Free Porn, gift or curse?

 

One of my all time favorite shows is Friends. While this show finished filming years ago (yes I cried during the final episode) the late night re-runs have brought it back to the forefront of my life, providing me with plenty of laughs after a long day. For people unfamiliar with the show it is essentially about six adults living in New York who are all, yes you guessed it, friends. The clip below is from episode 17 in season 4. In the episode Joey and Chandler realize they have free television access to porn. As the episode progresses the men refuse to turn off the porn for fear that they will never get it back. Rachel and Monica become annoyed by the boys’ refusal to turn it off. In the end of the episode Chandler and Joey realize that the amount of porn they have been watching has provided them with unrealistic expectations of reality and decide to turn it off, only to turn it back on with accompanied audience laughter as the credits begin to roll.

 clips of episode

Although this show is one of my all time favorites and I have come to consider these characters my own friends (yes the media affects me!) I must say that this episode left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth. Chandler and Joey’s glee at discovering free porn and insistence to keep it turned on seems to promote the idea that women are objects for men to drool at. Furthermore, Monica and Rachel simply adopt an eye-rolling, ‘boys will be boys’ attitude that further aggravated me. Bader (2007) mentioned that listeners often project their own personal thoughts and values into their perception and meaning of a song (p. 156). So maybe I’m wrong and simply projecting my own misconstrued interpretation of this episode, but this seems to be sending a clear message that sex is expected to drive men in an almost unmanageable and obsessive way while women are completely in control of their sexual drives and perhaps much less enticed by sex. The episode seems to be highlighting a clear contrast between males’ and females’ relationship to sex. To exemplify my point, later in the episode when the girls ask why they can’t just turn off the porn, Chandler exclaims, “then we would be the guys who turned off free porn!” Joey adds, “I’m going to have a kid some day, and some day that kid is going to ask me if I ever turned off free porn, I don’t want to have to tell him that I did.” Again, feel free to disagree, but I felt that this interaction was hammering home the idea that watching porn is a masculine quality. So much so that Chandler and Joey refuse to turn off the porn for fear of being mocked and identified as “the guys who turned off free porn.” This seems to be a dangerous message to send that emphasizes the masculine stereotype of loving porn to quench the male’s constant thirst for sex as well as the important need to live up to these stereotypes.

Another aspect of this episode I found particularly interesting was Chandler and Joey’s realization that their excessive porn watching was affecting their expectations and understanding of reality. When Chandler enters the apartment he greets Joey with, “I was just at the bank and there was this really hot teller and she didn’t ask me to go do it with her in the vault.” Joey responds with, “same kinda thing happened to me! Woman pizza delivery guy comes over gives me pizza takes the money and leaves!” Both men seem to be completely confused and caught off guard that the women in reality weren’t (gasp!) offering to have sex with them. Common themes among the studies we have read in class discuss the powerful effect the media can have on audience members. L. Monique Ward (2003) cited research that found that viewers often draw expectations about sexual encounters in the real world from fictional content (p. 369). The research also found that increased frequency and more involved viewers are more likely to develop expectations that sex is more prevalent (Ward, 2003, p. 368). In this episode the show is exemplifying the profound effect of excessive exposure to porn for these characters. They have clearly been affected by their non-stop exposure to porn to the point where they are actually surprised that the attractive female strangers they come across aren’t inviting them into their beds.

Although Joey and Chandler acknowledge the problematic nature of their excessive porn viewing and decide to turn off the television, the episode ultimately concludes with them turning the television back on. So, while the episode does recognize the danger in excessive porn exposure it seems to send the message that viewing the porn is worth the resulting consequences. While Friends is by no means an educational program and I think experienced such enormous success simply because of its entertainment value, as our readings and discussions have taught us, the messages television shows send regardless of the genre should not be overlooked.