Workshop on The Beijing+ Conference in New York, June 2000 by Asta Håland & Ane Stø
The porn and prostitution industry is the third most profitable industry in the world after weapons and drugs. In the United States the porn industry is bigger than film and record industry together. It is an enormous industry, with an enormous machinery to protect its interests, including PR-consultants, journalists and media, and even academics.
We regard pornography as a kind of prostitution, since the women being used are paid for the exploitation of their bodies. It's absurd that in most countries prostitution is illegal, yet pornography is legal and defended as free speech. At the same time, pornography is the biggest promotion and publicity place for prostitution. Prostitution is not illegal in Norway, but there as well, some people try to maintain the distinction between pornography and prostitution.
We argue that pornography is degrading, and that degradation is sexualised and eroticized. And we are not exaggerating: In porn magazines we find "the world's most fabulous heroin addict", "the worlds most sexy murder victim." We read about pregnant Russian women at low-price-brothels. We read about those who want to be raped or fucked hard and brutally. All these examples are taken from mainstream pornography that you can buy in any kiosk in Norway.
We often meet the argument that porn is only fantasy and has no connection to violence against women. For those women who are used, battered and penetrated in the porn, this is not a fantasy. The movies are real, the prostitutes are abused by real men, photographers, pimps, John's (customers), and editors. Even if the users believe that porn is only fantasy, they are influenced by it, and the use of porn has an impact on their sex life.
Image 4 - cocktail 6/98
Editorial page, the ideal woman and body
This is the editor of Cocktail, who we find nicely presented on page three. During the 90ies, the Norwegian porn industry has tried to, and succeeded in, expanding their market through normalising porn and making it more "friendly to women". Most Norwegian porn magazines have female editors, to show that pornography is not oppressive to women. These so-called editors are of course porn models themselves. Hiring female "editors" is a strategy for selling more porn, and one of the biggest Norwegian porn magazines expanded their sale from 3000 to 30 000 when they hired a female editor. This has of course not changed the contents of the porn magazines.
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The Swedish sin wearing latex and leather
The sado-masochist trend has grown into all pornographic magazines. This article is identical to the rest, its about women who love their "job" and that are "exhibitionist". Look at this woman's face, she looks really frightened. Perhaps she's not as exhibitionistic as the article wants us to believe.
Image 8 - Cocktail 2/99
Barbara's perversions
This is Barbara, a 19-yearold from Ukraine. The article tells us that this is her first time in a pornographic movie. She's raped, tied up and abused in her "debut". So-called "white slavery" from Eastern Europe has grown to be an enormous problem, and from Ukraine we get reports about how the female part of the population is decreasing. After the Berlin Wall, 250 000 women has disappeared to Western Europe, most of them to the industry of porn and prostitution. Just imagine the fate of this young woman.
Image 10 - Aktuell Rapport
Please rape me
Common headlines in the porn magazines says things like: "Please rape me", "Humiliate me!" or "Please abuse me!". The message of these magazines is: Women want to be raped, brutally, women enjoy being abused and you should never respect a no from a woman, all she wants is to be raped. This has nothing to do with what these women have said or not said about their wishes, it's histories about humiliating women, and taking away all their dignity.
Image 13 - Aktuell Rapport 3/99
I'm denied extreme sex
The girl in this article says that she's tired of all the exposures of sexual abuse against children. Because of her young looks, and her wish for brutal sex, men are afraid of giving her what she wants. According to the porn industry, the disclosure of sexual abuse against children is a nightmare for women that look very young, because men don't dare to fuck them hard. That's obviously a problem for the porn industry.
Image 19 - Aktuell Rapport 3/99
Sexual invasion from the East
Few years ago, porn magazines were full of stories from Asia, especially Thailand and the Philippines. It's main function was as a guide for johns (customers) about sex-tourism in the third world. The last years, these articles have been replaced by similar ones from Eastern Europe. This change is about price and accessibility. Norway has got too many customers compared to the number of prostituted women. Earlier, Norway exported the customers for sex-tourism to Thailand and the Philippines. Now, there are so many poor white women, that prostitutes are imported from Norway's neighbouring countries. This is common through the whole of Europe, and in Norway we see it mostly in the northern parts of the country, along the Russian border.
The reports from Eastern Europe are similar to the ones from Thailand. The main point is that prostitution is cheap here, and that the women there are more submissive than the Norwegian women.
In the prostitution debate, many people claim that it's because of the prostituted women that prostitution exists. Our point is that this market survives by the customers, the johns. Poverty alone is not the cause of prostitution, also seeing women as goods to be bought is what makes it possible for men to buy women. Prostitution is mainly about rich, white men buying poor women, and it's an enormous worldwide industry.
Image 23 - Cocktail, unknown number
Personal ads
Pornographic magazines are also used for advertising bride-trade. Russian women travel to Scandinavia, and are bought by Scandinavian men. Russian Mafia arranges this trade. We also hear stories about Russian women who search for Norwegian husbands through contact bureaux. They are poor and wish for a better life. The Russian women pay the bureaux a lot of money, and the bureaux send their personal ads to Norwegian porn magazines. There's a huge contrast between these ads and the other ones on this page. Men send their naked pictures, say they've looking for "perverted women". In the ads from the Russian women we can read: " I like to travel, dance, drive a car, listen to music..." or "I love art, music, literature..." Imagine what the Norwegian men search for while contacting women whose ads they find in these porn magazines.
Norwegian shelters for abused women report about increasing numbers of Russian women contacting them, having experienced abuse and rape from their Norwegian husbands. The Russian women are have few rights in Norway, they have to choose between staying in an abusive marriage or sent back to poverty.
Surveys show conflicting results, maybe it depends on what questions you ask and how you choose to analyse the answers?
Robert Jensen, an American sociologist says:
"Isolating with any certainty the effect of one particular manifestation of misogyny (~omography) in a culture that is generally misogynist, is hopeless. In fact, the danger of pornography is heightened exactly because it is only one part of a sexist system, and because the message it carries, about sexuality is reinforced elsewhere. What is learnt from the testimony of women and men whose lives have been touched by pornography is how the material is implicated in violence against women, and how it can perpetuate, reinforce, and be a part of a wider system of women-hating.
This shows that it is not as simple that pornography cause rape, the connection is much more complicated. All the same we claim that porn works as the wedge of the ideology which says that women are for sale, that women are whores, that women are without human value.
The debates on freedom of speech in Norway usually are concerned about the freedom to extend hatred. Racism, hatred against black people or pornography hatred against women. Unfortunately so-called intellectuals often use their resources to fight for the freedom to spread hatred rather than fighting against the hatred itself, in reality they play the role of "useful fools", or as staunch supporters of porn industry.
Anyhow, for women and blacks, living of life and freedom of speech are already heavily limited by racism and misogyny
Accidentally all those writers who divorce pornography from reality are proponents of porn.
This fits nicely into the trendy post-modernistic ideology. Nothing is inter-related, there are no causalities. Nothing is general, all political questions are individual. The world is exposed as a more or less entertaining theatre, in which we can not (or need not) act consciously, but instead act as spectators, at a cool distance and with an ironic smile. There is no surprise that feminists around the world view the post modernism as dangerous for the women' 5 movement.
The porn industry has run a long and fairly successful campaign on making pornography accepted in the right circles of Norway. And until recently, Norway has been quite special regarding people's view on these matters. The Scandinavian model is both acknowledged and hated throughout the world.
Porn is misogyny, and when the feminists in the 70ies and 80ies campaigned against porn and prostitution, the women's movement won many victories. We
had a new Act on pornography in tile 80ies, which in fact is quite good, the main problem is that it is not used.
These victories were bad for the porn and prostitution industry. In the early 90ies, porn and prostitution started a new era in Norway, establishing brothels, offering telesex, and topples waitering. Also the porn magazines changed their image, they had female editors - earlier and present porn models should promote tile porn industry. And it worked. One of tile magazines, Lek, increased its number of copies from 3 to 30 000, and the other magazines followed. Journalists ran as horny dogs after these editors, and made them celebrities.
The price to pay for acting as editors, was of course that they. still had to perform as porn models. Women in porn are always whores.
Porn and prostitution aren't just about the victim of the situation, prostitution is making all women victims.
I would like to end with a citation of Gail Dines, from tile book "Pornography, the production and consumption of inequality"
"My experiences as an activist, have shown me the enormous gap that exists between those who work in academe and those who live in the real world of economic an sexual exploitation. The acadeniic discussions over the nature of the pornographic text, the problems of definition, the polysemic qualities of pornography, the work of Annie Sprinkle, and so on, are utterly removed from tile lives of the women who are the casualties of this multi-billion-a-year-industry. By refusing to deal with the realities of pornography, the pro-pornography academics have chosen to defend a multi-billion-a-year-industry and to ignore the ways in which pornography is implicated in the oppression of women.