The truth about the porn industry

Today I reprint two important comment pieces by UK journalist and feminist Julie Bindel.

The first, ‘The truth about the porn industry’ was published recently in the Guardian. It’s about Gail Dines new book Pornland, which I also wrote about in a blog post titled ‘Opposed to porn sex’.

Julie Bindel writes:

According to Dines’s research the prevalence of porn means that men are becoming desensitised to it, and are therefore seeking out ever harsher, more violent and degrading images…”I have found that the earlier men use porn,” says Dines, “the more likely they are to have trouble developing close, intimate relationships with real women. Some of these men prefer porn to sex with an actual human being. They are bewildered, even angry, when real women don’t want or enjoy porn sex”…

Porn culture doesn’t only affect men. It also changes “the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships,” says Dines. “Every group that has fought for liberation understands that media images are part and parcel of the systematic dehumanisation of an oppressed group…The more porn images filter into mainstream culture, the more girls and women are stripped of full human status and reduced to sex objects…

You can read the article here

Legalising prostitution is not the answer

In this piece, also in the Guardian, Julie Bindel highlights the success of Sweden’s approach to prostitution: penalising the buyer of sexual services. An extract:

Today, Förbud mot köp av sexuell tjänst: en utvärdering 1999-2008 (Prohibition of the Purchase of a Sexual Service: an Evaluation 1999-2008), a report on the evaluation of the 11-year-old Swedish law that criminalises those who pay for or attempt to pay for sex, is released, and its conclusion is that the legislation has been overwhelmingly positive for all (except the pimps, traffickers and punters, of course). I hope it will put paid to the scores of assertions bandied about during the past decade that the law has been detrimental to those in prostitution as well as to wider society…

…today’s report, a comprehensive evaluation of the Swedish law, conducted by an independent commission appointed by the government, and led by the chancellor of justice (the highest legal officer in Sweden) shows that legislation criminalising demand has been a resounding success. The evaluation concludes that, since the law came in to force in 1999, the number of women involved in street prostitution has halved, whereas neighbouring countries such as Denmark and Norway have seen a sharp rise; that there is no evidence of an increase in off-street prostitution; and that, despite a significant increase in prostitution in the neighbouring countries during the past 10 years, there is no evidence of a similar increase in Sweden.

Read the full article here.

I hope those who are being pressured by vested sex industry interests to extend legalisation in Australia will read this report. Anyone interested in the issue should also read Making Sex Work: a failed experiment with legalised prostitution by Mary Lucille Sullivan,  which documents how all the positive claims made about the benefits of legalisation failed to be realised in Victoria.