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

Posted by NPNAdmin at 4/9/2009 10:59 AM
Categories: Capital Video Corporation, Impact of Porn, Media Ethics, Porn Examples--Judge for Yourself, Prostitution
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.

 
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