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Authors: Melinda Tankard Reist,Abigail Bray
Tags: #General, #Social Science, #Sociology, #Media Studies, #Pornography
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry (21 page)
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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These are all statements about status – and we hear them frequently – she’s a slut, she’s a whore, she’s the village mattress who will let anyone lie on her. But what of the men who are the perpetrators of these violations and humiliations? Their status as ordinary guys ‘unleashing their sexuality’ is secure.
What does pornography do? And to whom does it do that something? Pornography demeans the person at the other end of the camera whose image is then published in a magazine or book or digitally. That person is expected to put up with humiliation, pain, degradation and dehumanisation. That person is expected to accept being portrayed as dirty, as filth, as nothing more than a receptacle, and as a slave. That person is almost always a woman.
4
Pornography treats all women as if they were the same; it homogenises women and makes of women a group to be exploited and put down in all the same repetitive, boring ways. A monoculture of ‘receptive’ women is presented on Websites around the world.
Who benefits from pornography? Capitalists, individuals after fast money, and corporations with massive publicity budgets. As Gail Dines reports, in 2006 the global pornography industry was worth US$96 billion and in the USA alone $13 billion (Dines, 2010, p. 47). The market is growing significantly every year and 5 years later, it will be worth even more. At the individual end – men benefit because they gain a sense of power or a sense of camaraderie with their peers (see Stark and Whisnant, 2004).
Pornography and the confusion over free speech
Defending free speech is used by pornographers and the film
The People v Larry Flint
articulates this view. Dines responds that it’s not free speech that gets pornographers excited, it “is profit” (in Bindel, 2010). While the Left and Anti-globalisation activists understand the differences between free trade and fair trade, they have not made the link between free speech and fair speech. It took a feminist, Betty McLellan, to see that link. In her book
Unspeakable
(2010) she highlights the parallels between free trade / fair trade and free speech / fair speech (see also McLellan, this volume). Here, in brief, are the arguments she makes:
• free trade / free speech favours the powerful
• free trade / free speech fosters and entrenches inequality
• free trade / free speech focuses on the individual
• free trade / free speech ignores quality of life (McLellan, 2010, pp. 52–58).
McLellan does not specifically illustrate the contrasting axioms, but the consequences of her ideas are as follows:
• fair trade / fair speech decentralises power
• fair trade / fair speech fosters justice and fair treatment
• fair trade / fair speech focuses on the common good and engagement
• fair trade / fair speech highlights the importance of life over profit
Those who promote the idea that pornography is about freeing our sexuality and maintaining free speech have betrayed their political roots. They are no longer on the side of the exploited and the oppressed; they are instead supporting a massive capitalist venture which is based on humiliation, pain and exploitation. Just because those who are exploited are women does not mean that they should be regarded as having no human rights. Freedom is not a get-all-you-can menu. It is about justice and clarity, about who benefits and who loses.
Pornography and the blurring of sex and violence
If it is not about freeing our sexuality, where does sex come in? Does pornography have anything to do with sex? Does it have something to do with violence?
Let’s think for a moment about sex: good sex is enjoyable; indeed it can be ecstatic; it’s the kind of sex we all hope for and when it happens there is no mistaking it. Mediocre sex is rather disappointing because somehow the people involved have not connected with one another; mediocre sex is probably more common than good sex, but it is not something to make judgements about. Bad sex is when only one person has any enjoyment; it’s the kind of sex that happens as a relationship is waning; or when there is cruelty or exploitation on the part of one person.
Let’s think about violence: good violence? Is there such a thing? Violence is by necessity negative and only sadists or masochists or people who are severely disconnected from themselves and others would argue differently. Mediocre violence is the sort of thing that lawyers will raise when the issue of self-defence comes up, or perpetrators will claim ‘mitigating circumstances’ or say ‘he only slapped her mildly’. Bad violence is unjustifiable, unprovoked, an example of a massive imbalance in power between the parties. Lynching is bad violence.
Sex and violence don’t seem to have much in common, indeed, they appear to be on different ends of the behavioural spectrum. In general, at the good end of sex, it is something that one wants to re-experience. That sense of connection, that release, that overwhelming sensation of pleasure.
Where the two meet is at the bad end. Both are experiences that, if you are the victim – that is you are the one who is used or abused – then you would not wish to re-experience that abuse. When it comes to the user / abuser, it’s more complicated. That person often experiences an adrenaline high which arises with the sensation of having power over another being: men of other cultures, women of the same and other cultures, children and animals.
This is the point at which sex and violence blur. Those at the used and abused end are not confused; they can tell the difference. But the user and the abuser can no longer identify whether his enjoyment has come from the high of sex or the high of violence.
Pornographers take this confusion and promote it so that the buyers of pornography will come back again and again. They get addicted to the high of sex/violence; they want more and more hardcore things to do, since they are simultaneously desensitised and need an ever bigger hit to feel the same kick from pornography. Some men recognise the effect that pornography has on them (see Dines, 2010, p. 80), but many are caught in the web and find it difficult to extricate themselves since the confusion between sex and violence blurs their capacity for clarity.
And what of the women? Many of those who are used and abused, do have clarity. However, the original reason for entering pornography – mostly for cash – continues. A considerable number of the used and abused have become hooked on drugs which reduces the pain they experience, whether the social or emotional pain of humiliation, or the physical pain endured by being penetrated or beaten or simply ignored. Some of the used and abused will defend the perpetrators’ actions because they too have become desensitised, disconnected from their own sense of pleasure.
Pornography and the normalisation of torture
Torture has an ancient history and the torture of women is a long one (du Bois, 1991). Patriarchal institutions become the purveyors of violence and there are historical instances where religion, politics and medicine become torture fronts. Torture was attested to in Roman times, the church engaged in the torture of women through the witch burnings;
5
more recent histories of the torture of women have occurred in countries in political turmoil, such as Chile and Argentina in the 1970s (with CIA assistance). Naomi Klein (2008) writes of the experiments in torture carried out under the guise of medical treatment. And the well-documented torture of individuals at Abu Graibh have brought the subject of torture into the mainstream.
It is not only these extreme events that have given space for renewed calls for legalisation of torture; it is also the process of normalising violence through the ever-escalated desensitising effect of pornography that makes even torture ‘sexy’, giving it a kind of social cachet not only in heterosexual contexts – it has become especially de rigueur in Queer Studies.
Margot Weiss, in her article on ‘consensual BDSM
6
and sadomasochistic torture’, begins with the following description of what she calls ‘play’ (2009, p. 180):
The thing about torture is that you do not know whether you will be alive at the end of the day. You do not know when it will end. It is more than just ‘powerlessness’; it is subjugation, degradation, abandonment, and dehumanisation. To defend, as Weiss (2009) does, such acts as ‘performative’ is an instance of moral neglect. Such academic acceptance of torture as a game is deeply offensive. It is appropriative of people living under totalitarian regimes who do not have the ‘luxury’ of saying ‘No’, or of saying ‘Rumsfeld’ as a parody. It misses the entire history of the intersection of the colonisation of women and the colonisation of the ‘other’. Because, while Weiss acknowledges that the torture at Abu Ghraib is a “means of imperial control” (2009, p. 191), she fails to see that BDSM in the form she describes is a means of imperial control of women. She writes as if there has never been any difference in access to and exercise of power between women and men.
Sadomasochism and pornography that promote abuse and torture are forms of ‘consumerism of experience’. In a way similar to that in which Western culture has appropriated the cultures of Indigenous and non-Western peoples, the practitioners of S/M and the producers of torture pornography are appropriating the experiences of oppressed peoples who have been tortured by dictatorial governments or who have been slaves under racist regimes, or the lesbians who are tortured by fundamentalist and militarised regimes (Hawthorne, 2006). The practitioners of S/M turn an uncontrollable experience of torture into a game that can be stopped. But people undergoing real torture do not have the option of saying no.
8
The woman whose face is splashed by semen is paid to take it. She cannot say no either. And in pornography directed at lesbians, the woman humiliated in S/M porn is degraded. As pro-porn activist Pat Califia writes:
Conclusion
Pornography is a multi-billion dollar global industry
Pornography is appropriative
Pornography is violence
Pornography is racist
Pornography is very like lynching
Pornography exploits power imbalance between classes
Pornography uses women as sex fodder
Pornography is the free trade of (mostly) women’s bodies
Pornography is not about freeing our sexuality
Pornography is very profitable
Pornography is damaging to women
Pornography is damaging to men
Pornography is damaging to children
Pornography damages young people’s sense of bodily health
Pornography is a violation of human rights
Bibliography
Bindel, Julie (2010) ‘The truth about the pornography industry’.
Guardian
, 2 July, <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dines-pornography
>.
Califia, Pat (Ed) (1988)
The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual
. Boston, Alyson Publications.
Dines, Gail (2010)
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
. Beacon Press, Boston; Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
du Bois, Page (1991)
Torture and Truth
. Routledge, London.
Hawthorne, Susan (2006) ‘Ancient Hatred and its Contemporary Manifestation: The Torture of Lesbians’
Journal of Hate Studies
4 (1), pp. 33–58.
Klein, Naomi (2008)
The Shock Doctrine
, Penguin, Camberwell.
McLellan, Betty (2010)
Unspeakable: A Feminist Ethic of Speech
. OtherWise Publications, Townsville.
Mies, Maria (1986/1999)
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne; Zed Books London.
Stark, Christine and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) (2004)
Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography
. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Tankard Reist, Melinda (2010) ‘Who says female corpses aren’t sexy?’
Unleashed
, 10 December. <
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42078.html
>
Weiss, Margot (2005) ‘Consensual BDSM and “Sadomasochistic” Torture at Abu Ghraib’. Paper presented at Trans/Positions: A Conference on Feminist Inquiry in Transit, 7–9 April, Purdue University.
Weiss, Margot (2009) ‘Rumsfeld!: Consensual BDSM and “Sadomasochistic” Torture and Abu Ghraib’ in Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Eds)
Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World
. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, pp. 180–201.
What does pornography do? And to whom does it do that something? Pornography demeans the person at the other end of the camera whose image is then published in a magazine or book or digitally. That person is expected to put up with humiliation, pain, degradation and dehumanisation. That person is expected to accept being portrayed as dirty, as filth, as nothing more than a receptacle, and as a slave. That person is almost always a woman.
4
Pornography treats all women as if they were the same; it homogenises women and makes of women a group to be exploited and put down in all the same repetitive, boring ways. A monoculture of ‘receptive’ women is presented on Websites around the world.
Who benefits from pornography? Capitalists, individuals after fast money, and corporations with massive publicity budgets. As Gail Dines reports, in 2006 the global pornography industry was worth US$96 billion and in the USA alone $13 billion (Dines, 2010, p. 47). The market is growing significantly every year and 5 years later, it will be worth even more. At the individual end – men benefit because they gain a sense of power or a sense of camaraderie with their peers (see Stark and Whisnant, 2004).
Pornography and the confusion over free speech
Defending free speech is used by pornographers and the film
The People v Larry Flint
articulates this view. Dines responds that it’s not free speech that gets pornographers excited, it “is profit” (in Bindel, 2010). While the Left and Anti-globalisation activists understand the differences between free trade and fair trade, they have not made the link between free speech and fair speech. It took a feminist, Betty McLellan, to see that link. In her book
Unspeakable
(2010) she highlights the parallels between free trade / fair trade and free speech / fair speech (see also McLellan, this volume). Here, in brief, are the arguments she makes:
• free trade / free speech favours the powerful
• free trade / free speech fosters and entrenches inequality
• free trade / free speech focuses on the individual
• free trade / free speech ignores quality of life (McLellan, 2010, pp. 52–58).
McLellan does not specifically illustrate the contrasting axioms, but the consequences of her ideas are as follows:
• fair trade / fair speech decentralises power
• fair trade / fair speech fosters justice and fair treatment
• fair trade / fair speech focuses on the common good and engagement
• fair trade / fair speech highlights the importance of life over profit
Those who promote the idea that pornography is about freeing our sexuality and maintaining free speech have betrayed their political roots. They are no longer on the side of the exploited and the oppressed; they are instead supporting a massive capitalist venture which is based on humiliation, pain and exploitation. Just because those who are exploited are women does not mean that they should be regarded as having no human rights. Freedom is not a get-all-you-can menu. It is about justice and clarity, about who benefits and who loses.
Pornography and the blurring of sex and violence
If it is not about freeing our sexuality, where does sex come in? Does pornography have anything to do with sex? Does it have something to do with violence?
Let’s think for a moment about sex: good sex is enjoyable; indeed it can be ecstatic; it’s the kind of sex we all hope for and when it happens there is no mistaking it. Mediocre sex is rather disappointing because somehow the people involved have not connected with one another; mediocre sex is probably more common than good sex, but it is not something to make judgements about. Bad sex is when only one person has any enjoyment; it’s the kind of sex that happens as a relationship is waning; or when there is cruelty or exploitation on the part of one person.
Let’s think about violence: good violence? Is there such a thing? Violence is by necessity negative and only sadists or masochists or people who are severely disconnected from themselves and others would argue differently. Mediocre violence is the sort of thing that lawyers will raise when the issue of self-defence comes up, or perpetrators will claim ‘mitigating circumstances’ or say ‘he only slapped her mildly’. Bad violence is unjustifiable, unprovoked, an example of a massive imbalance in power between the parties. Lynching is bad violence.
Sex and violence don’t seem to have much in common, indeed, they appear to be on different ends of the behavioural spectrum. In general, at the good end of sex, it is something that one wants to re-experience. That sense of connection, that release, that overwhelming sensation of pleasure.
Where the two meet is at the bad end. Both are experiences that, if you are the victim – that is you are the one who is used or abused – then you would not wish to re-experience that abuse. When it comes to the user / abuser, it’s more complicated. That person often experiences an adrenaline high which arises with the sensation of having power over another being: men of other cultures, women of the same and other cultures, children and animals.
This is the point at which sex and violence blur. Those at the used and abused end are not confused; they can tell the difference. But the user and the abuser can no longer identify whether his enjoyment has come from the high of sex or the high of violence.
Pornographers take this confusion and promote it so that the buyers of pornography will come back again and again. They get addicted to the high of sex/violence; they want more and more hardcore things to do, since they are simultaneously desensitised and need an ever bigger hit to feel the same kick from pornography. Some men recognise the effect that pornography has on them (see Dines, 2010, p. 80), but many are caught in the web and find it difficult to extricate themselves since the confusion between sex and violence blurs their capacity for clarity.
And what of the women? Many of those who are used and abused, do have clarity. However, the original reason for entering pornography – mostly for cash – continues. A considerable number of the used and abused have become hooked on drugs which reduces the pain they experience, whether the social or emotional pain of humiliation, or the physical pain endured by being penetrated or beaten or simply ignored. Some of the used and abused will defend the perpetrators’ actions because they too have become desensitised, disconnected from their own sense of pleasure.
Pornography and the normalisation of torture
Torture has an ancient history and the torture of women is a long one (du Bois, 1991). Patriarchal institutions become the purveyors of violence and there are historical instances where religion, politics and medicine become torture fronts. Torture was attested to in Roman times, the church engaged in the torture of women through the witch burnings;
5
more recent histories of the torture of women have occurred in countries in political turmoil, such as Chile and Argentina in the 1970s (with CIA assistance). Naomi Klein (2008) writes of the experiments in torture carried out under the guise of medical treatment. And the well-documented torture of individuals at Abu Graibh have brought the subject of torture into the mainstream.
It is not only these extreme events that have given space for renewed calls for legalisation of torture; it is also the process of normalising violence through the ever-escalated desensitising effect of pornography that makes even torture ‘sexy’, giving it a kind of social cachet not only in heterosexual contexts – it has become especially de rigueur in Queer Studies.
Margot Weiss, in her article on ‘consensual BDSM
6
and sadomasochistic torture’, begins with the following description of what she calls ‘play’ (2009, p. 180):
My copy of the monthly newsletter of a San Francisco SM organization included a scene report, a written description of a consensual BDSM play scene. The scene took place at a San Francisco dungeon in March 2004. It was an interrogation scene, involving a Colonel, a Captain, a General, and a spy. The spy was hooded, duct-taped to a chair, and slapped in the face. As she resisted, the spy was threatened with physical and sexual violence, stripped naked, cut with glass shards, vaginally penetrated with a condom-sheathed hammer, force-fed water, shocked with a cattle prod, and anally penetrated with a flashlight. The scene ended when the spy screamed out her safeword, the word that ends the scene: ‘Fucking Rumsfeld!’.
7
One page later, Weiss goes on to say that “[t]he photographic representation in Abu Ghraib … effectively transforms a political real – torture – into a safe sexual fantasy” (Weiss 2009, p. 181). She takes no pause to ask whose fantasy and whose pain? The real torture of Abu Ghraib is real to the prisoners, and just like the women abused in pornography, it remains the fantasy of someone who watches from the outside.7
The thing about torture is that you do not know whether you will be alive at the end of the day. You do not know when it will end. It is more than just ‘powerlessness’; it is subjugation, degradation, abandonment, and dehumanisation. To defend, as Weiss (2009) does, such acts as ‘performative’ is an instance of moral neglect. Such academic acceptance of torture as a game is deeply offensive. It is appropriative of people living under totalitarian regimes who do not have the ‘luxury’ of saying ‘No’, or of saying ‘Rumsfeld’ as a parody. It misses the entire history of the intersection of the colonisation of women and the colonisation of the ‘other’. Because, while Weiss acknowledges that the torture at Abu Ghraib is a “means of imperial control” (2009, p. 191), she fails to see that BDSM in the form she describes is a means of imperial control of women. She writes as if there has never been any difference in access to and exercise of power between women and men.
Sadomasochism and pornography that promote abuse and torture are forms of ‘consumerism of experience’. In a way similar to that in which Western culture has appropriated the cultures of Indigenous and non-Western peoples, the practitioners of S/M and the producers of torture pornography are appropriating the experiences of oppressed peoples who have been tortured by dictatorial governments or who have been slaves under racist regimes, or the lesbians who are tortured by fundamentalist and militarised regimes (Hawthorne, 2006). The practitioners of S/M turn an uncontrollable experience of torture into a game that can be stopped. But people undergoing real torture do not have the option of saying no.
8
The woman whose face is splashed by semen is paid to take it. She cannot say no either. And in pornography directed at lesbians, the woman humiliated in S/M porn is degraded. As pro-porn activist Pat Califia writes:
By reviving the notion that sex is dirty, naughty, and disgusting, you can profoundly thrill some lucky, jaded lesbian by transforming her into a public toilet or bitch in heat (Califia, 1988, p. 52).
Just as the near death experience of S/M can be read as just another consumerist game, pornography and entertainment that focus on the abasement of women are new luxury purchases for the global consumer. As the consuming of material goods is reaching its limits in the West, S/M practitioners and makers of torture pornography attempt to simulate death in the pursuit of yet another thrill. They are luxury games. It is appropriation of experience. It is ultimately full of contempt for others.Conclusion
Pornography is a multi-billion dollar global industry
Pornography is appropriative
Pornography is violence
Pornography is racist
Pornography is very like lynching
Pornography exploits power imbalance between classes
Pornography uses women as sex fodder
Pornography is the free trade of (mostly) women’s bodies
Pornography is not about freeing our sexuality
Pornography is very profitable
Pornography is damaging to women
Pornography is damaging to men
Pornography is damaging to children
Pornography damages young people’s sense of bodily health
Pornography is a violation of human rights
Bibliography
Bindel, Julie (2010) ‘The truth about the pornography industry’.
Guardian
, 2 July, <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dines-pornography
>.
Califia, Pat (Ed) (1988)
The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual
. Boston, Alyson Publications.
Dines, Gail (2010)
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
. Beacon Press, Boston; Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
du Bois, Page (1991)
Torture and Truth
. Routledge, London.
Hawthorne, Susan (2006) ‘Ancient Hatred and its Contemporary Manifestation: The Torture of Lesbians’
Journal of Hate Studies
4 (1), pp. 33–58.
Klein, Naomi (2008)
The Shock Doctrine
, Penguin, Camberwell.
McLellan, Betty (2010)
Unspeakable: A Feminist Ethic of Speech
. OtherWise Publications, Townsville.
Mies, Maria (1986/1999)
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne; Zed Books London.
Stark, Christine and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) (2004)
Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography
. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Tankard Reist, Melinda (2010) ‘Who says female corpses aren’t sexy?’
Unleashed
, 10 December. <
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42078.html
>
Weiss, Margot (2005) ‘Consensual BDSM and “Sadomasochistic” Torture at Abu Ghraib’. Paper presented at Trans/Positions: A Conference on Feminist Inquiry in Transit, 7–9 April, Purdue University.
Weiss, Margot (2009) ‘Rumsfeld!: Consensual BDSM and “Sadomasochistic” Torture and Abu Ghraib’ in Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Eds)
Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World
. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, pp. 180–201.
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
9.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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