“YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?”
Advertising and Disconnection
AT THE CORE OF EVERY ADDICTION IS LONELINESS, ISOLATION. ADDICTS FEEL isolated by definition. They feel that the substance they are dependent on is their only real friend and source of comfort—the very thing that keeps them going, rather than the very thing that is killing them. I used to say that without alcohol, I’d put a gun to my head. But alcohol was the gun. The smoker feels that the cigarette is her best friend, but the cigarette is really her assassin. In his classic novel Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry described the “cold shivering shell of palpitating loneliness” of his alcoholic protagonist and wrote, “God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death.”
Jean Baker Miller refers to this terrible loneliness as “condemned isolation,” an unbearable state in which a person feels both doomed to be alone and responsible for the isolation. One is alone because one deserves to be alone. One is unlovable. This state is the result of often violent disconnection in childhood, something that many addicts have experienced. Indeed, it is almost impossible to be in this state of condemned isolation without seeking respite from drugs or other addictions. Whereas women’s yearning for connection has often been pathologized, Miller considers true pathology and psychological problems to be the result of disconnection or violation, especially in early relationships. These disconnections occur at the sociocultural level, as well as within families.
All addicts, male and female, become addicted to various substances for a variety of reasons. As I have discussed, scientists are increasingly discovering that most and perhaps all addictions, including eating disorders and behavioral addictions such as addictions to sex and gambling, have biochemical aspects, and that some people are genetically programmed to be more susceptible to addiction. However, it is also true that many addicts turn to alcohol, cigarettes, other drugs, sex, and food in an attempt to medicate ourselves against depression and despair and often to protect ourselves from the memories of very painful childhoods. At least two-thirds of patients in drug abuse treatment centers say they were physically or sexually abused as children. This is particularly true for women.
Female addicts weren’t studied separately until the 1970s. Since then, research has found fundamental differences in the ways that women and men use drugs and other substances. Women are far more likely to use them to self-medicate, to cope with anger and depression, and as anesthesia to deal with traumatic events such as childhood sexual abuse or family alcoholism, whereas men are more likely to use them for recreation and pleasure. This has been known for several years about alcohol and cigarettes. More recently, it has been found to be true of binge eating as well. A survey of eleven hundred patients in weight-loss programs reports that women tend to binge when angry or sad or to use food for comfort when alone or depressed. Obese men were found to binge in positive social situations when celebrating or encouraged by others to eat.
One thing we have learned for sure is that addictions for women are rooted in trauma. Several studies have found that alcoholic women are more likely than alcoholic men to have experienced deprivation and rejection in childhood, including the absence, divorce, death, or alcoholism of a parent. They are also very likely to have been sexually abused. In fact, psychologist Sharon Wilsnack found in her 1997 study that childhood sexual abuse is the strongest predictor of alcohol dependency for women, even stronger than a family history of drinking. She estimates that half of the four million female alcoholics in the United States may have been sexually abused in childhood. In her study, those molested as children have more than double the depression rate of other women.
According to researcher Becky Thompson, at least half of women with eating problems were sexually abused as children. Various studies show that from 55 to 99 percent of women in treatment for drug addiction reported a history of physical or sexual trauma, most of which occurred before age eighteen and was related to repetitive childhood assaults. When the women were victims of both types of abuse, they were twice as likely to abuse drugs as those who experienced only one type of abuse. Other research has found that, whether the addiction is to alcohol, heroin, other drugs, or food, from 34 to 80 percent of female addicts are survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The huge gap in the statistics reflects how impossible it is to know the exact numbers, but even the lowest number, one-third, is astounding. And we do know that nothing else creates quite the same sense of “condemned isolation.”
Sexual abuse is the most corrupt relationship, the most terrible disconnection. And, as we have learned in recent years, it is more common than many people are willing to believe. A review of 166 studies between 1985 and 1997 concluded that from 25 to 35 percent of girls and from 10 to 20 percent of boys are sexually abused, usually by men they know and trust. This abuse often leads to post-traumatic stress disorder, with its terrifying symptoms of panic attacks, nightmares, depression, flashbacks, and dissociative episodes. Various studies have found that from 30 to 60 percent of women in drug abuse treatment suffer from PTSD—two to three times higher than the rate among men in treatment. Men suffer terribly from abuse too, of course—multiple substance abuse among boys who were sexually abused was eighteen to twenty-one times greater than among boys who were not.
When the body itself is not safe, people often choose to “leave the body,” to dissociate. Dissociation is a very common defense mechanism used by people who have been abused. According to feminist theologian Rita Nakashima Brock, “The estimates are that anywhere from 80 to 95 percent of prostitutes in the US are sexually abused as children. The psychological mechanisms of dissociation that they’ve learned, to survive sexual abuse, are what they also have to use to survive as a prostitute. The kinds of psychological devices people use to survive a business where they serve strangers in this oddly nonintimate sexual way are not healthy.” When a person dissociates, he or she is essentially “not there”—not present in the relationship or capable of deep connection. In the immediacy of trauma, we dissociate at will. Years later some kind of drug or addiction is almost always necessary to maintain the dissociation. Seen in this light, some ads are chilling, such as the cigarette ad that says, “She’s gone to Capri and she’s not coming back,” the alcohol ad that promises “Your own special island,” and the chocolate ad that claims “Sometimes you’re most in touch with the world when you’re out of touch.”
Alcohol is the perfect drug for someone both seeking and fearing connection, because it gives the illusion of intimacy, while making real intimacy impossible. This is reinforced by the alcohol ads that, with their amber light and cozy little scenes, continually promise an end to isolation—an isolation that alcohol abuse virtually guarantees. People with eating problems also escape their bodies in several ways. They can waste away until very little is left of them or they can hide under layers of fat. They can stuff themselves to feel full and then purge to feel empty and “clean” again. There are rarely clear boundaries between addictions these days: Many women, in particular, have suffered multiple traumas and most female addicts have multiple addictions.
There are many different ways to numb feelings. Some are far more acceptable in the culture than others. All of them, however, have similar roots in different forms of childhood abuse, shame, and rage. I don’t think rage is the bedrock, however. I think the bedrock is grief. We turn to alcohol and cigarettes and other drugs and food because we fear we would not be able to bear the grief if we were truly conscious. We never want to go back there again. But we must, if we are to recover.
Of course, one doesn’t have to be a woman to experience a sense of condemned isolation. Agonizing disconnections occur in men’s lives too, but men are socialized to respond differently than women to these violations. Men who watch their mothers being battered in childhood are more likely to become batterers themselves, whereas women are more likely to become victims of batterers. Men who are sexually abused as children are more likely to become predators, whereas women often end up more obviously damaging themselves, marrying child abusers or becoming prostitutes.
Even in childhood girls are made to feel more responsible than boys for the failures of relationships. Many women, damaged as girls by their fathers, spend their lives trying to heal damaged men, hoping each time to make the relationship right. The daughters of rejecting men reach out to men who will abuse them. The sons of batterers and philanderers repeat the endless cycle.
Men are often taught to discount their need for connection, to strive to appear “independent” and “autonomous.” And they pay a high price for this. Terence Real and others have written about the terrible unnamed depression that afflicts many men. The cultural environment is only one part of what causes this, of course, and advertising is only one part of this environment. But it is a powerful part. Advertising, especially advertising for addictive products, generally encourages men to stay disconnected, to be tough and alone—starting as children, even as babies. “You talkin’ to me?” asks a baby with a Harley-Davidson tattoo in a Pepsi ad. The ad warns us not to mess with Joey or “he’ll trench your front yard.” Sure, this is supposed to be cute and funny, but it’s actually quite sad when one thinks of how many real little boys are encouraged to be like this, with often tragic consequences for themselves and their future partners and children.
“Have you ever seen a grown man cry?” asks a chilling ad for whiskey, as if the only thing a grown man would cry over is spilled liquor. Miller beer uses the same idea in a commercial featuring a bored guy trapped at a French movie with some sobbing women who is brought to tears himself only when his bottle of beer rolls beneath the seats and smashes into pieces. A joke, to be sure, but not too funny given that boys shamed for crying often grow up into men afraid to feel very much of anything, except rage.
Women often use alcohol and other drugs to cope with the pain and disappointment of unhappy or abusive relationships with these men. Millions of women have been given tranquilizers by doctors to help them cope with marriages that should have been dissolved. Countless battered women drink and smoke in a misguided attempt to cope with their terror and despair. And many other women use food or alcohol or cigarettes to numb the soul-destroying loneliness they feel in relationships with men who have never learned how to be intimate, how to connect deeply with another human being (which is certainly not to say that all women know how to be intimate, but most of us have been socialized to value intimacy and to blame ourselves if it is absent in our relationships).
Canadian researcher Lorraine Greaves found in her study of women smokers that some women see their cigarettes as passive but comforting “partners.” They like how their cigarettes are under their control, that they can have them whenever they want them. Greaves found that this is particularly true for abused women. There is so little security and predictability in their lives that the constancy of their cigarettes becomes very important. The irony, of course, is that the cigarette ends up controlling the smoker. And that most addictions make it almost impossible for women to leave abusive relationships and more difficult to resolve childhood trauma. Only in recovery can we come to terms with the abuse and make the connections that heal rather than harm.
“He loves me, he loves me not,” says an ad featuring a daisy and a pack of cigarettes. “But one thing is sure. Carlton is lowest.” You can’t trust men, but you can trust your cigarettes. Meanwhile, an ad for Briones cigars features a man on a balcony, smoking a cigar while an angry woman far below looks up at him. The copy says, “It doesn’t argue. It won’t talk back. And it has no opinion.” Looks like the woman needs a Carlton.
“Until I Find a Real Man, I’ll Settle for a Real Smoke,” declares a rather tough-looking woman in a cigarette ad. At first glance, this seems to be about sex, of course—the real man being the stud, the one in control. Another way to read it, however, is to think of the real man as one who is gentle, protective, caring. The woman who has never learned to think of men in this way, who has only been exploited by men, is likely indeed to settle for a cigarette or a drink instead. She is also likely to develop a veneer of toughness for self-protection. Not everything that advertisers do is intentional, but they do know what they are doing when they offer cigarettes—and alcohol and food—to women as a way to deal with anger and disappointment in relationships.
Addictions can also be viewed as an attempt to maintain connection in the face of often violent disconnection. We reach out to alcohol and cigarettes and food not simply to numb the pain, but also in an attempt to maintain some kind of relationship, even if it is a relationship with the very thing that will destroy us (a familiar pattern for those abused as children). As Jungian analyst Marian Woodman says, “An addiction reenacts a traumatized relationship to the body.”
We don’t become addicts because we are self-destructive. And we don’t develop eating problems because we are vain or obsessed with our appearance. Most addictions start as survival strategies—logical, creative, even brilliant strategies. In the beginning, we are attempting to save ourselves, to make it possible to go on living in spite of all that we know (even if only unconsciously). In the beginning, alcohol and other drugs and substances make us feel good. Ultimately, addiction only deepens our despair and our shame. By the time that happens, however, we are too deep in denial to admit it.
Most addicts feel ashamed long before we become addicted. Childhood abuse makes all people, boys and girls, feel ashamed of themselves. The only way a child can make sense of abuse is by believing he or she deserves it. This leads to a terrible feeling of shame and worthlessness and rage against the self. It becomes necessary to create a false self to confront the world. R. D. Laing wrote brilliantly about this phenomenon in his classic book The Divided Self. Speaking of what he terms the “unembodied self,” he says:
In this position the individual experiences his self as being more or less divorced or detached from his body. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being. Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, “inner,” “true” self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be.
The gap between the false self and the real self is unbearably painful. And one doesn’t have to be an addict to experience it. Many social critics, such as Jeremy Iggers and Christopher Lasch, contend that we all, not just those of us who are addicts or who have experienced childhood abuse, suffer to a greater or lesser extent from a sense of emptiness. Our capitalistic culture encourages this because people who feel empty make great consumers. The emptier we feel, the more likely we are to turn to products, especially potentially addictive products, to fill us up, to make us feel whole.
We also live in a culture in which it is difficult not to feel trapped in a false self, not to feel that one’s body is simply an “object among other objects in the world.” This is especially true for women, since our bodies are routinely used as objects to sell every imaginable kind of product, from chainsaws to chewing gum. This affects all of us—but how could it not retraumatize people who were treated as objects in childhood?
Mary Gaitskill, in her collection Because They Wanted To: Stories, describes a billboard in which the model’s:
eyes were fixated, wounded, deprived. At the same time, her eyes were flat. Her body was slender, almost starved, giving her delicate beauty the strange, arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want. . . . The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chafing together. It was a picture made for people who can’t bear to feel and yet still need to feel [italics mine]. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called Obsession.
Many ads feature just a part of a woman’s body—a derriere, a headless torso. An ad for an Internet terminal features a woman bending over. The copy says, “Your butt. It’s practically a fixation. You look at it in the mirror. You exercise it. You dress it, so it looks good. You pinch it, for firmness, like a melon. How can we help improve it? Sit on it, and find out.” Imagine—a part of one’s body is being referred to as a separate object, “like a melon.” How difficult it is to feel “embodied” in such a world. No wonder research studies keep finding that many women are depressed by exposure to advertisements and women’s magazines.
We may not be conscious of this, but we are affected. I’ve been studying these issues for decades and I still feel awful almost every time I read a fashion magazine. My belly is too round (ever since I gave birth to my daughter), my skin marred by sunspots and wrinkles, my teeth not white enough, my nails not perfect. It’s easy to write this off as trivial vanity, but the impact can be deep and serious. It makes it difficult for a woman to feel safe, at home in her body and, therefore, in the world.
Marianne Apostolides, a young woman in recovery from anorexia and bulimia, wrote of her experience:
I looked in the mirror and saw flabby arms, fatty hips, a rounded belly. I saw myself piece by piece. I didn’t see the connections. I didn’t see a form composed of curves and straight edges, of soft tissue and strong muscles. I didn’t see me. My body image reflected my self-image: I hated my body because I hated myself, I doubted my body because I doubted myself, I was angry at my body because I was angry at myself.
It is almost impossible to imagine what our popular culture would look like if women’s bodies weren’t objectified and dismembered. We are so used to this that it is hard to believe that it has not always been so. In fact, the eroticized imagery of women has been part of the general cultural landscape, not relegated to the world of pornography and sex clubs, for only the past fifty years or so. It is true that there have been erotic images of women in art for centuries, but mass technology has made it possible for these images to constantly surround us. Unlike art, advertising always yokes these images to products. The point is not to arouse desire for the woman, but to arouse desire for the product. Robert Schultz describes these images as “scattered like parks or resorts, little retreats for the male imagination, strokes to the ego and hooks for commerce.”
I’ve been talking about the exploitation of women in advertising since the late 1960s and it was the subject of my 1979 film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. It is certainly no longer news. However, it is more extreme and pervasive than ever before. Women’s bodies are not only used to attract attention to the product in increasingly absurd ways, as when a nude woman is used to sell a watch or breasts are used to sell fishing line, but increasingly the woman’s body morphs into the product, as in the ad for “the Sak.” And this objectification is related to addiction and substance abuse in ways that are complex and that have not been explored.
It is becoming clearer that this objectification has consequences, one of which is the effect that it has on sexuality and desire. Sex in advertising and the media is often criticized from a puritanical perspective—there’s too much of it, it’s too blatant, it will encourage kids to be promiscuous, and so forth. But sex in advertising has far more to do with trivializing sex than promoting it, with narcissism than with promiscuity, with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that it is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.
Sexual images in advertising and throughout the media define what is sexy and, more important, who is sexy. To begin with, sex in advertising in the mass media is almost entirely heterosexist—lesbian, gay, or bisexual sex is rarely even implied in the mainstream media (aside from the occasional male fantasy of lesbianism as two beautiful women waiting for Dick to arrive). We are surrounded by images of young, beautiful heterosexual couples with perfect hard bodies having sex. Women are portrayed as sexually desirable only if they are young, thin, carefully polished and groomed, made up, depilated, sprayed, and scented—rendered quite unerotic, in fact—and men are conditioned to seek such partners and to feel disappointed if they fail.
We never see eroticized images of older people, imperfect people, people with disabilities. The gods have sex, the rest of us watch—and judge our own imperfect sex lives against the fantasy of constant desire and sexual fulfillment portrayed in the media. To a great extent, the images define desirability—our own as well as others’. We can never measure up. Inevitably, this affects our self-images and radically distorts reality. “You have the right to remain sexy,” says an ad featuring a beautiful young woman, her legs spread wide, but the subtext is “only if you look like this.” And she is an object—available, exposed, essentially passive. She has the right to remain sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual.
Just as women and girls are offered a kind of ersatz defiance through drinking and smoking that interferes with true rebellion, so are we offered a pseudo-sexuality, a sexual mystique, that makes it far more difficult to discover our own unique and authentic sexuality. How sexy can a woman be who hates her body? She can act sexy, but can she feel sexy? How fully can she surrender to passion if she is worried that her thighs are too heavy or her stomach too round, if she can’t bear to be seen in the light, or if she doesn’t like the fragrance of her own genitals?
In the world of advertising, only young people have sex. Not only are young women valued only for their sexuality, but the rest of us end up in a culture arrested in adolescence, surrounded by teenage fantasies of sex and romance, a culture that idealizes the very things that make real intimacy impossible—impulsive gratification, narcissism, distance and disconnection, romanticism, and eternal youth. Sex in advertising is about a constant state of desire and arousal—never about intimacy or fidelity or commitment. This not only makes intimacy impossible—it erodes real desire. The endless pursuit of passion is fueled by a sense of inner deadness, emptiness—and it is doomed to failure, like any addiction. Passion inevitably wanes and one is alone again, empty.
When we think about it, the people in ads aren’t sexy because of anything unique to them. They have no personal histories. They mostly look alike and are interchangeable. They very rarely look at each other. “The only downside to female guests that stay over for breakfast is they leave with your nicest shirts,” says an ad featuring a man getting dressed. His back is to the young woman in his bed, who is covering herself up as if embarrassed. People in ads like this aren’t lovers—they are the users and the used. They are sexy because of the products they use. The jeans, the perfume, the car are sexy in and of themselves. The answer to the question posed by one ad, “What attracts?” is the perfume being advertised, which means these particular partners are irrelevant. They could easily be with anyone else who happened to be wearing Jovan musk. Advertising even tells us that “Shi Cashmere is sexier than skin!” Often the people in the ads are grim—there is no humor, no quirkiness, none of the individuality that defines the truly erotic.
Although the sexual sell, overt and subliminal, is at a fever pitch in most advertising, depictions of sex as an important and profound human activity are notably absent. It is a cold and oddly passionless sex that surrounds us. A sense of joy is also absent; the models generally look either hostile or bored. Passionate sex is one way that we can experience the oceanic, the transcendence of our own boundaries. But this can only occur between subjects, not objects. Sex certainly cannot and does not always have to be sacred and transcendent, but it is tragic for a culture when that possibility is diminished or lost. As psychologist Linda Pollock says, sexual pleasure is significantly more important and, at the same time, significantly less important than our culture holds it to be.
This notion that sexiness and sex appeal come from without rather than within is one of advertising’s most damaging messages. Real sexiness has to do with a passion for life, individuality, uniqueness, vitality. It has nothing to do with products or with all the bored, perfect-looking models embracing that we see all around us. If Jeremy Iggers’s definition of the erotic as “a heightened sense of aliveness” is true, then surely, in a world in which beautiful people so often look more dead than alive, it is the car ads that most promise an erotic experience. We live in a culture that is sex-crazed and sex-saturated, but strangely unerotic.
Advertising constantly confuses real sexuality with narcissism. Identical models parade alone through the commercials, caressing their own soft skin, stroking and hugging their bodies, shaking their long silky manes, sensually bathing and applying powders and lotions, and then admiring themselves at length in the mirror. We’re subjected to a steady barrage of messages telling us that all that matters is the immediate fulfillment of our needs and desires. “We are hedonists and we want what feels good,” declares a Nike ad. We are the heroes of every ad. “You deserve a break today.” “Go for it.” As an ad for a bath product says, “Entering Willow Lake. Population: One. You.”
“A celebration of laughter . . . love . . . and intense happiness,” says the ad for Amarige perfume. But all we see is a woman who seems to be in the throes of orgasm caressing her own throat. We don’t need partners any more. This is perfect disconnection.
This has been taken even further in some recent ads where the models are literally kissing themselves. Supermodel Linda Evangelista appears in one such ad as a woman and a man. Transvestite RuPaul is featured in another, in which RuPaul the guy nuzzles RuPaul the babe. She is no doubt wearing “Narcisse” perfume and he “Egoiste.”
This adolescent attitude toward sex is further reflected and reinforced by all the ads (and situation comedies and films) that turn sex into a dirty joke. Countless ads use sophomoric double entendres, such as “We keep it up longer” (for a radio station), “Your ability to score has just improved” (for a video game), and “You never forget your first time” (for alcohol and for a discount store). An ad for shoes in a British magazine aimed at young people features a photo of a blonde in the throes of passion (or dead—it’s hard to tell) and the copy, “Half way up Mount Caroline. Realised I’d forgotten my safety gear. Made a speedy descent.” An American ad for cruises asks the question, “What’s your idea of fun?” A beautiful woman slyly replies, “Licking the salt off my husband’s margarita.” When sexual jokes are used to sell everything from rice to roach-killer, from cars to carpets, it’s hard to remember that sex can unite two souls, can inspire awe. Individually these ads are harmless enough, sometimes even funny, but the cumulative effect is to degrade and devalue sex.
I do not mean to imply for a minute that sex has to be romantic, soft, nice, domesticated. We inevitably objectify ourselves and each other sexually, which is fine as long as there is reciprocity, as long as we all can be subjects as well, and never merely objects. As Ann Snitow says, “The danger of objectification and fragmentation depend on context. . . . The antipornography campaign introduces misleading goals into our struggle when it intimates that in a feminist world we will never objectify anyone, never take the part for the whole, never abandon ourselves to the mindlessness or the intensities of feeling that link sex with childhood, death, the terrors and pleasures of the oceanic.” Far from abandoning the erotic, we need to take it back from the commercial culture that monopolizes it.
Perhaps most important, advertising and the popular culture define human connection almost entirely in terms of sex, thus overemphasizing the relative importance of sex in our lives (and marriages) and underemphasizing other important things (friendship, loyalty, fun, the love of children, community). According to poet Robert Hass, the art of the pornographer “consists in the absence of scale.” There is no sense of scale in advertising, no sense of what is of greater or lesser importance. Life is rich and varied, with so many aspects that are important and meaningful—political, occupational, educational, creative, artistic, religious, and spiritual aspects. Sex is certainly one of these important aspects but, as Sut Jhally says, “Never in history has the iconography of a culture been so obsessed or possessed by questions of sexuality and gender.” Men’s magazines are filled with erotic images of perfect women (which also litter our highways and fill our TV screens). And women’s magazines are filled with desperate articles about how to keep our men sexually happy—explicit instructions for fellatio, recommendations to try new things like anal sex.
The magazines for single women, like Cosmopolitan, are breathless, risque (“Drive Him Wild in Bed: The Surprising Places He Wants You to Touch,” “Be the Best Sex of His Life,” and “Rated X: Sex Lessons of a Paris Madam” are typical cover stories). The ones for wives and mothers are more instructive (how to have romantic quickies, revive your sex life with a weekend in the Caribbean). When I read these magazines, I can almost feel the fatigue between the lines—oh, my God, in addition to working full-time and spending “quality time” with the children and remembering everyone’s birthday and being responsible for all the planning of our lives and all the emotional work of the marriage, I also have to schedule passionate interludes and put on a garter belt and stockings and learn the latest sexual positions. No wonder I need a drink or a cigarette or a pint of ice cream.
Perhaps not surprisingly, at the same time that we are surrounded by these images and exhortations, many therapists and marriage counselors say that a chief complaint of many people, both single and married, these days is lack of desire. According to one sex therapist, “Sexual boredom is the most pandemic dysfunction in this country.”
A 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that sexual dysfunction (such as lacking interest in or enjoyment of sex, performance anxiety, or inability to achieve or hold off orgasm) is an important public health concern, affecting 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men. The study, considered the most comprehensive look at American’s sex lives since the Kinsey Report of the late 1940s, surprisingly found that the rate of sexual problems, aside from impotence, is not closely correlated with age. More than one in four women aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they do not find sex pleasurable and young women (aged eighteen to thirty-nine) were more likely than older women (in their forties and fifties) to report a lack of interest in sex, anxiety about performance, pain during intercourse, or an inability to achieve orgasm.
Not surprisingly, victims of childhood sexual abuse reported much higher rates of sexual dysfuntion, with male victims three times more likely to experience erectile dysfunction and female victims twice as likely to have arousal disorders. “Traumatic sexual acts continue to exert profound effects on sexual functioning, some effects lasting many years beyond the occurrence of the original event,” the study authors wrote.
But even those who have not experienced trauma are often unhappy and dissatisfied with their sex lives. Another major survey found that a third of women respondents and a sixth of men were uninterested in sex. One-fifth of the women but only one-tenth of the men went so far as to say that sex gave them no pleasure. Although one advertiser joked about all this in an ad claiming that “37% of women prefer shoe shopping to sex,” it is decidedly unfunny to those who are afflicted. Sexual dysfunction is associated with unhappiness and poor quality of life, especially for women. In a sea of sultry images, many people are dying of thirst, drying up. Now it may be that these people are perfectly “normal,” but in an overheated culture have no idea of what normal desire is. We’re not morons. We know that slipcovers won’t lead to great sex and that a cruise won’t bring a dying marriage back to life. However, it is hard not to believe that other people are having more fun and that there is something wrong with us.
Syndicated columnist Dan Savage thinks that the way we talk about sex contributes to this unhappiness and destroys a lot of perfectly decent relationships. “When we talk about trying to bring the divorce rate down,” he says, “maybe we should do it by creating a society where we don’t insist a relationship is over when the sexual passion is gone.” Raymond C. Rosen, one of the authors of the JAMA study, said that too often people’s perceptions of what their sex lives should be like are shaped by articles in magazines that suggest everyone else is having great sex all the time. “As a scientist, it makes my hair stand on end,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
Perhaps these sexy images have the same effect as violent images: They lead more to desensitization than to imitation. As Norman Cousins said:
The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.
A recent issue of Sky, a magazine targeting young people, contained the following letter in the advice column: “My problem is that I don’t enjoy sex any more. I am a virile 22-year-old. I regularly have sex with my girlfriend, but I have no pleasure any more. . . . Is there something that I’m doing wrong?” The advisor replied, “Shootin’ air, eh, babe? You’ve caught the sex problem of the 90s: pelvic apathy. . . . Actually all that’s happening to you and your bald best mate of 22 years is that you’ve both managed to forget there’s another human being slaving away at the far end of your plank. Remember that person with the high voice and the lipstick?” This exchange was an unwittingly ironic counterpart to all the “sexy” ads throughout the issue. And how dehumanizing to refer to a woman, someone’s lover, as “that person with the high voice and the lipstick.”
Meanwhile, Mademoiselle offered this advice to young women whose arms start to ache while pleasuring their partners: “Your best bet—short of looking meaningfully at the bedside clock or developing the forearms of Martina Navratilova—is to get him to give you a hand.”
In 1997 NBC featured a story about some college students—men and women—who regularly make a practice of getting drunk together and then having sex with whomever happens to be nearest at hand. According to one student, it is a great way to get his sexual needs met quickly without the “time-consuming” hassle of actually dating and getting to know somebody.
In a world filled with fast-food chains and junk-food advertising, many people are deliberately starving themselves or gorging themselves into oblivion. Consuming food for which we have no real appetite, we are never satisfied and lose our ability to gauge our own hunger. In a similar way, the barrage of constant sexual images and perfect bodies being offered up to us like delectable pastries (or perhaps popsicles) leave us sexually numb and out of touch with our own desire. We can get almost any kind of ethnic food in our own hometowns these days, and we also have more sexual choices than ever before in terms of partners and techniques. But when eating is divorced from hunger and appetite and sex is divorced from desire and relationships, both experiences become onanistic, solitary, unfulfilling.
Of course, all these sexual images aren’t intended to sell us on sex—they are intended to sell us on shopping. The desire they want to inculcate is not for orgasm but for more gismos. This is the intent of the advertisers—but an unintended consequence is the effect these images have on real sexual desire and real lives. When sex is a commodity, there is always a better deal. The wreckage that ensues when people try to emulate the kind of sexuality glorified in the ads and the popular culture is everywhere, from my house to the White House. And many who choose not to act on these impulsive sexual mandates nonetheless end up worrying that something is wrong with them, with their flawed and ordinary and all-too-human relationships.
So, all these blatant sexual images that surround us actually are more likely to lead to disconnection rather than to connection. And substance abuse and addiction, especially for women, is often a response to disconnection. Advertising doesn’t cause this disconnection, of course, just as it doesn’t cause addiction. But it does objectify women’s bodies, making it more difficult for women to feel safely “embodied” and thus furthering a sense of dissociation. And it creates a climate in which disconnection and dissociation are normalized, even glorified and eroticized. And finally it deliberately offers addictive products—alcohol, cigarettes, food—as a way to cope with the pain this causes.
Far from improving, the situation continues to get worse. We are so used to blatant sexual images these days that advertisers have to constantly push the envelope in order to attract our attention, to break through the clutter. Increasingly, in order to shock us into paying attention, they borrow images from the world of pornography—which is a world of violence, a world of utter disconnection.
