The coalition of uneasy allies against pornography have, in recent years been the religious right (embodied in Canada by groups such as Focus on the Family) and feminist zealots (embodied in Canada by groups like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women).
Though few would find much about these two groups similar, they are remarkably so when it comes to their generally vehement and vitriolic opposition to porn. Each side feels porn degrades women and derive this view from their gut reaction in seeing examples of it. Though don’t happen to like each other very much and don’t work in concert where they might.
Institiutional feminists do not like anything that might perpetuate the stereotype of women as sex objects or women evaluated for their parts or proportions etc.
Moral majority people locally have fought a losing battle in either attempting to curb the activities of local sex workers or even at getting them to tone it down.
The religious right doesnt like anything that contradicts their doctrine. They don’t use logic or reason or examples as to why certain things are bad. They merely offer passages in an old book and often twist words and phrases out of context.
Both resent their own inability to control human sexuality. Each has been continually frustrated in their respective attempts to curtail porns availability, and popularity. Each has, itself, become less and less mainstream and watched as porn has become more and more mainstream.
These are not people who are saying “I disagree with this so I don’t want to have to see it”. These are people who are saying “I disagree with this so I don’t want anyone anywhere to see it”.
They have an almost symbiotic relationship with pornography. Porn gives them a platform. Pornograhpers themselves need not engage in the debate as it doesn’t involve them as much as you might think.
Anti-porn crusaders are really interested more in getting legislators and the public at large interested in their views. They don’t think they will convince porn producers to realise the nefariousness of their deeds and suddenly repent.
In Canada, the Mulroney Conservative government passed a law which restricted the sale of pornographic magazines in 1986 but the same government actually payed for a production of a lesbian pornographic film entitled Bubbles Galore a few years later through a Ministry of Culture grant.
In Alberta, where there is no film board, the province has thrown up its hands trying to enforce censorship seeing the internet as a mode where Albertans can get any kind of porn anyway. Recent articles suggest teenage boys in the province view internet porn at an alarming rate.
One cannot legislate good taste, which for the most part is what opposition to pornography is about. Only when the performers in such work are underage and/or the acts shown non-consensual is their public appetite for criminal investigation and prosecution of purveyors of smut or filth or erotica or whatever one wants to call it.
Though I have never supported the death penalty it is those who have created child porn that have most tested my opposition. I rank child molestation as something more severe than murder.
The sex industry gains staying power by intertwining itself with businesses that surround it. Sharing customers with a convenience store or coffee shop nearby, the adult video store, strip club or massage parlour ties itself together with local small business. Should the sex-related business relocate, or close-up then the businesses surrounding suffer a loss in clientele and revenue.
On a larger scale cable companies offer hardcore sex films as pay-per-view services which large hotel chains list for guests as in room entertainment options. These mainstream corporations would like to keep such activities quiet but the enormous amount of revenue generated by them makes their respectives endeavours more and more difficult to hide on stockholder reports.
Sex-related businesses are, like it or not, engines of economic growth and are strongest when they apply this argument to justify to their validity.
In a modern context, the libertarian argument of freedom of expression, for so long the main pillar justifying the validity of the sex industry is now merely its convenient mainstay to be employed largely in only a legal context. The new pillar is the industry’s capacity for economic growth (Canada’s leading porn producing province, Quebec is estimated to generate in excess of 350 million dollars a year in that industry), and it is one the industry leans on to try to gain for itself that which it has never had: respectability outside of itself.
British Columbian porn star Kathryn Gannon (aka Marylin Star)is an example of porn performer as businesswoman. She got into major legal trouble, but not over anything sex-related. She was convicted, and sentenced to three months in prison for insider trading. This occurred around the time of numerous corporate scandals intertwining the worlds of white collar crime and the adult industry.
The women who make pornographic films or work in other fields of sex-related industry ARE businesswomen, most of them. Though the industry they work in is outside of the mainstream at the moment, it is extremely lucrative. Gannon’s odyssey shows a modern woman’s willingness to flout conventions of society as it relates to traditional sexual roles as well as actual legality in business to get that big score of cash.
Pornographers themselves are, as a result, fairly unconcerned with the criticisms of institiutional feminists and the religious right. Only Playboy magazine has ever really had aspirations of mainstream legitimacy. For over a half a century it has sought to elevate porn from cheap smut to elegant, all-American erotica.
The only real threat to pornographers are themselves. Their product is not merely overproduced, like popular music and Hollywood cinema, it is extremely easy to copy and circulate.
Producers within the industry have banded together and set up a fund to form a litigation team of top-flight copyright attorneys to engage bootleggers in civil court actions.
Thus far similar moves by the music industry have resulted in almost comical results with no deterrent established and limp fines rather than stiff sentences. Music industry lawyers made money. Their clients continued to lose money down the blackhole of filesharing.
Yet you will not see feminists opposed to porn or the religious right engaged in the practice of bootlegging porn whatever harm it might do to that industry. For them it is a battle for the hearts and minds of people.