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The US: because AIPAC has a bunch of congressmen in their pockets, a lot of money, and idiots like the Tea Party and associated GOP loons aligned with them on the Israel stuff. I'm unspeakably grateful that the Democrats are in power, but I can imagine a world in which the US gets involved because of the whole "unshakable devotion to Israel's security" rhetoric and how some interpret it. (In my book, Obama is doing more for Israel's security than Bush ever did by not letting Netanyahu go crazy.)

Russia has interests in Syria, and in Iran too, I understand. I also remember something about Chinese interests in Iran.
Also, there was some stuff a while back about huge oil reserves in Iran, which...nuff said.

[we accept something]

AA, something I think you might just be missing here is the odd focus on reality here on PDCOM. Unlike discussions on this kind if topic in most places, the focus here seems to me first and foremost – especially in this discussion – to lie in understanding reality. Not in making normative statements (i.e. "x is badwrong") or imaginary policy concepts (i.e. "x should be banned") and when people do make normative statements, the culture here seems to, perhaps unusually, not add an implication of policy, public or otherwise. In other words, the discussion of porn, to me and to many of the others, I suspect, is not about what should be done, but about how things are. Not about drawing sharp lines that can be used in some imaginary world in which we dictate policy, not even sharp lines for personal policy – since the conclusion on personal policy is typically "think for yourself, schmuck." I think this community sees itself more as a way to thoroughly inform oneself, and to hash out ideas, but emphatically not a way to hash out guidelines for life, personal or public.

I see that you understand this to a degree, I just feel your line of argumentation assumes an implication that is not there. It's a valid pursuit to try to figure out where one should draw the line, and you raise interesting thoughts and questions. I just think you're missing something fundamental about how this community approaches this kind of discussion, or at least the discussion this thread branched off from. When another thread is started with a clear mission statement, that'll be a different situation, and might possibly generate less animosity, at least in a perfect world where this thread never happened so people aren't predisposed to that animosity.

I'm very open to the possibility that I'm speaking out of my anus here, BTW.

VERB,
Amateur Interweb anthropologist

I hear you. My question is whose and what reality? Let's say we gloss over all the problems I've been hammering away at here, and let's suppose for a moment that we accept something like this argument.

1. Porn is inherently exploitative and dehumanizing.
2. If something in inherently exploitative and dehumanizing, then we should not support/do it.
C. We should not support/do porn.

Fine. Now, what happens to whatever needs/desires that were being met by porn? Maybe you guys should start a fun thread of all the ways people could get off without it? Should people sit on top of their washing machines? Read romance novels? Maybe find real people (because no one consuming porn thought of that)? Personally, I'm going to check in with the Cistercians, because nothing is hotter than a man in uniform.

I think you don't quite understand.
The bolded parts seem to assume the goal is to reach a joint conclusion. That is not the goal for me, nor, I suspect, for most regulars here. There's a saying around here, or at least there used to be, that "a conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking." (remember that one, old-timers?)
And the general premise of this community seems to be "DONT TELL ME WHAT TO THINK YOURE NOT MY REAL FATHER."
This was a discussion about how things are, in reality. Whose reality? The reality of those directly involved in the matter at hand, in this case people working in the sex industry. You keep trying to make it about how things could/should be. And you do it as if the consideration of meaningless hypotheticals has some bearing on the original discussion of very concrete realities, which a few people here have had direct or second-hand experience of, whereas I and apparently you have only had media depictions and imagination to work with. What drew me into the porn princess thread was the information about what that industry is really like, and that's probably what a lot of the participants there were after too. Comparisons with language work and with hypothetical worlds are just completely off-topic, and I think the mistake you and holist keep making (and quite likely a lot of the rest of us too) is to talk about these things as if they were all part of one topic. They are not. Your introspective exploration of how porn could be, or as LMNO points out, how some outlying cases are, has practically no bearing on the discussion of how the porn industry generally is, in the majority of cases. Nor does Holist's musings about how cerebral freelance work is exploitative.

And I honestly don't know why I keep trying to smooth over this rift, rather than just enjoying the show while occasionally fanning the flames like my esteemed colleagues do. What the fuck is wrong with me? Can we please now discuss, in this thread, my need to understand and explain this meta stuff? It's super important that we do it here, because it occurred to me while participating in this thread! I WILL NOT BE SILENCED.

*cough*
Yeah whatever.

Thanks for the (relatively) detailed analysis, Cain. I was glad to note you didn't even mention Israel-Iran, while I was under the uneducated impression that it might have global war potential. My thinking was that the US and Europe would get dragged in on the one side, and Russia and/or China on the other, especially if Hizbollah and Syria somehow became part of the conflict. But you don't see this as an eventuality worth worrying about, correct?

AA, something I think you might just be missing here is the odd focus on reality here on PDCOM. Unlike discussions on this kind if topic in most places, the focus here seems to me first and foremost – especially in this discussion – to lie in understanding reality. Not in making normative statements (i.e. "x is badwrong") or imaginary policy concepts (i.e. "x should be banned") and when people do make normative statements, the culture here seems to, perhaps unusually, not add an implication of policy, public or otherwise. In other words, the discussion of porn, to me and to many of the others, I suspect, is not about what should be done, but about how things are. Not about drawing sharp lines that can be used in some imaginary world in which we dictate policy, not even sharp lines for personal policy – since the conclusion on personal policy is typically "think for yourself, schmuck." I think this community sees itself more as a way to thoroughly inform oneself, and to hash out ideas, but emphatically not a way to hash out guidelines for life, personal or public.

I see that you understand this to a degree, I just feel your line of argumentation assumes an implication that is not there. It's a valid pursuit to try to figure out where one should draw the line, and you raise interesting thoughts and questions. I just think you're missing something fundamental about how this community approaches this kind of discussion, or at least the discussion this thread branched off from. When another thread is started with a clear mission statement, that'll be a different situation, and might possibly generate less animosity, at least in a perfect world where this thread never happened so people aren't predisposed to that animosity.

I'm very open to the possibility that I'm speaking out of my anus here, BTW.

VERB,
Amateur Interweb anthropologist

Luckily for FreeIrishWoman she has a book deal now.

THE POOR WOMAN'S ESCAPED ONE FORM OF PROSTITUTION ONLY TO LAND IN ANOTHER!!!

When I asked my mother on Skype last night whether I should risk three weeks without insurance she went kinda berzerk. She and my sister are convinced bad things happen especially when you're uninsured. Irrational, but getting them to calm down probably tips the scale for me anyway.

And, as I have said and do believe, it also has some special features, all of its own: in the current setting, largely very unpleasant to downright horrible. But again, I don't think that's a necessary consequence of humans being the way they are (in general and about sex in particular). I think it is largely cultural, a consequence of all those general shortcomings of our civilization that we Discordians sometimes like to harp on about.

Could be otherwise =/= is otherwise.
The argument that it needn't be this way has no bearing on the question, "is it this way". Which is, to me, the question of the porn princess thread.

Holist, Roger keeps giving you very clear examples of special brands of awful you can get as a sex worker but not as a language professional. Yeah, some of the time it might read like an exaggerated joke, but it's only horrormirth material because it's actual reality for some people. Apart from acknowledging that you know sex work can go south way worse than other work, I haven't really seen that information given the attention it deserves. And whether you mean it to or not, the constant insistence that other things come close reads a lot like downplaying the awful.

I'm going in circles here, I know, but I'm rephrasing what I keep trying to say because I believe you mean this well and are interested in understanding the clash between what you mean and how some of us react to it.

I find the now-OP mostly thoughtful and sensible, especially the part between the two quotes (of me .)
And I'm sorry to hear about how your wage slavery has hurt you and the people around you. It sounds truly awful.
I could go on about what my mother does to set limits to her self-exploitation as a translator but it seems you are aware of what you can and cannot do, so I won't go on about it unless you ask me to.

And I'd wager that in any culture on earth, there's a basic difference between sex and other stuff, which you can notice with the next thought experiment: would you feel very weird about doing X for a friend in need, assuming you have the time and energy to do it and neither dearly love nor strongly dislike said friend? Substitute X with sex to their liking on the one hand, or any other activity (translation, writing, lifting furniture, etc.)  on the other.
While cultural hang-ups regarding sex probably make the difference bigger than it has to be, I'm willing to bet there's a difference, universally, in every human culture that ever existed.

Okay, the thought-experiment is a nice touch and I fully agree. But I think the "special status of sex" is extremely varied across cultures and across individuals. And the hang-ups do cause most of the demand for the sex-industry, I think.


Also, I have known some people who, while proceeding more carefully than when helping someone to move house, would actually proceed with sex in place of 'X'. Are they Bad People^TM? I don't think so. What can we say about the privileged status of sex in the life of hairless apes? A great deal, I am sure. Other thread?

The point was not in any way whatsoever that someone is a Bad Person. The point is only that sex is universally special to our species, and its commodification is, as a result, fundamentally different from the commodification of other aspects of a human being.
The greater point is, again, that while wage slavery is badwrong, when it is combined with sex – including and in some ways especially on camera – it's a whole different breed of badwrong.
Hence my personal irritation at your line of argumentation looking for the commonalities between porn work and other forms of wage slavery in a thread devoted to the specific evils associated with porn work.

Apart from that, I don't feel I have much to add. You don't have to convince me that being a freelancer is tough, nor that being a wage slave of any other kind is tough. I'm with you on that, and I think most of the people here are.

It's also worth mentioning that this community has had some very recent, very bad experience with discussions about Who Has It Worse, in the line of patriarchy/kyriarchy threads that preceded the porn thread. I think that might help you understand the irritation some have displayed, including myself.

Speaking of which, earlier I was at a university administrator, getting some of my credits in order. I also asked if it could be a problem if I don't get the remaining ones in order before I cease to be a student. She said it wouldn't be. I noticed afterwards that perversely, I was disappointed – if I had to sign up for the new semester to get my degree, I would end up paying a few hundred euro more altogether (registration fee of 100-odd, and cheap 80€/mo student insurance fees through March,) but I would be happy to have had the choice basically taken away from me. I hate this kind of choice that much, apparently.

Yeah... I'm tending towards the no-job options because I want to try to really finish my paper before I leave, and enjoy my friends as well... But the insurance thing is a tough choice, the kind behavioral economists love: should I spend a certain 100€ to avoid the possibility of paying an unknown, much-larger sum? There's probably no right answer, but I'm conditioned – by my Jewish family by always living with mandatory health insurance – to prefer the certainty of insurance. I'm pretty sure I'd be happier working off another 100€ of debt than having to deal with a healthcare dilemma and, if I end up going to a doctor, having to pay off much more... But on the other hand, it's going to probably only be three weeks, so I'm also pretty sure I'm not going to end up needing a doctor in that time.

Bah. Choices.

Okay, I guess I just don't see the sense of redefining "prostitution" to cover essentially what is covered by "wage labor", since some highly impressive minds have already done a pretty good job of illustrating how awful the latter is (at least as far back as Marx), all while the former adds on a couple special layers of awful that should be differentiated from the normal kind of awful.

And I'd wager that in any culture on earth, there's a basic difference between sex and other stuff, which you can notice with the next thought experiment: would you feel very weird about doing X for a friend in need, assuming you have the time and energy to do it and neither dearly love nor strongly dislike said friend? Substitute X with sex to their liking on the one hand, or any other activity (translation, writing, lifting furniture, etc.)  on the other.
While cultural hang-ups regarding sex probably make the difference bigger than it has to be, I'm willing to bet there's a difference, universally, in every human culture that ever existed.

Gotta go now, catch ya later.

I dunno. Whenever I think about all of the awful, abusive things I've seen almost every fucking time I looked for porn I can enjoy, and the sheer ration of awful-to-nice that I've experienced on every single site, I can definitely say I don't think musicians and other non-sexual performers have it nearly as bad. Absolutely fucking awful seems to be the norm in mainstream porn.

This is true. But, the central issue is that this may be a problem with human sexuality, and not porn.

This. Is. A. Large. Part. Of. What. I. Have. Been. Trying. To. Say. Also.

Yeah, okay. Obviously, porn wouldn't be so fucked up if the demand for fucked-up porn weren't there. OBVIOUSLY.
But what I've been concerned with, and what the thread as a whole seems concerned with, is first and foremost the factual reality of people making porn, i.e. how porn impacts people involved in making it. This then raises ethical questions on the one hand, but also raises questions of causation on the other hand, something that hasn't been the focus of this thread and doesn't seem as urgent a topic. IMHO, it matters a whole lot more that porn abuses the people that make it, than why, and the latter topic shouldn't obscure the former.

What I see you arguing, on the whole, is that actually, porn isn't that different than other industries, except that we're all caught up about sex so we notice the abuse in porn more. I'm pretty sure you're factually wrong on both counts (the abuse itself and the perception here.)
(I know you've stated you see that porn is worse, but I see you arguing otherwise at the same time. Being inconsistent is not the end of the world, I'm just explaining why I'm still on about this.)

Ok, I think I'm getting it. In a strictly theoretical sense, there shouldn't be anything intrinsically worse between doing porn and working a shitty office job; and its the societal sex-negativity that stigmatizes pornstars.

And in fact, there are indeed small niche markets that feature sex or other adult behavior at a level of consent more or less consistent with the level of consent of working at a shitty office job. 

People who are interested in these niche markets are in luck in the UNLIMITED DATA age-- there seems to be more of it around, more then ever. You might even get the impression that the industry is changing, and TGRRs scenario is now the exception, rather than the norm.

But in truth, just as the niche market has grown, the industry has exploded in size. And while the theory is nice, the actual majority of the industry is still pretty horrible. Otherwise, the average pornstar wouldn't have a lower life expectancy than the shitty office worker.

THIS.

Right, except working in porn features all the same stressors that your job features - deciding which jobs to do, selling your abilities, aligning yourself with the right people, and taking the right kind of risks. These are equal, sure. But on top of all that, when you work in porn, you also have to have your body used like a cheap toy from Hong Kong. Your body, which is for all intents an purposes you yourself -- your mortal coil -- the very tie that binds you to this plane of existence -- in a very real sense everything you have and, in porn, everything you are. That seems to me like it would hit much closer to home, and be that much more intense, than getting a wrist cramp or pining over writing an uncomfortable kind of propaganda. You can identify with all the business aspects of working as a porn star maybe, but business ain't the half of it.

This.

And also this:
You mention social biases regarding sex. They affect the people working in it, not only those discussing it. And the way these biases work, in all cases I'm familiar with, is that they are jarringly unbalanced in their treatment of men and women. In the specific context of mainstream porn, they are at their highest potential: the women are literally selling their body for money and having sex with multiple strangers, opening them up to all sorts of abuse just for the fact of doing what they, while the men are doing the same thing, which perversely puts them in a position of power and envy. And if that imbalance were to come to the fore, and a male performer were to get abusive with his partner, even if "only" on camera, "only" as an act, the female performer is required to act like she's enjoying the shit out of it. At that point the exploitation specific to that line of work meets the normal exploitation involved in all paid work – she has to do her job to have money for her basic needs (including self-realization, which I'm glad to hear you know people who found after working in porn.) And unlike most other professions, there is hardly a single other industry in which she can later sport her hard work on a resume.

I'm not saying – and I don't hear almost anyone here saying, but correct me if I'm wrong – that all porn work is necessarily worse than all other work. It's more that taken as a whole, the reality of porn work is awful in a whole other way, in a significant proportion of cases.