The pornification of America [View all]

[seabeyond]

Actors having real sex in art-house movies. Erstwhile child star Lindsay Lohan appearing barely clad on the cover of her new album. Teenage girls strolling down Main Street USA attired in ''Porn Star" T-shirts. A bikini-wearing Jessica Simpson bumping and grinding in the music video for ''These Boots Are Made for Walkin.' " College-age women flashing for the ''Girls Gone Wild" video series with nonchalant exhibitionism. Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.

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What is new and troubling, critics suggest, is that the porn aesthetic has become so pervasive that it now serves as a kind of sensory wallpaper, something that many people don't even notice anymore. The free-speech-versus-censorship debates that invariably surround actual pornography do not burn as hot when the underlying principles of porn are filtered more subtly into the mainstream. And those principles, critics say, often involve reducing women to subjugated sex objects while presenting men in dominant roles. Braving the inevitable accusations of prudery -- which they reject -- critics such as Paul are sounding the alarm. They say the current hypersexualized climate distorts the attitudes of young people toward sex and relationships. In particular, they contend it has a damaging effect on the self-image of young women and girls, who are confronted with a culture that objectifies them while disguising it as female empowerment.

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But the Internet is far from the only venue that does a thriving risque business. From the newsstands peek not just the usual randy suspects (Playboy, Hustler) but also general-interest ''lad mags" such as Maxim, whose covers feature actresses and models in soft-core poses, surrounded by leering headline copy. Even august Harvard University and its neighbor across the Charles River, Boston University, have recently become home to student-run sex magazines. Video games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were found to contain sexually explicit scenes, and an audience-building buzz surrounded nonporn movies such as ''The Brown Bunny" and ''9 Songs" when it was learned that their actors had real, not simulated, on-screen sex. Howard Stern brought his own obsession with porn to a daily radio audience of millions, and HBO's ''Sex and the City" accustomed TV viewers to racy sexual adventures.

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She speculates that the current climate is partly ''a backlash to feminism, a way of protecting male egos, and men insisting on retaining a power structure sexually if they can't retain it in areas of employment and parenting and so forth. It's a way to hang on to a male-dominated paradigm." But Eller says there is plenty of blame to go around. She and Pamela Paul point also to a schism in the women's movement several decades ago. Some feminists campaigned against pornography, but others viewed that as tantamount to censorship, or did not want to be perceived as anti-men. It divided the women's movement, they say, at a moment when it could have decisively changed the national dialogue on pornography.

http://www.boston.com/yourlife/articles/2006/01/24/the_pornification_of_america/?page=full