He said they’d found a brothel
on the dig he did last night
I asked him how they know
he sighed
a pit of babies’ bones
a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

Hollie McNish, ‘Conversation with an archaeologist’

This excerpt perfectly lays bare the dark and twisted truth of prostitution and today’s porn industry: that it is women who have been offered up as sacrifices to the cause of sexual freedom and it is the men who consistently benefit from this sacrifice. This is a truth that liberal feminism has attempted to hide through naïve and privileged claims that women should be able to do what they want with their bodies, to ‘fuck back’ and ultimately claim their ‘sexual liberation’.

What the liberal feminist narrative fails to recognise, is that sexual liberation treats men and women very differently, particularly in the world of prostitution and porn. Historically, the occupation of prostitution involved both the disadvantaged and influential women of society. Some prostitutes in ancient Greece were as famous for their company as their beauty, charging extraordinary sums for their services meaning they could be independent and wealthy women in social standing. In Ancient Rome, prostitution was widely accepted yet the prostitutes themselves were considered scum. Most were slaves or, if free by birth relegated to the infames, people lacking in social standing and deprived of the protections that most citizens under Roman law received. Despite these cultural and social disparities, the common thread within all forms of prostitution across the world was that it involved rape, incest and unimaginable abuses all for the purpose of pleasing men.

Nowadays, many feminists would argue that we have come a long way. The modern porn industry proves otherwise. The industry itself actually reflects much of the depravity of Ancient Rome and Greece. Pornhub is home to videos featuring women dressed up as school children in order to appeal to paedophilic fetishes, or videos featuring sexual encounters between siblings, fathers and mothers.

During the 1960s, our second wave feminists were indeed remarkable in continuing the pursuit of first wave feminism for equality in work, education, and politics. Yet, there was a side to the movement that went catastrophically wrong. Women had the opportunity to finally tell men to stop going to strip clubs, to stop watching and reading porn, to stop sleeping around and to finally respect women as we are: intelligent, emotional, beautiful human beings who are essential to human life and creation. We are not sexual objects. Yet, instead of telling men no, we said, if men can watch strippers and have sex with whoever they please, why can’t we? Slowly, what developed out of second-wave feminism was a fallacious message that ‘fucking per se is freedom per se’. [1]

Instead of telling men to stop acting like animals when it came to sex, we wanted to become just like them. But this so-called sexual liberation treats men and women catastrophically different. It is a lie that has created pathetic men with diminished principle and respect in the bedroom. It is a lie that has created foolish women who believe they are exercising their own ‘choice’ and strengthening the course of female ‘sexual liberation’.

Louise Perry’s 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution delves deeply into this issue through an exploration of the sexual revolutions key icons, Hugh Hefner and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was both the first ever cover star and the first ever naked centrefold in the first ever edition of Hefner’s Playboy Magazine. The clothed Monroe on the cover of the magazine beckoned in readers with a promise of a ‘Full Color” nude photo of the actress ‘for the first time in any magazine’. Her centrefold was the key reason for the publication’s initial success. Monroe herself was humiliated and had only resorted to posing in a photoshoot out of desperate need for money, signing the release documents with a fake name. Hefner didn’t pay her to use her images and didn’t seek her consent before publishing them.

For most of her life Monroe “grinned, posed and pretended”. She suffered a series of sexual abuse at the hands of pervasive men, first encountering sexual abuse at the age of 8 in one of the boarding houses that she spent time in. She spent most of her adolescent and adult life in and out of marriages and affairs to men who belittled and abused her. At times she had established herself as a “house girl” otherwise known as a prostitute for many of the producers and directors of Hollywood she worked for.

A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely damaged.[1] Marilyn Monroe’s supposed sexual liberation involved abuse, objectification and manipulation culminating in her suicide. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.

Perry writes, “Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it”.[2]

On the other hand, Hugh Hefner experienced a ‘sexual liberation’ vastly different from Monroe, as men typically do. As a younger man, he was the true play boy – handsome, charming and envied by other men. He hosted parties for his celebrity friends and would then retire upstairs with his harem of identical blonde bimbos. Unlike Monroe, Hefner lived to grow old having lived out his sexual fantasies and a hypersexualised legacy where men are encouraged to do whatever they feel and with whoever. Horrifyingly, numerous feminists[3] argued that Hefner had actually pushed feminism forwards as he notably took a progressive stance to the contraceptive pill and abortion rights.

However, none of these eulogists seem to recognise that Hefner was actually laughing at women. His commitment to severing reproduction from sex had nothing to do with a commitment to women’s rights or liberation. He never once campaigned for anything that didn’t bring him direct benefit, and, when fear of pregnancy was one of the last remaining reasons for women saying ‘no’ to free sex, he had every reason to push for a change that would increase the number of women available to him.

He wasn’t the one who had to go through the operation of an abortion. He wasn’t the one who went through the pain and discomfort. He wasn’t the one who experienced guilt for the rest of his life. The woman is and always will be.

What makes the experience of Monroe so similar to that of sex workers of this decade is that although a porn performer, stripper or prostitute may enjoy her lifestyle having “consented” at the precise time of a sexual encounter, sadly, it is often the case that years later they recognise their bodies were not being used as a means of propelling their own sexual liberation, but rather at the beckoning call of men.

Linda Lovelace, star of the 1982 hardcore film Deep Throat, appeared to be a grateful beneficiary of sexual liberation. Only later did she reveal the truth of what was done to her and became a campaigner against the porn industry. She wrote:

They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to avoid being killed.[4]

Vanessa Belmond performed porn between the ages of 18-25 years old and is explicit of the cruelty of the industry. She reports upon the vast amounts of racism as a black woman, financial exploitation, the prevalence of STD’s and the total lack of respect for the boundaries and wellbeing of porn performers, particularly females. But just like Lovelace, when Belmond was first involved in the industry she strongly insisted she was simply expressing her sexual agency.

Belmond wrote, “I was just a sexual young girl trying out all of the things she fantasized about! Right? I certainly wasn’t a broken-down young woman doing what she had to do to make money in the sex industry. I wasn’t a young woman whose self-worth had been completely destroyed to the point where she felt like nothing more than an object, a commodity. Noooo. I was a ‘liberated’, ‘sexually open’, ‘party girl’.[5]

Unfortunately, this is the reality of the majority of sex workers and performers. It’s very easy for a woman who has youth and beauty to justify why she participates in these activities or jobs. When you’re young, fit, thin, visually stunning and you have men gawking at you all the time this lifestyle seems to even benefit women. But when you reach the age of 35 or 40 and the aging starts, the cellulite becomes more obvious, suddenly the porn audience is less interested in you. This isn’t an issue of female body positivity. Most porn users don’t give a crap about body positivity when they log on to PornHub. Heck, most don’t even give a crap about whether or not the female performer is legitimately consenting. So, the older performers or workers either enter a phase of significant beauty enhancing technologies, starving themselves, dressing up as little school girls, or they get chucked out of the industry feeling exploited, manipulated, alone and yet again used by the patriarchy. So much for sexual liberation.

When a man or woman logs onto PornHub, very few are aware or even care that it has facilitated the trafficking of millions of women, men and children. See, we’re all horrified when we hear on the news the murder of a woman at the hands of her spouse, or we’re always quick to criticise the church upon hearing a child abuse scandal. Yet, most of us willingly enter a porn site regularly. Some of us have even gone the horrific step and used it in our relationships! Let me reiterate this for you:

We have used and relied on a site that facilitates and profits off the depiction of rape and abuse of women, men and children.

I can hear your excuse, “but I never watch porn where women are abused, it’s pretty obvious they’re consenting”. You don’t know that. They’re actors remember! If they don’t make it look real, then they won’t get paid or they won’t be released. Even if what you’re watching is consensual, you are using a site that profits off the distribution of film featuring rape and child abuse.

Perry’s Chapter “Consent is not Enough” reveals the true depravity hidden within the depths of the porn industry. She writes about the American campaign group, TraffickingHub, who have been developing a growing body of evidence that Pornhub knowingly hosts videos of children and sex trafficking victims being raped, as well as so-called revenge porn shared without the victim’s consent.

The Internet Watch Foundation has so far confirmed 118 cases of children being sexually abused on Pornhub. A fourteen year old child, Rose Kalemba, was gang raped at knifepoint. Footage of the attack was posted on Pornhub and viewed more than 400,000 times enabling Pornhub to profit significantly from the footage of the assault. Kalemba contacted Pornhub repeatedly over 6 months requesting the footage be removed, but to no avail.

In December 2020, an article in the New York Times delivered a painful blow to MindGeek, the giant of the porn world which operates close to 100 websites including PornHub. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof conducted an investigation into the failure of Pornhub to remove sexual images of children and non-consenting adults from the platform. It is important to note that not only is The New York Times one of the most prestigious news outlets in the world, but it is also a liberal publication that rarely criticises the sex industry. This meant that when Kristof’s piece was published, it could not easily be dismissed by Pornhub’s defenders as another example of conservative prudishness. This made his findings, all the more damning. He wrote, ‘The Pornhub site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos.’[6]

Are you feeling horrified now? Even a bit guilty? Well, the sexual liberation narrative has always assisted the privileged who enjoy the commodity of porn. This narrative has comforted people whom after watching porn feel a little bit guilty at what they are essentially funding and facilitating. Marilyn Monroe, Vanessa Belmond and Linda Lovelace all gave some version of the sexual agency narrative by responding to anyone who challenged it with a dismissive “of course I’m consenting”. All of these women later changed their minds after the porn industry had had its fill of them, and after the damage to their bodies and psyches had already been done.

There are many ignorant feminists who believe that so-called ethical porn is the solution. But this is yet another hypothetical product which serves only to comfort the privileged by distracting from the reality of how the porn industry truly operates. Porn marketed as ‘ethical’ makes up such a tiny and unpopular proportion of the market that focusing on it is like, as feminist writer Sarah Ditum has put it, ‘putting a chicken in your back garden and claiming you’ve fixed factory farming.’ Moreover, whatever ‘ethical’ label you’re stamping on a video, you cannot look at it and know for sure that the people in it were truly happy to be there or happy for the video itself to be distributed. Marilyn Monroe certainly wasn’t.

But what is the true solution to all of this? Well, this is one of the rare occasions where the solution is blatantly easy and obvious: opt out. Even if the state holds the power to regulate the porn industry (which would be a good thing) the individual maintains absolute control over whether or not he or she directly contributes to it. There is absolutely no good reason to use porn. It is merely a selfish waste of time that gradually destroys relationships, encourages violence against women and destroys the psyche of the man or woman who watches it. Feminists aren’t protecting sex workers by encouraging the use of porn. Rather, they are enabling another young generation of women to be trampled upon under the misguided idea of ‘sexual liberation’.

You might be horrified to know that Hugh Hefner, a man who catalysed the abuse of thousands of women under the disguise that he was barracking for women’s reproductive rights, bought and was buried in the site right next to Marilyn Monroe. “Her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death” with Hefner having delivered both the first and final blow as he was laid to rest by her side.

In the words of Louise Perry: “the sexual liberation narrative tells you to keep going; I’m telling you that you have an obligation to stop.”[7]

Penelope Dawson is a Member of the University of Sydney Conservative Club

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[1] Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee Books [1978].

[2] Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press 2022, p. 3.

[3] Pascale Day, ‘Opinion’, 28 September 2017, https://metro.co.uk/2017/09/28/hugh-hefner-might-have-been-a-sleaze-but-playboy-helped-push-feminism-forwards-6963213/?ito=cbshare.

[4] Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady, Ordeal: An Autobiography. New York: Citadel Press, 1980.

[5] See www.antipornography.org/is-doing-porn-empowering-for-women.html.

[6] Nicholas Kristof, ‘The children of Pornhub’, 4 December 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/pronhub-news-child-abuse.html.

[7] Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press 2022, p. 113.