Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  Vagelis – your solidarity, humour, courage, wise and kind advice, help with research, and inspiring political passion through difficult times, helped me stand when the knees of my soul were cut. This book is for you, comrade.

  Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray1

  Introduction: Unmasking a Global Industry

  We live in a world that is increasingly shaped by pornography. The signs are everywhere:

  • A urinal at the Clock Hotel on the Gold Coast in Queensland, shaped as a woman’s mouth with huge painted red lips.

  • A music video by Kanye West featuring semi-naked women’s corpses hanging from chains, with West holding the head of a decapitated woman in scenes of eroticised carnage.2

  • Ejaculation-themed images in advertising for face cream and alcohol.3

  • Porn-inspired t-shirts depicting women naked, bound and blood spattered, sold in youth fashion stores.4

  • A ‘Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society’ Facebook page set up in honour of the sister and bridesmaid of Kate Middleton, attracting over 200,000 members. Men describe what they want to do to the 29-year-old: knock her up, bash her ‘back doors’ in, cause her injury such that she would need ‘straw and a wheelchair’.5

  • A Facebook page dedicated to the facial cum shot titled ‘Smile or it’s going in your eye’ (“make sure every girl gets the message!”) had almost 12,000 members.6

  • In the children’s holiday movie Hop, the cartoon teenage boy-bunny asks Hugh Hefner about spending the night at the Playboy mansion.7 It’s where all the sexy bunnies stay, replies the pornography mogul through the mansion’s intercom.

  Big Porn Inc documents the proliferation and normalisation of pornography, the way it has become a global industry and a global ideology, and how it is shaping our world and the harm this causes. The global pornography industry is expected to reach US$100 billion in the near future.8 In 2009, the UN estimated that the global child pornography industry made a profit of up to $20 billion (M’jid Maalla, 2009). Pornography money is buying governments, academic research, national and international corporations and law enforcement agencies.

  This largely unregulated pornography industry has colonised private and public spaces at a rate that presents significant challenges to women’s and children’s rights. The mainstreaming of pornography is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life, popularising new forms of anti-women attitudes and behaviours and contributing to the sexualisation of children. The pornification of culture is leading to a form of hypersexism that entails an increase in physical, sexual, mental, economic and emotional cruelty towards women and children. This radical cultural shift is shaping the way we understand ourselves and others, both personally and politically.

  Big Porn Inc demonstrates why a comprehensive and uncompromising intervention – first to expose, and second to rein in – is needed to challenge the global pornography industry. Drawing on empirical, legal, political, ethical, and philosophical arguments, this collection presents the work of leading international experts and activists who are combating the toxic industries and cultures of Big Porn.

  Our book provides a powerful challenge to libertarian conceits that pornography is simply about pleasure, self-empowerment and freedom of choice. Challenges to the pornography industry that call attention to evidence of harm and the destruction of human dignity and rights are frequently derided as ‘moral panics’, a term designed to silence and humiliate political critics who threaten vested financial, political and ideological interests. Those who use the term ‘moral panic’ as an insult set up a reactionary conflict between ‘wowser’ types who have issues with ‘sex’ as against the more relaxed fun-loving sexual sophisticates. But challenging the sexist and racist pornographic industrialisation of intimacy is not an anti-sex position. Pornography is a distortion of respect-based sexuality.

  The real picture

  As we worked on Big Porn Inc, it was difficult to be confronted with hardcore violence on a daily basis. In 1980, Andrea Dworkin wrote: “The visceral experience of a hatred of women [in pornography] that literally knows no bounds has put me beyond anger and beyond tears; I can only speak to you from grief (p. 287).” She continued: “And how can it go on like this, senseless, entirely brutal, inane, day after day and year after year, these images and ideas and values pouring out, packaged, bought and sold, promoted, enduring on and on, and no one stops it” (1980, p. 290).

  We found ourselves relating to Andrea Dworkin’s words many times as we put this book together. We had to negotiate our own distress, but we also discovered that speaking out in opposition to pornography brings a deluge of online bile and e-hate (Jackman, 2011). Ironically, defenders of pornography who claim to be in favour of freedom of speech often engage in answering critiques of the pornography industry with personal attacks.

  As we discussed what we wanted to include in Big Porn Inc, we questioned whether it was ethically appropriate to publish some of the content. The chapters on child-rape and ‘incest’-themed pornography were especially disturbing. Other opponents of pornography have faced a similar dilemma. For example, Robert Wosnitzer and Chyng Sun (a contributor to this volume), included disturbing images in their film, The Price of Pleasure. Wosnitzer (n.d.) justified their use in this way:

  To not include these images would have distorted the reality of what is being actively consumed by viewers – a distorted version of reality that, interestingly, benefits the porn industry, enabling the industry to continue to construct an image of pornography that is harmless, sexual representations of consensual sexual activity, and masks the ideological world that pornography depicts.

  We share this rationale in deciding to include descriptions and written representations of pornography and harm here.9

  We also wanted to correct the pornography industry’s distorted version of reality by clearly saying: Here is why you shouldn’t believe the myths about pornography being simply ‘naughty pictures’ and ‘sex between consenting adults’. Here is how pornography creates and shapes appetites and demands. Here is how it operates to acclimatise and condition boys and men to demand the ‘Porn Star Experience’ from women and girls. Here is how men and boys have come to see the ‘money shot’ on a woman’s face as the climax to sex. Here is how boys develop a sexual taste for coercion. Here is how they learn predatory sexual attitudes. Here are some possible factors contributing to sex crimes committed by younger men (Malamuth and Pitpitan, 2007, p. 139; see also Nakasatomi, this volume).10 Here is how men are socialised into eroticising and sexualising children through Pseudo Child Pornography (Dines, 2010). Here is why demand for child sexual assault images – including of babies – is increasing.11 Here is how women have been turned into ‘human toilet bowls’. Here is how pornography and torture often look the same (see Dines 2010; and Kendall, Masson, Hawthorne, Farley, this volume).12 As Rebecca Whisnant observed: “In today’s mainstream pornography, aggression against women is the rule rather than the exception … hostile, aggressive content is so prevalent in contemporary pornography that it would be hard for a regular consumer to avoid it” (2007, p. 115).

  In Big Porn Inc we illustrate Whisnant’s claim.

  Pornography’s training ground

  We also wanted to explore how sex industry themes and messages have come to infiltrate the world of girls and boys. In toys and games, clothing, music videos, in the billboards wallpapering their daily lives, children are growing up in the shadow cast by pornography (see Hamilton, this volume). The globalisation of sexual imagery means that children become “valid participants in a public culture of sex” (Durham, 2008, p. 115). Little girls read in girls’ magazines where American pop singer Lady Gaga will be appearing next. When they go, they see her perform simulated sex acts on stage. Children’s cartoon characters are appropriated and turned into porn sites.

  Children and young people are exposed to pornography at increasingly early ages. Pornography has become a global sex education handbook fo
r many boys, with an estimated 70% of boys in Australia having seen pornography by the age of 12, and 100% by the age of 15 (Sauers, in Scobie 2007; see also Bryant, 2009).13 In Michael Flood’s study of 16 and 17-year-old teenagers in Australia, 73% of boys had watched an X-rated video, with 1 in 20 watching on a weekly basis, and more than 1 in 5 watching at least once a month (Flood, 2010, p. 165). Girls are also exposed to pornographic images; Joan Sauers found that 53.5% of Australian girls aged 12 and under have seen pornography, with the figure rising to 97% by the age of 16 (2007, p. 80).

  Michael Flood describes the potential harms to young people of these patterns of pornography use:

  What are the effects of showing sexual violence without negative consequences? … [I]t is possible that such depictions result in beliefs that people like to be slapped or insulted during sex; that double penetrations and gagging are erotic, and that treating a partner as a sexual object is arousing … [Y]outh may expect that these behaviours should feel erotic and arousing and, if they hurt, may choose to ignore that or avoid saying something to a partner, for fear of being seen as prudish or inexperienced (2010, p. 47).

  Gail Dines (2011) similarly notes the impact of pornography use on a boy’s developing sexuality:

  Porn is actually being encoded into a boy’s sexual identity so that an authentic sexuality – one that develops organically out of life experiences, one’s peer group, personality traits, family and community affiliations – is replaced by a generic porn sexuality limited in creativity and lacking any sense of love, respect or connection to another human being.

  Children are being transformed into living advertisements for the global pornography industry. Branded by Playboy and other sexed-up corporations, they are taught that consumer obedience is a form of rebellion, and that the only authority worth following and imitating is the very corporate culture that creates and feeds off their hopes, fears and desires while repackaging their feelings as hypersexualised consumer products (see also Quart, 2004). We should oppose this industrialisation of children’s bodies and minds by a pornified corporate culture just as we continue to campaign against the exploitation of children everywhere, whether in the mines and chimneys of yesteryear or the sweatshops, carpet factories and garbage heaps of today.

  For many girls, naming and expressing emotional or physical pain is the new taboo because it transgresses the fake porn script of the continually up-for-it girl who takes it with a smile. The message is that men and boys must be able to get sexual release whenever they need to, and that women should accept men’s need for porn.

  A 20-year-old university student expresses her misgivings on an Australian blog, but makes herself accept that even though she has sex with her boyfriend 5–7 times a week, she just cannot meet his ‘needs’:

  I found some porn on my bf’s laptop a while ago and i hit the roof….i spoke to girl and guy friends about whether i overeacted and every guy i spoke to said that i had and that is normal and i would never find a guy who doesnt do it, where as all the girls agreed with me and said since he has a girlfriend and we have a very active sex-life then he shouldnt need to. I felt like if i was serving his needs and he was still watchn porn then obviously i wasnt enough or good enough….all the girls i discussed this with said this was the same reason they hated their boyfriends watchn porn.

  I spoke to my boyfriend about it and he explained that while he thought we had a great sex life (usually 5-7times a week) he had a pretty high sex-drive and still wants it more but doesnt want to pressure me when im not in the mood/busy/whatever so uses porn to masterbate with instead…So while still dont really like it, i understand that my sex drive is not on par with his and i guess unless im willing to do it whenever he gets the urge (which he says he would always prefer to watchn porn) then i cant really object to him watchn porn.14

  Many women express their dissatisfaction with damaged relationships that are blighted by the pornography use of their partners.15 Michael Flood summarises the research on this aspect:

  In a US study, one quarter of women saw their partner’s pornography use as a kind of affair, one-third felt that it had had negative effects on their sexual lives and relationships, and over one-third agreed that they felt less attractive and desirable and more like a sexual object. Other studies find that partners of adult pornography users report decreased sexual intimacy, lowered esteem and demands that they participate in activities they find objectionable (2010, p. 172).

  Women as sex robots: artificial and living dolls

  Pornography is producing a more de-personalised, alienated and transactional sexuality. Sex doesn’t even have to involve an actual person. The film Hardcore Porn Profits shows a man who develops an artificial vagina for men to feel and put their hands into while watching a woman performing sex acts.16 “Always turned on and ready to talk and play”, Roxxxy is “a life-size robotic girlfriend,” complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin. The doll’s creator, Douglas Hines, says: “She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean.”17 Roxxxy is programmed to say “I love it in the arse!”18 This bizarre trend is connected to a broader pornographic cultural logic that views women as things, objects, holes, as ‘living dolls’.

  Of course our main concern is with flesh-and-blood women providing the raw material for the pornography industry. The pro-pornography assumption that the production of pornography does not harm women, or that it is merely their ‘choice’ if they are harmed, is as callous as the indifference to the rapid rise of women’s sexual degradation within new pornography cultures.

  The lived experience of pornography actors is the human face of research showing that physical and verbal aggression is “the norm rather than the exception in popular pornographic film” as noted by Ana J. Bridges (2010, p. 46). Bridges completed a content analysis of best-selling and best-renting pornographic videos available by catalogue in the USA, and found that

  [p]hysical aggression occurred in 88 per cent of scenes … Across all acts of aggression – both physical and verbal – 94 per cent were directed towards women … When aggressed against, 95 per cent of targets responded with either expressions of pleasure (encouragement, sexual moans, and so forth) or neutrally (e.g. no change in facial expression or interruption of actions) (Bridges 2010, p. 46; see also Sun, this volume).

  An insight into the abuse and violence visited on porn performers is graphically depicted in the photo documentary account ‘They shoot porn stars don’t they?’ by Susannah Breslin (2009). She describes how a woman, pulled into the porn industry to support her children, is subjected to verbal abuse and torture:

  He threatens to beat her, threatens to torture her, pulls up her shirt, pulls up her skirt, hits her breasts, hits her thighs, throttles her by the neck with both hands, humiliates her, degrades her, makes her cry, chokes her until she is gasping for air. He gets her to tell the camera she is 27 years old and the only reason she’s here doing this particular job on this particularly day in this particular hotel room in the Valley is for the money, and the fact of the matter is she has two young children to support, of whom the man asks rhetorically, and seemingly for the sole purpose of screwing with her head, ‘They’re going to grow up to be proud of you, right?’

  The woman is becoming unmoored. He orders her on her hands and knees, and begins beating her with a leather strap that cracks! across the bared skin of her backside every time he hits her, leaving angry pink welts, until, finally, in a futile attempt to protect herself, the woman reaches her arm around herself, her hand turned upwards, her palm facing outwards, and the man stops … ‘To steal a Quentin Tarantino line,’ he muses, mockingly, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’

  We give space in this book to the experience of girls and women used to make pornography and how their suffering doesn’t end because their images are circulated for eternity (see Pringle, and Amy’s Victim Impact Statement, this volume). As Amy, whose sexual abuse is kno
wn as the ‘Misty Series’ of child pornography images, writes: “I did not choose to be there, but now I am there forever in pictures that people are using to do sick things.”

  An industry unregulated and uncontrolled

  Compounding the abuse so often involved in the making of pornography is a lack of regulation of the industry in all its forms. The shelves of corner stores and petrol stations are stacked with pornography promoting sex with ‘live young girls’, rape and incest, while pornography distributors continually flout Australia’s classification laws (see Tankard Reist, 2008). Abigail Bray has described an Internet site called Passed Out Pussy which incites crimes of violence against women and girls, and endorses rape, torture and hatred upon the bodies of young women (Bray, 2009). Other sites revel in the torture and enslavement of women.

  For example, Ken Franzblau has written about photos on the ‘Slavefarm’ site: “These are pictures of naked women bound, gagged, chained, in a stock, and drinking from a dog’s dish. If there is a distinction between pornography and torture, it’s not detectable from these pictures” (2007, p. 262). There are sections on the site for auctions and rentals where you can sell, rent and purchase women, as ‘Female Slaves for Sale’. These representations of women and the hatred expressed in them are reminiscent of propaganda for the 19th century slave trade (see Hawthorne, this volume).

  However, against this background, attempts to bring Internet content into line with existing classification laws and the treatment of illegal material in Australia have met with virulent objection by vested interests. Requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter out a blacklist of URLs containing extreme and violent pornography has been proposed by the current (Labor) Government. This material can be legally viewed in no other medium. As Australian author and Professor of Public Ethics, Clive Hamilton, has argued: