For many of us, porn provided a way to bond with other kids or members of our family. In our research, we heard numerous stories from people who shared, traded, stole, and watched pornography with their friends or siblings. As you might guess, usually the groups were either all boys or all girls. Like Brad, who spent a summer watching porn with his older brother and later searching for porn with his middle school friends, many people told us they looked at porn videos and magazines with others. With today’s technology porn continues to be easy to share with friends: kids can include a porn Web site in an instant message or pass around a jump drive loaded with their favorite sexual images.
Sharing something forbidden and taboo is one way we strengthen social connections and support each other when we’re young. We feel more like part of a group when we have something in common with others, and if that thing is something we’re keeping secret from the adults, it can create an even stronger bond. Passing around porn is like passing around beer, cigarettes, or marijuana to your friends—it’s a way of upping your “cool factor,” especially for boys.
Ivan, a twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic, liked how porn helped him feel part of a small group of loyal friends. “In seventh grade a classmate stole a Penthouse from the market near our school. A group of us boys looked through it together. By the time we were in high school, we passed around hard-core videos. We would make jokes and comments about what we were seeing. But we never really talked about what we thought or how we felt about it. We went for the humor and shock value—stuff that was outlandish, ludicrous, and borderline disgusting. It wasn’t about getting jacked up sexually. It was about doing something together. I had my reservations about some of the things I saw, but I kept quiet to stay part of the group. Looking back on it I think obsessing about women’s bodies gave us a safe way to emotionally connect with each other.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Don also talked about bonding with his friends through porn. When he was twelve, he would often look through his father’s collection of Playboys with a friend. “We looked through each magazine, one at a time, commenting on them, what we saw, and giving our own personal evaluations: ‘Gee, she looks great’ and ‘Boy, aren’t those nice,’ or saying things like, ‘This is what I would do with this.’ Throughout my youth, looking at porn with my friends reinforced my fascination with pornography and also made me feel closer to my dad.”
A lot of the men we interviewed, as well as many of our male clients, reported this porn-bonding experience. They were attracted to porn because they felt it was “a guy thing” and thought that doing it would somehow initiate them into manhood. Corey, who at thirty-four years old is in recovery from a lifetime of porn use, told a similar story. “My friend and I used to stay up all night, drink, and watch as many movies as we could that had nudity and sex. It was our version of all-night sports. I felt somewhat guilty, but it was reassuring to me knowing the porn was out there and that everyone else is secretly looking at it too.”
For Ralph, a thirty-six-year-old mechanic, porn bonded him to his brothers and dad. “I grew up in a large family with five older brothers. My dad and brothers were all into pornography. We had Penthouses, Playboys, and other soft-core ‘weenie magazines’ lying around the bathroom all the time. We had a common pot from which we all shared. When I was fifteen, my brothers let me share their collection of hard-core videos.”
Women are a lot less likely to sit around with their friends watching porn as a way to bond and socialize. Even when it does happen, their responses are often different. Lacy, a twenty-seven-year-old hairdresser, recalls her experience. “One time in boarding school, a group of us girls watched a pornographic video just for the fun of it. We sat there and laughed at it at first. Then it got pretty gross. After a while, we began complaining that the men in it were ugly, the sex in it was weird, and the dialogue was a joke.”
In this case, porn’s power to strengthen the closeness of the group came about because of the way the girls unified and bonded in their dislike of the product. It’s interesting to note that these girls felt free to openly discuss and criticize the porn. The boys, on the other hand, seemed to abide by an unspoken rule forbidding them from expressing anything negative about porn to each other, even if that’s how they felt.