Sexual fantasy and pornography: two cases of girls brought up with pornography.

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%) than men (11%) do not make any use of 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 of 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 of 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 of the two gender curricula--what boys learn from other boys and girls from other girls--are discussed.