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. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
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Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections
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Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking
. Captive Daughters Media. Los Angeles, pp. 144–152.
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Journal of Trauma Practice
2 (3/4), pp. 33–74.
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.
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___________________________
1
Many thanks to Harvey L. Schwartz and Eleanor Kenelly Gaetan for helpful edits.
2
Evelina Giobbe is a US feminist, and founder of WHISPER, Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt. WHISPER was one of the first organizations to offer survivors of prostitution support for exiting prostitution along with a feminist understanding of prostitution as domestic violence.
3
For resources and articles documenting the human rights violations of prostitution see the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Website <
www.catwinternational.org
> or the Prostitution Research & Education Website <
www.prostitutionresearch.com
>.
4
If you go to Acworth’s Website, be forewarned that it contains disturbing photographs of women being tortured. <
www.kink.com
>
5
The psychiatric diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) describes mental and physical avoidance behaviors, psychological numbing, social distancing, flashbacks, and anxious physiologic hyperarousal that result from extreme emotional distress. Two-thirds of women, men, and transgendered people in prostitution in 9 countries suffered PTSD at the same level as rape survivors, combat veterans, and state-sponsored torture survivors. See Farley et al. (2003).
6
Many thanks to Annie Lobert, Las Vegas, for the words ‘sex trafficking industry’.
7
On a web cam site, the john pays to chat with women who perform prostitution on streaming video, performing in real time what masturbating johns pay them to do.
8
Andrew Masterson, the
Age
, 1998, p. 2 cited in Sullivan (2007) p. 181.
Abigail Bray
Capitalism and Pornography: the Internet as a Global Prostitution Factory
She is sold and bought minute by minute, breath by breath
In the slave markets of the earth – Kotzia is near here
Wake up early. Wake up to see it.
She is a whore in the rotten-houses
The german drill for conscripts
And the last
Endless miles of the national highway towards the centre
In the suspended meats from Bulgaria.
And when her blood clots and she can take no more
Of her kind being sold so cheaply
She dances barefoot on the tables a zeibekiko
Holding in her bruised blue hands
A well sharpened axe.
Loneliness,
Our loneliness I say. Its our loneliness I am speaking about,
Is a axe in our hands
That over your heads is revolving revolving revolving revolving
– ‘Three Clicks Left’, Katerina Gogou (1940–1993)
1
To those who think critically about pornography, it is clear that “[p]ornography
is
prostitution” (Whisnant, 2004, p. 20).
2
The bodies within pornography have been bought and sold for sex. Kathleen Barry writes that the “producers and distributors can be defined as pimps as they are living off the earnings of prostitutes” (Barry, 1979, p. 99). The pornographer buys the living sexual labour of human beings and then pimps their prostitution to ‘johns’ across the Net. Porn has become so normalised as liberating adult sexual entertainment that it is difficult to think of pornographers as pimps, the global porn industry as a form of human trafficking, porn consumers as ‘john’ or ‘buyers’, or the people in pornography as prostituted women. Instead, we are encouraged to use a language that masks the prostitution pornography is founded on, and that
disconnects us from the living bodies who are prostituted. Women and men whose bodies are bought and sold by pornographers are celebrated as ‘actors’ or sexually self-empowered ‘pornstars’. Pornographers are described as ‘film makers’ or ‘producers in the adult entertainment business’, while men who pay pornographers or porn-hosting ISPs, are called ‘consumers’ or ‘porn users’, if they are named at all.
Internet pornography is a complex form of prostitution: the social and economic relations within pornography go beyond our commonsense understandings of prostitution. By commonsense understanding of prostitution I mean a commercial transaction between a living prostitute, a buyer/john, and a pimp or brothel owner, that occurs for a specific period of time at a specific location. Within Internet pornography prostitution these kinds of social and economic relations – between a living prostitute, a pimp and/or john – and these kinds of historical constraints – time and place – are radically transformed. To put it simply, her living labour is prostituted for a day or so by a pornographer so that her prostitution can be sold for an unlimited amount of time. She is prostituted in a porn studio in North America so that her prostitution can be circulated globally. She is purchased once by a john so that an unlimited number of anonymous johns and pimps can sell and buy her prostitution. Through the production process of pornography, one act of prostituted sexual labour is reproduced indefinitely and put to work 24 hours a day, for an infinite number of years, across the world,
without pay
. Understood this way, pornography prostitution is closer to sexual slavery than it is to commonsense understandings of prostitution.
Within pornographic prostitution, the living labour of a prostituted woman is transformed into dead labour through the process of mass production. What she has produced with her living body does not belong to her, her prostitution is taken from her and turned into a commodity, a thing, dead, yet potent. To paraphrase Marx, pornography is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
3
Her living labour is transformed by Net porn into an indestructible commodity. It is impossible to completely remove pornography from the Net. As soon as her prostitution enters the Net, her prostitution remains there forever as an endlessly circulating commodity. In this way, her prostitution lives on after she is dead. Her
prostitution, in other words, will be put to work by the pornography industry after her body has died.
Ultimately, all pornography becomes the prostitution of the dead
.
It is worth recognising that, already, quite a few of the prostituted men and women within pornography are no longer alive. Many pornography prostitutes die young. In 2011, 23-year-old Caroline Berger died from brain damage caused by cosmetic surgeons who injected 800g (28oz) of silicone into her breasts. “She’s a hero,” comments a john, “[s]he died doing something awesome to the extent that most people wouldn’t dream of.”
4
‘The Dead Porn Stars Archive – Frances Farmer’s Revenge’ contains a lengthy list of deceased porn prostitutes with details of their cause of death that include suicide, murder, drug overdose, and AIDS.
5
‘The dead porn stars memorial’ also features a similar list.
6
‘A tribute to dead pornstars’ reads glowingly:
These dead pornstars were trailblazers and many paid a heavy price for their adventures in the adult entertainment arena. Whether thru suicide, accident, drug overdose or illness due to a crazy lifestyle, these dead pornstars still touched more that our peckers. They touched our lives and gave us a visual remembrance that we will never forget.
7
For ‘adventures in the adult entertainment industry’ read: prostituted by the pornography industry; for ‘heavy price’ read: death. Destructive prostitution is masked as a gift ‘they gave us’ (the johns) that extends beyond the grave.
Pornography prostitution can be described as a kind of virtual slavery: once in the Net, her prostitution is caught up in an endless system of exchange that feeds off her living labour without paying her for it. The perversion increases once we recognise that this virtual slavery continues after she has died. In this way, all pornography becomes the virtual sexual slavery of the dead. The pornography industry feeds off the bodies of the living and the dead: it is a system of virtual sexual slavery that makes no distinction between profit made from the living, or profit made from the dead.
The technology involved in pornography prostitution not only transforms her living labour into an infinite form of prostitution (see Farley, this volume), but the production process also refashions her living body. The dead labour of pornography technology, to use a Marxist term, dominates her living labour, her very body, her life activity. High definition communication technology,
for example, transformed the living bodies of pornography prostitutes. In his homage to the technological innovations created by Big Porn, Patchen Barss reports that with the emergence of Blu-ray and HD, the bodies of pornography prostitutes begin to change:
[H]itherto invisible ‘flaws’ – from moles and wrinkles to razor burn and surgery scars – were suddenly visible to audiences. This forced actors and producers to take all manner of compensatory action, including changing camera angles, increasing makeup, changing diet and exercise habits and even undergoing cosmetic surgery to remove the smallest imperfection. The technology has created too much clarity for the fuzzy fantasies that are the heart of pornography’ (2010, p. 274).
This is a clear example of the way that the dead labour of the pornographic production process changes the living bodies of prostitutes. The new HD communication technology contains an implicit command to prostitutes to transform their bodies. To become a viable commodity, she must now spend extra time and money refashioning her body with diet, exercise and cosmetic surgery. This intensifies her economic exploitation, for it is unlikely that a pornographer will pay her for breast implants or cosmetic surgery for her vagina and face. The new HD pornography technology expands her exploitation into her everyday life, taking her time and money just as it demands that she transform her body at her own expense. Capitalist technologies begin to converge on her body, extracting profit from an already exploited human being. Her body becomes a thing she must pay for so that she can prostitute herself. Her relationship to her own body becomes distorted in the mirror of pornography – her body is transformed into a sexual object she must pimp.
The new surgically altered HD porn body is not confined to the Net. With the mass marketing of pornography, and the pornification of everyday life, the image of the HD porn body moves into the mainstream: Brazilian waxes, breast implants, cosmetic surgery for women’s genitals, weight-loss drugs, make-up, hair products, Botox. A complex capitalist system of body modification is opened up and expanded by the new demands of HD pornography technology. Looking like a ‘porn star’ becomes confused with sexual self-empowerment, as though relating to her own body like a pimp were an act of freedom. Yet the money she invests in transforming herself into a sexually competitive commodity is rarely returned.
As Dunia Montenegro says, “[i]n porn, the money is a big cake and the [large] companies eat it all. The porn actress gets nothing” (in Barss, 2010, p. 279). Montenegro’s solution is to create her own pornography Website and copyright her prostitution. Without this she “would get paid a couple of hundred dollars
for a day of having sex on camera, and would never see another dime of profit” (Barss, 2010, p. 279). That Montenegro has pimped her own body is often celebrated as an example of self-empowerment and a role model for prostituted women. Attempts at reforming the sex industry, for example, the creation of better working conditions for prostituted women, women-owned porn companies and so on, are opportunistic. There is nothing to celebrate about the increased wages of a pornography prostitute; it is merely the temporary lengthening and lightening of a chain and nothing more. The point is to break the socioeconomic chains that have constrained women’s and girls’ work options to the barbaric point where a society offers women prostitution as a way of economic survival. Indeed, Montenegro’s example merely calls attention to the extreme levels of exploitation in the pornography industry. Unable to copyright their own prostitution, women are selling themselves for next to nothing. Pornography becomes, in effect, a form of sexual slavery.
The aggressive presence of the pornography industry within social networking sites, and across the Net as a whole, has normalised this trend. It is cool and fun to act like a sexy hot porn star. “We’re all prostitutes!” shouts the Facebook status of a teenager who is posed half naked on her bed. Within MSN, for example, there are peer-to-peer networks where women share pornographic pictures of themselves and perform pornographic acts on web cam without being paid. Adult social networking Websites also encourage women to web cam themselves to peers without pay. So-called homemade porn has a large circulation, seeping outside peer groups into territories women cannot predict. This new phenomenon cannot be called prostitution because women are not being paid for producing pornography. But what it reveals is that pornography prostitution has become so wedded to neoliberal ideas of sexual liberation that women are pimping themselves for free.
Although ‘free’ pornography might not generate money (and today the majority of pornography on the Net is free, which is not to say that ISPs do not benefit from it) it does generate powerful social or symbolic capital. In other words, the explosion of ‘free porn’ and peer-to-peer porn does not mean, as the porn industry often argues, the death of the porn industry as such. What it does reveal is that the idea of pornography has moved up from being part of a system of embodied economic exchange to becoming a form of symbolic exchange. Now pornography has become a form of social capital and has attached itself to the reproduction of social status. The pornification of everyday life has been achieved by the elevation of pornography prostitution to the level of social status.
Pornography prostitution has been re-branded by capitalism as the new ‘cool’:
porn is cool, pimps and hos are cool, the Playboy logo is cool, DIY porn is cool, getting off on watching a prostituted woman gag and struggle under a quadruple penetration is
cool
. Once, pornography was associated with sexually frustrated old men; now pornography is associated with sexually successful, hip young men, women, and teens. Pornography is so cool that the global anti-capitalist movement have yet to really notice or fight it.
Combating the new cool social status of pornography is challenging. When people question their sexual and emotional investments in pornography they risk losing their ‘cool’ social status. However, this social status is a collective mask that hides the real face of global pornography. The sexual exploitation of living prostitutes to the point of death and beyond, the relentless violent degradation of the living bodies of women, children and men is nothing to gain cool social status from (see also Bray, 2011). And while pornography has been elevated to the level of social status and social capital, the global prostitution factory of pornography continues to thrive.
Time and time again, it has been proven that prostitution is both a symptom of women’s oppression and the foundation of a socio-economic system which treats women as sexual objects to be traded, abused, and discarded. As the shock and awe tactics of disaster capitalism smash through decades of workers’ rights across the world, plunging millions into poverty, more women will be forced to turn to pornography prostitution in order to survive. Women and children are always the poorest of the poor. These women cannot copyright their prostitution like Montenegro; they will not be in a position to negotiate for better pay with pimps. Many, like women immigrants and their children, will become sexual slaves in networks of human trafficking, their bodies turned into pornography. Pornography is a feminist issue, a social justice issue, a human rights issue and a socialist issue that requires urgent attention.