ABSTRACT
The pornography industry is the launching pad of the contemporary normalization of the sex industry in the west. It is where the considerable growth throughout the sector began. Defended in the counterculture and sexual revolution of the 1970s as ‘transgressive’ and liberating (Jeffreys, 1990/91), it is now a massively profitable industry which has beenmainstreamed to provide revenue for major corporations. The foundation of the industry is the sexual use of girls and young women made vulnerable by homelessness and histories of sexual abuse, or by trafficking. But the profits of this industry do not flow to those who are most harmed by it. The harms have been made invisible as pornography has been normalized within popular culture, through the entertainment, sports, music and fashion industries (Jeffreys, 2005). Pornography has made the sex industry hip. It has created customers for strip clubs, sometimes called ‘live pornography’, and ultimately for brothels and other forms of prostitution. The doubling in the percentage of men in the UK in 10 yearswho nowprostitutewomen has been attributed to the normalization of the commercial sexual exploitation of women that pornography and strip clubs have enabled (Ward and Day, 2004). In this chapter I will examine the expansion and globalization of the industry, and what is involved in its production.
