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Authors: Melinda Tankard Reist,Abigail Bray
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4
See Lumby (1997): chapter 5 is entitled ‘Why Feminists Need Porn’.
5
This kind of juvenile punning and glib treatment of serious subjects pervades the book, echoing the language of a pulp novel by Catharine Lumby (Scud, 1995). It is odd that the popular video
Hairfree Asian Honeys
is not in the running for ‘best title ever’; indeed, the pervasiveness of the theme of racial subordination in pornography is not mentioned at all: see the discussion in Dines (2010, chapter 7).
6
McKee is here referring to the academic, Robert Manne, and radio host, John Laws, as examples of ‘studied ignorance’.
7
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board
[2007] FCA 1871, para. 62, 69–80, 174–178, and
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board (No.2)
[2007] FCA 1872 (re confidentiality orders). See also Overington (2007, p. 13), citing from the report by McKee for
AdultShop.com
. Beverland and Lindgreen (2003) provide a useful exploration of the organisation and early history of
AdultShop.com
.
8
Parliament of Australia, Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts (2008) Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment, transcript of 29 April, 2008, p. 18 (Julie Gale), and p. 36 (Lauren Rosewarne). Submissions had also been made to the Senate inquiry by McKee, and by Lumby and Albury.
9
Senate Inquiry, p. 102. See also Attachment A: Summary of Response to Adverse Comments made in the Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children, p. 104, “I am not pro-porn”.
10
Senate Inquiry, Attachment B: Responses to Adverse Comments in Order They Occur, p. 105. Such ‘arms-length’ arrangements are common in the proffering of expert evidence; however, the evidence was solicited for
AdultShop.com
, not by the Classification Review Board or the Federal Court, and not by the University of Sydney. Moreover, people do not usually enter into agreements to present expert evidence in support of positions or organisations to which they are unsympathetic.
11
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board
[2007] FCA 1871, para. 177.
12
None of the videos was Australian-made; there is very little professional production of pornography in Australia.
13
This claim is also repeated verbatim in McKee (2007b, p. 35). There are many other explanations that seem just as plausible for the low return rate.
14
The Website was <
http.www.understandingpornography.info
> which is now only available on Wayback.
15
The survey questions are set out in McKee (2007a, Appendix A, pp. 95–104). The backgrounds of interviewees are set out in McKee (2005a, p. 77, and Appendix 2, pp. 92–94); McKee (2006a, Appendix B, pp. 538–539); and McKee (2006b, Appendix 2, pp. 49–50). The Interview questions are set out in McKee (2005a, Appendix 1, pp. 91–92); McKee (2006a, Appendix A, pp. 536–537); and McKee (2006b, Appendix 1, pp. 48–49).
16
As Sarah Maddison commented on the project, however: “It would be naïve, or an extreme form of denial, to think women are not being exploited … Further it’s a huge leap to suggest that because a scripted porn production depicts a woman initiating sex, that you can somehow take from that she had a say in the production … It is well known that some men get off on women being assertive and initiating sex, and that will be represented in porn, but it doesn’t mean the actress has any agency in that decision” (quoted in Lunn, 2008, p. 11).
17
McKee delightedly exaggerated this ‘finding’ in an ABC public forum (ABC
Life Matters
, 2008).
18
The researchers also accepted at face value what their subjects said, whether in the survey or interviews, without either challenge or verification.
19
The documents in this case were supplied to me in a personal communication by Clive Hamilton. I do not know if similar letters were sent to other critics of pornography, as implied in the letter.
20
This is also the case with the article (Castles, 8 October, 2006) cited in
The Porn Report
to illustrate the media focus on addiction: see
TPR
, chapter 2 ‘Dirty? Old? Men? The Consumers of Pornography’, p. 24.
See Lumby (1997): chapter 5 is entitled ‘Why Feminists Need Porn’.
5
This kind of juvenile punning and glib treatment of serious subjects pervades the book, echoing the language of a pulp novel by Catharine Lumby (Scud, 1995). It is odd that the popular video
Hairfree Asian Honeys
is not in the running for ‘best title ever’; indeed, the pervasiveness of the theme of racial subordination in pornography is not mentioned at all: see the discussion in Dines (2010, chapter 7).
6
McKee is here referring to the academic, Robert Manne, and radio host, John Laws, as examples of ‘studied ignorance’.
7
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board
[2007] FCA 1871, para. 62, 69–80, 174–178, and
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board (No.2)
[2007] FCA 1872 (re confidentiality orders). See also Overington (2007, p. 13), citing from the report by McKee for
AdultShop.com
. Beverland and Lindgreen (2003) provide a useful exploration of the organisation and early history of
AdultShop.com
.
8
Parliament of Australia, Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts (2008) Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment, transcript of 29 April, 2008, p. 18 (Julie Gale), and p. 36 (Lauren Rosewarne). Submissions had also been made to the Senate inquiry by McKee, and by Lumby and Albury.
9
Senate Inquiry, p. 102. See also Attachment A: Summary of Response to Adverse Comments made in the Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children, p. 104, “I am not pro-porn”.
10
Senate Inquiry, Attachment B: Responses to Adverse Comments in Order They Occur, p. 105. Such ‘arms-length’ arrangements are common in the proffering of expert evidence; however, the evidence was solicited for
AdultShop.com
, not by the Classification Review Board or the Federal Court, and not by the University of Sydney. Moreover, people do not usually enter into agreements to present expert evidence in support of positions or organisations to which they are unsympathetic.
11
AdultShop.Com
Ltd v Members of the Classification Review Board
[2007] FCA 1871, para. 177.
12
None of the videos was Australian-made; there is very little professional production of pornography in Australia.
13
This claim is also repeated verbatim in McKee (2007b, p. 35). There are many other explanations that seem just as plausible for the low return rate.
14
The Website was <
http.www.understandingpornography.info
> which is now only available on Wayback.
15
The survey questions are set out in McKee (2007a, Appendix A, pp. 95–104). The backgrounds of interviewees are set out in McKee (2005a, p. 77, and Appendix 2, pp. 92–94); McKee (2006a, Appendix B, pp. 538–539); and McKee (2006b, Appendix 2, pp. 49–50). The Interview questions are set out in McKee (2005a, Appendix 1, pp. 91–92); McKee (2006a, Appendix A, pp. 536–537); and McKee (2006b, Appendix 1, pp. 48–49).
16
As Sarah Maddison commented on the project, however: “It would be naïve, or an extreme form of denial, to think women are not being exploited … Further it’s a huge leap to suggest that because a scripted porn production depicts a woman initiating sex, that you can somehow take from that she had a say in the production … It is well known that some men get off on women being assertive and initiating sex, and that will be represented in porn, but it doesn’t mean the actress has any agency in that decision” (quoted in Lunn, 2008, p. 11).
17
McKee delightedly exaggerated this ‘finding’ in an ABC public forum (ABC
Life Matters
, 2008).
18
The researchers also accepted at face value what their subjects said, whether in the survey or interviews, without either challenge or verification.
19
The documents in this case were supplied to me in a personal communication by Clive Hamilton. I do not know if similar letters were sent to other critics of pornography, as implied in the letter.
20
This is also the case with the article (Castles, 8 October, 2006) cited in
The Porn Report
to illustrate the media focus on addiction: see
TPR
, chapter 2 ‘Dirty? Old? Men? The Consumers of Pornography’, p. 24.
Melinda Tankard Reist
Sexpo and the Death of Sex
1
Billed as the world’s biggest health, sexuality and lifestyle exhibition, Sexpo came to Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion in October, 2010.
According to its Website (<
http://www.sexpo.com.au/
>) “[t]his show will increase your attractiveness and sexual drive. It contains beautiful women, hunky men, nudity and crackin’ entertainment.”
Call me fussy. Say I’m hard to please. But if what I witnessed is supposed to promote a healthy, happy sex life, then I think I just saw the death of sex.
Sexpo sex is formulaic, conveyer belt, plastic, industrialised, peep show porn sex.
The space was filled with pumping, grinding, crotch grabbing and female porn stars ‘presenting’, as they say in baboon studies. Cosmetically enhanced bodies waxed to within an inch of their lives. A landfill’s worth of plastic toys, dildos, whirling vibrators, penis rings and fake vaginas.
There were faux lesbian threesomes in hardcore acts of nastiness. Pole dancers, strippers, bondage mistresses and men in little aprons with their bums showing. Audience members were hypnotised on stage into believing they were receiving oral sex.
Male show goers pulled their pants down on stage and played with their penises. An artist known as Pricasso slathered his in paint, ready to capture your likeness.
Men practised their anal prowess on stage with lifeless blow-up dolls. Others paid a porn star $40 to pose topless with them. Many visited the ‘laporium’ for paid personalised lap dances. At times it felt like you were walking through one giant erection.
All of it captured by men with video cameras, for a longer lasting Sexpo.
Designed to turn us all on were: a man in a suit covered in fake penises; giant characters depicting male and female sexual parts; a sex sideshow alley including moving clowns with heads as genitals; the gerbil sex train advertised with giant breasts and penis in between.
A celebration of the vandalism of the human body.
Ex-footballer, now porn filmmaker, Warwick Capper, in his
Hustler
t-shirt? Sorry, just not doing it for me. Ex-
Hey Hey it’s Saturday’s
Russell Gilbert as ‘crackin’ entertainer and MC. Define crackin?
Two older long-bearded men sold t-shirts with slogans like ‘Wipe ya eyes princess and harden the f*ck up’ and offered to sign ladies’ underwear. Another t-shirt depicted a woman bound, with a red ball stuffed in her mouth and the slogan ‘Silence is golden’. “I look at that and see fun!” said the cheery saleswoman.
I look at that and see the objectification and subordination of women.
My friend and I could ‘enhance our assets’ for a mere $7,000 each for boobs and ‘tush’. Photos of pumped up breasts and tight bums adorned the stand. We were invited to handle the silicone implants.
There were also before-and-after photos of labia subjected to a scalpel for a bit of tidying up. And would we like to know more about the G-spot enhancement? Women are not good enough as they are. We must be sexually modified.
The enthusiastic staff testified to the skill of the boss. He’s operated on all of them. One showed me the bandages around her mid-section: pre-wedding liposuction. Hymen repair was also on the menu of services offered. They were seeing one to two Middle Eastern girls a week seeking the procedure to ‘prove’ their virginity.
Genital repair of another kind was being offered by a charity called Clitoraid. A devastating human rights violation against a woman’s bodily integrity is made sexy. They were raising money for female genital mutilation repair in Africa, with slogans such as ‘Give a Stranger an Orgasm’, ‘Help Build a Pleasure Hospital’ and ‘Adopt a Clitoris’.
There were photos of smiling African women and a baby mid-mutilation. A staffer told me they stopped showing a film of a child being cut as too many men stood around laughing.
I wondered what African women would think of the pornification of their suffering?
And, this, my last encounter as I was leaving.
A shivering young Asian woman in a wet t-shirt, sitting in a cage waiting for someone to strike the ‘bang me’ target on the image of a woman bent over which would send her plunging into the tub of water below.
Freezing, soaked, alone, disconnected, in an enclosure, to be ogled by men.
In the end, Sexpo is anti-intimacy, anti-connection, anti-warmth. It just leaves you feeling cold.
___________________________
1
An earlier version of this piece was published online on ABC
The Drum Unleashed
, 21 October, 2010, <
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40310.html
> and on Melinda Tankard Reist’s blog, <
http://melindatankardreist.com/2010/10/sexpo-and-the-death-of-sex/
>.
Sexpo and the Death of Sex
1
Billed as the world’s biggest health, sexuality and lifestyle exhibition, Sexpo came to Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion in October, 2010.
According to its Website (<
http://www.sexpo.com.au/
>) “[t]his show will increase your attractiveness and sexual drive. It contains beautiful women, hunky men, nudity and crackin’ entertainment.”
Call me fussy. Say I’m hard to please. But if what I witnessed is supposed to promote a healthy, happy sex life, then I think I just saw the death of sex.
Sexpo sex is formulaic, conveyer belt, plastic, industrialised, peep show porn sex.
The space was filled with pumping, grinding, crotch grabbing and female porn stars ‘presenting’, as they say in baboon studies. Cosmetically enhanced bodies waxed to within an inch of their lives. A landfill’s worth of plastic toys, dildos, whirling vibrators, penis rings and fake vaginas.
There were faux lesbian threesomes in hardcore acts of nastiness. Pole dancers, strippers, bondage mistresses and men in little aprons with their bums showing. Audience members were hypnotised on stage into believing they were receiving oral sex.
Male show goers pulled their pants down on stage and played with their penises. An artist known as Pricasso slathered his in paint, ready to capture your likeness.
Men practised their anal prowess on stage with lifeless blow-up dolls. Others paid a porn star $40 to pose topless with them. Many visited the ‘laporium’ for paid personalised lap dances. At times it felt like you were walking through one giant erection.
All of it captured by men with video cameras, for a longer lasting Sexpo.
Designed to turn us all on were: a man in a suit covered in fake penises; giant characters depicting male and female sexual parts; a sex sideshow alley including moving clowns with heads as genitals; the gerbil sex train advertised with giant breasts and penis in between.
A celebration of the vandalism of the human body.
Ex-footballer, now porn filmmaker, Warwick Capper, in his
Hustler
t-shirt? Sorry, just not doing it for me. Ex-
Hey Hey it’s Saturday’s
Russell Gilbert as ‘crackin’ entertainer and MC. Define crackin?
Two older long-bearded men sold t-shirts with slogans like ‘Wipe ya eyes princess and harden the f*ck up’ and offered to sign ladies’ underwear. Another t-shirt depicted a woman bound, with a red ball stuffed in her mouth and the slogan ‘Silence is golden’. “I look at that and see fun!” said the cheery saleswoman.
I look at that and see the objectification and subordination of women.
My friend and I could ‘enhance our assets’ for a mere $7,000 each for boobs and ‘tush’. Photos of pumped up breasts and tight bums adorned the stand. We were invited to handle the silicone implants.
There were also before-and-after photos of labia subjected to a scalpel for a bit of tidying up. And would we like to know more about the G-spot enhancement? Women are not good enough as they are. We must be sexually modified.
The enthusiastic staff testified to the skill of the boss. He’s operated on all of them. One showed me the bandages around her mid-section: pre-wedding liposuction. Hymen repair was also on the menu of services offered. They were seeing one to two Middle Eastern girls a week seeking the procedure to ‘prove’ their virginity.
Genital repair of another kind was being offered by a charity called Clitoraid. A devastating human rights violation against a woman’s bodily integrity is made sexy. They were raising money for female genital mutilation repair in Africa, with slogans such as ‘Give a Stranger an Orgasm’, ‘Help Build a Pleasure Hospital’ and ‘Adopt a Clitoris’.
There were photos of smiling African women and a baby mid-mutilation. A staffer told me they stopped showing a film of a child being cut as too many men stood around laughing.
I wondered what African women would think of the pornification of their suffering?
And, this, my last encounter as I was leaving.
A shivering young Asian woman in a wet t-shirt, sitting in a cage waiting for someone to strike the ‘bang me’ target on the image of a woman bent over which would send her plunging into the tub of water below.
Freezing, soaked, alone, disconnected, in an enclosure, to be ogled by men.
In the end, Sexpo is anti-intimacy, anti-connection, anti-warmth. It just leaves you feeling cold.
___________________________
1
An earlier version of this piece was published online on ABC
The Drum Unleashed
, 21 October, 2010, <
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40310.html
> and on Melinda Tankard Reist’s blog, <
http://melindatankardreist.com/2010/10/sexpo-and-the-death-of-sex/
>.
Sheila Jeffreys
Live Pornography: Strip Clubs in the International Political Economy of Prostitution
It is time for the link between the strip club industry and pornography to be recognised. Feminist research into the harms of the strip club industry and the ways in which it is connected to the international political economy of prostitution has only recently begun. In the last 20 years, stripping has moved from being a small scale, seedy industry, hidden in the sex shop areas of major cities, to a very profitable international industry in which clubs resemble business class airline lounges, and pimping companies supply women from around the world. The new ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ are designed to appeal to a wide range of men from corporate executives to the boy next door, offering stag nights, and even hen’s nights. They have been normalised and glamourised. The practice of stripping has been defended, too, by some ‘feminist’ academics who say that it empowers women and enables them to express their sexuality. In this chapter I will argue that stripping needs to be understood as a harmful part of the sex industry, which is closely integrated with pornography in its personnel and practices.
Academic discussion of stripping rarely examines it as an industry, or as harmful to the women who work in it and to women’s equality. Some writers in the field of gender studies even defend the practice of stripping. They euphemise the industry, calling it ‘exotic dancing’ or ‘entertainment’. They argue that stripping should be understood as socially transgressive, an exercise of women’s agency, or a form of empowerment for women (Hanna, 1998; Schweitzer, 1999; Liepe-Levinson, 2002). These arguments exemplify the decontextualised individualism which is common to many defences of the sex industry. Katherine Frank who worked as a stripper before researching a PhD on strip clubs and their patrons, says that she had ‘increased feelings’ of ‘self-efficacy’ when ‘dancing’, though she acknowledges in her work that the fact that she was known to be a graduate student and had other options, is likely to have made her personal experience atypical (Frank, 2002). She says that ‘sex work cannot be dismissed as a possible form of feminist resistance or an exercise in female agency’ (Frank, 2002, p. 16). Feminist critics, however, are arguing that stripping needs to be understood not
as resistance to women’s subordination, but rather as a most powerful example of it, and harmful both to the women who strip, and to the status of all women (see also Stella, this volume).
Feminist activism on strip clubs
Stripping only became the object of serious attention in the 2000s. Feminists became concerned about the way in which strip clubs form a halfway house between men’s pornography use and their becoming buyers of women in prostitution. Whilst pornography constructs the desire to use women as sexual objects, strip clubs provide live pornography in which they can see the women of pornography in the flesh and, often, touch them. The doubling in the percentage of men in the UK in 10 years who now prostitute women has been attributed to the normalisation of the commercial sexual exploitation of women that pornography and strip clubs have enabled (Ward and Day, 2004). Prostitution buyers in one London study spoke of how the strip clubs made them frustrated and made the buying of women in prostitution necessary (Coy et al., 2007). In 2010, Iceland, under the leadership of a lesbian feminist Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, became the first country to prohibit strip clubs (in Bindel, 2010).
The strip club industry
The strip club industry is now estimated to be worth more than US$75 billion worldwide (Montgomery, 2005). But very little research has taken place into the economics of the strip club industry. In 2009, a study by the Bureau of Business Research and the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the University of Texas, demonstrated the socio-economic impact of sexually oriented businesses on the Texas economy. It analysed the impact of the Adult Entertainment Fee imposed by the Legislature and provided recommendations for further regulating the industry. It was unusual in combining the expertise of a business school with concern for violence against women. It asked the question whether the “victimization and perpetration of sexual violence against women” are connected with this industry, and concludes from a review of the literature that they are. It concludes that stripping is, in fact, “a violent and traumatizing line of work that includes sexual, verbal, and physical violence, and exploits female workers” (Bureau of Business Research, 2009, p. 11). The report estimates that the industry has a yearly ‘total economic impact’ of between $920 million and $1.08 billion. This includes ‘direct and indirect effects’ of output by ‘adult cabarets’ and dancer income, adult book and video stores, escort services, and modelling and massage studios. There are 175 ‘adult cabaret’ clubs in Texas which were
worth $266.6 million in 2007 i.e. two-thirds as large as the Texas media industry as a whole, which was worth in 2006, $330.1 million. An estimated 8,272 people including 3,181 dancers are employed directly. The average entertainer works four 7-hour shifts per week as an independent contractor. The dancers earn an estimated average of $57,157 per year. In Queensland, Australia, strippers made an average of $1,120 per week, which is more than the average female wage of $804.50 in that state (Jeffries and Lynch, 2007). Stripping enables unskilled women to earn more, but does not provide the riches that pimping Websites promise to ‘dancers’. Moreover, they can only engage in it for a few short years.
Domestic and international strip club agencies provide strippers and ‘hostesses’ not just to clubs but to strip restaurants and a range of corporate and private events (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 2010
1
). The newly set up Australian strip club pimping firm, Busama,
Some clubs provide pole dancing classes to induct women into the industry and pole dancing has now become a leisure pursuit for girls and women. Taxi drivers take male buyers to strip clubs. Tailors create the costumes to be worn by women in porn and in strip clubs. Shoemakers design and manufacture cripplingly high heels for use in the industry. Restaurant staff run eateries in the strip clubs. Many technology companies service the pornography and strip industries by offering advertising for the Web, payment and exit services, hosting and so on. Websites act as advertising boards for escorts, brothels, strip clubs, pornography.
Strip clubs are now diversifying into the regular provision of sex shops attached to the clubs, either next door or in the foyer. These shops provide clothing for strippers, who are encouraged to take male buyers to the shop so that they can buy the items for the women. An
Adult Video News
(AVN) article on the evolution of the strip club industry says that diversification into linked sex shops is now de rigueur for clubs, which may also offer complimentary valet, premium liquor, gourmet meals, and even ‘hand-rolled cigars’ (Nelson X, 2008, p. 79). The Penthouse Club’s boutique in Las Vegas offers “exotic club fashions, evening wear, novelties and exclusive Penthouse-branded dancewear, lingerie, shoes, jewellery and DVDs (i.e. porn)” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). They also sell ‘sex toys’. The strippers are the main customers, about 55% of sales. There is a large market since each club has 75–100 strippers. The AVN Website advertises many companies which either service the porn production companies, women who strip, or the women whose partners require sexual servicing in a manner they are used to from their consumption of sex industry products. Products on offer include ‘semenex’ which makes the taste of semen less distasteful for women, nipple clamps and anal lubricant.
Stripping is a form of prostitution
All of this economic activity is supported by the use of naked women’s bodies. Pornography is usually not recognised as a form of prostitution. Defenders of pornography argue that it should be seen as a ‘fantasy’ or just ‘representation’ (Kipnis, 2003). In fact, real live women are paid to be penetrated every which way, often for hours, to make pornography, and this practice should be considered a very severe form of prostitution in terms of the forms of violence inflicted upon the women who are used (Jeffreys, 2009; Tyler, 2009). Similarly, stripping is widely promoted as a form of ‘dance’ or ‘erotic dance’. The entangling of stripping with prostitution has not been widely recognised (but see Bray, Farley, this volume). But forms of physical contact between male buyers and naked women seeking to sexually arouse or satisfy them, are very common. In traditional strip clubs, contact has always occurred, with men paying money to thrust their fingers up women’s vaginas, for instance (Holsopple, 1998). Now men pay for lap dances in private booths where the women may have to squirm on the semen covered laps of the buyers whilst naked, or they may engage in other sexual acts. The distinction between the regular practices involved in lap dancing, for instance, and other forms of prostitution is hard to make.
Prostitution is often negotiated in the clubs such that male buyers leave with the strippers or make assignations to meet later. Nakita Kash, a stripper in the
US, commenting on the fact that becoming a stripper is now an aspiration of lots of girls when they become 18, says that it is not an easy form of work because, “you have to have your head screwed on straight to not get wrapped up in drugs, prostitution, bad boyfriends – like in porn” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 86). Strip clubs in Queensland arrange outcall ‘dates’ for men who wish to take women out of the clubs (Jeffries and Lynch, 2007). Strip clubs operate openly and with minimal state interference all over the world (except in Iceland), as if they are genuinely entertainment venues, and not venues for men’s sexual abuse of women and girls. In Australia, this has led to the anomaly that legalised brothels are not permitted to serve alcohol, whereas strip clubs are, even when the strip club is on the upper floor of the brothel building and owned by the same person or company. There can be considerable, and deliberate, confusion about the distinctions between brothels and strip clubs.
The Site
, for example, describes itself as “Sydney’s No. 1 purpose built 5-Star brothel and gentlemen’s club” (
The Site
, 2009). Prostituted women in the brothel are called ‘hostesses’.
Connections between the pornography and strip club industries: same owners, same performers
The connections between the pornography and strip club industries are very clear from the fact that strip clubs evolved from the pornography industry, and porn companies and strip clubs frequently feature the same owners and performers. Pornographers extend their empires by setting up strip club chains, and strip club owners branch out into pornography. Harry Mohney is credited with ‘pioneering’ the first ‘upscale’ gentlemen’s club in 1987 (Nelson X, 2008). He now controls 70 ‘adult nightclubs’ in the Déjà vu chain. He runs the Hustler clubs too, founded by Larry Flynt, which carry the name of the porn magazine Flynt founded. Mohney began his career in the 1960s as a projectionist at an adult movie house. He opened Déjà vu stores in 1970 and now has 30 ‘love boutiques’, many within or adjacent to his strip clubs.
The women in porn and the strippers in clubs are often the same. The ‘dancers’ in strip clubs are often porn stars who go on tour around the clubs and do feature performances to bring publicity.
Adult Video News
tells us, for instance, that Carmen Hart, who is a Wicked Pictures contract girl, has taken many titles in exotic dancer awards competitions, such as ‘Exotic Performer of the Year’ in 2007 (Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). Sunny Lane, is a dancer for the Déjà vu chain who tours under the title ‘The Girl Next Door Goes Hardcore’ and has appeared in porn movies such as
Big Wet Asses 13
(Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). She is now an ‘adult feature’ on the strip club circuit after starring in an Eminem music video in 2003.
Sometimes strip club chains diversify into porn, when they have not evolved out of the porn industry. Thus the Spearmint Rhino chain, which is now international and has a branch in my city of Melbourne, has its own film studio to produce pornography (Nelson X, 2008, p. 82). John Gray, founder of Spearmint Rhino, has 6 convictions in the US for offences ranging from carrying a concealed weapon to writing dud cheques, for which, collectively, he received a suspended sentence, 68 months probation and periods in jail (Blackhurst and Gatton, 2002). He explains in
Adult Video News
that “[a] lap dance is not a hardcore sexual product like an adult video, they are radically different businesses. But, there’s enough synergy between the two that one could gain a lot of ground by dealing in both industries” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 82). He gives, as an example, the showing of the porn star, Jenna Jameson, in club bathrooms with Jameson saying, “Hi, I’m Jenna Jameson with Spearmint Rhino. While you have your dick in your hands, let me tell you about my new movie and some of the upcoming events at the Spearmint Rhino” (Nelson X, 2008).
Cross marketing
Porn and strip clubs are not only frequently created by the same market pimps and players, but they are generally promoted together, with the clubs acting as free billboards for porn. Thus the AVN Website, though it started as a mouthpiece of the porn industry, is now heavily involved in marketing strip clubs. There is, for instance, a strip club review section on the Website. The way the clubs are promoted can provide fascinating glimpses into the way the industry understands the motivations of the buyers. The advertising slogan of the ‘upscale’ strip club The Lodge in Dallas, for instance, is ‘Take back your balls’. The club ran a local TV commercial “in which a timid husband hesitantly tell his wife he’s going out with the guys. So she pulls out a key hidden in her blouse, unlocks the wall safe and takes out a box labelled, ‘Mike’s Balls’. With a disapproving look on her face she reluctantly hands them over” (The Lodge, undated, Website link no longer active). It seems reasonable to assume that this club sees men as wanting revenge or compensation for the fact that the women in their lives are no longer subservient, and may even be critical of their use of the sex industry. I call the practice in which men seek compensation for the better opportunities that women now enjoy in the public world, and the fact that they may rebel against unwanted sexual subservience in the home,
the outsourcing of women’s subordination
(Jeffreys, 2009).
Live Pornography: Strip Clubs in the International Political Economy of Prostitution
It is time for the link between the strip club industry and pornography to be recognised. Feminist research into the harms of the strip club industry and the ways in which it is connected to the international political economy of prostitution has only recently begun. In the last 20 years, stripping has moved from being a small scale, seedy industry, hidden in the sex shop areas of major cities, to a very profitable international industry in which clubs resemble business class airline lounges, and pimping companies supply women from around the world. The new ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ are designed to appeal to a wide range of men from corporate executives to the boy next door, offering stag nights, and even hen’s nights. They have been normalised and glamourised. The practice of stripping has been defended, too, by some ‘feminist’ academics who say that it empowers women and enables them to express their sexuality. In this chapter I will argue that stripping needs to be understood as a harmful part of the sex industry, which is closely integrated with pornography in its personnel and practices.
Academic discussion of stripping rarely examines it as an industry, or as harmful to the women who work in it and to women’s equality. Some writers in the field of gender studies even defend the practice of stripping. They euphemise the industry, calling it ‘exotic dancing’ or ‘entertainment’. They argue that stripping should be understood as socially transgressive, an exercise of women’s agency, or a form of empowerment for women (Hanna, 1998; Schweitzer, 1999; Liepe-Levinson, 2002). These arguments exemplify the decontextualised individualism which is common to many defences of the sex industry. Katherine Frank who worked as a stripper before researching a PhD on strip clubs and their patrons, says that she had ‘increased feelings’ of ‘self-efficacy’ when ‘dancing’, though she acknowledges in her work that the fact that she was known to be a graduate student and had other options, is likely to have made her personal experience atypical (Frank, 2002). She says that ‘sex work cannot be dismissed as a possible form of feminist resistance or an exercise in female agency’ (Frank, 2002, p. 16). Feminist critics, however, are arguing that stripping needs to be understood not
as resistance to women’s subordination, but rather as a most powerful example of it, and harmful both to the women who strip, and to the status of all women (see also Stella, this volume).
Feminist activism on strip clubs
Stripping only became the object of serious attention in the 2000s. Feminists became concerned about the way in which strip clubs form a halfway house between men’s pornography use and their becoming buyers of women in prostitution. Whilst pornography constructs the desire to use women as sexual objects, strip clubs provide live pornography in which they can see the women of pornography in the flesh and, often, touch them. The doubling in the percentage of men in the UK in 10 years who now prostitute women has been attributed to the normalisation of the commercial sexual exploitation of women that pornography and strip clubs have enabled (Ward and Day, 2004). Prostitution buyers in one London study spoke of how the strip clubs made them frustrated and made the buying of women in prostitution necessary (Coy et al., 2007). In 2010, Iceland, under the leadership of a lesbian feminist Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, became the first country to prohibit strip clubs (in Bindel, 2010).
The strip club industry
The strip club industry is now estimated to be worth more than US$75 billion worldwide (Montgomery, 2005). But very little research has taken place into the economics of the strip club industry. In 2009, a study by the Bureau of Business Research and the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the University of Texas, demonstrated the socio-economic impact of sexually oriented businesses on the Texas economy. It analysed the impact of the Adult Entertainment Fee imposed by the Legislature and provided recommendations for further regulating the industry. It was unusual in combining the expertise of a business school with concern for violence against women. It asked the question whether the “victimization and perpetration of sexual violence against women” are connected with this industry, and concludes from a review of the literature that they are. It concludes that stripping is, in fact, “a violent and traumatizing line of work that includes sexual, verbal, and physical violence, and exploits female workers” (Bureau of Business Research, 2009, p. 11). The report estimates that the industry has a yearly ‘total economic impact’ of between $920 million and $1.08 billion. This includes ‘direct and indirect effects’ of output by ‘adult cabarets’ and dancer income, adult book and video stores, escort services, and modelling and massage studios. There are 175 ‘adult cabaret’ clubs in Texas which were
worth $266.6 million in 2007 i.e. two-thirds as large as the Texas media industry as a whole, which was worth in 2006, $330.1 million. An estimated 8,272 people including 3,181 dancers are employed directly. The average entertainer works four 7-hour shifts per week as an independent contractor. The dancers earn an estimated average of $57,157 per year. In Queensland, Australia, strippers made an average of $1,120 per week, which is more than the average female wage of $804.50 in that state (Jeffries and Lynch, 2007). Stripping enables unskilled women to earn more, but does not provide the riches that pimping Websites promise to ‘dancers’. Moreover, they can only engage in it for a few short years.
Domestic and international strip club agencies provide strippers and ‘hostesses’ not just to clubs but to strip restaurants and a range of corporate and private events (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 2010
1
). The newly set up Australian strip club pimping firm, Busama,
is a premier international exotic dancer, table dancer and hostess recruitment agency and we are based on the Gold Coast in Australia. We provide a FREE dancer, lap dancing jobs and hostess jobs service to our showgirls and bookings into pole dancing clubs all around the world (Busama, n.d.).
Busama will take inexperienced girls and women and train them. They supply ‘hostesses’ and lap dancers to Macau, Hong Kong and South Africa. The employers will, in some cases, arrange working visas for the women, transportation and accommodation. Busama pimp, Justin, says that stripping and prostitution are not the same, “… exotic dancing is not synonymous to prostitution. It can’t be denied that some girls engage themselves into prostitution but it is very wrong to stereotype everyone as prostitutes” (Justin, 2010). But Busama’s Website is linked to an escort (prostitution) agency in the Dominican Republic, a well-known sex tourism destination.Some clubs provide pole dancing classes to induct women into the industry and pole dancing has now become a leisure pursuit for girls and women. Taxi drivers take male buyers to strip clubs. Tailors create the costumes to be worn by women in porn and in strip clubs. Shoemakers design and manufacture cripplingly high heels for use in the industry. Restaurant staff run eateries in the strip clubs. Many technology companies service the pornography and strip industries by offering advertising for the Web, payment and exit services, hosting and so on. Websites act as advertising boards for escorts, brothels, strip clubs, pornography.
Strip clubs are now diversifying into the regular provision of sex shops attached to the clubs, either next door or in the foyer. These shops provide clothing for strippers, who are encouraged to take male buyers to the shop so that they can buy the items for the women. An
Adult Video News
(AVN) article on the evolution of the strip club industry says that diversification into linked sex shops is now de rigueur for clubs, which may also offer complimentary valet, premium liquor, gourmet meals, and even ‘hand-rolled cigars’ (Nelson X, 2008, p. 79). The Penthouse Club’s boutique in Las Vegas offers “exotic club fashions, evening wear, novelties and exclusive Penthouse-branded dancewear, lingerie, shoes, jewellery and DVDs (i.e. porn)” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). They also sell ‘sex toys’. The strippers are the main customers, about 55% of sales. There is a large market since each club has 75–100 strippers. The AVN Website advertises many companies which either service the porn production companies, women who strip, or the women whose partners require sexual servicing in a manner they are used to from their consumption of sex industry products. Products on offer include ‘semenex’ which makes the taste of semen less distasteful for women, nipple clamps and anal lubricant.
Stripping is a form of prostitution
All of this economic activity is supported by the use of naked women’s bodies. Pornography is usually not recognised as a form of prostitution. Defenders of pornography argue that it should be seen as a ‘fantasy’ or just ‘representation’ (Kipnis, 2003). In fact, real live women are paid to be penetrated every which way, often for hours, to make pornography, and this practice should be considered a very severe form of prostitution in terms of the forms of violence inflicted upon the women who are used (Jeffreys, 2009; Tyler, 2009). Similarly, stripping is widely promoted as a form of ‘dance’ or ‘erotic dance’. The entangling of stripping with prostitution has not been widely recognised (but see Bray, Farley, this volume). But forms of physical contact between male buyers and naked women seeking to sexually arouse or satisfy them, are very common. In traditional strip clubs, contact has always occurred, with men paying money to thrust their fingers up women’s vaginas, for instance (Holsopple, 1998). Now men pay for lap dances in private booths where the women may have to squirm on the semen covered laps of the buyers whilst naked, or they may engage in other sexual acts. The distinction between the regular practices involved in lap dancing, for instance, and other forms of prostitution is hard to make.
Prostitution is often negotiated in the clubs such that male buyers leave with the strippers or make assignations to meet later. Nakita Kash, a stripper in the
US, commenting on the fact that becoming a stripper is now an aspiration of lots of girls when they become 18, says that it is not an easy form of work because, “you have to have your head screwed on straight to not get wrapped up in drugs, prostitution, bad boyfriends – like in porn” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 86). Strip clubs in Queensland arrange outcall ‘dates’ for men who wish to take women out of the clubs (Jeffries and Lynch, 2007). Strip clubs operate openly and with minimal state interference all over the world (except in Iceland), as if they are genuinely entertainment venues, and not venues for men’s sexual abuse of women and girls. In Australia, this has led to the anomaly that legalised brothels are not permitted to serve alcohol, whereas strip clubs are, even when the strip club is on the upper floor of the brothel building and owned by the same person or company. There can be considerable, and deliberate, confusion about the distinctions between brothels and strip clubs.
The Site
, for example, describes itself as “Sydney’s No. 1 purpose built 5-Star brothel and gentlemen’s club” (
The Site
, 2009). Prostituted women in the brothel are called ‘hostesses’.
Connections between the pornography and strip club industries: same owners, same performers
The connections between the pornography and strip club industries are very clear from the fact that strip clubs evolved from the pornography industry, and porn companies and strip clubs frequently feature the same owners and performers. Pornographers extend their empires by setting up strip club chains, and strip club owners branch out into pornography. Harry Mohney is credited with ‘pioneering’ the first ‘upscale’ gentlemen’s club in 1987 (Nelson X, 2008). He now controls 70 ‘adult nightclubs’ in the Déjà vu chain. He runs the Hustler clubs too, founded by Larry Flynt, which carry the name of the porn magazine Flynt founded. Mohney began his career in the 1960s as a projectionist at an adult movie house. He opened Déjà vu stores in 1970 and now has 30 ‘love boutiques’, many within or adjacent to his strip clubs.
The women in porn and the strippers in clubs are often the same. The ‘dancers’ in strip clubs are often porn stars who go on tour around the clubs and do feature performances to bring publicity.
Adult Video News
tells us, for instance, that Carmen Hart, who is a Wicked Pictures contract girl, has taken many titles in exotic dancer awards competitions, such as ‘Exotic Performer of the Year’ in 2007 (Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). Sunny Lane, is a dancer for the Déjà vu chain who tours under the title ‘The Girl Next Door Goes Hardcore’ and has appeared in porn movies such as
Big Wet Asses 13
(Nelson X, 2008, p. 80). She is now an ‘adult feature’ on the strip club circuit after starring in an Eminem music video in 2003.
Sometimes strip club chains diversify into porn, when they have not evolved out of the porn industry. Thus the Spearmint Rhino chain, which is now international and has a branch in my city of Melbourne, has its own film studio to produce pornography (Nelson X, 2008, p. 82). John Gray, founder of Spearmint Rhino, has 6 convictions in the US for offences ranging from carrying a concealed weapon to writing dud cheques, for which, collectively, he received a suspended sentence, 68 months probation and periods in jail (Blackhurst and Gatton, 2002). He explains in
Adult Video News
that “[a] lap dance is not a hardcore sexual product like an adult video, they are radically different businesses. But, there’s enough synergy between the two that one could gain a lot of ground by dealing in both industries” (Nelson X, 2008, p. 82). He gives, as an example, the showing of the porn star, Jenna Jameson, in club bathrooms with Jameson saying, “Hi, I’m Jenna Jameson with Spearmint Rhino. While you have your dick in your hands, let me tell you about my new movie and some of the upcoming events at the Spearmint Rhino” (Nelson X, 2008).
Cross marketing
Porn and strip clubs are not only frequently created by the same market pimps and players, but they are generally promoted together, with the clubs acting as free billboards for porn. Thus the AVN Website, though it started as a mouthpiece of the porn industry, is now heavily involved in marketing strip clubs. There is, for instance, a strip club review section on the Website. The way the clubs are promoted can provide fascinating glimpses into the way the industry understands the motivations of the buyers. The advertising slogan of the ‘upscale’ strip club The Lodge in Dallas, for instance, is ‘Take back your balls’. The club ran a local TV commercial “in which a timid husband hesitantly tell his wife he’s going out with the guys. So she pulls out a key hidden in her blouse, unlocks the wall safe and takes out a box labelled, ‘Mike’s Balls’. With a disapproving look on her face she reluctantly hands them over” (The Lodge, undated, Website link no longer active). It seems reasonable to assume that this club sees men as wanting revenge or compensation for the fact that the women in their lives are no longer subservient, and may even be critical of their use of the sex industry. I call the practice in which men seek compensation for the better opportunities that women now enjoy in the public world, and the fact that they may rebel against unwanted sexual subservience in the home,
the outsourcing of women’s subordination
(Jeffreys, 2009).
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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