, an international women’s group that promotes safe vaccination practices.
10 Mary Sullivan’s groundbreaking research into the failures of the legalised prostitution industry in the state of Victoria, Australia, documents the problems with OHS policies and the many health hazards of the sex industry (2007, chapters 6 and 7).
11 Space (and good taste) prevents me from discussing ‘old-fashioned’ pornography movies with doctor-and-nurse themes, or pornography with “depictions of damaged and dead foetuses in a sexual context” as documented by Norwegian researchers Marianne Erikkson and Eva-Britt Svensson (2006). See also Hilkens (2010).
12 I am borrowing the term ‘service stations’ from Jennifer Drew’s comment on Melinda Tankard Reist’s blog about Bill Henson’s photographs (4 April, 2011): “Pornography is not a moral issue, it is about the normalisation and acceptance that women and girls are not human but just men’s disposable sexual service stations,”
13 This refers to intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a technique that enables subfertile men to pass on their fertility problems to the males in the next generation. See Klein (2008) for an in-depth review of the fertility business since the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978, and Klein (2011a) for an update on the fertility business in Australia.
14 The Website
15 Children, too, are victims of the Surrogacy Industry. There are heartbreaking tales of women forced to abort a less than perfect child; babies no longer wanted, as the commissioning couple has divorced; children rejected as citizens of countries, such as France and Germany, who do not permit commercial surrogacy.
16 Apart from Google Baby, Made in India (2010) by Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha also shows the exploitation of so-called surrogates, see
17 See the Egg Donor Project initiated by the Alliance for Human Biotechnology,
18 The Website
19 The growing practice of allowing children as young as 10 to harm their bodies through hormones and surgery as they ‘transit’ from patriarchal masculinity to patriarchal femininity (or sometimes the other way around) is another alarming example of such practices (see Jeffreys, 2006).
20 See Alan Hesketh’s indictment for trading photos of ‘Amy’ in Helen Pringle, ‘Civil Justice for Victims of Child Pornography’, this volume. Hesketh was a vice-president and global patent director of the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.
21 Michael Bostwick and Jeffrey A. Bucci base their endorsement of Naltrexone on a case study with 1 patient who was a life-long porn user (2008). Naltrexone produced by Sun Pharmaceuticals based in Mumbai is an opiate receptor blocker which is said to block excessive dopamine release in response to the ‘reward’ of watching pornography. (The generic ReVia is produced by the multinational DuPont Pharma.) Its long list of adverse effects range from chest pain to excessive sweating and pain in joints. Liver and kidney checks are essential. It inhibits male orgasm,
22 In Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010), Cordelia Fine cautions about limitations in neuroimaging research: “fMRI doesn’t measure neuronal activity directly. Instead it uses a proxy: changes in blood oxygen levels” (p. 134).
23 Norman Doidge’s blaming of women for male porn sufferers’ predicaments in chapter 4, and his reliance on Freud for explaining childhood trauma, is disappointing and detracts from many interesting observations in his book, in particular, how intensely flexible the brain is which gives hope to brain-injured people.
24 While I welcome the de-stigmatisation of the term ‘mental illness’, I am concerned about the many adverse effects of antidepressants due to (over)diagnosis of depression-as-mental-illness, particularly in children and adolescents (see Klein, 2009).
25 For years, there have been many concerns expressed about APA members who decide which ‘condition’ will become the latest disease added to the DSM and their links to the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. see Moynihan, 2011).
26 The mind boggles at the idea of using ‘accountability software’ to check on your partner’s every move!
27 This is Abigail Bray’s term (2009) and I thank her and Helen Pringle for input into Conclusion. And Susan Hawthorne for practising Wild Politics (2002) in our daily lives.
PART TWO
Pornography Industries
“I blame pornography and the industry – for making this sexualised life seem so normal, so easy to do, no consequences to family or health, no problems just fun. We go to counselling once a week. Do they put that in Playboy? Is that sexy and fun?” – Marina
“It seems to me that a lot of women that are ‘pro-porn’ are not really aware of the sort of degrading material that is out there, nor the fact that they are supporting such damaging practices. Just wait until you are in a relationship with a porn addict who wants to orgasm onto your face, or calls you a dirty whore, or tells you there is something wrong with you because you do not want to swallow his orgasm or that your breasts are not big enough! That you are the one with the problem because you are uncomfortable with porn. This is not love or intimacy or even enjoyable sex. PORN IS ABUSE!” – Casey
“It almost lodges itself into your mind, like a parasite sucking away the rest of your inner life and you kind of use it to answer everything and anything. It’s a drug.” – Malcolm1
“Pornography turned my sex life into a form of science fiction/fantasy. I became unreal to myself in sex. I was unable to link these fantasies to any real human dynamic or intimacy. Objectifying myself, my sexuality, my lovers’ bodies and sexuality, destroyed any opportunity to ‘stay in the moment’. When I did stay in the moment, I found I was unable to experience arousal, except on very rare occasions … pornography colonized my sexuality and did it so thoroughly that I have never been able to undo the damage. I feel tremendous anger, frustration and sorrow over this.” – Anon (female)2
___________________________
1
2
Susan Hawthorne
Capital and the Crimes of Pornographers: Free to Lynch, Exploit, Rape and Torture
Underpinnings
We live in a world where the economic system is structured around global capitalism.
The global capitalist system relies on patriarchal social structures, including militarism to maintain control.
Under patriarchy, male symbolic systems prevail.
Patriarchal systems rely on putting men’s perceived needs ahead of all others (women, children, the poor, the colonised, the unknown, animals, plants, the earth).
Patriarchy is supported by male-centred religions in which the male is deemed inviolable.
Research on consumption shows that men spend money on luxury items such as gambling, alcohol, petrol, tobacco and sex.
The third largest illegal trade in the world after armaments and drugs is the trade in women.
Colonisation of poor nations by rich nations has resulted in significant power differentials across countries and ethnicities as well as across the sex divide.
Colonisation and theft of resources, lives and livelihood from the colonised people
constitutes structural racism that supports the economies of the rich. Women are the poorest of the poor.
Wars are declared against those among the colonised who get uppity or rebel against imposed systems.
Violence is perpetrated against groups and individuals who resist.
Torture against resisters is normalised.
The history of European slavery is intertwined with the growth of capitalism. Economic forces rather than humanitarianism inspired the abolition of slavery.
Economic forces inspired the increased participation of women in the workforce.
Feminism has been a significant face of resistance to patriarchal capitalism for the last four decades.
Violence against women is a structural weapon of patriarchal systems. Depictions of tortured women have become so normalised they are regularly used by advertisers and entertainers.
In 2006, the global pornography industry was worth US$96 billion.
The order of the above propositions is not intended to be causal; it is a complex and dynamic matrix made up of systems that support and perpetuate one another. The global pornography industry has the form of a monoculture, a system out of balance supported by economic, symbolic, attitudinal and institutionalised systems.
Global capitalism is a relatively new phenomenon, although capitalist forms have been around for many centuries.1 Capitalism has been built upon the theft of resources for the creation of wealth. Initially, this was done through plundering of nations by mainly European seafarers. As Maria Mies (1986/1999) argues, the wealth of Europe – and later of the USA and other rich nations – could not have come about without access to free labour, free resources (minerals), free land, access to knowledge about new plants, and the transfer of new ideas and concepts from the colonised world to the old world. Included among the free goods are women. This is the point at which racism and sexism meet and often result in violence against women. The women of the poor nations are ‘there for the taking’. The colonist regards it as the moment when the colonised man is truly crushed. Colonists rape the women and impregnate them as a way of weakening the colonised people, and targeting the esteem of the men. When local men abuse the women of their own communities, they share a kind of reflected power of the colonists. This creates a staircase of violence and profit. Capitalism depends on a staircase: the lowest profits and the greatest violence are on the bottom step; the highest profits at the top with impunity from responsibility for violence.
Pornography and lynching
When the slave trade was in full swing and in the hundred years that have followed its abolition, the practice of lynching shifted from one that was ‘acceptable’ to one that is now considered criminal.
What is lynching?
‘Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person,’ with a ‘mob’ being defined as ‘the assemblage of two or more persons, without color or authority of law, for the premeditated purpose and with the premeditated intent of committing an act of violence upon the person of another’. Lynching in the second degree is defined as ‘Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person and from which death does not result’ (Wikipedia, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching).2
Lynching has two elements. It is a) premeditated violence against a person; b) inflicted by a mob.
Let’s look at this in relation to pornography. A premeditated act is one in which a person plans an act. Pornography readily fits this, since in order to produce pornography one has to have a camera, a mobile phone or a video recorder. Taking photos and recording videos involves intention. The second part of pornography is distribution. Putting images onto a phone, Facebook, YouTube, or anywhere on the Internet, is an intentional act. Creating pornography therefore involves at least two layers of intention.
The mob: the definition above considers a mob to be made up of at least two people. This definition was created long before the Internet, mobile phones and video porn turned the idea of a mob into a virtual mob. Pornographers will deny the mob part of lynching, however, if a mob is as small as two people, then the intent to share images with more than one other person should amount to a mob. Indeed, in many instances of pornography the images are shared with a very large mob: hundreds, thousands, even millions of viewers.
And yet, pornography is not considered to be a form of lynching. One of the powerful effects of lynching was the photographing of the lynched bodies – black men and women who, through the distribution of these photographs, were put into a state of fear. Fear changes behaviour and when a particular group of people, such as freed slaves in the USA, are made fearful, then the behaviours of this group change: either by increased compliance to the expectation of the dominant group; or by increased aggression against the dominant group.
The production of fear responses in music videos has escalated over the years. Eminem’s violent song lyrics from the late 1990s onwards have morphed into a new genre of music pornography which attempts to pass itself off as art. In late 2010, a video by Kanye West was leaked and created an immediate storm. In an article on Unleashed, Melinda Tankard Reist (2010) includes a still which, upon seeing for the first time, reminded me of the photographs of slaves lynched in the years following the abolition of slavery.
From the video by Kanye West – Monster ft. Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj & Rick Ross [Official Music Video]. Still reproduced from:
Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, IN, 7 August, 1930. Photo by Lawrence H. Beitler. This image is reproduced from:
The video has had thousands of hits in the 6 months since it was first leaked, and while this lynching image, which appears near the beginning of the video, is distressing, the video goes on to depict in a luxury gothic setting acts of necrophilia, murder, bondage, strangulation, decapitation, evisceration and execution. All the victims are women. It is difficult to tell whether the women are real or mannequins and I would suggest that this confusion is intentional as it provides a defensive position (maybe) that no women were hurt in the production of this video. However, as others have argued (see Norma, this volume) showing ways in which women can be violated (even in animations) is enough to escalate the desire to hurt real women.
Kanye West is certainly aware of the response to his work, since the latest version of Monster appears with a disclaimer: “The following content is in no way to be interpreted as misogynistic or negative towards any groups of people. It is an art piece and it shall be taken as such.”3
The purpose of showing these 2 images together is so the reader can see for her- or himself just how reminiscent of lynching photography this latest example is. Puzzling over why such images should appear in popular culture at this time, it appears to me that the historical response to ideas of ‘women’s liberation’ might well be just as terrifying to the dominant culture (men) as was the idea of the end of slavery to the dominant culture (whites). While the video mixes dominance and subordination across ethnicities, there is no uncertainty in the viewer’s eye of which sex is subordinate.
Slavery was finally abolished across the USA in 1865. Mob violence and lynching against African Americans reached its height in the 1890s. Thirty years after the end of slavery, lynching was rife. Did this happen because African Americans had begun to take their freedom for granted, that is, they stepped on the toes of those who would happily have continued the institution of slavery? Is it any accident that 30 to 40 years after feminist analyses of pornography and other violations of women appeared that we are seeing these depictions of woman-lynching?
Since the 1970s, feminists have outlined radical ways of reforming social institutions, outlawing rape in marriage, sexual harassment, even in some places successfully decriminalising prostitution while simultaneously prosecuting the (mostly) male customers. Since the development of the Internet in the 1990s, and increased accessibility of social media, mobile
phones and video in the last 10 years, pornography, with the support of finance and industrial-strength publicity, has turned women’s bodies into the core of social violence.
Pornography as fodder for a class system
Many on the liberal left adopt a view that says pornographers are not businessmen but are simply there to unleash our sexuality from state-imposed constraints (Gail Dines, quoted in Bindel, 2010)
This is an old left-wing furphy and has no basis in fact. The women who are enticed into the system almost always say that they do it for the money. Working-class boys become soldiers or boxers; many working-class girls are pulled into prostitution or ‘just having their photos taken’. I know this latter attitude because I fell for it myself in my late teens. The men had expensive cameras; they had light dissipaters; they came in their suits. The girls – and we were girls – had only themselves and perhaps a boyfriend who thought he might live off her earnings.
Taking photos for pornography does not free anyone; does not unleash anyone’s sexuality; least of all the girls’. What it does do is provide fodder for men to exploit the naïvety of young women. What it does for the women is turn them into a saleable commodity. She begins to separate out from herself; she can no longer think of her body as her own; instead it is out there in someone’s bottom drawer or, more likely these days, on someone’s mobile phone or on the Internet.
We have heard about football clubs wanting to sue a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl for spreading around a photograph of a naked St Kilda footballer. These same clubs have been rife with sexism for years. When, in Melbourne, the tables are turned and it’s naked men instead of naked women, you see finally the concept of humiliation being raised. But only when it is the humiliation of men. While the clubs don’t consider it pornography, they do regard the distribution of images of men’s nakedness as humiliating. Women do complain about naked photos being spread around, but what feminists are complaining about is not mere nakedness, but depictions of sexualised violence against women. Pornography, these days, as indicated at the beginning of this essay, is about violation, humiliation and sexual gratification at the expense of women.
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 19