‘Pornography Is What the
End of the World Looks Like’
By Chris Hedges
February 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "Truthdig"
- BOSTON—“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book
and the movie, is a celebration of the
sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of
American culture and lies at the core of
pornography and global capitalism. It
glorifies our dehumanization of women. It
champions a world devoid of compassion,
empathy and love. It eroticizes
hypermasculine power that carries out the
abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture
of women whose personalities have been
removed, whose only desire is to debase
themselves in the service of male lust. The
film, like
“American Sniper,” unquestioningly
accepts a predatory world where the weak and
the vulnerable are objects to exploit while
the powerful are narcissistic and violent
demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as
natural and good.
“Pornography,”
Robert Jensen writes, “is what the end
of the world looks like.”
We are blinded by
self-destructive fantasy. An array of
amusements and spectacles, including TV
“reality” shows, huge sporting events,
social media, porn (which earns at least
twice what Hollywood movies generate),
alluring luxury products, drugs, alcohol and
magic Jesus, offers enticing exit doors from
reality. We yearn to be rich, powerful and
celebrities. And those we must trample to
build our pathetic little empires are seen
as deserving their fate. That nearly all of
us will never attain these ambitions is
emblematic of our collective self-delusion
and the effectiveness of a culture awash in
manipulation and lies.
Porn seeks to eroticize
this sadism. In porn women are paid to
repeat the mantra “I am a cunt. I am a
bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me
hard with your big cock.” They plead to
be physically abused. Porn caters to
degrading racist stereotypes. Black men are
sexually potent beasts stalking white women.
Black women have a raw, primitive lust.
Latin women are sultry and hotblooded. Asian
women are meek, sexually submissive geishas.
In porn, human imperfections do not exist.
The oversized silicone breasts, the pouting,
gel-inflated lips, the bodies sculpted by
plastic surgeons, the drug-induced erections
that never subside and the shaved pubic
regions—which cater to porn’s
pedophilia—turn performers into pieces of
plastic. Smell, sweat, breath, heartbeats
and touch are erased along with tenderness.
Women in porn are packaged commodities. They
are pleasure dolls and sexual puppets. They
are stripped of true emotions. Porn is not
about sex, if one defines sex as a mutual
act between two partners, but about
masturbation, a solitary auto-arousal devoid
of intimacy and love. The cult of the
self—that is the essence of porn—lies at the
core of corporate culture. Porn, like global
capitalism, is where human beings are sent
to die.
There are few people on the
left who grasp the immense danger of
allowing pornography to replace intimacy,
sex and love. Much of the left believes that
pornography is about free speech, as if it
is unacceptable to financially exploit and
physically abuse a woman in a sweatshop in
China but acceptable to do so on the set of
a porn film, as if torture is wrong in Abu
Ghraib, where prisoners were sexually
humiliated and abused as if they were on a
porn set, but permissible on commercial porn
sites.
A new wave of feminists,
who have betrayed the iconic work of
radicals such as
Andrea Dworkin, defends porn as a form
of sexual liberation and self-empowerment.
These “feminists,” grounded in
Michel Foucault and
Judith Butler, are stunted products of
neoliberalism and postmodernism. Feminism,
for them, is no longer about the liberation
of women who are oppressed; it is defined by
a handful of women who are successful,
powerful and wealthy—or, as in the case of
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” able to snag a rich
and powerful man. A woman wrote the “Fifty
Shades” book, as well as the screenplay. A
woman directed the film. A woman studio head
bought the movie. This collusion by women is
part of the internalization of oppression
and sexual violence that have their roots in
porn. Dworkin understood. She wrote that
“the new pornography is a vast graveyard
where the Left has gone to die. The Left
cannot have its whores and its politics
too.”
I met
Gail Dines, one of the most important
radicals in the country, in a small cafe in
Boston on Tuesday. She is the author of
“Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our
Sexuality” and a professor of sociology
and women’s studies at Wheelock College.
Dines, along with a handful of others
including Jensen, fearlessly decry a culture
that is as depraved as Caligula’s Rome.
“The porn industry has
hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture
and is laying waste to a whole generation of
boys,” she warned. “And when you lay waste
to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a
generation of girls.”
“When you fight porn you
fight global capitalism,” she said. “The
venture capitalists, the banks, the credit
card companies are all in this feeding
chain. This is why you never see anti-porn
stories. The media is implicated. It is
financially in bed with these companies.
Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have
nothing left as human beings—boundaries,
integrity, desire, creativity and
authenticity. Women are reduced to three
orifices and two hands. Porn is woven into
the corporate destruction of intimacy and
connectedness, and this includes
connectedness to the earth. If we were a
society where we were whole, connected human
beings in real communities, then we would
not be able to look at porn. We would not be
able to watch another human being tortured.”
“If you are going to give
a tiny percent of the world the vast
majority of the goodies, you better make
sure you have a good ideological system in
place that legitimizes why everyone else is
suffering economically,” she said. “This is
what porn does. Porn tells you that material
inequality between women and men is not the
result of an economic system. It is
biologically based. And women, being whores
and bitches and only good for sex, don’t
deserve full equality. Porn is the
ideological mouthpiece that legitimizes our
material system of inequality. Porn is to
patriarchy what the media is to capitalism.”
To keep the legions of
easily bored male viewers aroused, porn
makers produce videos that are increasingly
violent and debasing. Extreme Associates,
which specializes in graphic rape scenes,
along with JM Productions, promotes the very
real pain endured by women on its sets. JM
Productions pioneered “aggressive throat
fucking” or “face fucking” videos such as
the “Gag Factor” series, in which women gag
and often vomit. It ushered in “swirlies,”
in which the male performer dunks the
woman’s head into a toilet after sex and
then flushes. The company promises, “Every
whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her,
then flush her.” Repeated and violent anal
penetration triggers anal prolapse, a
condition in which the inner walls of a
woman’s rectum collapse and protrude from
her anus. This is called “rosebudding.” Some
women, penetrated repeatedly by numerous men
on porn shoots, often after taking handfuls
of painkillers, require anal and vaginal
reconstructive surgery. Female performers
may suffer from sexually transmitted
diseases and post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). And with porn mainstreamed—some porn
video participants are treated like film
celebrities by talk show hosts such as Oprah
and Howard Stern—the behavior promoted by
porn, including stripping, promiscuity, S&M
and exhibitionism, has become chic. Porn
also sets the standard for female beauty and
female comportment. And this has had
terrifying consequences for girls.
“Women are told in our
society they have two choices,” Dines said.
“They are either fuckable or invisible. To
be fuckable means to conform to the porn
culture, to look hot, be submissive and do
what the man wants. That’s the only way you
get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent
girls, who are dying for visibility, to
choose invisibility.”
None of this, Dines
pointed out, was by accident. Porn grew out
of the commodity culture, the need by
corporate capitalists to sell products.
“In post-Second-World-War
America you have the emergence of a middle
class with a disposable income,” she said.
“The only trouble is that this group was
born to parents who had been through a
depression and a war. They did not know how
to spend. They only knew how to save. What
[the capitalists] needed to jump-start the
economy was to get people to spend money on
stuff they did not need. For women they
brought in the television soaps. One of the
reasons the ranch house was developed was
because [families] only had one television.
The television was in the living room and
women spent a lot of time in the kitchen.
You had to devise a house where she could
watch television from the kitchen. She was
being taught.”
“But who was teaching the
men how to spend money?” she went on. “It
was Playboy [Magazine]. This was the
brilliance of Hugh Hefner. He understood
that you don’t just commodify sexuality, you
sexualize commodities. The promise that
Playboy held out was not the girls or the
women, it was that if you buy at this level,
if you consume at the level Playboy tells
you to, then you will get the prize, which
is the women. The step that was crucial to
getting the prize was the consumption of
commodities. He wrapped porn, which
sexualized and commoditized women’s bodies,
in an upper-middle-class blanket. He gave it
a veneer of respectability.”
The VCR, the DVD and,
later, the Internet allowed porn to be
pumped into individual homes. The glossy,
still images of Playboy, Penthouse and
Hustler became tame, even quaint. America,
and much of the rest of the world, became
pornified. The income of the global porn
industry is estimated at $96 billion, with
the United States market worth about $13
billion. There are, Dines writes, “420
million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million
porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine
requests for porn daily.” [To see excerpts
from Dines’ book,
click here.]
Along with the rise of
pornography there has been an explosion in
sex-related violence, including domestic
abuse, rape and gang rape. A rape is
reported every 6.2 minutes in the United
States, but the estimated total, taking into
account unreported assaults, is perhaps five
times higher, as Rebecca Solnit points out
in her book
“Men Explain Things to Me.”
“So many men murder their
partners and former partners that we have
well over a thousand homicides of that kind
a year—meaning that every three years the
death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no
one declares a war on this particular kind
of terror,” Solnit writes.
Porn, meanwhile, is ever
more accessible.
“With a mobile phone you
can deliver porn to men who live in highly
concentrated neighborhoods in Brazil and
India,” Dines said. “If you have one laptop
in the family, the man can’t sit in the
middle of the room and jerk off to it. With
a phone, porn becomes portable. The average
kid gets his porn through the mobile phone.”
The old porn industry,
which found its profits in movies, is dead.
The points of production no longer generate
profits. The distributors of porn make the
money. And one distributor, MindGeek, a
global IT company, dominates porn
distribution. Free porn is used on the
Internet as bait by MindGeek to lure viewers
to pay-per-view porn sites. Most users are
adolescent boys. It is, Dines said, “like
handing out cigarettes outside of a middle
school. You get them addicted.”
“Around the ages of 12 to
15 you are developing your sexual template,”
she said. “You get [the boys] when they are
beginning to construct their sexual
identity. You get them for life. If you
begin by jerking off to cruel, hardcore,
violent porn then you are not going to want
intimacy and connection. Studies are showing
that boys are losing interest in sex with
real women. They can’t sustain erections
with real women. In porn there is no making
love. It is about making hate. He despises
her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If
you bleed out the love you have to fill it
with something to make it interesting. They
fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty
and hate. And that also gets boring. So you
have to keep ratcheting it up. Men get off
in porn from women being submissive. Who is
more submissive than children? The
inevitable route of all porn is child porn.
And this is why organizations that fight
child porn and do not fight adult porn are
making a huge mistake.”
The abuse inherent in
pornography goes unquestioned in large part
by both men and women. Look at the movie
ticket sales for “Fifty Shades of Grey,”
which opened the day before Valentine’s Day
and is expected to
take in up to $90 million over the
four-day weekend (which includes Presidents
Day on Monday).
“Pornography has
socialized a generation of men into watching
sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not
born with that capacity. You have to be
trained into it. Just like you train
soldiers to kill. If you are going to carry
out violence against a group you have to
dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews
become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women
become cunts. And no one turns women into
cunts better than porn.”
Chris Hedges spent nearly two
decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and
the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The
Christian Science Monitor, National Public
Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New
York Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.
