The story of the ‘defilement’ told on these sites is genre-bound in that it almost always starts with an eager but innocent girl who is gently and playfully coaxed by off-camera adult men into performing sexually for the pleasure of the viewer. This is the narrative informing most of the images on the SoloTeengirls.com site, which has hundreds of movies available to members, as well as hundreds of still photographs posted on the site as a teaser for non-members. Each woman has 5 photographs and a written text detailing her supposed first sexual experience. For ‘Natasha’ the story goes as follows:
This lil cutie came in pretending that she couldn’t wait to be naked in front of the camera. And… we couldn’t wait to see her. As she started to take off her clothes and show off she giggled and smiled but we could tell she was nervous and when she found out that naked meant showing off her snug little teen pussy she blushed! But showing off her pussy proved to be too much of a turn on and when we encouraged her to play with it she could not resist. This beautiful teen girl really did have her first time on camera and we got to watch her stroke that velvety teen pussy (my emphasis).
The message that the written text conveys in this story can be found throughout the Websites in this category, as it embodies the way in which the pornographers carefully craft a story of who is really innocent and who is really culpable in the scenario. For all the supposed innocence of the ‘lil cutie’, as evidenced by her nervousness, giggling, smiling, and blushing, it really only took a bit of encouragement to get her to masturbate for the camera, which in porn-world language is another way of saying that it didn’t take much for her to reveal the slut she really is. It is this very culpability on the part of the girl that simultaneously divests the user of his culpability in masturbating to what would be, in reality, a scenario of adult men manipulating a naïve girl into masturbating for the pleasure of other adult men, himself included.
The obvious question here is: what effect could these sites have on the viewers? Once they click on these sites, users are bombarded – through images and words – with an internally consistent ideology that legitimizes, condones, and celebrates a sexual desire for children. The norms and values that circulate in society and define adult–child sex as deviant and abusive are wholly absent in PCP, and in their place is a cornucopia of sites that deliver the message (to the viewer’s brain, via the penis), that sex with children is hot fun for all.
There is a wealth of research within media studies that shows that people construct their notions of reality from the media they consume, and the more consistent and coherent the message, the more people believe it to be true.[27] Thus, the images of girls in PCP do not exist within a social vacuum, but rather are produced and consumed within a society where the dominant pop culture images are of childified women and hypersexualized, youthful female bodies. Encoded within all of these images is an ideology that encourages the sexual objectification of the female body, an ideology that is internalized by both males and females, and has become so widespread that it normalizes the sexual use and abuse of females. This does not mean that all men who masturbate to PCP will rape a child, or even be sexually attracted to a child. What it does mean, however, is that on a cultural level, when we sexualize the female child, we chip away at the norms that define children as off limits to male sexual use. The more we undermine such cultural norms, the more we drag girls into the category of ‘woman’, and in a porn-saturated world, to be woman is to be a sexual object deserving of male contempt, use, and abuse.
Bibliography
Gerbner, George (1998) ‘Cultivation Analysis: An Overview’ Mass Communication and Society 1 (3&4), pp. 175–194.
Jensen, Robert (2007) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. South End Press, Boston.
Jhally, Sut (1990) ‘Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture’ The World and I, July, pp. 506–519.
Quayle, Ethel and Max Taylor (2002) ‘Child Pornography and the Internet: Perpetuating a Cycle of Abuse’ Deviant Behavior 23 (4), pp. 331–361.
Russell, Diana and Natalie J. Purcell (2006) ‘Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization’ in Nancy E. Dowd, Dorothy G. Singer, and Robin Fretwell Wilson (Eds) Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence, pp. 59–82. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
The belief that pornography inhabits its own physical and mental world is an illusion. Nothing restricts its effects. Yet the protective myth of its spatial separation and cognitive confinement endures, even as pornography visibly takes over more and more public and private space, invading homes and offices and transforming popular culture.
There is such a thing as pornography, as its producers and consumers well know. No one is making tens of billions of dollars from, or masturbating to, the Bible, for example. This is only to notice that the pornography industry and mass media have long operated in separate spheres defined by content. In the name of taste, values or division of labour, legitimate cinema, books and media have traditionally eschewed or coyly skirted the sexually explicit. The ‘adult’ movie industry, cable television and ‘men’s entertainment’ magazines have frontally specialised in it. This mutually clear line, quite precisely and effortlessly observed in practice, coexists with the common cant that pornography cannot be defined or distinguished from anything else.
Pornography is increasingly making popular culture more pornographic. This effect is routinely observed and sometimes deplored, whether for sexually objectifying women yet more inescapably, or for taking away the sexiness of the forbidden. But if this movement is rarely documented, and even more seldom explained, the fact that pornography itself has been a popular feature of culture – the most mass of media – for some time is never faced.
Society’s ideology of compartmentalisation – that the rest of life can go on unaffected – never seems to be embarrassed by pornography’s ubiquity. It has been in plain sight all along. In reality, pornography’s place is just down the street, right there on the rack in the convenience store, not to mention in the bedrooms and bathrooms of homes where its users seldom live alone. Yet even as the industry has burgeoned, taking over more public space and penetrating more deeply into private life at home and at work with each advance in technology, it is considered to be somehow not really there.
The same dissociative logic structures the legal regulation of pornography.
Obscenity, one meaning of which is off stage, is located in some neighbourhoods and not others. The question of where is politically fought over locally like the placement of noxious waste, as if its effects can be so confined. Pornography has to be somewhere, the attitude is, the only question is where. (One reading of the law of this subject in the USA revolves around how far a man has to travel to get his fix before it becomes unconstitutional.) Pornography is considered addressed by the legal sleight of hand through which it is imagined placed in some demimonde: over there rather than right here.
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5 For a discussion of the findings of over 30 years of studies on how media shapes the social construction of reality, see Gerbner (1998).
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1 This is an edited version of ‘X underrated’ published in the UK