Melinda Reist - Big Porn Inc

Men too are organising against pornography. Matt McCormack Evans writes about The Anti Porn Men Project in the UK, explaining how men can challenge pornography. Finally, Susan Hawthorne in her Quit Porn Manifesto asks us to reflect on why people use pornography, and why refusal to participate in the industry is an issue of social justice.

In our efforts to challenge the global pornography industry, we need signs of hope. In writing this book we have found many signs. The activist section of Big Porn Inc is a beginning. New and exciting forms of action are emerging in many parts of the world. Susan Hawthorne offers us strategies to Quit Porn. The increasing number of men speaking out against the commercial exploitation of sexual expression in many countries is encouraging – and see Robert Jensen, Christopher Kendall, Jeffrey Masson, Robi Sonderegger, Hiroshi Nakasatomi and Matt McCormack Evans in this volume.

Big Porn Inc is a call to action, to begin to assert our human rights to dignity, respect and justice at every level. In ‘Pornography is What the End of the World Looks Like’, Robert Jensen has argued that forms of domination like pornography “diminish our ability to contribute to a just and sustainable future” (Jensen 2010, p. 112). By eroticising oppression, pornography cultures and industries undermine our ability to imagine and create a just future for all people.

Such a future is a non-negotiable goal for us. We want women to experience real justice, and to live free from all forms of oppression. For us, opposition to pornography is a question of social justice. We either allow subordination or freedom: there is not room for both.

We invite you, the readers of this book, to join our resistance to Big Porn Inc.

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I’m anxious about writing this. Anxious that although I know rationally there is no way you can know who I am, I am still afraid.

In one sense you will know me. I’m the woman behind you in the supermarket queue or sitting opposite you on the train. Middle aged, middle class, educated, professional. Ordinary. Yet there is something in my life I will hide from you, no matter how close we are.