Behind the Scenes of Porn: Futility and Coercion

By Jay Stringer

As a mental health counselor, I work primarily with people seeking freedom from the use of pornography and buying sex. Last year, I received an email from a man—I will call him Phil—who said he could benefit from talking to a therapist about some significant incidents he experienced during his time abroad.

Phil accepted a position with an international company headquartered in Hong Kong after he completed his bachelor’s degree. Phil, like many of his college friends, was hooked on pornography. So when the prospect of moving to Asia was first announced, they all began joking about how much sex he would be able to buy in the surrounding countries.

Phil’s story

The first year in Hong Kong was far more difficult than Phil imagined. His entry-level position became increasingly meaningless and he felt deeply disconnected from his family and friends. After nearly nine months abroad, he decided to take a two-week vacation to Thailand. As Phil spoke about this to me, something in his countenance shifted. He told a story of arriving in a small village in Thailand where he was treated like a king. He was given access to nearly any woman or child he desired.

In what was supposed to be one of the most erotic moments of his life, all he could focus on was seeing the deadness in the teenagers’ eyes that he purchased sex from. Phil put it like this:

“I remember thinking, Who have I become? By the end of my trip, I was doing horrible things I swore I would never do in my life. I left devastated by what I chose. The way I see pornography and buying sex has been forever altered.”

Trafficking and porn production, all in the same room

In several of the villages and brothels Phil visited, he was surprised to see webcams and other equipment for pornography production. When these women and children were not being sold for sex, they were forced to work in front of cameras. The content would then be uploaded to many of the leading porn sites around the world.

The more Phil looked around, the more he saw themes like poverty, fraud, and coercion driving a woman’s involvement in pornography. One woman he met was misled about an employment opportunity at a resort. When she arrived, she had to “work” off her travel debt with sex and pornography before she could be free.

Phil’s travels abroad showed him the insidious link between the world of pornography and sex trafficking. Behind the scenes of pornography, there was far more occurring than he ever would have known. In sex trafficking, traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to lure their victims into sexual exploitation. Pornography is the marketing department of the sex trafficking industry.

The two-dimensional product from a three-dimensional issue

Pornography has the ability to conceal what a small village in Thailand cannot. It can show a woman choked and raped in the United States and edit out the reality she only consented to be an actress in a film for $150. Porn can display beauty on a webcam but censors out her true age, economic situation, and the lifetime of coercion she has undergone to arrive at that moment on your screen.

I am certainly not saying that all pornography production has ties to sex trafficking. But what I am asking us to consider is what Phil witnessed that led him to an inflection point about his consumption of pornography—that sometimes, it IS tied more closely than we know.

As human beings, the spectrum spanning our dignity and our corruption is far-reaching. One of the most beautiful aspects of our humanity is our ability to love and look out for the interests of others. And one of our greatest downfalls is when we choose to use someone for financial, relational, or sexual gain.

What all forms of trafficking have shown us is that greed and power are central drivers of the demand for any product or person. It is no different with pornography. Men desire pornography not only because it is sexually arousing, but also because it gives them the power to attain what they want, exactly when they want it. Few other realms of life offer men that level of control.

Read the full article at https://fightthenewdrug.org/jay-stringer-behind-the-scenes-of-trafficking/