Research on effects on consumers is critical to our understanding of how society is affected by pornography. Robi Sonderegger’s chapter analyses the ways in which pornography grooms consumers into accepting the eroticisation of inequality. A number of industries have taken up the new business opportunities provided by pornography. Meagan Tyler examines how pornsex is legitimised through the industry of sex therapy and how its presentation as sexual authority threatens women’s equality. Renate Klein looks at the ideological and business links between Big Porn and Big Pharma, specifically the harms created by pornsex and reproporn. Klein calls for a future which is not a plastic ‘porn-and-pill saturated world’ where medicalisation rules, but a world full of possibilities for a creative and just life for all.
Susan Hawthorne’s chapter on lynching and torture opens Part 2, Pornography Industries. Hawthorne connects pornography to broader structures of global inequality, and identifies how porn culture feeds off the torture of people living under repressive regimes. Hawthorne also critiques ‘lesbian’ pornography while co-editor, Abigail Bray, explores how ‘post-feminist’ sex shops appropriate feminist rhetoric about sexual liberation and empowerment in order to promote and sell sex industry products. In an examination of The Porn Report, Helen Pringle provides an incisive discussion of the growing business of academic defences of pornography, and the striking indifference to harm on which they rest. Co-editor, Melinda Tankard Reist, investigates the marketing of pornography in her chapter on the Sexpo trade fair, which describes the open racism and misogyny promoted at such events.
Sheila Jeffreys, Stella and Melissa Farley articulate the ways in which prostitution, strip clubs and pornography intersect. Jeffreys argues that pornography and strip clubs overlap in ownership and customers, with the clubs acting as ‘free billboards’ for pornography. Stella offers a heart-breaking account of her life in the sex industry and provides an insight into the brutal assault of this industry on minds and bodies: “I left with my self-esteem in shreds, my pockets empty, my body damaged.” Melissa Farley argues that pornography is infinite prostitution, with similar kinds of violence in each, even involving acts that international conventions define as torture, a crime against humanity.
Abigail Bray refers to the Internet as a ‘porn factory’, and argues that women working in pornography are not only exploited, but that images of their prostituted bodies often continue to be exchanged on the Internet after they have died, such that pornography becomes the ‘prostitution of the dead’. Hiroshi Nakasatomi from Japan shows how the pornification of the computer gaming industry is exemplified by the simulation of rape in the game of Rapelay in which women are gang-raped and beg to be abused by their rapists. The final contribution in Part 2 is by Chyng Sun who traces the making of her documentary film, The Price of Pleasure. She offers an understanding based on 7 years of rigorous research and concludes that pornography has become much more violent and hence disturbing in its implications for sexual equality.
Part 3 focuses on child pornography and its growing availability. Diana E.H. Russell summarises her decades-long work to show how child pornography is linked to, and part of, the sexual abuse of children. Russell argues that child pornography works to undermine inhibitions against cruelty and violence to children, just as the training of soldiers for war breaks down inhibitions against doing harm to others. S. Caroline Taylor examines intra-familial rape and shows how the popular ‘incest’ genre of pornography promotes the sexual assault of children by family members in the home, where most child abuse takes place. Caroline Norma presents a compelling analysis of the links between pornography and child sexual assault, based on records of criminal cases that show how pornography is used in child sexual assault.
Helen Pringle’s chapter on restitution for victims of child pornography discusses some groundbreaking legal approaches in the USA which represent the emergence of a ‘civil rights’ approach to child pornography, perhaps able to be used in other countries to address the global trade in abuse. Amy’s Victim Impact Statement is an account of the social, emotional and psychological harms sustained by a victim of child pornography. Amy’s account indicates that pornography use is not just a form of voyeurism on an already-committed harm, but itself a crime scene of harm to children.
Part 4 is concerned with how governments and other state actors contribute to, support and participate in the pornography industry, and provides an exploration of the role of ‘free speech’ advocates in justifying the ready accessibility of pornography.
Anne Mayne explores the impact of the sex industry’s colonisation of South Africa since the end of apartheid, as pornography exploits an already vulnerable population of women through promoting sexual violence. Asja Armanda and Natalie Nenadic’s chapter is a gruelling analysis of the role of pornography in the genocidal sexual crimes during and after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Sexual atrocities were recognised under international law as acts of genocide through the effort of the authors and others, such as Catharine A. MacKinnon, in a landmark civil suit in the USA against Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Moving to Asia, Ruchira Gupta argues that the spread of violent pornography in India is linked to an increase in sexual assault, paedophilia and sex tourism, and to India’s emergence as a global ‘porn capital’.
Betty McLellan takes up the important issue of freedom of speech and provides ways of rethinking the relationship between free speech and the right to equality, dignity and respect. She outlines the importance of seeing fair speech as an analytical tool for maximising social justice, in an analogy with fair vs free trade.
In the final section, Part 5, anti-pornography activists from around the world contribute short essays on resistance to porn culture. Julia Long is optimistic about new forms of grassroots feminist activism in the UK, with a new generation of feminists emerging around this issue. Gail Dines’s ‘Stop Porn Culture!’ introduces the new wave of US feminist activism against porn. Linda Thompson in Scotland describes the challenges confronting activists and educators who are frequently vilified by defenders of the global porn industry. Anna van Heeswijk describes the activities and strategies of OBJECT, a formidable UK activist group in opposition to the objectification and dehumanisation of women. In Australia, Melinda Liszewski writes about the dynamic new movement, Collective Shout, with its inspiring and powerful grassroots campaign combating the sexploitation of girls and women by exposing and boycotting companies that market sexist and degrading products. And Caroline Norma writes about the 10-year history of the Tokyo-based Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) in combating pornography and prostitution.
Men too are organising against pornography. Matt McCormack Evans writes about The Anti Porn Men Project in the UK, explaining how men can challenge pornography. Finally, Susan Hawthorne in her Quit Porn Manifesto asks us to reflect on why people use pornography, and why refusal to participate in the industry is an issue of social justice.
Signs of hope
In our efforts to challenge the global pornography industry, we need signs of hope. In writing this book we have found many signs. The activist section of Big Porn Inc is a beginning. New and exciting forms of action are emerging in many parts of the world. Susan Hawthorne offers us strategies to Quit Porn. The increasing number of men speaking out against the commercial exploitation of sexual expression in many countries is encouraging – and see Robert Jensen, Christopher Kendall, Jeffrey Masson, Robi Sonderegger, Hiroshi Nakasatomi and Matt McCormack Evans in this volume.