Damaged Lives: The Hidden Cost of Pornography

There’s going to be a whole army of women out there who have had the experience of having their heads flushed down toilets as entertainment, being strangled as entertainment, being double penetrated and throat fucked ‘til they throw up as entertainment. These are women who found themselves caught up in something beyond their control, the sex industry, where the person who’s meant to be on their side, their ‘agent’ (best case scenario – or pimp), pushes and pushes and pushes them to ever more painful and degrading acts in the pursuit of money. Hard to see a human being when you have dollar signs in your eyes. These are vulnerable women, often women with histories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, substance abuse, psychological abuse, with mental health problems, financial problems. These are the women who just can’t say no, but not in the sexy way the industry would have you think. More of a Hobson’s choice situation.

Welcome to hell on earth. Lost already, you become increasingly split: detached from yourself, from what is happening to your body, from the verbal abuse directed at and over you, in which you’re made to take part - call yourself names, beg to be hurt. Alone, with no one to turn to for help, reliant on the very people who abuse you, who make money off your abuse. You become a shell: there but not there, enduring, just enduring, unable to comprehend, to compute, the horror of what is being done to you for the profit and pleasure of others. Out of your depth.

When you are hurt, people laugh or hurt you more. You stop showing that it hurts. Naked already, with cameras focused on your most intimate areas, on capturing their abuse, you become numb: this is what you do, what you are here for. They will do what they will do and it’s best not to think about it. You have to change the goalposts to survive. What was once humiliating and unthinkable is now an everyday occurrence. Unavoidable. It becomes: as long as I don’t show that I’m hurting, that they’re getting to me, give them that satisfaction. Your boundaries are broken one by one: they fuck you in the arse, subject you to double penetrations, to fisting, to speculums, to urinating and spitting and slapping and choking… Endless abuse, endless pain, endless degradation.

Total destruction.

The only thing left is your denial and your determination that they will not see how much they hurt you. Feigning supreme indifference, even enjoyment, you pretend you have some measure of control because to recognize your powerlessness is to open the gates to insanity and in all likelihood suicide.

As ever more aggressive, ever more debasing porn becomes more mainstream, the number of women who have had these experiences, who have been sold, abused and profited from, who have been tortured, grows. Everyday it grows. If they are lucky enough to get out, to get clean and sober (yeah, most women in porn have substance abuse issues – wouldn’t you drink or use to get through?), where have they to turn?

Most people nowadays if they are told that a woman has been in porn, would say ‘cool’. Cool!!! Knowing as she does the reality – wiping down after 8 sweating pigs have cum in her face, limping to the shower after being anally and vaginally penetrated for hours at a time with cocks and objects, bruised and bleeding, what was said to her and what she was made to say, the coercion, the ever present threat of violence, the powerlessness – this metrosexual, abstract notion of cool is from another planet. She has never been less understood. Hell, even the pornographers, even the cameramen, even her pimp or agent acknowledge that this stuff isn’t good on the body, is a test of endurance rather than a pleasure trip.

Hers is a great loneliness, separated as she is from the majority who believe that pornography is harmless fun, that women in it are empowered, choose it from a variety of meaningful options, enjoy it. 'Paid to get laid? Awesome!'. Her friends may hold this view, her neighbours may hold this view, her therapist may hold this view. Protective of their ‘right’ to wank over other women in similar circumstances, unwilling to hear the truth, theirs is a language far removed from the sordid realities, an abstract language of free speech and liberation. To many of the people who surround her, porn is just a concept, one with a very pleasing result, easily cleaned up with a tissue. These people, people who defend porn, project their dark desires onto her, conveniently forgetting that the reason for her being there is their demand for such images rather than her desire to engage in such acts. She wanted it! After all, she said so didn’t she, and she smiled?

A growing number of women who have been subjected to extreme physical, sexual, psychological torture. They are traumatised, they are used in ever more extreme ways for the amusement of the purchaser, unless they are lucky enough to exit, until they are too broken to be of further use. Anyone who objects to the use of the word 'torture' here might do well to look it up, and to compare some of increasingly common porn practices such as gagging, spitting, verbal abuse, slapping, and 'swirlies' to name but a few.

The pornographer doesn’t care about her.
The men fucking her don’t care about her.
The pimps and agents don’t care about her.
The guy at home with his cock in his hand doesn’t care about her. Her life is unimaginable to him, her humanity invisible to him, her hopes and dreams destroyed for him, all for a cheap and easy laugh and an orgasm.

She has quite simply no place left to go, her body battered from fucking after fucking without condom or care, her head mashed with thousands of fragmented images, sounds, scents, words, reminders of horror and pain and degradation beyond words. She has nightmares, flashbacks, PTSD. She continues to get sick, as she did when she was in it. Suicide becomes an option* Her humanity has been disregarded by every person in her life who sold her, who fucked her, who pressured her, who paid the men who did this to her and then calmly laid the blame at her feet.

We need to understand what it means to be a woman on a website called ‘Elastic Assholes’, to have people joke that ‘she might just be wearing a diaper by the time we’re finished’. To feel or to try to empathise what is is actually like to be choked so you can’t breathe, to be facefucked so viciously you throw up, to have water in your eyes and nose and mouth when you’ve been fucked every which way possible and they’re flushing your head down the toilet, the final insult. What it is like to be violently abused and traumatised, and to know that images of that abuse are being sold and generating money for the men who hurt you.

I am a survivor of prostitution – of pornography – of torture. Just. It’s been touch and go and recovery isn’t a piece of cake either. Being abused for entertainment is inhumane.

To remain desensitized is to be inhuman. If we’re not part of the solution, taking a stand against pornography, taking action, we’re part of the problem. Together we can be stronger and make a difference. We need to look past the picture the pornographer has painted for us of the women he uses.  She is not other, in some way different. There is not a subspecies of woman who wish to be abused in such a way. If it would hurt you to have two cocks in your arse, it will hurt her. Let go of the bullshit line of dismissal ‘whatever floats your boat’ and imagine yourself in her shoes for one moment. Would you like it? Would you be happy having that done to you? Would you be happy if she were your daughter or your sister or your mother? She says she likes it in the movies, maybe even asks them to hurt her because she has to, but if you look into her eyes, if you dare, you’ll see the very real fear and pain, you’ll see the truth.

Stop funding a system that destroys women. Stop porn.

* The suicide rate and death from drug and alcohol abuse in the industry is significantly above average, see www.antipornography.org

The Opposition: The Sex Industry's Supporters Uncovered

An anonymous person recently left me a lovely comment on 'The Invisible Man' calling me (and I quote) a 'man hating twat' and saying 'I hope you die' . Another anonymous person commented that prostitutes are cunts and as such I should shut up complaining.

So I give you, ladies and gentlemen, what survivors of the sex industry are up against.

It's important to me to give voice to the reality of the extreme violence meted out against women from the sex industry. When I was pimped that was physical. Now it is verbal, but painful nonetheless.

He doesn't even know you but he hates you and he wants you to die. Too familiar to me, a scenario acted out daily with brutality against the prostituted. The fact that you continue to survive, that you continue to have some spirit, is a personal insult to these people. It enrages them.

Articulate? No. Well informed judgment? Maybe not. Verbal abuse and aggression to the extreme.

And me? Should I be silenced by such abuse, slink off in shame at who I am and what I've gone through, give them what they want and shut up and die? What these people wrote confirms everything I know to be true about supporters of the sex industry. They have a vested interest in you not telling it as it is: it shows them for what they are. I survived the physical torture, I was mute for long enough. It's hard to have a voice when there's a cock rammed down your throat. I'm still here and so I'll continue to do what I do: put the truth out there and hope it makes some small difference.

If you ever thought that survivors of the sex industry exaggerate the levels of hatred and violence though, maybe my making public these comments will mitigate a little against that imagining. If I ever needed proof that the johns want to hurt the women they use, I guess this is it. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Thanks for that, anonymous.

How to Have Sex Like a Hooker (oops, I mean 'Pornstar')

Just a few tips I learned along the way, my experience of being used in pornography when I was pimped, and from a little research into the experience of other survivors of porn and prostitution. Oh yeah, and P.S., pornography is prostitution, in spite of the arbitrary line society chooses to draw: someone, be that the woman, her pimp or her agent is paid in exchange for the use of her body. Thus buyers of porn are johns, albeit one step removed, though they wouldn't like to be called that. Strange really, such sensitivity to words given the words used about the women in the porn they buy.

Anyway.

So, you're curious about having sex (definitely not making love) like a 'pornstar' (hooker)? Some handy hints:

- Disregard your body and its pain. Remember: this is not about you, it is about the johns and what they want to see, the men fucking you and what they want to do, and the men behind the camera and how much money they want to make. Your body is merely the vehicle for the sexual kicks of others, no matter how painful or perverse. As 'Buttman' John Stagliano put it, 'pleasure and pain are the same thing, right?' (1) . I guess that's empathy out the window.

- Expect to be humiliated. Much of the pleasure the punters take is from seeing you degraded, whether that be a cum facial, what they say to you (slut! whore! cunt! Say you're a cunt), or when they slap you or spit on you or do delightful stuff to you like ATMs and worse. That stuff that pro-porn peeps sometimes say about respecting the women in it for their choice to do it? BS all. They don't respect you one bit and the guys working you over won't either.

- View yourself from an outsider's perspective - a pornographer's perspective, a john's perspective. That's why you're here. Their attention's focussed largely between your legs, hence the close-ups. Oh yeah, and boobs and mouth have their uses too. That's where your value lies: in your availability to be used. Think they're bothered about how it feels for you, if you're in pain? There's no place for consideration when the camera's rolling and the johns are waiting, cheering on acts of aggression as a 'get even' with the women they can't have in their lives.

- Penetration, penetration, penetration. That's where it's at. If it can be done, someone'll want to see it, no matter how extreme. Vaginal, anal, oral... Now anal's become mainstream, the push is on for the next innovation, and your body's about to be tested to its limits, not thrilling but risky and painful, life and death. As one porn director, Mitchell Spinelli put it, 'People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass... It's like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless.' (2) Endurance is the number one qualification you'll need here: this is not about loving sex and being proud of your body like they tell you in the magazines. Think it'll be an exciting sexual experience? Think again. We're talking prolonged rough fucking, every way possible risking tearing, being bruised so badly that sitting down hurts, and shitting blood afterwards. And they'll use anything, not just their cocks - objects or fists, anything they can force inside you. You are a set of holes to them, money to them, the more extreme the act the more they'll make. Hard to see the human when you have dollar signs in front of your eyes.

- Be prepared to thank the men abusing you, to ask them to hurt you more, fuck you harder. The physical assault's not enough: they demand to know, for the benefit of the guy sitting at home jerking off, to get him off, that you're loving it. We're treating her nasty, and the little slut can't get enough! Or some audiences want to know you're in pain, so be ready to cry. You might not be able to help that, anyway, don't beat yourself up for that, you don't know what you'll be up against, that the strongest resolve is no defence. They have a way of breaking you, shaming you, hurting you 'til your eyes water. And don't forget to say thank you like a good girl when they're done, and present to the camera: they want to see that damage!

- Lay aside any notions of choice, empowerment or control. What they say goes, to avoid more off screen violence. Obedience is demanded: they have the power, your body is their playground, to do to as they wish. No matter how aggressively they treat you while the camera's on, be aware it can and does get a lot worse when it's turned off.

- And finally, take and use anything that you can get your hands on to numb you out, to lessen the pain, mental and physical. What's going to happen will happen with or without your consent, whether you struggle or don't, whether they have to beat you or threaten you first or not. Your body is here, and it's going to be sorely misused. The best you can do is get yourself as far away as possible, whatever that takes. Drink, drugs, dissociation. That's it kid, I'm afraid that's your only weapon: you're on your own out there.

Don't confuse the lies about women in pornography being empowered or respected, being 'stars', it being a thrilling glamorous job, or anything about enjoying sex, liberating sex, with the reality. Pornography is all about money and power. Women's bodies are the means to the end, which is someone who has power over her getting rich by selling her, images of her abuse, and someone getting off on it. Maybe if they knew a little more of the reality, people would be less keen to have 'sex like a pornstar', or to emulate the dynamic of abuser and abused that we call porn.

(1) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, R Jensen, Southend Press, 2007, p117

(2) Ibid, p70

Destruction Calling: Come on Down

I get the strongest urge at times to utterly destroy myself, to hurt and hurt and hurt myself, to shred myself to bits. To punish myself. It's as if I've internalised what they said to me - you deserve it, you like it, you were meant for this - worthless! Bitch! Dirty girl! Slut! Whore... and on. There's a part of me that feels horribly dirty and damaged beyond repair, which makes any attempt at change seem utterly futile.

My therapist said to me, when you encounter evil of the type you have experienced, most people go with one of two options: destroy others, thus perpetuating the evil, or destroy themselves. I took the latter course. I believed the badness, the hatred and aggression, and the dirtiness, which belonged to the men who used me, to be mine. There were no boundaries: nothing was mine, nothing was sacred, there was nothing that couldn't be smashed and tainted. Their words circled in my head, their hands possessed my body, their body fluids in and on me, my pain their orgasm. They consumed me. Not surprising then that I was confused about what was their stuff and what was mine. Degradation after degradation, beating after beating, rape after rape. It was always my fault - my fault I got hit for not cooperating, for showing him up, for making him angry, my fault I got raped because I deserved it, liked it, was a slut anyway, had it coming to me.

They told me it was my fault, and I believed them. Their voices were louder, more persistent, more cruel, playing on my fears, on my insecurities than the small whisper in my head that said this isn't right, what they do and say isn't right. They told me I was dirty and it fit my experience: I felt dirty, a collection of holes to be fucked and cum on and in. They told me I was worthless: I felt worthless, disposable, when one man after another used me and then left me, a battered wreck, to clean myself up, to make myself decent for the next fucking. They told me I liked it, and I thought, no I don't, but I found myself saying I did, colluding, to try and stay safe, try and avoid any more violence.

I felt at times I simply can't take anymore - anymore shouting, anymore beatings, anymore punishments. Anything but that, I'll do anything. And I did. The shame stays with me, the self-blame stays with me.

To survive what was happening, I used to tell myself it doesn't really matter, I don't matter, this body isn't really me. Unable to remove myself from that situation, just to survive, I ended up internalising the attitude of my abusers, denying my own feelings and rights and humanity. Knowing I might die there, but powerless to change that, coming close, I detached from myself, and said to myself, so be it. So tired, so so tired of the fear and the pain and the daily horror of being sold.

It's a slow and painful process to say to myself that I do matter, that what was done to me does matter, and to really believe it. There remains a behaviour pattern in me that makes it much easier to say, particularly when I'm tired and struggling and hurting as I am right now, it doesn't matter: none of this matters and neither do I, and hurt myself again. To detach from this body, as I did then, to separate off, let the body take the punishment, and self harm. I get this overwhelming urge to purge myself of this evil, to be rid of it, to destroy every last bit of it, but this evil left its marks on me, on Angel, in the form of scars and body memories, association. To wipe out the past would be to wipe out the body, to wipe out me, to end myself.

I have come to understand, though it has taken time, and the urge to hurt myself, to punish myself remains strong, that this is misplaced emotion. I don't want to erase Angel, and I shan't. I just don't want to feel dirty anymore, feel shameful anymore, feel worthless anymore. I still feel powerless in the face of the sex industry. But I can see that this is not my shame to bear. I can see that the dirt and the guilt and the blame lie with the men who used and sold me. The feelings, though, oh the feelings! They take a little longer to catch up. As long as I keep doing the right actions - talking about this stuff, writing about this stuff - I don't have to act on it. I didn't get clean and sober to fuck myself up another way.

You know what needs destroying? The sex industry with all its lies and abuses. I fully intend to do everything in my power to aid that process.

Anna Arrowsmith: So Open Minded My Brain Just Fell Out

My attention was drawn to an article in the Guardian online stating that porn is good for society. In it, the (female) writer argues that there is no evidence that porn causes any damage. I've just left my two pen'orth in the comments section for what it's worth, a little apprehensively (defenders of porn may claim to be in favour of free speech but in my experience they're never backward in coming forward to tell anyone who disagrees with their perspective to shut the fuck up - prude! conservative! do-gooder! frigid cow... you get my point) . I'm prepared for a backlash.

That the author, Anna Arrowsmith - a porn director - is likely to be a tad biased in favour of porn is hard to dispute. That she makes sweeping statements, as if of fact, as to the harmlessness of porn, is a little harder to swallow. And as a survivor of prostitution and pornography, I've had to swallow a good deal!

Of course, reading through the comments, her view is a popular one. Men and women who get off on using porn, without too much thought as to any consequences beyond their own orgasm are unlikely to thank anyone who draws attention to the damages caused by porn. Hell, it might take the edge off things or even make them feel a bit bad, and porn's all about feeling good after all, isn't it? Having a laugh, getting your rocks off, not too serious, no harm done.

As if.

Porn damages. Fact. In it, women are sex objects, a set of orifices to be bought, wanked over and discarded. Men who object to this view are seen as unmanly, women who object as prudish or jealous. Or anti sex. God, that makes me laugh, yeah, of course, I object to women being sold and abused to make vast sums of money for an industry that then discards them with their mental health problems and physical damage, so I must be an enemy of sexual empowerment and sex.

!!!

The arguments put forward by the sex industry are thin and reedy, when they are seen for what they are. Once we discard the fear of being called names for not supporting an industry that destroys women, we can begin to speak. But more than that, we can point out a few facts that unlike Anna Arrowsmith's wishful thinking are harder to dispute. The argument put forward by the industry is little more than hot air, a huge spin machine there to protect maximum profits for the business men behind it. The sex industry doesn't care about promoting a healthy varied view of sex, it cares about money! It is profit driven. The pimps don't care about the women's bodies, they care about new, ever more extreme niche markets. Double penetration? Double anal? Fisting? They all hurt. But they make money, push the boundaries, have an edge. Porn isn't free speech: since when did a vagina or anus have a voice? It's the very opposite, a muting of the voices of the women it uses and hurts. They can't say: this hurts! They have to say: I love it, I choose to be here, it feels so good, fuck me harder, or else not be paid or be hurt by the unseen pimps and coercers hidden in pornography at the other end of the lens.

I know: I've been there. The words I said weren't my words, they were the words of my ex, of the man who beat me and raped me and sold me for other men to photograph and film and beat and rape. Being forced to say I enjoyed being abused, wanted more of it, nearly killed me, and I'm not speaking figuratively. I've wanted to die even since I exited.

Women don't get into the sex industry because they're happy and sorted and well adjusted. We end up there through mental health issues, substance abuse issues, violence, past abuse... desperation. And once you get in there, it's all down hill from there on in. The trauma of being sold, of being used as pure entertainment, of being abused, being laughed at and hurt and fucked and told you deserve it, stays with you. If you're lucky enough to get out alive, and not everyone does, you are left so damaged, so scarred, that you feel you no longer fit in, no longer belong. You feel you belong back there, although you hate it, are terrified of it. It's the only place they'll welcome a fuck up like you. Everywhere you go for help they tell you that prostitution's just a job, that porn's harmless, they invalidate you, they judge you (you've got bad mental health now after all, you're easily dismissed, and a 'history' of substance abuse issues, of self harm) and they send you away. Even the so-called mental health professionals don't want to hear your story.

Mute then, and mute now. Disposable then, disposable now.

Because, as Anna Arrowsmith's article, and the majority of comments beneath it show, most people don't want to listen, don't want to hear the unpalatable truth. Society demands that the individual be able to use a woman, buy a woman, wank over a woman and then fold her back into the bedside drawer, with a box of tissues and a spotless conscience. This state of affairs will continue for as long as there is fear in speaking out. No one likes being called names. As for me, though, when I hear defenders of porn saying that people who are anti porn are closed minded, I say: it's ok to say that somethings are damaging. Porn damages. We have to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise we will continue to live in the situation in which we are so open minded, our brains have fallen out.

This Addict's Journey

I am 30 years old, an addict and an alcoholic, in recovery. My story differs little in many respects from those of countless others I have heard in the rooms of the 12 Step Programme I work. I count myself lucky to be here, and in a fit state to write. Recovery has in many ways changed my life beyond recognition.

However, the one thing I still struggle with is my experience of prostitution: of being a battered partner, a fuck doll, treated as less than human. I suffer with PTSD and get triggered, flashbacks and frequent intrusive thoughts.

It makes me sick when the media and sex industry talk about choices and freedom: these words have no place in my experience or the experiences of the other women I came across when I was 'working' and since, in recovery. The language of choice is meaningless in a context of violence, addiction, and mental health problems.

I am writing this blog to give some voice to the reality of prostitution. When I was in the middle of it, I had to say that I liked it, that it was fun, because that's what the johns want to hear. Or say nothing, to avoid a beating. The real me was effectively mute. I write for that part of me who cried herself to sleep every night that I had come to this, for the me that vomited before and sometimes after, full of fear and shame. And I write for the women still out there, who may never get the chance to be heard.