One of the key functions of propaganda is the naturalizing of hierarchy and authority in the minds of people at all places in the hierarchy. For elites at the top of the hierarchy, propaganda reinforces a sense of natural superiority and justifies a sense of entitlement. For those in the middle, propaganda promotes identification with the goals of elites above and discourages solidarity with oppressed people below. And propaganda also tries to persuade those on the bottom of the hierarchies that they deserve their fate, which can create a sense of futility about the prospects for change.
The Ideology of Pornography
Pornography is one of the dominant sexual-exploitation industries in the contemporary world, along with prostitution and stripping. These are the primary ways in which objectified female bodies are presented to men for sexual pleasure, typically for profit. The vast majority of people used in these industries are girls and women.
While women in prostitution and stripping tell stories in the course of their interactions with men, it is in pornography – the mass-mediated sexual-exploitation industry – that we see the ideology of sexual exploitation most fully developed. My analysis is that pornography (used to describe the genre of sexually explicit mass media) is routinely pornographic (used in a feminist sense, to describe the naturalizing of the social subordination of women).
Any discussion of the ideology of pornography should start with a sketch of the industry. The 2 main categories in today’s pornographic movie industry (whatever its form or outlet) are ‘features’ and ‘wall-to-wall/gonzo’. Features most resemble a Hollywood movie, with plot and characters. Wall-to-wall movies are all-sex productions with no pretense of plot or dialogue. Many of these movies are shot gonzo style, in which performers acknowledge the camera and often speak directly to the audience. In addition, there are specialty titles – movies that feature sadomasochism and bondage, fetish material, transsexuals – that fill niche markets. Heterosexual material dominates the pornography industry, with a thriving gay male pornography market and a smaller lesbian pornography market (much of it for a heterosexual male audience).
The majority of hardcore movies include oral, vaginal, and anal sex, almost always ending with ejaculation on the woman. A 1993 study of pornographic heterosexual videotapes (Brosius et al., 1993) found that the tapes typically presented a world in which women were younger, more sexually active, and more expressive than men; women were frequently depicted in subordinate positions (e.g. kneeling down in front of a partner); and sexual contact was usually between strangers. A 2007 content analysis of 50 best-selling adult videos (Wosnitzer and Bridges, 2007) revealed a similar pattern of inequality and violence. Nearly half of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression (for example, name calling or verbal threats), while over 88% showed physical aggression (including hair pulling, open-hand slapping or spanking, choking, and whipping). Seventy percent of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men and 87% of acts were committed against women. Fewer than 5% of the aggressive acts provoked a negative response from the target, such as requests to stop. This pornographic ‘reality’ was further highlighted by the relative infrequency of more positive behaviors (verbal compliments, embracing, kissing, or laughter), portrayed in fewer than 10% of the scenes.
As pornography depicting conventional sexual acts has become commonplace, gonzo producers have pushed the limits of social norms and women’s bodies with painful and body-punishing pornsex (Dines, 2010). Nearly every scene ends with the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’ – male ejaculation into a woman’s mouth or on her face or body. As one pornography director put it, “it’s like a dog marking its territory” (Sun and Picker, 2008). Another veteran pornographic director and actor put it more bluntly: “I’d like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women… [but] the most violent we can get is the cum shot in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have” (Stoller and Levine, 1993, p. 22).
Combining such quantitative studies with qualitative analyses using more interpretive methods (Dworkin, 1979; Jensen, 2007), the main propagandist messages of pornographic films can be summarized as:
1. All women always want sex from men;
2. Women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and
3. Any woman who does not at first realize this, can be persuaded by force.
Such force is rarely necessary, however, for most of the women in pornography are the ‘nymphomaniacs’ of men’s fantasies. Women are the sexual objects, whose job it is to fulfill male desire.
Summarizing insights from the feminist critique of pornography, we can describe the ideology of pornography, and hence its propagandist use, as:
1. We all must be sexual all the time.
Sex must be hot.
Hot sex requires inequality
and
2. Men are naturally dominant.
Women are naturally submissive,
therefore
3. While specific sexual scenes in pornography are ‘fantasy’, pornography portrays men and women in their natural roles free from unnatural constraints imposed by repressive social norms,
and all this can be reduced to one conclusion:
4. Women are whores.
No matter what a woman’s role or status, all women are for sex at the discretion of men. Men’s desires not only define women’s value to men, but women’s fulfilling of that male desire defines their essence. Women not only owe it to men to service them sexually, women owe it to themselves. Women can find their authentic selves only by acknowledging – indeed by embracing – this status as whores.
In the pornographic world, women are allowed to fill a variety of professional and social roles, as long as they recognize that they are made women not by pursuing the variety of goals that come with those roles, but by not allowing those roles to impede their core function as whores, as beings who exist primarily to provide sexual pleasure to men.
Complimentary Ideologies of Racism and Industrial Capitalism
Contemporary pornography is not only sexist but also the most openly racist mass-media genre in contemporary society. In mainstream movies and television, the most blatant and ugly forms of racism have disappeared, although subtler patterns of stereotyping continue. Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned racism – stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive black male stud, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha.
The pornography industry uses the term ‘inter-racial’ for the category of overtly racist material. This category contains most every possible combination of racial groups, but the dominant mode of interracial pornography is black men and white women (Dines, 2010, chapter 7). If the sexual charge of pornography is in the sexual degradation of women, for some consumers that sexual charge can be heightened by images of white women submitting to the sexual demands of the demonized black man. The degradation is intensified by the racism: the white male consumer can go ‘slumming’ and experience the sexual pleasure that is rooted in the patriarchal and white-supremacist ideology.