Porn and Escort Ads: An Exploitation Team (explicit language)

Porn and prostitution have long teamed up to exploit women. Porn tells men what to fantasize about. Some then go to prostituted women to act it out. For example, you can buy the following film today (number 3 in the top 100) from Amazing.net/GoFlix.com:

Also on sale today is “Fuck My Mom & Me #6” (explicit link). Should these get boring, this “Massage/Escort” ad in the March 26 Valley Advocate suggests a way to take your fantasy further:

Newspapers of New England, owners of the Valley Advocate and the Daily Hampshire Gazette, may not see themselves as in the same crowd as Capital Video and Amazing.net, but when it comes to exploiting women, the differences are slight.

See also:

Ask the Valley Advocate’s Editor and Publisher to Drop the Sex
Ads

Polaris Project: “The Washington Post: A Paper Pimp?”

S.M. Berg: “Hey, progressives! Cathouse got your tongue?”

Belltown Messenger: “Greed, Lust and Ink”

NOW-NYC Press Release: “New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking” (8/6/07)
New York Press, along with the Village Voice, New York Magazine and the
Verizon Yellow Pages are the leading publications that serve as the
intermediary between “johns” and trafficked people. The Village Voice,
a weekly with more than twice the readership of the Press, generates an
average of $80,000 per month from the adult ads on its back pages, New
York Magazine generates about $40,000 a month and the Verizon Yellow
Pages generates more than $1 million a year.

These ads are for
illegal businesses. In New York, massage parlors must be licensed by
the state. If they are not licensed, they are prohibited from
advertising or operating. Newspapers understand this. New York Magazine and the New York Press
explicitly make the distinction between legitimate spas and illegal
massage parlors by featuring two separate ad categories and by charging
up to three times the normal rate for the illegal businesses.

“We’re
simply asking publishers to do basic due diligence and use common
sense,” Ossorio said. “If someone calls wanting to place an ad that
reads ‘Russian Girls, Young, 24/7’ what’s there to check out? Take the
contact information and call the police.” This ad appeared in El Diario/La Prensa May 17, 2007.

Porn Use Correlates with Infidelity, Prostitution,
Aggression, Rape-Supportive Beliefs

In 2004, researchers reported in Social Science Quarterly that “People who have engaged in paid sex (i.e. used prostitution) or had extramarital affairs were three times as likely to have used cyberporn than those who did not.”

Pornography Trains and Indoctrinates Prostitutes
80% of prostitution survivors at the WHISPER Oral History Project
reported that their customers showed them pornography to illustrate the
kinds of sexual activities in which they wanted to engage. 52% of the
women stated that pornography played a significant role in teaching
them what was expected of them as prostitutes. 30% reported that their
pimps regularly exposed them to pornography in order to indoctrinate
them into an acceptance of the practices depicted. (A facilitator’s
guide to Prostitution: a matter of violence against women, 1990,
WHISPER – Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt
Minneapolis, MN)…

In a study of 475 people in prostitution
(including women, men, and the transgendered) from five countries
(South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA, and Zambia)…92% stated that
they wanted to escape prostitution immediately.

From “Prostitution Facts” at rapeis.org

Testimony in Minneapolis: Prostitutes and Porn (explicit language)
Citizens gave testimony about their encounters with porn and those who
consume porn to the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on
December 12, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.114-120). Portions of it have appeared in earlier posts.

Testimony of T. S.

I am speaking for a group of women. We all live in
Minneapolis and we all are former prostitutes. All of us feel very
strongly about the relationship between pornography and prostitution.
Many of us wanted to testify at this hearing but are unable because of
the consequences of being identified as a former whore. This is
absolutely incredible to me that prostitution is seen as a victimless
activity, and that many women are rightly terrified of breaking their
silence, fearing harassment to themselves and families and loss of
their jobs.

We have started to meet together to make sense of
the abuse we have experienced in prostitution and how pornography
endorses and legitimizes that abuse. These are some of our stories. The
following has all happened to real women who are the exception because
they have survived both pornography and prostitution…

One of
the very first commonalities we discovered as a group: we were all
introduced to prostitution through pornography. There were no
exceptions in our group, and we were all under eighteen.

Pornography
was our textbook. We learned the tricks of the trade by men exposing us
to pornography and us trying to mimic what we saw. I could not stress
enough what a huge influence we feel this was. Somehow it was okay.
These pictures were real men and women who appeared to be happy
consenting adults, engaged in human sexuality…

…a
woman met a man in a hotel room in the 5th Ward. When she got there she
was tied up while sitting on a chair nude. She was gagged and left
alone in the dark for what she believed to be an hour. The man returned
with two other men. They burned her with cigarettes and attached nipple
clips to her breasts. They had many S and M magazines with them and
showed her many pictures of women appearing to consent, enjoy, and
encourage this abuse. She was held for twelve hours, continously raped
and beaten. She was paid $50 or about $2.33 per hour.

Men would
constantly want to do what they have seen in pornography. If
pornography was not actually in the room with the client, there would
be constant reference. One example is that a woman was in a room with
two clients, one man told the other that he had seen some pictures of
women who had shaved their pubic hair and that it had turned him on.
They then proceeded with a jackknife to remove the woman’s pubic hairs,
plucking and burning what the knife had missed. They made comments of
how her hairless vagina reminded them of their young daughters’
genitals. They then, of course, engaged in intercourse.

Women
were forced constantly to enact specific scenes that men had witnessed
in pornography. They would direct women to copy postures and poses of
things they had seen in magazines and then they would take their own
pictures of the women…

When Deep Throat was released, we experienced men joking and demanding oral sex.

It
is very amazing to me what happens when a group of ex-prostitutes get
together in one room and tell stories. One of the things we discovered
was that the men we had serviced were very powerful men in this
community. Especially interesting to us are the amounts of men involved
in the media in this community that use prostitutes and pornography.
These are the same men that perpetuate the myth that Minneapolis is a
clean city with exceptional morals and a high quality of life.

In closing, I would like to say that, in my experience, there was not one situation where a client was not
using pornography while he was using me, or that he had not just
watched pornography, or that it was[n’t] verbally referred to, and
directed me to pornography…

My wish is that you could see with
my eyes just for a day how clear the relationship is between
pornography and the systematic abuse of women.

I would also like
to say that I’m petrified and scared for young women today. I believe
the pornography that is published today is more brutal and dangerous
than when I was involved. And because I understand clearly the direct
relationship between the material and the abuse of women, I am very
terrified of the consequences of what that means…

[Andrea Dworkin:] Could you…talk about the
relationship between the pornography shown and pictures actually taken
of the young women that it was being shown to?

How it was
introduced was that young women would be picked up on the street, off
the street, and everyone’s first experience was always the same, which
was that the man would show either magazines or take you to a movie and
then afterwards instruct her to act in the way that the magazines or
the films had depicted. Usually after, I call it a training period,
what would happen then is that these men or different men would set up
scenarios of usually more than one woman to very, very specifically
copy and reproduce scenes that were portrayed in magazines and books
that they had witnessed. And then they would make their own movies
using home video equipment and also Polaroid cameras and they would
collect their own library of pornography involving these women.