By Ariane Priyanka
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 9 — When she was 11-years-old, Deeva (pseudonym) typed the word “cute” while searching for dog pictures online. In response, she received prompts like “cute girls” and ‘cute, hot, sexy’.
“I wasn’t looking for porn,” said Deeva, a Malaysian woman who is now aged 26. But that’s the rabbit hole she fell into when her innocent search led her into the salacious netherworld of pornography in its many permutations.
From pictures and illustrations to hardcore videos, her accidental discovery resulted in a self-confessed adolescent addiction to porn, which she has a somewhat better handle on now that she is an adult.
While Deeva, who has a law degree, believes she has a “high sex drive”, she says she watches porn only once or twice a month.
Inadvertent Exposure To Porn A Universal Experience
Her inadvertent exposure to porn is a universal experience. An Australian study published this year found that two in three young women have been exposed to pornography by the time they reach 20.
According to a report published in January last year by the Children’s Commissioner for England, the average age at which children first see pornography is 13.
Luise (pseudonym), a 31-year-old woman from Sweden, told Ova she was around the age of 10 when she first stumbled upon pornographic images online. “As a teenager, I would watch it sporadically, like alone in my room on my laptop and delete my search history afterwards because it felt like something I shouldn’t be doing.”
Now as an adult, her porn viewing is a little more regular. Luise watches porn “like a couple of times a week maybe.”
Porn Mainly Targeted At A Male Heterosexual Consumer
Maree Crabbe, during an online presentation for the World Health Organization (WHO) last April 16, characterised mainstream pornography as being widely available on the internet and easily accessible via other mediums such as DVDs.
Crabbe, who is co-founder and director of the Australian violence prevention project, It’s Time We Talked, added that it is mainly targeted at a male heterosexual consumer.
Luise echoes this assessment. “I feel like the mainstream porn industry centres a majority of its content around the straight male audience. It has a very narrow view of what an attractive woman is supposed to be and look like, and what she should perform during sex to be considered good.
“Thin, young, [full of] makeup, often white, submissive and so on. The focus is often the male pleasure and the women are kind of just there to get the men off”, she said.
Deeva’s partner, Raj (pseudonym), a 25-year-old Malaysian, was 10-years-old when he first encountered pornography. He was hanging out with a friend at the latter’s house, when his friend put on a “confusing” CD.
“This was the first porn video I’d watched. So, basically, the girl went into the bus, she’s wearing a short skirt — I think she might have been wearing a uniform — and the guy comes and molests her, then she gets down from the bus and the guy follows her into an alley and rapes her.”
Raj added that following this initial experience with porn, the type of pornography he gravitated towards — when he started having access to the internet and continued watching porn throughout primary and secondary school — was of a similar nature.
Acts Of Aggression Commonplace In Most Popular Pornography
In her presentation, Crabbe said acts of aggression are commonplace in the most popular pornography. These acts include gagging, slapping, spanking, spitting, choking, hair pulling, abusive language, as well as humiliation and degradation.
From watching porn, Raj said he assumed women were not able to feel pleasure while having sex. It wasn’t until his first sexual encounter at 18 – when told by the woman he was having intercourse with – did he find out that women can experience pleasure during sex.
“It was mind-blowing to me. I was very naive,” said Raj. “I think there’s a lot of wrong perceptions that porn gives, especially to guys, on how a girl should act.
“I think, for me, there was a lot of rough porn (when I was) growing up, and how women were treated in that porn.
“It wasn’t until I got a woman’s perspective that I learned, oh, pulling hair actually hurts the woman,” added Raj, who thought that women actually liked it. “Some women do, (but) not all women, and that’s not what you’re told when you’re watching all those porn videos.”
His partner Deeva, however, found herself drawn to the violence and aggression during a “weird phase”, which she attributed to being so young when she discovered pornography.
“I think when you’re 15 or 16, you start experimenting and finding crazier stuff. At one point in time I was into very rough and very questionable porn and that included this whole Japanese porn, forced sex, rape porn, kind of thing.”
She recalled feeling disconcerted by the mixed signals women were projecting in those types of pornography. “The women just always looked like they were in pain and their ‘no, we can’t do this… oh, don’t stop’, were very confusing.”
Slowly, she found herself enticed by the aggressive types of porn involving “people being tied up, choking, gagging, public humiliation and stuff like that.”
“I was watching things that I knew clearly the man was in control and deriving pleasure from,” Deeva told Ova.
“That was the way I was viewing sex — very transactional. You use me for pleasure; if you feel pleasure, then I’m happy. That was literally my view of sex, I think, at that point of time.”
“I wanted that ‘ahhh’ after sex (feeling), like ‘ooh, I made a guy c*m’,” she continued, adding that she disregarded her own pleasure in the process.
Skewed Perspective On Relationships And Love
Yasmin, a 27-year-old Malaysian woman, also feels that her perspective on relationships and love was skewed by her early exposure to porn. She told Ova she started consuming porn at the age of nine when she chanced upon her brother’s folder, which was full of pornographic videos.
“For me, porn’s impact wasn’t really great because I did feel the need to be sexy; I did feel the need to please a man or boy or whatever person I’m (having sex) with. So yeah, at one point, I did feel like I was an object of sex.”
At the age of 13, Yasmin felt pressured into engaging in sexual intercourse despite her religious beliefs and unreadiness. She maintained a relationship with her sexual partner, whom she said manipulated her throughout their seven-year relationship. He was around her age.
(The age of consent for sexual intercourse in Malaysia is 16 years old. A person who has sex with a girl below that age can be charged under the Penal Code with statutory rape).
“Ending up with someone you really like, it’s really hard to say no to them, so you end up doing whatever they say. I was like, I’m happy that we’re still together, I’m happy that I get to express my love to you,” said Yasmin, a social media executive.
As a result, she associated love merely with physical touch, without any consideration for its emotional and mental dimensions. “It wasn’t the deep side of things,” Yasmin said, of the relationship. She added that this affected three of her subsequent relationships.
“And I ended up being in a lot of relationships because I feel this need to always be with someone.”
Yasmin told Ova she often found herself metaphorically backed into a corner in those relationships as she was always put in a position where she couldn’t defend herself. As a result, her self-esteem plummeted.
“So, I went through all of this, kind of like, relationships that are more like ownerships.”
She also attributed this to the influence of porn and its depictions of the unequal sexual dynamics between women and men, as well as its oversexualisation of women’s bodies.
“You see women getting railed and rammed into. Some of them allow themselves to be objects and they’re being thrown around like objects. Those are the kind of things I was watching. It doesn’t matter if it’s lesbian porn or a mix of and crossovers of genders. There are categories where the character is portrayed as just an object.”
Sexual Strangulation Mostly Enacted By Men
Asha (pseudonym), a 25-year-old entertainment reviewer from Sri Lanka, who said she was coerced into watching porn at the age of eight by her male friends, told Ova that “choking is fine, I mean I get the appeal…”
As in its portrayal in porn, sexual strangulation is mostly enacted by men, according to Crabbe, who cited a study which found that 49 per cent of men have choked a partner during sex and 25 per cent of men did so during their recent sexual encounter.
“Pornography is normalising practices and ways of engaging in those practices — often very aggressive ways of engaging in them — that most women don’t enjoy and may find degrading, painful or violating,” said Crabbe.
An Australian study, published in July this year, found that among young people strangulation was common during sex. The study, which involved 4,702 young people aged 18 to 35, found that 57 per cent had been strangled during sex at least once and 51 per cent had strangled a partner at least once.
It also found that more men (59 per cent) than women (40 per cent) said that they had ever strangled their partners, and nearly three-quarters (74 per cent) of trans and gender-diverse participants reported that they had strangled their partners.
More women (61 per cent) than men (43 per cent) reported ever being strangled, with a high proportion of people who identified as trans or gender-diverse (78 per cent) reporting ever being strangled.
Pornography (61 per cent ) was the most common way people found out about sexual strangulation, according to the study.
Same sex and trans pornography often convey the same kind of messages seen in heterosexual cisgender porn, Crabbe said.
There is a lot of diversity in mainstream pornography, but there is also a lot of commonality, she said. “The commonality relates both to the sorts of sex acts that are commonplace and to the way that sex and gender are portrayed.”
‘‘Guys In Porn Say Sh*t Like That’’
While Asha seemed fine with choking, other forms of violence in pornography have bothered her. “I think they (men) just like the idea of throwing a gal around, which I don’t like to see.”
Based on her experiences, men who watched pornography want or attempt to emulate the sex acts and scenarios they’ve seen.
“I remember when I first met (this guy) when I was in uni. He would watch porn and then he would be like ‘I can’t wait to have sex with my girlfriend like that’.”
In another incident, Asha said the last time she was with a man, she told him that she didn’t want to go any further. “He was just like, ‘um, I don’t think you should try and scream rape right now’.”
After she “shoved him off”, Asha pondered why he would say such a thing. “It got me thinking, guys in porn say sh*t like that. It’s like, completely normalised and then they share it with their friends and then their friends think the same thing, and they think it’s cool.”
Luise believes the objectification of women in porn does influence how men perceive and engage with women in real life.
“I do think that carries over into the real world and how women are viewed, especially by men. Maybe not to such an extreme degree in day-to-day interactions, but it’s still something that’s always there I think.”
She continued, “for example, young men that watch a lot of porn and maybe are anxious around women and don’t know how to interact with them, and in addition to that, grow to resent women.
“I think the word incel gets thrown around a lot nowadays that it’s losing its meaning a little bit, but those are the types of men I mean.”
According to Britannica, Incel is a member of an online subculture of primarily heterosexual men who identify as being unable to have romantic or sexual relationships. This self-described inability to form attachments is often expressed as grievance toward women.
Incel subculture has been associated with misogyny, extremism, rape culture, and expressions and acts of violence.
“Like they get such a warped view of women and women’s sexuality strictly from porn that they don’t see women as people almost, and can’t interact with them in a civilised and respectful manner,” Luise said.
