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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 (27 page)
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
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A 20-year-old woman was employed at a Ukrainian ‘modeling agency’ that sent her to beauty pageants throughout Europe where she had the chance to meet rich men. The modeling agencies functioned as pimps and traffickers. Buyers from United Arab Emirates, France, Italy, Japan and Russia inspected the women in beauty pageants, chose those they wanted to buy, and then rented the young models for up to a month at a time. The young woman herself may not have known that the modeling job was actually prostitution (often including pornography) until she arrived in another country (Plekhanova, 2006).
A Nevada legal pimp specialized in hiring women who had previously made pornography videos. He then used their videos to promote his brothel, advertising ‘pornstars for rent’ (Mead, 2001). At this pimp’s brothel, women told a research team that it was not possible to make much money
unless
they permitted the pimp to film their prostitution. Women new to prostitution reported intense pressure from this particular pimp to be filmed by him, even though they often preferred not to have that documentation made of their prostitution (Farley, 2007a).
Once their prostitution was documented via pornography, women felt that it defined and shamed them. In the long run, the pornography made it more difficult to escape the sex industry since it was a permanent record of their prostitution circulating on the Internet or in stores selling pornography.
The sold and re-sold film of prostitution that is pornography generates massive profits for pimps. But for her, it is infinite prostitution, a document of her sexual exploitation, her body exploited and masturbated over endlessly into the future as long as it generates profits. One session of paid sex in prostitution goes global on the Internet when she is turned into pornography.
Pornographers are specialty pimps
Pimps typically recruit women into prostitution by using pornography to glamorize the sex industry. Survivors at a public hearing on the harm of pornography testified that they had all been introduced to prostitution by pimps who showed them pornography (MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1997, p. 114). Once in prostitution, pimps use pornography to teach women and girls what sex acts to perform (Silbert and Pines, 1987, pp. 865–866).
Survivor Miki Garcia testified under oath that Hugh Hefner, pornographer and founder of
Playboy
magazine, was a pimp who controlled an international prostitution ring, and that Playmates under contract to
Playboy
were prostituting (MacKinnon, 2001, pp. 1539–1543).
In many cases, pornographers are indistinguishable from other pimps (see Nozaka, 1970). These predatory people exploit women’s economic and psychological vulnerabilities, coercing them to get into and stay in the sex industry. Pornographers and pimps both take pictures to advertise the people they are selling. One pornographer proclaimed that he was in the business of “degrading whores for your viewing pleasure,” clearly eliminating the alleged boundary between pornography and prostitution (in Jensen, 2006).
British torture pornographer Peter Acworth purchased a 14 million dollar building in San Francisco for his business in 2007. Acworth maintains he’s just a pornographer, not a pimp. He’s a fetishist with a camera who gets off by paying women to be terrorized, stuffed into boilers, hogtied, beaten, near-drowned, hung from ceilings.
Just as some prostitution is more violent than other prostitution, some pornography is more violent than other pornography. Calling it ‘kink’ not torture and calling the women he films ‘models’ not prostitutes, Acworth uses the same price structure used in prostitution: the more invasive and the more violent, the higher the price. In a newspaper interview, Acworth recruited women by publicizing the following rates for his pornography: “$700 for vaginal dildo and finger penetration; $800 for vaginal/anal dildo play
and
finger penetration; $900 for vaginal and/or oral sex; $1,000 for vaginal and oral sex plus anal dildos; $1,100 for vaginal and anal sex; and $1,300 for double penetration.” Acworth offered more pay for “forced finger fucking” (Harper, 2007).
4
Sometimes the violence is perpetrated by johns, pimps, and pornographers simply because they can and because women in prostitution, whether it’s filmed
or not, are not considered worthy of safety, protection, or of being offered real alternatives. As one woman testified about the making of pornography:
There is now research evidence for the harms generated by pornography. Some of the traumatic stress (PTSD) suffered by women in prostitution results from the ways that men use pornography of them and against them.
5
Having pictures taken of one’s prostitution causes more distress than if the prostitution was not filmed. When their prostitution is filmed, the pornography haunts them for the rest of their lives, causing the women distress and anxiety about it being viewed by family, friends, or future employers. Women in prostitution whose buyers or pimps made pornography of them in prostitution had more severe symptoms of PTSD than did women who did not have pornography made of them (Farley, 2007b, p. 146).
Women explain that the harms of pornography are worse than prostitution alone. A survivor explained,
In findings that are consistent with Malamuth’s, a research study of 110 sex buyers in Scotland compared high frequency prostitute-users to low frequency
users. The most frequent prostitution users were also the most frequent pornography users. The most frequent prostitution users were also more likely to have committed sexually aggressive acts against non-prostituting women (Farley et al., in press).
Other research studies have found similar statistical associations between pornography and prostitution. Monto and McRee (2005) compared the pornography use of 1,672 US men who had been arrested for soliciting women in prostitution with samples of US men who had not used women in prostitution. Men who had purchased sex were far more likely to use pornography on a regular basis than men who had not purchased sex. Men who were repeat users of women in prostitution were more likely than first time users of prostituted women to use pornography, and first time users of women in prostitution were more likely than men who had not bought sex to have used pornography.
It is possible that more frequent use of pornography supports and stimulates men in their use of women in prostitution. Three studies support the feminist understanding of prostitution as a form of violence against women: the Scottish sex buyer study described above, the Monto and McRee study in 2005, and a meta-analysis from Hald, Malamuth and Yuen in 2010 that found a significant association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women.
In the real world, pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking are indistinguishable
Human rights violations are obscured when trafficking is falsely differentiated from prostitution and pornography. The pimps’ and johns’ spin is that trafficking is bad but prostitution is a good-enough job for poor women. Some even say that
forced trafficking
is bad but
voluntary migration for sex work
is OK when the experience of the women is the same in both situations. Or that non-consenting prostitution is a problem but if there’s a camera in the room, pornography is then assumed to be consenting.
There is an endless stream of words that cover up the interconnections of the sex trafficking industry.
6
Like other global businesses, it has domestic and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it operates in each community, many different owners and managers, and it is constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit. Pornography today is used as advertising for prostitution and as a way to traffic
women (MacKinnon, 2005). Creating disconnections when in reality all sectors of the hydra-headed sex trafficking industry are deeply connected – leaves the door open for ideological arguments that permit pimps and johns to defend harmful practices. Manipulating these false distinctions can result in deep confusion about the nature of sexual harm and sexual freedom. When pornography is conceptually morphed into sex work, then brutal exploitation by pornographers becomes an employer–employee relationship. When prostitution is defined as labor, the predatory purchase of a human being by a john becomes an everyday business transaction.
Defining pornography as a choice can be confusing to women in it as well as to the public. She accepts the pornographers’ propaganda that it’s her choice, so she blames herself for the harm done to her, even though she often has no other options.
False distinctions confuse people who are trying to abolish these human rights violations. Endless elaboration on the differences rather than a focus on the essential similarities between pornography, prostitution and trafficking makes it challenging to end these sexual exploitation businesses.
In some scenarios, pimps and johns create a false distinction between modeling and prostitution. It’s called modeling for the viewer/john of an Italian beauty pageant who can afford “dates with available, beautiful women” but it’s experienced as trafficking for the ‘contestant’ who comes from desperate circumstances in the Ukraine and who accepted an offer to come to Italy to meet interesting, affluent men.
Although described as separate entities, Web-based, video, and print pornography are integral to the sex industry, including prostitution and trafficking. Legal brothel owners have attempted to “cross fertilize” prostitution with legal adult businesses such as strip clubs, Internet sex sites and pornography (Hausbeck and Brents, 2000).
The Girls of Cheetah’s
is pornography made at a Las Vegas strip club where prostitution happens (Jordan, 2004, p. 107). Connecting stripping and pornography, a strip club Website advertised, “Breeding pornstars: one showgirl at a time!!!” (<
http://tour.stripclubnetwork.com/
>).
The overlap between different arms of the sex industry is illustrated by a law enforcement investigation that took place in Las Vegas. Appearing to be an office complex from the street, a sex business operation blended pornography production with escort and web cam prostitution.
7
The pimp/pornographer
rented six offices that functioned as Internet pornography businesses, cyberpeepshow prostitution with a web cam, as well as a location out of which women were illegally pimped to hotels and to a brothel (confidential Nevada law enforcement source).
As the Leno joke indicates, the adult industry trade shows are promotion for prostitution. The sex trafficking industry is named an ‘adult industry’ not only to conceal the fact that it’s prostitution but to manipulate people into seeing the sex industry as grown-up, mature. In Australia and in the United States, sex trade shows shout out the message that prostitution is a fun, consensual, lifestyle choice accompanied by HIV-free health and the right to privacy. Despite these claims, at their core these sex trade shows have been described as “19th century freak shows”
8
where “the industry rejects no act of exploitation demanded by customers” (O’Connor and Healy, 2006, p. 18). The robotic, mocking and at times sadistic enactments of ‘erotic play’ at sex trade shows are especially harmful because of the pretense of genuine pleasure.
Pornography is a document of a woman’s humiliation (Clarke, 2004, p. 205). It’s a record of what men’s extreme domination of women looks like – in all its violently racist and classist specificity. But there are a few positive signs of real social change. Here’s some good news: Glenn Marcus, like Peter Acworth of
kink.com
, ran a torture pornography Website. A woman who was psychologically coerced by Marcus to permit pornography of her to be sold on
Slavespace.com
brought charges against Marcus who was her pimp/pornographer/trafficker. At one point he stuffed a ball gag in her mouth, sewed her mouth shut with surgical needles and hung her on a wall.
Her attorneys, as I understand it, used the following definition:
Sex trafficking is coercing or selling a person into a situation of sexual exploitation, such as prostitution or pornography
.
On 5 March, 2007, pornographer Marcus was convicted of sex trafficking (Bartow, 2007). This United States legal decision reflects a deepening understanding of how pornography harms women and the ways in which pornography and prostitution are the same for the person who is being sexually exploited for profit.
Bibliography
Amis, Martin (17 March, 2001) ‘A Rough Trade’
The Guardian
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1
> (accessed 20 March, 2001).
Bartow, Ann (24 May, 2007) ‘Bondage Webmaster Likely Going to Jail. Feminist Law Professors’ <
http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=1833
> (accessed June, 2008).
A Nevada legal pimp specialized in hiring women who had previously made pornography videos. He then used their videos to promote his brothel, advertising ‘pornstars for rent’ (Mead, 2001). At this pimp’s brothel, women told a research team that it was not possible to make much money
unless
they permitted the pimp to film their prostitution. Women new to prostitution reported intense pressure from this particular pimp to be filmed by him, even though they often preferred not to have that documentation made of their prostitution (Farley, 2007a).
Once their prostitution was documented via pornography, women felt that it defined and shamed them. In the long run, the pornography made it more difficult to escape the sex industry since it was a permanent record of their prostitution circulating on the Internet or in stores selling pornography.
The sold and re-sold film of prostitution that is pornography generates massive profits for pimps. But for her, it is infinite prostitution, a document of her sexual exploitation, her body exploited and masturbated over endlessly into the future as long as it generates profits. One session of paid sex in prostitution goes global on the Internet when she is turned into pornography.
Pornographers are specialty pimps
Pimps typically recruit women into prostitution by using pornography to glamorize the sex industry. Survivors at a public hearing on the harm of pornography testified that they had all been introduced to prostitution by pimps who showed them pornography (MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1997, p. 114). Once in prostitution, pimps use pornography to teach women and girls what sex acts to perform (Silbert and Pines, 1987, pp. 865–866).
Survivor Miki Garcia testified under oath that Hugh Hefner, pornographer and founder of
Playboy
magazine, was a pimp who controlled an international prostitution ring, and that Playmates under contract to
Playboy
were prostituting (MacKinnon, 2001, pp. 1539–1543).
In many cases, pornographers are indistinguishable from other pimps (see Nozaka, 1970). These predatory people exploit women’s economic and psychological vulnerabilities, coercing them to get into and stay in the sex industry. Pornographers and pimps both take pictures to advertise the people they are selling. One pornographer proclaimed that he was in the business of “degrading whores for your viewing pleasure,” clearly eliminating the alleged boundary between pornography and prostitution (in Jensen, 2006).
British torture pornographer Peter Acworth purchased a 14 million dollar building in San Francisco for his business in 2007. Acworth maintains he’s just a pornographer, not a pimp. He’s a fetishist with a camera who gets off by paying women to be terrorized, stuffed into boilers, hogtied, beaten, near-drowned, hung from ceilings.
Just as some prostitution is more violent than other prostitution, some pornography is more violent than other pornography. Calling it ‘kink’ not torture and calling the women he films ‘models’ not prostitutes, Acworth uses the same price structure used in prostitution: the more invasive and the more violent, the higher the price. In a newspaper interview, Acworth recruited women by publicizing the following rates for his pornography: “$700 for vaginal dildo and finger penetration; $800 for vaginal/anal dildo play
and
finger penetration; $900 for vaginal and/or oral sex; $1,000 for vaginal and oral sex plus anal dildos; $1,100 for vaginal and anal sex; and $1,300 for double penetration.” Acworth offered more pay for “forced finger fucking” (Harper, 2007).
4
Sometimes the violence is perpetrated by johns, pimps, and pornographers simply because they can and because women in prostitution, whether it’s filmed
or not, are not considered worthy of safety, protection, or of being offered real alternatives. As one woman testified about the making of pornography:
‘I got the shit kicked out of me,’ … ‘I was told before the video – and they said this very proudly, mind you – that in this line most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad … I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, “Turn the fucking camera off,” and they kept going’ (in Amis, 2001).
Research provides evidence for harmful effects of pornographyThere is now research evidence for the harms generated by pornography. Some of the traumatic stress (PTSD) suffered by women in prostitution results from the ways that men use pornography of them and against them.
5
Having pictures taken of one’s prostitution causes more distress than if the prostitution was not filmed. When their prostitution is filmed, the pornography haunts them for the rest of their lives, causing the women distress and anxiety about it being viewed by family, friends, or future employers. Women in prostitution whose buyers or pimps made pornography of them in prostitution had more severe symptoms of PTSD than did women who did not have pornography made of them (Farley, 2007b, p. 146).
Women explain that the harms of pornography are worse than prostitution alone. A survivor explained,
[P]ornography is much worse than prostitution because it affects me for the rest of my life. It’s not like I just … had sex with a john, collected my money, and went home … I’m still exploited all over the Internet ten years later. People recognize me. I’m harassed because of it. My kids are being harassed (in Simonton and Smith, 2004, p. 355).
In other research, pornography has been shown to affect men’s sexual aggression against women. Malamuth and colleagues have shown that in combination with other factors, pornography contributes to men’s increased sexual aggression against women. These factors include impersonal sex, hostile masculine identification, a history of family violence, adolescent delinquency, and attitudes supportive of aggression (Malamuth and Pitpitan, 2007).In findings that are consistent with Malamuth’s, a research study of 110 sex buyers in Scotland compared high frequency prostitute-users to low frequency
users. The most frequent prostitution users were also the most frequent pornography users. The most frequent prostitution users were also more likely to have committed sexually aggressive acts against non-prostituting women (Farley et al., in press).
Other research studies have found similar statistical associations between pornography and prostitution. Monto and McRee (2005) compared the pornography use of 1,672 US men who had been arrested for soliciting women in prostitution with samples of US men who had not used women in prostitution. Men who had purchased sex were far more likely to use pornography on a regular basis than men who had not purchased sex. Men who were repeat users of women in prostitution were more likely than first time users of prostituted women to use pornography, and first time users of women in prostitution were more likely than men who had not bought sex to have used pornography.
It is possible that more frequent use of pornography supports and stimulates men in their use of women in prostitution. Three studies support the feminist understanding of prostitution as a form of violence against women: the Scottish sex buyer study described above, the Monto and McRee study in 2005, and a meta-analysis from Hald, Malamuth and Yuen in 2010 that found a significant association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women.
In the real world, pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking are indistinguishable
Human rights violations are obscured when trafficking is falsely differentiated from prostitution and pornography. The pimps’ and johns’ spin is that trafficking is bad but prostitution is a good-enough job for poor women. Some even say that
forced trafficking
is bad but
voluntary migration for sex work
is OK when the experience of the women is the same in both situations. Or that non-consenting prostitution is a problem but if there’s a camera in the room, pornography is then assumed to be consenting.
There is an endless stream of words that cover up the interconnections of the sex trafficking industry.
6
Like other global businesses, it has domestic and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it operates in each community, many different owners and managers, and it is constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit. Pornography today is used as advertising for prostitution and as a way to traffic
women (MacKinnon, 2005). Creating disconnections when in reality all sectors of the hydra-headed sex trafficking industry are deeply connected – leaves the door open for ideological arguments that permit pimps and johns to defend harmful practices. Manipulating these false distinctions can result in deep confusion about the nature of sexual harm and sexual freedom. When pornography is conceptually morphed into sex work, then brutal exploitation by pornographers becomes an employer–employee relationship. When prostitution is defined as labor, the predatory purchase of a human being by a john becomes an everyday business transaction.
Defining pornography as a choice can be confusing to women in it as well as to the public. She accepts the pornographers’ propaganda that it’s her choice, so she blames herself for the harm done to her, even though she often has no other options.
False distinctions confuse people who are trying to abolish these human rights violations. Endless elaboration on the differences rather than a focus on the essential similarities between pornography, prostitution and trafficking makes it challenging to end these sexual exploitation businesses.
In some scenarios, pimps and johns create a false distinction between modeling and prostitution. It’s called modeling for the viewer/john of an Italian beauty pageant who can afford “dates with available, beautiful women” but it’s experienced as trafficking for the ‘contestant’ who comes from desperate circumstances in the Ukraine and who accepted an offer to come to Italy to meet interesting, affluent men.
Although described as separate entities, Web-based, video, and print pornography are integral to the sex industry, including prostitution and trafficking. Legal brothel owners have attempted to “cross fertilize” prostitution with legal adult businesses such as strip clubs, Internet sex sites and pornography (Hausbeck and Brents, 2000).
The Girls of Cheetah’s
is pornography made at a Las Vegas strip club where prostitution happens (Jordan, 2004, p. 107). Connecting stripping and pornography, a strip club Website advertised, “Breeding pornstars: one showgirl at a time!!!” (<
http://tour.stripclubnetwork.com/
>).
The overlap between different arms of the sex industry is illustrated by a law enforcement investigation that took place in Las Vegas. Appearing to be an office complex from the street, a sex business operation blended pornography production with escort and web cam prostitution.
7
The pimp/pornographer
rented six offices that functioned as Internet pornography businesses, cyberpeepshow prostitution with a web cam, as well as a location out of which women were illegally pimped to hotels and to a brothel (confidential Nevada law enforcement source).
As the Leno joke indicates, the adult industry trade shows are promotion for prostitution. The sex trafficking industry is named an ‘adult industry’ not only to conceal the fact that it’s prostitution but to manipulate people into seeing the sex industry as grown-up, mature. In Australia and in the United States, sex trade shows shout out the message that prostitution is a fun, consensual, lifestyle choice accompanied by HIV-free health and the right to privacy. Despite these claims, at their core these sex trade shows have been described as “19th century freak shows”
8
where “the industry rejects no act of exploitation demanded by customers” (O’Connor and Healy, 2006, p. 18). The robotic, mocking and at times sadistic enactments of ‘erotic play’ at sex trade shows are especially harmful because of the pretense of genuine pleasure.
Pornography is a document of a woman’s humiliation (Clarke, 2004, p. 205). It’s a record of what men’s extreme domination of women looks like – in all its violently racist and classist specificity. But there are a few positive signs of real social change. Here’s some good news: Glenn Marcus, like Peter Acworth of
kink.com
, ran a torture pornography Website. A woman who was psychologically coerced by Marcus to permit pornography of her to be sold on
Slavespace.com
brought charges against Marcus who was her pimp/pornographer/trafficker. At one point he stuffed a ball gag in her mouth, sewed her mouth shut with surgical needles and hung her on a wall.
Her attorneys, as I understand it, used the following definition:
Sex trafficking is coercing or selling a person into a situation of sexual exploitation, such as prostitution or pornography
.
On 5 March, 2007, pornographer Marcus was convicted of sex trafficking (Bartow, 2007). This United States legal decision reflects a deepening understanding of how pornography harms women and the ways in which pornography and prostitution are the same for the person who is being sexually exploited for profit.
Bibliography
Amis, Martin (17 March, 2001) ‘A Rough Trade’
The Guardian
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis1
> (accessed 20 March, 2001).
Bartow, Ann (24 May, 2007) ‘Bondage Webmaster Likely Going to Jail. Feminist Law Professors’ <
http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=1833
> (accessed June, 2008).
BOOK: Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry
8.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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