This is a remake of a lost rant I wrote in response to someone saying porn was "empowering" to women. I can't find the original, so I'm re-writing it now.
The life-cycle of the average porn starlet.
Okay, so there's this 18 year old girl, fresh off the bus and ready for her new life in The City. She's hoping to land a job as a waitress or whatever, until she can get her first big break in modeling or film or whatever.
At some point, she meets someone who says they can get her some big money NOW, making "adult" films. Then he names a figure.
Next thing you know, she's dragging down $600 a scene, pulling in several thousand a month. Not bad money for a girl with no marketable skills in a town where a pretty face and $4 will get you a cup of coffee.
But it turns out that to make that much money, she needs to make a LOT of films. So in her first year, she burns through a hundred low-rent flicks, easy. This wears you down. It's hard to get into it. So she gets a little something to help her along. Might be coke, more probably meth.
But now she's no longer a fresh face. She's known, and her value starts to drop. So she has to do more and more bizarre things to get on camera. Starts with anal, goes downhill from there.
6 months later, she's thinking to herself, "If I let that guy piss on me and then drag me into the shower, I could make rent."
6 months after THAT, she's thinking a little differently. "If I let those guys choke me out and put their cigs out on my back, I might get enough to score." By this point she looks 40, and her skin looks like that of a cadaver. Her eyes are dead, like two burned out light bulbs.
A few weeks later, she's been sold to a pimp for her drug debts, and she's hooking to score. Statistically speaking, she's dead in 3 years, tossed in a convenient dumpster.
Then there's the next 18 year old girl, fresh off the bus and ready for her new life in The City. She's hoping to land a job as a waitress or whatever, until she can get her first big break in modeling or film or whatever.
Rinse, repeat.
So when you feel the need to tell me porn is "empowering" to women, take a moment instead to SHUT UP. What porn IS, is turning a human being into a commodity. It is trading in human misery. It is about as "empowering" to the woman as being enslaved was "empowering" to the Black population of the 1800s America. It's sordid, when you look at it that way, and about as sexy as watching monsters waterboard people at Gitmo.
That's all I have to say.
