Beyond the geographical, the psychological disconnect is perhaps most socially potent: the delusion that pornography is ‘fantasy’. ‘No woman was ever ruined by a book’, as the slogan goes. This gives using pornography a certain deniability. Never mind that someone has to be sexually used to make the visual materials that form the vast majority of the industry’s output. Never mind that among the first and most robust of the results of consumption is the spontaneous generation of rape fantasies, or that people often do what they imagine they want to do. Never mind that ‘fantasy’ is the word used by a man convicted of being about to make a snuff film of a boy, to describe the detailed plans he was intercepted discussing, or what the media reported a man was having with a prostitute whom he drowned in a bathtub.
One telling episode in these annals of denial arose in the publication of American Psycho, an upmarket, high-concept work of fiction in which one woman after another is sexually slaughtered. Women are skinned alive, mutilated, raped and one dismembered head is used for oral sex, all in graphic and explicit terms. Simon and Schuster, in an exceptional move, rescinded its contract of publication shortly before the book was due out.
It was rumoured by insiders that women on the staff refused to have it published in their house.
The publishing industry has long coexisted with – at times affirmatively defended – the pornography industry. This includes the film Snuff, a sex movie available since 1972 right down the street from Simon and Schuster, in which a woman is shown being disemboweled while alive. The shock of, hence the opposition to, American Psycho was apparently that it was here, in mainstream publishing. As long as sexual killing is happening ‘over there’, it is as if it is not happening at all. American Psycho seemed to shatter that illusion of context for some people, at least momentarily. The book was quickly bought and published by Vintage, a division of Random House.
A similar magical framing move occurred in connection with the scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib in 2004. The photos of naked Arab men being abused by American soldiers while in their custody were routinely termed pictures of torture and sexual humiliation in the press. If the fact that the photos were identical to much pornography (although mild by its standards) was noticed at all, it was more often to excuse the crimes than to indict the pornography. Then a mass-market US newspaper was duped into publishing photos said to be of an Iraqi woman being raped by American soldiers that turned out to come from pornography. The public was upset by the pictures – until they found out that it was pornography. The newspaper apologised for not properly authenticating the picture.
The photos, had they been what they were thought to have been, would have documented criminal atrocities. The identical picture, framed as pornography, became masturbation material that a legitimate outlet had been cleverly tricked into putting on its front page in another blow for sexual freedom of expression. As pornography, the conditions of its making – who was she? how did she get there? was she being raped? – were not subject to inquiry. They never are.
The assumption that the violence, violation and abuse that is shown in pornography is somehow ‘consensual’ is just that: an assumption. It coexists with much evidence of force and coercion, beginning with the materials themselves. Mass emails advertising photos of ‘hostages raped!’ are spammed to Internet accounts without generating inquiry into whether they are either. A Website called Slavefarm offered women for sale as ‘sexual slaves’, complete with contracts signing away all human rights and explicit photographs of the slave being tortured. Authorities stonewalled.
Live feed provides direct sexual use of prostituted women onscreen. No matter how real and harmful it gets, pornography, in reality a form of trafficking in women, is this parallel universe in which everything that happens becomes harmless and unreal.
Long overlapping sub rosa with legitimate entertainment, pornography has been a criminal underworld pursuit. Making it still is. But as it has exploded to an industry approaching earnings of US$100 billion globally, its distributors no longer live under rocks. Legitimate corporations now traffic pornography, often through subsidiaries, their financial stake as immense and established as it is open.
Certainly the level of threat and damage to women’s status and treatment and to equality of the sexes worsens as pornography has gone mainstream and is seen as more legitimate. Venue does matter. That does not mean that pornography has not been a dangerous, damaging and real part of social life all along. As its effects worsen, the more widespread and visible pornography becomes, the view – as tenacious and pernicious as it is baseless – that it has no effects as long as it stays underground – makes its march into the open possible. If the spatial separation of pornography into its own little world has been dubious, its mental isolability is pure delusion. Pornography changes its consumers, who then go everywhere under its influence. Nothing contains them.
Excellent social science research over the past 25 years has documented the effects of exposure to pornography, providing a basis to extrapolate the predictable consequences of mass social saturation. The catharsis hypothesis – the notion that the more pornography men use, the less abusive sex they will seek out elsewhere – has been scientifically disproved.
Closer to the reverse has been found: it primes the pump. As women have long known, use of pornography conditions consumers to objectified and aggressive sex, desensitising them to domination and abuse, requiring escalating levels of violence to achieve a sexual response. Use of pornography is also correlated with increased reports by perpetrators of aggressive sex and with increased inability to perceive that sex is coerced. Consumers thus become increasingly unable to distinguish rape from other sex. Some become addicted, virtually none is unaffected, the evidence as a whole suggests.
Consuming pornography, with some individual variation, produces attitudes and behaviours of discrimination and violence, particularly against powerless others. By extension, the more pornography is consumed, the more difficult it will become, socially, to tell when rape is rape, even for some victims. An increase in sexual assault, accompanied by a drop in reporting and low conviction rates, is predictable. All this has happened.
Mass desensitisation of a major segment of the viewing public has a corresponding effect on the rest of popular culture. The audience for popular culture is the same as the audience for pornography. Ten winos in raincoats are not producing the industry’s revenue figures. Popular culture, from advertising to legitimate film and books, has to become correspondingly more explicitly sexual – specifically more sexually aggressive and demeaning to women – to get the desired rise out of the same audience. Advertising is a particularly sensitive barometer of this effect.
How that public buys, what it demands, how it responds and what it wants to see are being significantly controlled, skewed by pornographers. Soft pornography blurs into light entertainment. The powerful conditioning of huge proportions of the male public makes them demand that the women around them look and act in conforming ways. We increasingly live in a world the pornographers have made.
High culture is affected as well. Women writers who present young girls loving being sexually initiated by old men, daughters feeling ambivalent about sex with their fathers, pornography being part of the old world of freedom rather than a future dystopia of totalitarianism, rocket to success. It is not that they are not fine writers. It is the fact that their work converges with pornographic conditioning, affirms it in a classy woman’s voice that catapults them to the top, makes their work suddenly catch on as exciting. It is the moment of, and precondition for, their success. Academic women who breathlessly defend pornography benefit from the same response. Criticising pornography, or writing so that rape is experienced by the reader as abuse, produces the opposite reaction: detumescent shunning. When feminists unmask pornography effectively, those who support it suddenly become favourites du jour. It works for men, too.
Excuse sexual assault ever more openly, present women who oppose porno
graphy as befuddled if well-intentioned moralists, attack serious approaches to the problem as evil censorship and you too may receive a Nobel prize for literature.
Tracking the escalation in sexual explicitness and sexual violence in mainstream cinema is child’s play. More to the point, why was Sharon Stone’s vaginal flash in Basic Instinct so electrifying, such a sensation? Far more than that was available in any softcore pornography film or magazine right down the street. It was context: a mainstream actor, doing it here, in a mainstream film in a family cinema. Breaking the frame on sex gives a frisson of power, it seems, for which you first have to believe that the frame is there. Why was it shocking when Janet Jackson’s breast popped out in a dance-attack on her in the Superbowl halftime show? Playboy has scores monthly; page three, at least 2 a day. But this was a mainstream singer, here, in family time during one of masculinity’s public ritual events. Audiences are thrilled, scandalised, titillated. Barriers broken. Pundits juiced. Territory gained. Freedom reigns.
Who pays? Stone was told when she shot that scene that the footage would not be used (hence its grainy first-take outtake quality); she reportedly suffered considerably when it was. Jackson more or less apologised for the ‘wardrobe malfunction’. However, they felt they had to be good sports for the sake of their careers, a pressure that continues. Pornographic portrayals of feminist anti-pornography writer, Andrea Dworkin, lowered the floor on how she was seen and treated for life.
In pornography, women are publicly construed as members of an inferior sex-based group and constructed, some individually, before they are ever known personally. Sexual arousal, excitement and satisfaction are harnessed to that portrayal, reinforcing it, naturalising it, making it unquestionable and irrefutable. So, too, for all the nameless women used in pornography – society’s ‘whores’. Pornography is a mass instrument for creating how women in general, specific women and groups of women in particular, are seen, treated and received. It constructs their status as unequal and their reputation as inferior. Few weep for a ‘whore’s’ reputation.
Meanwhile, progressive people, whatever they really think, defend pornography’s right to exist and other people’s right to use it, in tones pious and terms high-minded. Esoteric debates about aesthetics and causation take place amid periodic convulsions of moral fervour, producing occasional convictions for obscenity or restrictions on indecency. The industry shapes itself to law, and, more crucially, law to it. Most fundamentally, pornography changes culture to protect its existence and extend its reach, so finally it will be true that there is no distinction between pornography and anything else. The best camouflage of all is being able to lie around in plain sight.
People who do not want to be accosted by pornography visually are expected to avert their eyes. Having fewer and fewer places to avert their eyes to, with fewer means of escape in public and none in private, women specifically – who are most endangered by these materials and often know it – are segregated, painted into ever smaller corners. The female version of the male compartmentalisation myth is, ‘pornography has nothing to do with me’. Pornography is thus at once increasingly everywhere and yet protected from direct scrutiny and effective abolition by seeming not to be there at all.
In 1983, Andrea Dworkin and I proposed a civil law that would empower anyone who could prove they are hurt through pornography to sue the pornographers for human rights violations. We defined pornography as what it is – graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and words that also includes specified presentations – and defined causes of action for coercion, force, assault and trafficking. We documented its effects and predicted its impact if nothing was done. Our law was found unconstitutional in the USA in a ruling that held that pornography had to be protected as ‘speech’ because it is so effective in doing the harm that the opinion conceded it does. Since then, although the law could have been re-passed and this blatantly wrong and arguably illegal ruling challenged, pornography has not only exploded, it has changed the world around us. Even the determinedly blinkered cannot evade noticing. It is colonising the globe.
The pornography industry is a lot bigger, more powerful, more legitimate, more in everyone’s face today than it was a quarter of a century ago. To the degree that it cannot exist without doing real damage, it could still be stopped in its tracks anywhere by this law. Sexual objectification and violation does not happen all by itself. Real social institutions drive it. Pornography does, powerfully, in capitalist mass-mediated cultures.
If nothing is done, the results will keep getting worse. We told you so.
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1 This is an edited version of ‘X underrated’ published in the UK Times Higher Education,
Maggie Hamilton
Groomed to Consume Porn: How Sexualised Marketing Targets Children
The pornification of our children and teenagers is a dark tale of greed, exploitation, and corporate muscle, orchestrated by those whose sole focus is on how much money they can make from our kids. Little or no thought is given to the devastating impact this trend has on them.
The level of exposure of children to porn, and the young age at which many are viewing this material – accidentally or otherwise – is cause for grave concern. Symantec’s 2009 study of children online revealed the word ‘porn’ ranked as the fourth most popular search word for children aged 7 and younger, and was in the top 5 words googled by children under 18 (Campbell, 2010).
The explosion of new technologies gives children access to the best and worst of online content. Aside from home computers, pornographic content is now accessible to kids on their mobile phones. They may view porn at their friends’ place or at less than vigilant Internet cafes. The advent of wireless technologies also means that as long as they can get a connection, children can download porn on buses or trains, in parks, out with friends, or wherever they choose. The presence of porn in our children’s lives has happened in a few short years, and is radically changing childhood and teenage life. When we fail to come to terms with this changing landscape, we leave children vulnerable in ways never-before-experienced.
Less obvious, but of equal concern, is the direct link between the increasing sexualisation of girls and boys, and their interest in and exposure to porn. The fallout from the countless sexual images seen in ads, on TV screens, posters and billboards, in MTV clips, movies, video games and sitcoms, on clothing and accessories, and on the Internet, is real and impacting. This constant stream of hypersexualised imagery and sexual expression that boys and girls are subjected to daily lowers their inhibitions, discourages empathy towards others, and reshapes their sexual aspirations and expression often in risky, violent or unhelpful ways.
Whether or not the use of sexual images and messages to market products is intended to prepare children for the consumption of porn, this is one of the most concerning outcomes. When the intense sexualised marketing to children is put under the microscope, we see that the methods corporations use to reach children are the very same techniques employed by sexual predators to home in on unsuspecting kids, as they meticulously groom them for their own ends. Like the sexual predator, corporations market their products to young people by pretending to be their friend. Using the same techniques as a predator, they work hard at cultivating a one-on-one relationship with our children, offering gifts and incentives, flattering them, talking in their language, and assuring kids that they understand. Like the sexual predator, corporations deliberately use sexualised content in their products and/or advertising, because they know how irresistible sexualised material can be. And, like the sexual predator, corporations actively ramp up the sexualised images and products they use, to lower kids’ inhibitions around sex, to get them to do what they want.
Perhaps most insidious of all is the way a predator works to separate a child victim from his/her parents and other gatekeepers, leaving them isolated and
vulnerable. Again, corporations use this same technique. So even though increasing numbers of parents complain about the sexy tops and skirts, padded bras and sexy underwear available to young kids, still the corporations rule. Sexualised marketing is now so prevalent among manufacturers of teen products most of us scarcely give it a thought. What would have been inconceivable a decade ago has very quickly become an integral part of teenagers’ lives. As noted media critic Professor Mark Crispin Miller puts it, “The official advertising worldview is that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor” (Miller, PBS, undated).
When a girl or boy grows up in a toxic sexual atmosphere, their inhibitions are lowered to the point that accessing porn seems a natural progression. The sexualised climate our children are growing up in is a manufactured process, not an organic one. The sexualised landscape children are now forced to inhabit reshapes their attitudes to sex and their desires, and it starts long before they learn to read or write. During my research for What’s Happening to Our Girls? and the subsequent presentation of this material to thousands of parents, so many voiced their concern at the sexualised behaviour and language they are seeing in children aged 3 and up. Jacki, a health professional and mother of a 5-year-old boy, spoke with concern at her son talking of ‘sexing’ girls, when referring to girls he liked, after day care (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 19). Gemma, also a mum and kindergarten teacher, talked of the level of sexualised behaviour she was seeing, to the point that she and other teachers were having to be extra vigilant around the toilets and out-of-the-way parts of the pre-school grounds (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 19). Another grandmother was worried to find her young granddaughter accessing porn sites on her computer when she stayed over. It transpired that the little girl had been told about these sites by a friend at school (Hamilton, 2008/2009, p. 52).
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 6