Connecting the Dots among Commercial Sex Businesses
An interview with Dr. Donna M. Hughes, professor of women’s studies at the
Citizen: What kind of connection can we draw between prostitution and pornography?
Hughes: When I talk to women who provide services to women in prostitution, they say at least a third of the women they work with have been in pornography, have been involved in the making of pornography. And that can be everything from sort of amateur stuff, where a john brings his camera and wants to take pictures of some of the women who may be stars for a few months in the pornography industry.
And where do they go after they’ve had their few months of stardom with a couple of movies? They usually go into stripping, which usually then just turns into prostitution. So, the categories we have for things like pornography, stripping, prostitution–we tend to think of them as really separate categories. But if you’re actually in the sex industry, they’re quite seamless. There are so many variations that I think our old categories are rather obsolete. And we also need to know how seamless the exploitation is.
Citizen: Do you agree with the argument that the commercial adult industry is actually helping create the market for child pornography through its ‘barely legal’ types of adult content?
Hughes: Yes, I agree. I mean, obviously this is something that people want to buy, that men want to buy, or they wouldn’t be advertising the barely legal kind of stuff with the girls made up with their hair in pigtails–and that is that they are clearly trying to attract and sell this material to people who are interested in someone who might be less than 18 years of age.
Look how few cases of child pornography have involved teens who are 15, 16 and 17–because they are not easily recognizable as being children. I believe there are a lot of teens who are being sexually exploited because no one can look and be able to identify them as definitely being under age. A lot of the stuff that is prosecuted as child pornography only involves age 13 or below. Unless you can actually find the victim, it’s much harder to identify this age group as child pornography.
Citizen: We hear there’s a big market in fake IDs.
Hughes: Oh, that’s absolutely common with the girls that are being exploited in prostitution as well–they all have fake IDs. And a lot of them end up being arrested and going through the system as adults, even though they’re children, because they simply won’t give any other name and won’t admit who they really are. And so the justice system just processes them as adults.
Also, some of the big producers like Vivid, because they are so big and so visible, try to keep things a little cleaner. But the pornography industry really ranges from some amateur with a camera on up to producers like Vivid. So, who’s monitoring these people?
Citizen: When the pornographers say trust them in the area of self-regulation and child protection and keeping minors out of pornography, why should we believe them?
Hughes: I think it’s a little bit like having the fox guard the henhouse. We know that about 70 percent of women in prostitution entered it while they were still minors, meaning under the age of 18. So, that automatically makes them victims of sex trafficking. And there has been no outcry from the so-called adult entertainment industry, saying, ‘Oh, dear. There are these girls being sexually exploited.’ They haven’t worried about that. They haven’t worried about using girls in pornography until somebody like the FBI started checking into it.
The Internet is overrun with child pornography. I believe the pornographers’ comments opposing that are really for publicity. I think some of the pornographers who are more closely watched may have to keep things a little cleaner, but the industry as a whole, its foundation really starts with the sexual exploitation of children.
Citizen: What should we make of the industry’s opposition to all forms of regulation, such as the age-verification requirements of USC section 2257?
Hughes: It means they really aren’t interested in protecting children. They’re opposed to absolutely anything that is going to regulate them or put any kind of limits on what they do.
Citizen: So, when someone like Steve Hirsch of Vivid calls for Yahoo and Google to do a better job of keeping on-line porn away from children, are they talking out of both sides of their mouth?
Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. They really are only looking out for their own interests. And when it benefits them, they’ll do some talking. But when it comes right down to what it is that they support, they don’t want any kind of regulation or interference in what they do whatsoever.
Citizen: What of their claims that there really hasn’t been a problem of minors slipping through into porn, with very few exceptions? How do they know?
Hughes: Yeah, how do they know–exactly right. Then what’s this material all over the Internet that the FBI is continuously making arrests on? Now, the catch word here is ‘commercial,’ in that a lot of pedophiles may not be producing child pornography for commercial use. And when it’s really obviously illegal, you can’t put it in stores.
But if you look at some of the cases, increasingly we’re seeing that a lot of the child pornography is becoming available commercially, meaning that it’s marketed through secret Web sites and peer-review servers and various clubs that try to create security on the Internet. But then, at some point it isn’t just purely private sexual exploitation, but people actually making money from it.
Citizen: Are feminists like you coming back to the fight against porn like they were in the ’80s?
Hughes: At one time there was an awareness by both feminists and conservatives of the harm of the exploitation and objectification of women through pornography. There was an opportunity for them to work together because there was common ground there. But the feminists were criticized for ‘being in bed with the right.’ And it was like it scared them off.
I think it was a mistake. They should have said, ‘We’re willing to work with people who agree with us on this.’ And they didn’t. My opinion is they backed off, and they lost a lot of support, where they could have come together on common ground and made some real progress.
What happened then in the late ’90s–different groups started taking the lead. And then there was more willingness to come together. I was involved. And I admit I was thinking, ‘Am I going to work with Barrett Duke–you know, a Southern Baptist?’ [Laughs] I have to admit I end up having the absolute most respect for Barrett and like him very much. It’s just been wonderful to work with him and other conservatives.
What happened the second time around, people would say, ‘You’re in bed with the right’–all those kinds of things. And it was like, ‘Well, OK. Go ahead and criticize me.’ [Laughs] I think the people this time weren’t scared off by those kinds of criticisms.
I’m very open to working with people where we have similar views—someone like Pat Trueman and Janice Crouse and Michael Horowitz at the Hudson Institute. We work together all the time, and we’ve been very productive, I think. And quite frankly, we haven’t sat around and decided what it is we agree on or disagree on.
We agree that the sexual exploitation of women and children is wrong, and therefore we’re going to come together and work on this.
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