Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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“I was completely shattered. I felt disgusted and also ashamed, like it must in some way be my fault. Clearly I, his wife, was not satisfying him sexually. Worse than this, was the betrayal. He had lied to me for years. How could I trust him again? I started to think about times when he was in his study and I was somewhere else in the house. Had he been looking at pictures of naked women when I was there? Did he wish I looked like them, would do what they did? I felt sick.” – Gina
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Gail Dines
The New Lolita: Pornography and the Sexualization of Childhood
In 2008, Miley Cyrus was photographed for Vanity Fair wearing a bed hairdo, a provocative gaze, and not much else. She was 15 years old. Even though these photos caused a stir at the time, just a year later – when she appeared in Elle sprawled across a table wearing S&M gear – barely a voice of protest was heard. These images, together with the thousands of others that bombard us daily, are part of what media scholars call ‘image-based culture’1 a term used to describe a society in which images have replaced the spoken or written word as the major form of communication. From billboards to 24-hour television, the staple of this image-based culture is the youthful, sexualized female body. Advertisements, movies, TV shows, music videos, and pornography are just some of the ways in which this image is delivered to us, and as we become more desensitized to such depictions, the producers need to ramp up the degree to which the female body is sexualized as a way to get our attention. This has led to an increasingly pornographic media landscape, where the codes and conventions that inform pornography filter down to such a level that the images we now see in mainstream media are almost on a par with those that were found in softcore porn just a decade ago.
As pop culture begins to look more and more pornographic, the actual porn industry has had to trend more hardcore as a way of distinguishing its products from those images found on MTV, in Cosmopolitan, and on billboards. Often called ‘gonzo’ by the industry, this subgenre is made up of acts that are designed to dehumanize and debase the woman with cruel and brutal sex that includes gagging with a penis and multiple men ejaculating onto her face and body. The problem for the pornographers is that consumers are becoming increasingly desensitized to such hardcore porn and are always on the lookout for something new and fresh. Porn director, Jules Jordan, who is known for a particularly violent brand of porn, said that even he is “always trying to figure out ways to do something different” since the fans “are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff” (in Jensen, 2007, p. 70). So one of the big challenges pornographers constantly have to grapple with is how to keep their customers interested.
It is this need to find new niche products that provides insight into why, in 2002, the Free Speech Coalition (the lobbying organization for the porn industry) worked to change the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act that prohibited any image that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” Arguing that the words “appears to be” limited the free speech of the pornographers, the coalition successfully got this ‘limitation’ removed. The law was thus narrowed to cover only those images in which an actual person (rather than one who appears to be) under the age of 18 was involved in the making of the porn. Thus, the path was cleared for the porn industry to use either computer-generated images of children or real porn performers who, although 18 or over, are childified to look much younger.
Since that 2002 decision, there has been an explosion in the number of sites that childify women, as well as those that use computer-generated imagery. Pseudo Child Pornography (PCP) sites that use adults (those people defined by the law as 18 or over) to represent children is never called child pornography by the industry. Instead, almost all of those sites that childify the female porn performer are found in the subgenre called ‘teen-porn’ or ‘teen-sex’ by the industry. There are any number of ways to access these sites, the most obvious one being Google. Typing ‘Teen Porn’ into Google yields over 30 million hits, giving the user his2 choice of thousands of porn sites. A number of the hits are actually for porn portals where ‘teen porn’ is one sub-category of many, and when the user clicks on that category, a list of sites comes up that runs over 90 pages. Moreover, teen porn has its very own portal,3 which lists hundreds of sub-subgenres such as ‘Pissing Teens’, ‘Drunk Teens’, ‘Teen Anal Sluts’, and ‘Asian Teens’.
The competition for customers is fierce in the porn industry, since the user, sitting at his computer and eager to begin his masturbatory session, has a cornucopia of sites, themes, images, and narratives to choose from. The pornographers know this, so they attempt to pull the user in quickly by giving the sites names that are short, to the point, and unambiguous. It is therefore not surprising that many of the sites in this category actually have the word ‘teen’ in the name, for example, Solo Teen, Solo Teen Babe, Sexy Teen Girl, Teen Cuties, and Solo Teen Girls. When the user clicks on any one of these sites, the first and most striking feature is the body shape of the female porn performers. In place of the large-breasted, curvaceous bodies that populate regular porn Websites, there are small-breasted, slightly built women with adolescent-looking faces that are relatively free of make-up. Many of these performers do look younger than 18, but they do not look like children, so the pornographers use a range of techniques to make them appear more childlike than they actually are. Primary among these is the use of childhood clothes and props such as stuffed animals, lollipops, pigtails, pastel-colored ribbons, ankle socks, braces on the teeth and, of course, the school uniform. It is not unusual to see a female porn performer wearing a school uniform, sucking a lollipop, and hugging a teddy bear while she masturbates with a dildo.
Another technique for childifying the woman’s body is the removal of all pubic hair so that the external genitalia look like that of a pre-pubescent female. What is interesting is that over the years, this technique has lost much of its signifying power, as it is now commonplace in porn for women to remove all their pubic hair. One of the results of this is that today, virtually every female porn performer has genitalia that look like a pre-pubescent female. This is a shift that, in itself, is cause for concern, as those porn users who are not looking for pseudo-child images nonetheless are exposed to them when they surf the porn sites. This normalization of a shaved pubic area is filtering down increasingly into mainstream pop culture, with regular articles in women’s magazines discussing the best way to remove pubic hair, TV shows such as Sex and the City publicizing and eroticizing the Brazilian Bikini Wax, and beauty salons across the country promoting the Brazilian as a way to spice up sex. The effect this is having on adolescent girls was made evident to me when I spoke to the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Conference in Boston in 2007. These nurses administer rape kits on adolescents who are the victims of sexual assault, and one of their tasks is to check for the markers of puberty, with pubic hair being a key marker. However, I was informed that this is no longer effective, as girls are removing the hair as soon as it grows, something that the nurses had never seen before. In my interviews with college-age females, I hear repeatedly that pubic hair is considered unhygienic and a sexual turnoff by their boyfriends, so they now wax or shave. This is probably one of the clearest examples of how a porn-generated practice slips into the lives of real women, no doubt because a good percentage of the male partners have become accustomed to, and are aroused by, images of women in porn.
For all of the visual clues of childhood surrounding the women in PCP sites, however, it is the written text accompanying the images that does most of the work in convincing the user that he is masturbating to images of sexual activity involving a minor. The words used to describe the women’s bodies (including their vaginas) – tiny, small, petite, tight, cute, teeny – not only stress their youthfulness but also work to separate them from women on other sites, since these are adjectives rarely used to des
cribe women in regular porn. Most striking is how many of these PCP sites refer to the females as sweeties, sweethearts, little darlings, cutie pies, honeys – terms of endearment that starkly contrast with the abusive names the women on other sites are called (slut, whore, cumdumpster, and cunt being the most popular). The use of kinder terms on the PCP sites is a method of preserving the notion for the user that these girls are somehow different from the rest of the women who populate the world of porn in that they are not yet used-up whores deserving of verbal abuse. This would explain why so many of these Websites have the word ‘innocent’ in their names, for example, Innocent Cute, Innocent Dream, Innocent Love, and Petite Innocent.
The reason why innocence is so central to the marketing of the sites and why the girls are portrayed as not yet sullied, dirtied, soiled, or tainted by sex is that the promise on offer on the Website is a witnessing of their loss of innocence. One fan of this genre, writing to a porn discussion forum, calls this a “knowing innocence,” which he defines as “the illusion of innocence giving way to unbridled sexuality. Essentially, this is the old throwback of the Madonna and the Whore. Therein lies the vast majority of my attraction to this genre.”4 This fan and indeed many others (if their posts are to be believed) make clear that for them, the pleasure is in watching the (sweet, cute, petite) Madonna being coaxed, encouraged, and manipulated by adult men into revealing the whore that lies beneath the (illusionary) innocence.
The pornographers reveal their understanding of the nature of this spectatorial pleasure when they offer the guarantee to their consumers that the ‘girls’ they are watching are “first timers,” having their “first sexual experience,” which, of course, leads to their “first orgasm ever.” The Solo Teen site goes so far as to promise that “[h]ere you will ONLY find the cutest teen girls … Our girls are fresh and inexperienced and very sexy in an innocent kind of way.” It is thus no surprise that most of these sites advertise “fresh girls added each week,” since using the same performer twice would cut into the sexual excitement of the viewer. How, after all, does one defile an already-defiled girl?
The story of the ‘defilement’ told on these sites is genre-bound in that it almost always starts with an eager but innocent girl who is gently and playfully coaxed by off-camera adult men into performing sexually for the pleasure of the viewer. This is the narrative informing most of the images on the SoloTeengirls.com site, which has hundreds of movies available to members, as well as hundreds of still photographs posted on the site as a teaser for non-members. Each woman has 5 photographs and a written text detailing her supposed first sexual experience. For ‘Natasha’ the story goes as follows:
This lil cutie came in pretending that she couldn’t wait to be naked in front of the camera. And … we couldn’t wait to see her. As she started to take off her clothes and show off she giggled and smiled but we could tell she was nervous and when she found out that naked meant showing off her snug little teen pussy she blushed! But showing off her pussy proved to be too much of a turn on and when we encouraged her to play with it she could not resist. This beautiful teen girl really did have her first time on camera and we got to watch her stroke that velvety teen pussy (my emphasis).
The message that the written text conveys in this story can be found throughout the Websites in this category, as it embodies the way in which the pornographers carefully craft a story of who is really innocent and who is really culpable in the scenario. For all the supposed innocence of the ‘lil cutie’, as evidenced by her nervousness, giggling, smiling, and blushing, it really only took a bit of encouragement to get her to masturbate for the camera, which in porn-world language is another way of saying that it didn’t take much for her to reveal the slut she really is. It is this very culpability on the part of the girl that simultaneously divests the user of his culpability in masturbating to what would be, in reality, a scenario of adult men manipulating a naïve girl into masturbating for the pleasure of other adult men, himself included.
The obvious question here is: what effect could these sites have on the viewers? Once they click on these sites, users are bombarded – through images and words – with an internally consistent ideology that legitimizes, condones, and celebrates a sexual desire for children. The norms and values that circulate in society and define adult–child sex as deviant and abusive are wholly absent in PCP, and in their place is a cornucopia of sites that deliver the message (to the viewer’s brain, via the penis), that sex with children is hot fun for all.
There is a wealth of research within media studies that shows that people construct their notions of reality from the media they consume, and the more consistent and coherent the message, the more people believe it to be true.5 Thus, the images of girls in PCP do not exist within a social vacuum, but rather are produced and consumed within a society where the dominant pop culture images are of childified women and hypersexualized, youthful female bodies. Encoded within all of these images is an ideology that encourages the sexual objectification of the female body, an ideology that is internalized by both males and females, and has become so widespread that it normalizes the sexual use and abuse of females. This does not mean that all men who masturbate to PCP will rape a child, or even be sexually attracted to a child. What it does mean, however, is that on a cultural level, when we sexualize the female child, we chip away at the norms that define children as off limits to male sexual use. The more we undermine such cultural norms, the more we drag girls into the category of ‘woman’, and in a porn-saturated world, to be woman is to be a sexual object deserving of male contempt, use, and abuse.
Bibliography
Gerbner, George (1998) ‘Cultivation Analysis: An Overview’ Mass Communication and Society 1 (3&4), pp. 175–194.
Jensen, Robert (2007) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. South End Press, Boston.
Jhally, Sut (1990) ‘Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture’ The World and I, July, pp. 506–519.
Quayle, Ethel and Max Taylor (2002) ‘Child Pornography and the Internet: Perpetuating a Cycle of Abuse’ Deviant Behavior 23 (4), pp. 331–361.
Russell, Diana and Natalie J. Purcell (2006) ‘Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization’ in Nancy E. Dowd, Dorothy G. Singer, and Robin Fretwell Wilson (Eds) Handbook of Children, Culture and Violence, pp. 59–82. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
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1 For a more extensive analysis, see Jhally (1990).
2 I refer to the user in the masculine since the majority of porn consumers are men. While it is impossible to give an accurate breakdown of male and female consumers, Mark Kernes, senior editor of the pornography trade magazine Adult Video News, stated that “Our statistics show that 78% of the people that go into adult stores are men. They may have women with them, but it’s men, and 22%, conversely, is women or women with other women or women alone.” (Author interview at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas with Robert Jensen, 7 January, 2005).
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5 For a discussion of the findings of over 30 years of studies on how media shapes the social construction of reality, see Gerbner (1998).
Catharine A. MacKinnon
X-Underrated: Living in a World the Pornographers Have Made1
The belief that pornography inhabits its own physical and mental world is an illusion. Nothing restricts its effects. Yet the protective myth of its spatial separation and cognitive confinement endures, even as pornography visibly takes over more and more public and private space, invading homes and offices and transforming popular culture.
There is such a thing as pornography, as its producers and consumers well know. No one is making tens of billions of dollars from, or masturbating to, the Bible, for example. This is only to notice that the pornography in
dustry and mass media have long operated in separate spheres defined by content. In the name of taste, values or division of labour, legitimate cinema, books and media have traditionally eschewed or coyly skirted the sexually explicit. The ‘adult’ movie industry, cable television and ‘men’s entertainment’ magazines have frontally specialised in it. This mutually clear line, quite precisely and effortlessly observed in practice, coexists with the common cant that pornography cannot be defined or distinguished from anything else.
Pornography is increasingly making popular culture more pornographic. This effect is routinely observed and sometimes deplored, whether for sexually objectifying women yet more inescapably, or for taking away the sexiness of the forbidden. But if this movement is rarely documented, and even more seldom explained, the fact that pornography itself has been a popular feature of culture – the most mass of media – for some time is never faced.
Society’s ideology of compartmentalisation – that the rest of life can go on unaffected – never seems to be embarrassed by pornography’s ubiquity. It has been in plain sight all along. In reality, pornography’s place is just down the street, right there on the rack in the convenience store, not to mention in the bedrooms and bathrooms of homes where its users seldom live alone. Yet even as the industry has burgeoned, taking over more public space and penetrating more deeply into private life at home and at work with each advance in technology, it is considered to be somehow not really there.
The same dissociative logic structures the legal regulation of pornography.
Obscenity, one meaning of which is off stage, is located in some neighbourhoods and not others. The question of where is politically fought over locally like the placement of noxious waste, as if its effects can be so confined. Pornography has to be somewhere, the attitude is, the only question is where. (One reading of the law of this subject in the USA revolves around how far a man has to travel to get his fix before it becomes unconstitutional.) Pornography is considered addressed by the legal sleight of hand through which it is imagined placed in some demimonde: over there rather than right here.