..as long as any woman, anywhere in the world is being bought or sold - none of us are free
-- Andrea Dworkin

In pornography, sexual torture stunts are usually real, performed on and by real human beings. In other film and literature, we easily accept the fiction. We know that the actors and actresses are just playing a part, following a script, faking emotions to fit the story. Special effects technology is often used to depict graphic scenes when using humans or animals, for example, films with scenes of horses being hurt or dying in primitive battles, often advise viewers that no real horses were harmed in the making of the film. In pornography, the rape, the water-boarding, the torture is real, no trained professional stunt-actors or trick cinematography. So when the actress smiles at the camera and says she enjoys being strangled, anally ab/used and urinated on, its accepted as truth. This form of systematic human abuse, humiliation and degradation is often seen as socially acceptable, and a major global industry is built around it, tolerated or legalised and used as routine commercial advertising messages. In the documentary Price of Pleasure - ironically - it is one of the men interviewed, who says he can't understand why women aren't offended.

In a November 2008 post at Anti-porn Feminists (London) blog, Porn and Sexual Liberation, Joy argues that sexual liberation cannot be found through the exploitation and de-humanisation of others, with harm both to the performers and to women.

Sensationalism is sometimes the criticism here. Feminists and allied anti-pornography/prostitution political activists are sometimes told that we focus only on a minority of "extreme" cases. As demonstrated in the above documentary, the overwhelming majority of the most popular Top 20's of pornographic films are extreme, and the less popular and cheapest vanilla-sex varieties, involve at least some verbal or psychological abuse and humiliation, often in symbolic form. Besides, cheap vanilla-sex humiliation and abuse of women can be found anywhere on any public street, in movies, nightclubs, TV shows, novels, newspapers, magazines, cartoons, billboards and advertising.

In several cross-national studies, the proportion of men who buy sex are reported as relatively small at around 12-18%, with the vast majority being habitual customers. In the documentary Why Men Pay For it, one john in the documentary, explained his use of prostituted women started after his wife died and became a "crutch", an addiction like alcohol or gambling. Another in his interview explains that he feels prostituted women are just providing a service.

Rebecca Mott, describes another side of this service concept, from her own personal experience on her blog in So, prostitution just a service

In parallel, the neo-liberal or libertarian sexually liberated culture is part of the same continuum or channels of the same 'River of Oppression' as described by MaryTracy in her BeyondFeminism blog post A Rather Evil Path, along with Maggie Hays on her Feminist Against Pornography blog Rape Increase in a Rape Culture. awfisticuffer from No Good Girls, No small Talk, No Bull blog also comments on rising sexual exploitation of women in Italy in her post: Italy's backlash, warning to everyone else.

The economy. Its a "choice" we are told, there are many women who do choose it, often as an economic choice of last resort, choosing survival. But the numbers don't add up. Study, after study, says over 90% of women want to leave the industry, with some conservative estimates at around 60%. In many countries with democratic representative majority voting mechanisms, that might be considered a landslide. Either way, even in the most conservative estimates, there never seem to be enough choosers in the supply to satisfy the demand, the majority are forced.

Liberal reformists prefer to regulate and unionise the industry to reduce the most extreme forms of it, such as international trafficking and children. Like abolitionists they agree that the industry as it operates currently, can be very harmful and exploitative, but believe that the risks and dangers can be effectively reduced and mitigated with legislation. Some use economic arguments in seeing slavery as a valid economic choice for women, such as in Katherine Avgerinos's 2006 essay: Normalisation of Prostitution in Post-Soviet Russia. While recognising the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union as the underlying cause of the explosion of the Russian sex trade, Katherine also maintains that "..It must be recognized that prostitution has become an... effective way for thousands of women to support themselves in the post-Soviet world." In other words, they have no choice in poverty.

In some recent debates, human females are sometimes spoken of in terms as just another economic resource from source countries (farming), transition countries (stock sale-yards) and destination countries (consumption). In the Structural Violence and Women blog post: Social Upheaval and Sex Trafficking in Europe, countries are listed blandly as "major suppliers of women" to the market, to which one commenter responded "It is hard to hear statements like “major suppliers of women,” making it seem like women are cattle to be traded across nations".

The recent global economic downturn appears to be impacting on the human flesh trade, according to a report in a mainstream economic business/trade blog in December 2008, World’s oldest profession, too, feels crisis.... "....a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists in Prague....the problem today is that there is too much competition, too many free pornography sites, and people are thinking twice before making impulse purchases, including paying for sex.”

"... brothel owners in Europe and the United States say belt-tightening caused by the global financial crisis is undermining a once-lucrative industry.... manager of Artemis, the largest brothel in Berlin, said that the recession had helped dent revenue by 20 percent in November, which is usually peak season for the sex trade. Meanwhile, in Reno, Nevada, the multimillion-dollar Mustang Ranch recently laid off 30 percent of its staff, citing a decline in high-spending clients.".

In such an economic climate, it is arguable whether industry regulation or unionisation of sex-trading would be effective in offering security or protection of workers' rights. Cath Elliot, in her Too Much to Say For Myself blog post: The Great IUSW Con, continues on this theme, discussing the involvement of sex-trade employers in the International Union of Sex-Workers (IUSW).

Italy is one major destination country for trafficked women, primarily sourced from eastern Europe, Albania and Nigeria, and has recently passed legislation on public street prostitution which penalises both client and prostituted woman, as reported at the TopNews Law blog. Meanwhile, in the Ukraine, in an "effort to dampen the prostitution crisis", police are writing notes to arrested girls parents, as reported by the Kiev, Ukraine News Blog