Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Porn Industry

Reviews

In Big Porn Inc feminists lay down the gauntlet to pornographers by exposing the hate and harm of their man-dated sexuality which has become normative behavior. Big Porn Inc not only contests pornographic harm and hate. It will, I predict, incite a new bold wave of global activism in which we reclaim our future.

—Kathleen Barry, Author of Female Sexual Slavery, Prostitution of Sexuality, and Unmaking War, Remaking Men

Global media have infused the culture with sexually objectified and commodified women and girls, mainstreaming pornography with ever-increasing harms to females everywhere. Big Porn Inc is a clarion call to action against this gross violation of women’s human rights. Brilliant, insightful, essential.

—Kathleen Sloan, Board of Directors, National Organization for Women (NOW) USA; Convener, UN Panel on the Media's Sexual Commodification of Women & Girls

Big Porn Inc represents a powerful and growing reaction against the influence of the porn merchants and society’s willingness to let them get away with one outrage after another. The book unleashes a cascade of emotions – shock, disgust, guilt, rage, and heart-felt admiration for the victims of the porn industry … A landmark publication sure to help open the eyes of the public to the modern scourge of porn and amplify the call for greater decency and respect. Because without them, there can be no true liberation.

—Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University

This powerful and humane book is a breakthrough. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring which launched the environmental movement, Big Porn Inc shows us we are poisoning our own spirits, and that an ugly misuse of thousands of women – and very young children –is the dark and criminal underside of this industry. I hope this is the point where we turn away from pornography – from using it, from condoning it, from allowing it.

Steve Biddulph, Author of The New Manhood & The Secret of Happy Children

Woman or man, ignore this book at your peril. A remarkable international collection of insightful essays on the growing, poisonous role Big Porn plays in global culture, economics, mores, and violence against women and children. Brava to Spinifex Press for publishing this gift to thoughtful readers.

—Robin Morgan, Author and Activist

What the book does so well is to capture, discuss, analyze and provide evidence for the many ways that pornography is harmful to women and children. We know that pornography is based on profit, capitalism and a patriarchal worldview and is therefore complicated to combat, but when reading the book it becomes difficult to understand why pornography is legal in the first place.

—Hennie Weiss, Metapsychology online review

If you’re passionate about the well-being of society and our next generations, it’s a good idea to read Big Porn Inc. It’s that kind of book. Not necessarily enjoyable to read (but it wasn’t meant to be!) but packed with information vital to anyone who wants (or needs) to be aware.

—Joni, Every (1) Matters

...Anyone interested in how ideas of free speech operate to defend an industry that causes serious harm to women and children will find compelling arguments and disturbing information in this book, and quite possibly be swayed towards the idea of 'fair speech' that the editors passionately advocate as an alternative. Big Porn Inc. will be of particular interest to those engaged in gender or cultural studies, as the authors provide many references for further reading on each topic.

—Portia Lindsay, Bookseller & Publisher

Big Porn Inc is a courageous book, brilliantly undertaken. Based on impressive research and experience, the collection provides a disturbingly convincing portrayal of the multibillion dollar global pornography industry. The pornography industry’s assault on women, girls and our culture is real. This is the book we need to understand how and why and the means by which it can be halted.

—Mary Lucille Sullivan, Author of Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution

Big Food, Big Oil, Big Pharma and, yes, Big Porn – global corporate giants that shape and exploit human needs and desires, profiting while furthering injustice and denying toxic effects. Big Porn Inc is a hugely necessary, radical and rousing work, full of big thoughts and big truths about the all-consuming pornographic worldview.

—Jane Caputi, Creator of DVD The Pornography of Everyday Life

Big Porn Inc is a first-rate book: comprehensive and thoroughly researched. Porn does not liberate sexuality. What is it that men enjoy in porn: humiliation, degradation, control, sexual violence, submission …? Fortunately, this anthology considers the possibilities of resistance and offers hope for transformative futures.

—Richard Poulin, Author and Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa

If you care about social justice, buy this book. Big Porn Inc is a must read for anyone interested in the human rights of women and children. The book is cogent and alarming, yet hopeful that together we can create a world where women and children are not hurt and degraded. Big Porn Inc is a much needed blueprint for ending the global porn industry.

—Christine Stark, Author of Nickles and Co-Editor of Not For Sale

Many people, for all sorts of reasons, have preferred to avoid thinking about the porn industry and its manifold negative impacts. The invasion of Big Porn throughout mainstream culture makes moving beyond such denial long overdue. Big Porn Inc offers clear and topical chapters from a range of thinkers who are uniquely well-equipped to explain why. This is a profoundly important book.

—Emma Rush, Lead Author Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia; Lecturer in Ethics, Charles Sturt University

At a time when so many celebrities, academics and free speech fundamentalists are siding with the sex industry to deny that pornography is violence against women, Big Porn Inc is the voice of reality – a strong indictment; an epic work.

—Janice G. Raymond, Professor Emerita of Women's Studies and Medical Ethics

Big Porn Inc is a brilliant exposé on how the porn industry has sold us big fat lies about sex and sexuality. No previous generation has had to navigate such a flood of porn inspired imagery and concepts. Essential reading for everyone, especially the deluded defenders who remain willfully blind to the harmful impacts. I hope Big Porn Inc helps to create the seismic shift humanity needs.

—Julie Gale, Activist and Founder of Kids Free 2B Kids

When anthropologists from Planet Upsilon report on how civilization failed, Big Porn Inc will probably be Exhibit One. I thank the authors for the courage it took to wade through this material and put together this awesome book that drags us kicking and screaming to what so many do not want to know about corporate sex. Big Porn Inc may be our last chance to grasp porn ideology before it slips in and becomes the very fabric of our lives.

—Martin Dufresne, Anti-sexism activist, Canada

This is by far the best and most significant of these recent books. It comes from Spinifex, a feminist press in Australia, where radical feminism is prospering rather more than in the U.S. (Spinifex was recently profiled by Barry, 2016). With 40 solid chapters, this is the richest such feminist collection since Laura Lederer’s (1980) 'Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography' and/or Diana Russell’s (1983) 'Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography'.

—Robert Bannon, Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

Anyone researching the sex industry will find this book a valuable resource. It is the first time such a global perspective has been compiled and the impact of this collective information is alarming. It is essential reading for any feminist who wants to stay on top of her game.

—Anne Mayne, Agenda Empowering women for gender equity

The editors deserve a lot of praise for making this book available. Many of the individual essays alone make for a solid case against porn, but taken together this information and research offers an insurmountable argument: porn is bad, real bad, and it is time to reclaim women, men, children, and society from its horrendous clutches.

—Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Melinda Tankard Reist/Abigail Bray
Australia
Introduction    
Caroline
Scotland
The Impact of Pornography on My Life    
PART 1: PORNOGRAPHY CULTURES
Gail Dines
USA
The New Lolita: Pornography and the Sexualization of Childhood    
Catharine A. MacKinnon
USA
X-Underrated: Living in a World the Pornographers Have Made      
Maggie Hamilton
Australia
Groomed to Consume Porn:  How Sexualised Marketing Targets Children  
Robert Jensen
USA
Stories of a Rape Culture: Pornography as Propaganda
Nina Funnell     
Australia
Sexting and Peer-to-Peer Porn      
Diane L. Rosenfeld
USA
Who Are You Calling a ‘Ho’?: Challenging the Porn Culture on Campus
Christopher N. Kendall
Australia
The Harms of Gay Male Pornography    
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
USA/New Zealand
Pornography and Animals    
Robi Sonderegger
Australia
Neurotica: Modern Day Sexual Repression   
Meagan Tyler
Australia
Pornography as Sexual Authority: How Sex Therapy Promotes the Pornification of Sexuality    
Renate Klein
Australia
Big Porn + Big Pharma: Where the Pornography Industry Meets the Ideology of Medicalisation     
PART 2: PORNOGRAPHY INDUSTRIES
Susan Hawthorne
Australia
Capital and the Crimes of Pornographers: Free to Lynch, Exploit, Rape and Torture    
Abigail Bray
Australia
The Pornification of Post-feminism: Why Roddick’s $ex Shops Are a Sell Out    
Helen Pringle
Australia
A Studied Indifference to Harm: Defending Pornography in The Porn Report    
Melinda Tankard Reist
Australia
Sexpo and the Death of Sex    
Sheila Jeffreys
Australia
Live Pornography: Strip Clubs in the International Political Economy of Prostitution
Stella
Australia
Dancing Pornography         
Melissa Farley
USA
Pornography is Infinite Prostitution    
Abigail Bray
Australia
Capitalism and Pornography: The Internet as a Global Prostitution Factory 
Hiroshi Nakasatomi
Japan
When Rape Becomes a Game: RapeLay and the Pornification of Crime 
Chyng Sun
USA
Investigating Pornography: The Journey of a Filmmaker and Researcher     
PART 3: HARMING CHILDREN
Diana E.H. Russell
USA
Russell’s Theory: Exposure to Child Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization
Caroline S. Taylor
Australia
The Pornification of Intrafamilial Rape   
Caroline Norma
Australia
Teaching Tools and Recipe Books: Pornography and the Sexual Assault of Children
Helen Pringle
Australia
Civil Justice for Victims of Child Pornography    
‘Amy’
USA
The Victimisation of Children by Pornography: Victim Impact Statement of Amy    
PART 4: PORNOGRAPHY AND THE STATE
Anne Mayne
South Africa
The Power of Pornography – A South African Case Study
Asja Armanda and Natalie Nenadic
Croatia and USA
Genocide, Pornography, and the Law 
Ruchira Gupta
India
Pornography in India  
Betty McLellan
Australia
Pornography as Free Speech: But is it Fair?    
PART 5: RESISTING BIG PORN INC
Julia Long
UK
Resisting Pornography, Building a Movement: Feminist Anti-porn Activism in the UK   
    
Gail Dines
USA
Stop Porn Culture!
    
Linda Thompson
Scotland
Challenging the Demand
    
Anna van Heeswijk
UK
OBJECT: Challenging ‘Sex-object Culture’
    
Melinda Liszewski
Australia
A Collective Shout for Women and Girls
    
Matt McCormack Evans
UK
Men Opposing Pornography in the UK
Caroline Norma
Australia
Challenging Pornography in Japan: the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP)    
Susan Hawthorne
Australia
Quit Porn Manifesto
Biographical Notes
Index