Violence

Open Access: No.

Abstract

Pornography has been perceived as existing separate from prostitution and trafficking. We suggest that pornography, prostitution, and trafficking overlap conceptually and empirically. We discuss similarities between pornography and other arms of the sex trade such as escort, street, or massage prostitution via a review of survivor testimony and existing research. Women used in the production of pornography suffer the same adverse antecedents as those in other prostitution including poverty, childhood sexual abuse, racism, domestic violence, and the cultural mainstreaming of sexism. These factors groom and channel women into pornography, with pornographers using the same controlling tactics employed by other pimps. In pornography, women are subject to physical and psychological harms that are the same as those harms in other prostitution. We offer recommendations for holding those who perpetrate sex trade harms – pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers – legally accountable. We conclude that pornography should be legally and conceptually understood as one variant of prostitution and trafficking..

Relevance

“It is often assumed that pornography is somehow separate from the rest of prostitution, but in this chapter, we explain the ways in which pornography is fully integrated into the multinational sex trade. There is similar exploitation and violence in all forms of prostitution, including sugar daddy/sugar baby prostitution, cell phone/escort prostitution, webcam prostitution, studio-produced pornography, massage brothel prostitution, street prostitution, and strip club prostitution.” In fact, studies show that at least 50% of all prostituted women have been in porn, often non-consensually.

As demonstrated by both research and survivor testimony, “The same kinds of violence against women are perpetrated in pornography, prostitution, and trafficking, including sexist verbal abuse, racist verbal abuse, degradation, physical and sexual assault, and acts that are identical to torture as defined by international legal conventions.” Women in pornography, as in other forms of the international sex trade, often have “multitraumatic” histories; they are, for example, “extremely likely to have been sexually abused as children.”

Pornography, too, like the wider sex trade, is also “profoundly racist.”

“Pornography production results in some harms that are different from non-filmed prostitution. More extreme and more violent acts are perpetrated in porn” such as “double or triple anal penetration, fisting, and a porn actor moving his feces-contaminated penis from the woman’s rectum directly to her mouth.” These acts may last for hours, as opposed to a short prostitution session, and result in psychological dissociation. Often, too, women in porn confront not just the violence of one man at a time, as in prostitution, but the violence of a group of men (actors, directors, cameramen, etc., at the same time). Pornographic violence, too, unlike most acts of prostitution, circulate the internet in perpetuity; it is “infinite prostitution.”

Citation

Farley, M., & Donevan, M. (2021). Reconnecting Pornography, Prostitution, and Trafficking: “The experience of being in porn was like being destroyed, run over, again and again”. ATLÁNTICAS – Revista Internacional de Estudios Feministas, 6(1), 30-66 https://dx.doi.org/10.17979/arief.2021.6.1.7312