Pornography

This book assesses American, Canadian, and Swedish legal challenges to the explosive spread of pornography and its contribution to violence against women within their significantly different democratic systems and constructs a political and legal theory for effectively challenging the sex industry under law. The obstacles are exposed as more ideological and political than strictly legal, although they often play out in the legal arena. The pornography industry is documented to exploit vulnerable populations in making its materials. A thorough analytical review of empirical studies that use complementing methods demonstrates that using pornography substantially contributes to consumers becoming more sexually aggressive, on average desensitizing them and contributing to a demand for more subordinating, aggressive, and degrading materials. Consumers often wish to imitate pornography with unwilling partners; many demand sex from prostituted people, who have few or no alternatives. Most young men regularly consume pornography. Legal challenges to the harms are shown to be more effective under legal systems that promote equality and when the laws empower those most harmed, in contrast to state-enforced regulations (e.g., criminal obscenity laws). Drawing on feminist theory, among others, this book argues that pornography is among the linchpins of sex inequality, contending that a civil society forum can empower those harmed, with representatives who have more substantial incentives to address them. This book explains why democracies fail to address the harms of pornography and offers a political and legal theory for making the necessary changes. The insights can be applied to other intractable problems of hierarchy.

Judicial Challenges, 1982–2019

The chapter compares Canadian and U.S. judicial challenges, tracing the development of Canada’s unconventional harm-based criminal obscenity law under the 1982 Charter’s substantive equality guarantees. It highlights the Canadian Supreme Court intervener LEAF—a women’s organization instrumental in Butler (1992), where the law was saved as an equality provision against freedom of expression challenges. Butler is contrasted with the more categorical U.S. First Amendment law. Despite Butler’s promises, it is shown that since then, pornographers have mainly been protected by Canadian courts, which use desensitized contemporary standards, flawed empirical evidence, surgically inserted loopholes, and wishy-washy judicial reasoning where harm is concerned. In light of LEAF’s successful intervention, the civil rights model is explored as an alternative to criminal law that would better represent the groups whose interests are most threatened by pornography—groups with substantially stronger incentives than the government to invest time and effort in challenging the pornography industry.

Digital Pornography and Everyday Life

No longer is the pornographic landscape restrictive, hidden, and controllable by conventional moral and regulatory frameworks. Instead, digital pornography is both hyperaccessible and hypersexualized, occupying an estimated 4%–20% of all digital media. The digital data generated through online interactions with this massive amount of content has opened new windows into an industry that has radically reshaped sexual practices and sexual health yet itself operates in the shadows of algorithms and bots. Sociology, as a critical social science, has little to say about the material realities of this ubiquitous sexual script, ceding important intellectual ground to medical/psychological sciences and cultural studies. Understanding the techno-economic structure of the digital pornography industry and its impact on sexuality requires a rethinking of conventional theoretical and empirical approaches, which I argue should be led by digital sociology. Digital sociology is a critical approach to studying the digital environment that focuses on ways in which digital media (re)produce institutions, structures, and systems of inequality as well as (re)shape human relationships and personal identities. Focusing on the production, distribution, and consumption of digital pornography using new forms of digital data would represent a paradigm adjustment to typical approaches the who, what, when, and where of pornography as well as the impact of types of content across particularized groups. Given that digital pornography is now the dominant normative framework for sexuality for adolescents and adults alike, it is essential that sociology re-engage with the material and structural realities of this powerful form of sexual education.

Pornography, Its Harms, and a New Legal Strategy: Research and Experience in Japan

In this article we describe pornography’s harms in Japan, which are known about from surveys and research, and from the outreach and consulting activities of Japanese feminist-abolitionist groups. Among these are the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS). We then propose a renewed classification scheme for pornography’s harms that centrally considers the experiences of victims in Japan. Lastly, we consider various legal approaches to addressing the myriad harms we describe and suggest possibilities for a new legal strategy. The article’s research comes from Japanese-language materials produced by the above-mentioned activist groups, as well as media reports of pornography-related crimes and court cases. Our aim in this article is to isolate each category of pornography’s harms so that individually tailored legal and public policy solutions might be tactically proposed and campaigned for, so that gains against the pornography industry can be made to the point where its operating environment as a whole becomes threatened.

The Failures of SESTA/FOSTA

In this essay, now-retired performer Valentina Mia talks about her experiences transitioning and the conditions that led her to join the pornography industry. She interrogates the role of the Trump administration's SESTA/FOSTA legislation and calls for the full decriminalization of sex work.

Pornography

This chapter provides an empirical analysis of the pornography industry. Facts concerning its growth and evolution are explained. The current financial status pornography industry is shown and compared with other mega-industries. The claim that it sexualizes inequality is explained and demonstrated through documenting the content of the materials sold and used, as reported by the industry itself. Further, the empirical evidence of the harms of pornography is provided and examined. Production harms and consumptions harms are distinguished and evidence of each is given. Criticisms of the empirical evidence are explained and rebutted. Finally, it is argued that the ordinances provide new and different legal grounds to address the harms of pornography.

Pornography’s White Infrastructure

In preparing my talk for a panel on “Whiteness and Technoculture” for the Society for the Social Study of Science in Boston, I wanted to think about the relationship of my research on the technocultures of the online pornography industry to the events in Charlottesville, which occurred only weeks earlier. Two trends within the online pornography industry came immediately to mind. The first is the aesthetic of “white innocence” as sexual fantasy that reveals a cultural conversation between the mainstream gay pornography industry and white nationalism in the United States. The second is the emergence of affiliate networks that aim to curate content for “unique male viewers” because the internet is, curiously, awash in “female-focused” content. Both of these phenomena seem particularly relevant at a time when white fragility, toxic masculinity, “men’s rights,” and xenophobia have been given explicit approval by the newly elected U.S. President, Donald Trump. These forces have long defined the United States, but they also reveal the way in which this presidency is uniquely awful and dangerous.