Breast-Implant Surgery To Please Her Boyfriend, But Decides Against It At The End

Sprawled on my sister's bed, I delivered a play-by-play review of TLC' s hip-hop music video for their top-10 hit, Unpretty: An attractive teen-ager almost risks breast-implant surgery to please her boyfriend, but decides against it at the last moment. Her boyfriend is reading porn at home when she bursts through the door and rips the magazine from his hands.

''Yes!'' cheered my sister, a high school senior, victoriously thrusting up her arm.

TLC speaks for the two of us and for 4 million other fans young women sick of our boyfriends' reading, posting and staring at images of scantily clad women with Kate Moss hips and Pamela Anderson Lee chests.

At college, I can't avoid images of exposed, contorted women. At a party last weekend, a poster of a nearly naked model peered down at me from a dorm-room wall. At an MIT frat house this summer, obscene magazines decorated bathroom stalls.

My male peers aren't just collecting pictures of harmless sex scenes. More than a third of male college students say they look at images of forced sexual acts, says The Journal of Research in Personality.

John Stoltenberg, a founder of Men Against Pornography, added logic to my gut feelings of disgust. When men put up posters of partially naked women, he says, they are ''like dogs peeing to mark their terrain.' ' The posters tell female visitors, ''This is what happens to you here.'' Women, he says, are implicitly being told they are valued for the sum of their body parts, and that this is how they should look: shapely and unclothed.

Viewing porn used to be a clandestine activity; now, men do it openly in the co-ed common rooms of college dorms, making it much harder to ignore. And this is happening even though private viewing of porn is easier than ever. In today's dorm rooms, fitted with high-speed Internet connections, college students are two clicks away from the most hard-core porn available.

''My impression based on anecdote is that college students are consuming hard-core pornography more publicly than they once did,'' says David Allyn, a cultural historian and author of a forthcoming history of the sexual revolution.

Along with less shame, there is easier access. Filtering Facts, an

organization of librarians, found that boys in high school and younger are using public library Internet connections to download violent sexual images.

According to Janet LaRue of the Family Research Council, young teens can be sucked into porn sites serendipitously. Looking for a friendly pen pal? Most results from a ''teens'' Internet search include the words ''dirty'' or ''hot.'' If curious teens enter one of these sites, they can have a hard time leaving; many porn sites are designed to open more Web windows every time one is closed.

In the movie American Pie, it was easy for Jim's father (Eugene Levy) to buy his son obscene magazines and congratulate himself for being a progressive, open-minded parent. He doesn't have to make love to his son. It's young women who have to deal with the damage inflicted by pornography. We have to try to understand why there is a stash of obscene videos under our boyfriends' beds, and somehow try to believe that they don't objectify our bodies in the same way.

As porn becomes more available to our male peers, such pop stars as TLC are standing up for us. In her poem Sunbathing, singer Jewel wrote, ''He thinks/ I cannot sense/ four eyes/ upon my flesh/ as the father tries/ to bond with/ his teen-age boy/ by ogling my breasts.''

Such objectification is familiar to any young woman who has walked down a busy street in a tank top. It's the result of a culture that accepts lewd posters in dorm rooms.

X-rated images aren't the only sources of offense. Skinny women in skimpy bikinis also pour out of cable television, another rampant phenomenon on campus. Finding a woman on MTV without overflowing cleavage and a cinched waist is almost as hard as finding a dry party on a Saturday night.

As Allyn pointed out, young women may be just as offended by these more accepted images as they are by pornography, but the latter is much more easily vilified. In other words, when we play TLC's Unpretty, we probably are also motivated by anger triggered by women's magazines, music videos and Hollywood movies.

Men lose even more than women from pictures of women in submissive or exposed positions. Men who view sexually explicit images have a harder time having healthy relationships, as they are more likely to associate sexuality with pictures than people, psychological studies repeatedly have found. These studies report that men who use pornography are more aggressive toward women, more accepting of rape and more likely to think that women enjoy forced sex. This is not the kind of guy with whom young women want to share a bed or even a meal.

As Alice Walker says of her protagonist in her short story Coming Apart, ''He does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. (They) have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body is alien to him.''

Convincing frat boys that they should get rid of the Playboy in their bathrooms is not an easy task. I failed to get my hallmate to take down his posters. But if young women take Stoltenberg's advice and tell our male intimates how their habit makes us feel, we may have a better chance. Men should take control of their sexuality and stop hurting other people, including themselves. Computer-screen backgrounds should not feature a woman's rear end. Dorm-room posters should be void of women's bare breasts. Like Walker's character at the end of Coming Apart, men can reject posters and magazines and hold real women instead. That would be more satisfying to all parties involved.

Copyright 1999, USA Today, a division of Gannett Co., Inc.

Kimberly Palmer, Male students flaunt pornography, degrading women and themselves. , USA Today, 10-19-1999, pp 17A.