An Insider’s View of the World of Pornography
TODAY pornography is a booming business involving the mass production of books, slick magazines, videocassettes, films, cable-television programs, and even dial-a-porn phone messages. In the United States its estimated revenue runs from $7 billion to $8 billion a year.
Some years ago former pornographer Burton Wohl wrote a vivid description of this sordid industry in Harper’s magazine. Calling his place of employment a “porno-fac,” Wohl revealed that “it was truly a factory, turning out tons, carloads of the stuff every month.” And he noted that “it was huge, sprawling, covering many acres, housed in many buildings, some contiguous, others scattered over a quarter-mile radius, all located in an industrial zone.”
And what kind of people were the models in this “porno-fac”? Here is how he characterized them: “Most of the people who appeared in the magazines—not my department—were lost souls. Not only were they stoned on one or more drugs, but they were the kind of hollow-eyed, deluded, self-absent young person one used to see—and does still—floating over the surface of California and heading, so many of them, and so inexorably, for ultimate bewilderment.”
“Pornography is squalor,” he confessed, “a stain, not merely indelible but also irreducible beneath” what is used as an overlay for it, be it “art, anthropology, sociology, religion, psychology.” As an insider, Wohl admitted that “pornography, like sewage, bleeds into everything it touches. Bleeds, yes, because the letting of blood, violence, is pornography’s bottom line and not even the insatiable marquis [de Sade who reveled in terrible violence] could get beyond it. Power depends on violence, bloodshed. And power is what pornography celebrates, illuminates—above all, sublimates.”
Mr. Wohl left this gruesome business after a year because, as he reported, “I couldn’t do that anymore. I thought that pornography was shabby stuff, squalid, that our profit came from human weakness, illness, even tragedy.” He concluded, “I learned that the price I paid for those wages was rising all the time. Thanks but no thanks.”
How well this inside portrait of the pornography business dovetails with the description found in the Holy Bible at Romans 1:24, 28 of the degradation of humans who reject God’s high moral standards: “That is why God left them to their filthy enjoyments and the practices with which they dishonour their own bodies. . . . In other words, since they refused to see it was rational to acknowledge God, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour. And so they are steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness.”—The Jerusalem Bible.