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

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  But no one would have guessed then that, 17 years later, the very legislation that was designed to protect children from exposure to pornographic images would have failed completely. Children have now become so pornified and so desensitised to sexual abuse that they are making pornographic videos of each other on their cell phones and even selling them! Nobody could even envisage then what is happening today. Children could well be prosecuted for making and distributing child pornography made by themselves (see also Funnell, this volume).

  The legislation administered by the FPB does not allow an explicit sex act, as depicted in pornography, to be viewed by anyone under the age of 18 (X18), and these magazines, videos and DVDs can only be legally bought at sex shops by adults. However, the FPB did not anticipate the casual way adults would treat this material or the flood of hardcore pornography that children would be accessing accidently and/or knowingly on the Internet in the course of their school research or on their cell phones. A recent national survey of school children conducted by the FPB found that 81% of children between the ages of 13 to 17 had been exposed to pornography (Film and Publications Board of South Africa, 2008).

  The proportion of the population who buy pornographic magazines, videos and DVDs from the sex shops is relatively small. This is the reason why Playboy folded after a few years, but the publishers intend to make a come back in March 2011. Pornography is expensive and out of the reach of the average working-class man, black or white; it filters into the low socio-economic communities in the form of second-hand copies and pirated videos. These are usually bought by individuals who accumulate this material and charge for viewing it, or men with a pimping agenda who use it to groom young girls into prostitution. Social workers and teachers have reported that there are certain houses in the townships where young people gather to view this material.

  Recently there has been media excitement about the first locally-made black pornographic movie, Mapona, as well as about Tau Morene the movie-maker. He gave himself this name, which means ‘Lion King’ in Sesotho. His Website Sondeza (which means ‘come closer’) was given a lot of free publicity in the media. The gonzo pornographic material on this Website appears to contravene the law regarding the unlawful distribution of X18 material. A complaint is languishing at the FPB which appears to be beset with operational problems.

  According to Patrick Meyer, general manager of Joe Theron Publishing, the company that warehouses and distributes Mapona, just days after its release the video had sold well over 3,000 copies at approximately R200 (US$30) a disc. Recent local films have been made in 3 to 5 days at a cost of about R150,000 (US$21,000), making it a lucrative proposition. Joe Theron Publishing is the company that first brought Hustler magazine to the country. His company includes the Sting Music Company and a number of Afrikaans pornography magazines; he has built a pornography empire from his offices in Johannesburg (in Krouse, 2010).

  Tau Morene has received thousands of Rands of free publicity from a popular national radio station, an e-TV political comedy show, and a double-page spread in what is regarded as a highly respected weekly newspaper, the Mail & Guardian. This newspaper, though claiming to champion a value system concerned with social justice and equality, under its previous name The Weekly Mail twice published articles publicising and promoting Penthouse (in Russell, 1994). Morene has been applauded for his ground-breaking enterprise: the first local, black, full-length pornographic movie made by the first local, black pornographer. His Website is also the first one created by a black pornographer. The journalist Matthew Krouse, who wrote the feature, claims that the story behind local black pornography,

  … is really the story of the new South Africa. Urban Africans have gained the means of production – even owning the pornographic image is ostensibly empowering (Krouse, 2010).

  So now industrialising black women’s vaginas is ‘empowering’! Krouse continues:

  Stephen McDermott, who buys stock on behalf of Adult World’s national chain of 65 stores, says he had to re-order the video three times for placement in his stores in the month since its release.

  To conclude: pornography has entered the mainstream of the new South Africa and entrenched itself despite an initial significant attempt by the public to stop it, and the effort to control its impact through the excellent campaigning of a small group of valiant citizens in S.T.O.P and other organisations. The Constitution includes the development of a non-sexist society as one of its goals and women’s right to dignity and equality are considered paramount. But the Constitution’s Gender Commission and its Human Rights Commission, tasked with driving the imperatives of our Constitution and seeing that the Equality Act is implemented, have not fulfilled their mandate. The NGOs concerned with women’s and children’s rights have been silent on the subject of pornography. And there has been a complete lack of engagement by political parties.

  South Africa has signed the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Beijing Platform for Action, and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (the last being the only one that mentions pornography). And yet we have allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by violent, racist, sexist pornography which has tragically impacted on the status of South African women.

  In the removal of the old forms of censorship around matters pertaining to sex, the legislators’ inability to recognise the violence against women intrinsic in the making and the consuming of pornography has made a mockery of the aims of the Constitution, and is responsible for the growth of a sex industry with interests totally inimical to women’s right to dignity and equality.

  Bibliography

  Barnes-September, Roseline, Ingrid Brown-Adam, Anne Mayne, Danielle Kowen, and Geraldine Dyason (2000) Child Victims of Prostitution in the Western Cape. Institute for Child and Family Development, University of the Western Cape.

  Film and Publications Board of South Africa (2008) Internet Usage and the Exposure of Pornography to Learners in South Africa. Johannesburg.

  Jeffreys, Sheila (2009) The Industrial Vagina. The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. Routledge, London and New York.

  Krouse, Matthew (22–28 October, 2010) ‘The money shot: Getting a rise out of the local porn industry’ Mail & Guardian, South Africa.

  Russell, Diana E.H. (1994) U.S. pornography invades South Africa: A content analysis of Playboy and Penthouse. Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa.

  Russell, Diana E.H. (1997) Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa. Incest Survivors Tell their Stories. Macmillan Press Ltd, London.

  Russell, Diana E.H. (16 April, 1998a) ‘Pornography: Towards a non-sexist policy’ Agenda – Open Forum. Durban, South Africa.

  Russell, Diana E.H. (1998b) ‘A Comparison of South Africa and Other Nations’ Women’s Studies 10 (1) pp. 30–39.

  van Rooyen, Kobus (1996) ‘Drafting a New Film and Publication Bill for South Africa’ in Jane Duncan (Ed) Between Speech and Silence. Hate Speech, Pornography and the New South Africa. Freedom of Expression Institute and Institute for Democracy in South Africa.

  ___________________________

  1 With grateful thanks to Robyn Fudge for generously sharing her huge fund of information; Doreen Meissner, Clive and Michele Human of S.T.O.P, for information on their campaign and constructive advice and help with editing; Diana Russell, for sending copies of her articles and helpful suggestions; Alix Johnson for her excellent editorial assistance; Rheina Epstein, Jessica Samson, Leah Abramsohn, Carol Bower and Pat and Horace van Rensburg for constructive advice and help with editing.

  Asja Armanda and Natalie Nenadic

  Genocide, Pornography, and the Law1

  The role of rape and other sexual atrocities in genocide came to international attention for the first time in the 1990s during the conflict in what was then Yugoslavia. We played a central role in a landmark civil lawsuit in New York against Radovan Karadžić, head of the Bosnian Serbs. For the first time in hi
story sexual atrocities were recognized under international law as acts of genocide.2 It then became easier to identify sexual atrocities in other genocides like Rwanda and Darfur and in conflicts such as Congo.

  In uncovering this gendered dimension of genocide, we also uncovered pornography’s role in it. In this chapter, we provide a summary of our work in highlighting the role of sexual atrocities in genocide, and focus on showing how pornography is intertwined with them. We conclude with suggestions about how law might help in making the pornographic dimensions of genocide more visible which might then affect the way that pornography is understood in what is called peacetime.

  1 Background: Genocide and Sexual Atrocities

  The difficult work of gaining international recognition of the genocidal purpose of sexual atrocities began in the summer of 1991. Serbia had just launched a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against civilians in Croatia, which soon expanded to include Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally Kosovo. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a euphemism for the destruction of non-Serbian peoples in the region, characterized by a system of camps for torture, mass killings, and mutilations.

  Asja Armanda, a Croatian-Jewish feminist in Zagreb, began hearing from women fleeing the Serbian-occupied parts of Croatia about the mass rape and killing of women. Soon she discovered that the mass rape, torture, murder, and mutilation of women, both in and out of camps, were distinctive features of this campaign. In some cases these atrocities were filmed as pornography.

  Armanda had grown up under state repression in which her own family was politically suspect and victimized by the secret police. Just a year earlier she had co-founded Croatia’s first feminist group, something that became possible with the advent of democratic elections in the region. Armanda tried to convince international human rights groups to investigate, but initially had little success. At first, she also had little success with the international women’s community. One reason is that Yugoslavia’s communist-era women’s representatives already had a relationship with this community and denied the atrocities and discredited those who were trying to get word out about them.3

  Armanda contacted Natalie Nenadic, an American whom she met during a trip Nenadic took to Europe. Nenadic graduated from Stanford University and was on her way to the University of Michigan Law School to study with Catharine MacKinnon, the leading US legal authority on issues of sexual violence and pornography, and now Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Armanda took Nenadic to visit survivors so that she could see and hear for herself what was happening.

  2 Genocide and Pornography

  We termed the distinctive crime taking place genocidal sexual atrocities or genocidal rape. Here, we describe that part of this crime tied specifically to pornography. Our information comes from our years of work with survivors.4 Sexual atrocities were filmed in the camps and elsewhere. Rozalija, a Croatian survivor of the Bučje camp near the town of Pakrac, Croatia, told us how pornography was made of her rape: “In front of the camera, one beats you and the other – excuse me – fucks you, he puts his truncheon in you, and he films all that.” One survivor of a camp near Kozarac, Bosnia-Herzegovina, said the mat on which the soldiers were raping her had a spotlight trained on it. Other men watched the rapes as if it were a kind of theatre, sometimes putting out cigarette butts on the women’s bodies.

  Pornography was also made to serve as an incitement to commit genocide. An elderly Croatian woman from the Bučje camp told us how she was filmed being gang-raped and tortured by electric shocks by soldiers of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). During the rapes, the soldiers were dressed in generic camouflage uniforms and forced her to say on film that the rapes were committed by Croatians, and that she was in fact a Serb. This film could then be used by the perpetrators to spread misinformation about events and to incite Serbs viewing such films to acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Armanda saw such footage on the evening news of Banja Luka, a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, just over the border from Croatia. In September, 1992, Armanda saw news broadcasts of actual rapes in which the ethnicities of victim and perpetrator were switched. One of the aired rapes showed a naked, visibly bruised, middle-aged woman with a Serbian Orthodox cross around her neck. The speech on the video was dubbed to make it seem as if the rapist and speaker were Muslim or Croat and the victim a Serb, whose ethnicity the rapist was cursing. A few days later, Armanda saw another actual rape on Banja Luka television. Here, however, the dubbing stopped for about four to five seconds due to a technical lapse which allowed the actual voice to be heard. The soldier was laughing and asking the woman, “Do you like a Serbian stud?” while spewing at her ethnic epithets used against Croats and Muslims.

  A woman from the destroyed Croatian city of Vukovar who was repeatedly raped and tortured in other ways in the Begejci camp in the Vojvodina autonomous region of Serbia, told us how she was forced to read ‘confessions’ for TV Novi Sad. A camp guard later told her that he recognized her from seeing her ‘confession’ on television. In January 2011, Serbia, with Republika Srpska (a Serbian governed region of Bosnia-Herzegovina that came into existence through genocide), began using such false ‘confessions’ as part of issuing international arrest warrants against survivors, thereby manipulating the instruments of international law to re-attack survivors through legal means.5 The 2009 conviction by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina of Serbian paramilitary leader, Predrag Kujundžić, for crimes in the municipality of Doboj makes a reference to such false ‘confessions’. Among his crimes was the rape in June, 1992 of a Muslim minor whom he held in sexual slavery through December, 1992. Kujundžić forced her to identify herself as a Serb and gave her a Serbian name, making her read a statement on Radio Doboj claiming that “Muslims were guilty of the war, that Muslims had killed her brother.”6

  Osman, a Bosnian Muslim from Croatia, spoke to Nenadic about witnessing sexual atrocities which he believes were taped, and seeing Serbian forces regularly carry cameras with them to film the atrocities they were committing. As a citizen of Croatia, he came to the aid of its civilians when they were attacked, joining a defense unit there, and then did the same when Bosnia-Herzegovina was attacked. So he was able to witness Serbian paramilitary and Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) forces, from occupied Croatia to occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina, “slaughter, kill, set on fire” everything that is Muslim or Croatian and the filming of these crimes.

  He described witnessing a gang-rape committed on orders in Licko Petrovo Selo in what was Serb-occupied Croatia. They tied the woman to 4 stakes in the ground. She was lying down but was still suspended, and they took turns raping her, laughing at her, asking her if she enjoyed it, saying that they were doing it for ‘Greater Serbia’. In April, 1992, hiding in a tree and spying on what occupying forces were doing, he observed a small concentration camp in this region, with emaciated, tortured, bloody, and beaten people. He saw a woman who looked 7 to 8 months pregnant, and a man who appeared to be her husband, taken from the camp into the woods. The woman was tied vertically to a cross. They cut her belly with a knife, after which she soon died. They attempted to make the man eat the baby’s arm, and then they cut him until he bled to death. As they were doing this, they were laughing and saying “We’re going to slaughter all of you. This is our Serbia.”

  Survivors told us of pornography’s pervasiveness in the camps. A woman from Vukovar who was repeatedly raped by members of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in a Belgrade military prison, described pornography magazines being passed around among the soldiers. They showed naked women in vulnerable, sexually accessible poses, and pornography of men with animals and women with animals. She described pornography that showed women hanging from ceilings, women chained to wooden boards, with masks over their eyes, and women being beaten by a whip of the kind with which she and other concentration camp inmates had been whipped. The guards’ sleeping room had pornography on the walls; she said that it was “those usual pictures from Start,” a Yugoslav pornography pu
blication. Pornography was even plastered on some Yugoslav Army tanks of the Banja Luka Corps that were rolling in to ‘cleanse’ Bosnia-Herzegovina, as Armanda saw on the regular news coverage of events.

  3 Pornography and Genocide Denial: A Serbian Film

  In 2010, a pornography film entitled A Serbian Film debuted on the international art film circuit. The movie has been banned in some countries for having some of the most disturbing, sexually sadistic scenes ever filmed. A court in Spain banned the film from festivals there while Australia refused to classify it, effectively banning it.7 Some British festival venues refused to show it though a British distributor recently released a cut version, and rights have been bought in other countries.8 German and Hungarian film print companies refused to process it.9

  The film sets out to shock, and takes delight in the cruelty it shows. But the film also functions as a vehicle for denying the reality of the sexual atrocities committed as part of Serbia’s genocidal campaign, and for denying the reality of sexual atrocities in general. The film’s director, Srdjan Spasojević, recasts sexual atrocities as ‘art’ and paints the perpetrators as ‘victims’, claiming that the film is a political allegory about the ‘molestation’ “of the Serbian people by the Serbian government.” For Spasojević, the film is a cinematic victim statement as to the trauma of the perpetrators.10 An example is a graphic depiction of a man helping a woman give birth to a baby girl whom he then rapes to death in what the director calls ‘newborn porn’, which for the director conveys Serbia’s loss of innocence.11 A woman handcuffed to a bed is raped and then decapitated with a machete; the man continues to rape her as her body goes into rigor mortis, which is presented as a particular pleasure.12