Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry by Melinda Tankard Reist, Abigail Bray Read Free Book Online

There are men who use pornography and don’t rape. There are men who rape and don’t use pornography. There was rape before pornography was widely available, and there would be rape if pornography magically disappeared tomorrow.
Pornography doesn’t cause rape, if by ‘cause’ we mean that a specific man’s specific act of sexual violence can be established as the direct result of pornography use and would not have happened if he had not used pornography.
However, a rigorous analysis of the nature and effects of human communication, including propagandistic communication, does not begin and end with simplistic assertions about mechanistic notions of cause-and-effect. In the study of propaganda, we do not ask whether one specific message, or series of messages, was the sole cause of one specific person committing one specific act. Instead we investigate the way in which the style of human communication labelled ‘propaganda’ encourages certain ways of thinking about the world and makes inviting certain behaviors that flow from those ways of thinking.
An examination of pornography as propaganda for a rape culture leads to more complex and productive questions. For example, how are gender, power, and sexuality typically constructed in the contemporary industrial pornography that is widely available? How do these themes support or undermine the ideology of a rape culture? By whom and how is that pornography typically used? When such material is readily available to young people, what is the effect on their sexual development? What are the effects of the habitual use of pornography onpeople’s intimate experiences? Is there a relationship between those constructions and the levels of sexual intrusion and violence in contemporary culture? How is pornography racialized? And how does pornography train us to understand who we are in an industrial capitalist society?
In addressing such questions, I offer the following assumptions to situate a study of propaganda in general, and pornography as propaganda in particular:
(1) Human beings are storytelling animals; stories are a primary way we communicate what it means to be a person in the world. When we tell stories, we not only report on our experiences in the world but also contribute to a collective understanding of that world, which will influence the experiences and understandings of others. Stories matter. In any culture, the stories that people tell will reveal things about how they collectively make sense of the world, and that sense of the world will shape how people act. Stories shape attitudes, and attitudes affect behavior.
(2) In flourishing societies with a relatively egalitarian distribution of power, storytelling tends to be dialogic and creative, a way for people to engage each other with respect and explore ways of understanding the world. In contrast, in societies marked by inequality and concentrations of power, storytelling can be a vehicle to control and dominate, a way for people to shut down that dialogic and creative process in the service of maintaining or taking power. This type of human communication is called propaganda.
Special attention to propaganda is especially crucial in societies with concentrations of power that undermine the dialogic and creative aspects of human communication. In heavily mass-mediated societies such as the USA, Canada, Australia and European countries, this inquiry is vital.
Again, a comparison to make this point: when critics speak of commercial advertising as propaganda for capitalism, we are not asserting that a specific advertisement viewed by a person is the direct cause of that person’s decision to purchase a good or service. Even advertisers recognize this, reflected in the common quip, ‘We know half our ads don’t work, but we don’t know which half’. Critics cannot explain exactly how a specific advertisement or series of advertisements cause people to think of themselves as consumption machines rather than