Wage Slavery

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm a bit more nuanced, as I actually have met college strippers (although it was for spending money, not tuition, and it was usually amateur nights).  And I do know personally at least two women who voluntarily entered and are in the porn biz, but didn't have to (the caveat is that it's niche market porn).  So, there are outliers.  Of course there are outliers. 

But this question isn't binary.  A lot of lip service has been paid to, "a lot of porn is degrading, but..." and then acting as if the outliers throw the whole thing into doubt. When, in truth, most porn is degrading, and therefore it is entirely reasonable to say and behave as if that is the default.  To act as if the outliers somehow redeem the entire concept of porn is disingenuous.

And for the record, showing people fucking, be it cartoons, film, books, or live, is not inherently bad.  If I was going to draw the line anywhere, it would be somewhere around the time when the need for cash surpasses the need for sex/exhibitionism/desire.

I knew one college stripper, only did parties, had two goons that showed up to keep the frat boys in line.  She seemed to enjoy it.  However, I also knew her from a history study group, and she was a bundle of bad wiring, so maybe not the best counter-example.

The rest of your post I agree with, 100%.

Also, there's been talk in this thread or the other one about how "in an ideal world" porn and/or prostitution wouldn't be degrading.  Problem is, we live in THIS world.

Another thing I've been thinking about is this:  There is no need to separate porn and prostitution.  After all, what is prostitution?  When a person performs sexual acts for money.  What is pornography (as an industry)?  The same thing.

[Ayotollah of Ass]

The Good Reverend Roger's Official Holy Man™ Statement on Porn:

I was listening to a war correspondent speak at the U of A, a few years back.  He said that humans like to destroy, especially to destroy other humans. That it gives them a feeling of godlike power to revoke another person's charter.  That one of humans' favorite activities is to dehumanize and objectify others, literally objectify them if possible by changing their status from living human individual to inert object over which they have total power and superiority.  And I'm going "Uh huh, sad but true," and then he says "Just like pornography."  And I said,  "Well dammit that too is unfortunately correct.  If I am opposed to one of those things I sure can't justifiably cater to my whims in enjoying the other."

Please use this for your next Porn Princess thread.

[Ayotollah of Ass]

I'm a bit more nuanced, as I actually have met college strippers (although it was for spending money, not tuition, and it was usually amateur nights).  And I do know personally at least two women who voluntarily entered and are in the porn biz, but didn't have to (the caveat is that it's niche market porn).  So, there are outliers.  Of course there are outliers. 

But this question isn't binary.  A lot of lip service has been paid to, "a lot of porn is degrading, but..." and then acting as if the outliers throw the whole thing into doubt. When, in truth, most porn is degrading, and therefore it is entirely reasonable to say and behave as if that is the default.  To act as if the outliers somehow redeem the entire concept of porn is disingenuous.

And for the record, showing people fucking, be it cartoons, film, books, or live, is not inherently bad.  If I was going to draw the line anywhere, it would be somewhere around the time when the need for cash surpasses the need for sex/exhibitionism/desire.

Hmmm, this is also a good point. Perhaps 1. is not doing what I think it is doing.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The Good Reverend Roger's Official Holy Man™ Statement on Porn:

I was listening to a war correspondent speak at the U of A, a few years back.  He said that humans like to destroy, especially to destroy other humans. That it gives them a feeling of godlike power to revoke another person's charter.  That one of humans' favorite activities is to dehumanize and objectify others, literally objectify them if possible by changing their status from living human individual to inert object over which they have total power and superiority.  And I'm going "Uh huh, sad but true," and then he says "Just like pornography."  And I said,  "Well dammit that too is unfortunately correct.  If I am opposed to one of those things I sure can't justifiably cater to my whims in enjoying the other."

Please use this for your next Porn Princess thread.

There won't be another one.  We've had an unfortunate tendency over the years to have 8 different threads about the same thing going.  I posted one thread.  I expected THIS thread to be something a little different, but it wasn't.

[Ayotollah of Ass]

"I try not to let it affect me, but it does.  It affects my personal relationships.  When I'm stripping for a living, my first instinct is to get you to like me, because you liking me means you'll give me more stuff.  So I end up having ulterior motives for making friends and getting to know people.  And it sucks, and I know it's a shitty thing to be thinking, but I can't help it."

I responded to this, but lost the post because I'm still not quite used to the "hey, some people have posted since you started writing this so might want to check it out before this goes through" functionality. This ties in well, with Fidel's point above and the psychology of it.

I'm going to have to give this some more thought.

[Ayotollah of Ass]

There won't be another one.  We've had an unfortunate tendency over the years to have 8 different threads about the same thing going.  I posted one thread.  I expected THIS thread to be something a little different, but it wasn't.

Are you going to merge threads? And if someone has an epiphany on this topic a year from now, the hope is that they will Google search, find it and bump it and not start a new thread?

[Luna]

In an ideal world, that would happen.

We live in THIS one, which means some jackass will start four more threads, because he's a special snowflake whose ideas make us ALL look badwrong and we will flock to agree.

Or shit on his head.

Whichever.

[Verbal Mike]

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.

[trippinprincezz13]

I don't see it as less bad.

I see it as Prostitution is worse than stripping is worse than porn.

Because at least porn actresses aren't being pawed at by random creepers in a dreary dimly-lit room with worn out carpeting and horrible stains on the undersides of the tables.  They are at least isolated from their audience.

Yea, that's true, actually. I was thinking of some of the awful things porn stars are subjected to in videos, but, thinking about it more, some strippers are subjected to much the same, but have a leering audience to deal with as well, is much worse. Whether it's "regular" stripping or any number of other "performances", that *live* aspect does make it that much more demeaning.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

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?)

No.  Because that itself was a conclusion, and so I stopped thinking.  Haven't started since.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

There won't be another one.  We've had an unfortunate tendency over the years to have 8 different threads about the same thing going.  I posted one thread.  I expected THIS thread to be something a little different, but it wasn't.

Are you going to merge threads? And if someone has an epiphany on this topic a year from now, the hope is that they will Google search, find it and bump it and not start a new thread?

No, my policy is to just let the burning remains sink into the swamp.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

In an ideal world, that would happen.

We live in THIS one, which means some jackass will start four more threads, because he's a special snowflake

You could have stopped right there.

[Luna]

In an ideal world, that would happen.

We live in THIS one, which means some jackass will start four more threads, because he's a special snowflake

You could have stopped right there.

Yeah, but I like to hear myself type.

[Ayotollah of Ass]

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.

I'm new. Been meaning to check out this forum for some time, and while you (and everyone else) may have been interested in getting a handle on what working conditions in porn is like, I took the original Porn Princess narrative to be one akin to a kind of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" allegory aimed at consumers/viewers of porn. In retrospect, maybe the fact that no one was offering up a perspective from that angle, it should have been a sign that the thread was about something else. Perhaps that was a mistake. But, if that's the worst fuck-up I have all week, I'll consider it a success.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This thread is now about LMNO.


SHAKE THAT