Damage on Parade

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Ariel Levy began noticing the change several years ago. The author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press, 2005) would switch on her television to find 'strippers in pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm.' On the newsstands were fresh examples of the 'porny new genre' dubbed the 'lad magazine.' Publications such as Maxim, FHM, and Stuff fixated on 'greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.'

The New York journalist observed teenage girls walking the streets in jeans that exposed their 'butt cleavage,' cheerfully stripping for the Girls Gone Wild videos, going to strip clubs, and buying the memoirs of porn stars Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords, which both graced the New York Times best-seller list. 'When I was in porn,' Lords said in 2003, 'it was like a back-alley thing. Now it's everywhere.' How, Levy wanted to learn, had the 'tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality' of Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton come to be promoted as progress for women in a postfeminist world? 'Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual,' she writes, 'and because the only sign of sexuality we seem able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture.'

'Raunch culture,' as Levy calls it, may be hardest on adolescent girls. Blitzed with images of how to be 'hot,' young women, already prone to insecurities, have a difficult time distinguishing the fake from the real. Their mothers, at least, could summon an era when the politics of feminism were ascendant. Not so for their new-millennium daughters. 'They have never known a time when 'ho' wasn't part of the lexicon,' Levy contends, 'when 16-year-olds didn't get breast implants.' Nor do most teens possess the sense of irony needed to negotiate a cynical, commerce-driven pop culture.

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If Female Chauvinist Pigs offers a PG-13 critique of the mainstreaming of pornography, Pornified heads with grim determination for the XXX websites. The digital proliferation of porn on the Internet is where the colossal profits are being made, and, in Pamela Paul's view, it's where the lasting damage is being done.

'Old school defenders of pornography,' she writes, 'may not be familiar with the direction in which Internet and DVD-era pornography has gone.' When an entertainment analyst is asked to define 'acceptable adult programming' for specialty cable TV, his list includes penetration, oral, anal, and group sex, along with lesbian and gay sex. Such material, the analyst acknowledges, 'used to be called pornography, but a lot of that has become socially acceptable now.' What is pornographic these days? The bar, especially in cyberporn, has nowhere to go but up. 'Pregnant women become pornified,' Paul reports, 'their naked torsos wrested from personal Web sites onto 'pregnant porn' Web sites, incest becomes fetishized, child pornography blends with adult pornography into an ageless 'teen porn' middle ground. Any sense of taboo dissipates in a free-for-all porn world.'

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