Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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Dines, Gail (28 February, 2011) ‘On Pornography’ Lecture presented at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Durham, Meenakshi Gigi (2008) The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualisation of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. The Overlook Press, New York.
Dworkin, Andrea (1980) ‘Pornography and Grief’ in Laura Lederer (Ed) Take Back the Night. William Morrow, New York, pp. 286–291.
Flood, Michael (2010) ‘Young men using pornography’ in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 164–178.
Franzblau, Ken (2007) ‘Slavefarm, Sex Tours and the Pimp John T.: Using Pornography to Advance Trafficking, Sex Tourism and Prostitution’ in Guinn, David E. with Julie Di Caro (Eds) Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking. Captive Daughters Media, Los Angeles, pp. 261-273.
Hamilton, Clive (16 February, 2009) ‘Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians’,
Jackman, Christine (4 June, 2011) ‘A War of Words’ The Weekend Australian,
Jensen, Robert (2007) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. South End Press, Cambridge, MA.
Jensen, Robert (2010) ‘Pornography is what the end of the world looks like’ in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 105–113.
Johnson, Jennifer A. (2010) ‘To catch a curious clicker: A social network analysis of the online pornography industry’ in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 147–163.
Malamuth, Neil M. and Eileen V. Pitpitan (2007) ‘The effects of pornography are moderated by men’s sexual aggression risk’ in David E. Guinn with Julie Di Caro (Eds) Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking. Captive Daughters Media, Los Angeles, pp. 125–143.
M’jid Maalla, Najat (2009) ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography’ A/HRC/12/23 Human Rights Council, Geneva.
Quart, Alison (2004) Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Basic Books, New York.
Ropelato, Jerry (n.d.) ‘Internet Pornography Statistics’,
Rothbart, Davy (30 January, 2001) ‘He’s just not that into anyone’ New York Times Magazine,
Sauers, Joan (2007) Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers. Random House, Sydney.
Scobie, Claire (6 February, 2007) ‘Wild Things’, The Bulletin p. 35,
Tankard Reist, Melinda (5 December, 2008) ‘Incensed about censorship’ Online Opinion,
Townsend, Mark (24 August, 2008) ‘Babies are new target, Met warns as paedophile threat spirals’,
Waltman, Max (2009) ‘The Civil Rights Equality Deficit: Legal Challenges to Pornography and Sex Inequality in Canada, Sweden, and the U.S.’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ottawa, 27–29 May, 2009, and the Law and Society Association, Denver, 28–31 June, 2009,
Whisnant, Rebecca (2007) ‘From Jekyll to Hyde: The grooming of male pornography consumers’, in Karen Boyle (Ed) Everyday Pornography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 114–133.
Wosnitzer, Robert (n.d.) The Price of Pleasure,
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1 We would like to acknowledge the significant input of Dr Helen Pringle to this introduction.
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9 We did, however, exclude some of the most extreme porn Websites so as not to promote them.
10 Exposure to porn has been linked to sexual crimes among young people in Japan. “Japan’s sex crime victims are predominantly teenagers. Of all indecent assault victims, 41 percent are aged 13 to 19, while a further 21 percent are of elementary school age or younger. The 13–19 age group also accounts for 44 percent of rape victims, a figure far higher than for any other demographic group. At 23 percent, nearly a quarter of all Japan’s convicted rapists are aged 19 or under” (Malamuth and Pitpitan 2007, p. 139).
11 Detectives from Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) are uncovering evidence that paedophiles are focusing on ‘pre-verbal’ victims whose inability to describe their abuse makes them attractive targets (Townsend, 2008).
12 See also anti-pornography activist Nikki Craft’s collection of pornography and torture from Penthouse,
13 See Ropelato (n.d.) for compelling 2005/2006 global Internet pornography statistics,
14 Anonymous (7 July, 2010),
15 See also the personal account by Caroline, this volume; and Whisnant (2010); Rothbart (2001); Cochrane (29 October, 2010). See more broadly Jensen (2007).
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17 ‘Sexbot’s here, and what a doll she is’ (11 January, 2010),
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19 Gail Dines exposes the mainstream companies which benefit from pornography profits (see Dines, 2010, chapter 3). The porn profit trail is also a feature in the film Hardcore Porn Profits,
20 See Nikki Craft, ‘Hustling the Left’,
21 The English language has a range of spelling conventions and this diversity is reflected in individual contributions.
Caroline
The Impact of Pornography on My Life
I’m anxious about writing this. Anxious that although I know rationally there is no way you can know who I am, I am still afraid.
In one sense you will know me. I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket queue or sitting opposite you on the train. Middle aged, middle class, educated, professional. Ordinary. Yet there is something in my life I will hide from you, no matter how close we are.
When I first met my partner, way back when, one quiet afternoon on my own in his flat I came across 3 dog-eared copies of Playboy in the back of his wardrobe. Flicking through the images of women in silk lingerie reclining in misty boudoirs, I was held. I could breathe these pictures to life with my own sexual imagination. They were mysterious, partial, hinting. It was a brief encounter with pornography. We stayed together, the paper pictures long thrown out.
Fast-forward many years. It happened like this. I borrowed my partner’s laptop and as the cursor rolled slowly over the Internet history it revealed a trail of regular porn viewing. Panic. I clicked on to a couple of the sites. For someone who had never seen Internet porn, the sudden imagery of women displayed arse up, faceless, with orifices, raw, red and black, open and roughly penetrated was deeply, deeply distressing. These were explicit; viciously invading my sexual ide
ntity and choking it with images distorted, ugly, degraded. The click speed, the slickness of the connections revealed that this was no occasional or unwanted intrusion but a regular search on my partner’s part to view.
How can I convey to you the way the stomach lurches and sickens with the discovery? A long-term loving relationship is built on things that are shared, unspoken, gathering over time. Love and making love; intimate, hidden, soft, warm and lingering; ruddy and boisterous; funny and fumbled. Trust, a commitment, ways of relating, a sexual life that you believe – oh, but believed until now – you both treasured. To discover suddenly that your partner has been visiting a secret, voyeur’s world, and has sought out these other images of women for arousal; many, many women, is devastating.
I looked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. But I looked because I needed to know what I was dealing with. I needed to know how far it extended. Who is this person I no longer recognise? I confronted. A wild, visceral, rage. His first reaction was to lie; to lie about the extent and to downplay it. I wasn’t supposed to know. For how long? Three, maybe four years – three, four times a week. And maybe more than that when working away, alone in hotels. A rare few men may be so addicted that the viewing has become compulsive, but many more, much more insidiously across society as a whole, have become habitual viewers. Ordinary men, with ordinary partners. You and me.
I was repulsed. In this climate of permissiveness, we are not supposed to confess to repulsion. It sounds censorious, prim, prejudiced. We are supposed to be open-minded, extending our boundaries of acceptance. Rampant individualism, the free market, the liberal gods of freedom and choice, insist on each to his own by right. But where does another’s supposed right infringe upon mine? Values of equality, respect, social responsibility, ethical concern for others – these are tossed aside; indifferent to the distress of others. But what is thought to be a question of freedom and choice, is in reality far from being free but instead is rigidly determined by the dominant, masculinist belief systems of our own society.
Once discovered he sought to justify and minimise the situation by one-sided arguments that ranged from – “it’s just guys’ stuff, a bit of fun, all guys look at porn, hey, get real – it’s the way the world is now.” The implication being that I was a prude, over-reacting and out of date. “It was just ‘fantasy’”, he said, and therefore not related to the real sex that we shared. My reply: “it’s obvious fakery for the women – you can see that” was met with “no, no, you have that wrong, they are genuinely enjoying it.” He knew. So it wasn’t fantasy then? I was supposed to believe it was just a mild diversion, when for the women it had to be real. Any suggestion though of the reality that women were coerced or treated badly was dismissed. They were fine, they were well paid. Self-delusional and ambiguous arguments ran amok. He seemed to have gone to a different place; to comment about the women in porn and me in a cold and detached way, to say things about women’s bodies, about sexual acts which came out of his mouth with swingeing bluntness. A layer of empathy had been ground away. My man. The one I had promised to love and cherish.
There is social-wide acceptance that an affair for a monogamous relationship is wrong, or at least if not wrong as such, certainly not conducive to the continuation of a trusting relationship. But with pornography there is no such clear line, with many levels of self-justification ready-made in a male dominated culture that the man can summon up to avoid having to look at its real impact on a loving relationship with cold, hard honesty. The male discourse provides justifications, minimisations that enable the man to deaden any lingering doubts.
We attended counselling. To my initial relief the counsellor acknowledged my enormous distress, and likened it to the discovery of an affair. This is a familiar approach, but while it helpfully acknowledges the degree of distress and the similar elements of secrecy, betrayal, hurt, there are some important differences. While I certainly wouldn’t have wished my partner to have had an affair, it would have been one-person related sex (who would naturally have found him adorable), intimate, secret, warm-bodied in a form I recognised. What caused me immense distress was the considerable shift in sexuality brought about by the porn viewing, the nature of the sexuality that the porn represented and the thought that he had looked at probably hundreds of women engaged in the most intimate of acts – using them to harness his own desire, allowing it to romp through scenarios created out of the imaginations of the porn makers. The most intimate parts of myself that I share with him, and only him, now seemed worthless. Porn-centred sex is a selfish activity that denies and thus destroys connections with anything outside itself. The porn-viewing partner needs help in re-connecting and with being less obsessed by their own wants and desires. The partner of a porn-viewer needs help with the profound sense of being cast aside, not good enough, mixed with conflicting emotions of being degraded and defiled.
The counsellor, however, changed tack to frame our relationship as co-dependent. My partner was supposedly dominating, an addictive personality, and I was the weak, co-dependent partner. Her efforts focussed on endeavouring to convince me that the relationship was in negative territory. In a fragile, emotional state when the pieces of my relationship were broken and I needed help in carefully reassembling them, I took more than I should of what she said seriously.
We changed counsellors. The next took a different line. Men, I was to understand, were visual, wired differently. Implicitly they ‘could not help it’ poor things – a message of the biological imperative. I was to show compassion and understanding. Did he know before that ‘no porn’ was one of the relationship rules. No? Well, then, how could he know I would impose this restriction on him? Restriction? Restriction! Despite the fact that little compassion and understanding seemed to come my way, I tried. What I have discovered by hard experience is that run-of-the-mill relationship guidance has inadequate resources for dealing with the emotional fallout and relationship damage caused by today’s Internet porn. I asked one of my counsellors if she had seen contemporary Internet pornography – she confessed she had not – they are working with out-of-date ideas. The result is that it’s very difficult to get the kind of support and help that you need to recover – particularly if the relationship is long-term and loving and you are trying to repair after the crisis.
I needed to mourn the loss of my relationship as I knew it and thought of it, and of my sexual self. I needed help in knowing how I – we – could rebuild a relationship with someone who could view and talk of women in those terms and still hold respect for him and for myself. To some extent I’ve managed to live with that dilemma, not as I would have liked it by his reflective and remorseful analysis of what has happened, but by trying to understand the process myself whereby affectionate, intelligent, kind and thoughtful men can become hooked, for want of a better word, in this strange, isolated, distorted world.
In the end I found a confidential online counselling service dedicated to women whose partners are involved with habitual Internet porn the most helpful. My long screeds of email message would be carefully responded to with insightful understanding and practical suggestions. Whoever you are out there who wrote replies to my emails, often frenetically tapped in the small dark hours, I thank you.
I have no time whatsoever for those who see pornography as liberating or empowering to women’s sexuality as this is absolutely not my experience at all. The distress caused sleepless nights, lots of crying, a constant feeling of being on edge, an anger that was all consuming.
A while on now, is it better? Carefully reassembling a relationship, mourning and accepting what has been lost, trying to make some parts anew, takes much time and patience. I still have enormous anger. Anger at him for, as I see it, being so easily drawn in to it. Some of my anger has, as I come to understand the psychology of porn viewing more, moved on to the industry. Yes he was responsible for his actions, but the industry is so slick at inveigling its way in. It toys with the masculine mind as our culture has made it. It qui
ckly becomes a habit, desensitising, a siren pulling men in to dare to look at increasingly edgy images. Secret, exciting, elicit, nefarious. All the elements necessary to relationships – care, respect, responsibility, empathy, are not only deliberately negated in porn, but alternative reassurances and flatteries are subliminally implanted in their place.
Yes, my partner promised not to view again, and has kept to that. But only after a long period can I relax and trust him again. In the early days of abstinence, although he declared he did not need porn, and invited me to search his Internet history any time, the hidden cache files still told the truth of glimpses at porn here and there. So shifting the habit was not as easy as he had declared. The topic is sensitive and raw still. If it resurfaces in our conversation, he often has another newly minted justification to offer that is supposed to convince me of the innocuousness of the porn and his viewing of it – never the real acknowledgement of responsibility or the harm to our relationship. I wait for the day he’ll say he thinks he understands and that he’s sorry.
PART ONE
Pornography Cultures
“Each time I found porn photos on his PC or his iPod I would begin to feel less and less attractive and more worried that I was never going to be good enough for him.” – Jade
“There is no glory in trying to make love to men who only know how to f**k – man after man after man after man raised on porn … A lot of guys have come to expect P.S.E. [the ‘Porn Star Experience’] as a common thing … A few [women] might enjoy it, but for most it’s harrowing. I think there’s a fear that if they can’t make it happen, their boyfriend will retreat online.” – Sadie1
“The fact that I trusted him with my physical and emotional self has left me shattered especially when he did not deny my body DISGUSTED him because I did not look like the internet [surgically enhanced and airbrushed] females he spent every night with …” – Chantelle