Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography

The gulf between critics of pornography and those who use it seems unbridgeable. Not only do the two sides disagree about its effect on society and individual men and women, they cannot even agree on what it is. Where one finds objectification, subordination, degradation, and violence against women, the other sees beauty, fun, pleasure, female power and assertiveness, and fantasy. Freud never asked, "What do men want?" but Katherine MacKinnon asserts, "Pornography provides an answer. Pornography permits men to have whatever they want sexually. It is their ‘truth about sex'." Is this true? Dozens of books have been published on pornography, yet almost none feature the voices of the men who use it. Indeed, most of our ideas about men and pornography are theoretical, and most are entirely derived from women. Watching Sex explores pornography through the eyes of men who use it. The interviews with nearly 150 men—between the ages of 19 and 67, single, married, divorced and widowed, of straight, gay, and bisexual—are telling and provocative accounts of what they think, feel, and do in response to pornography. Their answers confound the now conventional wisdom promulgated by anti-pornography feminists, who would have us believe, in the words of Robin Morgan, "Pornography is the theory; rape the practice." Watching Sex provides a window on the true nature of men's sexuality that will prove of enduring importance.