).
The overlap between different arms of the sex industry is illustrated by a law enforcement investigation that took place in Las Vegas. Appearing to be an office complex from the street, a sex business operation blended pornography production with escort and web cam prostitution.7 The pimp/pornographer rented six offices that functioned as Internet pornography businesses, cyberpeepshow prostitution with a web cam, as well as a location out of which women were illegally pimped to hotels and to a brothel (confidential Nevada law enforcement source).
As the Leno joke indicates, the adult industry trade shows are promotion for prostitution. The sex trafficking industry is named an ‘adult industry’ not only to conceal the fact that it’s prostitution but to manipulate people into seeing the sex industry as grown-up, mature. In Australia and in the United States, sex trade shows shout out the message that prostitution is a fun, consensual, lifestyle choice accompanied by HIV-free health and the right to privacy. Despite these claims, at their core these sex trade shows have been described as “19th century freak shows”8 where “the industry rejects no act of exploitation demanded by customers” (O’Connor and Healy, 2006, p. 18). The robotic, mocking and at times sadistic enactments of ‘erotic play’ at sex trade shows are especially harmful because of the pretense of genuine pleasure.
Pornography is a document of a woman’s humiliation (Clarke, 2004, p. 205). It’s a record of what men’s extreme domination of women looks like – in all its violently racist and classist specificity. But there are a few positive signs of real social change. Here’s some good news: Glenn Marcus, like Peter Acworth of kink.com, ran a torture pornography Website. A woman who was psychologically coerced by Marcus to permit pornography of her to be sold on Slavespace.com brought charges against Marcus who was her pimp/pornographer/trafficker. At one point he stuffed a ball gag in her mouth, sewed her mouth shut with surgical needles and hung her on a wall.
Her attorneys, as I understand it, used the following definition: Sex trafficking is coercing or selling a person into a situation of sexual exploitation, such as prostitution or pornography.
On 5 March, 2007, pornographer Marcus was convicted of sex trafficking (Bartow, 2007). This United States legal decision reflects a deepening understanding of how pornography harms women and the ways in which pornography and prostitution are the same for the person who is being sexually exploited for profit.
Bibliography
Amis, Martin (17 March, 2001) ‘A Rough Trade’ The Guardian
Bartow, Ann (24 May, 2007) ‘Bondage Webmaster Likely Going to Jail. Feminist Law Professors’
Clarke, D.A. (2004) ‘Prostitution for everyone: Feminism, globalization, and the “sex” industry’ in Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Farley, Melissa (2007a) Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections. Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco.
Farley, Melissa (2007b) ‘“Renting an Organ for 10 Minutes:” What Tricks Tell Us About Prostitution, Pornography, and Trafficking’ in David E. Guinn and Julie DiCaro (Eds) Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking. Captive Daughters Media. Los Angeles, pp. 144–152.
Farley, Melissa, Ann Cotton, Lynne Jacqueline, Sybil Zumbeck, Frida Spiwak, Maria E. Reyes, Dinorah Alvarez, Ufuk Sezgin (2003) ‘Prostitution and Trafficking in 9 Countries: Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’ Journal of Trauma Practice 2 (3/4), pp. 33–74.
Farley, Melissa, Jan Macleod, Lynn Anderson and Jacqueline M. Golding (in press) ‘Attitudes and Social Characteristics of Men Who Buy Sex in Scotland’ Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.
Hald, Gert Martin, Neil Malamuth and C. Yuen (2010) ‘Pornography and Attitudes Supporting Violence Against Women: Revisiting the Relationship in Nonexperimental Studies’ Aggressive Behavior 36 (1), pp. 14–20.
Harper, Will (21 February, 2007) ‘Kinky Town’ San Francisco Weekly
Hausbeck, Kathryn and Barbara G. Brents (2000) ‘Inside Nevada’s Brothel System’ in Ron Weitzer (Ed) Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry. Routledge, New York, pp. 217–243.
Jensen, Robert (2006) ‘The Paradox of Pornography’ Op Ed News
Jordan, Brent K. (2004) Stripped: Twenty years of secrets from inside the strip club. Morris Publishing, Kearney, Nebraska.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. (2001) ‘Testimony of Miki Garcia’ Sex Equality. pp. 1539–1543. Foundation Press, New York.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. (2005) ‘Pornography as Trafficking’ Michigan Journal of International Law 26 (4) pp. 993–1012.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. and Andrea Dworkin (1997) In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Malamuth, Neil M. and Eileen V. Pitpitan (2007) ‘The effects of pornography are moderated by men’s sexual aggression risk’ in David E. Guinn and Julie DiCaro (Eds) Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking. Captive Daughters Media, Los Angeles, pp. 125–143.
Mead, Rebecca (23 April, 2001) ‘American Pimp’ New Yorker
Monto, Martin A. and N. McRee (2005) ‘A comparison of the male customers of female street prostitutes with national samples of men’ International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 49, pp. 505–529.
Morita, Seiya (2004) ‘Pornography, prostitution, and women’s human rights in Japan’ in Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, pp. 64–83.
Nadon, Susan M., Catherine Koverola and Eduard H. Schludermann (1998) ‘Antecedents to Prostitution: Childhood Victimization’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 13, pp. 206–221.
Nozaka, Akiyuki (1968/1970) The Pornographers (translated by Michael Gallagher, 1970). Charles Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo.
O’Connor, Monica and Grainne Healy (2006) ‘The Links between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: a Briefing Handbook’ Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Plekhanova, Lena (10 August, 2006) ‘Prostitution remains issue for Ukrainian modeling industry’ Kyiv Post
Silbert, Mimi H. and Ayala M. Pines (1983) ‘Early Sexual Exploitation as an Influence in Prostitution’ Social Work 28, pp. 285–289.
Silbert, Mimi H. and Ayala M. Pines (1987) ‘Pornography and Sexual Abuse of Women’ Sex Roles 10, p. 857.
Simonton, Ann and Carol Smith (2004) ‘Who are Women in Pornography?: A conversation’ in Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) (2004) Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, pp. 352–361.
Sullivan, Mary (2007) Making Sex Work. A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Widom, Cathy Spatz and Joseph B. Kuhns (1996) ‘Childhood victimization and subsequent risk for promiscuity, prostitution, and teenage pregnancy: A prospective study’ American Journal of Public Health 86 (11), pp. 1607–1612.
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1 Many thanks to Harvey L. Schwartz and Eleanor Kenelly Gaetan for helpful edits.
2 Evelina Giobbe is a US feminist, and founder of WHISPER, Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt. WHISPER was one of the first organizations to offer survivors of prostitution support for exiting prostitution along with a feminist understanding of prostitution as domestic violence.
3 For resources and articles documenting the human rig
hts violations of prostitution see the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Website
4 If you go to Acworth’s Website, be forewarned that it contains disturbing photographs of women being tortured.
5 The psychiatric diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) describes mental and physical avoidance behaviors, psychological numbing, social distancing, flashbacks, and anxious physiologic hyperarousal that result from extreme emotional distress. Two-thirds of women, men, and transgendered people in prostitution in 9 countries suffered PTSD at the same level as rape survivors, combat veterans, and state-sponsored torture survivors. See Farley et al. (2003).
6 Many thanks to Annie Lobert, Las Vegas, for the words ‘sex trafficking industry’.
7 On a web cam site, the john pays to chat with women who perform prostitution on streaming video, performing in real time what masturbating johns pay them to do.
8 Andrew Masterson, the Age, 1998, p. 2 cited in Sullivan (2007) p. 181.
Abigail Bray
Capitalism and Pornography: the Internet as a Global Prostitution Factory
She is sold and bought minute by minute, breath by breath
In the slave markets of the earth – Kotzia is near here
Wake up early. Wake up to see it.
She is a whore in the rotten-houses
The german drill for conscripts
And the last
Endless miles of the national highway towards the centre
In the suspended meats from Bulgaria.
And when her blood clots and she can take no more
Of her kind being sold so cheaply
She dances barefoot on the tables a zeibekiko
Holding in her bruised blue hands
A well sharpened axe.
Loneliness,
Our loneliness I say. Its our loneliness I am speaking about,
Is a axe in our hands
That over your heads is revolving revolving revolving revolving
– ‘Three Clicks Left’, Katerina Gogou (1940–1993)1
To those who think critically about pornography, it is clear that “[p]ornography is prostitution” (Whisnant, 2004, p. 20).2 The bodies within pornography have been bought and sold for sex. Kathleen Barry writes that the “producers and distributors can be defined as pimps as they are living off the earnings of prostitutes” (Barry, 1979, p. 99). The pornographer buys the living sexual labour of human beings and then pimps their prostitution to ‘johns’ across the Net. Porn has become so normalised as liberating adult sexual entertainment that it is difficult to think of pornographers as pimps, the global porn industry as a form of human trafficking, porn consumers as ‘john’ or ‘buyers’, or the people in pornography as prostituted women. Instead, we are encouraged to use a language that masks the prostitution pornography is founded on, and that disconnects us from the living bodies who are prostituted. Women and men whose bodies are bought and sold by pornographers are celebrated as ‘actors’ or sexually self-empowered ‘pornstars’. Pornographers are described as ‘film makers’ or ‘producers in the adult entertainment business’, while men who pay pornographers or porn-hosting ISPs, are called ‘consumers’ or ‘porn users’, if they are named at all.
Internet pornography is a complex form of prostitution: the social and economic relations within pornography go beyond our commonsense understandings of prostitution. By commonsense understanding of prostitution I mean a commercial transaction between a living prostitute, a buyer/john, and a pimp or brothel owner, that occurs for a specific period of time at a specific location. Within Internet pornography prostitution these kinds of social and economic relations – between a living prostitute, a pimp and/or john – and these kinds of historical constraints – time and place – are radically transformed. To put it simply, her living labour is prostituted for a day or so by a pornographer so that her prostitution can be sold for an unlimited amount of time. She is prostituted in a porn studio in North America so that her prostitution can be circulated globally. She is purchased once by a john so that an unlimited number of anonymous johns and pimps can sell and buy her prostitution. Through the production process of pornography, one act of prostituted sexual labour is reproduced indefinitely and put to work 24 hours a day, for an infinite number of years, across the world, without pay. Understood this way, pornography prostitution is closer to sexual slavery than it is to commonsense understandings of prostitution.
Within pornographic prostitution, the living labour of a prostituted woman is transformed into dead labour through the process of mass production. What she has produced with her living body does not belong to her, her prostitution is taken from her and turned into a commodity, a thing, dead, yet potent. To paraphrase Marx, pornography is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.3 Her living labour is transformed by Net porn into an indestructible commodity. It is impossible to completely remove pornography from the Net. As soon as her prostitution enters the Net, her prostitution remains there forever as an endlessly circulating commodity. In this way, her prostitution lives on after she is dead. Her prostitution, in other words, will be put to work by the pornography industry after her body has died. Ultimately, all pornography becomes the prostitution of the dead.
It is worth recognising that, already, quite a few of the prostituted men and women within pornography are no longer alive. Many pornography prostitutes die young. In 2011, 23-year-old Caroline Berger died from brain damage caused by cosmetic surgeons who injected 800g (28oz) of silicone into her breasts. “She’s a hero,” comments a john, “[s]he died doing something awesome to the extent that most people wouldn’t dream of.”4 ‘The Dead Porn Stars Archive – Frances Farmer’s Revenge’ contains a lengthy list of deceased porn prostitutes with details of their cause of death that include suicide, murder, drug overdose, and AIDS.5 ‘The dead porn stars memorial’ also features a similar list.6 ‘A tribute to dead pornstars’ reads glowingly:
These dead pornstars were trailblazers and many paid a heavy price for their adventures in the adult entertainment arena. Whether thru suicide, accident, drug overdose or illness due to a crazy lifestyle, these dead pornstars still touched more that our peckers. They touched our lives and gave us a visual remembrance that we will never forget.7
For ‘adventures in the adult entertainment industry’ read: prostituted by the pornography industry; for ‘heavy price’ read: death. Destructive prostitution is masked as a gift ‘they gave us’ (the johns) that extends beyond the grave.
Pornography prostitution can be described as a kind of virtual slavery: once in the Net, her prostitution is caught up in an endless system of exchange that feeds off her living labour without paying her for it. The perversion increases once we recognise that this virtual slavery continues after she has died. In this way, all pornography becomes the virtual sexual slavery of the dead. The pornography industry feeds off the bodies of the living and the dead: it is a system of virtual sexual slavery that makes no distinction between profit made from the living, or profit made from the dead.
The technology involved in pornography prostitution not only transforms her living labour into an infinite form of prostitution (see Farley, this volume), but the production process also refashions her living body. The dead labour of pornography technology, to use a Marxist term, dominates her living labour, her very body, her life activity. High definition communication technology, for example, transformed the living bodies of pornography prostitutes. In his homage to the technological innovations created by Big Porn, Patchen Barss reports that with the emergence of Blu-ray and HD, the bodies of pornography prostitutes begin to change:
[H]itherto invisible ‘flaws’ – from moles and wrinkles to razor burn and surgery scars – were suddenly visible to audiences. This forced actors and producers to take all manner of compensatory action, including
changing camera angles, increasing makeup, changing diet and exercise habits and even undergoing cosmetic surgery to remove the smallest imperfection. The technology has created too much clarity for the fuzzy fantasies that are the heart of pornography’ (2010, p. 274).
This is a clear example of the way that the dead labour of the pornographic production process changes the living bodies of prostitutes. The new HD communication technology contains an implicit command to prostitutes to transform their bodies. To become a viable commodity, she must now spend extra time and money refashioning her body with diet, exercise and cosmetic surgery. This intensifies her economic exploitation, for it is unlikely that a pornographer will pay her for breast implants or cosmetic surgery for her vagina and face. The new HD pornography technology expands her exploitation into her everyday life, taking her time and money just as it demands that she transform her body at her own expense. Capitalist technologies begin to converge on her body, extracting profit from an already exploited human being. Her body becomes a thing she must pay for so that she can prostitute herself. Her relationship to her own body becomes distorted in the mirror of pornography – her body is transformed into a sexual object she must pimp.
The new surgically altered HD porn body is not confined to the Net. With the mass marketing of pornography, and the pornification of everyday life, the image of the HD porn body moves into the mainstream: Brazilian waxes, breast implants, cosmetic surgery for women’s genitals, weight-loss drugs, make-up, hair products, Botox. A complex capitalist system of body modification is opened up and expanded by the new demands of HD pornography technology. Looking like a ‘porn star’ becomes confused with sexual self-empowerment, as though relating to her own body like a pimp were an act of freedom. Yet the money she invests in transforming herself into a sexually competitive commodity is rarely returned.
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