CYBERSPACE — Katie Couric recently kicked off her new podcast with an episode titled “Is Violent Porn Changing Us?” The premise of the installment is that porn has become the de facto sex education for young people, and is teaching them bad things.
Obviously, the adult industry never sought this role. As Jessica Drake told XBIZ last week: “We’re not modeling what a loving relationship could or should look like. We’re literally modeling some very specific sex acts; we’re catering to sexual fetishes.” However, specific acts and fetishes are central to Couric’s thesis that some sexual behaviors are unacceptable.
It is easy to poke fun at Couric’s podcast. To begin with, her sourcing is laughable. She claims: “I was having coffee with a friend and she told me that health clinics on campuses were seeing a lot of college students with anal fissures.” The research method “a friend told me” hardly seems worthy of a nationally acclaimed journalist.
More likely, the anecdote was cribbed from this article in The Atlantic, in which a University of New Brunswick psychology professor recounts hearing from a physician about vulvar fissures among students. Perhaps Couric is coffee buddies with the Canadian researcher? Fortunately, Couric’s rigorous journalistic ethos prompted her to confirm the story — by “casually” asking her gynecologist about it during a pap smear. Here Couric simultaneously demonstrates both under-researching and oversharing.
Couric also asserts that 88% of top rented or downloaded porn “contains scenes depicting violence against women.” She borrows this statistic from one of her guests on the show, Dr. Gail Dines, billed as “the foremost expert on the effects of violent porn.” Dines herself seems to have cherry-picked her data from a study that interpreted all BDSM — which is famously focused on consent — as violence against women. Her error is helpfully debunked in Psychology Today.
Dines also claims that the predominant sex acts in pornography are facials, choking and ATM, but none of these terms appears among PornHub’s top categories and searches. When Dine labels these as the “major” sex acts, she seems to mean that these are the ones that most offend her personal sensibilities — and this is the heart of what is wrong with this podcast.
Couric talks about “scary sex,” and makes it clear that she personally finds “rough” activities like anal sex and choking to be frightening. Fine. Like everyone, she should engage only in activities that appeal to her. The problem arises when Couric and her guests map out what is acceptable sexual behavior and what is not, since Couric assumes that what she finds scary should also be scary to everyone. “Are you as freaked out as much as I am?” she asks.
Couric talks about “what a healthy relationship actually looks like” and declares “porn-like” intercourse to be “inauthentic.” Her other guest, teacher Al Vernacchio, who seems to be doing admirable work teaching kids about gender equity, likewise feels he has a line on what sex is about. He differentiates between “good, helpful fantasy” versus fantasy that is “corrupting” and “the opposite of what we’re supposed to be trying to do as human beings.”
Since “what we’re supposed to be trying to do as human beings” has been the object of contentious debate since humans learned to talk, it seems presumptuous for Vernacchio or anyone to assume consensus on the subject — much less a consensus easily translatable into a chart of good-versus-bad sex acts.
Vernacchio even proposes redefining sex as “consensual, mutually pleasurable sexual activity that helps people connect.” Aside from this being a circular definition, Vernacchio does not consider that some people might prefer their pleasure one-sided, or anonymous. Apparently, only a narrow, normative sexuality is healthy to depict.
Worse, Couric and Dines try redefining consent itself, such that any woman — they focus entirely on heterosexual relationships — who agrees to what they consider unacceptable acts, such as anal sex or choking, must by definition be doing so nonconsensually. Couric interviews Trish, whose pushy, insensitive boyfriend wanted to have anal sex and choke her. To please him, Trish did those things, labeling her own choice as consensual. Yet later in the podcast, Couric says Trish "initially thought it was consensual" before turning to Dines, who rules that, despite what Trish herself said, the sex acts she performed with her boyfriend were not consensual. Ironically, Dines literally cancels out a real woman’s voice to make the story fit a specific analysis: that if women were socialized properly, they would never consent to such activities.
Messages about female empowerment and consent are too important to dilute by confusing personal distaste for particular fetishes with moral superiority. Consent is not defined by a type of sex act; a kiss on the forehead is unacceptable if it is given without consent. It is consent that defines acceptability, not acceptability — to whatever authority — that defines consent.
In the end, Couric’s analysis of why porn is bad — because it provides fantasies about acts outside of her comfort zone — is a pretty good explanation for why porn exists in the first place. People need fantasy, especially when other people disapprove of their desires and they feel compelled to hide them. Fortunately, most people are able to separate fantasy from reality. If someone mistreats their sexual partners due to an inability to make that distinction, they have a much bigger problem than watching too much porn.
Find "Next Question With Katie Couric" on Apple Podcasts.
