Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
Page 17
The idea is created that if you follow this health advice, life in the pornography industry is without danger to your health. Indeed, ‘the Industry’ is depicted as so safe that you are admonished to watch your private sex life so you won’t infect your fellow ‘clean’ porn performers.
Condom use is encouraged (“switch condoms for every hole”) but ‘unprotected sex’ is mentioned so frequently that it is clear that condom use is wishful thinking rather than daily reality. The follow-up video, Porn 102, is interspersed with short video clips that show how exciting porn shoots are, while Dr Mitch and Nurse Nina – a jolly blond woman and former porn performer too – instruct you, with lots of laughs, how to start working in the Industry. Their advice includes: “don’t do anything you haven’t already tried out with your partner”, “don’t fuck under water, very bad for your tender parts.” Some of what they say sounds eminently sensible: “you can say no”; “[y]ou are in charge of your career”; and “make sure you get paid properly.” You are also advised to bring “some knitting, puzzles, a robe, slippers … because you will have to wait a lot on the set.” If, despite these precautions, you get sick, AIM promises plenty of drugs they can treat you with. The clear message is that ongoing medical supervision and treatment is part of your life in the porn industry: medicalisation and pornification joined at the hip (pocket).
Ultimately, despite – or precisely because of – the easy camaraderie between Dr Mitch, Nurse Nina and other ex-porn stars in Porn 101 and Porn 102, the AIM Website acts as a grooming site for inexperienced girls and women who are attracted to the promise of stardom and big money. The health care aspect normalises the Porn Industry, with potential porn performers being reassured repeatedly that it is a lucrative ‘job’ and that they will be in charge (“your pussy is your business – are you going to incorporate?”). In spite of all of this down-to-earth talk, we must remember that only sex industry ‘jobs’ accept dangerous STIs, as well as violence through rough handling and vaginal, anal and throat tears, as part of their ‘regular’ occupational health and safety (OHS) requirements. Add to these dangers the well-documented problems of substantial drug and alcohol abuse to cope with the demands of the ‘job’. Unintended pregnancies are not mentioned on the AIM Website, but the Australian Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP) recommends the use of the morning-after pill after unprotected sex or condom breakage. If used on a regular basis, the morning-after pill can adversely affect a woman’s health (see Sullivan, 2007, pp. 298–299).10
The pornography industry’s continuous medicalisation via 30-day STI testing and repeated courses of potent drugs for infections consolidate the link between Big Pharma and Big Porn. Pornsex is a health hazard, an ‘industrial disease’ (Sullivan, 2007, p. 303), and women are reduced to ‘industrial vaginas’ (Jeffreys, 2009).
4 Reproporn11
Similar to the way in which women are reduced to body parts that become ‘service stations’12 for men in pornsex, the ideology of ‘assisted’ reproductive technologies normalises the dissection of women into body parts for breeding. In ‘Fertility Inc’ – the thousands of IVF clinics proliferating around the globe – dozens of eggs are extracted from ovaries dangerously extended by high doses of drug cocktails; single sperm – ejaculated by men in fertility clinic cubicles with porn mags – are forced into egg cells;13 wombs-for-hire, surrounded by real live women, are implanted with petrie-dish embryos to ‘house a pregnancy’, ‘function as an oven’, ‘bake the bun’. Cut the child out of the woman’s womb after it has been sex selected and disease-screened, hand it to the commissioning couple (woman and man or 2 men; rarely 2 women), insert their names on the birth certificate as parents – and the birth mother is obsolete with one stroke of the pen. Women become dehumanised objects and are exploited as ‘gestational carriers’: for money in commercial surrogacy, or for love in so-called altruistic arrangements. In 1983, Andrea Dworkin foresaw the use of reproductive brothels for controlled eugenic reproduction (Dworkin, 1983); in 1985, US investigative journalist, Gena Corea, predicted that poor women would be used as breeders in reproductive brothels in the ‘Third World’ (1985, pp. 301–302).
In the 21st century, this practice is now widespread. In a raid on ‘Baby 101’, a clinic in Thailand, in February 2011, police found 15 pregnant women from Vietnam who had been trafficked (Winn, 2011). Their passports had been taken away and they were kept locked up as reproductive slaves: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) gains new meaning. Despite the police raid, the clinic continues to operate and advertises its eugenic services specifically to Western women: “Unnecessary to worry about out of shape on your stature, neither to fear the intimacy fading [with husband]” (
Pregnancies are medically outsourced to the wombs of poor women by an increasing number of Western couples who appear to see no ethical problem in medical tourism and renting a woman’s body for 9 months for their made-to-order child;15 after all, many argue, the woman is paid much more than she would earn in any other ‘job’. In the jarring Israeli documentary Google Baby (2009) by Zippi Brand Frank (see Kung, 2010), embryos made with quality-checked ‘white’ eggs from the USA (sourced online) and sperm from the commissioning fathers in Israel (gay or with infertile wives), are frozen and flown to India to be implanted in Indian women (often ‘pimped’ by their husbands) in an IVF clinic located in Gujarat, a poor state. Here the women are required to live assembly-line style in the clinic for the whole 9 months of their pregnancy and are not allowed to visit their families. The entrepreneurial businessman who hatched this plan in Israel, and the IVF doctor in India, pocket most of the money. Should the ‘surrogate’ miscarry, she will only receive a part payment.16
The Surrogate Industry has particularly taken off in India, where reproductive tourism was expected to bring in half a billion US dollars in 2010, and surrogacy services are offered in 350 clinics across the country. Women’s wombs are cheap; as the Medical Tourism Corporation (2010) claims: “Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less (
Some countries are now trying to regulate the practice: France and Germany prohibit surrogacy and the states of Queensland and New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory, recently passed legislation that makes going overseas to any countries for surrogacy a criminal offence (see Klein, 2011b).
Such human rights abuses mirror sex industry practices where husbands with ‘indisposed’ wives buy a prostituted woman, gorge themselves on online pornography and visit lap dancing clubs. Pornsex and reproporn both harm women, while men fulfil their desires, or profit as pimps and club owners.
The similarities between Big Porn and Fertility Inc do not end here. Good looks and glamour are as important for so-called surrogates and egg ‘donors’ (to provide egg cells for stem cell research and infertile women) as they are in the sought after slut-and-porn-star look for today’s girls and women.
On eggdonation.com which calls itself “the premier fertility agency in the United States since 1991,” a group of ‘Donor Angels’ entices prospective egg buyers with their photos: a cheerful blond Caucasian, an Asian girl in a ‘sexy’ pose, a red-headed beauty with pouting lips and seductive look, and a woman of colour, smile from the Webpage for you. The founder of the site, Shelley Smith, writes that “[t]he Agency for ‘Super Donors’ is known for representing the brightest, most beautiful and accomplished donors in the country. The Agency accepts less than 3% of the 1,200–1,500 applications we receive every month” (email from eggdonation.com, 13 May, 2011).
In Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor (2004), green-eyed, tall and blond Swede, Julia Derek, tells of her life as a 12-time egg ‘donor’. Derek moved to the USA as a student. She was not allowed to engage in paid work and was lured into the egg industry by promised fees of thousands of dollars. She became seriously ill from stuffing herself
with hormones and then ‘popping’ dozens of eggs as a Super Donor. Twice, she nearly died from ovarian hyperstimulation and other fertility-drug induced problems.
Julia Derek was lucky to survive the ordeal. Many women do not and there are sad stories of strokes, brain damage, heart attacks, ovarian and other cancers, and death as ‘side effects’ of the business of egg harvesting.17 In Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the Ukraine, poor women who prostitute themselves in the local sex industry are also exploited as egg providers for UK clinics who have set up egg-collecting franchises in this unregulated market (Sexton, 2005; Barnett and Smith, 2006).
All of these examples represent the systemic structural abuse of women (and their commodified children) in the power relations inherent in Big Porn and Fertility Inc. For decades, these abuses have been documented and researched by anti-pornography activists and feminist critics of reprogenetic science. The latter have exposed dangerous practices and shoddy research, and challenged the IVF Industry to prove that their lucrative business, and link with Big Pharma through multi-drug use, does not harm women.18 Their answer has either been silence or to produce one-sided pharmaceutical-funded research that does not pass even the first test of sound and ethical research methodology.
Postmodern ideology, the ease of advertising medical entrepreneurship on the Internet, rampant capitalism and the increasing commodification of life converge to lead to personal and political dissociation: the individual (female) body is ceasing to exist as anything but ‘other’ – a mere shell ‘out there’ that can be commercialised and cut, modified, drugged, penetrated – all in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘it is my right’.19
But there are signs of hope. There is an international groundswell of new activist groups coming together to challenge dehumanising practices. For example, 80 public health organisations, health networks, medical professionals, human rights and women’s groups protested against experiments with the ‘cervical cancer’ vaccine Gardasil on Indian tribal girls in 2010, and against the surrogacy industry in 2011 (see
There is, however another problem that puts new obstacles in the way of these encouraging developments: the return of biological determinism and the increasing tendency to reify behaviours such as compulsive porn use and the obsession with baby making as genetically determined, hard-wired in the brain, or even ‘addictions’.
5 Porn Brains: who profits from ‘porn addiction’?
When I type ‘porn addiction’ into Google I get 1,780,000 results in 0.15 seconds. Entries range from ‘Addicted to Porn’, ‘Can’t stop watching porn? – Why is it so difficult to stop?’ to ‘Dealing with Porn Addiction – Ask Men’, ‘Porn Addiction Treatment’ and ‘Freedom from Porn Addiction’. Offers to liberate the sufferers from their addiction span a bewildering array of treatments: individual and group therapy; counselling for co-dependency and porn addiction; addictive voice recognition technique (AVRT) also called ‘Rational Recovery’; a ‘re-sensitization model’. The idea that pornography can become addictive is being turned into a lucrative business proposition. Expensive clinics are expanding their treatments for alcohol, gambling and sex addiction to include ‘porn addiction’. And there are already drug treatments for pornography ‘addicts’ such as the SSRI antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline), manufactured by Pfizer20 and long associated with suicidal behaviour, for co-occurring anxiety and depression, and Naltrexone, approved by the FDA for use in alcoholism treatment, and used off-label for withdrawal from heroin (Bostwick and Bucci, 2008).21
But ‘Porn Addiction’ is rarely defined. In the mainstream media and by many in the ‘helping professions’, it is simply accepted as a new medical condition that is spreading like wildfire among the male population of the universe. Writing on this issue, Joel Tozer quotes ongoing online research of Internet Pornography Addiction by the Australian Centre for Addiction Research (ACAR): “many are becoming addicted to the safety of online pornography to the point where some are unable to achieve orgasm during intercourse” (Tozer, 2011). That pornography has devastating consequences for sexual behaviour has been extensively documented by feminist researchers over decades (see Dines, 2010), but does this prove that pornography (over)consumption is an addiction?
Research studies – often case studies with very few participants and an addon to sex addiction research – indicate that the study of ‘porn addiction’ is attracting intense attention from a diverse group of experts including biological psychiatrists, geneticists, endocrinologists, bioengineers, and the ever more prominent neuroscientists whose new scanning toys make us gaze in amazement at their experiments with lit-up brains during porn use, despite the lack of clear analysis of what such lit-up brain areas actually mean.
Might there be a chemical imbalance or ‘defect’ in the brains of the growing numbers of porn users who say they are suffering from ‘porn addiction’? Or even perhaps a ‘porn gene’? After all, for a long time, scientists have been talking about (controversial) gay genes, genes for happiness, for depression etc. In December 2010, a team of researchers led by Justin Garcia at Binghamton University looked at infidelity and sexual promiscuity, then matched the behaviour of the 181 research subjects to their genes and found the dopamine receptor D4 polymorphism, or DRD4 gene, to be the ‘culprit’ for such behaviour (Garcia et al., 2010). This gene had already been linked to sensation-seeking behaviours such as alcohol use and gambling; will ‘porn addiction’ be next?
Then there are developments in neuroscience – including recent technologies of brain imaging – that tell us that our behaviours are mirrored in different parts of the brain and can be observed.22
In his bestseller, The Brain that Changes Itself (2007/2008), Freudian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Norman Doidge, endorses the addiction theory of pornography (chapter 4), using neuroscience to back up his claims. He explains that because of brain plasticity, repeated porn use is visible on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Looking at gonzo porn (and Doidge has a good understanding of the violent nature of current pornography), makes “the pleasure-giving neurotransmitter dopamine more active in the brain” (p. 106). New brain maps are developed and, Doidge says, “[b]ecause it is a use-it-or-lose-it brain, when we develop a map area we long to keep it activated” (p. 108). The increased surges of dopamine “are thus wired into our brains” and “[n]eurons that fire together wire together” (p. 114). Put differently, it follows that on a fMRI scan you can see how watching pornography fries your brain.
However, Doidge argues that such wiring together of neurons can be undone. Men without serious childhood trauma, once they understand the problem of dopamine activation and “how they were plastically reinforcing it” (p. 131), can go cold turkey and stop “using their computers for a period to weaken their problematic neuronal networks, and their appetite for porn withered away” (p. 131). Even one of his difficult patients was able to unlearn his addiction to pornography once he understood that it was his childhood (e.g. his drunken, abusive mother) and later his sexual partner who forced her S&M practices on him, that made his sexual and violent dopamine-charged neurons get ‘fired and wired together’.23
Norman Doidge is optimistic: the brain is so flexible that every bad habit can be unlearned with the help of a therapist. Big Pharma, on the other hand, welcomes the medicalising of ‘porn addiction’ – defining it as an illness – as a promising market expansion. The use of tablets (or patches or injections), in particular, antidepressants and opioid antagonists, for the new ‘epidemic’ of ‘porn addiction’ is increasing. Prescriptions for conditions such as anxiety and depression have been skyrocketing. In 2007, the USA spent $25 billion on antidepressants and antipsychotics (Whitacker, 2010, p. 3).
It is now quite common to hear even young people explain: “I’ve been diagnosed with depression; it’s a chemical imbalance in my brain, but the antidepressant I was prescribed will fix it.”24 We are dutifully becoming ‘patients’ and swallowing the pills doled out by the ‘Sickness Industry’ (Moynihan and Cassels, 2005) to fix the ‘defect’ supposedly detected in our bodies. Perhaps we will soon hear the biological determinist explanation: “I have a porn addiction which is due to excessive dopamine in my brain because of a genetic defect, but my Naltrexone controls it”?
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is considering adding sex addiction to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).25 As Russell Brand reports (2011): “The United Kingdom’s health service is starting a preliminary project for sex addiction treatment, which experts say, could spark a boom in drug companies repackaging antidepressants and sex-drive-suppressants.” If this were to happen, it would lead to a further explosion in experimental treatments as we have seen for female and male sexual dysfunction (see section 1). John Cloud from Time Magazine notes:
APA recognition of sex addiction would create huge revenue streams in the mental-health business. Some wives who know their husbands are porn enthusiasts would force them into treatment. Some husbands who have serial affairs would start to think of themselves not as rakes but as patients (Cloud, 2011).