Testimony in Massachusetts: My Experiences with Men, Porn and Domestic Abuse (explicit)

Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.372-378).

Blanket statements that porn shops are about “romance” or that porn “enhances couples sex lives” are hard to credit in light of stories like the one below. Interestingly, the appearance of consent and enjoyment seems to be important to many abusers who use porn, even if this has to be coerced out of their victims.

Testimony of Karen Harrison

I’m testifying under a pseudonym, Karen Harrison. I live in the New Bedford area. I’ve had many experiences with sex discrimination directly linked to pornography. Some of these were harmful to my physically, but all of them were harmful to me emotionally. I’ve had six abusive relationships and four of these six involved pornographic indignities. These are as follows…

The first one was Carl, who was a bisexual child molester… He forced me to be photographed naked by him. He pressured me to come on to young teenage boys in the town. He’d try to get them home with me so he could get to them. When I would not do this, he would criticize my age, my looks, and would get violent. He also wanted me to come on to hitchhikers he would frequently pick up in the seat next to me. He wanted me [to] pick them up and bring them home and start a sexual session with them while he watched or could join in. When I would not do this, he got angry and violent. These were ideas he read about in gay and kiddie porn publications of how to get victims to come to your home. Porn materials were always kept on hand. He wanted me to do the kinky things that he read about in magazines. I remember one article in particular that he made me read. It was about a man who threatened to leave his wife if she didn’t stop [inaudible]. So he began to retrain her. Every time he brought home a certain briefcase it would have a kinky surprise, a sexy surprise, that she would have to submit to. The first surprise was an enema. The surprises got more and more bizarre until the woman admitted that she started to like them and was disappointed if he didn’t bring the briefcase home. One of the last surprises mentioned was putting chocolate Hershey’s kisses–unwrapped–up the woman’s rear end and then she would squat over his face and squeeze them all into his mouth with her bowel muscles. He asked me to do this and I refused.

I was forced to shave my pubic area to look like the little girls in the magazines. He made constant comments in public to peers and family about how much I put out and if it was performed to his standards. Some of the magazines kept in the house were High Times, Hustler, National Lampoon, Penthouse, Playboy, Swedish Erotica–Swedish porn and kiddie porn. He forced me to watch him perform oral sex on a [dog]. He molested several children in my care, unknown to me, and I found out [after he] left me. He [found out] and raped me with several of his friends.

The second relationship was with a man named Jim who worked in a bookstore warehouse supply company in the New Bedford area… They had a poor inventory control system. He stole porn magazines and books by the boxload. There were stacks and stacks of them on both sides of the bed and out in the rooms where guests, including my parents, could see them. He would refuse to move them and got violent when asked to. He forced me to spend hours and weeks on the beach getting painful sunburns so I would be tan and sexy like the girls in the pictures. He forced me to look at pictures of men and women defecating and puking on each other. He would have parties with his male friends. He would pass these magazines out and give some away as gifts. I was the only female in the room on these ocasions. I was forced to wait on them, distributing beer and sandwiches while they openly commented sexually about the women in the pictures. They would get drunk and put me down for not having big boobs like the women in the pictures. If I tried to leave the room or got insulted during any of these times, he would get angry and hit me. I was stupid and oversensitive. Most girls don’t care if men look at porn, I was told.

He made no secret of needing these magazines to get turned on enough to touch me. I was forced to participate in a bondage episode that he read about. He forced me to pose nude for a photographer, playing with myself, in Rhode Island for money, all of which he kept because he could not keep a job at this time. He collected these magazines religiously and hurt me if I moved, touched or acted wrongly in any way. I was beaten so severely while I was pregnant by this man that I miscarried and had internal damage and bleeding because I was no longer attractive like the girls in the pictures. They had flat stomachs, I was told. He read a story in a magazine about a woman who would take baths in ice cubes to be cold a half an hour before her husband would come home, and she would powder herself with white powder so she would look dead and [then they had] sex. I was asked to try this.

During all this, he began drinking and gambling heavily. When we broke up, I found an unpaid $500 telephone bill in my name to the 900 sex numbers found in the backs of these magazines.

My next relationship was with a man named Michael. He was a pornographic movie and pornographic magazine fanatic. He collected tapes of porn movies and kept them in our clothes drawers instead of our clothes. He was most proud of the Traci Lords tapes from when she was underage. He forced me to watch these movies with him and suggested I watch them while he was at work. He would even quiz me when he came home to see if I had. He would force me to have sex with him during these movies in positions where he could still see the movies, or move me to one side so that he could still see them. If  got insulted about this, he got angry and violent and turned it around so that it became my fault and I had to apologize.

He forced me to go to VCR shops and pick out sex tapes with me openly. One movie in particular he forced me to watch and reenact was called The Story of O. He threatened to leave me if I didn’t perform kinky or [inaudible] acts. During this time, he was drinking heavily and using pot and coke. Another one of the movies he wanted to act all the sex scenes out with me was 9 1/2 Weeks.

One of these kinky acts I was forced to do was to cut a hole in an army cot that lined up with his crotch. He would lay naked on his stomach and poke his penis through the hole and I would have to lay underneath and perform oral sex. He read this in the kinky column of a magazine that it was a wife’s gift to her husband. He had our sex and lovemaking videotaped and showed it to all his friends the next day while I was at work. He said we could destroy it, but later that day I couldn’t find it and he told me to forget about it.

He tied me up and blew strawfuls of cocaine up into my nose and then would rape me. He read this in a porn magazine that said that coke would turn women on and I would not take the coke willingly. He wanted me to do the things he saw the people in the movies do, like have sex with other people, other couples, and especially with other women. He wanted to come home and find me having sex with women like on the tapes. He told me that this was one of his biggest fantasies, and he tried to convince me that it was mine as well. He told me that if I felt guilty about it, he would tie me up and I could pretend it wasn’t my fault. He forced me to have sex with sex toys bought through the back pages of the sex magazines. He commented openly about our sex lives in front of me to his friends while high on coke, pot, or [inaudible].

He read a story in a fantasy column of a magazine about a man and a woman acting out rape. He broke into my apartment and tried it on me. He waited until I came home from work and he attacked me from behind in the dark. He would tie me to the kitchen table and blindfold me and leave me in the dark for hours and come home with friends to touch me sexually. This was an idea he read in an article in a sex magazine about brainwashing techniques. He would get high on cocaine and come home and force me to have regular, anal and oral intercourse for hours and hours and hours until I was raw, dry and bleeding. When I couldn’t stand the pain he would put cocaine on my vagina so he could keep going. He read this in a magazine that said it would numb me and turn me on. He would tie me up and put cigarettes out on my legs when I refused to have sex with other p
eople like in the movies and threaten to leave me.

He put me in several situations with other people to sexually switch partners, but I always left. He would stay for hours. He would spank me and hit me frequently during sex like in the movies and articles. He forced me to dress in certain ways, day and evening, like the women in the magazines and movies. He constantly criticized my weight and my figure. I was forced to diet continuously and reminded at the table in front of others what I was eating and how much.

I was forced to be in the room with his male friends and swinging couples during sex videos and wait on them. During these episodes, I was forced to wear outfits and act certain ways at these times like the hostess in those sex movies. He forced me to go to strip bars with him and not get upset or he’d hurt me. One night, he even forced me to dance and strip at one particular club on amateur night. He kept the money that I made.

He would pick and choose collector issues of porn magazines and I was made to look and feel inferior to these women, especially blondes with big breasts and women who posed sexually with other women. I was made to feel inferior to the women on MTV constantly. Magazine pictures and posters were hung on the walls whether I liked it or not. He began touching me in public and wanting to have sex with me on a restaurant table like a scene in a video movie that he made me watch one night over and over and over and over.

My next and final relationship was with a man named Patrick, a police officer. He had a five-year-old son. His magazines were pornographic and mixed with gun and vigilante magazines, and he kept opening them in the bathroom and living room at all times, except when I first met him. I was repeatedly raped throughout every day and several nights with his handcuffs. I was forced to go to strip bars with him and eventually to work there. It was his fantasy for me to strip for others but to go home with him. He lost his job and kept the money I made working.

He would force me to watch porn videos with his son in the next room and then would rape me and use the language heard in the videos. For example, I can’t forget, he told me was going to split me in half with his cock and I was a bitch and I was forced to admit I loved it and if I didn’t say this, he would hit me and rape me harder. He always spanked me during sex and pulled my hair very hard like in the movies we watched. He would leave me at home with no clothes or blankets to cover up with while his five-year-old son was there so I couldn’t leave him. He drank and did coke in secret and took prescription drugs like Valium, Percodan and codeine, and also fed them to me. He had several sex magazines and books on brainwash methods and methods of control. He raped me anally with handcuffs for hours one day while drunk because the magazines told him that a woman’s anus is tighter than her vagina and I had refused to have anal sex with him. He touched me constantly in public and in front of his son because the magazine’s Kinky Corner said that if you do it in public, it’s more exciting. He bought many of these videos from vendors who sold them out of the backs of their vans and at flea markets.

About this time, I began to realize that sex is not love and money can’t buy love, but maybe it can buy freedom. So I wanted to make enough money to escape these men and, in particular, the New Bedford area and the life I had led up until now. I went back to the strip bars to make money. I cannot tell you the lie and the fantasy that it is for men. Waitressing, I cleaned the floors and I own a box of men’s wedding rings that I found on the floor…

The degradation and inferiority and humiliation of being presented as two tits and a hole for entertainment was not as bad as the sexual harassment I received from the management of these places. Customers are not allowed to touch you, but management can and does. You cannot complain to the Labor Board because they say you put yourself there willingly, and usually it’s under the table. I felt worthless, but I need enough money to move and complete college and get a degree.

Because of these experiences I have been made to feel so inferior that I was saving and had planned for breast implants. I had dyed my hair blonde and ruined it at one point. I weighed 86 pounds. I now have severe emotional and medical issues, revolving around the stress, physical punishment and trauma I have gone through…

[Question from DiMasi:] I want to know if any of these individuals have been prosecuted for what they did.

[Harrison:] No. They’re all walking around. The last one, the police weren’t going to do anything about it because he was a police officer and his father was the chief of police for thirty-two years in that town…

The battered women’s society in New Bedford did try and push for a detective to come to my home and get samples of water and food and it was tested and found to have arsenic at the crime lab in Boston. And it’s been a year and we have never heard another thing.

[DiMasi:] Are you still actively pursuing prosecution?

[Harrison:] I’m terrified of these people, the last one in particular. The police officer has a history. He hurt several other women before me. And there’s a history on all these men.

[DiMasi:] Have you ever filed a complaint in the police department where this police officer works?

[Harrison:] Yes. They made me submit to having my blood taken and urinating to test the arsenic levels and they made a male detective go in a room with me while I urinated to see that I wasn’t poisoning myself. So I was just so victimized by all of this that I moved and I’m just trying to pick up the pieces and try to be a whole person again.

[Question: How long were the relationships?]

[Harrison:] …The first man, Carl, was five years. The second man, Jim, was five years. The third man was three and a half, and the police officer was between six and nine months.

[Question: What caused you to end each of them?]

[Harrison:] The first incident, when I found he was molesting children in my care. I was hurt as a child and I couldn’t condone that. The second incident, he was cheating on me, and she got pregnant, and he married her. The third incident, I said pick me or coke. I want a conventional life. No more of this. And he picked coke.

[Question: Was there a possibility of physical violence if you left?]

[Harrison:] Yes. I was always told in several of these relationships that no other man would ever have me. It would be him or I’d be dead.

See also:

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and the Death Spiral of a Marriage
About this time, when we went out we started meeting his friends at wet T-shirt contests, amateur strip nights or elsewhere–we would meet together as a group–or pornographic adult theaters or live sex shows. Initially I started arguing that the women on stage looked very devastated, like they were disgusted and hated it. I felt devastated and disgusted watching it. I was told by those men, if I wasn’t as smart as I was, and if I would be more sexually liberated and more sexy, that I would get along a lot better in the world, and that they and a lot of other men would like me more…

…we would have incredible arguments with each other. I
would tell him I loved him, I only wanted to love him, I wanted to be a
good wife, I wanted our marriage to work, but I didn’t want to be with
these other people. It was he I wanted to be with, and no one else. He
told me if I loved him I would do this. And that, as I could see from
the things that he read me in the magazines initially, a lot of times
women didn’t like it, but if I tried it enough I would probably like
it, and I would learn to like it. And he would read me stories where
women learned to like it.

Statement of Rev. Susan Wilhelm: “…the sex became especially abusive after he started using pornography” (explicit language)
He exposed me to the pornography, too. Once we saw an X-rated film that showed anal intercourse. After that, he pressed me to try it. I agreed to once, but found the experience very painful. He kept trying periodically. He told me my vagina had become as sloppy as an old sow’s and he could not get pleasure any other way. He also used to pinch and bite me. When I said “it hurts,” he would say, “no, it doesn’t.” I became numb. I lost track of my own feelings. One time, he said in reference to himself sexually, “it’s supposed to hurt.”

Laurie Hall, An Affair of the Mind
Over the years, I’ve spoken with other women who have had similar
experiences. They tried extra hard to be attractive to their husbands;
but the year-after-year battering of constant comparisons with other
women and the continual attack on their desirability as a sexual
partner wounded their spirits to such a point that they gave up and
became the exact opposite of the firm, gorgeous, beautifully made-up
women their husbands kept trying to force them to become. Ironic, isn’t
it, how pornography creates the exact opposite in real life of what it
promises in fantasy life?

Testimony of Wanda Richardson, Harriet Tubman Women’s Shelter
If
you look at a lot of pornography, it shows women being beaten,
humiliated, tied up. It shows women tied and stabbed, poked, prodded
and abused by devices, assaulted by several men or animals, and many
ugly and degrading things. When you see a woman being battered, you see
a lot of the same ugliness and violence at the same time. Not only do
they portray women as liking and deserving this sexual abuse, it shows
them as enjoying it, deserving it. And that is what one of the great
myths of battery is, is that women deserve to be battered and that they
enjoy it. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t stay…

Testimony of Elana Bowman, Member of the Women Against Violence Against Women Coordinating Committee
I was working up the papers for a restraining
order at the Domestic Violence Project, when a woman began telling me
that her husband confessed to her that he had raped his daughter from
his first marriage, and that he served time for it. She asked him how
he could do that to his own blood. He answered that it was all right,
that the little girl hadn’t minded it, and that he had enjoyed it
enough for both of them. He had seen the pictures of it, and when girls
did it enough, they liked it, and that they really did like it or they
wouldn’t do it in the pictures he had seen. We talked more about that,
and I asked her if she thought that the porn he read was any cause of
what he had done. She said, “Of course,” and he had those magazines
now, and she had had enough. She had a little girl too, and she was
doing all she could to stop him from getting to her daughter.

Testimony in Minneapolis: Role of Porn in Child Sexual Abuse; Pornographers Perpetuate, Profit from Dysfunction
What distance is there between the depiction of children “begging” for
sex in pornographic display, and Maggie’s father (in Kiss Daddy
Goodnight) saying to then-three-year-old Maggie, “Tell me you like it.
No, tell me you really like it. No, tell me like you mean it”?…

Robert
Jensen: When Examining Complex Social Phenomena, Scientific Method Has
Limits; Listen to the Stories of the Victims (explicit language)
“I know all about you bitches, you’re no different; you’re like all of
them. I seen it in all the movies. You love being beaten. (He then
began punching the victim violently.) I just seen it again in that
flick. He beat the shit out of her while he raped her and she told him
she loved it; you know you love it; tell me you love it…” [Silbert
and Pines, 1984, p.864]

Robert Jensen: Liberate Sex from Porn (explicit language)
“Do you like to gag? Beg for it. Say please. Say please gag me some more… Your throat is so good.”

Lizzy Borden: We don’t shoot “all the lovey-dovey stuff that there’s not a big market for” (explicit language)
“Yeah. She’s really going to get hit. She likes it. It’s good.
Sometimes, it makes you more horny when you’re getting hit. It makes
you more, like, more tingly down in your genital area. You should try
it. You should hit your wife a little bit…”

Martin Amis: “A rough trade” (explicit)
“Rocco has far more power in this industry than any actress,” said
Stagliano, pleased to be pulling one back for the boys (generally
speaking, men are the also-rans of porno). “I was the first to shoot
Rocco. Together we evolved toward rougher stuff. He started to spit on
girls. A strong male-dominant thing, with women being pushed to their
limit. It looks like violence but it’s not. I mean, pleasure and pain
are the same thing, right?”

Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution, Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs
In 1995, the Journal of Communication reported on a meta-analysis of 24
different studies. Researchers found that “A relationship between
pornography consumption and believing rape myths exists. Rape myths
pertain to erroneous and potentially harmful ideas regarding rape, for
example, that victims of rape are partially to blame for the crime,
rapists should not get tough sentences, or rape is not a serious crime.
This study found that violent pornography increased the acceptance of
rape myths, and nonviolent pornography increased the acceptance of rape
myths when compared to a control group.”

Testimony in Los Angeles: “it was harder to tell their assailants that they enjoyed the rape than enduring the actual assault”
…violent pornography trivializes rape and encourages men to think of violence as a part of normal sexual relations. It also provides the language which men can and do use to neutralize and justify their sexually violent behavior. When rapists I studied told me that despite the injuries they have been inflicting on their victims, “She enjoyed it,” they were describing the same image projected in pornography…