Porn is ruining America, but not for the reasons you might think

Tucker Carlson is upset. Again. This time it’s the Grammys. Tucker claims Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance at the Grammys was “trying to degrade our culture and hurt our children.” Quelle horreur, Tucker. The performance of Cardi B’s song “WAP” was provocative, but I question Tucker’s indignation given we live in a culture that sexualizes everything from hamburgers to breast milk, in which men air drop photos of their genitalia to unsuspecting passengers on trains, buses and planes, female FOX news anchors wear tight-fitting sheath dresses, Christian pastors compliment their “hot” wives from the pulpit, and the former president could brag about sexual assault and still get elected. This is what I call “raunch culture” which I explore in my book, “The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society.”

I date raunch culture to the mid-1990s, a time when the internet became increasingly important in our daily lives, and internet porn influenced media outlets to represent women as not only impossibly beautiful, but also sexy and promiscuous. Thirty years later, we can see raunch culture everywhere in our porn nation — in churches, workplaces, schools, and shopping malls; through our phones to magazines, movies, television, music lyrics, comedy material, and even in politics.

Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are both a mirror of the culture, and a flashpoint of resistance to it for some. In my book, I talk about pornification and race, particularly how the legacy of slavery in which white male owners could legally rape enslaved Black women still influences how people read Black women’s bodies today. In a pornified society, it’s difficult for any female performer to avoid sexualization, given the insistent pressure they experience to be “sexy and hot.” It’s worse for Black women whose bodies are historically and culturally “owned” more often than white ones.

Rather than singling out any one performer to praise or blame, I recommend we focus our attention on the culture. Pornification is complex, and we need better skills and more practice talking about it. Raunch culture matters because it is sexist, not because it is sexy. It sets expectations that women dress provocatively, and appear always “up” for sex while encouraging everyone to sexually objectify women.

Raunch culture also socializes women to focus on how they appear, not on how they feel. In this way, pornification is the performance of sexy, not the experience of it. This is logical given that raunch culture is the offspring of the sex industry, what it looks like when attitudes, behaviors, and accoutrements once exclusively reserved for sex work filter into the mainstream like twerking, fake nails, breast implants, push-up bras, long dyed hair, smoky eye makeup, plump lips, Brazillian waxes, platform stiletto shoes (or “stripper shoes”), pole-dancing classes for exercise, thongs, and hairless bodies. To be like a stripper or porn star is to look hot, and pretend arousal. Actual strippers are reviewing their grocery lists, or figuring out if they have enough money for the electric bill during those lap dances, not feeling turned on.

Pornification takes a woman out of her own body and defines her sexual worthiness through the male gaze. The women I interviewed for my book explained that the heightened body consciousness promoted in raunch culture makes them feel unattractive, unhappy, and unworthy – and this inhibits their experiences of sexual pleasure. In any case, women’s actual sexual pleasure is irrelevant within raunch culture, which instead markets the following sexist narrative: It’s empowering to be a live sex toy for men.

The cycle of blame and outrage media personalities like Tucker Carlson accelerate when they attack celebrities like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion keeps viewers focused on “bad actors” rather than a problematic culture. I suggest that if Tucker really “doesn’t hate” nor want to “degrade” women, perhaps his energy would be better spent addressing the sexualized workplace at FOX news, and its casting couch culture.

Bernadette Barton is a professor of Sociology at Morehead State University and the author of “The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society” and “Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers.”