The Dynamics of Women in Porn 1

The Dynamics of Women in Porn: A Review of the Literature

Rudy Sanchez
University of Texas at El Paso








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Pornography is huge in the United States mainly because it is consumed and created at
record levels. The adult entertainment industry grosses billions each year. 70% of American men
watch pornography at least once a month, and 20% of men admit to watching it in the office.
Porn is pervasive in American culture, yet there remains a huge stigma against porn performers.
It may be acceptable to watch porn, but it's certainly not acceptable to make it. Pornography
consists of images that sexually stimulate the viewer. Although there is a range from porn in
magazines to video material, what the material has in common is that it takes the viewer out of
reality. It is distinguished from erotica in that it is dehumanising, objectifying and completely
removed from a context of mutual relationship. Despite our personal convictions regarding porn,
the fact remains that the adult sex industry has a huge influence on Americans that spans a broad
grasp over the media. This stigma created around porn has been due to careful advertising and
planning on how it appeals to people in society. No one knows this better than the women who
attempt to leave successful careers in the adult entertainment industry. Some performers retire
when they reach a certain age, while others leave to pursue a career that is more stable. But there
are also large numbers of women who stop working in the porn industry because of its
systematic abuse of performers. I will be examining the dynamics of the industry through the
womens perspective, but in order to learn more about its validity and changing aspects, four
important questions need to be considered:
1. When was the Origin of Women in Pornography?
2. How popular is porn?
3. What is the content of porn doing to viewers?
4. Why cant women seem to leave the porn profession?
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When was the Origin of Women in Pornography?
Pornography is often seen as one of the ills of today's society through evidence of modern
moral decay brought on by video cameras and broadband access to the internet. In contrast to
popular belief porn was alive way before the modern age. Pornography existed long before video
or even photography which tells a story in itself. Whichever way you put it, the diversity of
pornographic materials throughout history suggests that human beings have always been
interested in images of sex. As Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist and licensed therapist in
San Francisco, said Sex has always played a super-important role for human beings and their
relationships," he later adds "What people do sexually has always been a curiosity, and of
interest." Since the 1800s, the idea of porn for person pleasure began to shape as a very
controversial idea that spread. Erotic novels had been in print since the mid-1600s in France, but
the first full-length English-language pornographic novel was "Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure," also known as "Fanny Hill" by John Cleland being published in 1748. This was the
first time people could this type of entertainment in the media. This drastically effected society in
the U.S by opening a whole industry in adult entertainment. Although the reserved public
attitudes toward sex at the time were a norm, pornographic novels held little back portraying a
subject in a whole different perspective.
Technology drove innovation in the porn genre. The invention of the daquerreotype, a
primitive form of photography, by Louis Daquerre in 1839 opened up the technology to
pornographers to use. Almost instantaneously, pornographers commandeered the new
technology. The introduction of Video into pornography followed a similar path. By 1896,
filmmakers in France were exploring the genre with short, silent clips like "Le Coucher de la
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Marie," in which an actress performed a strip tease. Hard-core sex started showing up after 1900.
These "stag films" were usually shown at all-male gatherings drawn from the fact that they
appealed more to a male audience. Women through the history pornography have taken part in
the industry far before the modern day in age.
How popular is Porn?
For a long time, stag films remained consistant, both in content and in quality. Then, in
the 1970s, changing social dynamics opened the door for public showing of explicit films. The
Internet and the invention of the digital camera opened to window to porn-making so low that
entire websites could now be devoted to non-professional videos.
The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet
downloads encouraged changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. With privacy, men were
more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994
Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems, found that 48 percent
of downloads were outside the sexual norm, depicting incest, bestiality and pedophilia. What was
surprising was that less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have
resulted because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people
began to seek images they couldn't find elsewhere from the privacy of their computers.
In the modern age, porn is all over the internet, but the actual size of the industry is
unknown. There is a lack of official records, and very few studies have made conclusions at the
economics of porn. Adult Video News, a trade industry journal, made annual estimates of porn
sales and rentals in the industry. In 2007, according to an AVN senior editor Mark Kernes, retail
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sales reached $6 billion a year, However, AVN's figures have been widely disputed based on its
inability to take into account all of the free videos uploaded to sites. The growing popularity of
the industry in the U.S is clearly building momentum as a recent study, conducted by Benjamin
Edelman of Harvard Business School, depicted the amount of porn subscriptions nationwide
within the states in the picture below.

Regardless of how much money is being made, porn is growing market appealing to
more and more audiences. A 2008 study of 813 American university students found that 87
percent of men and 31 percent of women reported viewing pornography. Not only do men
participate in the viewing of pornography but also women despite being contrary to popular
belief that men solely indulge in adult entertainment. This speaks to the impact that porn has had
and will continue to have across all different audiences. Women in the porn industry have greatly
promoted the popularity due to the changing technologies by which pornography utilizes.
What is the content of porn doing to viewers?
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One question that is infrequently asked is So what is all that porn doing to us? Due to
the massive online industry, critics argue that competition between pornographers has led to a
rise in dominance and verbal abuse of women depicted in films made for men. This mainstream
of competition is creating a need for more intense films and drawn from the need to do
something more edgy. As Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University
and director of the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships," said
to LiveScience magazine They need to always put out something new, something enticing, to
attract people," he also added "The degradation, the aggression levels, that is something you can
create, something a little bit new to offer to the audience." This attitude towards making films is
inevitably creating an image for women that is highly unrealistic and out right inappropriate.
By reviewing best-selling pornography films, Sun has found that physical and verbal
aggression are present in 90 percent of mainstream porn scenes. Moreover, films directed by
women are no less likely to contain aggression than films directed by men which comes so slight
surprise being that the viewer would think that women would help get rid of this trend and not
facilitate it. Sun argues that these aggressive images are damaging to people's sex lives and that
they help cement negative perceptions of women. These men that participate in the viewing of
this kind of porn pick up the conception that is it socially acceptable to treat women in this
manner. Psychologists have speculated that this frequent porn viewing is potentially damaging to
a mans health in that is dulls arousal. There are other points of view on this subject as
Prosterman, the San Francisco sexologist, points out that research has failed to draw a clear link
between porn and criminal sexual behavior. And he later added, Porn is one way for people to
explore their own sexual desires. It is clear that there are many different opinions on the subject
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of whether pornography is damaging not only to societal perceptions of women but also mens
psychological health in terms of what he believes is the sexually arousing.
According to the site Fight the New Drug, Thanks to the Internet, porn now mixes the
most powerful natural dopamine release the body can produce with a cocktail of other
elementsendless novelty, shock, and surpriseall of which increase the dopamine surge. And
because Internet porn offers an endless stream of variety, users can flip to a new image every
time their high starts to fade, keeping dopamine levels elevated for hours. Porn is being referred
to as the new silent drug drawn from its proven scientific evidence to release hormones in your
brain in the same manner as drugs do. Drawn from this evidence it is clear that porn is indeed
changing how women are viewed in society, perhaps for the worst.
Why cant women seem to leave the porn profession?
While the common conception may be that it is acceptable to watch porn, it is not
acceptable to make it. No one knows this better than the women who attempt to leave their
careers in the adult entertainment industry. Most performers retire when they reach a specific
age, while others leave to pursue careers with more stability. But the majority of women who
stop working in the porn industry leave because of its systematic abuse its performers. There
have been many ex-porn stars that have recounted stories of not only physical but psychological
abuse. The physical abuse has many forms that may include forced sodomy, assault, and
transmissions of sexually transmitted diseases. On top of this abuse, women recount being
ignored while yelling for help. One woman fighting againt porn is Ex-porn star Shelley Lubben
who is an anti-pornography activist who works with the Pink Cross, a nonprofit organization that
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promotes healing from porn. In a 2012 interview Lubbin stated the industry "does not care about
performers' health." Her statements shined a light on the harsh realities of the porn industry as
she sought to reveal the abuse that takes place against women behind the camera.
On the topic of these allegations of abuse, it is particularly disturbing that ex-porn
performers face major difficulties reentering the workforce. Comparable to the difficulties faced
by felons after leaving prison, ex-porn stars are always struggling to leave their past behind. One
example of this difficulty is addressed by Gauge, a well-known performer who entered the
business at 18, who spoke openly about her struggle to work outside the industry. After she
stopped performing, she tried several careers, but they all ended the same failure. She described,
"Every single time I was discriminated against, somebody would recognize me, it'd be a big fit
thrown." Gauge was forced to change jobs multiple times as a result. Her story is very common
and is one of the reasons that so many porn stars stick with or return to porn. Employment law in
most states does not outlaw termination on the basis of moral character or employment history,
however, is it quite evident that there is some level of discrimination taking place due to the
difficulty of ex porn stars acquiring a job in a different field. As a result, porn has become a one-
way ticket with no options to return to the life you once had. It is an unfortunate enigma that
women in the porn industry must pay this price in a culture sexualizes youth and prizes young
naked bodies.
Conclusion
Evidence drawn from the dynamics of the porn industry provides validity of the types of
problems women face in society. This stigma created around porn has been due to careful
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advertising and planning on how it appeals to people in society. No one knows this better than
the women who participate the adult entertainment industry. I examined the dynamics of the
industry through the womens perspective by asking four key questions that provide validity to
the argument that women indeed are affected by the ever growing industry that is porn.














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References
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Nestler, E. J. (2005). Is There a Common Molecular Pathway for Addiction? Nature
Neuroscience 9, 11: 14451449.
Angres, D. H. and Bettinardi-Angres, K. (2008). The Disease of Addiction: Origins, Treatment,
and Recovery. Disease-a-Month 54: 696721; Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That
Changes Itself. New York: Penguin Books, 102.
"GET THE FACTS." Get the Facts. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
"Once a Porn Star, Always a Porn Star?" PolicyMic. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.