A friend sent me a link to The Porn Debate: Wrapping Profit in the Flag by Stan Goff. I rarely see men writing about the nasty results of prostitution and the pornography business. According to him, it is "the world's third most lucrative industry (right after weapons and drugs)." It's definitely worth reading.

The ubiquitous nature of internet commodified prostitution and pornography has only served to reinforce the notion of sexuality as an abstraction and to hide the concrete reality of sexual degradation and slavery. The reality of the world's third most lucrative industry (right after weapons and drugs) is that it is a daily social catastrophe among millions of women... as well as millions of children, where in the real world beyond the white American comforts of so-called sex-radicals, these women and children have been thrown off the land and into various forms of sexual slavery. The sex libertarians of the porn industry won't mention this, even though a significant number of the women featured in much of this new porn are precisely these refugees from global destabilization and poverty.

When Dr. Sun and others point out that this is an industry, all we hear from Nina Hartley and her partisans are paeans to so-called 'sex radicals,' like Carol Queen, who claim it is a culture. After Linda Marchiano (renamed 'Linda Lovelace' by her rapist-pimp husband, Chuck Traynor) went public about how Traynor had habitually beaten her, sold her to other men, forced her to have sex with a dog, and forced her to make porn films for his own profit, Hartley's pal Carol Queen referred to Marchiano dismissively as "Linda-he-had-to-put-a-gun-to-my-head-to-make-me-fuck-that-dog-Lovelace." This, presumably, is the 'sex-radical' take on rape and battering.

Pornography and prostitution _ in the material world _ are overwhelmingly not 'choices.' They are vast, exploitative, patriarchal-capitalist industries, largely violent, very lucrative, controlled by women-hating men, and destructive of the women (and children) who are victimized by them. Most of the women who are prostituted (including those who are used to produce pornography) are poor, disproportionately from oppressed groups, frequently drug-addicted, the vast majority showing clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, and wanting out. The majority suffered from sexual abuse as children, and many were first 'turned out' as minors. Many new prostitutes are 'broken in' through gang rape, and constantly abused by pimps.