Archive for the ‘sexploitation’ Category
on power and sexploitation: the Epstein files
a young woman who deserved so much better
What was I thinking about writing about? Oh yes, the Epstein thingy. I’ve been avoiding it, partly because I have, I think, a rather permissive attitude to sexuality (I blame bonobos), even though my own sex life has been largely a disastrous nullity, and in my seventieth year it’s not likely to improve.
But the Epstein matter isn’t about a kind of open-hearted – ‘let’s get it on so that we can be more of an all-for-one, one-for-all’ – society, which is, of course, the Musketeerian motto of bonoboism. It’s pretty well all about exploitation and power.
So let me for the purpose of this essay divide power relations into two forms – the power of males over females, and the power of the rich over the poor. In the WEIRD world, it seems to me, the power of males over females is slowly diminishing, but the power of the rich over the poor is growing faster than ever before. And the wealth of males is of course growing much faster than that of females. That’s to say, in the world of the super-rich, men like to have it all, and their quantum of wantum doesn’t vary much in its exponential increase.
We’re the financial apes, though of course there are many other distinguishing features, good and bad – the clothed apes, the language apes, the nationalistic apes, the nucleonic apes, the mass-murdering apes, the astronautical apes, and of course the most populous apes by far. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but what might ground us, as they keep us in touch with the rest of the animal world, are our sexual urges.
But these urges have long been a problem for us, or maybe not that long, maybe since the dawn of religion and its various tabus. How long ago was that? 15,000 years ago? 300,000? At some stage monogamy was born – a ‘this is my sole sexual partner’ notion, which somehow transmogrified into ‘I own this female’, or something similar. And attitudes to sex changed, perhaps long before the advent of clothing. Sex, or sexual play, could only be an adult thing – which rather undermines the notion of play.
There are so many perhaps unanswerable questions – when did ‘civilisation’ begin? Did this supposed civilisation load us with endless sexual tabus? Yes, maybe, and it also gave us agriculture and cities and writing and more sophisticated weapons and a whole variety of artful activities. Perhaps, if we’d gone more the way of bonobos, we’d have been so absorbed in sexual fun that we’d never have stopped to contemplate the Meaning of Life, and the Creation of the World.
However, it seems that the super-rich, and their families, many of whom, like the offspring of monarchs and so-called ‘robber barons’, come under the category of the idle rich, are drawn to a bonoboesque lifestyle, if a rather more patriarchal and one-sided version of it. And, given our generally hypocritical public attitude towards sex, the victims tend to suffer as much as, or more than, the perpetrators when all is exposed. Virginia Giuffre’s suicide here in Australia last year is a tragic example.
It’s amusing, though, from this distance, to note how the so-called MAGA conservatives, with their generally negative thinking about abortion, feminism and anything resembling sexual licence, have been so keen to hide the sexual licence on steroids that are the Epstein files. But to be fair, the MAGA people are divided on the issue – those in power and in government are definitely in favour of suppression, while the rest are confused, to put it generously. Then again, if you take the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ seriously, confusion must be a fundamental aspect of your identity.
So where and how is this all going to end? It’s hard to imagine that the rich and very powerful are going to allow the mid-term elections, destined to result in a large non-conservative majority in Congress, to cause any more damage vis-à-vis the Epstein files than they already have. They will surely find a solution, and I’m sure they’re working on it right now, or have already worked it all out more or less to perfection. We will have to wait and see.
The Bonobo Sisterhood – some comments
Chrystul Kizer self-portrait
Recently I finally acquired a copy of The Bonobo Sisterhood, by Diane Rosenfeld, which, for obvious reasons, I’ve been keen to read. However, having read two thirds of the book, I must say that I find it something of a let-down. Firstly, it’s very US-based, which sorely tests my anti-US bias, shameful though that is. Second, it concentrates almost solely on individual male sexual violence – certainly an important topic, but not so much a part of my own focus, which is political, economic, legal and military power, among other things. It’s also somewhat aggressively black-and-white, often giving the impression that most if not all males are potential violators and/or sexual predators, which, when I think of my own social circle, strikes me as absurd. A great deal of the writing focuses on women’s self-defence, which, again, I’ve never given much thought to. None of the women in my admittedly narrow circle go in for self-defence training, though most have been into physical fitness, yoga, pilates and the like. They clearly don’t feel the need for it, which might suggest that this is more of a US problem. Then again, my little microcosm may be atypical.
To be fair, The Australian Bureau of Statistics does make for grim reading on male violence,
In the most recent incident of physical assault by a male (September 2023):
For women
- 87% knew the perpetrator
- 70% experienced the incident in a residential location
- 63% experienced anxiety or fear
For men
- 42% knew the perpetrator
- 74% experienced the incident in a non-residential location
a bonobo world: sex, at last
Japanese women discuss exploitation in the sex industry
Decades ago I was attending a session at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, a discussion with the author of a fairly sexually explicit and popular novel. During question time, someone came out, in ‘a voice peppered with petulance’ (a favourite phrase of an old friend), with this query: Why this modern obsession with sex? After all, he opined, the sexual act is trivial and perfunctory, it’s over in minutes, it’s of no greater significance and of probably lesser value than teeth-cleaning. Why not focus on more important matters?
The author and other panellists seemed non-plussed, to say the least, and certainly didn’t find any memorable rejoinder to this attack upon the source of all animal life. I myself was both amused and enraged – amused, because I’d immediately recognised the questioner as a history lecturer at the nearby University of Adelaide, where I was then a student. As it happened, a friend of mine had been dating the lecturer’s daughter, but he’d given up on her, telling me that she was the most sexually indifferent person he’d ever met. A chip off the old bloke, apparently.
But I was angered and a little shocked at the panellists’ meek reaction to this – misunderstanding? – of the sex act. This obliviousness? This lifelessness? This lack of imagination? My mind spluttered to comprehend such a different mind. I spent the next few days thinking up a series of responses. ‘Well, if you’d care to read Jared Diamond’s pleasant little book Why Is Sex Fun? you might …’ (actually that book hadn’t been written then). ‘Have you never heard of The Joy of Sex? We had that book kicking around our house in the seventies, how about yours?’ ‘Well sex may be perfunctory for you, but many species put a helluva lot of energy into having it – far more than into keeping their teeth clean. Australia’s little antechinuses actually fuck to death when the time is ripe. And what about octopuses?….’
Anyway, trying to convince the odd oddity of the pleasures of rumpy-pumpy is probably a waste of time. Today there’s a massive sex industry catering for the converted and perverted, and it doesn’t seem to have led to the fall of civilisation. At least, not yet.
Today’s online sex video industry (I eschew the term ‘pornography’) is clouded in myth and misinformation. For example, just how exploitative/life-affirming is it, compared to say, other service jobs such as bar or barista work? What does it mean for the status of women? And of course – just how ‘big’ is it? In the following posts, I’ll explore this minefield as best I can.
First, let’s look at the question of the bigness of the business. As anybody who has ‘looked into it’ knows, anyone, young or old, with an electronic device, can access more sex video material than they could consume in a lifetime for absolutely free, to the point that one would have to question the sanity of anyone who would bother paying for the stuff. So my first question would have to be – how do these businesses make any money at all?
From what I can gather, the sex video industry (which for brevity’s sake, I’ll call the SVI) is mostly divided into two spheres of production, Euro-American and Japanese. At least those are the two areas I’ll be focusing on – I suppose anyone, in any country, can put their own videos online, as long as they don’t have a heavy-handed government to deal with.
I note that most articles I’ve looked at use the term AVI – for adult videos – bur as a teacher for many years of NESB young people, and also as a former foster carer, I can categorically state that non-adults are accessing sex videos online in large numbers. These sites used to ask viewers about their age, a kind of autumnal fig leaf, but this has since died of shame. Of course, there is the question of SVI performers, and the concern that young people, whether above or below the 18-year-old divide, are really giving free consent to have their bodies and antics gawked at. This is a vital issue given the given the rise of child sexual exploitation via social media in recent times.
But to return to the mainstream SVI, I’m not so much interested in how lucrative, or not, it is, as in how popular it is. First, I want to look at the Japanese industry, which, it strikes me, is less extreme, more accepted by the community, and generally more story-driven and certainly more eccentric and comedic than its Euro-American counterpart. This isn’t to say there aren’t disturbing elements, including a lot of fake-rape scenes, in a nation where rape stats are only one twenty-seventh those of the USA. In fact, reported cases of rape in Japan reduced by some 50% in the decade between 2003 and 2014, though they have increased slightly since then, probably due to a widening of the legal definition of rape in 2017.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to get reliable data on the Japanese SVI. One website, for example, claims that about 14,000 sex videos are produced annually in Japan, compared to about 2000 in the USA, but provides no references. Still, it’s pretty clear that Japan has a massive sex video market, probably the biggest market in the world – certainly for its size.
To me, the most interesting feature of the Japanese SVI is that it appears to be less hidden, more mainstream than the Euro-American. It’s more ‘ordinary’, with scenes taking place in basic homes and hotel rooms rather than in the ‘palatial’ seaside residences of, presumably, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Many of the young women look like any attractive youngsters you might find in any shopping mall, and don’t feel the need to be tizzied up with ‘pornstar fingernails’ or revealing outfits. In fact, some are also in J-pop bands or mainstream movies. The atmosphere in these videos seems collegial, with a lot of beforehand-chit-chat and laughter. Yet, there are signs throughout of a male-dominated society, not so much in the role-playing – the female stars are often teachers or office managers, as well as ‘schoolgirls’ or bewhiskered cosplay cuties – as in certain giveaway behaviours, such as putting their hand in front of their mouths and giggling shyly when, presumably, asked a sexual question in interviews (I don’t understand Japanese). This may seem a minor thing, but in fact it’s endemic in Japanese SVs, and not found in other cultures. The noise they often make during intercourse – squealing like a stuck pig, if I may be so blunt – is also something of a problem. It just doesn’t happen with Euro-American performers, and it’s surely not a sign of empowerment. It also tends not to be such a feature with veterans of the industry.
The story-lines of Japanese sex videos are mostly absurd and somewhat formulaic. There’s the time-stop vids, the bus or train frottage leading to full-blown sex vids, the classroom-rape vids (whether of teacher or student), the vids of the kids having sex on the sofa while the family is chatting, oblivious, at the dining table in the same room, and so on. All good dirty fun, no doubt, but though the Japanese SVI world is almost mainstream, it still involves the compartmentalism that bedevils the human approach to sexuality, where there’s a place for everything and everything in its place. Is this compartmenting, or closeting, of sex, absolutely necessary to human civilisation? Opening the closet would surely reduce the exploitative aspect of the business – and allow us to examine just how exploitative it is, compared to say, the gig economy that many young (and older) people have to negotiate today. That’s an issue worth exploring.
References
https://www.statista.com/statistics/864883/japan-reported-cases-rape-and-forcible-indecencies/
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Japan-have-such-a-big-porn-industry