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

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  However, a rigorous analysis of the nature and effects of human communication, including propagandistic communication, does not begin and end with simplistic assertions about mechanistic notions of cause-and-effect. In the study of propaganda, we do not ask whether one specific message, or series of messages, was the sole cause of one specific person committing one specific act. Instead we investigate the way in which the style of human communication labelled ‘propaganda’ encourages certain ways of thinking about the world and makes inviting certain behaviors that flow from those ways of thinking.

  An examination of pornography as propaganda for a rape culture leads to more complex and productive questions. For example, how are gender, power, and sexuality typically constructed in the contemporary industrial pornography that is widely available? How do these themes support or undermine the ideology of a rape culture? By whom and how is that pornography typically used? When such material is readily available to young people, what is the effect on their sexual development? What are the effects of the habitual use of pornography on people’s intimate experiences? Is there a relationship between those constructions and the levels of sexual intrusion and violence in contemporary culture? How is pornography racialized? And how does pornography train us to understand who we are in an industrial capitalist society?

  In addressing such questions, I offer the following assumptions to situate a study of propaganda in general, and pornography as propaganda in particular:

  (1) Human beings are storytelling animals; stories are a primary way we communicate what it means to be a person in the world. When we tell stories, we not only report on our experiences in the world but also contribute to a collective understanding of that world, which will influence the experiences and understandings of others. Stories matter. In any culture, the stories that people tell will reveal things about how they collectively make sense of the world, and that sense of the world will shape how people act. Stories shape attitudes, and attitudes affect behavior.

  (2) In flourishing societies with a relatively egalitarian distribution of power, storytelling tends to be dialogic and creative, a way for people to engage each other with respect and explore ways of understanding the world. In contrast, in societies marked by inequality and concentrations of power, storytelling can be a vehicle to control and dominate, a way for people to shut down that dialogic and creative process in the service of maintaining or taking power. This type of human communication is called propaganda.

  Special attention to propaganda is especially crucial in societies with concentrations of power that undermine the dialogic and creative aspects of human communication. In heavily mass-mediated societies such as the USA, Canada, Australia and European countries, this inquiry is vital.

  Again, a comparison to make this point: when critics speak of commercial advertising as propaganda for capitalism, we are not asserting that a specific advertisement viewed by a person is the direct cause of that person’s decision to purchase a good or service. Even advertisers recognize this, reflected in the common quip, ‘We know half our ads don’t work, but we don’t know which half’. Critics cannot explain exactly how a specific advertisement or series of advertisements cause people to think of themselves as consumption machines rather than human beings. Instead, we recognize that in a larger culture which encourages that sense of self, the endless barrage of commercial advertising carrying the same message plays a role in that process.

  This is the sense in which we can see pornography as propaganda for a rape culture.

  Pornography

  The term ‘pornography’ is used by many people to describe all sexually explicit books, magazines, movies, and Internet sites, often with a distinction made between softcore (nudity with limited sexual activity not including penetration) and hardcore (graphic images of actual, not simulated, sexual activity including penetration). Pornography also is often distinguished from erotica, with pornography used to describe material that presents sex in the context of hierarchical relationships. Laboratory studies often construct categories of pornography according to their degree of violence and degradation.

  The associated terms ‘indecency’ and ‘obscenity’ have specific legal meanings. In the United States, for example, indecency concerns only broadcast television and radio, while the case of Miller v. California (1973) established a three-part test for obscenity in any media – material that appeals to the prurient interest (an unhealthy interest in sex); portrays sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value – and identified contemporary community standards as the measure. Pornography using children is a separate category that is banned.

  In this essay, I focus on the heterosexual commercial pornography industry which produces a significant portion of the pornography available and whose codes and conventions have shaped much of the pornography produced by others.

  Rape Culture

  My analysis is rooted in feminist critiques of male dominance and hierarchy. By feminist, I simply mean an analysis of the ways in which women are oppressed as a class in this society – the ways in which men as a class hold more power, and how those differences in power systematically disadvantage women. Gender oppression plays out in different ways depending on social location which makes it crucial to understand the oppression of women in connection with other systems of oppression such as heterosexism, racism, class privilege, and histories of colonial and postcolonial domination.

  In patriarchy, men are trained through a variety of cultural institutions to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as ‘naturally’ dominant and women as ‘naturally’ passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate. Power is eroticized.

  The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that it must be considered to be normal – an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. A recent review of the data by well-respected researchers concluded that in the United States, at least 1 of every 6 women has been raped at some time in her life, a figure that is now widely accepted (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2006).

  The term ‘rape culture’ describes ideas and practices beyond those legally defined as rape. As one researcher suggests, we should “ … broaden the definition of violence against women to include not just violent acts, such as physical assault, sexual assault, and threats of physical and sexual assault, but also nonviolent acts, such as stalking and psychological and emotional abuse” (Tjaden, 2004, p. 1246).

  I use the term ‘sexual intrusion’ to describe the range of unwanted sexual acts that women experience in contemporary society – obscene phone calls, sexual taunting on the streets, sexual harassment in schools and workplaces, coercive sexual pressure in dating, sexual assault, and violence with a sexual theme. In public lectures on these issues, I often tell the audience that I have completed an extensive scientific study on the subject and determined that the percentage of women in the United States who have experienced sexual intrusion is exactly 100%. Women understand the dark humor; no study is necessary to describe their routine collective experience.

  The Ideology of Hierarchy and the Role of Propaganda

  No society would let happen what happens to women, and children, if at some level it did not have contempt for them. A rape culture is a woman-hating culture. But most people’s stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in ideas of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people. So, how do we explain all the violence, exploitation, and oppression? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, those incapable of empathy who engage in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and with relish.

  Maintaining a claim to naturalness is essential for the maintenance of unjust hierarch
ies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them. Oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchies – and the disparities in power and resources that flow from hierarchies – are natural and, therefore, beyond change. If men are naturally smarter and stronger than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally smarter and harder working than poor people, then economic injustice is inevitable and justifiable.

  One of the key functions of propaganda is the naturalizing of hierarchy and authority in the minds of people at all places in the hierarchy. For elites at the top of the hierarchy, propaganda reinforces a sense of natural superiority and justifies a sense of entitlement. For those in the middle, propaganda promotes identification with the goals of elites above and discourages solidarity with oppressed people below. And propaganda also tries to persuade those on the bottom of the hierarchies that they deserve their fate, which can create a sense of futility about the prospects for change.

  The Ideology of Pornography

  Pornography is one of the dominant sexual-exploitation industries in the contemporary world, along with prostitution and stripping. These are the primary ways in which objectified female bodies are presented to men for sexual pleasure, typically for profit. The vast majority of people used in these industries are girls and women.

  While women in prostitution and stripping tell stories in the course of their interactions with men, it is in pornography – the mass-mediated sexual-exploitation industry – that we see the ideology of sexual exploitation most fully developed. My analysis is that pornography (used to describe the genre of sexually explicit mass media) is routinely pornographic (used in a feminist sense, to describe the naturalizing of the social subordination of women).

  Any discussion of the ideology of pornography should start with a sketch of the industry. The 2 main categories in today’s pornographic movie industry (whatever its form or outlet) are ‘features’ and ‘wall-to-wall/gonzo’. Features most resemble a Hollywood movie, with plot and characters. Wall-to-wall movies are all-sex productions with no pretense of plot or dialogue. Many of these movies are shot gonzo style, in which performers acknowledge the camera and often speak directly to the audience. In addition, there are specialty titles – movies that feature sadomasochism and bondage, fetish material, transsexuals – that fill niche markets. Heterosexual material dominates the pornography industry, with a thriving gay male pornography market and a smaller lesbian pornography market (much of it for a heterosexual male audience).

  The majority of hardcore movies include oral, vaginal, and anal sex, almost always ending with ejaculation on the woman. A 1993 study of pornographic heterosexual videotapes (Brosius et al., 1993) found that the tapes typically presented a world in which women were younger, more sexually active, and more expressive than men; women were frequently depicted in subordinate positions (e.g. kneeling down in front of a partner); and sexual contact was usually between strangers. A 2007 content analysis of 50 best-selling adult videos (Wosnitzer and Bridges, 2007) revealed a similar pattern of inequality and violence. Nearly half of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression (for example, name calling or verbal threats), while over 88% showed physical aggression (including hair pulling, open-hand slapping or spanking, choking, and whipping). Seventy percent of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men and 87% of acts were committed against women. Fewer than 5% of the aggressive acts provoked a negative response from the target, such as requests to stop. This pornographic ‘reality’ was further highlighted by the relative infrequency of more positive behaviors (verbal compliments, embracing, kissing, or laughter), portrayed in fewer than 10% of the scenes.

  As pornography depicting conventional sexual acts has become commonplace, gonzo producers have pushed the limits of social norms and women’s bodies with painful and body-punishing pornsex (Dines, 2010). Nearly every scene ends with the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’ – male ejaculation into a woman’s mouth or on her face or body. As one pornography director put it, “it’s like a dog marking its territory” (Sun and Picker, 2008). Another veteran pornographic director and actor put it more bluntly: “I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women … [but] the most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have” (Stoller and Levine, 1993, p. 22).

  Combining such quantitative studies with qualitative analyses using more interpretive methods (Dworkin, 1979; Jensen, 2007), the main propagandist messages of pornographic films can be summarized as:

  1. All women always want sex from men;

  2. Women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and

  3. Any woman who does not at first realize this, can be persuaded by force.

  Such force is rarely necessary, however, for most of the women in pornography are the ‘nymphomaniacs’ of men’s fantasies. Women are the sexual objects, whose job it is to fulfill male desire.

  Summarizing insights from the feminist critique of pornography, we can describe the ideology of pornography, and hence its propagandist use, as:

  1. We all must be sexual all the time.

  Sex must be hot.

  Hot sex requires inequality

  and

  2. Men are naturally dominant.

  Women are naturally submissive,

  therefore

  3. While specific sexual scenes in pornography are ‘fantasy’, pornography portrays men and women in their natural roles free from unnatural constraints imposed by repressive social norms,

  and all this can be reduced to one conclusion:

  4. Women are whores.

  No matter what a woman’s role or status, all women are for sex at the discretion of men. Men’s desires not only define women’s value to men, but women’s fulfilling of that male desire defines their essence. Women not only owe it to men to service them sexually, women owe it to themselves. Women can find their authentic selves only by acknowledging – indeed by embracing – this status as whores.

  In the pornographic world, women are allowed to fill a variety of professional and social roles, as long as they recognize that they are made women not by pursuing the variety of goals that come with those roles, but by not allowing those roles to impede their core function as whores, as beings who exist primarily to provide sexual pleasure to men.

  Complimentary Ideologies of Racism and Industrial Capitalism

  Contemporary pornography is not only sexist but also the most openly racist mass-media genre in contemporary society. In mainstream movies and television, the most blatant and ugly forms of racism have disappeared, although subtler patterns of stereotyping continue. Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned racism – stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive black male stud, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha.

  The pornography industry uses the term ‘inter-racial’ for the category of overtly racist material. This category contains most every possible combination of racial groups, but the dominant mode of interracial pornography is black men and white women (Dines, 2010, chapter 7). If the sexual charge of pornography is in the sexual degradation of women, for some consumers that sexual charge can be heightened by images of white women submitting to the sexual demands of the demonized black man. The degradation is intensified by the racism: the white male consumer can go ‘slumming’ and experience the sexual pleasure that is rooted in the patriarchal and white-supremacist ideology.

  Pornography also dovetails with industrial capitalism. The advertisers and marketers of mass-consumption society train us to think of ourselves as consumption machines. Such a cultural climate provides added support for the idea that as sexual beings we are little more than pleasure-seeking machines
. In a world dominated by the industrial model, it’s not surprising that a view of sexuality as primarily pleasure-acquisition by a body-as-machine flourishes. So, while pornography constructs women as objectified bodies for male pleasure, it also reduces all humans – men and women – to industrial objects, bodies devoid of any deeper humanity. It is dehumanizing in the same sense that the industrial model is dehumanizing.

  The pornography industry in capitalism is engaged not in the exploration but in the exploitation of sexuality. The DVDs and Internet sites to which men are masturbating are not being made by struggling artists who work in lonely garrets, tirelessly struggling to help us understand the mysteries of sexuality. In abstract discussions about sexually explicit material – the kind pornographers prefer we get lost in – a focus on the reality of pornography drifts off into musings about the nature of ‘sexual expression’ that ponder the ‘transgressive’ nature of pornography. Such discourse obscures the reality that the vast majority of pornography is produced to turn a profit.

  Conclusion: Reading the Resistance

  It is interesting to note, however, the resistance from the Left to this critique of pornography as propaganda. Leftists who otherwise pride themselves on analyzing systems and structures of power can turn into extreme libertarian individualists on the subject of pornography. The sophisticated, critical thinking that underlies the best of Left politics often gives way to simplistic, politically naïve, and diversionary analysis that leaves far too many leftists playing cheerleader for an exploitative industry. That analysis is all about individual choice, not about the culture’s ideology and how it shapes people’s perceptions of their ‘choices’. A critique of pornography doesn’t imply that freedom rooted in an individual’s ability to choose isn’t important, but argues instead that these issues can’t be reduced to that single moment of choice of an individual. Instead, we should ask: What is meaningful freedom within an industrial capitalist system that is racist and sexist? Leftists, who challenge the contention of the powerful that freedom comes in accepting one’s place in a hierarchy, need to make the same challenge to the sexual hierarchy of pornography.