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Writer David Loftus delves into the male perception of pornography
BY TAMARA WIEDER
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A FACT IS a fact, and there is no truer fact than this: men watch pornography. Perhaps not all men, perhaps not everywhere, but legions of them, whether in the shadows or out in the open, have some kind of relationship with porn. Yet for all its controversy, for all the public brouhaha over the pornography industry, little has been said about what men — undoubtedly the biggest consumers of porn — actually think of the stuff (or snuff, as the case may be). Which is precisely why David Loftus decided to write Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography (Thunder’s Mouth Press), from which he reads in Boston next week. Q: Why the book? What made you decide to put it together? A: When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I was really big into the women’s movement. I read all the feminist theorists, and I really enjoyed and appreciated a lot of what I was reading, because I was uncomfortable with masculinity and a lot of things that society expected men to be and to do. Feminist theorists taught me a lot about what was going down on the street, but when they got to talking about pornography, it didn’t really fit with my experience and my perceptions. And, moreover, it struck me as an oddly un-feminist thing that women were doing, because the women’s movement is based on the notion, and the very sensible notion, that the individual should have the right to participate in defining reality for herself, and it sought correctly to correct millennia of men defining women’s reality without their input. But some women turned around and did the same thing to men: they said, "This is what they think and feel; this is what happens to them when they look at pornography." And I’m thinking, hmm, can’t we ask ’em? And way back in college I thought, someone’s going to have to call them on this. Years went by and not too much happened, and I thought, maybe I’m going to have to call them on this. Right about the time I started to really plunge into this project, the early ’90s, a lot more feminist theorists began to write and publish from a pro-pornography, anti-censorship perspective, which is very heartening. But the interesting thing is, although they could see the weaknesses in a lot of the anti-porn feminist theory, still nobody was talking to men. Q: How did you find the men you spoke to for the book? A: I talked to anybody who would talk to me. I talked to friends, I talked to friends of friends, people who were recommended, and then I went fishing on the Internet. I would say roughly 10 percent of the people I spoke to face-to-face with a tape recorder, and the other 90 percent I surveyed by e-mail. Q: So your friends were willing to take part? A: A few. I certainly wasn’t going to pressure anybody. If people don’t get the point of the project up-front, then there’s no point in pushing them. I had a pretty extensive questionnaire; there were, like, 170 questions, and I certainly didn’t want to dump all those on people right from the start, so I kind of parceled them out in small groups and got people involved and interested before they knew what they were getting into. And even so, a lot of people dropped out. I pretty much did not include any input from dozens and dozens of men who did not complete the survey. Q: What most surprised you about what you learned from these men? A: There were two different things. The first thing was, I was kind of surprised at how powerful the social myths about pornography are, to the extent that men would repeat them even when their own experience didn’t back it up. Guys in the survey would repeat the same social received wisdom even though they were telling me things, or you could infer from the stuff they said, that their lives didn’t go that way. Q: For example? A: For instance, a lot of them strongly said, "Violence doesn’t turn me on, and I’ve never seen snuff, and I’m not particularly interested in seeing snuff." And nobody had seen snuff. But a lot of people took it for granted that it’s out there. I think one thing that sort of occurred to me much later on is that a fair number — not all of them, certainly, but a fair number — of the men repeated the notion that children should not be exposed to pornography. They disagreed at what age the cutoff would be, some said 12, some said 14, some said 16, I think some even said as old as 18 or 21. But the average age for first exposure for men in my survey was less than 12 years old. And you have to assume, certainly from the attitude of a lot of the guys that talked to me, that they don’t feel much the worse for wear. And yet, they still say, "Oh, well, I agree with everybody else that it’s dangerous." Well, dangerous how? Dangerous why? You don’t have any evidence to support this. The other big surprise for me, because it was just totally unexpected, is that I went into this assuming I was going to talk to guys like me: sensitive, New Age heteros. But as I was fishing for participants on the Internet, I started to get gay and bisexual guys saying, "Do you want to talk to me?" And I thought about it for all of a few minutes, and I thought, well, why not? Let’s see what turns up. Q: And how did their opinions and perceptions of pornography differ from those of the straight men you talked to? A: In some ways, a lot of them were similar. A lot of them were like straight guys: they said there’s too much emphasis on genitals, we’d like to see more whole-body shots, we’d like to see more romance, more plot. And I thought, it makes a lot of sense with regard to gays, because homosexual relations are so circumscribed in our culture that in a sense romance is almost as taboo or even more taboo than sex. You see heterosexual romance depicted everywhere, on the street and in the movies and on television and so on and so forth. But gays don’t get to see much of that, so suddenly it made sense. On the other hand, gays in general tend to have a much less ambivalent and mixed relationship with pornography — for, it seems, the very simple reason that for the most part their partners understood it. Their partners understood their taste, they may not even share their taste or interest, but they understood that they were interested and it wasn’t a big deal. And so they tended to be much more relaxed, they tended to be more witty, more fun to talk to, as opposed to a lot of the straights, who were still laboring under this pressure from society as a whole. A lot of them had had partners who disapproved strongly, who reacted badly, who didn’t understand. There was a lot more — shame is too strong a word, but just discomfort among the straights. Q: What, ultimately, was your goal in publishing this book? A: There were several. One was simply just to open up the public debate into a much broader area than it has been. I think that politicians and prosecutors and people like that are able to get people simply because there’s such a powerful taboo/shame sort of feeling around sex in general, as well as pornography, that they’re able to get this knee-jerk response from the public, saying, "We have to protect the children!" and "We have to cut back on civil rights in order to increase our security and safety." You see this happening in regard to the Iraq war, too. And because people are afraid to say, "Wait a minute; let’s think about this, and discuss it further," they say, "Oh yeah, yeah, okay." So I thought, just by asking questions openly and having people discuss it, that it would broaden the public debate. Secondly, I wanted to give women a better look into the male psyche, because a lot of women regard men’s interest in pornography with puzzlement at best, and fear — they feel threatened — at worst. And then as usual, to make the primary subject, males, feel less weird and alone and perverted. Because the more you try to control and ban and demonize something, the more artificially empowered it becomes. It becomes that much more scary and powerful, and it distracts you from the much more important things. I mean, it seems ironic to me to be working hard to try to promote a book that basically says, "This is no big deal." That’s what the message comes down to. But other people keep making it a big deal. So that’s why I felt I had to rise up and speak up about it. Q: Do you think people in the porn industry are reading the book? Do you think it’ll become a kind of handbook for producers of pornography, letting them know what men want to see? A: I’d like to say yeah, but I don’t think so. People who manufacture and perform in pornography by and large I suspect don’t read a lot. Q: Or maybe that’s just another misconception. A: Could be. Who knows? But I’ve got to say, I haven’t had a lot of feedback in general. Q: Yes, I was going to ask you what the response to the book has been so far. A: Well, my wife keeps hoping the religious right will picket our condo. In fact, I have been tempted to mail copies to people like Reverend [Donald] Wildman and Jerry Falwell and Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, because I heard Terry Gross interview Al Franken last week, and he talked about how he had his publisher send a copy of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations to Limbaugh, with a note that said, "Mr. Franken thinks it might help sales if you commented." Rush was pretty smart; he didn’t say a thing. So I’m tempted. Maybe I’ll do it on a whim one of these days. Q: They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. A: Oh yeah — that’s for sure. Certainly Bill O’Reilly has sold a shitload of Al Franken’s new book. He couldn’t have asked for a dumber, more perfect response. But as I said, it’s been tough, surprisingly tough, to get reviews; a lot of newspapers and bookstores have kind of shied away, and when I do get reviews, often I feel like the reviewer is trying to show everybody how au courant he or she is. (I say, that’s French for "way cool.") The basic message in these reviews is: "Oh, there’s nothing surprising here; I knew it all along. It’s no big deal." They’re not looking at the bigger picture because they hang out with people who think like them, and who all read their columns or their reviews and say, "Yeah, right on." But there’s a whole other country out there, and there are a lot of people out there who still regard pornography as frightening and powerful and satanic and "a symptom of the breakdown of the family and American morals." And periodically, they do things that affect the rest of us, on a legal and public-policy level. Q: You lived in Boston for a while. Do you have any thoughts on how this city, and men in this city in particular, respond to pornography? A: Not really. I was kind of surprised; the last time I visited Boston was three years ago, and I was surprised to see that the Combat Zone had all but disappeared. So I’m curious to know where that kind of business has gone. Is the Golden Banana still operational? Q: The Golden Banana is still there. A: But that’s not the same thing. That’s very, very different, from what I hear. I actually worked in the Naked I for a number of months after graduation from Harvard. It was a graveyard custodial shift. I’d come in and watch the last dancers and then shoo the dancers and customers, and I’d lock the doors and I was there all by myself. I’d clean up the place, and bring in my Stravinsky and Ravel albums, sometimes rock or Gershwin, wear my Anaïs Nin T-shirt. Q: What’s your day job? A: I’m a secretary. I tell people, "I’m a secretary to support my writing habit." David Loftus reads from Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography at Barnes & Noble at Boston University on September 23, at 7 p.m. Call (617) 267-8484. He also reads at the Harvard Coop on September 28, at 2 p.m. Call (617) 499-2000. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com
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