Article

Why I Stopped Antyajaa: Indian Journal of

Women and Social Change
Watching Porn 2(1) 1–6
© 2017 SAGE Publications
India Pvt. Ltd
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2455632717708719
http://jws.sagepub.com
Ran Gavrieli1

Abstract
This text* is not a theoretical one; it is a result of four and a half years of serving
aid to women, girls and boys in prostitution on the streets of Tel Aviv. The effort
here is to connect the dots between human trafficking, prostitution and porno-
graphy, and see how they are steeped in gender inequality and common tolerant
notions that need deconstruction. The article is not an indictment but an invita-
tion to take action, and especially looks at how pornography and prostitution
construct sexuality, kill imagination and perpetuate abuse.

Keywords
Pornography, prostitution, sexuality, Tel Aviv, gender violence

If you would have talked to me a few years ago, I would have been able to
recommend you a movie with a couple of school girls having ‘fun.’ But you’re
talking to me now, after four and a half years of aiding women living and working
in the ‘SEX’ industry.
Two and a half years ago, on a summer night near the old central bus station in
Tel Aviv, they found the one they called Linda, with a broken throat. Our main
concern, in the STD mobile clinic, was to hide Linda’s occupation and cause of
death from her five children who came from the south to the scene of the event,
and later to the pathological institute in Abu Kabir.
Her youngest son was already a sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces, and her
eldest was 35 years old. For years, every morning, she made the trip to work in
housekeeping in North Tel Aviv, they didn’t suspect a thing. At night, she returned
ready and attentive and they—as sensitive as kids are—knew how to repress and
hold their questions until they were completely forgotten. And now she was
strangled by a John who learned on the Internet how convulsions cause the vagina
to shrink so it will intensify his orgasm. ‘Better than f___ing in the ass,’ said the
actor.

1
Entrepreneur, sexual health expert, and scholar.
* Translation by Gad Ben-Moshe and Ran Gavrieli. The unedited version first appeared in
Else in 2013, retrieved  from  http://elsebyrangavrieli.com/how-else-our-sex-ed-talks/why-i-stopped-watching-
porn/i-stopped-watching-porn

Corresponding author:
Ran Gavrieli, 5 Ben Siraa St, Tel Aviv, Israel.
E-mail: r4nama@gmail.com
2 Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change 2(1)

He was supposed to stop before Linda lost consciousness, but something went
wrong with his coordination. She took in 15 men like that a day. Now try hiding
that from the children.
We stood there trying to get our stories straight with the field coordinator of the
clinic and two dumb cops who were completely dispassionate about the hardship
the truth would cause the family. There are a lot of women in porn and prostitution
who are not eager on living, on the contrary. And still, their biggest fear is to be
murdered like that. Because it’s not the fear of death that gets to them: it’s the guilt
of hurting their children that is too much of a burden.
Linda got her nickname after an incident with a ‘client’ in the late 1980s.
Though personal video cameras were rare, demented Johns were all around. This
fellow fell in love to an obsession with Linda. So in a lapse of judgement, right
before climaxing, the camera dropped from his hand crushing her left eye socket.
Her colleagues on the street, who knew the John, immediately knew what was
what. They had also experienced the fear of being with him, his weird sexual
practices and his heavy video camera going up and down swinging over their
heads. There was another before her whose nose was broken by the camera.
Linda told us that story when we were sitting in her room at the brothel and the
doctor was taking her blood. We were looking for a little laugh while filling up the
forms. When she revealed to us her real name she also explained how she got her
nickname: When she returned to the street with a black eye, her colleagues gave
it to her as a gesture to the Heroine of ‘Deep Throat,’ Linda Boreman aka Linda
Lovelace.
Incidentally, Linda Lovelace later on went to testify that she was forced to
participate in the film undergoing abuse and death threats. Her husband used
to beat her up and pimp her out to his friends at gun point. He then proceeded to
make her ‘act’ in pornographic movies. ‘Deep Throat’ grossed over 600 million
dollars. Linda Boreman didn’t see a cent.
I met Linda from Tel Aviv as a volunteer in the mobile STD clinic, as someone
who comes to reach out and offers help and rehabilitation. Why there from all
places? I couldn’t tell you. There are plenty of unfortunate souls who need help. I
just wanted to mark a ‘V’ on my humanity and I wound up with victims of human
trafficking and prostitution. Linda was not the only tragedy I came to know, but
she was probably my first reason to stop consuming porn.

Prostitution and Pornography: Exploiting Vulnerabilities

‘Let me see your belly,’ said the man with the crude face. He is on the fast track
to cumming,1 all rules of proper conduct and manners surpass him at this point.
‘Your belly, whore, your f__ing belly! You think I’m too old? That I couldn’t get
you pregnant too?’ His eyes are blazing. She returns an empty look. His thrusting
becomes rapid and he commands her to take off the cheap black lace covering her
growing belly. She complies.
Gavrieli 3

His left hand is hurting a breast filled with milk, and his right is relentlessly
pointing the CellCam2 up and down, from his penetrating organ to her lips, and
look of distress. He promised he wouldn’t show her face and he paid an extra 50
dollars. She’s here anyway. Might as well let him think he’s a porn star. What does
she care?
The rotting stench of his breath gets to her as his back arches and his face
squinches. A growl of bad breath. Another. And another one even deeper. A crude
hand grabbing on to a round belly, black fingernails clawing into the flesh and
now she’s worried: Will the baby feel a sharp pain?
He pulls himself from on top of her. He doesn’t say a word, just films his spew
on a 3rd trimester pregnant belly. Finally, he lets out a moan and asks her for a
towel. She gestures with a look towards the towels on the chair behind him, then
reaches her hand to the dresser, grabs a toilet paper role and picks up his remains.
After he leaves, she grabs a wet towel and cleans herself up.
She tries to block out the resemblance of his mean face to that of her father’s.
Reminiscing would only bring more pain. She is preoccupied anyway, dreading
the days to come, the future that awaits her and her unborn child.
She straightens the bills and clips them, turns on the television in full volume,
tightens up the bedsheets and opens the door to her room, as if calling out without
words ‘Next!’
Four and half years I’ve been volunteering and working to help women and
minors who got caught in prostitution. This young mother, who didn’t spare me any
detail on her encounter with the man that looked like her dad, was one of those who
really left her mark on me. It’s hard to say why her and not someone else, I think it
has to do with her intelligence. The more intelligent and self-aware the woman is,
the harder it is for her to suppress the traumas with defence mechanisms.
This particular young mom was not born into this life, not at all. She is but one
of an increasing group of girls who get a little bored and a little bit curious and
find themselves mixed up with predators on the Internet, as they undress a little,
take a couple of pictures and somewhere along the road cross the line between a
flirt and a sexual act. You can find these girls in every school in the country.
I lecture in dozens of high and middle schools per year and I can assure you, in
almost every school there’s at least this one girl who trusted the wrong guy and
found her nudity traded on WhatsApp and spread on the web.
That’s where it starts, after that comes infamy, loneliness, transfers, relocations,
and Facebook and public harassments that follow her wherever she goes. Most of
the time there’s also parental neglect or complete lack of parenting, but not always.
These are the new faces of porn and prostitutions’ victims.

Pornography and the Construction of Sexuality

Catharine MacKinnon, a Professor of Law who helped Linda Boreman, wrote:

Pornography is a means through which sexuality is socially constructed, a site of

construction, a domain of exercise. It constructs women as things for sexual use and
4 Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change 2(1)

constructs its consumers to desperately want women to desperately want possession

and cruelty and dehumanization. Inequality itself, subjection itself, hierarchy itself,
objectification itself, with self-determination ecstatically relinquished, is the apparent
content of women’s sexual desire and desirability […] Women are in pornography to be
violated and taken, men to violet and take them … (Nicholson, 1997, p. 167)

Yes, porn has a formidable cultural influence. The stray girls we have here are
simply the real version of all the ‘slutty’ college girls we fantasized about. This is
the reality our girls are raised in, with a new definition of womanhood with the
ability to engage in sexual intercourse without emotion, connection, security or
kinship.
These are not just girls from broken homes we’re talking about. They are also
the lovely girls with straight A’s whom we raised. Remember Michael Douglas’s
daughter in ‘Traffic’? She was president of the volleyball team, president of the
debate team with an astronomical GPA. So, how do these girls get so low as to
suck an illiterate drug dealer’s dick while he takes a video of her having intercourse
with two guys without an original tooth in their mouth or a condom on their dicks?
How? That is an excellent question. The answer lies—not solely, but most
definitely in part—in the ‘Porn Industries’ food chain. When a private user in
Jerusalem is showing a gallery of movies from ‘College Fuck Fest’, ‘Bang Bus’
or ‘Porn Fidelity’, his double click is not lost. It feeds industries worth over
billions of dollars and promotes forceful transportation of women, escorts and
girls from Moldova, Thailand and Congo to multiple rape and brothel homes in
London, Stockholm and New York.
The cynical use of values such as the freedom of speech and occupation bring
with it a whole perspective where women are but a commodity for men, where
men are objectified as an economic entity and women as a sexual one before any
other measure.
I am not trying to create some kind of theoretical feminist discourse. I wonder
how it can be that Ada Yonath, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, wins a
Nobel Prize and the press in Israel is far more concerned with her hair than with
what she has to say. I also do not believe that the problem is just with us Men:
Consumers.
What I am interested in is to understand how come there is an entire generation
of girls whose dream is not to win the Nobel Prize, because they are too busy
losing too much weight and looking for people to tell them how ‘hot’ they are.
When you sit in front of a porno, you take part in defining society and culture.
This is not a metaphor, this is not theoretical—it is completely practical. When a
good kid with high academics and good scores pressures his girlfriend to have sex
in front of a camera, it does not derive from thin air. When they break up and he,
as a well-adjusted promising individual, does not erase said photos but instead
shares them online for the rest of the world to see, it is not solely on him. The fault
is on all of us.
Gavrieli 5

Pornography Kills Imagination, Perpetuates Abuse

Statistics in the field of filmed prostitution—Porn—indicates that for every Jenna
Jameson who holds her own production company making millions, there are
another 10,000 young girls with incest history and great emotional distress. The
average career of a porn star is about three months. That means, that after two to
three sessions of filming, each session is of eight hours where every pore and
orifice in her body is dismantled and tortured, she runs for her life.
The sad thing is that they are not in any emotional state to run far enough.
Women get in the porn industry from escort services or strip clubs and are emitted
to brothel houses and to the streets. 40 per cent of them would not make it to the
age of 50. The four most common causes of death are: STDs, occupational
diseases (ODs), murder by clients and suicide. This is how Valery Heller, a
survivor of sexual abuse as a child and in the ‘sex industry’ as an adult, described
her not so distant past:

I believed I existed only after I was turned on, like a light switch by another person.
When I needed to be nurtured I thought I wanted to be used. Marks and bruises and
being used were the way I measured my worth. You must remember that I was taught
that because men were fucking my body and using it for their needs, it meant I was
loved. (MacKinnon, 1989, p. 149)

And she is not the only one: It is hard to say when exactly it happened, but
eventually I realized that porn was screwing me up too. Back then I was in a
serious relationship—a bad one, but totally serious. It was a roller coaster of
emotional drama, the relationship before the one true love you find in your 30s
that brings order and stability to your life. Truth be told, I never was a porn ‘addict’
or a ‘Hard Core’ user, but I had a little taste of everything. Some breasts, a bit of
‘MILF’, ‘BBW’, a few college girls messing around, maybe a little homemade
porn and riming here and there.
That is about it, but still I was invaded by Trojan horses and viruses. My
computer was not the only system that needed a clean-up, my mind too.
Porn is the essence of the male forceful domination apprehension; the filmed
fantasy infiltrates our minds and enslaves our imagination to its imaging. What
we used to fantasize about before does not matter, sooner than later we find
ourselves beating off angrily, gnashing our teeth while ejaculating on someone’s
face, in our mind. It is bad. And we have all been there.
We have already declared a day without smoking and a day without car
accidents. Try two weeks without porn. You are a grown man; it should not be too
hard a task. You do not even need an imagination to do it. A good memory should
do the trick.
It took me 18 months; from the moment I decided to dispose off porn to when
I stopped using completely. I made my decision after meeting the other side—all
the women who moaned, squealed and asked for more as if having the time of
their lives, whom I met after the little red light was off and the damage was already
done—but like every other bad habit, deciding is not enough. The body has its
own pace. After so many years without using your imagination, it is hard to jump
start it on your own.
6 Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change 2(1)

Notes
1. Vulgar slang to mean semen ejaculated during orgasm.
2. Cellphone camera.

References
MacKinnon, C.A. (1989). Toward a feminist theory of the state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Nicholson, L. (Ed.). (1997). The second wave: A reader in feminist theory. New York. NY
and London: Routledge.

Author’s Bio-sketch
Ran Gavrieli is an entrepreneur, sexual health expert, activist, speaker and
mentor. His TEDx talk ‘Why I Stopped Watching Porn’ (https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU) has been viewed by more than 12 million people,
making his talk the most viewed anti-porn and anti-trafficking video in the world.