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Private Worlds 2: Some Weird Sin
In the second of a series of articles on the darker side of
the New Technologies, Tony Keily examines the question of
pornography, filmed and otherwise, in the age of broadband
internet.
The vast majority of filmed fiction viewed globally is pornographic
or 'adult' in nature. Although it's increasingly difficult
to estimate the number of films produced in any given territory,
an educated guess would indicate that in Japan alone upwards
of 100 porn films are made every day [1].
Consumption of these films in every industrialised nation
must be as common as the consumption of many genres of mainstream
cinematic fiction. Yet only a minority of adults anywhere
admit openly to viewing pornography.F
From the 1960s on, liberalised censorship laws
in many countries did however bring the adult film industry,
relatively speaking, out into the open. Until then, exhibition
of 'blue' or 'stag' films had a variety of seamy underground
venues. In the 1970s adult performers became celebrities and
celebrities embraced porn. Francis Ford Coppola attended adult
awards ceremonies while Sammy Davis boasted in interviews
of regular showings of Deep Throat in his private screening
facility. Access to theatrically exhibited filmed pornography
was now cheap and safe, although not everybody wanted to be
seen crabwalking head-down into an adult theatre. Even that
problem was solved in the 1980s when, as Boogie Nights
relates, video killed the celluloid pornstar. For anyone who
didn't want to crabwalk into a sex shop, mail order was available
as a purchase route. By the early 1990s, the US was producing
2500 adult films a year. Japan was pumping out 10,000 [2].
Through the 1980s and into the 90s US mainstream fare was
often cheerfully straightforward, as in Debbie Does Dallas.
The standard plotlines are exemplified by the Coen brothers'
cameo porn video Logjammin' (from The Big Lebowski):
the TV repairman arrives to find that... 'me and my girlfriend
were just having a shower'. Well now isn't that a surprise?
For as long as video meant tape, delivery was
via a VHS player typically situated in the main room of a
home, at a pinch in the bedroom. DVDs were initially played
on similarly placed machines. But the internet and increased
RAM in portable computers soon allowed porn films to be both
ordered and viewed in an enclosed space of choice. The arrival
of broadband put paid to mail order, and in a matter of minutes
entire porn films could be downloaded and viewed, shorter
clips being available in a matter of seconds. Streaming was
another option. The relationship between the individual spectator
and their porn film had radically altered, all mediation and
social context having evaporated. After a brief flirtation
with daylight, porn had gone back to the dark: if the cinema
was a public venue, and video porn was conceivably home entertainment,
the internet implies just somebody alone in a room.
As we will see, the internet, regardless of
content, has from the outset alarmed conservative and fundamentalist
groups. There is nothing new in this: technological innovation
in entertainment has always had such an effect. But as has
just been noted, the New Technologies and the internet in
particular have some specific characteristics which aggravate
conservative technophobia. If, as has been suggested in another
article for Film Ireland [3],
TV-connected media are nucleating 'family' elements, New Technology
promises fragmentation through wandering (mobile devices)
and separation (PCs). The abandonment of the hearth breaks
up the family and allows avoidance of communal accountability:
'What is he doing on his own in that dark room?' The
internet has also caused confusion in non-users due to its
bundling of a variety of previously unrelated activities and
functions. For the inevitable 'concerned parent/spouse' of
anti-internet lore, their loved one is isolated and hooked
to a screen in the dark. The internaut, on the other hand,
may rightly consider themselves to be shopping, corresponding,
banking, scanning the morning papers, studying, working, researching,
telephoning, or being entertained. Their enclosure in a room
and their use of a PC are merely secondary, concomitant factors.
The religious fundamentalist objection to internet pornography
is presented within a paradigm featuring the individual as
a weak and fallen creature adrift in a perilous world, bereft
of autonomous will or wisdom, in need of the guidance and
protection of the Wise and Strong; technological innovation
and new media may bring improved access to this world, but
they also push the individual into contact with depraved material
which triggers buried impulses.
The paradigm is an inherited one. In an excellent
study examining children and the media, Ellen A. Wartella
and Nancy Jennings analyse societal attitudes in the US to
the introduction of successive waves of media/entertainment
technology, from cinema, through radio and TV, to the internet
[4]. The scenario in each case
is startlingly similar. The pro argument holds that better
access will bring culture, education, understanding, a better
world. Opponents fear depravity, sin, addiction: hooked, helpless
children leaving their supper uneaten, bent for hours over
a terrible squawking box offering 'lurid radio bedtime stories'.
The internet has reawakened such familiar phobias, which often
find expression in arguments echoing anti-drugs activism:
children 'as young as 11' are accessing sexually explicit
material, while good family men accidentally taste forbidden
fruit online, are hooked, and helplessly search out 'harder
and harder stuff' in a downward spiral of addiction.
The use of the word 'addiction' is significant.
In both the media and even in academic studies, individuals
are widely held to be addicted to internet, to pornography,
or to internet pornography [5].
Granted, not all internet enthusiasts and/or pornography consumers
can have an unproblematic relation to their interests. Some
of them may spend an inordinate amount of time online or use
their PCs for (in the parlance of the specialists) 'avoidance'
of the unpalatable realities of everyday life, with its frequent
disappointments and fragile relationships. But it has to be
asked how this in itself makes internet/porn/internet porn
dependency significantly different from avoidance-reliance
on shopping, sports, or pubs. Niccolo Ammaniti, a prominent
Italian author, was recently challenged on his alleged 'addiction'
to video games. He countered with news of his much more serious
addictions to music and reading. The point here is obvious:
we tend to call a consuming interest or dependency an addiction
when we judge its object or effects to be harmful or evil.
If the 'explosion' of pornography on the internet
had indeed led to widespread addiction, global figures for
adult movie sales should presumably reflect this to some extent.
But in the US, revenues from sales or rentals of adult video
products have been flat from 1997 to the present. It might
be countered that sales and rentals of DVDs are not a reliable
indicator on the basis that 'addicts' for some reason a) tended
prior to the introduction of broadband to be attracted exclusively
to still graphic material, and b) have preferred streaming
or downloading as a means of delivery thereafter. But the
relatively modest current sales estimates for adult internet
revenues excluding sale and rental of video (equivalent
in the US to proceeds from lapdancing joints) also deny this
possibility. Even if a majority of addicts viewed only free
material, the behaviour of a minority of 'paying addicts'
should nonetheless allow us to trace the lines of expansion
or explosion. And if the vast majority of pornophiles only
access free material, who supports the considerable bandwidth
rental costs of sites posting enormous volumes of graphic
files? [6]
In a perceptive and sometimes excellent Special Report entitled
'Net Porn' published in the Observer Review in 2003,
Decca Aitkenhead asserts that most of those who go online
in search of porn live in the happy delusion that their habit
will not affect their real lives [7].
The delusion, Aitkenhead goes on to say in what is the crunch
point of her study, is not supported by evidence: 'Here is
some evidence. Experiments were carried out on "normal"
men... for research by Edward Donnerstein, a prominent academic
and author. "On the first day," he reported, "when
they see women being raped and aggressed against, it bothers
them. By day five it does not bother them at all. In fact,
they enjoy it." Before long they got the feeling that
women were to blame for being raped, and actually quite liked
it. Even porn which wasn't violent made the men twice as likely
to say they felt aggressive towards women.'
Who was this Donnerstein and what was he researching?
He was one of a number of 'prominent academics and writers',
such as James B. Weaver, Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant
who had claimed to demonstrate links between the viewing of
adult video material and a variety of sociopathic attitudes
and behaviour. The research cited by Aitkenhead dated from
the 1970s. But by the 1980s Donnerstein had gone on to experiment
with the more sexually explicit new wave of video materials
and came to quite different conclusions. A serious academic,
he eventually made considerable efforts to distance himself
from the increasingly crude instrumentalisation of his early
work by fundamentalist groups. In 1988 he stated before the
Joint Select Committee on Video Material set up by the Australian
Government at the behest of conservative senator Brian Harradine
that:
...the sexually explicit X [American] rated
material of a very popular nature – films such as Debbie
Does Dallas, The Other Side of Julie, Inside
Jennifer Wells and other titles which I cannot remember
at the present moment – which do not contain physical
violence, did not produce any effects whatsoever... It is
those messages about violence, and messages about rape, which
tend to produce effects; not the graphicness of the material
and definitely not the sexual explicitness of the material.
I think research has been fairly conclusive... there is no
question that if you are dealing strictly with sexual material,
no matter how explicit, there has not been to my knowledge
in the last 20 years of research on the topic, any evidence
of any type of negative, asocial or damaging effect on individuals
so exposed to that material.[8]
The material Donnerstein had shown his students
in the '70s experiments which Aitkenhead cites was in fact
not pornographic, but simply 'explicit' footage culled from
from US network television and R-rated releases. He was able
to produce images of women being 'raped and aggressed against'
because the MPAA under Jack Valenti was happy to pass with
an R rating movies in which women were assaulted while notoriously
cutting or slapping the more severe NC-17 rating on films
in which women were seen to enjoy sex. [9].
This reflected a conservative view that the raped woman's
struggle represented resistance to sex and was therefore 'virtuous',
while the enthusiastic sexual activity of Debbie and her ilk
was viewed as the 'fallen' sluttishness of the 'Bad Girl'.
This bias consigned Debbie, 'harmless' though pornographic,
to a moral underworld of sex shops and mail order lists, while
Donnerstein's 'messages about violence, and messages about
rape, which tend to produce effects' could be freely accessed
on US screens, large and small [10].
The Harradine thesis continues to prosper in
the internet age and is one of the cardinal points of anti-pornography
prohibitionist activism and legislation across the globe.
After the killing of Jane Longhurst in England in 2003, there
were widespread calls for the banning of extreme online pornography
when it emerged that her boyfriend and murderer had been a
user of such material. In 2005 UK legislative proposals were
drafted prohibiting violent or extreme pornography and making
its possession an offence, at least partly in reaction to
public pressure following media reports of this and other
'internet-prompted' sex slayings [11].
It is however difficult to find evidence beyond
the anecdotal that could link sexual crime to the use of internet
pornography or adult film. Classic studies of the effects
of pornography on society by Milton Diamond and Burt Kutchinksy
– much criticised by prohibitionists - expressly decouple
sex crime from pornography [12].
The US 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography
(for some reason not called the Johnson Commission) came to
similar conclusions and even found that repeated and prolonged
exposure to pornography 'caused decreased interest in it,
less response to it and no lasting effect' [13],
in marked contrast to current concerns regarding addiction
following contact with adult material.
In line with such findings, statistics for most
EU territories indicate a drop, or at least no marked increase,
in sexual crimes through the internet years. There has however
been a notable increase in EU citizens' fear of and preoccupation
with crime of all sorts. In a representative survey conducted
in 2004 by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower
Saxony (KFN) in Germany, 2000 people were asked about their
perceptions of crime trends in the previous decade [14].
While respondents estimated that sexual murders in the Federal
Republic had increased by 260%, in that time, they had in
fact dropped by 37.5%. A KFN spokesman commented on the results,
saying 'You have to look at the way a lot of TV presents crime
stories. They are at the same time highly emotional and affect
people directly... When a child disappears, it interests everyone
and it often leads the newscast.' The Institute traced the
trend to the mid-1980s, when commercial television networks
appeared in Germany. Taking a lead from US TV, commercial
networks gave prominence to sensational sex/crime stories
over 'drier stories on topics like unemployment or government'
[15] in a bid to win ratings.
If an increasingly commercialised media is fixated on sex
and violence, it has a particularly harmful preoccupation,
as pointed out by the KFN, with stories involving children.
And of course the pervasive social fear and disorientation
promoted by sensationalist reporting are most acute when news
stories feature the young. Such fears are aggravated by the
ease with which 'factoids' put out by pressure groups and
others can find their way into the media, a prime example
being Time's famous 'Cyberporn' cover which claimed
in 1995 that 83% of all internet content was pornographic
[16].
Operation Ore, the UK police swoop on thousands
of individuals suspected of accessing pedophile pornography
in the UK in 2002, makes one of the stranger media stories
of the new century. Fom the outset, the story was hugely mediated:
in the UK, the BBC were 'accompanying' police through the
warm-up phase of the operation even before it was made public.
The television crews then sat in on the operational phase,
while in Ireland fierce print and broadcast interest was led
by a dedicated Late Late Show hosted by Pat Kenny.
The allegations were that hundreds of thousands of individuals
globally, and more than 7,000 in Ireland and the UK, had been
accessing child porn via a Texas site called Landslide, as
revealed by the Stateside police swoop Operation Avalanche.
The media, with the tabloids leading, fed voraciously off
the scandal, and the public, already bombarded by fear stories
in the wake of 9/11, was left stunned.
From the beginning something seemed badly wrong
with investigations. As has emerged, information supplied
by the US authorities to other countries was misleading and
defective, allowing suspicion to fall on many who had never
accessed child pornography [17].
But under pressure from the initial surge of publicity, Operation
Ore had to run its course. Although the BBC documentary on
the operation had been entitled Police Protecting Children,
only six months into the operation senior police figures were
complaining that it was putting children at risk. They were
being forced to pull more and more officers from child protection
units dealing with known offenders and actual cases of abuse
in order to perform often pointless arrest warrants [18].
Though many individuals possessing child porn were eventually
identified, the various actions stemming from US Operation
Avalanche were hugely expensive, extremely ineffectual as
a means of combating child abuse, and harmful both to the
wrongfully accused and to the children left exposed to abuse
by depleted police resources. To give an idea of the extent
of the mess, in Italy, where I am writing, the identities
of 1,200 suspects were initially revealed, the authorities
made a great show of being capable of combating child abuse
in the internet age, and not a single case has ever been successfully
prosecuted.
To make matters worse, the media projection
of the operation spread fear, confusion and hopelessness in
the population, who were made to feel helpless spectators
of a nightmarish hi-tech scenario. The mentioned Late Late
Show hosted a panel of experts who advised parents that
images and films retrieved contained material too offensive
to be imagined (though they had quite remarkably been shown
by police to a leading journalist on the panel – presumably
one of the Wise and Strong). The show's host took a well-worn
a line of questioning that led from the internet to accidental
porn access through addiction to the 'harder and harder' scenario.
Accidental access to child porn, it was suggested, through
a similar process of dissolution of the will, might even lead
to nascent pedophilia. Indeed the terms 'internet porn' and
'child porn' were and are constantly and confusingly linked.
Allegations often seemed to centre on technology rather than
actual offences: online victims in the new-tech age, abused
in realtime by pedophiles for the edification of others thanks
to webcams and digital cameras, were becoming younger and
younger [19]. The thirst for
child pornography on the internet was causing hundreds and
thousands of children to be abused. Other experts on the show
warned that the fact that material was explicit was in one
way irrelevant, since online predators would devour innocent
family pictures with equal hunger.
The print media magnified the confusion and
alarm. A piece in the Irish Examiner from Spring 2003
asked the question 'Fancy looking at graphic pictures of babies
or children being abused, tortured or raped?' with the answer
'It's just a click away' [20].
It went on to offer no doubt well-intentioned quotes from
members of UCC's COPINE unit ('It is a world outside the understanding
of people'; 'There is nothing to base an explanation of these
pictures on. You simply can't imagine what these images are
like.'; 'Many probation officers in Ireland don't even have
access to email, how are they supposed to deal with these
offenders?') which gave the impression of a problem not only
beyond control but beyond comprehension. The piece effectively
linked the 'new' phenomenon to the internet, digital technology,
broadband and cheap digital cameras. Typically it warned that
although 'some of the pictures would appear in any family
album' these pictures were subject to alchemical alteration
and became obscene images under the pedophile's gaze.
This last conviction, much repeated in the media,
soon led to widespread condemnation of all images of child
nudity in the UK and Ireland for fear that these might 'fall
into the wrong hands'. More worryingly, there seemed to be
the implication that there might be something intrinsically
wrong or obscene in all production of still or moving images
of children. According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology
at Kent University, 'When it comes to child protection, we
now regard almost every aspect of children's lives from the
pedophile's point of view, so that even the most innocent
activities – like taping a nativity play – have
a sinister connotation' [21].
There are ineluctable facts about online pornography. Almost
all sites offering porn are aimed at men. Despite progressive
claims regarding women and pornography, TGP sites guiding
internauts to pay-to-view material rarely if ever take women
consumers into account [22].
What is more, they all too often present their material in
language typified by the 'cum-slurping sluts' cited by Decca
Aitkenhead [23]. It would
be nice to think that there are thousands of independently-minded
women out there using the fantasies of men to further their
chosen career. But the distinct impression is that many of
the dozen or so Japanese porn films made every hour feature
distressed late teenagers putting up with semen showers or
multiple-penetration gang rape scenarios in an attempt to
scrape together enough cash for the next hit, or maybe dinner
if they can keep it down.
Looking at this situation, it's hard not to
see the appeal of the arguments of so-called Second Wave feminists,
with their direct and ethically-grounded stances (sometimes
expressed in terms which may appear extreme or dystopian).
The notoriously 'sex-negative' Andrea Dworkin saw all forms
of pornography and sex work as symptomatic of the enslavement
and abuse of women by men, and therefore damnable. It's certainly
true that while adult films on the internet may not cause
crime, rape, or addiction, many of them do seem to portray
and endorse the 'enslavement and abuse of women by men'. And
the notion that such filmed pornography may have a preventive
effect in relation to sexual crime can also be decoded as:
'Give me porn or I'll rape you' [24].
So-called Third Wave feminism does, on the other
hand, contemplate more relativist positions which would not
automatically exclude pornography or sexual work as unacceptable,
and in some cases advocates the use of pornography by women
as progressive. The Third Wave perspective is attractive for
its optimism and has been exemplified by the careers of several
of the more successful mainstream adult actors who have been
able to perform and live on their own terms [25].
Some well-known porn stars refuse to have penetrative sex
at all, specialising instead in softcore 'erotica' which at
times does not involve even nudity. Significant segments of
the adult market are given over to these retro-Betty Page-style
soft-core/fetish images, featuring 'empowered' stars such
as Marilyn Manson's partner Dita Van Teese. The companies
who monopolise adult film in the US often pay well, appear
to care for their performers, and offer largely 'traditional'
pornography to their audiences [26].
But Third Wavers are quick to admit the limitation of a Utopian
view: the sex trade is rarely an easy career option, as witnessed
by the documentary feature The Annabel Chong Story,
in which Chong's attempts at portraying herself as a strong
woman making her own choices rang sadly hollow [27].
As has been argued, there may be an unduly negative
view of online adult film of the basis of supply-oriented
analysis (of countless small-time operations offering extreme
material) rather than consumption (mainstream demand for 'conventional'
adult movies and erotica). This leaves us with a conundrum:
although most adult performers are almost certainly not well-treated,
a great deal of the adult cinema consumed features a small
number of well-known stars who fare much better.
Many anti-pornography activists including Dworkin
have insisted that there can be no distinction between hard
and soft, mild and extreme [28].
There is however, an evidently available if not unproblematic
dividing line. On the one hand there are images or films which
portray consensual activity ('normal sex' would be a foolish
tag to apply) of almost any type. On the other hand there
are images of non-consensual activity including extreme debasement,
humiliation or violation of various types, the infliction
of pain where role-play or agreement is not involved, or images
in which the object/recipient of sexual activity is evidently
drugged or distressed. Given the fictional nature of many
filmed scenarios, the exact location of this line will always
be problematic.
Unfortunately the New Technologies have probably helped to
worsen the plight of most adult film performers. The boom
in cheap digital technology in the '90s sent budgets plunging
[29]. Since the majority of
resulting productions have had to compete for that small share
of a stagnant market not monopolised by the adult Majors,
a favoured marketing tactic has been to offer 'niche' material,
often extreme. As the number of productions continues to grow,
revenues per production drop, and so it must be presumed that
non-mainstream actors are receiving very little remuneration
for performance of often violent and debasing acts that have
little to do with consensual sexual activity. Prior to the
introduction of broadband, simulation was an easy option since
still material implied intermittence. But broadband has meant
that most online pornographic material is video, and many
movies are filmed in long unbroken takes that require little
editing input but which make simulation more difficult. To
make matters worse, thanks to the internet producers of extreme
material operating in territories which offer at least some
protection to performers and their rights are under competitive
pressure from operations in territories which either do not
offer such protection or, more likely, do not enforce it.
Censorship, however, can only realistically
be endorsed for films which can be shown to portray actual
illegal situations, and, even here, its application will be
ineffective and offer little help to victims and little deterrence
to offenders. Although censorship in the area of child pornography,
however ineffective, is obligatory, the authorities need to
be much more careful of confusing the protection of children
with the combating the visual representation of assaults:
to date, identification of abused children appearing on the
net has been both difficult and resource-draining. This at
a time when 50% of Lithuanian prostitutes are thought to be
minors, as many as 30,000 minors prostitute themselves on
the streets of Italy, and a so-called 'free zone' for child
prostitution reportedly exists along the Czech border with
Germany [30]. Tabloid-driven
legislation, especially in the UK, often seems to designed
to offer therapeutic relief to confused adults rather than
actual help to children [31].
The harm caused with the aid of New Technologies
has to be balanced against the enormous good brought by the
same innovations. The community-making capacity offered by
the internet, notoriously abused by pedophiles, is of great
benefit to the isolated, the lonely, the uninformed and the
unempowered. The truth is that the internet has brought more
of everything: more porn, more information, more communication.
Somebody has pointed out (though this may be a factoid) that
more people have used the internet to access greetings cards
than porn, but for some reason this statistic doesn't make
it to the headlines. Similarly, it may be that many consumers
soon tire of adult material in line with the findings of the
US 1970 Presidential Commission, but for the time being addiction
makes for hotter news.
Whatever the case, the evident omnipresence
of expicit sexual material on the net means it has ceased
to be 'forbidden' and become a part of the world. In every
sense, it has to be looked at. And as with most shadowy corners,
observation allows fear to yield to reason. There may thus
be more discussion and education in regard to all sexual matters,
especially in Anglo-Saxon puritain cultures such as the US,
Britain and Ireland, with their innate distaste for nudity
and bodily functions. As a consequence, there may be more
reflection on the extent to which our judgement of pornography
is based on a skewed Valenti-type squeamishness which is quite
content with most forms of non-sexual onscreen excess [32].
Sexual activity may have to be dicsussed as a civil right,
who knows, maybe even as a healthcare issue, for both men
and women, able and disabled. And if pornography becomes part
of the world, there may be more effort to protect the rights
of adult performers and other sex workers. There may be more
studies of Japanese pornography which critically analyse the
social topography and hidden needs of a culture which produces
vast quantities of very extreme adult film [33].
In any case, from now on, people will have to start looking
or not looking at certain types of image for their own good
reasons, and on their own responsibility. Could it be that
we will all have to grow up?
1. See my article 'Porn
Sells?' on this website for the background to this estimate.
2. See 'The Effects of Pornography: An International
Perspective' and 'Pornography Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan',
both by Milton Diamond available on the University of Hawaii's
Pacific
Center for Sex and Society website.
3. See my article 'Stuck
Inside of Mobile' on this website for further discussion
of the geographics of domestic delivery.
4. 'Children and Computers: New Technology
– Old Concerns' By Ellen A. Wartella and Nancy Jennings,
available on www.futureofchildren.org
5. See 'Child Pornography and the Internet:
Perpetuating the cycle of Abuse', by E. Quayle and M. Taylor,
page 24, for a serious discussion of the phenomenon of 'addiction',
available on www.copine.ie
6. See my article 'Porn
Sells?' on this website for the background to this paragraph.
7. 'Net Porn' Decca Aitkenhead, The Observer,
March 30, 2003, available on www.guardian.co.uk
8. Details on the Harradine Commission from
'The X-rated Hoax' on www.libertus.net
9. Jack Valenti's preferences are discussed
in the recent feature doc This Film Is Not Yet Rated.
A sample discussion of the issues raised can be seen on the
Detroit Free Press website.
10. It's also worth noting that Harradine's
Select Committee, feeling let down by their key specialist
witness, promptly buried Donnerstein's statement, giving prominence
instead to studies by John Court, a 'Christian psychologist',
which supported a core thesis coupling video pornography to
sexual crime. The same Court had previously provided opinions
to the UK Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (Williams
Committee) in 1979, which concluded: 'We reject his evidence
and, to the extent that they rely on it, those who quote him.'(Quoted
from 'The X-rated Hoax' on www.libertus.net.)
11. See 'Kneejerking off to Violent Porn'
by Brendan O'Neill and 'Indecent Proposals' by Sandy Starr
on www.spiked-online.com.
12. For samples of their work see note 2
above and 'Pornography, sex crime and public policy' on www.aic.gov.au/publications/proceedings/14/kutchinsky.html.
Diamond's study of the Japanese adult entertainment sector
after liberalisation in the 1980s seeks to show that although
an enormous number of adult material was legally produced
and distributed, including many very extreme 'abuse' films,
sex crimes of all sorts dropped for the period. Diamond's
conclusion, in contrast to Donnerstein's reservations about
violent material, was that even films which portrayed women
in the most debased and humiliating situations did not seem
to lead to actual assaults. He even speculated, controversially,
that such material had a preventive effect. Kutchinksy made
a similar study of more general availability of pornography
in Europe in the '80s and '90s and came to similar conclusions,
although he was even more outspoken in his emphasis of the
potential positive effects of pornography. In addition, these
and other authors often point to the fact that those committing
sex crimes most commonly come from conservative and sexually
repressed backgrounds in which they had no access to pornography
and/or little knowledge of sex in their formative years.
13. The Commission is discussed by Diamond
in the articles noted in 2
and is also the subject of a brief wikipedia article. The
actual conclusion was 'there was insufficient evidence that
exposure to explicit sexual materials played a significant
role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behaviour.'
Findings on exposure to adult material were the result of
experiments conducted at the behest of the commission on male
college students.
14. All details on the KFN are taken from
a Deutsche Welle article 'Safer Streets, Growing Fears' by
Kyle James, posted 16.06.05 on www.dw-world.de
15. This quote from the DW article itself,
not from KFN.
16. In relation to 'factoids', children
and the media, see – 'Sex, Lies and Statistics' by Seth
Lubove, which appeared 11.23.05, on www.forbes.com.
It traces the lineage of a factoid put out by in 2005 US senator
Blanche Lincoln when introducing the Internet Safety &
Child Protection Act which levied a 25% on internet porn sales.
She claimed in support of the measure that US children typically
accessed pornography online at the age of 11. A series of
pre-internet factoids was famously generated in 1976 by TV
journalist Robin Lloyd in his book For Money or Love.
This led to the Council of Europe to publish a figure estimating
that about two million US children were involved in child
prostitution! The Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission
(ILIC) looked into these claims and found that police and
justice functionaries had not been able to discover organised
groups of teenage and child prostitutes anywhere in the US,
despite widspread targeted investigations (see 'The Trade
in Child Pornography' by Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rossen
on the website of the Institute
for Psychological Therapies, Amsterdam).
17. Most details from 'Operation Ore Exposed'
by Duncan Campbell from the PC Pro Website 01.07.05 (www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed.html).
In the UK and Ireland, all credit card holders on Landslide's
SQL database were targeted by investigations. The US authorities
who had supplied the information to London and Dublin, however,
restricted their own investigation to the homes of 144 individuals
from a total of 35,000 card holders. This was because Landslide's
primary business was supplying an Adult Verification Service
(AVS) to those wanting to access adult sites legally. The
card records of such individuals had been dumped unsorted
into the company's database along with those subscribing to
Keyz, another later Landslide service offering access to a
bundle of several hundred sites worldwide. Some of these sites
in turn contained or linked to images of children and of child
abuse, although this was not something automatically evident
to subscribers. The US investigators sending out lists to
the UK and Ireland gave the contrary impression: all
card holders in the Landslide database had knowingly accessed
child porn, in that the front page of Landslide site offered
a clear choice as to whether or not internauts wanted such
access. This, it has emerged, was entirely false. (The original
front pages can be seen as rebuilt by computer forensics on
the PC world site: www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed.html).
Although some did access child porn via the Keyz service,
thousands of others had simply used Landslide to obtain an
AVS password which would allow them to comply with US legislation
on adult site access aimed at protecting children.
18. One explanation for the trend in online
child pornography to feature ever younger children and more
explicit material might be connected to the fact that the
great majority of images posted online up to 2002 were very
old – between 15 and 40 years, in fact. My guess is that
this was because most of such images came from commercial
pornography sold relatively openly in Europe and the US up
to the early 1980s (see 'The
Trade in Child Pornography' by Jan Schuijer and Benjamin
Rossen on the website of the Institute for Psychological Therapies,
Amsterdam). Such 'legal' child porn generally featured subjects
aged 12 and over and for fear of prosecution observed certain
limits. Contemporary producers of illegal child porn are not
bound by any restrictions in regard to age or subject matter.
This sort of little-aired fact might have helped the public
to understand the dynamics of the problem behind the 2002
scandal, but it would probably not have sold as many papers.
19. See 'Operation Ore "puts children
at risk"' 27.01.03 from news.bbc.co.uk By early 2003,
only 10% of suspects (i.e. those appearing in the Landslide
database) had been identified in London, let alone charged.
Even where prosecutors decided to bring charges against identified
suspects, cases were often thrown out in court because no
knowing access to child pornography could be demonstrated.
One specialist witness, Duncan Campbell, indicates that all
four cases he assisted in were dismissed. But he also indicates
that pressures on identified suspects were huge, leading to
three dozen suicides in the UK alone.
20. See 'Porn
Portal' by Colette Keane See Irish Examiner 21.04.03
(achives.tcm.ie). To understand properly the issues being
discussed: www.copine.ie
21. See 'What is a pornographic photograph?'
by Jon Silverman, The Guardian, 18.12.02, available
on www.guardian.co.uk.
The particular comment quoted was in response to an edict
by the Edinburgh city council restricting videoing of nativity
school plays. .
22. See 'Whatever Turns You On' by Anna-Marie
Fitzgerald and Phoebe Frangouland, a Guardian Special Report
on women and pornography, 09.06.06 www.guardian.co.uk
23. Take for example an online description
of the Japanese film Sweet, relatively tame on the
standards of that country: 'Miku Tanaka is a submissive young
girl who likes to be treated as a sex object. She is approaching
her master licking his feet and sucking his large cock. He
headfucks the girl until she almost chokes, then she gets
behind him, jerking him from the rear while eating his asshole
out. Soon she is spreading her pink and lets her master fuck
her with his big cock. She rides on him in reverse cowgirl,
which is always a nice sight, looking at the round buttcheeks
while the rod is thrusting in and out. A Japanese doggystyle
is performed thereafter, where she is held by her arms, pushing
through her back so that we can admire her perfect butt some
more. She gets finished off in a frontal position, eventually
receiving a cumshot into her mouth.'
24. See Pornography – Men Possessing
Women, by Andrea Dworkin, 1981, ISBN 0-399-50532-6.
25. Details on careers of individuals adult
performers are available on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_porn_stars
26. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pornographic_movie_studios
for details on individual studios and policies.
27. See also 'Feminist Approaches to the
Sex Industry' by Barbara Sullivan, www.aic.gov.au/publications/proceedings/14/sullivan.html
28. Dworkinists would argue that sociological
conditions make it impossible for a woman to offer consent,
or for any male-fashioned sexual representation to be ordinary
or dignified. But given the societal grounding of such criticism,
it could be countered that pornography is merely an extension
or expression of attitudes prevalent in the world.
29. For further background on the US adult
'Majors' see Forbes.com:
'Stock Focus: Adult Entertainment Companies', 05.23.01; 'How
Big Is Porn?', 05.25.01; 'Obscene Profits', 12.12.05; 'The
Porn King', 03.07.05.
30. Estimates taken from article 'Chi difende
i pedofili in rete?' published in La Repubblica delle Donne,
No. 517 .
31. See 'Surfing with a safety net' by Sean
Hargrave, 29.06.06, www.guardian.co.uk
on the limited efficacy and considerable cost of most measures
aimed at blocking illegal material.
32. I've just watched Red Dawna
1980s mainstream Hollywood film by John Milius, which portrays
mass and summary execution, torture, bombing, blood-drinking,
murder and attempted rape in a teen setting. The Guinness
Book of Records decided it was the most violent film of
all time (2.23 acts per minute!). Interestingly, it received
a PG-13 rating in the US but was banned in Finland. Set against
Milius's piece of provocation, it's difficult see what's objectionable
about two people getting it on for the camera.
33. Japanese sex films are well-known for
their strange, extreme and fetishistic content which often
portrays non-consensual acts and almost shirk the everyday
sexual behaviour favoured by US adult cinema US. It is easy
to trace links between this underground production and the
contemporary films of Takashi Miike (think particularly of
Audition, Ley Lines and Dead or Alive)
or the '60s art-trash films of Suzuki Seijun and Koji Wakamatsu.
An interesting feature of Japanese adult films is that it
is very often set in routine work and study situations which
involve relationships of power, submission, control and repression.
These relationships are translated into pornographic scenarios
in which bosses seduce/assault employees, office workers seduce
cleaners, cleaners attack office workers, doctors seduce nurses,
nurses are attacked by patients, doctors are attacked by nurses,
teachers are attacked by students and so on. It would be interesting
to trace a link between the emphasis on self-effacement, self-control,
non-violence and obedience in Japanese culture and these fantasies
of absolute transgression.
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