Excuse sexual assault ever more openly, present women who oppose pornography as befuddled if well-intentioned moralists, attack serious approaches to the problem as evil censorship and you too may receive a Nobel prize for literature.
Tracking the escalation in sexual explicitness and sexual violence in mainstream cinema is child’s play. More to the point, why was Sharon Stone’s vaginal flash in Basic Instinct so electrifying, such a sensation? Far more than that was available in any softcore pornography film or magazine right down the street. It was context: a mainstream actor, doing it here, in a mainstream film in a family cinema. Breaking the frame on sex gives a frisson of power, it seems, for which you first have to believe that the frame is there. Why was it shocking when Janet Jackson’s breast popped out in a dance-attack on her in the Superbowl halftime show? Playboy has scores monthly; page three, at least 2 a day. But this was a mainstream singer, here, in family time during one of masculinity’s public ritual events. Audiences are thrilled, scandalised, titillated. Barriers broken. Pundits juiced. Territory gained. Freedom reigns.
Who pays? Stone was told when she shot that scene that the footage would not be used (hence its grainy first-take outtake quality); she reportedly suffered considerably when it was. Jackson more or less apologised for the ‘wardrobe malfunction’. However, they felt they had to be good sports for the sake of their careers, a pressure that continues. Pornographic portrayals of feminist anti-pornography writer, Andrea Dworkin, lowered the floor on how she was seen and treated for life.
In pornography, women are publicly construed as members of an inferior sex-based group and constructed, some individually, before they are ever known personally. Sexual arousal, excitement and satisfaction are harnessed to that portrayal, reinforcing it, naturalising it, making it unquestionable and irrefutable. So, too, for all the nameless women used in pornography – society’s ‘whores’. Pornography is a mass instrument for creating how women in general, specific women and groups of women in particular, are seen, treated and received. It constructs their status as unequal and their reputation as inferior. Few weep for a ‘whore’s’ reputation.
Meanwhile, progressive people, whatever they really think, defend pornography’s right to exist and other people’s right to use it, in tones pious and terms high-minded. Esoteric debates about aesthetics and causation take place amid periodic convulsions of moral fervour, producing occasional convictions for obscenity or restrictions on indecency. The industry shapes itself to law, and, more crucially, law to it. Most fundamentally, pornography changes culture to protect its existence and extend its reach, so finally it will be true that there is no distinction between pornography and anything else. The best camouflage of all is being able to lie around in plain sight.
People who do not want to be accosted by pornography visually are expected to avert their eyes. Having fewer and fewer places to avert their eyes to, with fewer means of escape in public and none in private, women specifically – who are most endangered by these materials and often know it – are segregated, painted into ever smaller corners. The female version of the male compartmentalisation myth is, ‘pornography has nothing to do with me’. Pornography is thus at once increasingly everywhere and yet protected from direct scrutiny and effective abolition by seeming not to be there at all.
In 1983, Andrea Dworkin and I proposed a civil law that would empower anyone who could prove they are hurt through pornography to sue the pornographers for human rights violations. We defined pornography as what it is – graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and words that also includes specified presentations – and defined causes of action for coercion, force, assault and trafficking. We documented its effects and predicted its impact if nothing was done. Our law was found unconstitutional in the USA in a ruling that held that pornography had to be protected as ‘speech’ because it is so effective in doing the harm that the opinion conceded it does. Since then, although the law could have been re-passed and this blatantly wrong and arguably illegal ruling challenged, pornography has not only exploded, it has changed the world around us. Even the determinedly blinkered cannot evade noticing. It is colonising the globe.
The pornography industry is a lot bigger, more powerful, more legitimate, more in everyone’s face today than it was a quarter of a century ago. To the degree that it cannot exist without doing real damage, it could still be stopped in its tracks anywhere by this law. Sexual objectification and violation does not happen all by itself. Real social institutions drive it. Pornography does, powerfully, in capitalist mass-mediated cultures.
If nothing is done, the results will keep getting worse. We told you so.
Maggie Hamilton
(Australia)
Groomed to Consume Porn: How Sexualised Marketing Targets Children
The pornification of our children and teenagers is a dark tale of greed, exploitation, and corporate muscle, orchestrated by those whose sole focus is on how much money they can make from our kids. Little or no thought is given to the devastating impact this trend has on them.
The level of exposure of children to porn, and the young age at which many are viewing this material – accidentally or otherwise – is cause for grave concern. Symantec’s 2009 study of children online revealed the word ‘porn’ ranked as the fourth most popular search word for children aged 7 and younger, and was in the top 5 words googled by children under 18 (Campbell, 2010).
The explosion of new technologies gives children access to the best and worst of online content. Aside from home computers, pornographic content is now accessible to kids on their mobile phones. They may view porn at their friends’ place or at less than vigilant Internet cafes. The advent of wireless technologies also means that as long as they can get a connection, children can download porn on buses or trains, in parks, out with friends, or wherever they choose. The presence of porn in our children’s lives has happened in a few short years, and is radically changing childhood and teenage life. When we fail to come to terms with this changing landscape, we leave children vulnerable in ways never-before-experienced.
Less obvious, but of equal concern, is the direct link between the increasing sexualisation of girls and boys, and their interest in and exposure to porn. The fallout from the countless sexual images seen in ads, on TV screens, posters and billboards, in MTV clips, movies, video games and sitcoms, on clothing and accessories, and on the Internet, is real and impacting. This constant stream of hypersexualised imagery and sexual expression that boys and girls are subjected to daily lowers their inhibitions, discourages empathy towards others, and reshapes their sexual aspirations and expression often in risky, violent or unhelpful ways.
Whether or not the use of sexual images and messages to market products is intended to prepare children for the consumption of porn, this is one of the most concerning outcomes. When the intense sexualised marketing to children is put under the microscope, we see that the methods corporations use to reach children are the very same techniques employed by sexual predators to home in on unsuspecting kids, as they meticulously groom them for their own ends. Like the sexual predator, corporations market their products to young people by pretending to be their friend. Using the same techniques as a predator, they work hard at cultivating a one-on-one relationship with our children, offering gifts and incentives, flattering them, talking in their language, and assuring kids that they understand. Like the sexual predator, corporations deliberately use sexualised content in their products and/or advertising, because they know how irresistible sexualised material can be. And, like the sexual predator, corporations actively ramp up the sexualised images and products they use, to lower kids’ inhibitions around sex, to get them to do what they want.