The Pornography of Everyday Life

Chapter 39, The Pornography of Everyday Life begins with a comparison between the way men and women are often posed in advertisements.  Jane Caputi offers the reader an example to make her case: a photograph taken by American soldiers that shows the abuse of Iraqi male prisoners.  The prisoners were posed in various “sexual displays,” which lead to many viewers’ shock over the behavior in the photos.  Caputi then points out that while men are presented in this way in a humiliating fashion, women are often posed this way, sometimes worse, and receive little to no backlash.  Instead, these women are perceived as “sexy.”  She goes on to write about this “habit of thinking” that sexualizes and degrades both genders (374). 

In her first section, Caputi discusses gender pornography, such as instances where the man is presented as strong, intelligent, and powerful.  The woman in these cases is often posed as vulnerable, younger, and weaker.  This comparison is only enhanced with clothing choices- even when both people in the situation are nude, the man still appears to be dominant.  She suggests these illustrated hierarchies begin with the imbalance of power and inequities between people in everyday life.  Moving forward with these ideas of power and hierarchies, she then introduces the idea of violence porn.  This type of pornography focuses on the domination aspect in sex.  She writes that “to prove manhood, men, one way or another, have to assert domination” (376).  She ends this section with a particularly powerful statement: when sex becomes violent, and “the penis is represented as a weapon, rape becomes its purpose” (377).

Rape porn is habitually portrayed in ads and leads to many of the double standards present in society today.  This goes back to her argument that shows the differences between how men and women are portrayed.  Both sexes could be posing nude, but it usually the women who get the brunt of the objectification.  Objectification is the act of treating a person as a literal object.  Sexual objectification sexualizes this possession and may convince women to believe they need a number of products and services to live up to the impossibly high standards set by society.  Caputi ends this piece by describing the “Goddess,” a sexual divinity that was suppressed by patriarchal religions, and states that the Goddess should come back not as a pornographic symbol, but a natural “life force” (382).