The websites owned by one pornography company alone, Manwin (recently renamed MindGeek), receive around 16 billion visits each month, while a recent BBC survey found that a quarter of young people have watched porn by the time they reach their teens.
Unsurprisingly, then, the profits reaped by the porn industry are similarly prolific. CC Bill, an online billing company for porn sites, processes over $1 billion in transactions each year.
So what exactly is it that’s being consumed en masse? What does today’s pornography look like? A ground-breaking analysis of top-selling porn films by US researcher Ana Bridges revealed that this can be basically be summed up in two words: violent and misogynistic.
She and her colleagues found 88% of the scenes featured physical acts of aggression – such as choking and gagging, and 94% of all physical and verbal aggression was directed at women.
Sam Benjamen directed heterosexual porn films in LA for five years, and has since described his role as this: ‘While my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female “targets” were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.’
While porn’s mainly male audience now enjoys unfettered access to footage produced by the likes of Benjamin, it hasn’t been entirely plain sailing through the years for the porn profiteers seeking to deliver it to their screens.
As with any commercial enterprise, the porn industry relies on a particular set of laws and cultural conditions to keep its wheels turning.
Challenges to those conditions were being made from the outset of the industry’s push into mainstream culture during the 1960s and 70s, particularly by a burgeoning women’s movement. Looking back over his career, the world’s most famous porn profiteer, Hugh Hefner, recalled: ‘The criticisms that troubled me the most came from the feminists, from liberals, at the very beginning. I was blindsided by them and didn’t know what they were talking about.’
A strategy that has proved effective in keeping critics at bay, and is one of the first lines of defence rolled out by the contemporary porn business, is to appeal to legal principles around freedom of speech.
The trade body for the US porn industry is called the Free Speech Coalition (FSC). Its executive director contends that, ‘Censorship comes in many forms, and our most difficult battles today appear in the guise of regulation and market limitations… But make no mistake: these are attacks on our right to free speech and liberty, and will fight and defeat them.’
Except, there’s a slight problem when it comes to relying on freedom of speech principles to fend off restrictions on the profitable exploits of FSC members: their ‘product’ is filmed prostitution.
Production companies hire the women in their films to have sex with a designated person, in a designated way, in a designated place, at a designated time. The fact that someone was holding a camera while the acts took place does not alter the fact that it was prostitution. Many countries have laws against third-party profiteering from prostitution – in recognition of it being commercial sexual exploitation. So why haven’t they been applied to the filmed prostitution trade?
Speaking to lawyers as part of my investigation into the sex trade for my book, Pimp State, it became apparent that the reasons are political rather than logical. Porn profiteers have done a remarkably effective job of creating a smokescreen for the trade by directing debate towards the fact that they use media in the dissemination of their ‘product’. Of course, the mere act of filming an illegal activity does not somehow transform that act into a legal one. A commercial trade in human organs, for instance, would not become legal simply by virtue of someone filming the operations to remove those organs; just as facilitating and profiting from someone else’s prostitution would not become legal just by virtue of it being filmed.
The pornography industry has been getting away with this ruse for far too long. It’s time to hold these companies accountable for what really powers their profits: commercial sexual exploitation.
On 1 October at the Jersey Opera House, Kat will be joined by former sex worker Diane Martins to discuss her new book, Pimp State
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