PART FOUR
Pornography and the State
“I could make our home environment porn free, but as soon as we stepped outside into a shopping centre, past a bus stop, or to get petrol, there was a reminder. While my husband was trying to leave this part of his life behind, and we were trying to strengthen our marriage, we could not avoid it.” – Cate
“I have struggled with pornography for a long time and I hate it. I hate what it does to my mind and my perception of women. I hate how it can consume my thoughts. I hate the fact that I constantly fight to keep my mind free and I will have to fight for the rest of my life.” – Oliver
“I fear for future generations when ‘intelligent’ men are slaves to the need for ever increasing degrees of excitement rather than deepening intimate connection.” – Ginger
“I don’t want to view, read or encounter pornographic materials. Why is this so hard for so many people to understand … Why are the sexual desires of those who wish to use porn more important than those who don’t? Why should I have to change so many aspects of my life in order to avoid feeling violated, to protect my mind, to protect my child?” – Nicole
Anne Mayne
The Power of Pornography – A South African Case Study
1
There is verbal evidence from survivors of incest and childhood sexual abuse that pornography circulated in the dark, dank corridors of underground networks under apartheid in South Africa. When Diana Russell conducted a study on incest in South Africa in the 1990s, she found that as far back as 40 years ago, pornography was used to groom and intimidate children into lives of abuse. Survivors remembered being forced to watch movies and look at magazines, then forced to act out the sexual scenes (Russell, 1997). In those days anyone found in possession of pornography faced criminal charges and serious penalties.
With the end of apartheid and the release of Mandela in 1990, South Africa began to reassemble itself into a constitutional democracy under the African National Congress (ANC) government. While the Interim Constitution was being drafted in 1996, Frene Ginwala, a well-known leader in the liberation struggle, was asked to find an expert to draft a policy on pornography for the ANC. Ginwala invited Diana Russell, the internationally renowned feminist sociologist, activist and author of books on pornography and violence against women and girls, to undertake this task. Russell drafted a paper in which she cited evidence of the severe harm done to females who are victimised in the production of pornography, as well as those who are sexually abused by males acting out sex acts that they had been exposed to in pornography (Russell, 1998a). Ginwala’s response to Russell’s paper was total silence.
In August 1994, the then Minister of Home Affairs, Dr M. Buthelezi, appointed a Task Group to draft a new act to replace the existing Publications Act of 1974, the scope of which included the production and dissemination of pornography (van Rooyen, 1996, p. 172). This group began by researching and
consulting internationally, and concluded that a mere amendment of the Act would not remedy the situation, and that the current approach to pornographic material needed to reflect that there was a clear movement away from morality to whether it could cause harm (van Rooyen, 1996, p. 172).
At the same time that van Rooyen was conducting his research, a nationally circulated petition against the legalisation of pornography, drawn up by Pat and Horace van Rensburg’s organisation STOP Pornography, which drew 250,000 signatures, was presented to the then Minister of Home Affairs and later 1800 submissions were presented at the Portfolio Committee Hearings, 95% of which called for the government not to legalise pornography (pers. comm. retired MP Horace van Rensburg). These appeals from the public appear to have been ignored.
It took a mere 6 weeks for this research to be completed and the new Act to be drafted. The research of internationally recognised anti-pornography feminists, sociologists, legal experts and psychologists – plus a large sector of the South African public – was totally ignored in favour of the opinion of international patriarchal ‘legal experts’. Russell’s published revision of the recommendations she had previously sent to Ginwala was once again not responded to. (This legislation was passed in 1995 and enacted in 1996; pers. comm. Pat van Rensburg, February, 2011.)
The fact that the vast majority of the South African population was in a state of crisis – impoverished; denied adequate education; their communities destroyed by the slave-like migrant labour system, forced removals and a devastating HIV/AIDS pandemic – did not appear to concern those drafting this legislation which eventually allowed pornography to be sold in South Africa. It did not seem to occur to them that the proliferation of extremely misogynistic pornographic material would be harmful to masses of already vulnerable women barely surviving in an oppressive, male-dominated society.
From 1996, a number of anti-pornography groups began to be established. STOP Pornography inspired another effective and long-lasting campaigning group Standing Together to Oppose Pornography (S.T.O.P). By various means this group has achieved great success over the past 15 years – initially by getting pornography removed from convenience stores, gaining co-operation from local school principals and backing up the African Christian Action group who had succeeded in removing pornography nation-wide from supermarket shelves. They organised marches to raise public awareness, poster demonstrations at Council meetings, a community meeting and a widely attended conference. From worldwide sources they collected and edited information which was then printed
and handed to the chairperson of the newly created Film and Publications Board (FPB). S.T.O.P initiated workshops for the police and presentations at schools and continue to deliver them today. Importantly, their actions have resulted in credibility with Government. They now also run support groups for growing numbers of men addicted to pornography – increasingly younger in age – who are trying to break free. Throughout the years, their letters have been published in the main daily newspapers and S.T.O.P is frequently featured in the media (pers. comm. Doreen Meissner, Michele and Clive Human of S.T.O.P, 25 January, 2011).
The liberalisation of the previous legislation coincided with the emergence of a multifaceted sex industry which had not existed in the country before 1994. Sex shops, strip/lap-dancing clubs, escort agencies, massage parlors, brothels and visible evidence of mostly black women being prostituted on the streets appeared in cities all over the country. The normalisation of images of women and girls being sexually exploited in pornography – which led to the prevalence of images of women being sexually exploited in advertising – appears to have been the impetus for the sudden explosion of the local sex industry. This new women-selling industry now exploits a large number of poverty-stricken South African women and girls. In so doing, it has created yet another industry new to the country: sex trafficking. Those who drafted the legislation ignored the fact that the pornography industry, dependent on the commercial sexual exploitation of young and vulnerable members of society, is extremely lucrative for those who manufacture and control it.
Paradoxically, prostitution and associated activities, such as brothel keeping, lap dancing, selling of ‘indecent acts’, living off the proceeds of prostitution and procuring, has remained criminalised and, in fact, was strengthened by the criminalisation of the buyer in the Sexual Offences Amendment Act 2007. However, the policing of the sex industry appears to be a low priority with the South African Police Service.
Sheila Jeffreys (2009, p. 62) states that according to research by Ward and Day, the percentage of men prostituting women doubled in 10 years in the UK when hardcore pornography became mainstream in the early 1980s. Though the prevalence of prostitution in South Africa after the passage of this law is not known, a study by the Institute for Child and Family Development at the University of the Western Cape shows its devastating effects (Barnes-September et al., 2000). The findings of this research were that all the respondents, i.e. the prostituted girls, came from poor, abusive, dysfunctional backgrounds and some had been trafficked from rural areas, believing that they were going into domestic
work. One told of being videoed while having sex, clearly for pornography. She was an illiterate rural girl, and could not understand why they were videoing her.
Pornography has been visibly present in South Africa for 17 years and we are now a country that has one of the highest police-reported rape statistics in the world. Diana Russell noted in 1998 that “some people have argued that because the rape rate in South Africa is so high, and because pornography has only recently become much easier to obtain … this proves how insignificant pornography is as a cause of rape.” Her response was that “it proves no such thing … It merely means that the rape rate will become even higher” (Russell, 1998b). Her prediction, unfortunately, has come true: current rape rates in South Africa are exceedingly high.
The following illustrates how invasive the pornography business is. As soon as the news filtered out of South Africa that Mandela was going to be released and the ANC unbanned, the big pornography-producing companies in the US moved in to set up their offices in Johannesburg.
Hustler
was the first to establish itself in 1993 and
Penthouse
set up its office in Johannesburg in 1994 (Krouse, 2010).
Penthouse
had secured the right to publish a South African edition, with the explicit pornography left out, in 1991. The first South African edition of
Playboy
, along the same lines as
Penthouse
, came out in 1993 (see Russell, 1994). The new Film and Publication Bill (FPB) had not yet been drafted, they knew that the country was in a state of flux, and clearly the pornographers wanted to capture their market as soon as possible. As the US-funded industry was establishing itself, an Australian, Arthur Calamaris, moved in with the capital and stock to set up the Adult World chain of sex shops, which have now become established in all the major cities along with the sex shops of the chain Private that came later. Many smaller shops now sell pornography and even street sellers illegally display their usually pirated wares on the pavements at bus and taxi terminuses.
In the beginning, when pornographic magazines flooded into supermarkets and convenience stores, one heard distressed and angry women calling in to radio talk shows complaining that they and their children were being traumatized by sexual images in the magazines displayed in check-out areas and that pornographic publications were sometimes being placed adjacent to children’s magazines. Angry women called in saying that their husbands/partners were buying these magazines and leaving them around the house, and that they were disgusted and sexually turned off because their men wanted them to act the same way as the women in the magazines. These have been removed now as a result of pressure brought to bear by S.T.O.P.
But no one would have guessed then that, 17 years later, the very legislation
that was designed to protect children from exposure to pornographic images would have failed completely. Children have now become so pornified and so desensitised to sexual abuse that they are making pornographic videos of each other on their cell phones and even selling them! Nobody could even envisage then what is happening today. Children could well be prosecuted for making and distributing child pornography made by themselves (see also Funnell, this volume).
The legislation administered by the FPB does not allow an explicit sex act, as depicted in pornography, to be viewed by anyone under the age of 18 (X18), and these magazines, videos and DVDs can only be legally bought at sex shops by adults. However, the FPB did not anticipate the casual way adults would treat this material or the flood of hardcore pornography that children would be accessing accidently and/or knowingly on the Internet in the course of their school research or on their cell phones. A recent national survey of school children conducted by the FPB found that 81% of children between the ages of 13 to 17 had been exposed to pornography (Film and Publications Board of South Africa, 2008).
The proportion of the population who buy pornographic magazines, videos and DVDs from the sex shops is relatively small. This is the reason why
Playboy
folded after a few years, but the publishers intend to make a come back in March 2011. Pornography is expensive and out of the reach of the average working-class man, black or white; it filters into the low socio-economic communities in the form of second-hand copies and pirated videos. These are usually bought by individuals who accumulate this material and charge for viewing it, or men with a pimping agenda who use it to groom young girls into prostitution. Social workers and teachers have reported that there are certain houses in the townships where young people gather to view this material.
Recently there has been media excitement about the first locally-made black pornographic movie,
Mapona
, as well as about Tau Morene the movie-maker. He gave himself this name, which means ‘Lion King’ in Sesotho. His Website Sondeza (which means ‘come closer’) was given a lot of free publicity in the media. The gonzo pornographic material on this Website appears to contravene the law regarding the unlawful distribution of X18 material. A complaint is languishing at the FPB which appears to be beset with operational problems.
According to Patrick Meyer, general manager of Joe Theron Publishing, the company that warehouses and distributes
Mapona
, just days after its release the video had sold well over 3,000 copies at approximately R200 (US$30) a disc. Recent local films have been made in 3 to 5 days at a cost of about R150,000 (US$21,000), making it a lucrative proposition. Joe Theron Publishing is the
company that first brought
Hustler
magazine to the country. His company includes the Sting Music Company and a number of Afrikaans pornography magazines; he has built a pornography empire from his offices in Johannesburg (in Krouse, 2010).
Tau Morene has received thousands of Rands of free publicity from a popular national radio station, an e-TV political comedy show, and a double-page spread in what is regarded as a highly respected weekly newspaper, the
Mail & Guardian
. This newspaper, though claiming to champion a value system concerned with social justice and equality, under its previous name
The Weekly Mail
twice published articles publicising and promoting
Penthouse
(in Russell, 1994). Morene has been applauded for his ground-breaking enterprise: the first local, black, full-length pornographic movie made by the first local, black pornographer. His Website is also the first one created by a black pornographer. The journalist Matthew Krouse, who wrote the feature, claims that the story behind local black pornography,
… is really the story of the new South Africa. Urban Africans have gained the means of production – even owning the pornographic image is ostensibly empowering (Krouse, 2010).
So now industrialising black women’s vaginas is ‘empowering’! Krouse continues: