I spoke to my boyfriend about it and he explained that while he thought we had a great sex life (usually 5-7times a week) he had a pretty high sex-drive and still wants it more but doesnt want to pressure me when im not in the mood/busy/whatever so uses porn to masterbate with instead…So while still dont really like it, i understand that my sex drive is not on par with his and i guess unless im willing to do it whenever he gets the urge (which he says he would always prefer to watchn porn) then i cant really object to him watchn porn.[14]
Many women express their dissatisfaction with damaged relationships that are blighted by the pornography use of their partners.[15] Michael Flood summarises the research on this aspect:
In a US study, one quarter of women saw their partner’s pornography use as a kind of affair, one-third felt that it had had negative effects on their sexual lives and relationships, and over one-third agreed that they felt less attractive and desirable and more like a sexual object. Other studies find that partners of adult pornography users report decreased sexual intimacy, lowered esteem and demands that they participate in activities they find objectionable (2010, p. 172).
Women as sex robots: artificial and living dolls
Pornography is producing a more de-personalised, alienated and transactional sexuality. Sex doesn’t even have to involve an actual person. The film Hardcore Porn Profits shows a man who develops an artificial vagina for men to feel and put their hands into while watching a woman performing sex acts.[16] “Always turned on and ready to talk and play”, Roxxxy is “a life-size robotic girlfriend,” complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin. The doll’s creator, Douglas Hines, says: “She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean.”[17] Roxxxy is programmed to say “I love it in the arse!”[18] This bizarre trend is connected to a broader pornographic cultural logic that views women as things, objects, holes, as ‘living dolls’.
Of course our main concern is with flesh-and-blood women providing the raw material for the pornography industry. The pro-pornography assumption that the production of pornography does not harm women, or that it is merely their ‘choice’ if they are harmed, is as callous as the indifference to the rapid rise of women’s sexual degradation within new pornography cultures.
The lived experience of pornography actors is the human face of research showing that physical and verbal aggression is “the norm rather than the exception in popular pornographic film” as noted by Ana J. Bridges (2010, p. 46). Bridges completed a content analysis of best-selling and best-renting pornographic videos available by catalogue in the USA, and found that
[p]hysical aggression occurred in 88 per cent of scenes… Across all acts of aggression – both physical and verbal – 94 per cent were directed towards women… When aggressed against, 95 per cent of targets responded with either expressions of pleasure (encouragement, sexual moans, and so forth) or neutrally (e.g. no change in facial expression or interruption of actions) (Bridges 2010, p. 46; see also Sun, this volume).
An insight into the abuse and violence visited on porn performers is graphically depicted in the photo documentary account ‘They shoot porn stars don’t they?’ by Susannah Breslin (2009). She describes how a woman, pulled into the porn industry to support her children, is subjected to verbal abuse and torture:
He threatens to beat her, threatens to torture her, pulls up her shirt, pulls up her skirt, hits her breasts, hits her thighs, throttles her by the neck with both hands, humiliates her, degrades her, makes her cry, chokes her until she is gasping for air. He gets her to tell the camera she is 27 years old and the only reason she’s here doing this particular job on this particularly day in this particular hotel room in the Valley is for the money, and the fact of the matter is she has two young children to support, of whom the man asks rhetorically, and seemingly for the sole purpose of screwing with her head, ‘They’re going to grow up to be proud of you, right?’
The woman is becoming unmoored. He orders her on her hands and knees, and begins beating her with a leather strap that cracks! across the bared skin of her backside every time he hits her, leaving angry pink welts, until, finally, in a futile attempt to protect herself, the woman reaches her arm around herself, her hand turned upwards, her palm facing outwards, and the man stops… ‘To steal a Quentin Tarantino line,’ he muses, mockingly, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’
We give space in this book to the experience of girls and women used to make pornography and how their suffering doesn’t end because their images are circulated for eternity (see Pringle, and Amy’s Victim Impact Statement, this volume). As Amy, whose sexual abuse is known as the ‘Misty Series’ of child pornography images, writes: “I did not choose to be there, but now I am there forever in pictures that people are using to do sick things.”
An industry unregulated and uncontrolled
Compounding the abuse so often involved in the making of pornography is a lack of regulation of the industry in all its forms. The shelves of corner stores and petrol stations are stacked with pornography promoting sex with ‘live young girls’, rape and incest, while pornography distributors continually flout Australia’s classification laws (see Tankard Reist, 2008). Abigail Bray has described an Internet site called Passed Out Pussy which incites crimes of violence against women and girls, and endorses rape, torture and hatred upon the bodies of young women (Bray, 2009). Other sites revel in the torture and enslavement of women.
For example, Ken Franzblau has written about photos on the ‘Slavefarm’ site: “These are pictures of naked women bound, gagged, chained, in a stock, and drinking from a dog’s dish. If there is a distinction between pornography and torture, it’s not detectable from these pictures” (2007, p. 262). There are sections on the site for auctions and rentals where you can sell, rent and purchase women, as ‘Female Slaves for Sale’. These representations of women and the hatred expressed in them are reminiscent of propaganda for the 19th century slave trade (see Hawthorne, this volume).
However, against this background, attempts to bring Internet content into line with existing classification laws and the treatment of illegal material in Australia have met with virulent objection by vested interests. Requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter out a blacklist of URLs containing extreme and violent pornography has been proposed by the current (Labor) Government. This material can be legally viewed in no other medium. As Australian author and Professor of Public Ethics, Clive Hamilton, has argued:
We live in a democracy where citizens ask their governments to impose restrictions on certain types of content that are regarded as harmful to individuals or to the community more broadly. We have a censorship system governing films, television and magazines, defined by law, enforced by government bodies and with widespread community support. There is nothing special about the Internet that puts it beyond community standards (Hamilton, 2009).
14
14 Anonymous (7 July, 2010), http://www.mamamia.com.au/weblog/2010/07/naomi-wolf-porn-feminism-sex.html.
15
15 See also the personal account by Caroline, this volume; and Whisnant (2010); Rothbart (2001); Cochrane (29 October, 2010). See more broadly Jensen (2007).
17
17 ‘Sexbot’s here, and what a doll she is’ (11 January, 2010), http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,1,26574881-5006301,00.html.