Sr. Mary O’Connor
As a member of an anti-trafficking committee here in the Twin Cities, I was privileged to attend in May two days of workshops on issues related to trafficked and prostituted women. This event, Demand Change, was sponsored by the Christian organisation Breaking Free and involved several other social service groups around town.
The most striking and memorable talks I attended were given by Gail Dines, Professor of Sociology at Wheelock College, Boston, author of Porn-Lit: How Pornography Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. In two presentations, Dines laid the groundwork to help us understand the social construction of the “John,” the male who solicits sex from prostituted others, male or female. She does not accept what we assume to be human nature in a man as a purely natural thing: a man’s need for pornography or prostitution, she says, is socially constructed. She was vehement about this: “As a mother of a son, I believe in the humanity of men.” We’ve got a perpetrating culture, she claims. The culture is doing the grooming that creates Johns.
Her talk, which included many appalling examples from internet porn sites, had as its thesis that a combination or “perfect storm” of racism, sexism and capitalism has produced generations of Johns and prostitutes. For our purposes of this paper, I want to focus on the aspect of capitalism.
The pornography industry, in print, film or especially in its new home on the internet, is the major from of sex education in the western world. Pornography is a multi-million dollar business, a corporate world, with mega-corporations run like any Fortune 500 business. 36 percent of the Internet is pornography. More than 1/3 of all downloads are from pornographic sites. And while some women and certainly some children access it, it has been established that 75 of the credit-card users for internet pornography are men.
As we are all aware, the job of a corporation is to maximise profits—and human needs and the health of the ecosystem have to give way to that.
Since pornography is part of the feeding chain of American Capitalism, you’ll never see anything really critical of porn in the media. And the softcore/hardcore division or classification of pornography is no more: Soft core porn has migrated into pop culture (e.g. the novel 50 Shades of Grey), while Internet porn is mostly hardcore: on these sites, there’s no sex act seen that doesn’t involve a woman’s debasement. Young boys exploring the internet who are introduced to sex in this way see violence towards women as the way to be a man. This is training, grooming. Traumatised boys will play this out in later life.
Have no doubt that the industry is making money all the time: free pornography is there to create gateways. Perhaps a first-time user will go into a free porn site; by the third click he is into a paid site. And as all of us internet users know by now, a user is observed, “monetised,” at every click.
A worrying contemporary trend is the increasing use of minors in internet pornographic films. “Teen Porn” is one of the top searches on the Internet, with scenarios such as “First Time with Daddy,” and “Daddy’s Whore.” Trafficked minors provide the starring roles. Online trafficking of minors for physical sex has also increased. In my state of Minnesota, in 2010, the online sales of minor girls being sold for sex increased by 55 percent in a six month period.
Incredibly, our society looks away, thinking perhaps that a broadminded, live-and-let-live approach is the way to go, and preferring not to know about the children. Dines showed that it’s a myth that increasing porn use is a progressive/liberal movement, and again exemplified her claim by reference to capitalism. In California in November 2012, Measure B, a measure to require condoms and prevent diseases such as AIDS in the porn industry, was strongly obstructed by a major money donor: MANWIN, the publisher of hardcore gonzo porn. Their funding money was also useful in striking down two provisions of the Child Porn Prevention Act, in the name of Free Speech rights. Whatever about human beings, the Industry should not suffer.
The effects of the pornography industry are more widespread than we might want to think. Men who use pornography become desensitized away from intimacy. Women, the major victims of pornography, are swept up into this syndrome too: Dines says the very core of capitalism is women hating themselves: privileged Western women consume, consume, consume, because they can’t live with themselves as they are. Then, less privileged women, women in sweatshops, are forced by their need to make a living into providing for this syndrome. Even Marx expressed this insight, when he commented more than a century ago that Capitalism would commodify everything important and take it away from ordinary people. Capitalism would enter every nook and cranny of their lives. The industry having commodified sex, “Users want to play out the porn sex they’ve seen on the internet, and girlfriends aren’t having it, so they go to prostituted girls or women,” Dines says. It is clear that the pornography industry is driving the demand for prostitution.
Mary O’Connor rsm
US Province
