What's Porn Got to Do with It?

by Magdalene Taylor

This essay appears in Issue 4 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Silicon Valley Porn Star: A Memoir of Redemption and Rediscovering the Self

by Jason Portnoy

Honest Climb Media, 222 pp., $15.97

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Most men watch porn. Many will admit to it. Many don’t even consider it something that requires admission at all. 

There are numbers to quantify this: Various studies estimate that between 60 and 98 percent of men consume pornography, depending on who you ask and how you ask them. Women, too, consume plenty, at rates of 30 to 90 percent. Without any figures at all, though, porn’s status as a form of mass-consumed media is readily apparent. Look toward memes, music, television—the language of pornography, whether terms like “MILF” or the PornHub drum beat, have been woven into our cultural fabric. Even the constant discourse over the merits of sex scenes and the rising puritanical reaction against them are marks of porn’s social weight: Porn is so embedded in our lives (whether we view it or not) that some feel as though there is no need for sex elsewhere. 

But even so, we refuse to delve much further into how we got here, and how our own practices play a part. Men may say they watch porn: What kind of porn are they watching? How often are they watching it? Where? And most crucially, how has this viewing shaped their sexuality overall? How has this shaped our culture?

Surely, to have every man answer these questions publicly is not actually what we need, nor should every man feel compelled to dissect their sexual proclivities on the public altar. The point isn’t to further normalize porn, but to confront it. In his memoir Silicon Valley Porn Star, venture capitalist Jason Portnoy positions himself as being willing to do so. Best known for his work with Peter Thiel at Paypal and later Palantir, Portnoy documents how his successful Silicon Valley career and family life were nearly devastated by libidinal excess. “On the outside, his life looked perfect,” the dust jacket summary reads, “but unhealed traumas from his past left him tortured; descending into a dark world of pornography and sex that eventually pushed him to the edge.” 

Silicon Valley Porn Star is a road to redemption memoir tracing the sex and porn addiction of Jason Portnoy. He begins with vague early childhood traumas, discovering porn in college, and meeting his wife. He finds career success almost immediately with Paypal, but quickly escalates his porn consumption as his stress relief of choice. Eventually, porn isn’t enough, and he turns to sugar baby apps and various affairs, too. The only thing that makes any of this interesting is his high status, a spare few juicy details, and the sense that Portnoy may at some point lose it all. Portnoy is an honest, clear-voiced writer, offering a highly approachable tone. But clouding the memoir is the sense that we’re never quite getting the full story. 

In Silicon Valley Porn Star, porn—something entirely worthy of critique—becomes a scapegoat. Portnoy points to porn as much of the inspiration behind his misdeeds, yet offers no analysis of how this came to be. The finer details of this so-called “dark world” are left to the imagination. He does confront the most deceitful, contemptible moments of his life: He describes the feeling of his jaw unclenching, his shoulders relaxing, as he leaves his condo where his wife and parents care for their days-old newborn daughter—while he, under the guise of retrieving some papers from his office, visits an escort at a hotel. He discusses being blackmailed after a hookup with the receptionist at his gym, sabotaging a period of otherwise “good” behavior under his wife and life coach’s eyes. For Portnoy to blame these actions on porn is to relieve himself of responsibility for his own flimsy character. And to be sure, porn certainly is partially to blame, but without much hard scrutiny of how exactly this works, he lets both himself and porn off easy.

In the midst of his most reckless behavior, Portnoy views himself as two different people: the well-to-do, family-man venture capitalist and the risk-addicted, porn-watching adulterer. Yet he does seem to understand that these two roles  aren’t entirely distinct. Portnoy’s first introduction to porn was accessed via dial-up internet, when he was a college freshman in the late ’90s. It’s practically quaint to consider. He describes doing some late-night browsing, stumbling upon a picture of a woman performing a blowjob. “Even though I haven’t been around porn, I think I know what guy code says about it,” he says of his thought process at the time. “Every guy looks at it, but it is not okay to be seen looking at it. . . . Porn is just something guys do. Men are supposed to make money, drive sports cars, have beautiful women, and look at porn. Everyone knows that, right?” By 2007, he’s a habitual viewer, sometimes watching porn and masturbating several times a day as a means of coping with his stressful career. His wife, whom he met in college, sees porn consumption as “weird” and akin to cheating. And so, it becomes an even more private practice. Despite the belief that watching porn is “just something guys do,” Portnoy divides his sexuality much in the same way he divides his understanding of himself. 

Absent from the book is any true characterization of either of these forms. What exactly does this porn-centric sexuality look like? What even is porn? Can we place dirty magazines, ’90s late night HBO, Pompeiian frescos, OnlyFans, and the MindGeek empire into the same group? Even on PornHub alone, it seems like a mistake to identify two neighboring categories—“Romantic” and “Rough Sex”—as functionally the same thing. Within them there is surely overlap, but “Mutual Masturbation And Sensual Sex During A Morning Rain” and “NO MERCY PAINAL | Destroying A Tight Teens Asshole Whilst She Cries” are about as different as When Harry Met Sally and SAW IV. 

Portnoy, notably, does not elaborate at all upon what type of porn he was watching. There is no reason to assume it was anything but the vanilla stuff. It would, however, have been illuminating—and more compelling—had he taken his introspection further. Tell us, Portnoy, what type of videos is it you liked to watch? Did your tastes grow more intense as the habit continued? Did you find it increasingly difficult to find content that got you off? Confronting the specifics of his addiction are, as Portnoy says in the book, critical to his own recovery. He tells his life coach about it, and later his wife. “She even asks what kind of porn I look at, which I share, albeit sheepishly,” he says as he recalls the admission. “These are some of my most intimate secrets.” 

The subtext to Portnoy’s narrative is that porn is a problem because of what it does to a person’s desires—particularly what it does to young men with their still-developing sexualities. But without allowing the reader to dig into how Portnoy himself addresses his own desires, we are left with the flat assertion that “porn is bad,” without any discussion as to why.

What’s bad about porn isn’t that wives consider it cheating, or that it’s some dirty private activity. What’s bad about porn is that porn today, the kind that enraptures people into addiction, isn’t just images of a woman performing a blowjob downloaded at 25mbps. It’s an entire culture. It is a bottomless well of progressive degeneration. It is an instrument that dictates sexuality at the expense of eroticism. This porn is something different than the kind Andrea Dworkin lambasted and Camille Paglia celebrated. It’s different from even the raunchiest pages of Penthouse. And still, Portnoy leaves that undefined. 

Nevertheless, he does manage to work himself out of whatever depths he’d fallen to. Most important to his recovery is a “life coach,” with whom his wife also works. The trio take on a dictum of agonizing honesty, and his sex and porn addiction becomes yet another thing to be optimized away. In a March, 2023 blog post, Portnoy shared that the publication of his memoir has led to him receiving dozens of emails from similarly addicted people. To them, he offers some advice: He recommends finding a life coach, finding a form of group therapy like Sexaholics Anonymous, “self care,” and study through books and TED Talks. He even recommends avoiding red meat as a food that revs up his sexual impulses. And really, what else is a person to do? The individual can’t mend the culture of porn, but one can read self-help books and listen to vaguely inspiring lectures and maybe, if one is really lucky, find a community of people with similar ambitions. 

The culture of porn is, of course, not a topic that Portnoy alone is responsible for tackling. But gosh, would it have been more interesting if he had—particularly through the Silicon Valley lens he himself promotes. He’s quicker instead to frame his relationship with sex and porn as one of masculine ambition, to argue that the issue is that we’ve told men to have certain lofty aspirations, which require that men have an outlet. Portnoy would prefer to apologize for being a man who strives for wealth, its markers, and its vices, rather than dig too deeply into how sex and porn are their own cultural forces. 

Because isn’t it, in fact, normal for men to want to make money, drive nice cars, have beautiful women, and watch porn? In theory, simply to desire these things ought to be okay. There isn’t a crisis of masculinity in having aspirations and a sex drive—there’s a crisis in not. And while Portnoy misidentifies the nature of this crisis, he is accurate in naming porn as one of its sources. Portnoy presents himself as the poster boy for what our sexual culture does to a person, but he’s more likely an outlier. By the end of the book, he remains married, wealthy and successful. The real poster child of our sexual culture is more likely someone who struggles to achieve normalcy in their domestic life at all: Pick any of the third of young men who haven’t had sex at all in the last year, for example. Porn is not the only culprit in this phenomenon. There are broader economic, cultural and social forces at play. These forces, though, are best defined by what they lack. We are in a moment where many feel there are no economic prospects, there is no culture, and there are no social bonds. In this void, however, there is still porn.