The Porn Industry and Exploitation

Posted by Jack Stephens | July 30th, 2008 | Crossposted from The Blog and the Bullet

Renee blogs:

Normally I am in agreement with most things that Noam Chomsky has theorized but in this case I must respectfully disagree.  The idea that the decision to work in the porn industry is simply a result of womens exploitation ignores the degree to which womens agency can make this an active choice.  While all paid labour in a capitalist economy is defiantly exploitation, working in the porn industry is not more exploitative because what is being produced is sex, or rather the imitation of  reciprocal sex.

Why is sex work necessarily more degrading than working at McDonalds, or a  Dunkin Donuts for that matter? Both involve the sale of ones body, and labour power to a certain degree. Both involve not being adequately compensated vis a vis profits versus wage, yet pornography is deemed horribly degrading. I submit that this because women’s sexuality is only culturally acceptable when it is virginal in nature.

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10 Responses to “The Porn Industry and Exploitation”

1. vesper de vil Writes:
   July 30th, 2008 at 9:02 pm

   very well said, Renee!

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2. Inverarity Writes:
   July 31st, 2008 at 3:37 am

   Ah, the old “porn is just like working fast food!” argument. Because having to pretend you like it when a stranger ejaculates in your mouth is JUST LIKE having to smile when you ask, “Would you like fries with that?”

   There’s a qualitative difference between having to work a crappy wage-slave job you don’t like, and having to let strangers stick their dicks in you, and it has nothing to do with cultural notions of virginal sexuality.

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3. Renee Writes:
   July 31st, 2008 at 7:30 am

   There’s a qualitative difference between having to work a crappy wage-slave job you don’t like, and having to let strangers stick their dicks in you, and it has nothing to do with cultural notions of virginal sexuality.

   You are making the assumption that all porn actresses despise their jobs.

   This comment was written by Renee.
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4. Crys T Writes:
   July 31st, 2008 at 9:22 am

   If sex work is so non-degrading, why aren’t men lining up in droves to dominate it, the way they do for any job that’s the least bit desirable?

   This comment was written by Crys T.
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5. Brandon Berg Writes:
   July 31st, 2008 at 11:35 am

   If sex work is so non-degrading, why aren’t men lining up in droves to dominate it.

   Where exactly did you get the idea that men aren’t lining up in droves to perform in pornographic movies? I believe it’s on the short list of male dream jobs, between beer taster and professional athlete.

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6. Aerin Writes:
   July 31st, 2008 at 1:09 pm

   I’d written a whole piece about prostitution before I re-read the original post about pornography. So I’m leaving the prostitution bit in because the prostitutionresearch.com link is a good one, but it comes last.

   Most feminists agree with Renee, I know.

   Feminists for Free Expression (I’m generally not a fan of FFE, though)

   Wendy McElroy

   Although the women who make and defend pornography ally themselves with feminism, Beeson says it would be more accurate to say that censorship is a “very traditional civil rights issue, and the only time it was associated with feminism had to do with the lobbying efforts of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.” ACLU president Nadine Strossen agrees. The author of Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, Strossen says the heyday for feminists against censorship was a decade ago, when the group Feminists for Free Expression was founded in response to MacKinnon and Dworkin’s proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act in 1992.

   . . .

   Strossen says she thinks Dworkin and MacKinnon have become little more than a bad memory. Pornography, she says, is “not a big issue on the feminist agenda. It’s not about feminists and nonfeminists. It’s about people who follow Internet issues and those who don’t.”

   Still.

   My problem with pornography is that it objectifies sex - male, female, hetero, homo, whatever. Yeah, I know, I’m a Dworkin junkie.

   “I think that one of the things pornography has done is that it’s changed the way women experience their bodies so that sex is what you look like, not what you touch or what you feel and do,” Dworkin says. Few feminist pornographers would disagree.

   In a feminist sense, then, I think it degrades both women and men. And I have serious reservations about the ages of people used in porn, as they get younger and younger.

   
   My ranting bit about prostitution:

   I blogged about this a while back, although in regard to Hooters, which is not quite prostitution.

   Maybe in a perfect world, sex work could be seen as feminist choice; but the reality is most women are forced into this trade. And feminism is about recognizing women’s right ability to make choices to the full extent of their personhood.

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7. RonF Writes:
   August 1st, 2008 at 7:20 am

   If sex work is so non-degrading, why aren’t men lining up in droves to dominate it.

   Men don’t dominate peforming in porn because women don’t dominate in watching heterosexual porn, and homosexual porn is a very small market.

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8. Michelle Writes:
   August 1st, 2008 at 11:51 pm

   I have a number of friends who do porn. One even has a PhD in law. And they do it because *they like it*. Because it is an integral part of their sexuality. Because the role-playing is a hell of a lot of fun. The money (which isn’t much) has very little to do with.

   Now I’m not saying that they are anywhere close to being the norm. But goddamnit, there is such a thing as female agency! Porn — particularly fetish porn like spanking — allows women an outlet to see their otherwise taboo sexual fantasies on the screen for their sexual gratification and enjoyment. Sure it may objectify sex AND women AND even men, but it can also validate a woman’s (and a man’s, though he has less need of it) core sexuality.

   I dunno. The whole “porn is bad” thing just seems so 1980s.

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9. sylphhead Writes:
   August 3rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm

   Ah, the old “porn is just like working fast food!” argument. Because having to pretend you like it when a stranger ejaculates in your mouth is JUST LIKE having to smile when you ask, “Would you like fries with that?”

   There’s a qualitative difference between having to work a crappy wage-slave job you don’t like, and having to let strangers stick their dicks in you, and it has nothing to do with cultural notions of virginal sexuality.

   Yes, our society is right when it tells us that working porn is worse than working fast food. It can destroy your future prospects, trap you with some very unsavoury people, etc. etc. For similar reasons, smoking marijuana is worse than smoking tobacco.

   Society looks very Mafia-ish in that respect. And sexual puritans, on either the Right or the Left, would be its made men.

   This comment was written by sylphhead.
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10. B. Adu Writes:
    August 5th, 2008 at 5:12 am

    So if you disagree that we are all whores, you are a sexual puritan or stuck in the 80’s, strong arguments.

    I remember seeing a photo by a female photographer doing a project catching womenin the act of masterbation. The particular picture showed a woman at the point of orgaism, to be honest, she looked weird far too real and therefore strange.
    Years of exposure to various forms of in your face sexiness, had failed to show to even suggest this. There’s the puritanism, the greatest obscenity is to show a woman actually coming, rather than simulating it, or being heavily directed.

    Having her hair and make up in place and making the right noises, face not looking too distorted, that’s porn for you. Presumably, this hollowness at it’s heart, is what makes it need to just keep filling female orifices, any with how many. Anything but show that women’s pleasure doesn’t take away from men’s or vice versa.

    The fact people can’t see any reason against selling sex as a commodity, shows not liberation and modernity, but what eventually happens when capitalism appears to have no legitimate opposition. Porn is not about sex, it’s about cash. In future, hopefully, that will seem sooooOOO 2000 ish.

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