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

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  We live in a democracy where citizens ask their governments to impose restrictions on certain types of content that are regarded as harmful to individuals or to the community more broadly. We have a censorship system governing films, television and magazines, defined by law, enforced by government bodies and with widespread community support. There is nothing special about the Internet that puts it beyond community standards (Hamilton, 2009).

  But those who demand a right to view ‘legal and illegal’ pornography protested against the filtering proposal. In February, 2010, Australia’s Parliament House and Federal Government Websites were shut down in a cyber-attack and inboxes of members of parliament were flooded with pornography (Davis, 2010). This sense of entitlement to ‘our pornography’ entails defending the ‘right’ of the pornography industry to market child rape, violation of women and girls, and female slavery to anonymous consumers, all in the name of freedom of speech. If we consider this ethically acceptable, whose rights are we defending?

  The Swedish scholar, Max Waltman, has analysed the shielding of these kinds of abuses behind the screen of ‘free speech’. He details numerous cases where law makers, judges, and other arbiters dismiss claims against even some of the most violent pornography, or where those in breach of various laws in various countries are only given ‘penalties’, such as community service.

  Waltman responds to the common refrain of pornography defenders to ‘avert your eyes’ or to ‘turn it off’ if you are offended by it. He points out that such a response assumes that the harm of a pornographic world is no more than ‘offensive’ to the observer:

  Closing your eyes will not prevent women from being raped, battered, or tortured by intimate partners being inspired and impelled by pornography though. Nor will it help adolescent girls forced out on streets, coerced into imitating pornography upon thousands of clients’ requests, to escape the sexual abuse. Defining harm as an offence to observers silences and denies these women their rights (Waltman, 2009, p.12).

  Like Waltman, our primary concern with pornography is not that it is offensive (although it often is), but that it is subordination and degradation – mostly of women. It is a human rights issue.

  ‘Capturing Men in a Wide Net’

  The global pornography industry shows little concern for subordination, degradation or human rights violations; indeed powerful elements in the industry market the violation of human rights. Meanwhile Big Porn continues to devise new ways of catching men in a global and very sticky web. In her chapter ‘To catch a curious clicker’, Jennifer A. Johnson describes how the online porn industry captures men in a vast web:

  Upon his arrival, he is entangled in a series of click manoeuvres and marketing gimmicks calculated to further reduce his agency and transform him from the ‘curious clicker’ into the ‘member clicker’ (p. 148) … men are drawn into the online commercial pornography network, where they find themselves enmeshed in a well constructed set of relationships designed to extract maximum profits through the circumscription of consumer choice. The structure of the network is designed to prevent ‘leavers’ … by restricting and/or obfuscating (male) consumer choice (2010, p. 153).

  It is remarkable that civil libertarians can see this level of manipulation into industrialised sex as something for freedom-loving people to celebrate.

  Nothing radical about mass market masturbation

  People on the ‘Left’ have opposed ‘Big Pharma’ and more recently ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Society’, but many seem to fall silent in the face of ‘Big Porn’ and its predatory profit-driven practices.19 Long-time US anti-porn campaigner, Nikki Craft, takes ‘progressive’ anti-globalisation campaigners to task for ignoring the global profit machine of Big Porn.20 There is, however, nothing to be celebrated in the dehumanising global commodification of women in pornography. There is nothing revolutionary about mass-marketed masturbation. Radical big-picture thinking requires that we connect the global pornography industry to other social justice issues, in order to acknowledge the lack of justice in the reduction of human beings to objects of exchange.

  Pornography today presents elements of every kind of barbarism imaginable – from overt fascist celebrations of racial hatred, to the killing of animals for sexual entertainment. And yet, for many people it still passes as ‘cool’, as just a bit of fun, as sexual ‘lulz’, something to emulate and celebrate. In the brave new world of pornochic, ethical boundaries are for wowsers and bores.

  Contributors to Big Porn Inc

  Our contributors are from diverse backgrounds and countries, with a range of views on social and ethical issues. But they are in broad agreement on the harms of pornography. We have divided Big Porn Inc into 5 Parts: Pornography Cultures, Pornography Industries, Harming Children, Pornography and the State, and lastly, a section on global activism, Resisting Big Porn Inc.21 Each Part opens with extracts from personal accounts shared with us during the writing of this book (and some sourced online) so that we remember that real people suffer real harm through pornography.

  We begin the book with a personal reflection by Caroline (a pseudonym) who remembers the impact that finding her partner’s pornography had on their relationship. She captures the ordinariness and the normalisation of pornography in women’s lives as she states: “I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket queue.” In Part 2, Stella (a pseudonym) describes the destructive impact of dancing in a strip club and her grief that continues 12 years later. In Part 3, ‘Amy’ writes of how the abuse of pornography is re-experienced over and over. All 3 women voice the profound sense of loss, shame and humiliation they experienced in reflecting on how pornography touched their lives. But they also give voice to the courage to expose what happened to them – for the sake of others.

  These contributions illustrate how pornography has become integrated into our cultural norms. In Part 1, Pornography Cultures, Gail Dines argues that Pseudo Child Pornography, in which girls over the age of 18 are represented as children, normalises and eroticises child abuse. Dines believes that this form of sexualisation weakens the norms that define children as off-limits to sexual use by men. Catharine A. MacKinnon writes about living in a world made by pornographers, and explores the many ways in which pornography has colonised our world, such that “[t]he cultural politics of pornography become normalised to the point of invisibility.” Maggie Hamilton focuses on how sexualised marketing targets children so they see pornography as a consumer good. Hamilton offers a passionate analysis of the ways in which children are sexually groomed, and in which childhood itself is controlled and defined by corporations.

  Robert Jensen identifies rape culture and pornography as forms of propaganda by which the powerless are kept in line. He points out that pornography is not only sexist, but that it is also the most openly racist form of mass media today. Nina Funnell looks at how communication technologies, sexting and peer-to-peer porn affect the intimate lives of teenagers, especially how technology has multiplied the ways in which they are humiliated and abused. Diane L. Rosenfeld offers insights into an emerging extreme culture of pornography-inspired sexism on North American college campuses. She concludes that a ‘pimp and ho’ culture is glorified on campuses as exciting and desirable, creating a backdrop to sexual negotiations among college students.

  Women bear the brunt of pornography culture, but men are not immune to its objectification and dehumanisation. In his chapter on the harms of gay male pornography, Christopher N. Kendall argues that sexual subordination is enforced through extreme forms of torture and violence which celebrate a masculinity founded on the abuse of vulnerable others – often feminised – in the name of sexual pleasure. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson takes on pornography and animals, exploring the academic and aesthetic condoning of women engaging in bestiality in the name of a ‘post-feminist’ self-empowerment.

  Research on effects on consumers is critical to our understanding of how society is affected by pornography. Robi Sonderegger’s chapter analyses the ways in which
pornography grooms consumers into accepting the eroticisation of inequality. A number of industries have taken up the new business opportunities provided by pornography. Meagan Tyler examines how pornsex is legitimised through the industry of sex therapy and how its presentation as sexual authority threatens women’s equality. Renate Klein looks at the ideological and business links between Big Porn and Big Pharma, specifically the harms created by pornsex and reproporn. Klein calls for a future which is not a plastic ‘porn-and-pill saturated world’ where medicalisation rules, but a world full of possibilities for a creative and just life for all.

  Susan Hawthorne’s chapter on lynching and torture opens Part 2, Pornography Industries. Hawthorne connects pornography to broader structures of global inequality, and identifies how porn culture feeds off the torture of people living under repressive regimes. Hawthorne also critiques ‘lesbian’ pornography while co-editor, Abigail Bray, explores how ‘post-feminist’ sex shops appropriate feminist rhetoric about sexual liberation and empowerment in order to promote and sell sex industry products. In an examination of The Porn Report, Helen Pringle provides an incisive discussion of the growing business of academic defences of pornography, and the striking indifference to harm on which they rest. Co-editor, Melinda Tankard Reist, investigates the marketing of pornography in her chapter on the Sexpo trade fair, which describes the open racism and misogyny promoted at such events.

  Sheila Jeffreys, Stella and Melissa Farley articulate the ways in which prostitution, strip clubs and pornography intersect. Jeffreys argues that pornography and strip clubs overlap in ownership and customers, with the clubs acting as ‘free billboards’ for pornography. Stella offers a heart-breaking account of her life in the sex industry and provides an insight into the brutal assault of this industry on minds and bodies: “I left with my self-esteem in shreds, my pockets empty, my body damaged.” Melissa Farley argues that pornography is infinite prostitution, with similar kinds of violence in each, even involving acts that international conventions define as torture, a crime against humanity.

  Abigail Bray refers to the Internet as a ‘porn factory’, and argues that women working in pornography are not only exploited, but that images of their prostituted bodies often continue to be exchanged on the Internet after they have died, such that pornography becomes the ‘prostitution of the dead’. Hiroshi Nakasatomi from Japan shows how the pornification of the computer gaming industry is exemplified by the simulation of rape in the game of Rapelay in which women are gang-raped and beg to be abused by their rapists. The final contribution in Part 2 is by Chyng Sun who traces the making of her documentary film, The Price of Pleasure. She offers an understanding based on 7 years of rigorous research and concludes that pornography has become much more violent and hence disturbing in its implications for sexual equality.

  Part 3 focuses on child pornography and its growing availability. Diana E.H. Russell summarises her decades-long work to show how child pornography is linked to, and part of, the sexual abuse of children. Russell argues that child pornography works to undermine inhibitions against cruelty and violence to children, just as the training of soldiers for war breaks down inhibitions against doing harm to others. S. Caroline Taylor examines intra-familial rape and shows how the popular ‘incest’ genre of pornography promotes the sexual assault of children by family members in the home, where most child abuse takes place. Caroline Norma presents a compelling analysis of the links between pornography and child sexual assault, based on records of criminal cases that show how pornography is used in child sexual assault.

  Helen Pringle’s chapter on restitution for victims of child pornography discusses some groundbreaking legal approaches in the USA which represent the emergence of a ‘civil rights’ approach to child pornography, perhaps able to be used in other countries to address the global trade in abuse. Amy’s Victim Impact Statement is an account of the social, emotional and psychological harms sustained by a victim of child pornography. Amy’s account indicates that pornography use is not just a form of voyeurism on an already-committed harm, but itself a crime scene of harm to children.

  Part 4 is concerned with how governments and other state actors contribute to, support and participate in the pornography industry, and provides an exploration of the role of ‘free speech’ advocates in justifying the ready accessibility of pornography.

  Anne Mayne explores the impact of the sex industry’s colonisation of South Africa since the end of apartheid, as pornography exploits an already vulnerable population of women through promoting sexual violence. Asja Armanda and Natalie Nenadic’s chapter is a gruelling analysis of the role of pornography in the genocidal sexual crimes during and after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Sexual atrocities were recognised under international law as acts of genocide through the effort of the authors and others, such as Catharine A. MacKinnon, in a landmark civil suit in the USA against Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Moving to Asia, Ruchira Gupta argues that the spread of violent pornography in India is linked to an increase in sexual assault, paedophilia and sex tourism, and to India’s emergence as a global ‘porn capital’.

  Betty McLellan takes up the important issue of freedom of speech and provides ways of rethinking the relationship between free speech and the right to equality, dignity and respect. She outlines the importance of seeing fair speech as an analytical tool for maximising social justice, in an analogy with fair vs free trade.

  In the final section, Part 5, anti-pornography activists from around the world contribute short essays on resistance to porn culture. Julia Long is optimistic about new forms of grassroots feminist activism in the UK, with a new generation of feminists emerging around this issue. Gail Dines’s ‘Stop Porn Culture!’ introduces the new wave of US feminist activism against porn. Linda Thompson in Scotland describes the challenges confronting activists and educators who are frequently vilified by defenders of the global porn industry. Anna van Heeswijk describes the activities and strategies of OBJECT, a formidable UK activist group in opposition to the objectification and dehumanisation of women. In Australia, Melinda Liszewski writes about the dynamic new movement, Collective Shout, with its inspiring and powerful grassroots campaign combating the sexploitation of girls and women by exposing and boycotting companies that market sexist and degrading products. And Caroline Norma writes about the 10-year history of the Tokyo-based Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) in combating pornography and prostitution.

  Men too are organising against pornography. Matt McCormack Evans writes about The Anti Porn Men Project in the UK, explaining how men can challenge pornography. Finally, Susan Hawthorne in her Quit Porn Manifesto asks us to reflect on why people use pornography, and why refusal to participate in the industry is an issue of social justice.

  Signs of hope

  In our efforts to challenge the global pornography industry, we need signs of hope. In writing this book we have found many signs. The activist section of Big Porn Inc is a beginning. New and exciting forms of action are emerging in many parts of the world. Susan Hawthorne offers us strategies to Quit Porn. The increasing number of men speaking out against the commercial exploitation of sexual expression in many countries is encouraging – and see Robert Jensen, Christopher Kendall, Jeffrey Masson, Robi Sonderegger, Hiroshi Nakasatomi and Matt McCormack Evans in this volume.

  Big Porn Inc is a call to action, to begin to assert our human rights to dignity, respect and justice at every level. In ‘Pornography is What the End of the World Looks Like’, Robert Jensen has argued that forms of domination like pornography “diminish our ability to contribute to a just and sustainable future” (Jensen 2010, p. 112). By eroticising oppression, pornography cultures and industries undermine our ability to imagine and create a just future for all people.

  Such a future is a non-negotiable goal for us. We want women to experience real justice, and to live free from all forms of oppression. For us, opposition to pornography is a question of social justice. We either al
low subordination or freedom: there is not room for both.

  We invite you, the readers of this book, to join our resistance to Big Porn Inc.

  Bibliography

  Adelaide Advertiser (11 January, 2010) ‘Sexbot’s here, and what a doll she is’, .

  Bray, Abigail (24 August, 2009) ‘Googling S*x’ Online Opinion, .

  Breslin, Susannah (2009) ‘They shoot porn stars, don’t they?’, and .

  Bridges, Ana J. (2010) ‘Methodological considerations in mapping pornography content’ in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 34–49.

  Bryant, Colleen (February, 2009) ‘Adolescence, pornography and harm’ Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice No 368, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, .

  Cochrane, Kira (29 October, 2010) ‘Men who hate porn’ The Age, .

  Craft, Nikki (n.d.) ‘Torture photos from Penthouse’ (1985), .

  Craft, Nikki (n.d.) ‘Hustling the Left’, .

  Davis, Mark (13 February, 2010) ‘Porn fans attack website to protest against censorship’ Sydney Morning Herald, .

  Dines, Gail (2010) Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Beacon Press Boston; Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.