"Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle"
~ by Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges
This excellent book includes a chapter entitled "The Illusion of Love," that tells the harsh and painful truth about the reality of the abusive and destructive pornography industry. (As opposed to the glamorized PR version promoted by the pornography industry that pornography is just fun, safe and harmless.)
Below on this page are selected excerpts from this chapter, as compiled by AntiPornography.org. Please refer people to this website with a link to read them rather than reposting them at other sites. Thank you. Note: Scroll down page for a VIDEO of Chris Hedges speaking about the harms and abuses of pornography.
Please support the author and the book by buying it at Amazon.com or elsewhere. The whole book is very thought provoking, extremely informative, and is highly recommended.
CAUTION: VERY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING CONTENT AHEAD.
So please proceed accordingly and at your own risk.
Book excerpts that tell the truth about the harsh reality of pornography.
--from Chapter 2 of "Empire of Illusion," - "The Illusion of Love"
Page 62-63
Adult video companies such as JM Productions and Extreme Associates, which includes graphic rape scenes in its array of physical abuse of women, make no attempt to hide the pain and acute discomfort endured by the women. The pain and discomfort are the major draws of the productions. JM Productions pioneered "aggressive throat-fucking" videos such as the Gag Factor series, in which women have penises pushed all the way down their throats until they gag or vomit. On the Gag Factor Web site, the producers promise "The best throat-fucking ever lensed." It offers still shots of women being "face-fucked." One typical description of a film begins with the standard brief summary, as if the women were criminals with a rap sheet: "Degraded on: 10/8/08. Name: Ashley Blue... Age: twenty-five. Status: Happy? Home Town: Thousands Oaks, CA." It shows a picture of a woman with black hair lying on her back with her eyes closed. Her face is covered with semen and a penis is buried in her throat.
"Here's Your Retirement Party," the description of the film reads. "As many of you will remember, for quite a long time super whore Ashley Blue was the official JM contract whore. But like the sole of an old shoe, porn whores eventually wear out and have to be thrown away. So, our way of throwing a retirement party for Ashley was to have her head get piston fucked one last time. Enjoy!"
Regarding porn star Jessica Lynn, 23, page 66
"I love watching my husband fuck other girls, watching him make her feel good." She has been in scenes, she said, that "got too violent and rough and one where one of the men began to eat his own come." She said she is saving money for college and has stayed away from drugs. "A lot of girls have breakdowns," she says. "They call me. I have numerous calls. They're freaking out about their life and are usually on drugs."
Page 67-68
The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most porn stars are also prostitutes. They charge a range of fees, usually in the thousands of dollars, to fans on porn escort Web sites.
When I ask ex-porn actress Jan Meza, who once did a scene in which twenty-five men had sex with her, how she would describe the producers and directors of the porn industry, she answers curtly: "Pimps." Porn stars make anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 an hour as prostitutes. (Patrice) Roldan would, along with other porn actresses, be flown into a city, including New York, and stay at a hotel for week. They would meet clients in their hotel room.
(Shelley) Lubben says the AVN convention and awards ceremony brings together high-priced porn stars and clients.
"Ninety percent work as prostitutes," she says. "They meet a lot of their big clients in Vegas during this convention. There is really big money being made by some of these women at night, as much as $2,000 an hour."
The most famous porn actresses can make as much as $30,000 a week as hotel bound prostitutes. Clients "would see you in the film and they wanted you to be exactly the same way," Roldan says. "It was uncomfortable to meet some married stranger. I would walk around these cities and feel sad and empty. No one cared about me. My agent didn't care. All I had was money and nothing else."
The most successful porn films keep pushing the physical and emotional boundaries of the women on screen and incorporate an expanding array of physically and verbally abusive acts.
Ariana Jollee, twenty-one, is sitting in a motel room beside a particle-board desk and a bare white wall, giving a pre-film interview 65 Guy Cream Pie, produced in 2005 by Devil' s Film. She has sex with sixty-five men beside the indoor pool of a Prague resort during the film. She is smiling at the camera. Jolle has sleek, dark hair with bangs, a tribal tattoo encircling one bicep, and wears jeans and a loose black tank top. She has rounded arms, full cheeks, and a slightly heavy chin. Jollee started doing porn in 2003, when she was 20, debuting in a film called Nasty Girls 30. She has done hundreds of films and was one of the industry's premier gonzo girls, purportedly enjoying extreme abuse. Jollee tells the camera that she performed in a twenty-one-man gang bang on her twenty-first birthday. She says she's looking forward to doing the same now with fifty men, although this number climbs to sixty-five on the set. "Cream pie" refers to men ejaculating in a woman's anus or vagina, rather than ejaculating on her body.
"I'll be banging fifty guys - fifty, fifty, fifty! Maybe more even. That'd be cool. So I'm like really excited."
She laughs and plays with her hair. "And it just so happens that all these guys are going to be coming IN me." She looks coyly at the camera. "In the ass and pussy," she grins, wrinkling her nose. "See I like it in the ass the best. I wanna zxxfind the biggest pervert and get him to suck all fifty loads out and spit it in my mouth." She reaches up and fiddles with her bangs. "That'd be so good. That'd be fucking hot. It'd be disgusting." She giggles. "I get off on that." She runs her fingers through her hair, fanning it out behind her.
"It's a big, big fantasy, always been a big fantasy of mine to be with more than one guy at a time. Many women have that fantasy" Her voice drops to a whisper. She wrinkles her nose and narrows her eyes. "You have all these men, and they all wanna fuck you, and they're all there, and it's just like, cock, holy shit. It's so good. So good. Now I'm getting wet," she complains, giggling. Her feet are up on the seat of her chair, and the camera pans down briefly to the exposed crotch of her jeans. She demurely pops her thumb in her mouth, still smiling, gazing at the camera.
"If you're watching this before the scene, you're in for a fucking treat. Each one of those motherfuckers is gonna, you know, it's gonna be the ride of their lives." She nods thoughtfully. "But, who knows," she throws her hands in the air, "maybe they'll fuck me up. Maybe they'll really, like, teach me a lesson." She throws a small smile at the camera. She scratches her knee absently. "We'll just have to wait and see. Maybe I'm not as insatiable as I think I am. We'll see. I'm excited."
She concedes that when it is over she will "look like shit" but will be "well fucked." The interviewer asks what condition her vagina and anus will be after having sex with that many men. She speaks of her body parts in the third person: "They can take it. They want it. They like it. They go back to size after. Pussy's tight. She always goes back to size." The degradation she endures has turned her body into something she no longer consciously recognizes as herself.
She talks briefly about her private life in the interview. She says that before she did gangbangs in films she once had sex with 12 men on a fire truck. She does not say how old she was at the time, but her remarks suggest she was a teenager. "It was so good," he says. "I will thank that man who took me there every day for the rest of my life. I still talk to him; he's a really good friend of mine. He's a pervert but I love perverts. I like free people."
Her enthusiasm, as she relates this story on the fire truck, momentarily fades. There is a brief tremor that crosses her face, an almost imperceptible sign of ambiguity or doubt. The fleeting impression when she falls out of character is that the experience of being taken to a fire house by a friend who is "a pervert" and having sex with 12 men on a truck was not sexy or exciting, that for a teenage girl the experience was perhaps not the result of being free or the product of sexual desire. She quickly snaps back into the pornographic facade. She says "I hope everyone gets off. I plan on cumming."
(Note: A full graphic description of the gang bang then follows in the chapter for several pages. The following is a one paragraph summary from the book.)
Page 70
65 Guy Cream Pie takes six hours to film. Jollee has oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal with sixty-five men. They ejaculate into and onto her body. When the shoot is finished, the last man heaves himself off Jollee. In a behind-the-scenes DVD bonus, she clambers up and stands on the curlicued iron bed. She is naked. Her body is covered in semen. Her hair is tied back. She jumps off the stained, pink mattress on to the tiled pool deck. She bounces up and down in front of a large potted palm, laughing gleefully.
Page 72
Jollee was also featured in the 2005 JM Productions release Swirlies, in which the male performer dunks the woman's head into a toilet after sex and flushes. The company promo for the film promises that "every whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her."
In Swirlies, Jollee comes to the door of the house and meets a man named Jenner. She tells Jenner that his little brother has given her little brother a swirlie at school. There is less than a minute of the usual stilted dialogue before the sex scene begins. There's oral, vaginal, and anal penetration in a variety of positions, with many close-up shots of the performer's genitals. The oral penetration includes deep thrusting that causes Jollee to gag. Jenner finely ejaculates on Jollee's face. He then takes her to the bathroom for a swirlie.
Page 72
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of unlimited male power, but today it also involves expression of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out onto the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and super patriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.
The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified, could be stills from porn films. There is a shot of a naked man kneeling in front of another man as if performing oral sex. There is a naked man on a leash held by a female American soldier. They are naked men in chains. There are naked men stacked one on top of the other in a human pile on the floor, as if in a prison gang bang. And there are hundreds more classified photos, many privately viewed by members of Congress, that show forced masturbation by Iraqi prisoners. Prisoners are made to pose for the camera in simulated sexual acts. And there are reportedly pictures of sexual intercourse among the guards. The photographs reflect the raging undercurrent of sexual callousness and perversion that runs through contemporary culture. These images speak in the language of porn, professional wrestling, reality television, music videos, and the corporate culture. It is the language of absolute control, total domination, racial hatred, fetishistic images of slavery, and humiliating submission. It is a world without pity. It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects. It is a reflection of the sickness of gonzo porn.
Torture and pornography inevitably converge. They each turn human beings into submissive objects. In porn the woman is stripped of her human attributes and made to beg for abuse. She has no identity as a distinct human being. Her only worth is as a toy, a pleasure doll. She exists to gratify any whim that a male decides is pleasurable. She has no other purpose. Her real name vanishes. She adopts a cheap and usually vulgar stage name. She becomes a slave. She is filmed being degraded and physically abused. This film is sold to consumers, who, in turn are aroused by the illusion that they too can dominate and abuse women. They, too, can be torturers.
Three of the alleged torturers in Abu Ghraib were women. They appeared to be willing participants. Porn has become so embedded and accepted in the culture, especially among the young, that sexual humiliation, abuse, rape, and physical violence have merged into a socially acceptable expression, once fear of retribution is removed. Absolute power over others almost always expresses itself through sexual sadism.
"My whole reason for being in the industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don't care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the woman they couldn't have when they were growing up," Bill Margold, a performer and producer of porn, has said. "I strongly believe this, and the industry hates me for saying it.... So we come on a woman's face or somewhat brutalize her sexually: Were getting even for their lost dreams. I believe this. I've heard audiences cheer me on when I do something foul on screen. When I've strangled a person or sodomized a person or brutalized a person, the audience is cheering my action, and then when I've fulfilled my warped desire, the audience applauds."
A performer known as Max Hardcore, currently in prison in Florida on obscenity charges, pioneered many of the forms of physical abuse now widely embraced by the industry. He was the first to perform anal fisting and "face-fucking." He placed lighted medical speculums in the vagina and anus. He urinated on women, often directly into their mouths. He slapped woman around, tied them up, thrust their heads into toilets and flushed, pulled their hair, threw them onto the floor, and called them bitch, whore, cunt, and slut.
The women in porn plead to be abused. They call themselves whores and sluts. They are beaten and penetrated by groups of men. Their faces are covered with semen from dozens of masturbating men, their anuses penetrated repeatedly by lines of partners, and they are raped. The women portrayed in the films exist to fulfill the desires of men in the most degrading and painful way possible. Nearly all porn dialog includes lines from women such as I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.
Page 86 -- 87
Porn has evolved from the airbrushed misogyny of glossy spreads in Playboy and smutty films sold in seedy shops. It is corporate and easily available. Its products today focus less on sex between a man and a woman and increasingly on groups of men beating off on a woman's face or tearing her anus open with their penises. Porn has evolved to its logical conclusion. It first turned women into sexual commodities and then killed women as human beings. And it has won the culture war. Pornography and the commercial mainstream have fused. The publicity photo for the porn production company Wicked could be lifted from a Victoria's Secret catalog. The lacy brassieres and thongs, candelabras, stilettos, windswept hair, strings of pearls, and arched backs are staples of mass culture. The wars fought by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem to free women from sexual tyranny have been defeated by a cultural embrace -- by both men and women -- of bondage and objectification. Stripping, promiscuity, S&M, exhibitionism, and porn are mainstream chic.
Sexual callousness and emancipation have become synonymous. Fashion takes its cue from porn. Music videos feature porn stars and pantomime porn scenes. Commercials and advertisements milk porn for shock value. The grainy sex tapes of vacuous celebrities from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton enhance their allure as porn icons. Madonna has built her public persona, and her dance routines and videos, around the sexual boundaries obliterated by porn. Rap stars like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Yella produce porn. Howard Stern interviews porn stars. Fitness Clubs offer pole-dancing and strip classes. Porn star Jenna Jameson's memoir was published by HarperCollins and was a New York Times bestseller for six weeks. The E! True Hollywood Story episode of her life remains the highest rated single episode of that show. Reality television shows like The Girls Next Door and Rock of Love feature a male celebrity who has multiple female partners competing for his attention. The Girls Next Door, which stars the octogenarian Hugh Hefner and girlfriends young enough to be his granddaughters, is spiced up with undertones of incest and pedophilia. HBO celebrates and glamorizes porn, prostitution, and strippers with specials on shows like Thinking XXX, Katie Morgan's Sex Tips, Cathouse, and G-String Divas. The language, abuse, and moral bankruptcy of porn shape and mold popular culture. And there is a direct line from the heartlessness and usury of the culture of porn to the hookup parties on college campuses, in which young men and women get hammered, have sex, and do not speak to each other again.
Women, porn asserts, whether they know it or not, are objects. They are whores. These whores deserve to be dominated and abused. And once men have had their way with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as (Robert) Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It is the belief that "because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have a right to use this force and control." It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts in Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.
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From 8:45- 11:15 Chris Hedges addresses pornography, but the whole video is about the cultural issues covered in "Empire of Illusion" and is excellent and highly recommended.
The Pink Cross booth has a table of anti-porn tracts and is set up in the far corner of the Sands Expo convention centre in Las Vegas. It is an unlikely participant at the annual Adult Video News (AVN) expo. Pink Cross is a Christian outreach program for women in the porn industry, run by ex-porn star Shelley Lubben.
In a convention exalting the pornography industry, Lubben’s table is not overrun with visitors, most of whom are male and middle-aged with cameras around their necks. The few men who make it to the far corner of the convention centre look curiously at its pink banner and walk past. The expo is filled with more alluring fare. There are numerous booths for porn producers and distributors, many with women in tiny skirts and bras who, often clinging to stripper poles, gyrate and bend over and spread their legs for groups of men. They simulate masturbation and flash their breasts for crowds of onlookers. Huge banners hang from the ceiling promoting new releases such as Slutty and Sluttier 6.
A local escort service, VegasGirls, has a booth about 100 feet from Pink Cross. There is a homemade wooden wheel with a flipper that looks like a middle-school shop project on its table. Those who spin the wheel can get various discounts or even a free visit by a “stripper” to their hotel room. Small, glossy cards are fanned out on the table, showing women in evocative poses and not much clothing, all with a first name, the agency’s phone number and the phrase “actual photo” emblazoned on the side of the card.
“You want to take a picture of my boobs, then you have to take my card,” a woman in front of the booth tells a camera-wielding, middle-aged man.
“If I call this number, is it you who will come?” he asks.
“Here, baby,” she says, giving him the card. “I will come.”
Many of the booths at the Sands Expo feature well-known porn stars. There are long lines of men waiting for a signed photo and the chance to have a picture with stars from the Wicked Pictures studio, including Kaylani Lei, Kirsten Price and Jessica Drake. The men usually wrap their arms around the women for the photo, always taken by a friend or someone in line. As they hug the women’s waists, the women sometimes playfully grab the man’s crotch or lick their lips. Huge plasma screens placed in the booths run nonstop porn, often featuring the stars having anal sex with multiple partners or giving blow jobs. The sheer volume of porn blasted throughout the convention floor by the sea of giant screens becomes, very quickly, numbing.
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality.
The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting, oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in the films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
“I was addicted to porn for two years,” says Scott Smith, 29, from Cleveland, Tenn., who is at the Pink Cross booth. He first watched Internet porn as a college student.
“I started out once a day, usually at night, when my roommate wasn’t there,” Smith says. “You try and hide it. Then I started watching it several times a day. I would only watch it long enough to masturbate. I never got why they make these long features since I would always turn it off when I was done.”
Smith says the images crippled his ability to be intimate. He could not distinguish between the fantasy of porn and the reality of relationships. “Porn messes with the way you think of women,” he says. “You want the women you are with to be like the women in porn. I was scared to get involved in a relationship. I did not know how extensive the damage was. I did not want to hurt anyone. I kept away from women.”
Patrice Roldan, 26, with black hair and a loose-fitting purple and black potato sack dress, is standing next to the Pink Cross table. Roldan, whose screen name was Nadia Styles, made her last porn film in November 2008. She starred in nearly 200 films. She is 5-foot-5, 110 pounds and wears a black scarf around her neck, black knitted stockings with knee-high black socks, and flat, black shoes. Her outfit seems calculated to be exactly what a porn star should never wear in public. She looks like a schoolteacher.
Roldan, like many of the women who drift into the porn and prostitution industry, had a difficult and troubled childhood, including a physically abusive mother. Her mother threw her out of her home when she was 17, and she spent time in homeless shelters. She answered an ad in LA Weekly that offered women $1,000 as models. This is a common doorway into the porn industry. She started appearing in Internet porn. She had a boyfriend when she began filming and tells me she “felt guilty” about hiding her porn sessions from him, but the money was good. Her boyfriend eventually found out, and their relationship descended into one increasingly characterized by verbal and physical abuse. She drifted from the Internet into films. She was 19 when she made her first film.
“Doing a movie shoot was a different experience,” she says as we sit in two folding chairs across from the Pink Cross booth. “I made my first film with New Sensations [adult video studio]. I got makeup. There was a set and cameramen all around. I thought it was glamorous to have my makeup done, to have pictures taken of me. That was a regular boy-girl shoot. At that point, I was just trying to survive.”
She had been promised $1,000 for her first film. She was handed $600 when the scene was done. She also contracted gonorrhea. Porn stars are tested for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases once a month, but “people do so many scenes between tests that a month is a long time.” She began, once she had treated her gonorrhea, to do films three or four times a month. She would have several more bouts with gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during her career. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The demands on her began to escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became “extremely rough. They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll.
“The next day my whole body would ache,” she recalls. “It happened a lot, the aching. It used to be that only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace, would once do things like anal. Now it is expected.”
She became a staple in “gonzo” porn films. Gonzo movies are usually filmed in a house or hotel room. They are porn verite. The performers often acknowledge the camera and speak to it. Gonzo films push the boundaries of porn and often include a lot of violence, physical abuse and a huge number of partners in succession. According to the magazine Adult Video News, “Gonzo, non-feature fare is the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it’s less expensive to produce than plot-oriented features, but just as importantly, is the fare of choice for the solo stroking consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get off on the good stuff, then, if they really wanna catch some acting, plot and dialog, pop in the latest Netflix disc.”
Roldan would endure numerous penetrations by various men in a shoot, most of them “super-rough.” As she talks of her career in porn, her eyes take on a dead, faraway look. Her breathing becomes more rapid. She slips into a flat, numbing monotone. The symptoms are ones I know well from interviewing victims of atrocities in war who battle posttraumatic stress disorder.
“What you are describing is trauma,” I say.
“Yes,” she answers quietly.
Shelley Lubben, who also worked as a porn actress, agrees.
“You have to do what they want on the sets,” she says. “There’s too much competition. They can always find other girls. Girls bring in their friends and get kickbacks. They feel like stars. They get attention. It’s all about the spotlight. It’s all about me. They have notoriety. They don’t realize the degradation. Besides, this is a whole generation raised on porn. They’re jaded and don’t even ask if it is wrong. They fall into it. They get into drugs to numb themselves. They get their asses ripped. Their uterus hemorrhages. They get HPV and herpes, and they turn themselves off emotionally and die. They check out mentally. They get PTSD like Vietnam vets. They don’t know who they are. They live a life of shopping and drugs. They don’t buy real estate. They party, and in the end they have nothing to show for it except, like me, genital herpes and fake boobs.”
“Porn is like any other addiction,” Lubben says. “First, you are curious. Then you need harder and harder drugs to get off. You need gang bangs and bestiality and child porn. Porn gets grosser and grosser. We never did ass-to-mouth when I was in the industry. Now you get an award for it. And meanwhile the addicts make their wives feel like they can’t live up to the illusion of the porn star. The addict asks, ‘Why can’t she give blow jobs like a porn star?’ He wants what isn’t real. Porn destroys intimacy. I can always tell if a man is a porn addict. They’re shut down. They can’t look me in the eyes. They can’t be intimate.”
“When legal and social mores first changed and porn went mainstream in the 1970s, there was a standard sexual script, which included oral and vaginal sex, with anal sex relatively rare, ending with the ‘money’ or ‘come’ shot, where the man ejaculated onto the body of the woman,” Robert Jensen, the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, tells me over breakfast one Saturday morning at my home in Princeton. “But once there were thousands of porn films on the market, the porn industry had to expand that script to expand profits. It had to find new emotional thrills. It could have explored intimacy, love, the connection between two people, but this was not what appealed to the largely male audience. Instead, the industry focused on greater male control and cruelty. This started in the 1980s, with anal sex as a way for men to dominate women. It has descended to multiple penetrations, double anals, gagging and other forms of physical and psychological degradation.
“What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?” Jensen asks. “What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason porn is so difficult for so many people to discuss is not that it is about sex—our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with images of women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty are played out. And many men—maybe a majority of men—like it.”
The cruelty takes a toll on the bodies, as well as the emotions, of porn actresses. Many suffer severe repeated vaginal and anal tears that require surgery.
The male stars are encouraged to be rough and hostile. Some, she says, “hated women. They would spit in my face. I was devastated the first time that happened, but I thought it was good they were rough because of my abusive relationships. I thought roughness in porn was OK. I would say, ‘Treat me like a little slut,’ or ‘I’m your bitch,’ or ‘Fuck me like a whore.’ I would say the most degrading things I could say about myself because I thought this was what it meant to be sexy and what people wanted to hear, or at least the people who buy the films. You are just a slut to those who watch. You are nothing. They want to see that we know that.”
She would shoot scenes with men who disgusted her, whose sweat and smell “made me cringe.” And when the lights went off and the cameras stopped, she would stumble off the set in pain, her face often covered with semen. “Sometimes they would hand you a paper towel to wipe your face off,” she says, “and sometimes they would say, ‘Don’t touch us. You’re gross.’ I remember the first time I had come all over my face. I was so pissed off, but I took it. I pretended to like everything they did. I took pride in being a good gonzo girl. My fame came from this.”
By the second year of shooting, with an income of $100,000, she had turned to drugs, including painkillers and muscle relaxants.
“The lifestyle of a porn star is to spend your money as soon as you make it on weed, alcohol, coke, ecstasy and Vicodin,” Roldan says. “I wanted to be the good gonzo girl they wanted me to be. I took this so I would not feel anything. By the next year, instead of only Vicodin I began to drink vodka, a whole bottle. Every girl I knew used alcohol. We were drinking so we did not feel the pain.”
Adult film stars pose for photos at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.
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Many thanks to Chris Hedges for so eloquently exposing the harsh truth about the horrific harms of the violent and misogynist pornography industry. Please support his outstanding work by buying "Empire of Illusion" at Amazon.com here or elsewhere.
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Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexualitytakes an unflinching look at today’s porn industry: the stories woven into the images, the impact on our culture, the effects on us as men and women, the business machine that creates and markets porn, and the growing legitimacy of porn in mainstream media. Above all, PORNLAND examines the way porn shapes and limits sexual imaginations and behaviors.
Although we are surrounded by pornographic images, many people are not aware of just how cruel and violent the industry is today. PORNLANDshows how today’s porn is strikingly different from yesterday’s Playboy and Penthouse magazines — how competition in the industry and consumer desensitization have pushed porn toward hard core extremes. And, with the advent of the internet and other digital technologies, users don’t have to wander far to access porn; todaythe average age of first viewing is about 11 for boys, and studies reveal that young men, who consume more porn than ever before, have difficulty forming healthy relationships.
PORNLAND also looks at how our porn culture affects the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships. PORNLAND: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality argues that rather than sexually liberating or empowering us, porn offers us a plasticized, formulaic, generic version of sex that is boring, lacking in creativity and disconnected from emotion and intimacy.
Fall 2011: Please pardon any errors, omissions, or technical problems, etc., while this website is under construction. Also please feel free to help us out by informing us about them here. Thanks. And if you would like to contribute to this website being developed more quickly, please feel free to donate here. Thank you! Your support is very much appreciated and will definitely make a difference.
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Please support the fight against the global epidemic of pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking by making a tax-deductible donation.
THANK YOU FOR WHATEVER YOU'RE ABLE TO DO TO HELP!
"We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs."
Gloria Steinem
*All donations made will go to support the work of AntiPornography.org in fighting against the harms of pornography, prostitution, sex trafficking, and other forms of sexual exploitation and abuse. While our own 501(c)(3) nonprofit status is in progress donations are routed through the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit organization Captive Daughters, a sister organization who is our IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Captive Daughters does not fund our work but they currently facilitate nonprofit tax deductible donations for AntiPornography.org because some of our work is a continuation of Captive Daughter's work addressing pornography as a demand factor for sex trafficking. For more information about Captive Daughter's important work on this issue please see the Captive Daughters conference: Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking and their book: Pornography: Driving the Demand in International Sex Trafficking.Thank you.
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For more information about the documented harms of pornography please visit the extremely informative new websitePornography Harms at PornHarms.com.
"Dedicated to providing the most accurate peer-reviewed research on the harm from pornography, along with relevant news and opinion."
This outstanding website comprehensively addresses the harms of pornography in regards to all of the following categories: addiction, brain science, children, cybersex, family, Internet, Internet safety, marriage, men, psychological, prostitution, relationships, research, self image, sex trafficking, sexting, sexual violence, societal, STDs, teens, and women.
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A URL shortcut for this website is Anti-Porn.org or anti-porn.org. If you use this shortcut please don't forget the hyphen. Thank you!
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Please feel free to add this button to your blog or website. It will bring people here to AntiPornography.org so that they will be able to learn exactly how pornography hurts people and what they can do to help. Get HTML code here.
"Pornography is everywhere, and as it becomes more common in all forms of media, it is also becoming more sexist, violent, and graphic. These forms of pornography are also becoming more and more common among children and teens. Why we should worry about pornified America."
Have you taken the NO-PORN PLEDGE at NoPornPledge.com yet? If not, now would be a really great time to do so! Please click here or the banner below.
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See the list of many people from all around the world who have signed the No-Porn Pledge. Click here.
Read the reasons why they have signed in the No-PornPledge Guestbook. Click here. Don't forget to join them by signing the pledge and sharing your reasons why in the guestbook there as well!
From NoPornPledge.com:
"Join a growing number of people who have made a decision to eliminate porn from their lives. Sign your name, and publicly declare that you won't use porn, or have an intimate relationship with anyone who does."
At AntiPornography.orgwe are working to prevent and combat the devastating harms of pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking, as well as all other forms of sexual exploitation, through public education and advocacy. We are:
Note for clarification: This is not an AntiPornography.org petition and the concerned citizen who started the petition is not affiliated with this organization. A link to the petition is posted here at the request of the petition author.
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RESOURCES, FRIENDS, SUPPORTERS AND ALLIES:
(All those marked with * are friends, subscribers, or followers of AntiPornography.org at our social networking projects at YouTube, MySpace, or Twitter or have demonstrated support for our work otherwise, such as providing content for this website or linking to us or to one of our blogs and/or social networking projects. Also please note that the below list is a work in progress and that it is not complete. Please share any errors or omissions here. Thank you!)
WOMEN AND GIRLS FOCUSED RESOURCES:
(For family, children, men and addiction focused resources, please scroll down.)
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ANTI-PORNOGRAPHY ORGANIZATIONS GROUPS AND WEBSITES:
AntiPornography.org supports the CP80 Internet Pornography Solution that provides an option for Internet users to protect children and others from unwanted exposure to pornography. (For those who choose it only.) Please click on the button below to find out more information or to learn how you can support CP80 also.
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PORNOGRAPHY ADDICTION AND COMPULSION HELP AND SUPPORT:
Saavi Accountability (www.saaviaccountability.com) -- The only online accountability program that works with all online addictions. It is also the only program that sends notifications instantly via text message to an accountability partner so that they can be supportive when an individual needs it the most at the point of weakness, while they are accessing the online content. The software was created by a young man (26) who overcame his addiction and is trying to help others.
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ADDICTION MESSAGE BOARDS & DISCUSSION FORUMS FOR HELP & SUPPORT:
(Note: The No Porn Northampton FAQ is in the bottom half of their sidebar. In addition to the usual questions about pornography it addresses questions and concerns about activism against sexually oriented businesses such as "adult bookstores.")
"The only way to impede sex trafficking is to end demand—to stop buyers from buying."
Shared Hope International, "DEMAND: A Comparative Examination of Sex Tourism and Trafficking in Jamaica, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States"
"DEMAND" - A Documentary by Shared Hope International
This excellent documentary by the anti-sex trafficking organization Shared Hope International is about demand factors for sex trafficking, one of the most significant of which is pornography. It also addresses how all forms of commercial sexual exploitation such as pornography, stripping and prostitution are connected to all other forms such as sex trafficking and sex slavery. Please visit EndDemand.org to learn more about how demand for sex trafficking is created by those individuals (mostly men) who purchase women and children for sex.
For 2 minute and 12 minute versions of the above video, as well as more information from Shared Hope about demand, please click here.
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Shared Hope International specifically focuses on fighting the demand for commercial sexual exploitaiton, including addressing pornography as a very significant demand factor for sex trafficking.
"Pornography is a marketing device for sex trafficking: It normalizes degradation and violence as acceptable and even inevitable parts of sex, and uses the bodies of real women and children as objects. The difference between pornography and erotica is clear in the roots of the words themselves -- porne means females slaves, eros means love -- so pornography, like rape, is about violence and domination, not sex. Millions of lives depend on our ability to separate pornography from erotica, and to disentangle violence from sexuality."
Gloria Steinem, 2006
For information about Gloria Steinem's important work of fighting against the harms of pornography, sex trafficking and other forms of sexual exploitation and abuse, including videos and an audio interview, please see our page on Gloria Steinem. Click here.
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For more information on how pornography fuels prostitution and sex trafficking, please see our page on Pornography and Trafficking. Click here. Thank you!
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YOUR HELP IS NEEDED. PLEASE DONATE IF YOU ARE ABLE TO.
Please remember that it is not up to AntiPornography.org, the other organizations listed on this page, the government, or "someone else" to do the entire job of fighting against the harms of pornography, prostitution, trafficking, and other forms of sexual exploitation or abuse. It is an enormous job and the responsibility lies with each and every one of us to do our part as part of the bigger team of those who are choosing to be part of the solution of creating a more just and humane world for everyone rather than the problem. So thank you in advance for whatever you are able to contribute to the cause, whether in the form of a tax-deductible donation or your actions. What you do does matter, so for the sake of all those across the world who are being exploited and abused, and for the sake of the future of humanity, please do what you can to create a more compassionate and safer society for all.
Thank you for whatever you are able to give or do to help create a better world for everyone, especially for women, children and future generations.
YOUR SUPPORTIVE ACTIONS AND YOUR DONATIONS ARE VERY MUCH APPRECIATED.
Thanks for visiting!Please feel free to come back in the future as more content will be added to this website on a regular basis. Thank you
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