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

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  It was against the club rules to go home with a customer, and any dancer caught doing so was fired. I could easily imagine how it would happen, and before long I had also left with a customer and, while not formally arranged, I accepted payment for my time afterwards. It happened more than once. I couldn’t then, and I still struggle now, to call what I did prostitution, but by any definition it was … I suppose denial helped me keep going.

  It is easy to imagine where my life may have gone if I had continued to follow this well trodden, spiralling path downwards. It was my body that tripped me up and forced me to change direction. My knees, which had gradually been failing me, finally became too sore and swollen to dance on, and my back, too laced with pain. I rang my father who reached out a loving hand and pulled me as far as he could out of the mire. After I had suffered through the withdrawal from my heroin addiction and my head had cleared, I put in a late application to university and, miraculously, was accepted. Within a few weeks I was studying.

  It took me four and a half years to complete the degree. My body suffered from the damage I had done to it from dancing, making full-time study difficult, and my heart and mind suffered from their own slowly healing scars. I relapsed many times with heroin, and it took more than half a decade to overcome the burning need for some chemical amnesia. My personal grief was immense – the time wasted, the damage done, the lack of self-love, all stung me deeply and I struggled to heal. Writing this today, 12 years later, my eyes still prick with tears, and the fear that my own 3 daughters might suffer the same experiences and the fact that I may be incapable of stopping them, truly stills my heart.

  I didn’t think that stripping would have the profound and long reaching effect on my life that it did. I didn’t realise that when I left it, it might not leave me, that each time I sold myself, each time I danced pornography, I altered myself, redefined myself, demeaned myself, erased myself on a fundamental level. The trauma from dancing came in many guises and has taken a long time to recover from. I left with my self-esteem in shreds, my pockets empty, my body damaged, and my heart filled with shame, both self-imposed and compounded by the social stigma of being a junkie stripper. It was a hair-raising ride to the bottom. I often wonder where life would have taken me if I hadn’t been pressed by circumstance to become a stripper, if I had lived in a world without strip clubs, brothels, and other institutions built on the trade of flesh and so heavily reliant on people in compromised positions to feed them. I passionately hope that my daughters might inhabit such a world.

  Melissa Farley

  Pornography Is Infinite Prostitution1

  Pornography is an act of prostitution

  The first time I heard Evelina Giobbe2 explain that “pornography is pictures of prostitution,” a light bulb went on in my mind. Of course. How had the two gotten separated in the first place?

  Prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators. It is a gendered survival strategy based on the assumption of terrible risks by the woman in prostitution. Sexual violence and physical assault are the norm for women in all types of prostitution, regardless of its legal status or physical location.3

  Although the real lives of those in prostitution and pornography are often indistinguishable from the experience of incest, intimate partner violence, and rape – human rights violations are obscured when pornography is falsely differentiated from other kinds of prostitution, as if they’re not at all connected. Pornographers and their public relations people will fight to the death to deny the overlapping parallels of prostitution and pornography, but johns (punters) and comedians know there’s little difference. Jay Leno joked, “Did you hear about the porn convention that is going on right now in Las Vegas? They say that you can mingle with porn stars at the convention. Yes, and they act just like everyday normal whores” (NBC Tonight Show, 17 January, 2007).

  People laughed at the joke, but what made it funny for them, I wondered? The misogyny? Because he winked at what johns were getting away with: pretending to be just porn viewers when in fact they were really just good old johns? Did the audience experience complicity with Leno in his dehumanization of women? Did the listeners feel some kind of guilt or shame that made them laugh uncomfortably?

  A john interviewed for a study of men who buy sex explained, “Yes, the woman in pornography is a prostitute. They’re prostituting before the cameras. They’re getting money from a film company rather than individuals” (Farley, 2007b, p. 147).

  A survivor of prostitution further explained, “Pornography is prostitution that is legalized as long as someone gets to take pictures …” (Simonton and Smith, 2004, p. 355).

  The same kinds of violence against women are perpetrated in both pornography and prostitution: verbal abuse, including racist verbal abuse, contempt, degradation, physical and sexual assault, and acts that are identical to torture as defined by international legal conventions.

  A survivor of pornography and prostitution described their sameness, explaining that she had been physically hurt, raped on camera, and pressured to do more extreme sex acts on film, such as anal sex, just as women in prostitution are pressured by johns to perform more extreme sex acts (Simonton and Smith, 2004).

  The conditions leading to entry into pornography are much the same as the conditions leading to entry into prostitution

  The same factors that compel women into prostitution, compel women into pornography. These include:

  Poverty

  Vulnerability to deceptive job offers

  Racism

  Lack of educational and job training opportunities

  Childhood physical and sexual abuse

  Childhood neglect

  Sexual harassment

  Abandonment

  Culturally mainstreamed contempt for women and girls

  Seductive manipulation by sexual exploiters who are businessmen

  Most women in the sex industry were sexually abused as children (Silbert and Pines, 1983; Nadon et al., 1998; Widom and Kuhns, 1996). The pornography replicates the sexual abuse, with psychological as well as physical coercion as the perp’s means of control.

  As in prostitution, women are coerced into pornography by threat, deception, or the threat of violence. After an agreement to perform one specific act of prostitution for the camera, many women tell us they are physically coerced into performing another and often more dangerous sex act.

  The pornographer/pimp uses the camera as his tool of intrusive degradation. For example, she may be secretly filmed while using the toilet, with that footage used as pornography (Morita, 2004).

  Women’s economic desperation serves as a means of coercion into pornography. One woman explained that she was about to be evicted from her apartment when she saw an advertisement for nude photos. “The owner of the ‘nude photo agency’ offered me a place to live and a lot of other work if I did film. At that point in my life, I really didn’t have any other options” (Simonton and Smith, 2004, p. 352).

  A 20-year-old woman was employed at a Ukrainian ‘modeling agency’ that sent her to beauty pageants throughout Europe where she had the chance to meet rich men. The modeling agencies functioned as pimps and traffickers. Buyers from United Arab Emirates, France, Italy, Japan and Russia inspected the women in beauty pageants, chose those they wanted to buy, and then rented the young models for up to a month at a time. The young woman herself may not have known that the modeling job was actually prostitution (often including pornography) until she arrived in another country (Plekhanova, 2006).

  A Nevada legal pimp specialized in hiring women who had previously made pornography videos. He then used their videos to promote his brothel, advertising ‘pornstars for rent’ (Mead, 2001). At this pimp’s brothel, women told a research team that it was not possible to make much money unless they permitted the pimp to film their prostitution. Women new to prostitution reported intense pressure from this particular pimp to be filmed by him, even though they often preferred no
t to have that documentation made of their prostitution (Farley, 2007a).

  Once their prostitution was documented via pornography, women felt that it defined and shamed them. In the long run, the pornography made it more difficult to escape the sex industry since it was a permanent record of their prostitution circulating on the Internet or in stores selling pornography.

  The sold and re-sold film of prostitution that is pornography generates massive profits for pimps. But for her, it is infinite prostitution, a document of her sexual exploitation, her body exploited and masturbated over endlessly into the future as long as it generates profits. One session of paid sex in prostitution goes global on the Internet when she is turned into pornography.

  Pornographers are specialty pimps

  Pimps typically recruit women into prostitution by using pornography to glamorize the sex industry. Survivors at a public hearing on the harm of pornography testified that they had all been introduced to prostitution by pimps who showed them pornography (MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1997, p. 114). Once in prostitution, pimps use pornography to teach women and girls what sex acts to perform (Silbert and Pines, 1987, pp. 865–866).

  Survivor Miki Garcia testified under oath that Hugh Hefner, pornographer and founder of Playboy magazine, was a pimp who controlled an international prostitution ring, and that Playmates under contract to Playboy were prostituting (MacKinnon, 2001, pp. 1539–1543).

  In many cases, pornographers are indistinguishable from other pimps (see Nozaka, 1970). These predatory people exploit women’s economic and psychological vulnerabilities, coercing them to get into and stay in the sex industry. Pornographers and pimps both take pictures to advertise the people they are selling. One pornographer proclaimed that he was in the business of “degrading whores for your viewing pleasure,” clearly eliminating the alleged boundary between pornography and prostitution (in Jensen, 2006).

  British torture pornographer Peter Acworth purchased a 14 million dollar building in San Francisco for his business in 2007. Acworth maintains he’s just a pornographer, not a pimp. He’s a fetishist with a camera who gets off by paying women to be terrorized, stuffed into boilers, hogtied, beaten, near-drowned, hung from ceilings.

  Just as some prostitution is more violent than other prostitution, some pornography is more violent than other pornography. Calling it ‘kink’ not torture and calling the women he films ‘models’ not prostitutes, Acworth uses the same price structure used in prostitution: the more invasive and the more violent, the higher the price. In a newspaper interview, Acworth recruited women by publicizing the following rates for his pornography: “$700 for vaginal dildo and finger penetration; $800 for vaginal/anal dildo play and finger penetration; $900 for vaginal and/or oral sex; $1,000 for vaginal and oral sex plus anal dildos; $1,100 for vaginal and anal sex; and $1,300 for double penetration.” Acworth offered more pay for “forced finger fucking” (Harper, 2007).4

  Sometimes the violence is perpetrated by johns, pimps, and pornographers simply because they can and because women in prostitution, whether it’s filmed or not, are not considered worthy of safety, protection, or of being offered real alternatives. As one woman testified about the making of pornography:

  ‘I got the shit kicked out of me,’ … ‘I was told before the video – and they said this very proudly, mind you – that in this line most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad … I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, “Turn the fucking camera off,” and they kept going’ (in Amis, 2001).

  Research provides evidence for harmful effects of pornography

  There is now research evidence for the harms generated by pornography. Some of the traumatic stress (PTSD) suffered by women in prostitution results from the ways that men use pornography of them and against them.5 Having pictures taken of one’s prostitution causes more distress than if the prostitution was not filmed. When their prostitution is filmed, the pornography haunts them for the rest of their lives, causing the women distress and anxiety about it being viewed by family, friends, or future employers. Women in prostitution whose buyers or pimps made pornography of them in prostitution had more severe symptoms of PTSD than did women who did not have pornography made of them (Farley, 2007b, p. 146).

  Women explain that the harms of pornography are worse than prostitution alone. A survivor explained,

  [P]ornography is much worse than prostitution because it affects me for the rest of my life. It’s not like I just … had sex with a john, collected my money, and went home … I’m still exploited all over the Internet ten years later. People recognize me. I’m harassed because of it. My kids are being harassed (in Simonton and Smith, 2004, p. 355).

  In other research, pornography has been shown to affect men’s sexual aggression against women. Malamuth and colleagues have shown that in combination with other factors, pornography contributes to men’s increased sexual aggression against women. These factors include impersonal sex, hostile masculine identification, a history of family violence, adolescent delinquency, and attitudes supportive of aggression (Malamuth and Pitpitan, 2007).

  In findings that are consistent with Malamuth’s, a research study of 110 sex buyers in Scotland compared high frequency prostitute-users to low frequency users. The most frequent prostitution users were also the most frequent pornography users. The most frequent prostitution users were also more likely to have committed sexually aggressive acts against non-prostituting women (Farley et al., in press).

  Other research studies have found similar statistical associations between pornography and prostitution. Monto and McRee (2005) compared the pornography use of 1,672 US men who had been arrested for soliciting women in prostitution with samples of US men who had not used women in prostitution. Men who had purchased sex were far more likely to use pornography on a regular basis than men who had not purchased sex. Men who were repeat users of women in prostitution were more likely than first time users of prostituted women to use pornography, and first time users of women in prostitution were more likely than men who had not bought sex to have used pornography.

  It is possible that more frequent use of pornography supports and stimulates men in their use of women in prostitution. Three studies support the feminist understanding of prostitution as a form of violence against women: the Scottish sex buyer study described above, the Monto and McRee study in 2005, and a meta-analysis from Hald, Malamuth and Yuen in 2010 that found a significant association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women.

  In the real world, pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking are indistinguishable

  Human rights violations are obscured when trafficking is falsely differentiated from prostitution and pornography. The pimps’ and johns’ spin is that trafficking is bad but prostitution is a good-enough job for poor women. Some even say that forced trafficking is bad but voluntary migration for sex work is OK when the experience of the women is the same in both situations. Or that non-consenting prostitution is a problem but if there’s a camera in the room, pornography is then assumed to be consenting.

  There is an endless stream of words that cover up the interconnections of the sex trafficking industry.6 Like other global businesses, it has domestic and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it operates in each community, many different owners and managers, and it is constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit. Pornography today is used as advertising for prostitution and as a way to traffic women (MacKinnon, 2005). Creating disconnections when in reality all sectors of the hydra-headed sex trafficking industry are deeply connected – leaves the door open for ideological arguments that permit pimps and johns to defend harmful practices. Manipulating these false distinctions can result in deep confusion about the nature of sexual harm and sexual freedom. When pornography is conceptually morphed into sex work, then brutal exploitation by
pornographers becomes an employer–employee relationship. When prostitution is defined as labor, the predatory purchase of a human being by a john becomes an everyday business transaction.

  Defining pornography as a choice can be confusing to women in it as well as to the public. She accepts the pornographers’ propaganda that it’s her choice, so she blames herself for the harm done to her, even though she often has no other options.

  False distinctions confuse people who are trying to abolish these human rights violations. Endless elaboration on the differences rather than a focus on the essential similarities between pornography, prostitution and trafficking makes it challenging to end these sexual exploitation businesses.

  In some scenarios, pimps and johns create a false distinction between modeling and prostitution. It’s called modeling for the viewer/john of an Italian beauty pageant who can afford “dates with available, beautiful women” but it’s experienced as trafficking for the ‘contestant’ who comes from desperate circumstances in the Ukraine and who accepted an offer to come to Italy to meet interesting, affluent men.

  Although described as separate entities, Web-based, video, and print pornography are integral to the sex industry, including prostitution and trafficking. Legal brothel owners have attempted to “cross fertilize” prostitution with legal adult businesses such as strip clubs, Internet sex sites and pornography (Hausbeck and Brents, 2000). The Girls of Cheetah’s is pornography made at a Las Vegas strip club where prostitution happens (Jordan, 2004, p. 107). Connecting stripping and pornography, a strip club Website advertised, “Breeding pornstars: one showgirl at a time!!!” (