Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry by Melinda Tankard Reist, Abigail Bray

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 betweenstrangers. 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.
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