Porn

Porn

With it being the month of February and that usually means Valentine's day is right here a good day or two away, I think we should touch on a serious subject. Porn.

Yeah, that's right. Porn.

Here is a rare chance to see the transformation from regular kid off the street to the all dolled up "sex worker" with it being relatively safe for work footage.



Before you click it though, I'd like to give a minor intro:
I find them most interesting because the sex industry is tremendous and really loved in this country, but everyone involved is viewed as a total whore. Despite women being the de facto stars, they're essentially treated as passive objects. It's also interesting that they take place during the makeup process which shows how ridiculous the beauty standards can be.Most of them aren't entirely focused but they ask about views from their hometown, their reasons for getting in the industry, etc. My biggest issue is that sometimes the dude wants to talk about what kind of acts they'll do on screen and I don't give a shit about that or find it worth posting about. They are definitely far from perfect, but it's hard to look up interviews of sex workers without stumbling through a million shitty, shallow PR interviews about how they just love their fans, and these are a bit more substantive. Also he does ask those stupid intro questions ("were you abused" etc), but I think he does to dispel the notions that a damaged psyche is necessary to enjoy sex work. I could be projecting a bit though.

Anyway, the dichotomy between the obsession over the industry and the treatment of the workers is what I find really interesting because it's essentially an extreme version of "regular" life. Women in general are idolized as sex objects (as long as they meet society's beauty standards) but it's just that, objects and not partners. There's more to it than that, but at its base it's like a weird magnification of societal attitudes at large. I think porn is a really fucked industry, but my general feeling is that it's not intrinsically sex work that causes that, but external factors, like societal influence.

Society in general doesn't have anything even approaching a healthy attitude towards women or sex and it seems unsurprising that in an industry that revolves around the two you're going to have even more issues. That being said, the porn industry has a particularly poor record of women being abused, both physically and mentally (I forget if this interview mentions it, but my understanding is that it's at least slightly better than it used to be, not that that's some great accomplishment) and is very patriarchal. More to the point, there's some logic behind the idea that you absolutely cannot last in the industry without actually enjoying sex and I wonder how that affects our view point on it. Society already has deemed it bad if woman enjoy sex, let alone to get paid for it? What is this nonsense!

There's some crossover here with discussion of my hate towards capitalism because of how the industry can force women into acts that they simply aren't interested in. There's another interview with a woman who talks about how her fans want her to do scene xyz and how that affects her. Ultimately it is her decision, but she can get forced into it if she wants to remain successful, and that's awful (welcome to capitalism etc).

It's a weird totem pole of sorts, at the bottom and middle you do shit shoots for assholes who are misogynist idiots, and at the top you get to choose what you do because you're in demand (Hey, the plus side of capitalism!). Anyway, there's probably a million things to discuss with these thoughts and there's a very large possibility that I am totally wrong, and I'm okay with that, I'd just like to know why!

This interview involves a bit of that (about half the length of the first one



I forget where, but she talks about how fans on her twitter are continually asking for a specific type of scene, one that she's not really interested in or whatever but that she feels compelled to do. I believe it's this interview anyway. It's also an interesting video because she talks about how sex work has been a very redemptive thing for her (there's probably a bit more to read into this). I think it also covers interracial stuff a bit which plays into intersectionality quite a bit because interracial porn is racist and sexist as fuck.

Again, yeah. these interviews are pretty bad, but it's really hard to find anything even remotely decent as far as interviews go in this industry that doesn't just feel like more pillow talk to sell a dvd. Especially since the interviewer is pretty much the definition of a creepy asshole.

Near the end of that interview the guy asks the girl if she would do bestiality stuff, mentions that it used to be legal until recently in the Netherlands and says something to the effect of "if it's legal we'll film it". This gives me the feeling that there's a lot of pressure on women in the porn industry to do all sorts of sick shit that they don't want to. Maybe it would be better to have a state monopoly for porn (or the whole sex industry in general), so as to prevent porn producers from competing in production of fucked up shit that nobody wants to do.

Then again, my understanding of the attempt to establish porn and erotica as separate categories is really just to put fourth the concept that you can depict sex and sexuality in a non-exploitative manner.

Yeah, I guess everyone is just trying to justify to themselves in this basic idea that retreating into the happy hooker fantasy or any variant of that so that you can say to yourself "but my porn is okay!" is, at best, monstrously callous when talking about an industry that regularly rapes and tortures people... And all for your enjoyment. Then again, how many Chinese children did you put to suffer for that iPhone?

You can't really say they're HAPPY to do these things. Who in their right mind would be? So while I can accept the fact that some of these people don't automatically hate having sex, you can't say that they are happy simply because they put a smile on for the camera. Remember, it's basically an essential part of their jobs to look as happy as possible.

Then again, I'm guessing that it's the same people that go around thinking women are happy to be subservient in every social situation, and happy to be shunted into limited career paths, and happy to be objectified, and happy to be pressured into sex, and happy to be told to smile when they walk down the street because a pretty woman should always happy, dammit!.

Look, as a man and while I have a lot of feminist leanings, this little self-examination that I'm writing to you to do about your collective kink, is probably like a colorblind person trying to deduce what a field of flowers really looks like. I have no idea the levels of objectification women go through on a daily basis. In some ways I'm actually glad about that, otherwise I would lose that last inch of hope I have in humanity.

I present this to you for more reasons than just to open your eyes to what a sex worker actually does and how they prepare themselves for the selling of themselves. If there's one thing to take away from this, it's probably that you should be concerned on what you're viewing does to you.

I'm probably more concerned about the harm to myself and my sexuality from watching porn. Even the most "ethical" porn can still give you weird ideas about what's to be expected in sex, and how to relate to woman and all that jazz.