ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representations of the sex industry what Karen Boyle refers to as the mainstream narratives of commercial sex in order to demonstrate that the dynamics of prostitution are increasingly found in contemporary globalized media as part of the pornification of popular culture. The narratives and representations of prostitution in mainstream media combine to reflect and reconstruct certain ways of perceiving and understanding the sex industry, which we define as symbolic violence. Central to framing the glamorization of prostitution as symbolic violence is recognition of the harms women experience in the sex industry: violence, coercion and exploitation as well as the dehumanization of the body as commodity. Furthermore, glamorizing the sex industry and equating sexualization, pornification and pimp and ho chic with empowerment enacts symbolic violence on women who experience prostitution as harmful, desperate and distressing.
