Mercator Net has an interview with one of the authors of the new book, Big Porn Inc.

Melinda Tankard Reist: The aim of Big Porn Inc. was to blow apart the myth that porn is just about ‘naughty’ pictures of consenting sex between adults, that it is just a bit of ‘harmless fun’. We wanted to expose that pornography is a multi-billion global industry profiting from commodifying sexuality and selling it back to us as industrialised, commercialised, plasticised porn sex. We also wanted to demonstrate the way pornography is colonising the public space, how everything has become pornified. We believe pornography is a public health hazard of major proportions and it’s time to address it.

How has this industry been able to grow so big? Who else is profiting from it?

The industry has a lot of power. This power has bought off law makers, regulators and enforcement bodies around the world. They know how to gain new users, how to get men (the primary users of pornography) using their product and wanting more. The internet has been a massive boon for the porn industry, estimated to reach $US100billion by 2013. There are so many who profit from it, from traffickers who sell women who are used to make pornography, to the porn companies who make the porn, to the hotels who profit more from pay-per-view porn that they do selling rooms and the mainstream companies who profit from carrying porn brands, such as Diva, a jewellery store chain for girls 8-13, which is currently pimping Playboy brand products to them.

A review notes the following:

Here are just a few, with the total Web pages for each: teen sex – 82 million pages; animal sex – over 50 million; bondage – nearly 30 million; crush sex (which involves the killing of small animals) – 8 million; vomit sex – 4 million; wired porn (involving electrical shock) – 1.7 million; snuff sex (involving actual death) – 1.3 million.

So much for porn being all-American and indispensable for freedom from that terrifying bogeyman of modernity – repression….