Archives o f Sexual Behavior, Vol. 11, No.

5, 1982

Sexual Fantasy and Pornography: Two Cases of

Girls Brought Up with Pornography
Zella Luria 1

A normal part of late childhood and preadolescence for boys is exposure to

pornography. The visual imagery of the forbidden acts in pornography are
readily integrated with sexual fantasy in masturbation and in social sex.
Money and Ehrhardt (1972) have attributed the fact that proportionately
more women (36~o) than men (11%) do not make any use o f visual imagery
during sexual acts to a greater biological readiness to respond to distal,
visual images with arousal among men. While such a biological threshold
hypothesis may well be correct, the ubiquity of practice with norm-violative
behavior in the excited and approving context of the childhood male peer
group could make an important contribution to the later uptake of
pornographic imagery into fantasy. A full test of the Money and Ehrhardt
hypothesis would be impossible, entailing a study o f adolescent fantasy
among a group of girls who grew up just like boys until adolescence. Two
sisters close in age, now women in their 20s, grew up with pornography ad
lib because o f the family's business in pornographic publishing. They were
interviewed for their sexual histories. One uses visual fantasy and has
integrated some elements of the imagery of the pornography for a period
into her sexual life; the other has not. Implications for the definition o f the
two gender curricula- what boys learn from other boys and girls from other
girls- are discussed.
KEY WORDS: pornography; gender sex differences; childhood sexual imagery; sexual
fantasy; gender curriculum.

INTRODUCTION

Interest in sexual fantasy and especially in sex differences in fantasy

antedates modern research on sexual functioning. There is a strong clinical
bias toward viewing sexual fantasy as predominantly endogenous in origin.

Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155.

395

0004-0002/82/1000-0395503.00/0 © 1982PlenumPublishingCorporation
396 Luria

Sociologists of sexuality are more likely to attend to shared generational,

same-gender experiences in fantasy-i.e., particular movies, books, or
magazines shared by the preadolescent and adolescent gender-segregated
peer group (Gagnon, 1979)-and to minimize the endogenous. In a
sociological context, the experiences to be sexually elaborated by the two
genders as segregated peer groups are likely to be different. Thus, the
particular elaboration of experience into sexual fantasy is likely to be
different for males and females. Moreover, sexual fantasy is generally
embedded in a gender context such that the same act in fantasy can be
viewed by an adolescent women as tender and romantic and by an
adolescent man as tough and sexually arousing.
Money and Ehrhardt (1972) view the role of the visual image in male
eroticism as of special importance. They see natural selection as the force
making the visual stimulus "the distance activator of erotic arousal in
mankind, and specifically in man" (p. 145). Nature's logic is seen as prepar-
ing the male, at a distance, for sexual activity. The distal visual system
provides "an automatic erection stimulator, applicable on demand" (p.
179). Moreover, the erection tells the man that he is turned on. The
internalization of the visual stimulus in fantasy is clearly present to the
pubescent boy in the fantasies connected with wet dreams and
masturbation. Money and Ehrhardt make much of the uninvited nature of
these fantasies, and of the chagrin experienced by teenage boys at the
"deviant nature of some of those images." This latter point is to indicate
how autonomous the fantasies feel to the young men experiencing them.
Anyone who counsels teenage men would agree.
According to Money and Ehrhardt, young women do not have
experience corresponding to the wet dream. Women's fantasies tend to
elaborate their actual sexual experiences; thus, in women, orgasmic dreams
"increase with experience and age through the twenties and thirties, whereas
in males they are maximal at the onset of adolescence" (p. 149). The
particular imagery that appears at puberty, they call "the c a p s t o n e . . , of
the edifice of gender identity," and its origins, along with the erotic arousal
power, derive from earlier years' experiences. The object(s) imaged is (are)
presumably the precursor(s) of sexual orientation.
The use of visual imagery for erotic arousal in males may well be part
of nature's program. But it is a~so part of the male's gender role curriculum,
taught by the gender-segregated peer group. Preadolescem and adolescent
male groups are avid consumers of pornographic magazines. These groups
may, in fact, be the culture's teacher of what is a socially agreed-upon
effective stimulus for arousal and masturbation. The focus on what is
slightly sexually "irregular" occurs among grade-school boys and not among
girls-i.e., talking "dirty" for generalized arousal even with minimal
Fantasy and Pornography 397

information on a word's definition. These two social experiences in the

gender-segregated male peer group-talking "dirty" and exposure to
pornography-confound the effect of the hypothesized biological pro-
gramming.
One does not know what the effect on visual imagery in women's
sexual acts would be if they had experienced social training of their peer
group in the viewing and selection of pornography. Would girls' access to
pornography increase their use of visual imagery in masturbation, coitus,
and other sexual acts? Is the ability and/or readiness to incorporate
pornographic imagery for turn-ons, or to sustain turn-ons, sexually
dimorphic? Obviously, m a n y - b u t not a l l - w o m e n use fantasy in
masturbation and coitus. Many women report a strategy for maintaining
arousal that consists of avoiding images and staying with sensations (Hire,
1976). Although this may be seen as a biologically higher threshold for use
of imagery by females, other interpretations are possible. Part of the gender
curriculum of the female is a strategy of careful monitoring of interactional
behavior, with attention to requirements posed by others-- friends, siblings,
babies, lovers. Females must put that strategy aside if they are to focus on
their own sensory arousal. Would exposure to pornography in the context
of the peer group result in more women incorporating such visual imagery?
The cases of two girls growing up with pornography, available ad lib
during childhood, may help us with these questions. Both women are in
their 20s, well educated, and well adusted. In no sense can they be seen as
psychologically disturbed. Both women are heterosexual, with good rapport
with friends and sexual partners.

CASE #1

Anna was first seen as a 20-year-old junior in college, living apart

from family. She sought help with a problem of separation from her family,
precipitated by her decision to move with her boyfriend, Peter, to another
city for the summer. Both parents felt Anna's relationship was moving too
fast. Her father advised that Peter's respect would be lost should Anna
"follow" him. Because of Anna's attachment to her religious mother and to
her somewhat flamboyant father, she was deeply upset by the discrepancies
between her view of her situation and that of her parents. The family was
obviously close-knit.
During Anna's childhood the family interacted regularly with other
families employed in the business-publishing pornographic material.
Religious events and holidays brought an extended family together. Despite
the fact that each of the girls had friends in the extended family group, the
398 Luria

two sisters had special bonds because they were close in age and were
surrounded by older brothers and younger male cousins. Each had a peer
group of children of her own age, in which she was well integrated. But in
the family and the extended family group, their gender brought them
together.
Until 4 years before Anna's first interview, the family was involved in
the publication and distribution of pornographic materials. Both parents
and some cousins worked in the business. Anna recounted tales of relaxed
dinner discussion about the pornographic magazines. Every now and then
she saw some magazines. Her father used names that Anna or her older
sister, Janet, invented for titles of new magazines. With some pride, the
father would then show the girls the magazines, printed with the names each
had chosen. Anna recalls that by age 6 (at the latest) she and her sister
regularly visited the warehouse where the books, magazines, and
paraphernalia were housed.
Anna's reaction to the magazines was neutral: "It was just what Dad
did. He sold magazines of naked women." Anna's mother had concerns
about the children viewing the magazines, but no effort was made to keep
the home empty of the pornographic material. None of the children in
Anna's large family saw their father as doing anything wrong. Everyone in
the family, regardless of age or sex, had access to the pornographic
material.
The pornographic material the girls saw was primarily "the girlie
magazines" of the early 1960s, with one woman on a page with exposed
genitalia. The poses recalled were "her hands on her thighs, her behind to
the camera, or lying on top of a bear skin rug with the animal's head tucked
neatly in her groin." Anna, in particular, was conscious of the women's
large nipples.
Neither woman recalls seeing magazines with pictures of men only.
Instead, "Men were in the magazines when coupled with women. Always,
the men were very erect or well on their way to being there. The idea of
intercourse seemed always to be suggested by the close proximity of both
people's genitalia." The magazines contained no transvestism.
Sadomasochism was suggested, but was muted. The girls saw
photographs of men holding whips, but neither woman recalled any case
where the whip hit or had hit the woman photographed. The girls thought
that the woman who was threatened and/or about to be beaten was a maid.
The reason for the children's association appears to be lost to the two
women. The photographed woman's helplessness was transformed by them
into her being of a lower class, subject to a male employer's whim. Only
Anna sought out and read narrative material for arousal. She reported
excitment while looking for pages in the Fanny Hill books that described °'a
Fantasy and Pornography 399

man thrusting hard into a woman and the powerful descriptions o f . . .

orgasm." Anna remembered identifying her own medical problem with
vaginal discharge with the description in the books that "a wet, throbbing
vagina was a pleasure thing." Somehow Anna worked out the idea that "a
woman in p a i n . . , w a s . . , relieved of the pain by the insertion of a penis."
Anna recalls reading such narrative passages over and over again "while my
mother was doing paperwork at the desk next to me."

Sexuality

Anna was an early masturbator. Her sister Janet, 2½ years older,

showed Anna how to masturbate. She liked Janet's "new way to feel good"
and by first grade became a frequent and open masturbator. Persistent
childhood masturbation in school led Anna's kindergarten teacher to insist
that the family consult a pediatrician. Her mother was told by the
d o c t o r - in the child's presence- that masturbation was completely normal,
and never, thereafter, interfered.
Anna masturbated as a child to the magazine fantasies. She recalls her
sister helping her learn how to do this. (Her sister still has no memory of
this.) Anna viewed Janet as someone "who knew just what to do!" This view
of Janet as a "strong woman" who knew what to do persists to this day.
Her peers taught Anna about menses, in part because Anna thought
her mother was embarrassed at questions about sex. Anna had a late
menarche, when she was in ninth grade, well after all her friends. Her
concern about being behind her friends was expressed to her family: "I
drove the family crazy." Finally, when the great event occurred, her father
announced that he would sent a public notice to the New York Times. The
young teenager saw that witticism as a special way her father both
supported and teased her. Anna also had a relatively late first coitus (by the
standards of her high-school peers). She wanted the man to be "the right
man." Also, she said, "I didn't want to be the sleazy woman in the
magazine, but I used her in fantasy and still do in making love. It feels
liberating."
Anna's affection for her parents is now mixed with compassion at
seeing them age. Her father represents to her the sensual and affectionate.
But sexuality also has another side for her: sleazy sex with paraphernalia,
group sex, lesbian sex, and sadomasochism. For Anna, the image of woman
associated with pornography is enormous breasts.
Anna's mother represents "cleanness, purity, monogamy." She is a
balance to the father's flamboyance and represents the emotional base of
the family. For 18 months Anna delayed telling her mother about her first
400 Luria

coital experience and felt that she was "lying" by withholding the
information. In fact, her mother's reaction was supportive. A quotation
from Joni Mitchell was cited by Anna to describe her parents: " M a m m a
knows she spoiled me, Papa made me free."
Anna has had two serious coital partners. Peter, her current partner, is
her first enveloping emotional relationship. The move to a new city with
Peter is viewed by her as fun and independence. It is also an attempt to
develop a sexual relationship and a solid friendship in one. "He's the first
man I want to get to know. I can't love a man I can't be friends with."
Anna consulted a doctor about being orgasmic on only 50% of her
coital opportunities. He congratulated her and suggested she counsel some
of his 40-year-old patients. Peter has expressed concern about Anna being
orgasmic more reliably. In turn, she is pleased at his concern for her and for
their relationship.
A year after the interview summarized above, Anna had loosened her
childhood ties to her family considerably. She could talk about her wish for
freedom from her family. She was living with Peter and was able to talk
about the shaping by her father of her image of males: strong, challenging
to her emotional demands, dominant without requiring the female to be
passive.
Anna views the pornography as having given her an image of the
female as dominant: "It's 'look what I have'; she controls with her huge,
powerful, glorified breasts, because she has what the male wants. He is
always willing to have sex in the magazines. But she sets up the environment
for its expression."
Anna used the visual material from her childhood in most of her
sexual life. In the last year, 4 years after her initial interview with me, she
has ceased to do so, although she can conjure the images up for her current
therapist. She does not seek out new magazines to stoke the imaginary fires.
She is not, nor was she ever, dependent on the images for sexual arousal.
She continues to be turned on by new visual and narrative material, and can
use the material at will to stoke arousal.

CASE #2

Anna's 23-year-old sister, Janet, shared the experience of the family

pornography business. To Janet, as to Anna, it was a business like any
business: "If Bibles sold, my father'd sell Bibles."
Janet was marked by the experience of being an early adolescent
during the few years the family ferried between two homes. Janet, an early
maturer with menarche at 11, found the new school very strange. Despite
Fantasy and Pornography 401

the family business, Janet felt that she had not been exposed to sex as much
as her new junior-high-school and early-high-school age mates had been.
Sex, drugs, orgies, and pills seemed far more evil to her than the
pornography with which she had grown up. Janet views her childhood as
"real good" because her parents were at ease with the children and family
life was always stable.
Janet saw her mother as "a young mother," the sexual liberal in the
family. Her father was stricter, "about a generation behind. Dad never
talked about sex to me." Janet never got the cautionary tales from her
parents that Anna did. Janet put herself on the pill when she was 16 or 17.
Anna never knew this.
Janet had a boyfriend when she was 16 and has had one almost ever
since. She considered marriage in her senior year in college. When she
decided to enter graduate school in science, she refused her lover's offer to
move with her. This moratorium in their relationship was meant to allow
each of them a period of commitment to their differing professional
choices.

Sexuality

Janet recalled visiting her father's warehouse at least once a week

when she was small. Her current impression of the pornographic material
lacks the precision of Anna's memories. The pornographic material seemed
to Janet to be "artificial. People didn't seem real; they had lots o f make up."
She found (and still finds) the more violent magazines offensive.
She has masturbated for "as long as I can remember," from nursery
school age. She thinks this started before exposure to the magazines but is
not sure. She recalls a friend asking Janet's mother, while Janet
masturbated, "Aren't you going to stop her?" Her mother answered, "Only
when she's finished."
Janet has never used fantasy o f any sort during masturbation, which
she enjoys enormously. She masturbates regularly when she is not in a
sexual relationship. Janet does not recall teaching Anna how to masturbate.
She does remember a friend being confused when J a n e t - a t age
6 - m a s t u r b a t e d while they played at the friend's house. Janet explained
quite expertly to her naive girl friends about sex and body parts.
Janet was never (and still is not) turned on by pornography. She sees
current pornography as "tougher" than what she saw as a child. She never
saw a pornographic film, although she could have quite easily. She recalled
her teenage brother falling asleep during a viewing of such a film. Her
reaction to pornographic material was, and still is, "immune." She reasoned
402 Luria

that "Maybe I've seen so much, it can't do anything." She was only once
turned on by pornographic material: the material was in what she called
"the unexpurgated Presidential Report on Pornography," a reference to the
Kemp (1970) illustrated edition of the report.
Janet had one long-term relationship involving strong emotional and
sexual bonds. "I enjoy someone holding me, not just intercourse itself." She
tried a one-night stand out of curiosity, "to prove I could have an orgasm. I
did, but I didn't like it. There was no emotional bond."
The interviews do not make clear why the two women have such dif-
ferent images and memories of their parents. This Rashomon effect may be
based on a number of factors, some mentioned herein; but any explana-
tion would be predominantly surmise, and of uncertain relation to the issue
of this paper.

DISCUSSION

These two cases of an unspecified amount of repeated exposure to

pornographic material in girlhood tell us that some females do incorporate
pornographic visual material into fantasy for use as facultative stimuli to
arousal. Only one of the two females reported here did this, in fact. The
other, like 36% of the female sample in the Kinsey et aI. (1953, p. 667)
report (and 11%o in the male sample), used no visual imagery at all, despite
the exposure to pornography.
Both women saw their parents as important sources of their sexual
values. Anna still wishes to consider their parents as good models. Her sister
views herself as having had an easier time, thanks to what she sees as
closeness with a sexually liberal mother. Janet describes their parents
simply as "models."
Both women have gender-consistent romantic imagery, characteristic
of the female pre- to postadolescent peer group. Perhaps this suggests that
the readiness to incorporate pornographic material into fantasy requires not
only a sizable amount of peer group tutelage but also a framework
including dominance, overcoming, or winning. To come to viewing coitus in
baseball terms may require a lot of investment in winning, and not only at
baseball.
To partial out the variables determining the incorporation of visual
material into sexual fantasy, one would need more cases than we have
presented here. The amount of pornographic exposure may have been
greater in Anna's case than in Janet's, but we cannot even specify the range.
Anna appears to recall more of the childhood events connected with
sexuality, and it is she who has incorporated the pornographic imagery into
Fantasy and Pornography 403

her early adult fantasies. Currently, she has turned to other sources for such
imagery. No image is a necessary prerequisite for arousal for her, however.
In summary, these two cases do not challenge the finding that there is
a sex difference between male and female incorporation of pornographic
material into fantasy. While this sex difference may have endogenous
features, our cases suggest that, at least in part, the difference may be
socially induced. The two women described here had normal, healthy
histories and like many boys, learned to masturbate with gusto and pleasure at
an early age. Like many boys, their exposure to pornography occurred in a
positive social context and did them no observable harm. Nonetheless, both
girls viewed the pornographic material negatively ("sleazy") or, at best,
neutrally ( " I ' m . . . immune"). Unlike boys, neither girls ever sought out
pornographic material, although both know how and where to find it. Even
Anna, who uses sexual imagery, describes it now as a turn-on but not an
obligatory one.
If we assume that the value judgements made ot pornography have
their origins in shared experiences with family and/or peer group, then we
should pose the question, what happens in families and in the gender-
segregated peer groups to foster the sex difference? We see little evidence to
suggest that families foster the use of pornography, but much evidence that
peers do so. Why do boys not view pornography as sleazy and, therefore, to
be avoided? It is probable that many boys do see pornography as sleazy but
do not, therefore, avoid it. Why might this be true? The male peer group,
between nursery school and preadolescence, primes titillation and pleasure
to "dirty" or out-of-bound words. The giggling of boys to four letter words
and words for hidden body parts and functions, the hidden joys of mad lib
games where the bodily, the sexual, and the excretory are joined for
ludicrous effects (such as words mixed together in a fill-in sentence
supposedly on the Constitution of the United States - "The shit was ratified
in Cuntville in 1788") may represent a framework that permits boys to hold
(and to treasure) the forbidden, to invoke the excitement of the forbidden,
to stoke sexual arousal. Girls do not usually have the experience of the
shared gratification of being "bad."
Some attention should be paid to issues of dominance. Explicit in
much pornography is power over women-helpless, weak, and exquisitely
available women. Even the chains on the women appear redundant. If the
male gender curriculum teaches boys to attend to dominance cues and
information, the pornographic literature surely shows men as dominant.
Issues of dominance status are less salient in preadolescent girls' smaller
groups. That does not mean that issues of control are not attended to by
girls; they are probably just less important. It is interesting, though, how
Anna interprets dominance in pornographic material; the female, with
whom she identifies, is in control because the female has what is wanted by
404 Luria

men. P o r n o g r a p h y m a y well be about d o m i n a n c e and submission in

sexuality. A n n a ' s readiness to incorporate the p o r n o g r a p h i c imagery is due
to factors we cannot explain. The same is true for Janet's failure to
incorporate the imagery. But A n n a ' s view o f female d o m i n a n c e in the
p o r n o g r a p h y m a y cue us to attend to the p o r n o g r a p h y viewers' labeling o f
the power in the images they incorporate.
The two w o m e n described here had some exposure to p o r n o g r a p h y .
But their peer g r o u p was a female peer group. Neither w o m a n ever viewed
p o r n o g r a p h y as forbidden. Nonetheless, this minimal, socially supported
exposure tells us that females can incorporate p o r n o g r a p h y into sexual
fantasy; A n n a shows us that. Janet tells us that the i n c o r p o r a t i o n does not
necessarily occur.

REFERENCES

Gagnon, J. (1979). The interaction of gender roles and sexual conduct. In Katchedourian H.
(ed.), Human Sexuality: A Comparative and Developmental Perspective, University
of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 225-245.
Hite, S. (1976). The Hite Report. McMillan, New York.
Kemp. (ed.). (1970). The illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity
and Pornography. Greenleaf Classics, San Diego.
Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B. Martin, C. E., and Gebhard, P. H. (1953). Sexua/Behavior in
theHuman Female. W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia, p. 667.
Money, J., and Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972). Man and Woman: Boy and Girl. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore.