Pornography and the Industrialization of Sex

Hi,

I am sending two extracts from Ms Dines book Pornland plus and interview with her which has appeared in New Left Project a year ago. Also, attached two articles (one co-authored with Jensen) which will help us to understand the deeper meaning of the argument espoused by Ms Dines. I think it will help us to kick-start some kind of meaningful debate within ourselves.

Sethu

Dr. Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, an internationally acclaimed speaker and author, and a feminist activist. Her writing and lectures focus on the hypersexualization of the culture and the ways that porn images filter down into mainstream pop culture.

Gail’s work on media and pornography has appeared in academic journals, magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and newspapers across the country. She is a frequent guest on radio and television and is a recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights.

Gail is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture – an educational and activist group made up of academics, anti-violence experts, community organizers and anyone who is concerned about the increasing pornification of the culture.

Pornography and the Industrialization of Sex

Excerpt from Introduction

“Don’t Come Here Looking for Love.” -  Ad for porn site, Im Live

I am in a cavernous convention hall surrounded by hard-core porn images of women …. trying to have a conversation with Patricia, a middle-aged African-American woman who is a security guard working for slightly more than minimum wage, but we both have difficulty hearing as our voices are being drowned out by the orgasmic sounds coming from the movies. Patricia is distinguished from the other women in the hall, not only by her age and race, but by the fact that she is fully clothed. Most of the women in the hall are dressed in only thongs and pasties while the thousands of men here are fully clothed. .. . I am at the Adult Entertainment Expo, the pornographers’ annual trade show in Las Vegas.

Patricia has a bad crick in her neck from trying to avoid looking at the porn that is being projected onto the screens. Needles to say, this is no easy feat as porn is everywhere. She expresses her frustration about being forced to work this detail, as she has never before seen porn. Divorced for many years, Patricia tells me that after doing this job for a few days, she now knows why she “can’t find a good man to settle down with.”  As we talk, one of the very few African-American porn performers in the hall walks past us, dressed in the usual porn garb of high-heeled shoes and not much more. Patricia taps me on the shoulder and says “go and tell her that it is not good for her to be doing this stuff.” At that very moment a fan goes over to the porn performer and puts his hand on her crotch; his friends take a picture. Patricia groans.

As someone who studies porn, I am accustomed to these kinds of images, but Patricia is new to them, and it is through her eyes that I see it for what it really is: a parallel universe where the complexity of humans, the multiple pleasures of life, and the deep connections that nourish and sustain us, vanish. …. Both Patricia and I are in the middle of  a world which reduces humans to orifices and body parts, bled dry of soul, personality, history, and future, as life in the porn world is only about the here and now where penetrating someone or being penetrated is all humans exist for. As I am writing notes for my book, Patricia starts to plot her future far away from Las Vegas.

As I wander around the hall, talking to pornographers, it becomes very clear that they are not particularly interested in sex. What turns these people on is making money. The only time they seem excited is when they are discussing market shares, niche products, or direct marketing versus bulk mailing in one of the many business seminars that accompany the trade show. Many of the porn producers I interviewed freely acknowledge that they are in the business to make money, not to further our sexual empowerment or creativity. They see themselves in a business that, thanks to the growth of the Internet, is like a runaway train because nobody really knows where it is heading. What they will admit is that porn is becoming more extreme, and their success depends on finding some new, edgy sex act that will draw in users always on the look-out for that extra bit of sexual charge. Not one of the men I talked to seemed particularly interested that this new, edgy sex act will be played out on real women’s bodies; bodies that are already being pushed to the brink of their physical limits. No, these men want a piece of the pie, and their single-minded focus on the bottom line is evident….

Images have now become so extreme that what used to be considered hard-core is now mainstream pornography. Acts that are now commonplace in much of internet porn were almost non-existent a decade ago. As the market becomes saturated with porn and consumers become increasingly bored and desensitized, pornographers are avidly searching for ways to differentiate their products from others, in hopes of expanding their market share and increasing their consumer base.

This shift …. has had profound implications for the ways boys and men experience porn. To begin to understand the changes, consider how young men and boys were introduced to porn in pre-Internet days. Hormones raging, boys would most likely discover their father’s Playboy orPenthouse to masturbate to. These magazines, with their soft-core, soft-focus pictures of naked women, taught boys and men that women existed to be looked at, objectified, used, and put away until the next time.  Their future supply of porn was dependent on what they or their friends could pilfer from their father’s stash or from the local convenience store because going to a porn shop was out of the question, given their age. The sexism of these images was bad enough, but compared to what adolescents or adults have unlimited access to today, the porn of yesterday seems almost quaint.

Rather than sporadic trips into a world of coy smiles, provocative poses, and glimpses of semi-shaved female genitalia, youth today, especially boys, are catapulted into a never-ending universe of ravaged anuses, distended vaginas, and semen-smeared faces.  When they masturbate to the stories, acts, and narratives of the porn in a heightened state of arousal, the images send a cornucopia of messages about women, men, relationships, and sex to the brain.

…. Porn, like all other images, tells stories about the world, but these stories are of the most intimate nature as they are about sexuality and sexual relationships. When men go to porn to experience sexual arousal and orgasm, they come away with a lot more than just an ejaculation, as the stories seep into the very core of their sexual identity. To suggest otherwise would be to see sex as just a biological urge, removed from the social context within which it is developed, understood, and enacted in the real world. No biological urge exists in a pure form, devoid of cultural meaning or expression, and in American society, porn is probably the most visible, accessible, and articulate teller of sexual stories to men.

Racy Sex, Sexy Racism: Porn from the Dark Side

Excerpt from Chapter 7

In April, 2007, radio show legend Don Imus finally overstepped the mark with his vile description of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed ho’s.” Following a concerted campaign by the African-American community, CBS fired him amidst a public outcry and a mass exodus of corporate sponsors from his show. But what barely merited a comment, let alone outcry from the media, was a press release issued three weeks later from the porn company Kick Ass Pictures, announcing its intention to donate one dollar from every sale of its new movie, titled Nappy Headed Ho’s, to the Don Imus retirement fund. And this movie is just one among countless that have “hos” in the title, a shorthand way the porn industry commonly refers to black women.

….Black women do not fare well in the porn industry because the “plum” jobs for porn performers – the contract employment with the two major porn-feature studios, Vivid and Wicked – are reserved mainly for white women. These studios with their chic image, sophisticated marketing practices, and guarantee of regular work, afford their contract women an income and level of visibility that makes them the envy of the industry (Jenna Jameson, of course, is held up as the quintessential example of just how far a contract porn star can go). With surgically enhanced bodies, perfectly coiffed hair, and glamorous makeup, these women act as PR agents for the porn industry, showing up regularly on Howard Stern, E! Entertainment, or in the pages of Maxim. As the porn industry increasingly wiggles its way into pop culture, it is no surprise that they use mainly white women as the “acceptable” face of porn; their all-American-girl looks seamlessly mesh with the blonde-blue eyed images that grace the screens, celebrity magazines, and billboards across North America.

….It is no surprise that Asian women are the most popular women of color in porn, given the long standing stereotypes of them as sexually servile Geishas, Lotus blossoms, and China dolls.  Depicted as perfect sex objects, with well honed sex skills, Asian women come to porn with a baggage of stereotypes that make them the idealized women of the porn world. In most sites and movies specializing in Asian women, we see a mind-numbing replay of the image of Asian women as sexually exotic, enticing, and submissive, in both the text and pictures. Using words such as naive, obedient, petite, cute, and innocent, the websites are full of images of Asian women, who, we are told, will do anything to please a man, since this is what they are bred for. It seems, however, from these sites that Asian women are only interested in pleasing white men because Asian men are almost completely absent as sex partners.

…. This mirrors pop culture, where apart from a few sagely old men dispensing wisdom in broken English, Asian men are virtually absent in media… But if we move over to gay porn, we see plenty of Asian men who are portrayed as anything but asexual. Some of these sites have Asian-on-Asian male sex, but when an Asian male is paired with a white man, he is described in much the same way as Asian women – cute, petite, innocent. The word that often appears with Asian men in porn is “twinks,” a term used in gay slang to mean a young looking, attractive, slightly built, gay male. The stereotypes that make Asian men attractive as feminized gay men are the very ones that make them unappealing in straight porn since to be a feminized  man would undo the strict gender demarcation present in all straight porn.

…If Asian men have occupied the feminized end of the masculinity continuum, then black men have been at the hyper-masculinized end of the continuum. Saddled with ugly stereotypes as violent thugs and rapists, black men are often held up as examples of masculinity run amok, the kind that is uncontained and out of control. In fact, this is the very masculinity that is idealized and glorified in porn, since every male in the porn world is hyper-aroused and ready to do what he has to in order to pleasure himself.  It would appear that the long-held images of black men as spoilers of white womanhood were, in fact, tailor-made for porn, so it should be no surprise that the industry has cashed in on these stereotypes in the form of the very successful genre of interracial porn.

…. Adult Video News articles suggest that interracial porn is being produced, marketed, and distributed mainly to a white audience. This seems strange given that a relatively short time ago, the thought of a black man just looking at a white woman was enough to work white men up into a lynch mob frenzy. And now they are buying millions of dollars worth of movies that show, in graphic detail, a black man doing just about everything that can be done to a white woman’s body. But it is actually less strange when we realize that in the world of porn, the more a woman – white or of color – is debased, the better the porn experience for the user.  And what better way to debase a white woman, in the eyes of white men, than to have her penetrated over and over again by that which has been designated sexually perverse, savage and debauched? One interracial porn producer says that his most popular movies are those where “the purity of the sacred white women is compromised … even if the white girl is as dirty and diseased-riddled as humanly possible.” This explains why interracial porn geared towards white men is almost totally dominated by black male porn performers rather than any other ethnic group.

….While this debasing of white women might well intensify the sexual thrill for the white user, it has real world implications for the black community. All forms of oppression, be they gender, race or class based, require a system of beliefs that justify why one group has power over another. This justification process often comes in the form of negative images of the targeted group as somehow less human than the group in power, and it is this less-than-human status that makes them especially deserving of exploitation, abuse, and degradation. In porn, all people are seen as less-than-human because everyone is reduced to an orifice, but for whites, this is not presented as a condition of their whiteness, whiteness is colorless and hence invisible by virtue of its power status. For people of color, however, it is their very color that constantly makes them visible as a racialized group as they carry the marker of “difference” on their skin.

….The pornographic images that meld the racial with the sexual may make the sex racier, but they also serve to breathe new life into old stereotypes that circulate in mainstream society. While these stereotypes are often a product of the past, they are cemented in the present every time a user masturbates to them. This is a powerful way to deliver racist ideology, as it not only makes visible the supposed sexual debauchery of the targeted group, it also sexualizes the racism in ways that render the actual racism invisible in the mind of most consumers and non-consumers alike.

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Pornography’s supporters often claim that critics don’t pay enough attention to the wide range of sexually explicit images available today, especially the material that is said to be empowering for women.

But after a few minutes on the floor of the sex-saturated Adult Entertainment Expo, the pornographers’ annual trade show in Las Vegas, such pro-pornography claims start to seem pretty silly.

The 2008 AEE drove home the reality that while there are indeed differences in the level of overt woman-hating in the pornography for sale in the United States, that industry is at its core about (1) the control of women (2) to facilitate the presentation of women (3) for male consumption (4) in the pursuit of profit. Our interaction with the makers of the latest popular example of “female-centered” pornography provided a first-hand reminder that the industry’s hallowed commitment to free speech and feminist empowerment is more public-relations posturing than principled positions.

The company making one of the biggest splashes on the convention floor this year was Abbywinters.com, an Australian website that bills itself as offering “real, passionate, unscripted” sexual activity by “happy, healthy, regular girls in their normal environments.” The company markets its female masturbation and girl/girl videos as “an endless bounty of gasping sex, stunning beauty and friendly faces” featuring women with “no makeup, no fake boobs, no airbrushing.”

Call it the down-under girl-next-door market niche.

Of course not all pornography consumers are interested in the softer-edged material that Abbywinters.com sells, but it’s popular enough that the company signed a distribution deal with Wicked Pictures, one of the top production companies in the United States, according to an industry insider working for Abbywinters.com. And based on the size of the crowds that the Abbywinters.com booth was drawing, this market niche appears to be holding its own.

At the booth, Abbywinters.com “girls” (in porno-speak, there are no women; females of any age are called girls) were chatting amiably with the fans (even playing chess with some of them, to show that the girls are smart as well as sexy) and being openly affectionate with each other. Instead of the caricatured porn star look (impossibly high heels, over-the-top makeup, and surgically enhanced bodies), these women really did look like ordinary people.

In interviews with several of them, a familiar story of empowerment emerged -- we are comfortable with our bodies, confident in our sexuality, proud to be taking control of how we are represented, etc. We responded with questions that reflected our feminist critique of pornography, which sparked interesting responses regarding their feelings about their work and our assessment of the industry. We asked the women to explain how the interests of women (or men, for that matter) were advanced by selling images mostly used by men as a masturbation facilitator. How did that improve the lot of women in the world? Each of the conversations ended with an agree-to-disagree parting, and we went off to other parts of the convention.

The next day, when Jensen was back on the convention floor and had just interviewed another female performer at the Abbywinters.com booth, he was taken aside by the website’s photographer (who wouldn’t give her name) and told that because the conversations of the previous day had upset the women by bringing up a feminist critique, they preferred that we stop talking to the women. “These are smart women who’ve made a decision to perform, and we’d like you to respect that,” she said. Jensen responded that it was precisely because we respected these women and viewed them as intelligent adults capable of making choices that we had engaged them in a serious, respectful way during our interviews. What could be wrong with that?

The photographer responded that it was just this kind of “intellectual sparring” that they wanted to avoid. Why are questions that reflect a critical viewpoint a threat, Jensen asked? Was it because this convention was about making money, not talking about bigger issues about power, especially with a feminist analysis behind the questions? The photographer did not argue, acknowledging that the main market for the website and films was men who used the images for “wanking.” But she was firm in her position, and we agreed to not approach any of the Abbywinters.com women/girls for additional interviews.

Free speech, it appears, is all well and good when it protects the profits of pornographers, but not when it includes a challenge to the claims pornographers make.

Of course on private property, such as the convention center, legal guarantees of free speech don’t apply; we understood that we had to follow the rules of the people running the show. But the rules those people imposed reveals much about the real agenda, as did the behavior of the men watching. And, in the end, it is really about what the men watching want.

A few hours after we were banned from interviewing the girls it was show time at the Abbywinters.com booth, with four female couples kissing and caressing for the overwhelmingly male audience. In that moment the connection between these Australian women and the rest of the AEE convention was clear. Just as at the other companies on the floor, men with all varieties of cameras and cell phones ringed the booth, vying for the best angles to record images of women being sexual. The Abbywinters.com women looked different from the porn-star caricature, but their girl/girl action (the industry’s term for lesbian sex presented for a male audience) didn’t look much different from the industry norm, and the men who were watching behaved the same as other fans on the convention floor.

That moment provides an important reminder: Pornography, at its core, is a market transaction in which women’s bodies and sexuality are offered to male consumers in the interests of maximizing profit. Market niches vary, but the bottom line does not. In the end, it’s about attracting the most “wankers” possible. Some of those men who wank to these images like porn-star caricatures. Some like the girl next door.

A man watching the Abbywinters.com sex display said that he loved the site for a simple reason: “No fake tits and more pubic hair.” A man who had just gotten a signed photo from a performer at the Hustler booth said he loved porn women for a simple reason: “They are like a fucking sculpture.” The slightly different preferences were trivial; more important was the fact that both men had bags full of pictures and DVDs that would mostly likely be wanking material that evening.

The Abbywinters.com booth, with its more female-friendly sexual activity, existed alongside the booths of other pornographers selling an overtly woman-hating sex, and it’s easy to tell the difference. Films that present ordinary women kissing are different from films that offer exaggerated porn stars being penetrated by three men at once. Films of women holding each other gently after sex are different from films of men ejaculating on a woman’s face. We have no doubt that the women performing for Abbywinters.com videos work under better conditions than much of the rest of the industry. But in the end, pornography is in the business of presenting women’s bodies to men for masturbation.

The many different women who engage in sex in front of a camera make that choice to be used in pornography under a wide range of psychological, social and economic conditions. The choices women make to reduce themselves to sexual objects for men’s masturbation are complex, and we should be cautious about generalizations and judgments.

The men who make up the vast majority of the industry’s customers also make choices, about which kind of objectified women are most sexually stimulating to them. Such choices that men make are considerably simpler, and generalizations are easier to make. Political judgments also are not only possible but necessary -- if we are to resist male supremacy, reject the subordination of women in all its forms, and replace that corrosive conception of gender and sex with a vision of human integrity and community that can be the basis for a just and sustainable society.

Gail Dines, a sociology professor at Wheelock College in Boston, is co-editor of Gender, Race and Class in Media. Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Dines and Jensen, with Rebecca Whisnant, have produced a PowerPoint slide show on pornography.

Weekend Edition
March 15 / 16, 2008

In the American Media, It's All About the John

Prostitution and Male Power

By GAIL DINES

Prostitution is hot news on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, Eliot Spitzer is being treated by the media as a fallen hero, a tragic figure brought down by recklessness. Some are even acting like a bunch of frat boys, snickering at a pal who got caught with his pants down. The British press, on the other hand, is more serious and sedate; and it's focused on the women. It took five dead women to get the British media to recognize that prostitution is not all fun and games for those who sell sex for money. Serial killer Steve Wright was convicted last month for murdering five women working as prostitutes in Ipswich, England, and his trial revealed just how deadly prostitution can be. The prosecution said Wright "systematically selected and murdered" all five women over a six-and-a-half-week period, and the press reports that he left two of the bodies in a cruciform position with arms outstretched.

In the American coverage of Spitzer, it's all about the "john": Spitzer's meteoric rise to fame and power, his national political ambitions, his political blunders, and now the "tragedy" of his disgrace. The women he paid for sex have been treated as hardly worth a mention. The dangers and violence of prostitution have been ignored. Even if the women used by Spitzer were well paid, they never had a shot at state attorney general or governor. We have not heard about the tragedy for most women who enter prostitution because of poverty, childhood sexual abuse, a drug habit, or a pimp-boyfriend, and live in fear that their next john could turn out to be another Steve Wright. Even if the john is not an actual murderer, there is a high risk of violence and rape. In a study of 130 prostitutes, Melissa Farley and Howard Barkan, found that 82% had been physically assaulted; 83% had been threatened with a weapon; and 68% had been raped while working as prostitutes.

As a way to avoid the reality of prostitution, the American media keep talking about a "high-priced" prostitution ring, as if the up-market end of the industry has nothing to do with the more "low-class" street prostitution. The media images thrown at us depict these high-end "escorts" as hot, young attractive model-lookalikes who stash their big bucks away and end up living a life of luxury. Who, after all, can forget Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, looking glamorous as she is being carried away into the sunset by her handsome john, in the form of Richard Gere? For many of these women, life may not be as dangerous on a daily level, but their bodies are still commodities to be bought and sold by men who see them as disposable sex objects to be used for male entertainment.

Prostitution is at its very core, an absolute expression of male power and women's lack of choices, and no amount of up-market-chic can change that. But in place of an analysis that situates prostitution within the context of sexual and economic inequality, the media give us (mostly male) talking heads. For these pundits, Spitzer was caught making a mistake and now he has to pay for it. We all know that "power corrupts", but there has been no discussion of the particular way in which men with political power abuse their position in a sexual way. Neither has there been any discussion of what it means for a political leader, who holds very real power over our lives, to treat women as "pussy", to be bought, shipped, and traded like cattle. Women pay the price for men like Spitzer, and it's no surprise that women everywhere make up the majority of the poor, the hungry and the over-worked. As long as men with a john mentality get elected to office, there is no change in sight.

Gail Dines, a sociology professor at Wheelock College in Boston.

Gail Dines teaches sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. She is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture. She spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty on her new book PornLand: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.” First published on April 15, 2010

Could you tell us what your new book ‘Pornland’ is about? What do you hope to convey?

Pornland is about how porn and the porn culture shape our ideas about sexuality, relationships, masculinity, femininity and intimacy. Thanks mainly to the internet, the porn industry has exploded over the last decade, with over 13,000 films a year released to the market. With this explosion has come an increasing pornification of our society, where the images, ideologies and messages of porn filter down into pop culture. If you just turn on the television, flick through a magazine or look at billboards, you will see that porn has now become a blueprint for how the media represents women’s bodies. Whether it be Britney Spears writhing around almost naked in a music video, or Miley Cyrus draped over a stripper’s pole, the images that bombard us daily look much like soft-core porn did a few decades ago. Today there is almost no soft-core porn on the internet, because most of it has migrated into pop culture. What we are left with is a porn industry that is now so hardcore that even some of the big-name porn producers and directors are amazed at how far they can go.

I travel the country giving lectures on the harms of porn, and I am still surprised as just how few women and older men really know what today’s porn looks like. For this reason Pornland delves into the content of contemporary porn by walking the reader through the most popular websites. Gone are the days of women posing seductively as they coyly smile into the camera. Instead, we enter a world of distended anuses, red raw vaginas, violent oral sex where the woman ends up gagging, and gallons of semen often smeared over the women’s faces and bodies. As all this is happening to her, she is being called a filthy cunt, whore, cumdumpster, slut etc. In porn the man “makes hate” to the women’s bodies because all the emotions and feelings we associate with love – joy, kindness, empathy, happiness – are missing and in their place we see contempt, loathing, disgust and anger.

As the porn industry becomes more cruel and violent, fans are becoming desensitized and are looking for more hard core content. According to porn director Mitchell Spinelli, fans are becoming “more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff.” The problem for the porn industry is that there are only so many ways you can show a woman being anally, vaginally and orally penetrated, and there is little left to do to the woman apart from killing her. For this reason, the industry is always on the lookout for new niche markets and Pornland looks at two of the most popular: Interracial Porn and Teen Porn.  Both niches aim to spice up the porn by promising to show sex that can “split”, “rip”, and “tear” women’s orifices. For interracial sex the spice for the user is watching a black man “defile” a white woman, while for teen porn it is the potential harm that an adult male’s penis can do to an immature vagina and anus.

The question I pose in Pornland is, what does it mean to grow up in a society where the average age of first viewing porn is 11 for boys, and where girls are being inundated with images of themselves as wannabe porn stars? How does a boy develop his sexual identity when porn is often his first introduction into sex? What does it mean for a girl or young woman to see herself as a desired object rather than a desiring subject? What do heterosexual relationships look like when sexual identity is constructed within this porn culture? These are not questions that can be answered by experiments, but rather belong more in the field of critical cultural studies, which takes as its starting point that we are cultural beings who develop our taken-for-granted ideas about the world out of the dominant (that is, hegemonic) ideologies that swirl around the culture.  To think that men and women can walk away from the images they consume makes no sense in light of what we know about how images shape our sense of reality.

The book does not rehash the old “porn wars” arguments but instead takes a fresh look at how we can understand the porn industry as both a capitalist enterprise and as a producer of ideology that legitimizes gender inequality. It gets under the skin, so to speak, of the porn industry to reveal the cruel and dark underbelly that is so often glossed over in pop culture.

It’s often stated that there are no definite links between pornography use and violence. What is your view on the matter?

As a sociologist who studies media, I do not think that it is useful to focus on the “Does porn cause violence?” question, because it reduces the effects of porn to violence. A more nuanced analysis asks us to consider the ways in which porn ideologies shape our gender and sexual identities. By way of example, let’s look at how media scholars understand the effects of racist images. Few would ask whether racist images directly cause violence against people of color. Rather, the question would be, how do such images legitimize, condone and cement racist ideologies that whites internalize by virtue of living in a racist society? Such images would most likely not turn an average white person into a card carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, but they would help to consolidate the way they think about race, whiteness and equality.

When applying this to porn, I doubt that the average man will be driven to rape a woman just because he viewed porn, but that does not mean that the images have no effect. Men are already socialized by sexist ideologies before they look at porn, but nothing delivers such ideology as crisply, eloquently or as succinctly as porn. Porn doesn’t mess around; it tells men that women are whores who exist to be sexually used by men, that they are receptacles for penises rather than full human beings. In porn, women don’t need health care, safe housing, good jobs or free childcare; rather they need to be fucked in the most debased way that the pornographers can think of. The problem here, of course, is that women somehow have to convince porn users – those who are our partners, our fathers, brothers, employers and lawmakers – that what they are seeing in porn is a lie about women. What we really need to live a full life with dignity and human rights is real equality. This is a problem that all oppressed people have – how to convince your oppressor that you deserve equality – but no other group has their oppressor masturbating to images of them being dehumanized. Porn delivers to men sexist ideology in a way that is incredibly pleasurable, and it is this pleasure that masks the real harm that porn does to the economic, legal and cultural status of women.

Why do you think so many women are at best indifferent to porn and the sexual exploitation industries and in some cases supportive of those industries?

This is a question that many of us in the anti-porn movement are preoccupied with. My experiences tell me that a good percentage of women have an outdated view of what porn is. They think of a Playboy centerfold from twenty years ago rather than the actual brutality that you see on sites such as Altered Assholes, Gag Factor, Anal Suffering, Fuck the Babysitter, First Time With Daddy, Ghetto Gaggers, and so on. After my lecture the majority of women are stunned because they had no idea how violent porn had become. Once they know, they feel very differently towards the industry. Their indifference gives way to both sadness and anger, and as an activist my goal is to harness that anger as a force for social change.

Heterosexual women, especially young women, who condemn the porn industry are in a very difficult position because they will most likely date and marry men who are porn users. Many of the women I have spoken to who have asked their partners to stop have eventually had to leave them. For some women, it feels better to avoid the topic altogether and hope that his porn use does not spill over into their relationship. For those women who decide not to date men who use porn, they have a very small pool to pick from. Few people want to think that they will live their lives alone so they make compromises. If, however ,we are ever going to have real social change, then women need to stop compromising and start organizing.

Another reason women tend to be indifferent is the way porn is represented in media. One of the results of living in a pornified society is the glamorization of porn in pop culture. Rather than showing it as a sleazy business that uses women’s bodies as bait, porn is represented as chic and edgy, and the few women who make it to the top – especially Jenna Jameson and Sasha Gray – are showcased as examples of just how great porn is for women. What’s missing, of course, are the stories of untold thousands of women who are spat out by the industry and end up unemployed or working as prostitutes. To get some insight into just how harsh the industry is for women, whom better to quote than Jenna Jameson herself:

Most girls get their first experience in gonzo films—in which they’re taken to a crappy studio apartment in Mission Hills and penetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch.  And these girls . . . go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience.  But, unfortunately, they can’t take that experience back, so they live the rest of their days in fear that their relatives, their co-workers, or their children will find out, which they inevitably do
(Jameson, Jenna. 2004 How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.  NY: Harper Entertainment, p. 132)

The women who end up in the porn industry are usually working class and in a recession, porn, as it is represented in the media, is seen as a way to build a career. Many of the women who write about porn being empowering have real choices based on their class and race privileges, and hence can feel free to support an industry in which they will never have to work.

For many women, there is a fear that being seen as anti-porn will mark them as prudish, which amounts to a social death in a porn culture. To question in any way the politics of heterosexual sexuality is to be misperceived as an anti-sex, man-hating feminist who screams rape every time a man and woman have sex. This is not a particularly appealing label for young women eager to meet a potential partner. Remember also that these women have been bombarded with pro-porn messages from women’s media and if they have heard of anti-porn feminists, it is most likely in a way that ridicules and trivializes our arguments.

I have met a number of young women who do eagerly support porn as a form of female empowerment. Since porn is sold as edgy, chic and rebellious, support for the industry provides an identity that appears “hot.” This is attractive to men on the lookout for porn sex, and to be desired is, for women, to feel empowered. Getting men’s attention if we are giving a speech or asking them to do the dishes is not easy, but put on a porn star wannabe outfit and suddenly you become the most compelling woman in the world. That is, of course, until he is done with you and onto the next, since in a porn culture women are interchangeable, as long as they meet the standards of “hotness.”

Those who critique porn are often accused of being anti-free speech. What is your take on this debate?

I am not going to spend much time on this because it’s what my colleague Robert Jensen calls a dodge, a way to close down any serious discussion on porn. My book does not address this issue as it is specifically concerned with the effects of porn and the porn culture on women and men. As a left-winger I see free speech as impossible under capitalism since corporations own much of the media and they use it to disseminate ideologies that legitimize capitalism and unequal power relations. The pornographers are capitalists and they control much of the speech on sexuality. Anti-porn feminists are repeatedly censored from mainstream media and silenced by the capitalist juggernaut that is the porn industry.

Advocates of porn point to increasing consumption of pornography by women. What do you make of women’s use of porn?

I really question how much porn is actually being consumed by women. When I give talks to college students the women are usually shocked by what they are seeing. Few women I have met really know what is in gonzo porn so if women are using porn it certainly isn’t the porn that men use. My sense is that the porn women are using is more the feature type that has a (limited) storyline and is shot in a more up-market location than the usual gonzo. I have also heard that women tend to prefer woman-on-woman porn which makes sense since in many cases it is less cruel.

But before we try to answer this question, we need a reality check. An article in Adult Video News says that women make up only 15% of internet porn users. The author, Jack Morrison, makes the obvious claim that the products still appeal to mainly male users, and to attract women adult webmasters should create sites that involve interaction and education. According to Morrison:

Such sites would allow women to obtain advice, perhaps during teleconferences with experts, have elements of cybersex, and should play into women’s relationship fantasies. (i.e., a story of how a woman got a rich and powerful boyfriend because she knew how to give head better than any other woman - with instructions as to how she did it.) Such sites would be low on visual content, except as it serves the need for interaction and education. The site would have live interviews (with audience questions) with “hot” guys who tell what they like sexually. In other words, take the content of Cosmopolitan and Glamour, make it X-rated (not XXX), and provide for massive amounts of interaction.

Morrison assumes that women want rich and powerful boyfriends as a way to climb the social ladder and the way to get them is to give great oral sex. How sexist and reactionary is that? Porn is no friend of women and I strongly encourage women not to financially support an industry that exploits and degrades us for the sexual pleasure of men.

You point to the use of racial difference to heighten sexual excitement. How does the industry behave on the question of race?

To really appreciate how racist porn is let us take as an example the racist comments made by Don Imus when he described the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy headed ho’s.” Following a concerted campaign by the African-American community, CBS fired him amidst a public outcry and a mass exodus of corporate sponsors from his show. But what barely merited a comment was a press release issued three weeks later from the porn company Kick Ass Pictures, announcing its intention to donate one dollar from every sale of its new movie, titledNappy Headed Ho’s, to the Don Imus retirement fund.

So the obvious question is why does the porn industry get away with a level of racism that would simply not be tolerated in any other media form? One answer to this is that porn, by sexualizing racism, renders it invisible. Instead of being seen for the racism it is, it is instead eroticized and classed as hot sex made hotter by the presence of a black male body that has historically been coded as deviant, animalistic and predatory. As Cornel West once said, one of the major stereotypes of blacks is that they have “dirty, disgusting, and funky sex.” What could be better than that for the pornographers?

Progressives have been amazingly quiet on the issue of racism in porn, and part of the reason, I suspect, is that they don’t want to get linked with the right wing groups that protest porn. But being silent on this issue ignores the fact that these images, like all racist images, impact on the way we construct our notions of reality, and the more white men use the images, the more they cement past racist images in the present. If this was acknowledged, then maybe we would also have to acknowledge that watching a woman being choked as she is called a filthy whore could affect the way we see women in the real world.

As you have noted dislike of porn is frequently conflated with a prudish dislike of sexual expression in general - Does “anti-porn” = “anti-sex”?

To appreciate just how bizarre it is to collapse a critique of pornography into a critique of sex, think for a minute if I were criticizing McDonalds for its exploitive labor practices, its destruction of the environment, and its impact on our diet and health. Would anyone accuse me of being anti-eating or anti-food?  I suspect that most readers would separate the industry (McDonald’s) and the industrial product (hamburgers) from the act of eating and would understand that the critique was focused on the large-scale impact of the fast food industry and not the human need, experience, and joy of eating. The same goes for porn; what I am critiquing is not the human experience of sex or sexuality but the industrialization of sex. Sex in porn is not so much sex as a particular kind of representation of sex, formulaic, generic and plasticized. It is not a slice of reality. The pornographers construct sex in ways that debase and dehumanize women, and it is this debasement and dehumanization that makes porn sex “hot.” As a feminist, I am against anything that subordinates women.

All my adult life I have been fighting corporate power and I have had a community of people on the left. But once I turned my attention to the porn industry, the left became as hostile as the right. In my book I ask why is that people on the left – people who understand corporate power – suddenly forget that the pornographers are capitalists and see them instead as guardians of our sexual freedom? Since when did capitalists ever care about our freedoms? Pornography is like all industries, predatory and out to make a profit by any means possible. They commodify real human needs and wants as a way to sell products, and until we resist, the pornographers will continue to hijack our sexuality.

Gail can be contacted at gdines@wheelock.edu. Stop Porn Culture will be holding a conference in June 2010 in Boston. For more details please go to: http://stoppornculture.org/