The industry of sexual
* debate Pornography is omnipresent in western societies, and the subject of much pseudoacademic discussion. Unfortunately, little of this theory is supported by 999) scientific investigation. Richard Poulin Pornography is a delicate topic, the subject of moral, religious and political controversy. The social and economic stakes are high: the trade in legal pornography is transnational and generates fantastic profits, impossible to calculate simply because we know so little about it. And, by definition, the scale of the illegal trade is even more difficult to determine.
Despite its omnipresence in our societies, there is surprisingly little real research and discussion about pornography. A number of academic and journalistic accounts pornography exist. But these are above all descriptive,' historical, or focused on the question of censorship?
A large number of them ask bad questions because they fail to go beyond the surface of the issues. Statements pornography is a form of writing full of hatred explains poorly why thousands of women seem disposed to spread it" 4 could be tested if the author were to go to the trouble of leaving his office and interviewing women working in the sector. But where pornography 1S concerned, social scientists prefer discussion to research!
In the 70s and 80s, North American feminists attempted, often with success, to revolutionise analytical perspectives on porn.° But few of their reflections have been accompanied by research in the area. They also devoted a good part of their efforts to the issue of legislation' to regulate the distribution of pornography.
The lack of serious interest among 32 International Viewpoint #316 November 1999 domination researchers hasn't always been the case. At the end of the sixties, a number of governmental commissions of inquiry on pornography and obscenity concluded that it was inoffensive. The report of the American commission* is reliable statements on the effects of pornography use. A large number of college-level introductory books on sociology produced in North America still rely on these inquiries. According to some of these, pornography had beneficial effects only: it served to protect women from male sexual aggression and, even, permitted a greater sexual harmony between pariners.
But the research methods used by the appointees of the US commission have since been widely criticised and discredited by specialists.® It has even been proved that the commission's researchers suppressed some findings which suggested links between the use of pornography and sexual violence.
But above all, the premises guiding assumed, among other things, that women were less sexually stimulated by pornography than men because of their "social and cultural inhibitions". They took no account of the messages put out by this sexually explicit material. They did not consider the possibility that women did not use pornography because they felt attacked
During the seventies and carly psychologists, in laboratory experiments, showed that pornography consumption made sexual violence and rape seem more trivial to its users.' A survey undertaken in San Francisco in 1978, taking a representative sample of the female population, estimated that 10% had been "antagonised by men who, having read about a pornographic act, tried to make a woman do it with them". " This percentage is a minimal estimate because very many women don't know that their partner uses porn.
Most of the sex offenders who I have interviewed say that pornography has played a definite role in their crimes. One Californian study suggested that 57% of offenders carried out acts seen in pornographic films. In France, the anthropologist Daniel
Welzer-Lang' drew similar conclusions in the aftermath of his investigation into men accused of rape.
When an important inquiry into pornography and prostitution was held in Canada, no real research was ordered into pornography's effects. In this country, as elsewhere, the great majority of the "researchers" about porn but do not actually inquire into the subject.
Pornography isn't merely a question of use. Pornographic images put on sale are made using human beings who live off it, who suffer from it, and who, in certain cases, die from it. Pornography is therefore also a question of production. Our knowledge is equally deficient in that field. What do we know about the women, men and children who are used as the labour force? What do we know about the men who produce porn? Practically nothing.
Almost studies have concentrated on one aspect of the problem. They try to see whether there are marked effects on the users of porn. My hypothesis on this subject (reinforced by numerous interviews with men), is that porn participates in the development of fantasies. It therefore influences a share of its users, but not to the same degree. Some would like to fulfil their fantasies, others not.
What pleasure do men take in using images of sex rather than sex itself?
Pornography is used essentially by men. In Canada, they represent 80% of the film watchers, 90% of the clients at nude entertainments, and 95% of the magazine buyers. Where women are customers, it's usually in response to men's requests. Even a magazine like Playgirl, ostensibly for women, is used 85% by men. About three men in five use pornographic material regularly. 's
What, socially, can explain such a massive use of fantasy products? And what kind of fantasies are these? From the point of view of a porn user, the naked body they see refuses sex. They can see it, imagine it, hear it, but they can't touch it. The body displayed mimics sensuality, and the image is sexualised. However, from producers point of view, the pornographic body is real; it can be subjected to demands-even to rape.
Using pornography involves more than watching it. It's also a matter of experiencing sexual excitement. Porn that "works" is that which excites the user. It doesn't have the ability to bewitch solely through images, but also by presenting them within a particular narrative code, by their specific organisation.
In porn, you see "everything". But this "everything" isn't just the "dross of reality". 1 The hyper-reality of pornographic production, the hyper-vision of genitalia in close-up, the promiscuity of watching it and the fascination with detail have as their functions a full reconstruction of reality, but of a reality from which humanity is removed, and which mechanises the sex act.
There is a spectacular absence of tenderness and love. The female pornographic body is dehumanised and infantilised: for Playboy it's a "bunny" and for Penthouse, a 'pet'. The child's body, be it female or male, is feminised. Some heterosexual porn uses young boys as a substitute for women. According to Florence Rush, these youths share with women the status of "minor" and the "same feminine gender". "
At least sixty thousand Canadians were used as pornographic models in their youth. Each year the US sex industry helps itself to a million and a half young people under sixteen." With new technologies (videotape among others), the possibility is growing that a porn company will be built up through exploitation of children. More and more cases of sexual abuse linked to such practices have been exposed by social workers and police. Loss of identity
The model who is photographed for Playboy or Penthouse is consenting and generally an adult. She is there of her own free will. She is "happy" to show her "charms". She provokes sexual desire and this alone is enough for the man who masturbates while fantasising about this photography.
But what sexual desire are we talking about? To grasp this, necessary to explore the image of this woman's body further, by comparing it with that of a man in the same situation in a similar magazine, like Playgirl.
The naked body of the man is not presented in the same way. He is never shown without his head. In all the photos, his complete form, in other words the link between body and head, is safeguarded. When women are photographed, there is often close-up of the sex organs, and the head disappears.
An erection is banned, but porn producers various creams to moisten all the lips of the female body to suggest her excitement. We find the need to impose the image of his body language appealing to animality to describe physical attributes and activities).
«The man doesn't lose his identity; in essence, he is determined not by his body but by his work. One might be a well known sportsman, another an actor. In these cases, Playgirl never shows the penis. That would be "degrading" for these men. Only the carnal character. A man is always more than a body!
The definition of pornography proposed by Playboy" and accepted by the Canadian pay-television First
Choice is: "a penis at 45 degrees". But the visual exploitation of the female body is never pornographic-just "erotic"!
Pornographic films always proceed in the same way: the scenes end when the man ejaculates into his partner. The man's pleasure structures the entire thing, and must be evidenced. The women celebrate their bodies autoerotically, but the men masturbate to keep an erection. Their movements are characterised by mechanical efficiency.
By definition-and pornographic representations of female autoeroticism are proof of this-screwing is the only thing women are good for, and they think of nothing else. They are nothing but sexual beings. They are offered with enticing looks, suggestive poses. moist and half-open lips-to males, to real men who know how to master them. The women are to be conquered and to submit. They exist not solely for men's pleasure, but also to prove male virility.
Finally, the men must learn to defend themselves from them. In the pornographic imagination, aren't they "devourers of men"? To protect themselves from women, the men must discipline them. Pornographic discourse asserts that women have a "loathing of weaklings" (Lui). Women who are interested in exciting themselves sexually using pornography are rare, because pornographic fantasies are male fantasies. Dehumanisation
If explicit sexuality, hyper-real and mechanical, crystallises the features of pornography, this isn't just about sexuality. Social relations between the sexes le at its toundation. Men stay complete, even when reified; while the body of the man is shown without decapitation, the woman is amplified and she is reduced to an animal sexuality. Pornography makes the female body sacred in order better to
As well as solitary sexual pleasure, the reification or dehumanisation of the pornographic body has the effect of conferring a human superiority on its male users over the women who are debased to animal level. In some cases, notably in that of bars with nude dancers, the man cannot even masturbate." His pleasure is not physical. That which is pleasurable here is the alienation of women. It's also the fact that these bodies are there voluntarily. This is proof that women are subjugated to their sexuality. International Viewpoint #316 November 1999 33
* debate
Pornography functions like racism. Inferior beings are perceived creatures of nature, contrasted with the people of "culture", the "civilised" people. The creatures of nature are, by definition, depraved. Their anatomy is their destiny. Here, too, the comparisons with animals are legion. Thus the black man is considered, physically and psychologically, as a "stallion". The women, for her part, becomes a "pet". Even you like this animal a lot, you must nevertheless train it so that it will obey you. The pornographic body
The pornographic body is altered (with tattoos, plastic surgery, bodypiercing, etc) to accentuate its sexual characteristics. Few pornographic models and nude dancers avoid being transformed in this way. The breasts are made enormous and hard. They are filled with silicone. Their bodies are modified to satisfy an "idea of what they ought to be. This swells the body, giving it a greater symbolic dimension. And there is a complete fusion with the
The body concerned definitively dedicated to sexuality. Artificially constructed, it incarnates the processes of seduction and becomes a material stigma. By this sort of physical metamorphosis, there isn't just expansion of certain parts of the body, but also expansion of one's awareness
These bodies are self-worshipping. They believe themselves to represent the ideal woman—-a feminine woman, who releases the desire of men.
How can we explain this exaggeration? How can we understand that some women find self-enhancement pornographic activity, reject this occupation?
What is lacking in the consenting pornographic body, just because it is a body, is the completeness of personality and of the person. This is also its main quality in men's eyes. A 34 International Viewpoint #316 November 1999 pornographic model could be defined as a person who distinguishes their body from the rest of their personality. Hence the possibility of trading. it.
A likely explanation is that this is one of the ways for them to survive undergone in their youth. overwhelming majority of nude dancers that I interviewed had been victims of
Another unpublished study" by a Montreal sexologist claims that all such dancers that he asked had suffered from sexual violence in their youth. Their family backgrounds turned out to be seriously inadequate, sexually exploitative, on a moral and emotional level. In this way, these young women - whose bodies, because of a male relative, have been the source of their problems - use them in future as a means of gaining reward.
The men pay just to see them! But for the client, beyond the covetousness, the stare enveloping the body isn't comparable to other looks. There is a deduction, the feeling that these women are mere trash. There is the base and servile body. There is the flesh, empty of a soul; it is just a body alone. And this is living proof that the female sex is its sexuality. The client enjoys this situation. Violence
The female body (or the feminised body of a child of either sex is, in pornographic discourse, the element that crystallises fantasy. Even heterosexual pornography, there is feminisation and infantilisation of male bodies in order to mark out the sexual stakes."
And this implies violence. In magazines we can frequently read passages such as this one: "When I fuck a woman, I like to do it as hard as I can to prove to her that she has a man between her legs.' This extract from Penthouse, a pornographic magazine described as *erotic', which sells five million copies every month, shows that violence and are virtually inseparable for this pornography refers incessantly to brutality and aggression by men. Since virility is never assured, it has to be
Rape is one of the more usual manifestations of this. After rape, the woman discovers real' sexual pleasure: "Now that he'd taken off her gag, she cried out with joy." (Club) The woman and child, non-consenting at the start of rape, necessarily become consenting afterwards because they discover "real sexual pleasure".
According to psychological studies conducted at the beginning of the eighties,* subjects exposed to this sort of narrative were desensitised with regard to rape, and the majority of them admitted that they would commit rape if they were certain of not being caught.
With a mixed group at the university where I work, I watched a pornographic film in which there were three rapes of this type. None of the male students remarked that there had been rape, whereas the female students immediately spotted it. The idea that rape becomes pleasant for the person who suffers it-one of the ideas at the root of pornography-was shared by my male students, who accepted the premises of the film.
In pornography, not only can we speak of becoming accustomed to sexual violence, but also, we can venture to describe this sexual material as propaganda in favour of rape. The skin trade
Until now, I have avoided defining pornography, preferring to examine the reality of the sexual material available to all. In the usual definition, pornography is distinguished from eroticism in being more vulgar. Yet pornography concerns all the genres, all the categories, all merchandise created for a market divided according to buyers means and the particular tastes of the various social strata.
But pornography is an industry. There is no real confusion between art, the product of individual creativity, which requires total freedom for the artist, and this "genitalised" representation of sexuality, which exalts sexual domination of one human being over another.
Not all sexually explicit material is necessarily pornographic, and nor is all material comprising representations of maltreatment and degradation in a sexual context. Books and films can include scenes of rape, and if they show the real repercussions of the aggression on the victim, then they are realistic, rather than pornographic presentations.
Pornographic images put on sale are created from human beings who suffer from it, who live from it and who, in certain cases, die from it. The sexual relations of domination structure pornography and its use. This form of sexuality expresses, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the paradoxes of our ambiguous sexual liberation.25 Scenes of nudity and of sexual intercourse invade the media in Canada. But these images don't participate in
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sexual liberation, but rather in the enforcement of subordinative seX relations.
Pornography is an industry pursuit of fantasies and neuroses. As long as this sex market flourishes, the traffickers of all genres will try hard to bite fresh meat, because where there are enormous incentives, human sentiments disappear. Transforming sexual fantasies into commercial transactions allows no place for philanthropy.
Pornography cuts up bodies in order to remodel them according to male desires. The body-objects that result are a symbol blessing the "moral superiority" of consumers—whose accomplices are the men who make money from them and the industry which profits. * Notes 1. See, for example, Serge Garde. L'industrie du sexe, Paris, Messidor, 1987; Roger Faligot et Remi Kauffer, Porno Business, Paris Fayard, 1987. 2. See, among others, Walther Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in in Modern Culture, New York Vicking, 1987. 3. See, among others, Varda Burstyn (ed.), Women against Censorship, Vancour & Toronto, Douglas & Melntyre, 1985; David Copp and Susan Wendell (ed.), Pornography and Censorship, Buffalo, Prometheus Book, 1983; Catherine Itzin (ed.), Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties, a Radical New View, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. 4. Bernard Arcand, Le jaguar et le tamanoir, vers le degre zero de la pornographie, Montreal, Boreal, 1991. 5. This is even more obvious from the point of view of two young journalists who defend the "post-modern libertarian" thesis (to use Andrea Martinez's expression, found in "La pornographie sans frontieres", Carrefour, 19-1, 1997, p72): Nathalie Collard et Pascale Navarro, Interdit aux femmes, le feminisme et la censure de la pornographie, Montreal, Boreal, 1996—an indictment of the orthodox" feminism that opposes freedom of pornographic expression. The book's accusation is made so virulently that the two authors feel the need to assure their readers that "we are not paid by the sex industry to put forward its defence." (p15). 6. There is a large literature on this subject. See for example: Micheline Carrier, La pornographie, base ideologie de l'oppression des femmes, Quebec, Apostrophe, 1983; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York, Perigree, 1981; Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture'S Revenge Against Nature, New York & Toronto, Harper Colophon Books, 1981; Laura Lederer (ed.), L'envers International Viewpoint de la nuit, les femmes contre la pornographie, Montreal, Remue-menage, 1983. I have contributed to the debate by publishing La violence pornographique, la virilite demasquee, (in collaboration with Cecile Coderre), Hull, Asticou, 1986; La violence pornographique, industrie du fantasme et realities, Yens-sur-Morges, Cabedita, 1993; Le sexe spectacle, consommation, main d'oeuvre et pornographie, Hull/Ottawa, Vents d'Ouest et Vermillon, 1994. 7. See Marie-Helene Cote, "Des strategies et des luttes contre la pornographie", Cahiers du socialisme, no 16, 8. The American Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. L'obscenite et la pornographie, extrait du rapport de la Commission U.S., Paris, UGE, 9.Diana Russell, "La pornographie et la violence, les recherches recentes", dans Laura Lederer, op. cit. 10. See, among others, S. Feschbach and N. Malamuth, "Sex and Aggression: Proving the Link", Psychology Today, November 1978; E. Donnerstein, "Pornography and Violence Against Women: Experimental Studies, Annals New York Academy of Sciences, 1980. 11. See the third part of my book La violence pornographique, industrie du fantasme et realities, op. cit., 13. Daniel Welzer-Lang, Le viol au masculin, Paris, 14. Comite special d'etude de la pornographie et de la
Rapport du comite special d'etude de la pornographie et de la prostitution, Ottawa, Centre d'edition du gouvernement du Canada, 2 vols., 1985. 15. See my book La violence pornographique, industrie du fantasme et realities, op. cit. Following research on the World Wide Web, Andrea Martinez (op. cit., p83) affirms that "cyberporn" is first and foremost "a male thing". 16. Jean Beaudrillard, Les strategies fatales, Paris, Grasset et Le livre de poche, 1983, p64. 17. Florence Rush, Le secret le mieux garde, 'exploitation sexuelle des enfants, Paris, Denoel/Gonthier, 1983. 18. According to the committee on sexual offences against children and young people. Infactions sexuelles a l'egard des enfants, Ottawa, Centre d'edition du gouvernement du Canada, 2 vols., 1984. 19. Florence Rush, op. cit.; see also A. W. Burgess (ed.), Child Pornography and Sex Rings, Toronto, Lexington Books, 1984 and Shirley O'Brien, Child Pornography, Newporth Beach, Kendall-Hunt, 1983. 20. See La violence pornographique, la virilite 21. This is going to change very quickly. In Quebec, like in Ontario, bars employing "adult" dancers allow "dances" at C$10, i.e. dances where the client can grope the dancers. Furthermore, many bars have created "booths" or private rooms where the client and dancer can be alone together and not only can they touch and fondle, but they can also engage in some sex acts. The distinction between pornography and prostitution is blurred at the margins. On this subject, see La sexe spectacle, op. cit. 22. Study given to the author for scientific assessment. 23. See Francois Moreau, "Pornographie et movement gai" in Cahiers du socialisme, no. 16, 1984, p73-88. 24. Neil M. Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein, Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Orlando, Academic Press, 1984.
25. On this subject, see issue 6 of Critiques socialistes, Ottawa, 1989. This issue has the theme "L'amour aux temps du chlamydia". The authors try to draw the balance sheet of the "sexual revolution".
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Transformation andi regroupment
Regroupments of forces determined to learn the lessons of the historical abomination that was Stalinism and to continue, against the winds and the tides, to fight against capitalism are being realised in a number of countries.
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At the international level, the Fourth International is an active participant in regroupment, bringing with it the advantages of a long tradition of combat against capitalism and Stalinism. *
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