Beyond the geographical, the psychological disconnect is perhaps most socially potent: the delusion that pornography is ‘fantasy’. ‘No woman was ever ruined by a book’, as the slogan goes. This gives using pornography a certain deniability. Never mind that someone has to be sexually used to make the visual materials that form the vast majority of the industry’s output. Never mind that among the first and most robust of the results of consumption is the spontaneous generation of rape fantasies, or that people often do what they imagine they want to do. Never mind that ‘fantasy’ is the word used by a man convicted of being about to make a snuff film of a boy, to describe the detailed plans he was intercepted discussing, or what the media reported a man was having with a prostitute whom he drowned in a bathtub.
One telling episode in these annals of denial arose in the publication of American Psycho, an upmarket, high-concept work of fiction in which one woman after another is sexually slaughtered. Women are skinned alive, mutilated, raped and one dismembered head is used for oral sex, all in graphic and explicit terms. Simon and Schuster, in an exceptional move, rescinded its contract of publication shortly before the book was due out.
It was rumoured by insiders that women on the staff refused to have it published in their house.
The publishing industry has long coexisted with – at times affirmatively defended – the pornography industry. This includes the film Snuff, a sex movie available since 1972 right down the street from Simon and Schuster, in which a woman is shown being disemboweled while alive. The shock of, hence the opposition to, American Psycho was apparently that it was here, in mainstream publishing. As long as sexual killing is happening ‘over there’, it is as if it is not happening at all. American Psycho seemed to shatter that illusion of context for some people, at least momentarily. The book was quickly bought and published by Vintage, a division of Random House.
A similar magical framing move occurred in connection with the scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib in 2004. The photos of naked Arab men being abused by American soldiers while in their custody were routinely termed pictures of torture and sexual humiliation in the press. If the fact that the photos were identical to much pornography (although mild by its standards) was noticed at all, it was more often to excuse the crimes than to indict the pornography. Then a mass-market US newspaper was duped into publishing photos said to be of an Iraqi woman being raped by American soldiers that turned out to come from pornography. The public was upset by the pictures – until they found out that it was pornography. The newspaper apologised for not properly authenticating the picture.
The photos, had they been what they were thought to have been, would have documented criminal atrocities. The identical picture, framed as pornography, became masturbation material that a legitimate outlet had been cleverly tricked into putting on its front page in another blow for sexual freedom of expression. As pornography, the conditions of its making – who was she? how did she get there? was she being raped? – were not subject to inquiry. They never are.
The assumption that the violence, violation and abuse that is shown in pornography is somehow ‘consensual’ is just that: an assumption. It coexists with much evidence of force and coercion, beginning with the materials themselves. Mass emails advertising photos of ‘hostages raped!’ are spammed to Internet accounts without generating inquiry into whether they are either. A Website called Slavefarm offered women for sale as ‘sexual slaves’, complete with contracts signing away all human rights and explicit photographs of the slave being tortured. Authorities stonewalled.
Live feed provides direct sexual use of prostituted women onscreen. No matter how real and harmful it gets, pornography, in reality a form of trafficking in women, is this parallel universe in which everything that happens becomes harmless and unreal.
Long overlapping sub rosa with legitimate entertainment, pornography has been a criminal underworld pursuit. Making it still is. But as it has exploded to an industry approaching earnings of US$100 billion globally, its distributors no longer live under rocks. Legitimate corporations now traffic pornography, often through subsidiaries, their financial stake as immense and established as it is open.
Certainly the level of threat and damage to women’s status and treatment and to equality of the sexes worsens as pornography has gone mainstream and is seen as more legitimate. Venue does matter. That does not mean that pornography has not been a dangerous, damaging and real part of social life all along. As its effects worsen, the more widespread and visible pornography becomes, the view – as tenacious and pernicious as it is baseless – that it has no effects as long as it stays underground – makes its march into the open possible. If the spatial separation of pornography into its own little world has been dubious, its mental isolability is pure delusion. Pornography changes its consumers, who then go everywhere under its influence. Nothing contains them.
Excellent social science research over the past 25 years has documented the effects of exposure to pornography, providing a basis to extrapolate the predictable consequences of mass social saturation. The catharsis hypothesis – the notion that the more pornography men use, the less abusive sex they will seek out elsewhere – has been scientifically disproved.
Closer to the reverse has been found: it primes the pump. As women have long known, use of pornography conditions consumers to objectified and aggressive sex, desensitising them to domination and abuse, requiring escalating levels of violence to achieve a sexual response. Use of pornography is also correlated with increased reports by perpetrators of aggressive sex and with increased inability to perceive that sex is coerced. Consumers thus become increasingly unable to distinguish rape from other sex. Some become addicted, virtually none is unaffected, the evidence as a whole suggests.
Consuming pornography, with some individual variation, produces attitudes and behaviours of discrimination and violence, particularly against powerless others. By extension, the more pornography is consumed, the more difficult it will become, socially, to tell when rape is rape, even for some victims. An increase in sexual assault, accompanied by a drop in reporting and low conviction rates, is predictable. All this has happened.
Mass desensitisation of a major segment of the viewing public has a corresponding effect on the rest of popular culture. The audience for popular culture is the same as the audience for pornography. Ten winos in raincoats are not producing the industry’s revenue figures. Popular culture, from advertising to legitimate film and books, has to become correspondingly more explicitly sexual – specifically more sexually aggressive and demeaning to women – to get the desired rise out of the same audience. Advertising is a particularly sensitive barometer of this effect.
How that public buys, what it demands, how it responds and what it wants to see are being significantly controlled, skewed by pornographers. Soft pornography blurs into light entertainment. The powerful conditioning of huge proportions of the male public makes them demand that the women around them look and act in conforming ways. We increasingly live in a world the pornographers have made.
High culture is affected as well. Women writers who present young girls loving being sexually initiated by old men, daughters feeling ambivalent about sex with their fathers, pornography being part of the old world of freedom rather than a future dystopia of totalitarianism, rocket to success. It is not that they are not fine writers. It is the fact that their work converges with pornographic conditioning, affirms it in a classy woman’s voice that catapults them to the top, makes their work suddenly catch on as exciting. It is the moment of, and precondition for, their success. Academic women who breathlessly defend pornography benefit from the same response. Criticising pornography, or writing so that rape is experienced by the reader as abuse, produces the opposite reaction: detumescent shunning. When feminists unmask pornography effectively, those who support it suddenly become favourites du jour. It works for men, too.