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

human beings. Instead, we recognize that in a larger culture which encourages that sense of self, the endless barrage of commercial advertising carrying the same message plays a role in that process.
This is the sense in which we can see pornography as propaganda for a rape culture.
Pornography
The term ‘pornography’ is used by many people to describe all sexually explicit books, magazines, movies, and Internet sites, often with a distinction made between softcore (nudity with limited sexual activity not including penetration) and hardcore (graphic images of actual, not simulated, sexual activity including penetration). Pornography also is often distinguished from erotica, with pornography used to describe material that presents sex in the context of hierarchical relationships. Laboratory studies often construct categories of pornography according to their degree of violence and degradation.
The associated terms ‘indecency’ and ‘obscenity’ have specific legal meanings. In the United States, for example, indecency concerns only broadcast television and radio, while the case of Miller v. California (1973) established a three-part test for obscenity in any media – material that appeals to the prurient interest (an unhealthy interest in sex); portrays sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value – and identified contemporary community standards as the measure. Pornography using children is a separate category that is banned.
In this essay, I focus on the heterosexual commercial pornography industry which produces a significant portion of the pornography available and whose codes and conventions have shaped much of the pornography produced by others.
Rape Culture
My analysis is rooted in feminist critiques of male dominance and hierarchy. By feminist, I simply mean an analysis of the ways in which women are oppressed as a class in this society – the ways in which men as a class hold more power, and how those differences in power systematically disadvantage women. Gender oppression plays out in different ways depending on social location which makes it crucial to understand the oppression of women in connection with other systems of oppression such as heterosexism, racism, class privilege, and histories of colonial and postcolonial domination.
In patriarchy, men are trained through a variety of cultural institutions to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see themselves as ‘naturally’ dominant and women as ‘naturally’ passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate. Power is eroticized.
The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that itmust be considered to be normal – an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. A recent review of the data by well-respected researchers concluded that in the United States, at least 1 of every 6 women has been raped at some time in her life, a figure that is now widely accepted (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2006).
The term ‘rape culture’ describes ideas and practices beyond those legally defined as rape. As one researcher suggests, we should “ … broaden the definition of violence against women to include not just violent acts, such as physical assault, sexual assault, and threats of physical and sexual assault, but also nonviolent acts, such as stalking and psychological and emotional abuse” (Tjaden, 2004, p. 1246).
I use the term ‘sexual intrusion’ to describe the range of unwanted sexual acts that women experience in contemporary society – obscene phone calls, sexual taunting on the streets, sexual harassment in schools and workplaces, coercive sexual pressure in dating, sexual assault, and