Chatsworth is a district of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, well endowed with parkland and sports facilities. It is home to a number of Hollywood film stars. Many famous films and TV series were shot in the area.
Chatsworth is also the world center of the porn business, with 200 production companies employing 1,200 – 1,500 performers (and a few thousand other workers). Here too are the offices of the industry’s trade magazine Adult Video News, which sponsors an annual convention in Las Vegas and an award show modelled after the Oscars.
Most performers are poorly educated young women aged 18 – 21. They are attracted by the pay, which seems good compared to other jobs open to them. Rates for a scene range from $200 for a blowjob up to $2,000 for a double anal or gang bang.
But a lot of the money goes on supporting drug habits. Former porn star Shelley Lubben, who established the Pink Cross Foundation to help performers trying to get out of the business, explains that they need drugs because without them they would be unable to bear the abuse that the work entails: “Guys are punching you in the face. You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It’s never ending.”
Besides drug addiction, another perk of the job is sexually transmitted diseases. Only some end up dying of AIDS, but few escape the discomfort of herpes, which is likewise incurable.
Explosive growth
Porn is very big business. Worldwide revenue in 2006 has been estimated at $97 billion. Revenue in the US rose almost 2,000-fold between 1972 and 2006 – from $7 million to $13 billion. Market expansion through the internet has fuelled this explosive growth, although other media – videos, films, TV, magazines – have also done well.
With growth comes political clout. Like other capitalists, porn producers employ lobbyists to promote their interests. One such lobbyist is Bill Lyon, head of the Free Speech Coalition (!), which represents 900 companies. Besides passing off porn as free speech, Lyon stresses the contribution that it makes to California’s economy: 12,000 jobs and $36 million per year in state tax revenue.
Porn versus religion?
Those who oppose porn do so for different and often conflicting reasons. Many condemn porn in the name of traditional religious morality. Yet many of the same people support conservative politicians who are totally beholden to corporate interests and hostile to any restrictions on business, including the porn business.
Porn industry propagandists use the religious anti-porn movement as a scarecrow in order to portray all their opponents as puritanical, repressive, intolerant – in short, killjoys. Although this stereotype is blatantly false, not to say absurd, it probably serves to silence many people who feel uneasy about porn but do not want to appear old-fashioned or intolerant.
Neither the promoters of porn nor religious puritans make the essential distinction between porn and erotica. There is great educational value in the artistic celebration of sex as a beautiful and joyful activity. In sharp contrast, porn presents sex as dirty, ugly and predatory.
Besides the suffering of those whose bodies are used to produce it, porn corrupts and dehumanizes its male users. It distorts their perceptions of women, makes them more likely to commit rape, and undermines their capacity to engage in satisfying human relationships in real life. Especially serious is its impact on the immature minds of teenage boys – the age group that views the greatest amount of online porn. The average age at which a boy in the US now downloads porn is now 11 years old.
Creating new markets
As the sexual reactions of users grow desensitized to milder kinds of porn, they seek out more extreme varieties in order to sustain the same level of stimulation. On the supply side, the remorseless drive of capital to expand also impels porn producers to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas, to break down taboos, to keep creating new markets. So porn tends to become more extreme, violent and abusive over time.
One barrier to expansion is the illegality of using the bodies of children in porn production. But it is a weak barrier. Even porn producers who try to remain within the letter of the law press hard against the barrier by using “childified women” – a concept introduced by sociologist Dr. Gail Dines (see her 2008 interview with Citizen magazine*). Young women are made to look like children: they wear children’s clothes, hold lollipops, have braces on their teeth, and shave their pubic hair. Thus while these porn producers do not abuse children directly, they train and incite their customers to do so.
Porn goes mainstream
At the same time as porn grows increasingly violent and abusive, it becomes more acceptable socially and culturally. Characters in popular TV sitcoms joke about using it.
The underlying reason is that porn is no longer viewed as a disreputable enterprise on the fringes of the business world. The porn industry has “come in out of the cold” and merged with “respectable” big business. Perhaps more accurately, “respectable” business has merged with porn as major corporations, observing the high rates of return offered by porn, have invested in it in a big way. In either case, porn has gone mainstream.
* Media and telecommunications companies now rely heavily on profits from porn. AT&T offers cable subscribers a hardcore porn channel, as does Comcast. AT&T owns a porn video company. Viacom owns the porn channel MTV. (Is this perhaps why media moguls use “family programs” like sitcoms to make viewers more accepting of porn?)
* Over 95% of the films released by Hollywood are “adult movies” (11,000 of them in 2002).
* The big hotel chains (Hilton, Marriot, Hyatt, Sheraton, Holiday Inn) now make 70% of their profits by feeding porn to the TVs in guests’ rooms on a pay-per-view basis.
* The most profitable parts of General Motors are not its auto plants but the porn channels EchoStar and DirecTV, owned by GM subsidiary Hughes Technology.
Consumer goods manufacturers and retailers are linked to the porn industry in another way – through their use of “soft porn” in advertising cars, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, etc. Fashion modeling, in particular, is not all that far removed from porn production.
Political implications
The deep political implications of this development are explored in a valuable essay by D.A. Clarke, a contributor to the volume Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (Spinifex Press), edited by Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant. Now that the industry has gone mainstream, she argues, opposition to porn challenges the interests of capital as a whole. So anti-porn protestors are up against formidable odds.
If we want to decommercialize and humanize sex, we need to take the next step and build a broad popular movement to overthrow capitalism itself.
* http://www.thepinkcross.org/pinkcross-articles/october-2011/children-are-pornography-industry’s-goal
Related posts:
