies? In the classified advertising sections in the back of hip newsweeklies? On the Internet? Does the travel industry collude when agencies organize and promote trips for johns to go to favored destinations for sex tourism, where they have easy access to cheap sex with young girls and boys? To what degree is the U.S. military complicit when it averts its institutional eyes as brothels spring up near bases and U.S. service members continue the long tradition of taking quick trips on weekend leave to solicit prostitutes in Asia? There are a host of public health concerns that revolve around men. When American men travel to Southeast Asia or South America to have sex with children, do they wear condoms? Or do they force the girls and boys to have sex without them, which increases the chance that either party—but especially the prostituted person—might contract HIV or other sexually transmitted infections? Do the men’s wives, girlfriends, and boyfriends back in the States know about their unprotected episodes when they return from their travels and have sex with them?
Unless men’s demand for sexual services subsides, in a world where there are billions of poor and desperate people, there will always be a steady supply of women and children who are forced, tricked, or blackmailed into prostitution by criminal pimps and organized crime syndicates. The trouble is that until recently, few people even mentioned the demand side, much less sought to analyze it systematically. It was simply expected—and accepted— that millions of men would want to procure prostitutes or pay to have sex with young girls or boys. And to this day, few people seem willing to name and challenge the colonialist exploitation at the heart of the globalized prostitution business. Exhibit A: the increasing number of American and European men who travel to impoverished Third World countries to have sex with dark-skinned young women and girls, and boys. When you add that degree of overt racism to the already rampant sexism of prostitution, the problem can seem overwhelming. I know that for some women, this entire subject is simply too sensitive to raise, especially because some men can be defensive and hostile when women challenge them on the subject of their “private” sexual behaviors.
A woman I know who works as a rape advocate described to me a conversation she had with her neighbor, a man she considered very sensitive to women’s issues, about a new book she was reading by Melissa Farley.
She said, “I’m reading this book on prostitution and post-traumatic stress. It describes the experiences of prostitutes around the world and their experiences parallel those of rape and physical battery…”
The neighbor replied, “No, I don’t believe that. It’s the woman’s decision.”
“Is it?” she replied. “Do you really think they want to have sex with all those men? In the book it talks about how many are forced into it and then controlled by pimps or boyfriends, husbands.”
“They make a lot of money,” he said.
“…that the pimps keep.”
“I don’t know. It’s still their choice to do it.”
“What other choices do they have?”
“No one puts a gun to their head!”
At that point, according to the woman, her neighbor became defensive to the point of belligerence. He grew angrier as the conversation continued, while she felt a mixture of frustration and sadness. She also felt a chill coming on in their friendship. “He became a stranger to me in that moment,” she said.
This conversation is not unusual. The entire subject of men’s participation in the purchase, sale, and rental of women’s bodies has long been shrouded in denial, euphemisms, and evasions. The anonymity of pimps and johns in discussions about sex trafficking has been maintained in the same way that domestic violence and sexual assault have been defined as women’s issues. The language used to discuss it obscures men’s role. For example, the New York Times lead editorial on New Year’s Eve 2005 offered a series of resolutions for bipartisan national action, and it highlighted sex trafficking as one area where Republicans and Democrats could work together. But men were not mentioned in the editorial. There were references to “helping women in the third world” and earnest pronouncements that this kind of “exploitation of women” remain on the international agenda. But one would search in vain for any acknowledgment that the demand for the illegal business of sex trafficking is men’s desire to purchase sex with “exotic” women—and young girls—that they can use and abuse with virtual impunity. There was also no mention of pimps or johns. The editorial suggested the focus of the anti-sex trafficking agenda should expand beyond the poor countries where trafficking begins to include the wealthy nations where the sex slaves are imported, such as the Scandinavian countries, Japan, and the U.S. This is a step in the right direction. The next step is to say that the focus needs to be on the criminal men in the poor and wealthy countries who coerce and enslave women and children in order to exploit their bodies for financial gain, and the average guys whose money fuels the demand.
In the early 1990s, I was a guest on a television talk show where the subject was “feminist strippers.” The question: does strip culture empower women or degrade them? Most discussions about strip culture on mainstream TV focus on the titillating and sexy aspects of strippers’ lives, or the conflicts that arise in women’s relationships when their husbands or boyfriends patronize the clubs. I was there to argue that it is impossible to discuss stripping without taking into account the prevalence of sexual violence in our society. We can speculate about whether or not strip clubs would be popular in a nonsexist, rape-free world, but that is not the world we live in. Predictably, one or two of my fellow guests, as well as several members of the studio audience, countered that the popularity of male strip shows like Chippendale’s proves that stripping culture is not sexist. Women love this stuff. They go crazy at male strip shows. But even the slightest peek beneath the surface of these comparisons reveals a huge difference between female and male strip culture. That difference provides interesting insight about some of the ways that the sex industry contributes to the sexual violence pandemic.
The male and female strip cultures are not even close in size and scope. Male strip shows make up a tiny fraction of the “exotic” dancing industry. It is a challenge to find any strip clubs that cater exclusively to heterosexual women who want to watch men take their clothes off, although there are “male stripper” nights at strip clubs that offer naked women dancers every other day and night of the week. And male strippers typically do not fully disrobe. As someone said of the bikini, what it reveals is exciting, but what it conceals is vital. Male strippers rarely appear totally naked with their genitals on full display, while in a great many of the twenty-five hundred strip clubs across the United States, women take everything off. Even more revealing is the difference between how female and male strippers pose. Like women in pornography, female strippers pose in vulnerable positions—writhing around poles, back arched, legs spread, bending down with their rear ends up in the air and facing toward the audience. The intent is to invite the male patron to fantasize about penetrating them. Male strippers, on the other hand, do not pose in vulnerable positions. They strut around stage and thrust their bodies forward, posing in ways that reinforce not their vulnerability but their sexual and physical power. Even their choice of costumes is revealing in their celebration of traditional masculine strength: male strippers frequently pose as police officers, cowboys, construction workers. Compare that with female strippers’ costumes of choice: garter belts and lace, cheerleader skirts and pom-poms, or the classic French maid’s outfit. (One exception: the dominatrix is another popular stripper persona.) In other words, in strip culture as in pornography, men’s power and women’s vulnerability is presented as sexy. Not coincidentally, that is the same dynamic that underlies and defines rape culture.
In patriarchal culture, women’s sexuality and physical appearance is one of their defining features, a sexist presumption that the institution of female stripping confirms and perpetuates. By contrast, heterosexual men’s sexual attractiveness is much less based on their looks. So, when women go to “ladies night” at the strip club, or hire a male stripper for a private bachelorette party, part of the pleasure is in the role reversal. They can act like men for a night. In fact, one reason there is so much laughter at such shows is that for men to put themselves on sexual display for women in this way is still relatively uncommon; the humor resides in the subversion of the norm. This has begun to change over the past twenty years, as male “beefcake” and “hunk” calendars have become more of a regular feature in the cultural landscape.
Spokespeople for the strip industry insist that many of today’s prominent strip clubs are not the sleazy strip joints of decades past: they are more likely to be housed in attractive steel and glass buildings with nice furniture and clean bathrooms, and the deeper pockets of their owners allows for higher quality advertising than the cheap XXX signs that you still see in windowless strip clubs near highway truck stops or in economically depressed urban or rural areas. But these upgrades do not hide the danger for women that lurks just beneath the surface of the stripping industry. In fact, perhaps the most important difference between the male and female strip cultures is the threat of violence that is absent from the former and ever-present in the latter. Female strippers rely on continuous protection from male bouncers and security officers, who are present in every strip club to shield the dancers from aggressive, disrespectful men—many of them drunk—who do not recognize or accept the “official” boundaries between the dancers and the customers. Unlike male strippers, female strippers have to worry about their safety after they leave the club, and not only for the reasons that all women are vulnerable to men’s violence. Female strippers, like prostitutes, are more vulnerable to sexual violence outside the club.
Most men who go to strip clubs do not assault women, and they respect the boundaries put forth by the establishment. But some men clearly do not respect the women, and after a few drinks they have no shame or reluctance to express their contempt. One former stripper told me that it was common for men to yell insults to women on stage as they walked by, and many dancers she knew had experienced everything from slaps and pinches to digital penetration. One of the open secrets of the sex industry is that some male customers believe that once they have paid a woman for sex they have the right to treat her any way they want. This includes some men who go to strip clubs and watch women strip, and it certainly includes men who pay women for lap dances, where the line between stripping and outright prostitution is deliberately vague. They might not have touched the woman with their own hands or naked penises, but in their minds they have paid women for sex, and are thus entitled to them.
In some cases, this sense of ownership plays out in disturbing and violent ways. Prostitutes are regularly beaten and raped, both by pimps and by customers. According to the prostitution researcher Melissa Farley, women in prostitution report that half of their customers demand sex without a condom. Many women who strip are also prostitutes, but in the minds of many men, there is not a big difference between the two. The good girl/bad girl dichotomy is alive and well, and when a woman is a bad girl, some men who have been socialized in our deeply misogynistic culture believe she is no longer worthy of their respect. In fact, when a woman so much as takes her clothes off in public, some men think she has given up her right to control when and with whom she wants to have sex. I have talked with several former strippers who say they cannot tell men whom they are interested in romantically that they used to strip, because they fear the men will assume that means they are ready to have sex with them practically on the spot.
It is one thing to argue that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body, which includes taking her clothes off for men so she can put clothes on the backs of her children. But for anyone to say that stripping is an expression of women’s sexual freedom or empowerment is laughable, given that most men read it as confirmation of their degraded “whore” status. In fact, this is how some men think about all girls and women who dare to be explicitly sexual—not just strippers. This presents young heterosexual women with a difficult dilemma as they try to negotiate the line between sexual self-expression and physical safety in a world where men’s violence is a common occurrence. Lynn Phillips thoughtfully explores some of these challenges for young women in her book Flirting With Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (2000). The disconnect between what women intend when they express themselves sexually and how some men interpret that expression also helps explain the ongoing debate about the legacy of the pop star Madonna. Madonna is celebrated by many in the media and academia for being an unapologetically sexual woman and artist who is unafraid to transgress the boundaries of proper femininity. But as noted by the cultural theorist Elayne Rapping, Madonna’s critics argue that the many young girls who imitated her dress and style were likely to be met, in the real world, by a male public very much in the dark about the liberatory intent of the pop diva’s work. Or as a sixteen-year-old boy in a detention center in the mid-1980s said to me when I asked him what he thought of Madonna, “Boy, I’d like to fuck her.”
Women who work as prostitutes and strippers are routinely subject to brutal violence from pimps and johns, and they are a favorite target of serial killers. They live in a dangerous world, where they never know if the next john they meet will kill them, or if the polite schoolteacher who sits in the front row at the strip club will turn into the stalker from hell. This ever-present danger is one of the reasons why so many women in the sex industry develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There have been numerous media stories in recent years about a trend in high-end strip clubs toward friendlier environments for women patrons, and some women who describe themselves as feminists claim to be empowered by the experience of watching other women take their clothes off. But no matter how many positive stories the strip industry tries to sell to a public eager to avert its eyes from sexism and exploitation, women strippers remain particularly vulnerable to harassment, abuse, and violence from men—inside and outside the clubs.
A particularly tragic example of this took place in June 1996, in Peabody, Massachusetts, on the north shore of Boston. A tall, blond, twenty-sevenyear-old woman, Kristen Crowley, stopped at a Mobil Mini-Mart on her way home from work one night to pick up a can of ravioli and some water and soda. It was around midnight, and two drunk white men, Timothy Dykens, twenty-three, and John Keegan, twenty-five, were in front of the store, talking to the nineteen-year-old clerk, who was having a cigarette. Earlier, the men had been drinking in the Golden Banana, a local strip club where women danced in cages. Keegan reportedly saw Kristen get out of her car and said to Dykens, “Wow, look at that. I want a piece of that.” The nineteenyear-old clerk, perhaps in a spirit of male-bonding, shared a piece of titillating information with his temporary acquaintances.
“She’s a stripper,” he said.
“You know what we’ve gotta do,” said Dykens. According to the clerk he repeated the phrase several times.
Kristen made her purchases and left the store to drive home. The clerk watched as the two men got in their car and followed her back to her condo complex, where they jumped her as she walked across the parking lot with the bag of groceries. They dragged her to a ravine where they tore off her clothes and tried to rape her, and then smashed her skull with a large boulder and left her to die, just a few dozen yards from where her husband of eighteen months sat in their apartment, awaiting her return. Not surprisingly, media accounts of the murder highlighted Kristen Crowley’s part-time work as a stripper at men’s private birthday and bachelor parties: “Dancer murdered in Peabody.” “Jury selection begins in dancer murder.” The victim-blaming undertones were subtle but unmistakable. There is a well-established narrative in this culture that sexual women get punished for their freedom and libido. It is a favorite theme in Hollywood films, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Janet Leigh plays the sacrificial sexy blond whose brutal and eroticized murder scene in the shower has titillated audiences and wowed critics for more than four decades.
What was not explored in great detail in the media coverage of this horrific murder was the connection between the men’s patronage of a strip club earlier that night and their crude objectification of this woman. There wasn’t even much discussion about whether their discovery that she was a stripper contributed to the crime. There was only one substantial piece in the mainstream Boston media that suggested a relationship between strip culture and men’s violence against women. It was a November 1996 article in Boston Magazine entitled, “Pretty Girl Dead,” by J. M. Lawrence, and I have used it to draw some of the facts of the case for this account. But few people in media seemed eager to examine some of the critical questions raised by this murder: Do men who frequent strip clubs learn to objectify women even more than men who do not? If men are already misogynistic and angry with women, do certain aspects of strip culture—like women in cages—validate their feelings of superiority and feed their contempt? How do men read the act of women taking off their clothes for men in public? What are some of the differences between men in the way they interpret this experience? No doubt some men remain unfazed by all of the sexist trappings of strip culture, and simply like to stare up at the stage and fantasize about having sex with an attractive woman. They see it as just another type of entertainment, some eye-candy in the background while they have a few drinks. But other men have less benign intentions. For them, strip clubs are places where they feel special license to vent their hostility toward sexual women. A former stripper I know tells this story:
One time I was on stage dancing and this guy walks up to the stage and waves a $100 bill in front of me and gives me a wry grin. I remember being so happy because no one had ever given me a tip that big. When I bent down and opened my garter for him to put the money in, he yanked it back, called me a slut, laughed, and walked away.
Would it have made any difference if someone had confronted Timothy Dykens and John Keegan earlier in the evening when they were making tasteless and vulgar comments to strippers at the Golden Banana? Probably not. How about earlier in their lives? Would Kristen Crowley still be alive today if someone a little older and wiser had provided better guidance for them years before, when they were young and impressionable, and still learning how a decent man is supposed to treat women?
J. M. Lawrence reported in the Boston Magazine piece that the name of the Mobil Mini-Mart clerk was impounded by request of the district attorney’s office after he was threatened by a man claiming to be a member of Hell’s Angels. She also quoted one of Kristen’s friends, who said she did not blame the nineteen-year-old clerk for the murder, although his comment (“She is a stripper”) might have triggered the entire episode. “He was just a kid,” the friend said. “It was just guy talk to him.” It is probably safe to assume that he wishes he had not been “one of the guys” that night. The other guys in the case surely have their own regrets. Dykens is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Deegan was convicted of murder in 1998 but will eventually be eligible for parole, after his lawyer convinced the jury that his client was too drunk to lift the boulder that killed Kristen Crowley.
At first it seemed like either a crude satire or an elaborate hoax. Or maybe it was true. In July 2003, a Las Vegas television station broke the news about a new business, called Hunting for Bambi, where men in camouflage outfits hunted naked women and shot them with paintball guns. The idea of men paying thousands of dollars to shoot women dressed in nothing but tennis shoes and hiding behind bushes in the Nevada desert was at first too outrageous for many people to believe. The news sped rapidly across the Internet, and then made a rotation on the 24/7 cable news channels. The story made great TV: it combined a titillating Las Vegas mix of sex and violence, and it came complete with homemade video footage of naked women scampering around outdoors.
The concept of this new business was so over the top that the rational response, at first glance, was to think the entrepreneurs responsible were simply looking to profit from the shock value of their demented idea. This is a tried and true marketing strategy. Outrageousness sometimes does move product. Hence the dilemma faced by women’s groups and others: how to fight back? If they responded with outrage, it would fuel the controversy that brings free media, and even more people would be exposed to the offensive product. On the other hand, if they ignored it, they would run the risk of sending the message that men pretending to kill women for sport was not only socially acceptable but might even be profitable. Cultural critics also faced a dilemma in seeking to understand this phenomenon. Should they treat Hunting for Bambi as a cultural aberration—in which case the media storm that surrounded it could be viewed as the response of a healthy society to a violation of its central norms? Or should they treat this new “pastime” as a chilling but nonetheless understandable development in a culture where the objectification of women is common and men’s violence against women is in the news on a daily basis? There is no doubt that it was more comforting to think of Hunting for Bambi as an aberration, because the focus then would not have been on “normal” men, but on the amoral businessmen who created it and the pathetic wackos who supposedly paid big bucks to play the game.
Soon after the initial burst of publicity, the urban legends website Snopes declared that Hunting for Bambi was a hoax. Eventually the promoter, Michael Burdick, acknowledged there were no actual hunts—they were staged for TV news as a way to sell Hunting for Bambi videos. Many media commentators breathed a sigh of relief, grateful to hear that our culture had not yet sunk quite that far. But why did so many people easily believe there were men who were willing to pay thousands of dollars to play out murderous fantasies about stalking and shooting women like scared animals? For that matter, why are there men who would buy a video that depicts this? And as the sociologist John Glass pointed out, why should the actual hunt be considered degrading to women, but a video of it should not? As of this writing, the video is still available for purchase on Amazon.com, where one reviewer called it “Lewd, crude, and funny . . . watch this video at a bachelor party or at a hunting camp and roll on the floor laughing.”
The Hunting for Bambi controversy did not appear out of nowhere. It emerged in the context of a broader entertainment culture where the degradation of women has been normalized, and male sexual aggression celebrated. Is the idea underlying Hunting for Bambi so unbelievable? Not when you consider that in the U.S. in the early twenty-first century over ten thousand new porn videos are produced each year, with titles like The Stalker, Flesh Hunter, and Anal Intruder; or that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a video game that gives players the opportunity to simulate sex with a prostitute and then beat her to death is one of the all-time leaders in video game sales. Men’s violence against women—or the minimizing and excusing of it—was a pervasive presence in our entertainment culture long before Hunting for Bambi came on the scene. Still, there is something revealing about this ugly episode. While media stories about this new form of “adult” entertainment focused mostly on the degradation of women, the fact that so many people believed the Hunting for Bambi hoax says more about how we feel about men than it speaks to how we view women. During his deception, Michael Burdick— who named his company Real Men Outdoor Productions—told the Las Vegas TV station KLAS that the majority of men who paid the $5,000 to $10,000 to play the game were the submissive, quiet types. “For the individual who’s used to saying, ‘I can’t go out with the boys tonight,’ or the wimp of America,” he said, “it’s a chance for him to come out and vent his aggression and really take charge and have some fun.” No such authentic individual was ever identified. But it is a fair bet that Burdick markets the video of the staged hunt to men who fit that description. It is an open secret that tens of thousands of average Joes with similar motivations come to Las Vegas (“What happens here, stays here”) each year to explore those sorts of sexual power fantasies with prostitutes in hotel rooms, or in the legal brothels nearby. What Burdick was banking on is what feminists regard as a truism: you can look like a nice guy in public and still do—and fantasize about doing—abusive and degrading things to women and girls in private.