Forget about Dave-we're porn again

BY SCHUYLER SCHOUTEN

EUGENE WONG/YH

How do the Organization Kids ever find time to satisfy their burning collegiate libidos? To judge from the "history bars" and temporary file caches on Yale's computers, the Organization Male relies on Internet porn—and lots of it.

"It's great," one sophomore admitted. "You can just come home, check e-mail, check porn, read the newspaper, and jack off at the same time. I wish I had more time for Internet porn." For a significant number of Yale men, online pornography has become a regular fact of school life—quick, efficient, and unavoidable.

"It's very much related to being at Yale," a freshman user said. "When I go home [from college] I don't really think about it. But when you're here, you can't help it. I'm at my desk and I start thinking, `Hmm, my roommate isn't here.' I should do work, but it's like, `Okay, I'll just open up Internet Explorer for a second.' With Ethernet it's so easy."

Most guys who indulge in e-porn don't think twice about it—and perhaps they shouldn't. Surely young scholars here have engaged in "self-abuse" since the days of Elihu Yale's original bequest. Many students note that the Internet is only one in a long line of smut-purveying media. "Men have always been imagining bodies," an English major said. "Before this, if it wasn't computers, it was something else."

Some Yalies point out that any situation combining young men, stress, and high-speed Internet access is bound to result in excess. "It's part of American life," one international student declared. On average, guys interviewed seem to think that around 75 percent of their brethren indulge regularly in online porn (higher estimates are "99.9 percent" and "everybody"). "It's natural," one student explained, "and it happens all the time. You come home and your roommate's sitting there staring at a blank computer screen. `Hey, what's up?' he says. You know what he's been doing."

Some young men even describe Internet pornography in terms of male bonding. One varsity athlete said his assistant coach exchanges porn files with players via e-mail. Other students speak of Internet porn as "a great community" or "a common link." "People talk about it all the time," another said. "My roommate and I have a competition to see who can find the best sites." One junior speaks glowingly of a stash he and his suitemate assembled together: "It's on the network, so we let our friends check it out. We do our best."

Many Yale men seem to have picked up their Internet porn habit at college. While some report having surfed for smut in their high school days, most agree that the temptation was not as strong. "At home, it takes forever. And it's not like here, where you have Ethernet and full-screen streaming video." Many students dabbled upon arrival at Yale and soon found themselves spending more and more time online. A secret pleasure became a daily routine. "People have gotten bolder and opener," a freshman said. "My friend used to hide his porn when his roommate came in, but now he keeps it on. Plus there are things that you'd never have done before—like get off when there's someone in the common room. Now it's just part of a hard day's work."

Yalies who indulge more frequently and openly also find themselves accustomed to increasingly hardcore material. Many seek out what they once found objectionable—and some say the softer stuff just doesn't work any more. One student described how he and his friends "slid" into raunchier and more graphic pornography over the course of several months. "You come to Yale and you start off with the Playboy-style pictures," he said. "Then you get into slightly more racy or romantic stuff. After that you go to the `raw' sex pictures, then deviant pictures, and then videos." One senior offered what may be the ultimate endpoint: "My roommate's into the animal movies."

Some porn users associate their deepening involvement with the development of the field itself. Said one self-professed "firm proponent of Internet porn," "The past year or so has really been a turning point in terms of the breadth and depth of the material available to download."

What is all this pornography doing to Yale? True, earlier generations had their magazines and their bawdy woodcuts, but Ethernet seems to have ushered in a new age with more variety, more raunch, and (perhaps) greater frequency. While Yale men have always chomped at the sexual bit, they have never done it with such a wealth of filth at their fingertips.

Some have raised the question of whether porn habits affect relationships with women. Suffice it to say that anyone who routinely pores over pornographic thumbnail images may come to have some peculiar notions about sex and romance. As one sophomore put it, spending hours online "totally desensitizes you. It changes your expectations for real girls." Another student admitted, "My standards for average breast size have been inflated."

But the pornography on Yale's computers is hardly just a parade of double-D's. One wonders what sort of standards the raunchier stuff engenders. Even the Yale man of the licentious '60s didn't expect to ejaculate in a woman's face on the first date. But today's students kill 10 minutes between classes by surveying scat, bestiality, and amputee fetishism. What of this do they bring to their interactions with females? Perhaps much of it gets left at home on the laptop. Indeed, many porn fans feel comfortable using Internet sites as an outlet separate from their real romantic lives. "I know guys with girlfriends who check it out all the time," one sophomore explained. Indeed, it seems such a normal routine that "sometimes I look around at all the guys and wonder—how many of them just came from jacking off?"

Still, it is hard to think of behavior like this as being totally inconsequential: "People have huge collections of these 30-second video clips, so they make collages of them—a cumshot here, a lesbian scene there—and they play them all rapidly." This is hardly the birds and the bees.

Perhaps it is telling that the auto-erotic male Yale is a laptop culture. The student who multitasks his orgasm needs only click a mouse to return to his e-mail, his news, or his lab report. "There's a folder on my desktop labeled `porn,'" explained one junior, looking up from his computer screen. And for students who navigate dozens of sites to assemble digital collections, the only real complaint is when the porn gets out of order. Every guy groans knowingly at the prospect of "pop-up windows"—barrages of porn sites that open themselves faster than the user can click them off.

If Internet porn is the sign of a Yale that can't stray far from work and order, it's also the refuge of a Yale that hasn't quite learned how to go out and flirt. Instead of frolicking in the sun (or the bed, for that matter), countless students sit at their desks and watch MPEG files on RealPlayer. "I think there are a lot of Yale students who have social issues," a female student (and not a porn user) offered. "If you're really driven and perfectionistic but you don't know how to relate to people, porn is an easy way to access sexual desire without having to deal with the human side of it."

What happens when this desire meets the computer isn't exactly lust, however. In fact, most users describe it as rather tedious. Explaining his daily Internet porn sessions, a political science major explained, "I'm not really sure why I do it. A lot more of it is boredom than real sexual desire. I'm just working on a paper and it's like, `Eh, might as well.'"

"Sometimes it takes forever to find something good," an athlete complained. "It's kind of a pain in the ass. It's like, `How much time am I wasting on this?'"

Internet porn is certainly here to stay. But what is it here to do? Talking about their habits, most students seem vaguely disenchanted. Many shake their heads in disbelief at the time they have wasted, or the hardcore depths they have sunk to. Emerging from their descriptions, however, is a more troubling general effect: the desexualization of sex. Students talk more excitedly about their MP3s—and when they mention an orgasm it is now sandwiched between words like "e-mail" and "nytimes.com." The term "sexual fantasy" never comes up. The truth is, most of this is not very sexual at all. A guilty pleasure has become a rote task.

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