257 Comments

1. thomas:

   Just so sad how so many of us manly men are so “full spectrum” sociopathic, especially in our terror of the women we hate so much, but profess to love, only if it’s our way — correction, I am most grateful to know that this is not “My Way,” that though I am a former warrior officer from Vietnam, I am also, by act of congress even, a Gentle-man, who delights not in the pain of my loving partner, but in her pleasure . . .

   A very disturbing article which highlights for me the reality that many of our dominant gender, especially here in the U.S. of Empire, are “testosterone challenged” beyond hope for ourselves individually or as a species . . .

   11 March 2005, 10:45 am

2. Ricky:

   *Men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection.*

   That’s a fact, Jack.

   So, why would a man “avoid” love and affection? Why would I?

   I must ponder.

   I’ll be back.

   Thanks for this, Robert. I’m with you. Let’s start a fire.

   15 March 2005, 12:50 am

3. Ricky:

   You too, Stan! Sorry! One too many beers tonight! Cheers!

   15 March 2005, 12:54 am

4. Ricky:

   Well, now that I’m a little more sober, I notice a couple considerable barriers to talking about this subject in public. What the heck! Like, how often does this conversation take place:

   “So. Jerk off much?”
   “Oh yeah! I do it all the time!”
   “So what gets you off? Do you find your own body deliciously erotic all by itself, or do you use props?”
   “Nah, gotta have props, you know! I can only get off when I feel safe and in control. When I use porn, I’m in charge! I can do whatever I want, hassle-free. I like that feeling.”
   “Yeah, it’s like having your own little private Idaho, and it’s all for *me*! But… don’t you ever get lonesome in there?”
   “Lonesome!? What the fuck…! You some kind of fag, or what!? What the hell kind of talk is that!”

   This line is stuck like a bone in my throat:

   *Men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection.*

   Or more like a bone in my ear. I have to ask again, what’s up with that? What the hell kind of talk is that!?

   Breaching this topic reminds of that Far Side cartoon with the cows grazing in the pasture, and one cow is suddenly struck with an epiphonous realization: Hey! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!”

   Or the accountant guy at his desk, who, after thirty years with the firm, in a single salient moment while poring over this months actuarial reports, pencil suspended in mid-air, suddenly exclaims: “This sucks!!”

   Even comedians are shy to broach the topic. Which is odd. Howie Mandell is the only one I can recall at the moment (remember that one where he’s walking around in hip waders a couple sizes to big? anyway…)

   I think we need to talk about this. So how does one get the conversational ball rolling along?

   So what gets you off? What do you eroticize? Tenderness? Mutual delight? Simulataneous openness and vulnerabilty? Or what?

   Me, near as I can tell, I’m an odd mix. Got some serious and severe New Man/Old Man ambivalences goin’ on. I’d like to put my best self forward. Whateer that looks like. It’s not like we’re awash with men who model the New Man. Know what I mean, Vern? Someone has to go first. Maybe Mikey?

   Maybe you and me.

   Are you lonesome? I am. I’m so lonesome I could cry, like the man sang it. I don’t mind sayin’… well, aren’t we all? Aren’t we? Maybe we should say so? Instead of eating grass? Take a more manly proactive approach to what ails us? Men with men doing that which is seemly?

   We do need each other for this. I sure would like a better legacy to pass on to my sons than what I’ve come up with so far. Wouldn’t you? I want to know the joy. Know what I mean? I want my sons to know the joy. I want my daughters to know the joy, and not the terror; not that most exquisite of torments, to realize all the love is a lie.

   I think it begins by telling the truth. To ourselves, and then to each other.

   No, it begins with a hunger…

   Are you hungry, man?

   I sure the fuck am. Beyond telling.

   No, I don’t need meds. I need you to say, Me, too. That’s when the fire starts.

   Got a light, brother?

   16 March 2005, 4:36 pm

5. Ed:

   If you want to create a majority consensus around an issue, dismissing the POV of half the population is not an approach likely to be successful.

   Contrary to the author’s assertion, most religious conservatives do not espouse “male domination”, and our critique of porno is not on puritanical moral grounds.

   Most of the conservatives that I know reject pornography for similar reasons to yours. We reject it because we recognize the destructive influence it has on healthy relations between men and women. Families are important to us, and we’ve seen porn damage families.

   Perhaps the author should get past his ideological biases and look for common ground on this issue.

   16 March 2005, 8:23 pm

6. Stan:

   Actually, I have to challenge Ed on his assertion that religious conservatives do not espouse male domination. They won’t call it that precisely because of the inroads that have been made politically and socially by women, but if we simply open this conversation up a bit, and begin to talk about “roles” and such, the foundation of patriarchy that underwrites religious conservatism becomes glaringly apparent. We might start with gay marriage as an entryway to that conversation. Homophobia is nothing if not an attempt to police gender and keep women and men in their “proper” roles.

   What is Ed’s position on gay marriage?

   The religious right’s opposition to pornography is related most directly to their aversion to putting sexuality in any form into the public sphere, like their insistence on abstinence only sex education, or sex education at all. The very basis of patriarchal rule and the maintenance (to this day) of patriarchal power has been relegating sexuality and sexual intimacy (which have been constructed patriarchally) in the “private” sphere, where “a MAN’s home is his castle.”

   Ironically, this insistence that the question of sexuality is a “private” matter instead of a system of power is exactly where “sex-radicals” and the religious right share some ground. One (religious right) recognizes and one fails to recognize (‘sex radicals’) that social systems of power (like sexuality) that exist PRIOR to liberal law are maintained by liberal law’s exclusion of those system’s from political intervention (like the old laws that denied the existence of marital rape and allowed men to batter their wives). Both base their positions onf sexuality on precisely this exclusion. The religious right’s attempts to move sexuality into the public sphere in the face of challenges from LGBT and women is a predictable reaction to a loss of male social power.

   The other irony, IMO, is that the two things that have conspried to give pornography much of its consumer appeal have been the construction of male sexuality as aggression (and masculinity as impersonal and controlling) and Victorian taboos related to sexual practice. Robert’s description of porn “escalation” shows very clearly what this looks like.

   The reason I challenge Ed on his claim is based on what I know aboujt religious conservative definitions of “healthy families,” because those families always place the father-husband at the “head” of the family, even in the Promis Keepers’ version where the ideal father-husband is a kind of benevolent dictator.

   The reason I challenge ‘sex radicals’, aside from the fact that they try to football tackle anyone who even critiques porn as an industry, is that they refuse to acknowledge sexuality as a system of power, and try to redeuce the whole issue to a question of personal choice… which is libertarian nonsense. The VAST majority of women who are in pronography have been bounced out of the patriarchal family frying-pan into the patriarchal sex-commodity fire.

   The inhering opposition between porn-purveyors and religious conservatives has created confusion on the left, a left which has in many cases uncritcally internalized libertarian fallacies in their understandable resistance to the retrograde agenda of the religious right. I believe this is due to the most important failure of the left, which has been the failure to grasp sexuality as a system of social power that can not simply be subsumed as a secondary consideration to a schematic notion of “class.” There has been little attempt, for example, (with notable exceptions like Rosemary Hennessy) to theorize desire using a materialist conception of history. So the left has been caught using the “live-and-let-live” orientation that was in position against religious conservatives, or in some cases even adopting forms of biological determinism to describe sexuality.

   17 March 2005, 9:01 am

7. Stan:

   I have just asked those included in the porn debate on an earlier thread to shift to this thread just to give more people access to it. I have been out of town, and will be out again in the near future for over a week, then again from April 11-28. This is not desinged to be a challenge forum for only one person’s position, so it’s no big deal. I do, however, find myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages on the earler thread who oppose my position, and to which I have not had time to reply adequately. To my partisans on this issue, I apoloogize for my inability to drink from a fire hose. (-:

   I will say this… I don’t think formal logic is the last word on debate. It is, in fact, based on some assumptions about the reducability of every issue almost to plain mathematics. But debates that are more productive than those waged within the confines of formal logic are those who have learned that logic and transcended it, not those who continue to fall short of it with basic fallacies that used to be taught as part of every “logic and rhetoric” course. Dialectics transcends formal logic. Ad hominem attacks, false dilemmas, unrepresentative samples, straw men, non sequiturs, et al, fall short of formal logic. They are not arguments, but counterfeit arguments because they contain within themselves their own disproof or doubt.

   I suggest to anyone who is engaged in debates that they at least familiarize themselves with logical fallacies to avoid falling into these traps, and to recognize them when they are deployed against you demogogically. A couple of good web references are:

   http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm
   http://www.drury.edu/ess/Logic/Informal/Strawman.html

   Let’s aim higher, not lower.

   17 March 2005, 9:56 am

8. Bear:

   What about fair trade porn where women control what kind of scenes they do but are still receptive to healthy male fantasies? I think pornography provides a needed outlet for the lonely in todays modern isolated society. Obviously, the horrible things described should be stopped. I think alot of pornography users would switch to a more socially conscious product if it was appealling. I dont mean some watered down erotica shit though, something which recognizes the darker side of masculine sexuality without perpetuating pain and discrimination.

   17 March 2005, 6:12 pm

9. Stan:

   Exactly what is meant by an outlet? What does this metaphorical language say about how sexuality is constructed? A machine that is building up too much pressure, and will explode if it’s not released? This is not nitpicking, but a real question about how sexuality is epistemologically constructed.

   Reason vs the Beast religious constuction.
   Psuedo-Darwinian Man the Hunter construction.
   Newtonian mechanical construction.
   20th Century “normative” medicalized construction.
   Post-Freudian “drive” construction.
   Post-modern “narrative” construction.

   What these all have in common is they are extracted from history.

   And pornography users, as described in this article, are expressing a consumer demand for ever more “extreme” representations of the objectification of women.

   What is the masculine sexuality you refer to here? Is there usch a thing? If so, where does it come from? Again, not a nitpick, but a very serious question that goes to the heart of what Marx called false consciousness… naturalization. Treating a construction of social power as if it were a fact of nature floating above and out of reach of history.

   Feminists have rightly made a big issue of epistemology for just this reason… HOW we know determines what we think we know. I reiterate the point I have been shouting from behind this debate all along… gender (including desire) is not simply biologically determined. It is a system of real, material power, that is socially and ruthlessly enforced, and perpetuated through ideology. The whole notion of masculinity is a sexual ideology, not some “natural” phenomenon.

   As the title of Leonore Tiefer’s book says, “Sex is Not a Natural Act.”

   Men do love their pornography, and they will perform some gymnastics to justify it. Bob and I are not trying to be the sex police, and we are not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. We are asking our fellow men to engage in some serious self-criticism and analysis. How we have been taught to see ourselves as men has real consequences. Everyone feels defensive when their privilege is questioned, and we can even have a tendency to portray ourselves then as the poor, picked-on victims. (This is a general statement, not directed at one particualr person.)

   17 March 2005, 7:45 pm

10. Sex Worker:

    http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=2

    17 March 2005, 10:44 pm

11. polybi:

    I reiterate the point I have been shouting from behind this debate all along… gender (including desire) is not simply biologically determined. It is a system of real, material power, that is socially and ruthlessly enforced, and perpetuated through ideology. The whole notion of masculinity is a sexual ideology, not some “natural” phenomenon.

    As the title of Leonore Tiefer’s book says, “Sex is Not a Natural Act.”

    So does that mean we’re naturally neuters?

    polybi

    18 March 2005, 4:31 am

12. Stan:

    It means we are not “naturally” anything. Human beings long ago quit being merely the biological products of natural selection, guided by instincts, and surviving in an ecolgical niche. We are active participants in our own history, but participants without much individual influence over that history, and individuals shaped largely by the forces of socialization. Systems of power, like class and gender and national domination (imperialism), are determinative social forces with the most power, that reproduce themselves in individuals through learning (indoctrination and imitation), not instinct, or mindless drives.

    A pre-pubescent boy who is policed by his peers when he shows any behavior characterized as “female”. They taunt him with terms like ‘pussy’ or ‘faggot’… or, ‘girl.’ His parents ensure that he wears boys clothes, censure him if he cries out of emotion instead of phsysical pain, direct him into activities that seem ‘appropriate’ for boys. He sees ‘male’ behavior modeled by his father, uncles, male teachers, entertainment media, et al, and he sees sexuality constructed everywhere in a (male) subject/(female) object, phallocdentric way. He ‘learns’ what is and is not attractive in a woman (which is why cultures not yet taken over by american hyper-culture often have dramatically different standards fo beauty from the hairless, infantilized, anorexic one we cling to here, jacked up on high heels, and pointed to look like a Barbie doll).

    As new technologies emerge under the pressure of innovation or competition (capitalism), and systems of social power are adapted to fit these new technologies, those systems evolve to fit the reorganization necessary to (1) use the technology and (2) maintain the power of the dominant group (class, gender). This process is ‘history.’ Think about the changes that have occurred with just two technologies, TV and cars.

    Anyway… gotta get some work done.

    18 March 2005, 6:01 am

13. Sex Worker:

    (forwarded from the discussion at http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=2)

    Ok Stan, maybe you are right about my last few comments. I apologise. I think I too many arguments at once then got conflated them all (several of the comments about being “degraded” etc were from an argument on Portland Indy recently where some “feminists” were arguing that raping prostitutes isn’t as bad as raping other women because they’ve “already had their sexual identity destroyed”) which is ironically just what I got annoyed at you about earlier. Also, most of my last few comments were directed at other peoples posts here.

    I just want to clarify that I don’t support the sex-industry but I don’t oppose sex-work or pornography.

    I think that the reason “radical feminists” don’t support (especially not in practice) sex-worker organisations is because at the heart of their ideology is the belief that either women are mindless victims forced into sex-work or that they are choosing to support the opression of all women for their own profit. Therefore they must either be saved, ignored or opposed.

    Anyway, I think that unless someone actually responds to what I have been saying then I will try (sometimes it’s difficult) not to post anymore here because it is likely just to be frustrated or repetetive.

    18 March 2005, 6:28 am

14. Stan:

    One of the most insidious attacks on the rad-fem position contains the premises that we (1) see women in sex work as degraded (a friend has pointed out to me that MOST prostitutes are most often humiliated, and not ‘degraded’ like a depreciated commodity), (2) that we see these women as having no social agency, (3) and that we see prostitutes as uncle toms. These are grotesque and demagogic substitutions for the position I am advancing, and even more grotesque is the idea that any of us would minimize the rape of a prostitute. That is just a slanderous claim.

    What we are saying is that women who are still practicing prostitutes are not the appropriate people to work with organizaitons that are trying to facilitate women leaving prostitution. What we are saying is that prostitution is more than merely work in the sense of ‘class,’ but that it is a manifestation of a system of power that is both inextricable from class but different from the classic marxist definition of it… patriarchy.

    Here is the opening quote from MacKinnon’s book, “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”:

    “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away. Marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanl. Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value. It is that activity by which people become who they are. Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital a congealed form, and control its issue.

    “Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes: women and men. This division underlies the totality of social realitons. Sexuality is the social process through which social relaitons of gender are created, organized, expressed, and directed, creating the SOCIAL (caps mine) beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter an d mind. As the organized exproriation of the work of some for the bvenefit of others defines class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its structure, desirte its internal dynamic, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue.”

    The point is, prostitution is more than merely work, even in the class-sense. It is also defined fundamentally and not tangentially by sexuality, a connected but separately observable system of power that can not be struggled against inside what is commonly perceived to be the class struggle.

    So while I will never try to disrespect you as an individual, nor any other prostitute (you see now why I am averse to using the term sex worker… it ignores the dimension of sexuality as described by CM), and none of us has ever blamed the women (this is a vicious and innacurate caricature used to sideline our actual argument). I believe it is possible to be a victim of patriarchally constructed sexuality and have human agency at the same time. This is not amutually exclusive proposition.

    I am not trying to save you, nor am I ignoring you. I do think you are wrong in your argument for the reasons stated above. You have not engaged with the issue of HOW sexuality is constructed as a system of power, except in its dimension as ‘work.’

    Hartley, on the other hand, as an individual, works as a lobbyist (paid or not) for an industry in which she now prospers, lies to minimize the violent nature of the industry generally, attacks critics like Dr. Sun with unprincipled polemics, btw way using the language of the capitalist market as her baseline justification. As an individual, I see her very much the way I see Condi Rice or Colin Powell. That’s why I won’t dignify her last missive, which was all the same stuff recycled (including the idiotic implication that I am in league with Christian rightists), with a reply. Anyone who wants to see my counter-arguments can scroll through the comments that preceded this redundancy. Her link, btw, doesn’t work, the one that refers to the Deep Throat discussion.

    No one seems to have noticed that Earnest Greene’s attempt to attack me in his original screed refers to my own military past (which he deploys as an ad hominem attack) includes a reference to me as a reformed “whore.” Interesting, isn’t it, how his use of this metaphor is underwritten by the premise that ‘whores’ are people who will do bad things for money (the pimps always get off the hook in this analogy). Get your head around that one.

    18 March 2005, 7:20 am

15. Sheldon:

    Your original post contained the following, starting with a quote from Nina Hartley:

    “It’s not all Bang Bus, and by no means does all of it, or even most of it, conform to the author’s notions of porn-as-expression-of-misogyny.”

    Then, you said:

    “Actually, in the words of my great grandmother, an earthy Oklahoma Cherokee who would know, “That’s horseshit.

    “Anyone who doesn’t believe me can bring up Google and have a look. I find a porn review site called “Pornliving” there, in which there is a menu of pornographic categories, which lists Amateur (which closer inspection reveals is not exactly true, since these are capitalist ventures), Anal, Asian, Big Tits, Black Girls, Black on White, Blow Jobs, Celebrity, Fetish, Gothic, Hardcore, Latina, Lesbian (in which none of the shaven, siliconed women featured bear the least resemblance to the lesbians I know), Live, Mature, Multiple Models, Pantyhose, Pornstar, Single Model, Soft Core, Teens, Video. In case the blatant racist-sexism of some of these categories or the dehumanization and objectification of women as body parts fails to even bump one’s outrage meter, a peek inside any one of the many sites listed typically describes key forms of sexual action (which is the commodity) – like ejaculating in women’s faces, stretching their anuses with various and often damaging forms of penetration, and gagging them during fellatio – and the vast majority of these sites refer to women in terms like cum-hungry slut, nasty little bitch, etc.

    Ms. Hartley’s contention that this is an aberration within a much more benign industry is patently untrue.”

    Oh, really? For the past week, I have been examining the “Free Tour” and “Guest Areas” of each of the 861 websites (now up to 865) on the Pornliving website for any derogatory epithets hureld at women, not only “bitch” and “slut”, but also “tramp”, “whore”, “bimbo”,
    “tramp”, “harlot”, “ho’”, “slave wife”, “cunt”(referring to the woman per se) and “stupid”, as well as a bit more artfully crafted sentences that reveal the same sentiment. Without considering the context in which these words are used, here is the complete tally, sorted in alphabetical order by first alphanumeric character of website name(so that others can check my data). Each number on the left is the total websites containing at least one sexist epithet toward women; the number on the right is the total websites for that alphanumeric category:

    #0-9: 3 / 9
    A: 4 / 60
    B: 36 / 75
    C: 20 / 74
    D: 9 / 36
    E: 4 / 28
    F: 13 / 38
    G: 13 / 34
    H: 16 / 42
    I: 3 / 14
    J: 8 / 19
    K: 1 / 19
    L: 6 / 35
    M: 18 / 52
    N: 5 / 30
    O: 2 / 8
    P: 18 / 51
    Q: 0 / 5
    R: 9 / 27
    S: 17 / 84
    T: 22 / 47
    U: 0 / 5
    V: 6 / 20
    W: 10 / 27
    X: 1 / 13
    Y: 4 / 8
    Z: 0 / 3

    GRAND TOTAL OF MISOGYNIST WEBSITES REVIEWED ON PORNLIVING.COM:
    —> 255

    GRAND TOTAL OF WEBSITES REVIEWED ON PORNLIVING.COM:
    —> 861

    My trusty, rusty calculator tells us that 255 / 861 = 29.62%

    Stan, is this what you meant by an “absolute majority”? Using your OWN citeria, and then some, your conclusion is way off base. To paraphrase Marx, your indictment of Nina Hartley dissolves into air.

    If one starts to look at context (something which you don’t do, except when Andrea Dworkin is being questioned), that figure might have to be adjusted downward. At least several dozen of the ‘bad’ sites are clearly run by women who have reclaimed words like ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ to give them a more positive, even playful meaning.

    Like African-Americans with the ‘N’ word…

    Like gay people with ‘queer’…

    Like Jews are starting to with…’heeb’ (yes, there is a magazine by that name run by Generation-X Jews)

    Stan, did you actually tally up each of those websites, or were you bluffing, hoping that folks would feel intimidated by the large number of websites to be checked out? Well, not me.

    Dude, if you can’t get the math straight, I don’t believe you’re entitled to be lecturing anybody about simple logic or dialectics. Garbage in, garbage out. Or, as your great-grandmother would say…

    18 March 2005, 7:46 am

16. Stan:

    No, Sheldon, I did not review 800+ websites. I don’t have that kind of time. Robert did some actual research, which is in the article above. Would you care to comment on that?

    What do you not understand about the term “etc.”? And what do you refuse to understand about the argument that the VAST MAJORITY of porn is anti-woman propaganda?

    A mere 29% actually uses epithets to describe women! What YOU call epithets.

    How many that do not use that explicit language reduce women to a body part or phenotype (big tits, teen, black, Asian)? How many represent the women as sex-hungry obsessives? How many of them are pushing to the extremes described by the porn magnate quoted in Robert’s article?

    You are doing it again, Sheldon. You are reducing what I said to one part of what I said in order to recast my argment into one that you think can rebut. Did you just read the PL page on these sites, or did you look inside them? You say you did, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. The question remains, are these sites misogynist?

    I did not do anything except a representative sample, and I found such content in almost all of them, which are invariable linked to other sites. Is the content misgynist, or is it not?

    Here’s the first one I drag up on the second category… “crystal clear exclusive pussy and anal internal cumshots” Does this qualify as misogynist in your cosmos?

    And yes, slut and bitch are such playful terms… the very ones used during virtually every incident of battering and rape.

    Sheldon, this is not about me. Speak to the issue.

    Look at the images in these sites. Anyone, look at the images. What do these images say about women?

    BTW, I just brought up PL, and there is the “feature site of the day,” HomeCummers. It’s all very young, hyper-feminized, obviously posed women. Sub title: The nastiest girls on the web.” First “model”: Hunny Bunny. First title: “Dirty Talking Bitch.”

    Gosh, glad I checked. And here I thought porn was anti-woman.

    18 March 2005, 11:40 am

17. Sex Worker:

    This is the charming discussion I was reffering to (I couldn’t post a link before because because there was some problem with their search engine). This is someones response to an article about Portland city police raping a couple of sex-workers. I know it is not representative of and feminists (that is why I put the terms in quotes), but my point was actually about why I kept bringing it up – not saying that you had claimed that. I think I made that pretty clear so don’t do that “straw man” thing with me, please.

    ——————————————

    the tragedy 11.Feb.2005 10:00

    by sue

    When $ex is for sale, isn’t rape less tragic? Isn’t it more akin to shoplifting from a store than burglary of a house? I understand that the bent of this article was to shame a cop, but this is nothing like the violent rapes of teenage girls. When your body is for sale, sex is theft of a buyable good. Sex no longer is related to love with prostitution, its been reduced to a product. It’s common in the lower and middle classes to distrust and dislike cops, I just happen to not be such a big fan of prostitutes either.

    Were the prostitutes ‘asking for it’? I’m sure they weren’t. I just find it degrading to the rape victims whos sexual identities were destroyed by rape. A fate served to prostitutes much earlier in their lives that will continue at this higher rate if prostitution remains illegal.

    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310374.shtml

    18 March 2005, 6:02 pm

18. Sex Worker:

    The other thing is that the reason I posted my comments on the other thread was that they are not relevant to the discussion that has been happening on this one. By posting them here – out of context of what was being discussed there you have changed the meaning of them.

    ———-

    “What we are saying is that women who are still practicing prostitutes are not the appropriate people to work with organizaitons that are trying to facilitate women leaving prostitution.”

    What I am saying is that by taking the position that the only way to approach the issue of prostitution is to demand it’s abolition you are ignoring the reality that it is a part of the material reality of class society. By taking the position that the only way to approach sex-workers is to try to remove them from the industry you have essentially abandoned the potential for organising and the basic human rights of sex-workers. You actually CANT support sex workers organising.

    You also conveniantly ignore marriage. If prostitution is the commodification of sexuality then marriage and the family is sexual slavery.

    In many countries there have been organisations of “house-wives” etc during periods of struggle. I have never heard anyone say that women who are housewives are not the appropriate people to work with organizaitons that are trying to facilitate women leaving the home in response to these organisations.

    18 March 2005, 6:17 pm

19. Pavlos:

    You raise some interesting points and I agree with the goals of your argumentation. However I don’t agree about your assesment of the severity or character of the problem. Here are a few counter arguments:

    As you admit, the main value of porn is that it is a record of actual sex between the performers. We are turned on by the fact that real women, who are generally not slaves, offered to do these scenes. Personally, I find this liberating. The narrative is indeed deplorable, but I would argue that it is a very ugly secondary detail and not the main premise of the work.

    Why are you assuming that men take pleasure in imagining that they are men in a world where women act like Gang Bang Girls? I know that if I was a man in that environment, it would be stressful and mildly entertaining for a few minutes and then I would be sexually drained. I am a man, but I fantasize about having the extremely intense sexual experience the *women* performers appear to have. I cite the increasing degree of extreme penetrations, etc. as supporting evidence. Stupid repression of maintream men’s own “feminine” sexuality may be the main problem here.

    It is hard enough to make a porm movie where the women are stereotypically described as “cock hungry sluts”. The men and the women have to get naked and have sex, they both have to prepare physically, and they have to be content with baring this intimate and vulnerable aspect of themselves to the World. Now you want these already brave folk to exhibit real sex, and real affection, and real intimacy and sexuality. I too would like that, by my, you are demanding!

    So, in summary, when I watch maintream porn I admire the women perfomenrs, the more so the more extreme the acts, and despair at the cruel partiachical scenarios that the producers set up. I don’t think I’m an atypical man, except perhaps in honesty. I see these problems as stemming from repression of vulnerable sexuality (in everyone, but mainly in men) and I agree that *that* is the main problem that Patriarchy has saddled us.

    18 March 2005, 6:26 pm

20. Ricky:

    *I don’t think formal logic is the last word on debate. It is, in fact, based on some assumptions about the reducability of every issue almost to plain mathematics.*

    I’ve heard it said that logic is a male hysteria.

    Not all assertions are propositional – the ones that are are of course debateable. Some assertions are testimonial, like “That hurt me!” Guys like my brother might seek to counter someone’s testimonial assertions (particularly ones that implicate him – “That didn’t hurt! See? [SMACK!]“), but that isn’t debate – that’s simply a hearsay argument in defense.

    I’m not really all that interested in debate. I want to folks hear the screams – all the blood that cries out from the ground, from the mortar in the walls, from the rooftops, from the deep. Just listen – that tell-tale beat, that constant drone – can’t you hear it? Shhh…. just listen! There! See?

    I’m thinking maybe if we can hear, and grieve, maybe then we can start gettting better.

    18 March 2005, 6:32 pm

21. Sheldon:

    Stan, I AM speaking to the issue by engaging you in a debate. You have made yourself part of the issue by creating a blog and taking a stand on porn here. Why should I ignore what I regard as your misrepresentations of the facts – because it suits you? The business about epithets – which you brought up in the first place as a key part of your accusations against Nina Hartley – was easily subject to verification, enabling us to see how much integrity you are bringing to your side of the debate. If that part of your argument is false, then it might well serve notice on the rest of your case.

    There are at least tens of thousands of porn websites on the Internet, and thousands of them are free. Any claim that Pornliving constitutes a representative sample is dubious, since it covers less than 900 of the paid ones, none of the free ones and omits gay male XXX-rated websites entirely.

    It’s nice for you to admit that you didn’t review all or even most of the websites – but don’t you think it would have been more honest if you had said that from the get-go, instead of implying the opposite? Wouldn’t that have kept the debate to a high bar, one that you claim you want?

    I understand what you meant by “etc.” In fact, while you mentioned only two epithets, I went out of my way to include others, expanding the list. You say that list is “what YOU call epithets.” Really, well do tell – which of those words don’t belong there?

    “Crystal clear exclusive pussy and anal internal cumshots” do not qualify as misogynist verbiage in “my” or most liberal feminists’ cosmos. The same websites that refer to female genitalia as “pussy” also refer to male genitalia as “cock” or “prick”. Did you forget that naked men are also featured on these websites and are just as much ‘objectified’ as the women with whom they appear?

    Overall, what indeed do these images say about women, especially the huge majority – 71% – of Pornliving’s websites that are not misogynist? They say that women should enjoy guilt-free reproductive sex and not be punished for it. Women (and men) on these sites are not ‘reduced’ – they are transformed into sex-positive people. That’s an important message of confrontation with the dominant puritanical culture. By and large, that’s the message of the sexually explicit material that’s been emerging from the San Fernando Valley and other venues since the beginning of filmed porn. And that is precisely why porn and its producers have been subjected to persecution by the state authorities.

    That you see the women in these images as ‘obsessive’ says something about you, as if one should downplay one’s libido because sex by itself is evil and can only be justified when part of a greater purpose. Sorry, but I don’t Cotton to the Mather…

    18 March 2005, 6:39 pm

22. Sheldon:

    Oops. I should have originally posted “guilt-free NON-reproductive sex.”

    Would be nice if the posting machinery here had an editing function.

    18 March 2005, 6:43 pm

23. Ricky:

    *…a real question about how sexuality is epistemologically constructed.

    Reason vs the Beast religious constuction.
    Psuedo-Darwinian Man the Hunter construction.
    Newtonian mechanical construction.
    20th Century “normative” medicalized construction.
    Post-Freudian “drive” construction.
    Post-modern “narrative” construction.*

    Cool!

    So, what’s next? IS it up for grabs, then? Okay, once more from the top… Let’s get creative this time around. Maybe we caould start by paying attention…

    Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a great suggestion, I think:
    “Man in his lust has regulated long enough this whole question of sexual intercourse. Now let the mother of mankind, whose prerogative it is to set bounds to his indulgence, rouse up and give this whole matter a thorough, fearless examination.”

    I think it’s high time we men started doing that, too.

    So, What are we doing? Anyway?

    Yeah, that thing. That thi-i-i-ing.

    What are we doing?!

    18 March 2005, 6:43 pm

24. Ricky:

    *…as if one should downplay one’s libido because sex by itself is evil and can only be justified when part of a greater purpose.*

    Libido?! Is that your Freudian slip showing, Sheldon, or do you consciously and unapologetically consider yourself a driven man? Surely there’s more to it than just that! Is your love electro-chemical? Is your lust? Gird up your loins like a man, and tell me what “sex by itself” looks like. If you can do that, then tell you can try explaining to me how it’s so much better.

    18 March 2005, 7:22 pm

25. Sex Worker:

    This is Ernests statement:

    “They say there’s no missionary more fervent than a reformed whore, and Goff’s overheated anti-sex-industry rhetoric would certainly seem to bear out that contention, but in terms of actual resumes, I think either Nina’s or mine would be far easier to defend on moral grounds than his.”

    I diddn’t comment on it because, in the version I saw it had been changed to “reformed alcoholic”. Either way it doesn’t actually make much sense.

    Firstly, as I said before, I don’t think your personal history is relevant because you are not supporting the millitary but actively opposeing it. Whether you or Ernest are good activists or nice people is entirely irrelevant.

    Seccondly, the comparison between the millitary and sex-work is pretty flimsy. The only similarity is that people do what they have to, or are conditioned to, to survive. But the job of prostitutes doesn’t involve opressing people on behalf of an imperialist government. Even if you believe that sex-workers are providing ideological support for patriarchy – it still is not the same as being part of the armed wing of the state.

    I know that Nina’s bottom line is Capitalist production. That is where my dissagreement with her lies. I don’t support the sex-industry any more than I support any other industry. But I don’t see how pornography provides any more ideological support for partiarchy than does 90% of depictions of women in the media. Why should I oppose pornography when I don’t oppose magazines like Cosmopolitan? I oppose much of the ideological content but I don’t oppose depictions of sex that are made to arouse people any more than I oppose magazines that are made to entertain them.

    As for the thing about “liberal law” – it’s a flimsy argument because the law DOES intervene in people’s private lives all the time. It intervenes to support patryarchy by outlawing homosexuality, through “age of consent” laws (I’m not advocating pedophilia BTW and I know it’s a complex issue, but the fact is that these laws have been mostly used to supress the sexuality of young, especially gay, people), through re-enforcing domination of women and children through marriage and the family, by outlawing sex-workers (when have anti-prostitution or porn laws EVER actually helped sex-workers?).

    The only times that the law ever doesn’t intervene in peoples private lives are:
    a) when as you said, in the case of male property rights over their family
    b) where progressive activists and community sentiment have FORCED them to but out (ie in the case of homosexuality etc)

    The whole point is that BECAUSE liberal law is just power and class relationships codefied, you can’t depend on it to protect the rights of the opressed. That is why any censorship laws end up being used against progressive sources no matter what they were originally intended for. That is why in Australia pro-choice campaigners have argued for simply taking abortion laws off the books rather than “legalising” it – we have seen what happened with the roe V wade thing in the US.

    Also, I haven’t argued specifically about sexuality being a “globalised system of exploitation” for a few reasons. Firstly, I am not entirely clear on what you mean by that. I have been reading your stuff (not just on this thread) to try to get my head around it and I’m still just not sure what you are trying to say or whether or not I agree with it. My *feeling* is that there is a lack of something (awareness? interest? something ideological?) or something about that on the left. I don’t think the liberal law thing is it. I don’t think that trying to get rid of prostitution or porn will help whatever that is. I’m not even sure what the right question to ask to clarify it is… I just don’t have the words yet so I can’t even think it clearly (and BTW “prostituted people” is NOT the words I’m looking for). I was hopeing that it might come clear to me during the course of discussion but because nobody really responds to what I have written it just isn’t happening. THis debate is fucking frustrating because the left just don’t want to discuss it and always resort to silly guilt trips about some mythical bunch of “prostituted-people” who are not like me or anyone I have ever met. We just aren’t communicating. And no, I’m not going to read Dworkin because I have tried to before and her writing was so self-indulgent and hate-filled it made me feel physically ill.

    Do you get it? I’m *trying* to understand what you (and people like Nina) are saying and I’m *trying* to get you to understand what I’m saying. This *is* personal for me in a way (for obvious reasons) so please excuse me if I get fustrated and angry sometimes.

    18 March 2005, 7:41 pm

26. Sex Worker:

    Actually now that I think about it, even tho the comparison between soldiers and sex-workers is really flimsy, maybe there is a contradiction in how you apprach these issues?

    Q. Lastly, what do you think are the immediate concrete tasks of the anti-war movement? How much of this involves trying to reach out to the troops with their growing demoralization and resentment?

    A. I’ve long been an advocate of reaching out to the military, but not in the ham-handed way some people have tried. Saying goofy shit like “Overthrow your officers!” is not going anywhere now. The BTHN campaign is addressing real issues, with a lot of emphasis on outreach to military families. Soldiers might reactively engage in shouting matches with a stranger from the movement, but they have respectful, thoughtful discussions with spouses and parents and siblings. They also confide in them when they themselves experience doubts.

    Eventually, of course, I believe the soldiers will have to overthrow some of their officers, but not until we overthrow all of our bosses. The important thing for revolutionaries — if that term is to mean anything other than phrase-mongering and adventurism — is to build and maintain a bridge with the military. The day will come when we will need them, and they will need us.

    http://www.agitprop.org.au/nowar/20031111_goff_stan_goff_interview.php

    18 March 2005, 8:20 pm

27. Ricky:

    **But I don’t see how pornography provides any more ideological support for partiarchy than does 90% of depictions of women in the media. Why should I oppose pornography when I don’t oppose magazines like Cosmopolitan?**

    The lights went on for me when I got a handle on the fact that pornography is political propaganda. Pornography perpetuates and reinforces and reiterates and reifies a foundational social myth, namely that Women are for Men, or more explicitly, women are for men’s pleasure. It functions effectively as a psycho-social conditioning agent that results in the ordering of human existence both personally and socially, how people see the world, and themselves and others in it. It’s a fact. Some may regard those assertions as debatable. But it’s something that needs to be looked at, just in case, most would agree.

    18 March 2005, 8:21 pm

28. Ed:

    Well, this conversation has moved far beyond my limited point of input, so I’ll step back out of it. But since Stan asked me a direct question, I feel compelled to answer it.

    I have no opinion on gay marriage. Frankly, it’s not something I’ve given much thought to or care about. But if forced to pick a position, I’d probably favor some sort of civil union. That seems a reasonable compromise between two segments of society disinclined to compromise. However, gay marriage wouldn’t really bother me either. To each his own.

    Beyond that, I think you are wrong to paint all religious and social conservatives with one broad brush. Like all large movements, we comprise many sub-groups at varying points along the spectrum of views. Some no doubt fit your theories. But plenty of others do not.

    If you are truly interested in building a consensus for action and change on this issue, or even trying to shift the tone of public discourse, then you should look for common ground with as many groups as possible. However, if you are merely looking to score some rhetorical points, then by all means reject all points of view that are not ideologically pure.

    Ed

    18 March 2005, 8:31 pm

29. Sex Worker:

    “Pornography perpetuates and reinforces and reiterates and reifies a foundational social myth, namely that Women are for Men, or more explicitly, women are for men’s pleasure. It functions effectively as a psycho-social conditioning agent that results in the ordering of human existence both personally and socially, how people see the world, and themselves and others in it.”

    So does Cosmo, so do most movies, music, books, magazines, everything else. Even those horrible T-shirts with “Princess” written across the breasts.

    The basis of pornography is depiction of sex designed to arouse people. The fact that most of it (including the written variety) contains mysoginist propaganda doesn’t actually fundamentally change that as far as I can see.

    18 March 2005, 8:37 pm

30. Ricky:

    “One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive it from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it.” Catharine MacKinnon

    18 March 2005, 8:37 pm

31. Sex Worker:

    Yes, but the question is how do you approach that. Working to create proffits for capitalists is the opposite of what you need to do to change it but most dont approach that by dropping out – rather by organising for better conditions. People see there power by organising for immediate gains and that helps them to organise agaist the system as a whole…

    Sorry about the over-simplified Marxism 101 but that kind of is the whole point of my argument – how do you concretely approach this isse (read previous thread).

    18 March 2005, 8:46 pm

32. Sex Worker:

    Damn. Now I’m starting to see a hole in my own argument which is that the socialisation of labour under-capitalism creates the pre-conditions for a classless society but does the comodification of sex actually create the pre-conditions for a non-patriarchal society…maybe the destruction of the family system does? Anybody have any thoughts?

    18 March 2005, 8:52 pm

33. Ricky:

    *So does Cosmo, so do most movies, music, books, magazines, everything else. Even those horrible T-shirts with “Princess” written across the breasts.*

    I’m with you on that. It’s just life in the Patriarchy. But pornography is, as they say, a lot more explicit. But yes, for sure, the subtler messages in support of the myth deserve to be challenged, as well. I tend to regard porn as a central metaphor/motif, and the rest as thematic allusions to the same strain.

    *The basis of pornography is depiction of sex designed to arouse people. The fact that most of it (including the written variety) contains mysoginist propaganda doesn’t actually fundamentally change that as far as I can see.*

    Got to ask, Which people is it designed to arouse? Women people? Also have to ask, Why is it that men find misogynist propoganda so arousing? And, Why is that men don’t recognize misogyny even when right in their face?

    18 March 2005, 9:07 pm

34. Sex Worker:

    Well, for a start I have a couple of female friends who write porn. One writes alien sex porn which she sells to magazines, the other writes lesbian porn on the internet for herself and any other people who read it. There are also people who film themselves or others having consensual sex, no monetary transaction involved because they enjoy it. I know that this is a minority, but so are people who put out progressive women’s magazines. Why is a graphic description of sex qualitatively different from anything else?

    18 March 2005, 9:22 pm

35. Sex Worker:

    Also, I know that men find mysoginist depictions of sex arousing because they have been conditioned to. Not just by porn but by everything in their socialisation from how they are treated and taught to treat women.

    18 March 2005, 9:24 pm

36. Sheldon:

    Ricky:

    The libido is simply another term for the sex drive. It’s part of all human’s psychic infrastructure. To what use it is put depends on the society in which one dwells.

    Sex “by itself” could mean a consensual one-night stand or a brief fling. with no follow-up commitments necessary. In the realm of sexual fantasy (which pornography depicts), this is a very popular scenario for people who don’t want to do that in real life due to fear of disease, performance anxiety, etc.

    Hope that helps.

    18 March 2005, 9:32 pm

37. Sheldon:

    Here is the article from the February 9, 2005 New York Times referenced by Nina Hartley for the link-impaired:

    An X-Rated Phenomenon Revisited
    By CHARLES MCGRATH (NYT)

    History, Karl Marx might have observed had he been more savvy about public relations, repeats itself first as documentary, then as a panel discussion.

    On Monday evening, at the New York premiere of ”Inside Deep Throat,” a movie about the making of the groundbreaking 1972 adult film, the guests — who included Claire Danes, Dana Ivey, Ron Silver, Kurt Andersen, Tina Brown, Erica Jong and Brian Grazer, the documentary’s producer — strode boldly into the Paris Theater. They did not hide their faces behind newspapers, as viewers of the original film did until people like Jacqueline Onassis and Truman Capote made going to watch ”Deep Throat” chic and almost respectable. Nor did they resort to the old porn watcher’s strategy of circling the block a couple of times before sidling into the lobby when no one was looking.

    They watched the documentary intently, laughing several times and clapping at the end, and then listened as some experts, including the book publisher Judith Regan and the law professors Catharine A. MacKinnon, of Michigan, and Alan M. Dershowitz, of Harvard, got up and talked about the ”Deep Throat” phenomenon, without coming to many conclusions about what it might or might not mean.

    Neither Ms. Regan nor Mr. Dershowitz, it turned out, had ever seen ”Deep Throat.” Mr. Dershowitz, who defended the movie’s male star, Harry Reems, in a prosecution for obscenity, said he had not needed to see the film to know that an important First Amendment issue was at stake. And though Ms. Regan had presumably been invited on the panel as a ”pornocrat,” to use a term that came up a couple of times — as the publisher of both ”The Surrender,” Toni Bentley’s memoir of anal sex, and Jenna Jameson’s ”How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” — she claimed not to be an expert.

    As a young woman, she said, she was not one of the thousands of sensation-seekers who dutifully lined up at the World Theater, on West 49th Street, where ”Deep Throat” was first shown. She added that she learned about Ms. Jameson from her son, who dropped out of his M.I.T. fraternity because Ms. Jameson’s videos were all the fraternity brothers were interested in watching.

    Ms. Regan proved a surprising ally, moreover, to Ms. MacKinnon, who for years represented Linda Lovelace, the other star of ”Deep Throat,” after Ms. Lovelace claimed she had been coerced into appearing in the film and sought to have it suppressed. The new documentary, she said, told only part of the truth. And by focusing on censorship, she went on, it failed to address the fact that pornographic films not only are sexually exploitive of the women who made them but also tend to employ women, like Ms. Lovelace, with a history of being sexually abused.

    Ms. Regan reminded everyone that ”How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” is subtitled ”A Cautionary Tale.” She said she thought that despite all Ms. Jameson’s financial success, the author was ”miserable,” and that the writing of the book had caused her to realize how much she had been exploited. Though she was not averse to selling a few copies, Ms. Regan added — which is why ”How to Make Love” had a suggestive cover and some topless photographs inside — part of her reason for publishing the book was to encourage Ms. Jameson and women like her to begin exploring their own stories.

    The other big issue of the evening was whether watching porn is bad for you. Absolutely not, said Mr. Dershowitz, who cited evidence showing that as pornographic films become more and more available, the incidence of rapes is actually declining. Ms. MacKinnon had some studies of her own, and also some meta-studies — that is, studies of studies — showing that consumption of pornography ”does increase acts and attitudes of violence against women.”

    This was not the first time these two have sparred, and they now appear to have their roles down pat. She discreetly rolled her eyes while he delivered a line so good that it might have been prepared beforehand: ”Michigan thinks that everything Harvard can do, it can do meta.”

    On the evidence of ”Inside Deep Throat,” which includes scenes from the original and is itself shot in a way that suggests the grainy, lurid look of porn films 30 years ago, the making (if not the watching) of pornographic films may have a strange aging effect. In interview segments, the director, Gerard Damiano (whose oeuvre also includes ”The Devil in Miss Jones,” ”Meatball,” ”Manbait” and ”Manbait 2”), the production manager, Ron Wertheim, and Count Sepy Dobronyi, in whose wine cellar some of the action was filmed, all seem a little raisiny — shrunken and overly tanned. Even former Damiano stars like Andrea True and Georgina Spelvin are, sadly, showing their years.

    The one exception is Harry Reems (aka Herbert Streicher), who, after years of alcohol and drug addiction, pulled himself together and — now trim and silver-haired — works as a real estate broker in Park City, Utah. He was at the premiere, smiling and shaking hands and looking like a guy who never watches anything racier than ”Wall Street Week.”

    ”I haven’t seen an adult film in 25 or 30 years,” he said. ”I don’t need to. I’m happily married now.”

    Correction: February 19, 2005, Saturday An article and a picture caption in The Arts on Feb. 9 about a panel discussion at the New York premiere of the documentary film ”Inside Deep Throat” misstated the surname of the director in some copies. He is Brian Grazer, not Glazer.

    18 March 2005, 9:53 pm

38. Sheldon:

    The “Inside Deep Throat” documentary has its own website, from which this account appeared. This is the one that mentions throat rape:

    “The New York screening of Inside Deep Throat at the Paris Theatre was a hoot. The boisterous audience included a clutch of entertainers like Bebe Neuwirth, Claire Danes, Fred Schneider, Scot Whitman John Epperson aka Lypsinka, Jason Bateman, Ron Silver joined at the hips to doppelganger Alan Dershowitz, and Gwyneth Paltrow. There were reams of scribes: Erica Jong, Tina Brown, the Page Six posse, Cintra Wilson, Emma Forest. And a gaggle of documentarians: Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans), Shari Berman (American Splendor), Todd Graff (Camp), and Barbara Kopple (My Generation).

    This time, the hapless lot of directing a post-screening panel fell to Elvis Mitchell, former movie critic at the NY Times. The panel was made up of HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan, journallist Peter Boyer, criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz (who defended Harry Reems in the famous obscenity trial), and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.

    Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. “What’s so funny?” she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff’s hand shot up – “I can do it,” he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going “me too!” (Gigi Grazer – wife of Brian – later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.

    Judith Regan chimed in preposterously, maintaining that her Jenna Jameson autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, really was “a cautionary tale” rather than just an afterthought of a subtitle. She argued that all sex workers are victims of sexual abuse. Frontliner Peter Boyer went on on about rape porn and tried to raise a quorum on fisting.

    Which left the task of defending Deep Throat and the porn world by extension to Alan Dershowitz, who pointed out that to say porn promoted rape was akin to saying that rap promoted. . . But then Elvis Mitchell leapt to his feet, as if about to throw a Springer-like punch, and put us all out of our misery by ending the panel abruptly.

    Adjourning to the after party at 81/2, Michael Musto said, “Congratulations, you’ve managed to incite the exact same debate that happened 30 years ago. People said exactly the same things they said decades ago. That really takes some doing.”

    And after that, everyone wound up at the after-after party at The Cock. Except Catherine McKinnon.”

    18 March 2005, 10:03 pm

39. Sex Worker:

    Firstly, the article was funny Sheldon (btw I can too! … sorry, couldn’t help myself…), but I really don’t think that whether or not Linda Lovelace enjoyed making Deep Throat really sheds any light on the issue.

    She was so badly abused that I don’t think she would have been able to make a free decision about whether or not to do porn. Living for prolonged periods under constant fear and pain makes people physically and emotionally incapable of making decisions based on anything other than immediate survival. From the later interview of hers I read she seemed to have a lot of contradictory thoughts about it all (ie that porn helped her escape an abusive relationship and improved her life but that it was also exploitative) and a classic case of PTSD. I think that is far more likely a reason why she flipped so wildly between being anti and pro-porn at various times than any kind of opportunism.

    The point is that she is just one individual and there are also people like Nina who made informed decisions and enjoy their work. Not just in porn but in prostitution and other sex work too.

    “Sexuality is the social process through which social relaitons of gender are created, organized, expressed, and directed, creating the SOCIAL (caps mine) beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society.”

    So is labor.

    “As work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter an d mind. As the organized exproriation of the work of some for the bvenefit of others defines class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. ”

    I have never said that prostitution is exactly the same as other work. What I have been asking is:

    Why is it that you do not go around calling for wage-labor to be immediately abolished but you (basically) do for sex-work (whatever you want to call it)?

    Why do radical feminists not actively support sex-worker self-organising?

    18 March 2005, 11:56 pm

40. Sheldon:

    Hi, Sex Worker!

    I only reprinted the article(s) here because Stan may have thought that Nina and Anthony were making up stories about MacKinnon because his link to the Times site waa broken.

    BTW, I’ve noticed that both Stan and Robert Jensen don’t exactly say that 100% of porn is misogynist. Stan says an absolute majority of it is, which leaves open the possibility (given a literal reading of the text, since ‘absolute majority’ does not equal ALL) that he thionks some of it is not misogynist.

    Perhaps Stan would like to give us examples of porn that he approves of. Name of videotape, DVD, or website would be fine, thank you.

    19 March 2005, 12:38 am

41. Sex Worker:

    Ps… This is what Engels actually said about it… I have so far not seen the radical feminists add anything particularly enlightening to this.

    —————————
    From Family State and Private Property:

    With the rise of the inequality of property … waged labour appears sporadically side by side with slave labour, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of female slaves. Thus the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to civilisation is double edged … contradictory: here monogamy, there hetaerism [multiple sexual relationships] with its most extreme form prostitution. Hetaerism is as much a social institution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom—to the advantage of the men.

    —

    Monogamy arose from the concentration of larger wealth in the hands of a single individual – a man – and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other. For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy of the man… In the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed opposites, but inseparable opposites, poles of the same order of society.

    ——————
    From Communist Mannifesto:

    The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property-historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production — this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

    Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

    On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

    The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

    Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

    But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

    And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

    The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

    But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

    The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

    He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

    For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

    Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes,take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

    Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus,at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with,is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest,it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

    ————————-

    Ok I’m gonna try and tear myself away from this discussion again now…

    19 March 2005, 12:42 am

42. Anti-Porn Feminist Activist:

    Hi everyone. I wrote a letter to Counterpunch on Nina Hartley’s article a few weeks ago, and happen to have it handy. I figure I might as well share it with all of you as it seems quite relevant to the discussion on this blog. Feel free to give feedback. I’d love to hear what you all have to say about the points I’ve made in it. And before I forget – thanks for the fantastic article, Stan. If only more people would actually really listen to the truths in it….

    Dear Counterpunch Editors,

    I am a woman who didn’t think much about pornography until a few years ago – when I happened to run across some on the Internet by mistake. I was so disturbed by the cruel and out of control exploitation and misogyny of what I saw that I felt compelled to learn if what I had come across was representative of the American $10 billion porn industry that I knew to exist. So rather than just read the second hand selective writings of individuals on either side of the debate about porn, I decided that the one of the best ways to learn about the issue was to study pornography itself.

    So I went to a porn store with thousands of porn videos and DVDs. I spent a long time looking through hundreds of them at random, to get a very good sampling of what the porn business is all about. What I found was that all of these porn videos had something in common – they all contained one or more of the following elements, and sometimes all of them: degradation, dehumanization, exploitation, violence, cruelty, forced sex, blatant misogyny, and humiliation. (Also in most of them it was clear that the performers were engaging in unsafe sexual practices that would leave them open to possible sexually transmitted diseases.) In not a single one of these videos and DVDs did I see any of these contrasting elements, which I believe most rational people would say are part of a healthy sexual experience: equality, respect, dignity, kindness, caring, sensitivity, or empathy.

    Here are a few specific examples of what I found, which were sadly typical of the overall tone of the thousands of videos:

    - “Anally Ripped Whores” – “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want, and we’re giving it to you. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.”

    - “Throat Gaggers #5” – Pictorial: http://www.dvdtalk.com/covers/ts1071374785.jpg Selected quote: “The content is probably enough to make John Ashcroft have a stroke and fans of performers like Brandon Iron will feel right at home enjoying this one for months. I watch a lot of porn and it made me feel somewhat unclean. The semen fly everywhere in this one and most of the women get plastered all over with an emphasis on the mouth and tonsils.”
    Don Houston, DVD Talk

    - “Zero Tolerance – No Holes Barred” – “Women were born with three holes for one purpose: To cram a cock deep inside every cuddly cavity! Like true cock sockets, our whores subject their beautiful bodies to the nastiest 4-way debauchery ever lensed.”

    In your “About Us” section of Counterpunch you say that you are very happy when your newsletter helps people “in their battles against the war machine, big business and the rapers of nature.” To the best of my understanding you are against war in large part because of the violence and cruelty involved. Also – to the best of my understanding – you are against big business because of how they exploit their workers and the general public. I am very perplexed, then, why you would provide a platform in your publication for a spokeswoman for the very big corporate business of pornography. Allowing the corporate porn business to be defended by one of the very few women who have been in it who will support those big corporations in their blatant exploitation of girls and women seems extremely contrary to your stated positions.

    Perhaps you were acting out of ignorance of the full truth about the corporate big business of porn, despite the excellent article by Chyng Sun that Ms. Hartley absurdly tried to rebut. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I will assume you were indeed ignorant of the facts of this issue. Therefore, please allow me to share with you some very enlightening information about the huge corporate business of porn, taken from the transcript of the ABC Primetime Live television show: “Porn Profits: Corporate America’s Secret”. Here are some of the highlights:

    “Pornography has grown into a $10 billion business — bigger than the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball combined — and some of the nation’s best-known corporations are quietly sharing the profits.

    Companies like Time Warner and Marriott earn revenue by piping adult movies into Americans’ homes and hotel rooms, but you won’t see anything about it in their company reports.

    And you won’t hear them talking about the production companies that actually make the films — or the performers the producers hire, men and women as young as 18, for sex that is often unprotected.

    “We have an industry that is making billions of dollars a year, is spreading to cable television and to the Internet, and yet their employees are considered to be throwaway people,” said former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
    Only a handful of “high end” production companies require condoms, leaving the majority of performers vulnerable to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. While some companies require performers to take HIV tests, there is no government regulation mandating tests across the industry.

    Koop — noting that performers’ sexual activity off the set, with spouses or lovers, can spread disease beyond the industry — says America’s big corporations are complicit in a public health hazard: They want the profits from pornography but “they don’t want to get involved.” ”

    …

    “Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, through its subsidiary DirecTV, delivers hard- and soft-core porn to homes via satellite. Communications giant Comcast supplies various kinds of porn to homes via pay-per-view. And Time Warner owns a cable company that offers erotic programming from Playboy and other outlets, including hard-core.”
    …

    “Few of the companies provide health insurance, and most performers find they must work without condoms if they want to keep getting jobs. “The fans don’t like to see condoms,” said performer Belladonna, reflecting a belief that is widely held in the industry. Like many other performers, Belladonna started in the business when she was 18, the legal minimum.”
    “The person that packs the porn in a box in the warehouse … is entitled to hepatitis B vaccines … But someone that’s having unprotected anal sex, hmm. There is no standard,” said Sharon Mitchell, a veteran performer who now heads a clinic for sex workers, the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation. ”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132370&page=1

    If Nina Hartley is happy being a porn performer that’s her business. But per your “About Us” section you make it clear that it’s your business to battle against big business. The porn that Nina Hartley spins so eloquently into happy and innocent “sexual expression” is a huge corporate business, and getting more gargantuan by the day. It includes many of the biggest players in the corporate game, who are making large fortunes off of exploiting a lot of young vulnerable women in a cruel and sick manner – all for the – as Nina Hartley puts it – “sexual entertainment” of men.

    Luke Ford,”who spent seven years writing an Internet gossip column about the adult entertainment industry for his own Internet Web site”, and “is often referred to as the Matt Drudge of porn” made a very poignant and important point when he said:

    “Most girls who enter this industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again.”

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/21/60minutes/main585049.shtml?CMP=ILC-SearchStories

    One has to wonder how bad conditions might be in the porn business that a young woman would not be willing to work in it again – even for $1,000 for a couple of hours of “work”.

    I highly recommend reading all of the transcript linked above, which is from a CBS 60 Minutes show about the big business of porn. There is a lot more information in it about the many large corporations which are wildly profiting off of the pain, embarrassment, and humiliation of so many young girls who have participated in the porn “industry”.

    If you have any good explanation as to why the exploitation and abuse in the corporate big business of porn is any different than any other corporate big business that exploits people, please feel free to share this with me. And if you have any good explanation as to why you gave a well-paid spokesperson for this big corporate business a platform to whitewash the truth in your publication – which is supposed to be totally opposed to such activities – I’d love to hear that as well. Please feel free to enlighten me if I am somehow missing something, or misunderstanding something.

    Thank you very much,

    Sincerely,

    Me

    19 March 2005, 1:30 am

43. Sheldon:

    Nina Hartley is a socialist who has organized sex workers for better and safer working conditions, as has been mentioned earlier in this thread. Of the other sources you mentioned, “Me”, several are Reaganites who can not be trusted. Why trust any Matt Drudge? Or Dr. Everett Koop? Or a Nixon associate like Diane Sawyer? The TV programs you cite were geared toward supporting enforcement of current obscenity laws, and information that would undermine support for those laws was not heard. Those laws put an entire industry under siege, forcing both labor and management to form a coalition, despite their differences, to beat back the prudes.

    Now, whom do you believe if your name is, say, Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, a socialist (like Nina Hartley), and you’ve already reported on the disreputable conduct of Catharine MacKinnon years ago in The Nation magazine when she lashed out at Serbian feminists for not supporting her anti-porn agenda?

    While I’m no mind reader, I suspect that explains Counterpunch’s decision-making process.

    19 March 2005, 6:33 am

44. Anti-Porn Feminist Activist:

    Sheldon – Just because you repeatedly refer to Nina Hartley as a “socialist” doesn’t mean she really is one. In truth, through her support of the massive corporate business of porn, she – and others like her – are supporters of big capitalist corporations (and all their Republican connections), and the associated exploitation of women and children that comes about in order to create billions of dollars worth of – as Nina spins it so brazenly – “sexual entertainment”.

    Your attempt to refute the facts of what I wrote by engaging in the same old tired tactics of positioning all the sources I used as untrue just because you say so, or somehow complicit with the “Right” – and therefore not to be believed on anything – is pathetically transparent. If you could really dispute those facts you would do so with other facts – rather than attack the sources. Feel free to do so.

    I find it ironic that anti-porn feminists on the left are presented by you as not credible, as well as sources who do not identify as that – whether someone very familiar with the porn industry, a doctor, or a female journalist.

    However, if you and others desire something from the media more to the “left” to say the same things about the corporate aspects about porn, and therefore somehow truly validate them, then feel free to check out this PBS report and site called “American Porn: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/ In particular you could check out this page: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/business/mainstream.html Doesn’t sound like porn has much to do with socialism, does it?

    One question for you and the others: Other than Nina Hartley and her cohorts, who would you consider to be a credible source to refute your arguments and provide you with facts about the capitalist porn industry? What I am getting from you and some others is that you will likely never accept any facts that anyone presents about porn – unless they support it – no matter if they are very left – such as Robert Jensen – or from any other position on the social or political spectrum.

    I notice you didn’t bother to refute the truth of my own observations as a result of my own real world examination of the reality of porn in a porn shop. This is of course because one can’t refute that harsh reality. All the intellectual debate in the world, (and false positioning of porn performers and spokespeople as “socialists”, and therefore theoretically always working on behalf of the best interests of all), won’t change the reality that I shared.

    I invite anyone reading this blog who is curious as to what the truth of this issue is to do the same thing I did. (Go visit a porn shop and spend some time randomly examining the videos. Even better, rent some that a clerk recommends as the most popular and watch them in full.)

    If people do this they won’t have to listen to you, me, or anyone else to know what constitutes the reality of porn. They will be able to see it for themselves – with all of its cruelty, dehumanization, and misogyny being proudly and loudly advertised and glorified. This way no one will have to worry about the validity of any media sources and their political leanings.

    If Counterpunch had any integrity at all, they might have taken the time to engage in such an exercise before printing that absurd and insulting nonsensical article by Ms. Hartley. They then might have wisely decided not to print it, if they had any concern at all about being consistent with their self-described mission of being anti big business.

    19 March 2005, 8:15 am

45. Sheldon:

    Nina was interviewed by yours truly for Shmate magazine back in 1989 and she talked at length about her socialist philosophy and her parents, who were in the Communist Party. A letter to the editor from her to The Guardian was published in April, 1986 in which she identified herself as a third generation socialist.

    I don’t need to trust others to tell me what’s available in the porn marketplace. I’m a porn consumer, among other things, so I see what’s out there, and in what proportion. I’ve written about it on various occasions, and have talked about it at the Socialist Scholars Conferences held in New York City. But if Nadine Strossen or Alexander Cockburn or Molly Ivins had information that conflicted with mine, I would take that very seriously. Why? Because at least I know they are truly against censorship of sexually explicit adult material – they oppose not only obscenity laws but the Dworkin-MacKinnon Model Ordinance that was all the rage around the time of the Meese Commission on Pornography.

    Who has ever said here that the porn industry isn’t, well, an industry? The issue is what goes on there and whose spin do you believe.

    Since when do say, pro-choice feminists, trust anything the right-wing says on the issue of reproductive rights? Do you protest when NOW dismisses what the right-wing has to say about that? Or do you reserve that “Give-the-Right-Wing-A-Chance” standard only for porn?

    And speaking of credibility issues, what do you think it says about you that the fact that pretty much everything you can say, repeatedly, about Nina’s article is that it is “absurd”, “insulting” and “nonsensical”? Talk about raising the level of debate!

    You thought little about porn until you walked into a porn shop and was overwhelmed by a few examples of misogynist imagery? Oh, please! Like that store didn’t carry ANY of Candida Royalle’s or Nina Hartley’s tapes [Nina has appeared in over 400 different features since her debut in 1984]? Yeah, right!

    The anti-porn feminists lied to the world about Linda Lovelace, and she exposed them for what they were before she died. They lied to the world about the movie “Snuff”, in which, contrary to their allegation, no one actually died on camera. And now I’m supposed to ignore that background and suddenly take your account at face value? Hello???

    Fool me once, shame on you.
    Fool me twice, shame on me.

    19 March 2005, 9:29 am

46. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    APFA:

    Why don’t any of you ever support groups like the ones below? None of them are run by the industry, but are grass-roots innitiatives by sex-workers. It seems to me that you deliberately ignore sex-worker self-organising because it doesn’t fit with your ideology. That isn’t what you claim – but it does seem to be what you actually do in practice.

    http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/
    http://walnet.org/csis/groups/nswp/dmsc/
    http://www.nswp.org/

    Just a few examples.

    19 March 2005, 3:41 pm

47. Nina Hartley:

    And, at the very least, you should add AIM’s site. The Adult Industry Medical Healtcare Foundation is an entirely independent, non-profit, non-political, non-industry-sponsored, sex-worker supported, grass-roots organization. Unless somebody really believes that a progressive poliical aganda is served by sex-workers going without medical care, this should be entirely uncontroversial.

    http://www.aim-med.org

    19 March 2005, 4:41 pm

48. Ricky:

    *The libido is simply another term for the sex drive. It’s part of all human’s psychic infrastructure. To what use it is put depends on the society in which one dwells.*

    I do know what ‘libido’ means. Have you ever considered the meaning of ‘drive’? Check this out:

    drive n.
    A strong motivating tendency or instinct, especially of sexual or aggressive origin, that prompts activity toward a particular end (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.)

    1 : an urgent, basic, or instinctual need : a motivating physiological condition of the organism 2 : an impelling culturally acquired concern, interest, or longing (The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. )

    I got this from Dictionary.com:

    drive – noun
    A strong organized effort to accomplish a purpose.
    Energy, push, or aggressiveness.
    Psychology. A strong motivating tendency or instinct related to self-preservation, reproduction, or aggression that prompts activity toward a particular end.
    A massive, sustained military offensive.
    Sports. The act of hitting, knocking, or thrusting a “ball” very swiftly. The stroke or thrust by which a “ball” is driven. The act of moving with the “ball” directly to the “basket”.
    A rounding up and driving of “cattle” to new pastures or to market.
    A gathering and driving of “logs” down a river.

    verb tr.
    To push, propel, or press onward forcibly; urge forward
    To guide, control, or direct
    To supply the motive force or power to and cause to function
    To force into or from a particular act or state:
    To supply the motive force or power to and cause to function: Steam drives the engine.
    To cause or sustain, as if by supplying force or power: “The current “merger mania” is apparently driven by an urge… to reduce risk or to exploit opportunities in a very rapidly changing “business” environment” (Peter Passell).
    To compel or force to work, often excessively:
    To force into or from a particular act or state:
    To force to go through or penetrate:
    To create or produce by penetrating forcibly:
    To carry through vigorously to a conclusion:
    To chase (game) into the open or into traps or nets
    To convey or transport

    verb intr.
    To move along or advance quickly as if pushed by an impelling force.
    To rush, dash, or advance violently against an obstruction:
    To operate a vehicle, such as an “auto-mobile”.
    To go or be transported in a “vehicle”:
    Sports. To hit, throw, or impel a “ball” or other “missile” forcibly. To move directly to the “basket” with the “ball”.
    To make an effort to reach or achieve an objective; aim.

    Is that rich, or what? An apt description of the myth of male sexuality if ever I heard one.

    The point, though, is this: Words make worlds. We use words to literally “make up” our lives as we go. Words are bricks of meaning we use to build and shape what you call “all human’s psychic infrastructure”. So we need to be careful which words we use to describe and define our human-ness and the human condition. Because words make us, too. Words define us. Words lend us and what we do “meaning”. That’s huge.

    We all know what ‘drive’ means. My question is, How does that fit with what “human being” and “human sexuality” means? And more importantly, How do *we* fit into that? Is it a good fit? Or not?

    One might also want to re-examine what exactly the objectives or aims of one’s so-called “sex drive” might be. I’d like to see a selection of rifle scopes included in the usual mix of sex toys and accessories. Gives a whole new meaning to the word “strap-on”, doesn’t it?

    Careful where you point that thing – it’s loaded.

    19 March 2005, 4:57 pm

49. Ricky:

    “WHAT makes male supremacy so insidious, so pervasive, such a seemingly permanent component of all our precious lives, is the fact that erection can be conditioned to it.” John Stoltenberg

    19 March 2005, 5:56 pm

50. Ricky:

    John Stoltenberg cuts to the chase:

    When a man looks at a person’s body as if he wants that body to belong to him, or as if the body does belong to him-not as if the person is somebody, an independent, volitional person whose flesh belongs to that self only-and when a man looks at that body as if it were an object, a thing, and the man becomes sexually excited, what does that mean?

    What does it mean that a man becomes sexually aroused when he looks at a body in that way, and what does it mean that he looks at a body in that way in order to become sexually aroused?

    When a man is in a public place, and he sees a person from some distance, a person whom he has never seen before, and he applies his attention to the person’s body, and he scrutinizes the person’s body with a particular intensity, with deliberate curiosity, with unequivocal intent, and inside his body there begins a pounding, a rushing of blood, a craving, and what he craves is to have sex with that stranger, what does that mean?

    When with one hand a man is paging through a magazine, a magazine containing photographs of naked and nearly naked bodies, bodies posed with their genitals concealed and bodies posed with their genitals showing, bodies posed with props and with other bodies, bodies posed with their faces looking at the camera and not looking at the camera, bodies posed by a photographer to look available, accessible, takeable, in color and in black and white, and with his other hand the man is masturbating, and he is searching from picture to picture, searching from body to body, from part of body to part of body, from pose to pose, rhythmically stroking and squeezing and straining, seeking some coalescence of the flesh he is looking at and the sensations in his own, imagining his body and one of the bodies attached, joined, tenderly or forcefully, and he masturbates until he is finished, and when he is done he is done looking, and he stores them away until next time, the magazines, the pictures, the bodies, the parts of bodies, what does that mean?

    When a man stands at a magazine rack, and his eyes roam from image to image, from photograph to photograph, pausing over the bodies that make him palpitate the most, the bodies that make his insides sensate, the way a great and sudden fright does, the way a sonic boom does, the particular bodies that astonish him, that jolt him, that make him tremble with sexual longing, exacerbating an ache, a pelvic congestion that never seems to leave him, bodies that he can count on to do that, bodies that will be there to do that when that is what he needs done, and the magazines that are not wrapped in plastic he opens, he thumbs through, until he finds the ones that are effective, the ones he wants at home, and he takes some, he buys some, what does that mean?

    When in order to feel like having sex, a man requires sex partners who look a certain way, who have a certain build, and when as they age he discards them, and when as he ages he pictures of them, by owning them somehow, what does that mean?

    What does it mean when a man calls up pictures in his mind when he is having sex with someone’s body, in order to imagine a different body, a body that is not there, pictures of a body that suits him, a body he thinks about in his mind in order to feel like having sex?

    When a man is feeling tense or angry or anxious, or withdrawn and isolated and irritable and unhappy with himself, and so to make himself feel better he has sex by himself, with pictures of other people’s bodies in his mind, with pictures of other people’s bodies in his hand, pictures of particular parts and poses, and as he masturbates he uses the photographed or mental pictures to help him imagine a body there with him, a particular body he can seem to be with, to touch and feel, a body he can do things to, a body to connect to, an imaginary body more real than his own, and the more vividly he imagines the body the more aroused he becomes, until he comes, having sex in his mind with a body in a picture, and he feels a moment’s relaxation and resolution, a fleeting consolation, then, gradually or suddenly, he feels unease again, disconsolate, incomplete and cut off, and the body he had imagined has vanished, there’s nobody else there, and he doesn’t want anybody else there, he wants to be utterly alone now far more than he had wanted to have sex with someone before what does that mean?

    What does it mean that a man’s most routine, most repeated, most reliable, perhaps even most intensely “personal” erotic experiences are those that happen in relation to things, to bodies perceived and regarded as things, to images depicting bodies as things, to memories of images of bodies as things? What does it mean that he responds sexually to bodies as things and images of bodies as things in a way that is more or less constant, no matter whether another human being is actually with him? What does it mean when a man’s inner life is obsessionally devoted to his sexual objectifying? What does it mean when a man arranges much of his life around his sexual objectifying, to make sure he will periodically and often be in circumstances where he can become sexually aroused in relation to bodies he imagines as things? What does it mean that a man’s appetites, attention, opinions, and buying habits have become almost completely manipulable simply by triggering his habit of sexual objectifying? What does it mean that in his sexual responsiveness to his sexual objectifying, such a man is quite ordinary? What does it mean that such a man is “normal”?

    19 March 2005, 5:58 pm

51. Ricky:

    Fox hunting with John Stoltenberg:

    How can anyone ever learn what good sex really is if they haven’t ever had it?

    At this point, aficionados of pornography will perhaps protest: but sex films are still emerging as a communications medium and they ahve yet to reach their full, “artistis” potential. So of course the sex films need to be improved, with enhanced production values, more believable story lines, upgraded acting… you know…better lighting. The solution, some will say, is to change the way that sex films are made.

    Frankly, I don’t think that will do. The solution, I believe, is really to change the way that sex is had. Here’s what I mean:

    Let’s assume that there exists an authentic erotic potential between humans such that mutuality, reciprocity, fairness, deep communion and affection, total body integrity for both partners, and equal capacity for choice-making and decision-making are merged with robust physical pleasure, intense sensation, and brimming-over expressiveness. Let’s say that some people have actually already experienced that erotic potential and some people never have. Let’s say, further, that the experience of this erotic potential occurred quite against the odds -because given the prevailing social values about sex, it could not have been predicted that two people would ever find out that this erotic potential exists. everything about the cultural context would seem to predict that sexual meetings would be tainted with or steeped in shame and guilt, hierarchy and domination, contempt and repulsion, objectification and alienation, sexually crippling incidents from childhood, or simply emotional absence from each other. But as luck would have it, a few folks happen upon an erotic potential that is actually rooted in the same values that bring kindness and exhuberance and intimacy to the rest of their life. So then the question becomes: How does anyone pass along that knowledge of that potential to other folks on the planet -how do they express it, show it, communicate it -without having to sleep with everyone?

    Some cultural artifacts will of course be necessary to get the word out -to attempt to convey to people what can be good about sex and to help people disentangle their sexual histories from the social norms that keep sex from being good. There will need to be expressions in the form of many kinds of messages -words, pictures, performances, combinations. Information will need to be shared, but I imagine that this communication will be very different from most sexually explicit media that now exist, which are essentially things made for consumers to have a sexual relationship to. The whole point of communicating about this human erotic possibility is that people be whole people to one another -not parts, not things, not objects, not consumables. Obviously, then, the media appropriate to such communication cannot itself be produced and marketed as things to have sex with -as “orgasm totems” -which would merely reinforce sexual relating to people as things.

    But the human connection has to begin among us. The human communication cannot wait to be mediated.

    What I believe needs to happen is a radical reexamination of the values in the kinds of sex we are having. We need to make a commitment to responsibility and responsiveness in sex. We need to make a personal commitment to stay conscious during sex, to stay alert to what is going on as it is going on, a commitment to be ethically awake instead of doped. as individuals, and perhaps as as friends (I don’t believe there is any readiness for this in any existing movement), we need to begin to understand more about what is going on between us when we have sex, the values in it, how it is related to the rest of our lives, how it is related to how we treat people, and how it is related to political change -and we need to to talk about it all, face to face, one to one, before, during, and after.

    Our bodies have learned many lies. If we dare to be ruthlessly honest, we can perhaps recover truth.

    19 March 2005, 6:15 pm

52. Ricky:

    And now a few words from Wendel Berry:

    “It’s impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”

    “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and
    demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of
    justice and mercy.”

    “The serious question is whether you’re going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy and empathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human.”

    19 March 2005, 6:40 pm

53. Kathleen:

    I can see how mainstream heteronormative pornography is seriously problematic. I wonder, though, if maybe you’re focusing too much on the fact that the media you’re looking at is porn, and not enough on the fact that it IS mainstream and heteronormative, and that perhaps the same power dynamic is available in all mainstream heteronormative media, but is just more obvious in id-centered pornography.

    I am a consumer of porn, but the porn I buy is not similar to what you have described, though there is violence in it. I’m speaking specifically of leatherdyke, On Our Backs, or leathermen genres, typically not produced by the mainstream publishers. There is a power differential, but not drawn along gender lines, and it doesn’t reinforce the gender-based power dynamics. It’s not soft and fluffy, though.

    Do you think it’s possible to address this problem by producing better porn? Or would the mainstream heterosexual audience not be interested in using porn to engage in a discussion about sex?

    19 March 2005, 6:57 pm

54. Sheldon:

    On July 14, 1986, I interviewed John Stoltenberg in-studio on WBAI-FM as part of a Bastille Day special on pornography that I produced.

    After I had played a 90-minute interview with Candida Royalle on the air, I asked him what he thought. He denounced her as a pimp. He also said that he agreed with his companion, Andrea Dworkin, that yes, men should give up their erections as part of a liberated sexuality.

    Making a virtue of one’s own impotence? Charming chap.

    19 March 2005, 9:27 pm

55. Ricky:

    *On July 14, 1986, I interviewed John Stoltenberg in-studio on WBAI-FM as part of a Bastille Day special on pornography that I produced.

    After I had played a 90-minute interview with Candida Royalle on the air…,*

    Wow you.

    *He also said that he agreed with his companion, Andrea Dworkin, that yes, men should give up their erections as part of a liberated sexuality.

    Making a virtue of one’s own impotence? Charming chap.**

    A virtue of one’s own impotence? Well, I guess that’s one way to look at it. You’re not all that much into virtue, I take it? Much less into impotence, eh?

    It’s not exactly an unthinkable thought. It’s not even a new one. Voluntary celibacy has a lot going for it. Ever tried it? It all depends on what matters most to a person, what one values and teasures in life above all else. Some folks value other people more than anything in the world. And for some folks that 4 inch piece of meat between the legs just gets in the way of our soul’s truer commerce. It can be an impediment to real and satisfying human encounters more than a help. Like I said, it depends on what you want most.

    But yeah, I’d say John is utterly charming. He really loves Andrea, that’s for sure. My hat’s off to him. May his tribe increase. Quickly!

    19 March 2005, 11:01 pm

56. Sheldon:

    Stoltenberg was (and I assume still is) preaching impotence for EVERY man, not just for himself and a few individuals. As if to say, erections and feminism are incompatible. And that’s one good reason among many why anti-porn feminism is indeed sex-negative.

    No one’s tribe is going to increase if erections disappear. But in his case, that’s a good thing, because that’s one tribe that should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

    20 March 2005, 7:05 am

57. Sam:

    Sex Worker is wrong about Australian legalization. I know she is wrong about legalized prostitution being a good thing for sex workers in Australia and I can, and have directly with her very recently, proved it.

    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310374.shtml

    My partner’s mom lives in Alaska and she rails on every now and again about the “lower 48″ telling Alaskans they can’t allow drilling in their state if they want to. Telling her it is the oil companies who have framed the debate as Alaska vs. the “lower 48″ when it’s really oil industries vs. the rest of us just makes her mad and more insistant that she ain’t gonna take any crap from the “lower 48″ and fuels the libertarian flames that oil companies pat themselves on the back for fostering so effectively to their continued great profit.

    Australian Sex Worker similarly digs her heels in when presented with solid, peer-reviewed research proving her very wrong about the benefits of legalized prostitution, and the organized criminals who still control the majority of Australian brothels pat themselves on the back.

    I also wrote a response to Hartley’s self-serving Counterpunch piece:

    Hello,

    I’m a good lefty woman, vegetarian, bicyclist, writer, sexual health activist and antiwar protestor.

    I’m also a bit confused as to why Counterpunch liberals who understand implicitly that corporations don’t work in the interests of consumers would make a huge exception for the capitalist CEOs that produce pornography. Having Nina Hartley defend pornography in Counterpunch is like having Dick Cheney defend Halliburton in Counterpunch, or Ken Lay defending Enron in Counterpunch. I can’t think of another time when a very well paid, high ranking lobbyist for a specific industry was considered by Counterpunch to be a credible source for defending said multibillion dollar global industry, so I question why the exception when it comes to men’s sexual entertainment (70-80% of porn is consumed by men).

    How is it progressive men who would not be caught dead in Nike shoes drinking Starbucks coffee in a Hummer will still proudly don a Playboy logo and kid themselves into believing the prostitution/pornography industry is the only capitalist enterprise that genuinely cares about the “freedom” and “liberation” of its consumers and employees more than generating massive profits?

    The prostitution/porn film industry has made Nina Hartley a wealthy woman, and she is paying them back in more ways than Counterpunch editors aparrently know.

    In 2004 pornographers gave a death sentence to Lara Roxx (link below) by demanding she perform unprotected anal sex against her will. Several other porn actors got the AIDS virus from these regular outbreaks that inevitably come with an unregulated prostitution/porn industry. It was also the year porn industry biggies like Larry Flynt and Nina Hartley fought against basic health regulations for sex workers against the explicit wishes of the low level porn performers exposed to repeated unsafe work situations. The commercial sex industry that profits enormously creating unhealthy, sometimes-deadly conditions exposing its ‘workers’ to contaminant human fluids is nothing less than widespread corporate exploitation.

    Like all wealthy corporate bigwigs, Hartley prefers the porn industry self regulate. Despite the fact that only 22% of porn video products comply with the barest minimum of OSHA guidelines for protecting workers exposed to contaminant human fluids, Hartley opposes any accountability and oversight into the porn industry. I ask Counterpunch to consider if this laissez faire, neoliberal business ethic is what you believe to be preferable for most corporations or if it’s an exception you’re willing to make for sexual capitalism.

    I wouldn’t have thought when I went to your website today that Counterpunch would side with a wealthy corporate porn public relations spokeswoman over an NYU university professor asking only for more earnest critiques of pornography’s content than either mainstream or leftist media currently offers. You’re supposed to be the anti-sexist, anti-exploitive corporation folk, remember?

    Thank you for reading,
    Sam

    “Worker Health and Safety in the Adult Film Industry” post-hearing report
    http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a42/Pdf/afi.pdf

    Professional Dangers (Lara Roxx’s story)
    http://www.oneangrygirl.net/LaraRoxx.html

    20 March 2005, 12:37 pm

58. Nina Hartley:

    It’s truly fascinating to see myself once again distorted in the fun-house mirror of porn-hating ideologues, who eagerly practice the Big Lie in the service of what they perceive to be the Greater Truth they want to push on the rest of us. Again, in a forum where ad hominem attacks are supposedly discouraged, I see that an exception continues to be made for those who criticize me.

    Sam repeats the familiar indictments, and adds a particularly mendacious new one that seeks to turn my efforts on behalf of AIM and AIM’s actions during last spring’s HIV transmissions in the porn industry against me and against AIM itself. I guess I was wrong in hoping that a forum advocating community organizing among working people wouldn’t find AIM’s mission of providing healthcare to sex-workers controversial. Clearly, the welfare of those indivdiual workers isn’t a priority in a forum that links to a site where the rape of a sex-worker is defined as a lesser offense than that of a woman elsewise employed.

    First, to the tedious, endlessly repeated slam that I am “a well-paid, high-ranking lobbyist” for the porn industry, comparing me to Dick Cheney no less. One more time, I am not paid for any lobbying activities on behalf of the porn industry, directly or indirectly, and far from being high-ranking, I am an indepedent producer/director, primarily of sex-education videos, and hold no position in any other production company. We don’t have ranks in porn – unlike in say, the army – but if we did, I would be nothing higher than a senior NCO. I have no input to the policies of large-scale producers, other than through my very public advocacy of more enlightened labor practices throughout the industry, which does not make me any more popular in many porn-business quarters than I am here.

    As to the assertion that the porn industry has made me a wealthy woman and that I am paying them back in whatever fashion, both claims are equally invalid. While, after twenty-one years as a sex-worker, I have been lucky enough to attain a standard of living approximating that of a journeyman CPA, to describe me as wealthy is preposterous. While I don’t pretend that there are no material rewards for my labor, they have always been a secondary motivation for participatiing in work I find creatively satisfying and personally meaningful, and my bank balance reflects those priorities. To be sure, I could have made more over the years, but my ambitions are not driven by the desire for materal gain. However little your contributors here may like it – or choose to believe it, I do what I do because I enjoy what I do. I understand far better than any outsider that not everyone in my line of work has the same motivations or the same relatively fortunate history in porn, but I must continue to insist that my ideas, based on my own experiences, are mine and mine alone. I have paid a substantial price for the views I hold, both inside and outside my area of labor.

    The most hurtful, and most wildly off the mark, of Sam’s allegations is that my testimony before the California State Assembly hearing into the four cases of HIV infection among porn performers last spring – quickly identified and contained through AIM’s diligence – was in opposition to “basic health regulations” to safeguard those who work in porn, and that I did so over the objections of “low-level” porn industry workers.

    An accurate reading of what I actually said to the investigators should quickly dispel this gross misrepresentation. The community-based, performer-supported testing and monitoring program administered by AIM over the past seven years has effectively reduced the incidence of STD transmission among X-rated performers to less than ten percent that of other sexually-active young adults in the Los Angeles area. Our voluntary, performer-initiated and performer-operated system is one of the great public-health success stories in the overall bleak narrative of attempts to prevent the spread of HIV among at-risk populations worldwide.

    The “regulations” under discussion by the California State Assembly at that time, drafted by grand-standing politicians seeking to capitalize on the publicity attending the personal catastrophe that befell Lara Roxx and three other performers, would have supplanted an effective, community-based harm-reduction program with exactly the kind of state-controlled, top-down bureaucracy that has proven woefully ineffectual at halting the spread of HIV-AIDS in a series of failed public-health initiatives throoughout the state. Morevoer, the proposed regulations would have made the reporting of HIV testing results to government agencies mandatory, in direct contravention of state anti-discrimination laws regarding the medical privacy of HIV patients. I was joined in my opposition to this element of the ill-coinceived regulatory scheme by that other evil front-group for “the pornographers,” the Calfironia ACLU.

    My concern then, as it is now, is the distinct possibility that a clumsy, state-run program would undermine an effective, existing, sex-worker-administered system that has held the number of work-related HIV transmissions in the porn industry to a total of four over a seven-year period. It is precisely because I recognize the work-place risks of what I do – and BTW, I am still an active performer who works in front of the camera just like everybody else – that I am unwilling to gamble on an untried approach to a serious problem for which our community has painstakingly developed a functional response through years of careful and deliberate community organizing, often over the vociferous objections of disreputable “agents” and “producers” who would prefer a more easily gamed government system run by unresponsive outsiders. I think it noteworthy that the most ferocious opposition I faced for taking this position came not from performers, who overwhelmingly support AIM and its policies, but from a handful of low-level PRODUCERS who have always wanted to replace AIM with a more easily circumvented substitute that wouldn’t perform AIM’s other function of providing direct support and crucial education to incoming industry workers, to whom those particular producers would prefer to have unimpeded access.

    Of course, these are mere facts, and facts are much less important in a partisan debate such as the one raging here than proper ideology – an area in which I admit to being at something of a disadvantage, as ideology concerns me far less than the well-being of those I know and care about.

    What troubles me most in all this is the emergence of what appears to be systematic pressure exerted on the operators of Counterpunch to deny me or anyone with my perspective exposure to their readers. Coming from those who claim to have been “silenced” in their attempts to critique the porn industry, this is a bitter irony indeed. It certainly seems like they’re the ones doing the silencing, as if the mere existence of my dissent from their party line constitutes some significant obstacle to their opinions receiving a hearing. The current anti-porn, anti-indecency campaign being mounted through corporate media by an alliance of convenience between anti-porn feminists and the Religious right – at least one self-described member of which has given high-fives to the creator of this very site for his anti-porn positioin – seems to me to be getting its ideas out to the public quite effectively. Attempts to strong-arm progressive media into disregarding any commentary opposing the anti-porn political agenda suggest nothing so much as the degree of personal spite and intolerance that characterizes that side of the debate. That a female sex-worker dares to outspokenly challenge them is simply intolerable, and a justification for the very ugliest kind of vitriolic, personal vilification.

    If your repeated falsehoods about me, my work and those with whom I work is an example of the high-road in this discussion, I’d hate to see the road not taken.

    On a final point related to Lara Roxx, her own recent statements make clear that she appreciates the consistent help and support she has received from AIM, where she was first diagnosed and through which early treatment for her infection was immediately made available. That’s what helping women in sex-work is all about, as opposed to the hollow rhetoric of leftist intellectuals.

    Nina Hartley

    20 March 2005, 3:15 pm

59. Sheldon:

    A comradely disagreement with Nina – are you sure these are intellectuals?

    They keep saying you are a paid lobbyist when you are not – and they have no proof that you are paid.

    They have a psychological need to believe that you are paid, facts notwithsatnding – another reason why they can’t

    20 March 2005, 5:04 pm

60. Sheldon:

    Let’s try this again:

    A comradely disagreement with Nina – are you sure these are intellectuals?

    The anti-porners here keep saying you are a paid lobbyist when you are not – and they have no proof that you are paid. That’s the kind of backtalk I get from my 7-year-old twins when they claim, falsely, that I promised to take them to Toy’s ‘R’ Us every Saturday to buy them expensive Nintendo games if they do their homework in a timely manner.

    So what’s really going on here? They have a psychological need to believe that you are paid, facts notwithstanding – another reason why they can’t EVER be trusted with their accounts of porn-shop visits and the like. About 30% of something is misogynist – and they yell, “ABSOLUTE MAJORITY!!” Now, perhaps in the ‘red’ state of North Carolina, folks might believe that – like when George Bush gets that much of the vote in NC when running for President. Diebold Mathematics run amok!

    An unpaid lobbyist is a sincere, true believer – and the ‘radical feminist’ worldview might shatter if it acknowledged that. After making a big deal about Nina being a ‘paid’ lobbyist, Stan, reacting to your first response here, took a step back by parenthetically noting something like “(paid or not)”, as if it didn’t matter. Then why bring it up in the first place? [For the record, the porn industry has only one paid lobbyist - Kat Sunlove]

    As for the so-called ‘leftists’ whose snappings make the Baskervilles mastiff seem like a chihuahua, the only thing red about them are their herrings.

    20 March 2005, 5:23 pm

61. Sheldon:

    As for Counterpunch’s mission, it’s to provide an ALTERNATIVE to the major media. When the major media (including PBS, which has been run by the Bush administation since 2001) are piling on an anti-porn crusade, it is PRECISELY the mission of Counterpunch to present an alternate view.

    Same with Pacifica Radio, with which I have been associated.

    20 March 2005, 5:30 pm

62. Sam:

    Nina, what you’ve said here contradicts with what’s in the report I linked to among other things. Specifically, your claim that you stand with low-level performers against stricter reguilations and against porn producers is clearly false when compared to the testimony provided.

    Are you saying the post-hearing report misrepresents your views?

    20 March 2005, 5:51 pm

63. Sam:

    Just to be clear about exactly where Ms. Hartley’s position differs from industry performers:

    “In addition to invited panelists, the Committee heard from various interested parties
    during the hearing’s public comment section. The speakers included interested citizens,
    industry performers, and producers. Of particular interest was testimony by individuals
    from the industry supporting government protection of performer’s health and safety.”

    Ms. Hartley’s position is, “If performers wish to use condoms, she stated, they can always “say no” to productions requiring unprotected sex.”

    I do not share Ms. Hartley’s ambivilance towards “employee choice” regarding safe sex requirements when the end result of such decisions can be deadly and seriously harmful to health. That less than 1/4 of US porn companies complies with basic OSHA standards belies her assertion that no regulation of the porn industry is effective. Lara Roxx is not a “personal catastrophe”, she is a victim of an unregulated film prostitution industry. There was nothing “personal” about the way Ms. Roxx got her death sentence handed to her, no one from the porn industry will “personally” take care of her through the anguish she faces over the shortened years of her life, and the worst thing is that her death has not hastened in stricter regulations as of yet. I don’t believe you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet when those “eggs” are young people’s lives and the omelet is something as small as men’s masterbatory entertainment.

    If we can’t make porn without exposing people to HIV, herpes, gonorrhea, syphillis, etc. then it’s time we ask ourselves how humane it is to risk any person’s life and health for the making of a leisure and entertainment corporate product.

    20 March 2005, 6:10 pm

64. Sheldon:

    Excuse me, Sam, but contrary to your assertion, Lara Roxx is very much ALIVE, having recently being interviewed on http://www.adultfyi.com

    There was nothing ambivalent about Nina’s position. If the newspaper’s account is correct, then it shows Nina FIRMLY, not ambivalently, supporting a performer’s right to say no to working on a set replete with unsafe working conditions.

    The porn industry is not a fully legal industry, anyway. So any talk of OSHA applying its standards to the San Fernado Valley’s biggest business is premature until full-fledged decriminalization occurs. That means the end of all obscenity laws.

    Until then, the A.I.M. Foundation is the best bet for safe sex there, despite the best efforts of anti-porn feminists to make it go away.

    20 March 2005, 8:11 pm

65. Nina Hartley:

    Sam,

    Just to clear up this point regarding the Assembly-committee hearing testimony, the “individuals from the industry supporting government protection of performers’ health and safety” – a concept which I do not in principle oppose, BTW – consisted of one producer, Adam Glasser, with whom I respectfully disagree on a couple of points, and one self-styled “agent” who has subsequently left the industry. No low-level performers testified at the hearing, nor does the report to which you link claim that any did. I was, in fact, the only active performer to address the panel that day, though Dr. Sharon Mitchell and I did request additional time for comments from performers, which request was denied. I note that you omit mention of the testimony of AIM’s founder, my friend and colleague Dr. Mitchell, also speaking in opposition to the regulatory schemes under consideration at the time, and for the same reasons I have already stated. It is a fact that a small number – fewer than 20 out of an active talent pool of nearly 2000 members – have spoken in other forums in support of government-imposed health regulations for the porn industry, but so far no consensus has emerged from any performer-led organization regarding the shape of a regulatory scheme preferable to the existing voluntary system. There is essentially no support in the performer community for turning supervision of STD prevention in the industry over to any government agency. Sex-workers have sufficient experience with official efforts to “protect” them to be highly suspicious of any such approach.

    So, in short, the report you cite didn’t misrepresent my position or what happened at the hearing – you did.

    Though you make every attempt to dismiss the personal choices of sex-workers, as anti-porn feminists routinely do – this seemingly being the one area of women’s agency where individual choice is unworthy of defense – the fact remains that responsible judgement on the part of performers, accepted by the overwhelming majority of producers, has kept STD infection levels in the porn industry at a fraction of those to be found in the community at large. I note that you do not address this readily demonstrable statistical fact.

    Also, concerning the implied charge that Lara Roxx and other performers who are infected with HIV have been abandoned by the porn community, again, the facts are simply otherwise. Before Ms. Roxx returned to Canada by her own decision, she was provided with medical care, counseling and peer support through AIM, as were the other performers infected last spring. Those who chose to remain in contact with AIM continue to receive this support and will for as long as they desire it. Obviously, they are also free to sever all ties with the industry and address their situations individuallly if they choose.

    No occupation is risk-free, as the government representatives present at the hearing readily acknowledged, but on-the-job injuries of all sorts are substantially less frequent in the creation of sexually explicit entertainment than they are in the creation of mainstream entertainment, largely as a result of adult-entertainment-performer-iniated safety reforms. Industrial safety is a legitimate concern for every member of society, but the singling out by the media of a small number of high-profile incidents in the porn business and by those with agendas hostile to the content of porn has little to do with concern for the lives of suffering individuals and everything to do with the political preoccupations and personal ideological biases of the industry’s critics.

    Neither the election-year grandstanding of politicians nor the crocodile tears of anti-porn feminists ever have or ever will do anything to ameliorate the hardships of Lara Roxx, anymore than they did those of Linda Lovelace, who complained bitterly of her abandonment by her so-called “feminist supporters” after her stage-managed appearance before the Meese Commission. The task of safeguarding and caring for sex-workers will always fall entirely on their compatriots for as long as society continues to stigmatize sex-work and demonize everyone and everything associated with it. The preservation of existing prohibitions against sex-work, and/or the addition of new legal sanctions against it, can only add to the misery of sex-workers everywhere. If you really cared about any of us, you and I would be on the same side in this debate.

    Nina Hartley.

    20 March 2005, 8:37 pm

66. Sheldon:

    Oh, and that link of yours, Sam – it goes to a story about a cop raping a prostitute, and in Oregon, not Australia. So how does that prove that decriminalization/legalization is bad for sex workers.

    Oh, that’s right, I forgot…in the fun-house mirror that is anti-porn feminism, Oregon is part of Australia, fact-checking is patriarchical, and logic is the male hysteria. Common sense, moreover, is to be supplanted by ‘dialectics’, which neither Marx nor Hegel would have recognized.

    21 March 2005, 7:11 am

67. Ricky:

    **Stoltenberg was (and I assume still is) preaching impotence for EVERY man, not just for himself and a few individuals. As if to say, erections and feminism are incompatible. And that’s one good reason among many why anti-porn feminism is indeed sex-negative.**

    And that’s one good example of hysterical male logic.

    **No one’s tribe is going to increase if erections disappear. But in his case, that’s a good thing, because that’s one tribe that should be consigned to the dustbin of history.**

    How many children have you got, Sheldon?

    21 March 2005, 2:24 pm

68. Sam:

    When sex workers in countries around the world are asked directly what they want, they say they want out of prostitution, not help staying in. I have asked time and again for pro-prostitution advocates to show me some proof that most prostituted people want to stay prostituting and have not yet been presented with compelling evidence showing this population to be remotely larger than the “wants out of prostitution” population.

    What a small group of privileged white women in the USA say does not constitute the breadth of sex worker opinions around the Earth. When they are asked what they want, they overwhelmingly (as in 90% or more consistantly) say that they want out but are unable to leave. Being unable to leave is the opposite of consenting to stay.

    I don’t expect you to bite the hand that feeds you, Nina. You’ve done well for yourself telling men exactly what they want ot hear, and that’s always made certain women popular. I don’t say these things to be popular or to personally profit from them, I say them because I have known too many people devastated by the commercial sex industry to believe the default position of prostitution’s harmlessness any more. All through my youth I bought into the lies about how harmless sexual capitalism is, I spoke of legalizing prostitution before I even knew what the fuck I was talking about because all I knew at the time was that was the sexy, male-approved position. The more I heard from sex working friends the more I questioned, and the more I read about sexism, patriarchy, capitalism and sexual violence the more I questioned.

    The more I learned, the more I could no longer accept my hypercaptialist culture’s acceptance of the renting and selling of certain people’s bodies, particularly the poverty-stricken, sexually abused, drug addicted, not-white skinned bodies that overpopulate this and all other kinds of the worst sorts of exploitive, damaging work. I believe in true sexual autonomy for women, and sexual autonomy has proven itself unworkable in situations where economic coercion is the dominant model. One anecdote is but one anecdote, but a thousand anecdotes is evidence.

    http://www.prostitutionresearch.com

    for starters

    I’m willing to look at any published research on the desires of sex workers around the world to continue being prostituted versus those who would get out of prostitition right away if they had what they needed (drug assistance, career training, childcare, etc).

    21 March 2005, 3:06 pm

69. Sam:

    Also, I’ll let the written record speak for itself: “Of particular interest was testimony by individuals from the industry supporting government protection of performer’s health and safety.”

    There’s nothing you can do to 100% prevent the spread of potentially organ damaging, potentially deadly STDs. There is no such thing as risk-free sex and I don’t consider jack off material worth the high risks of exposure. I want as close to 100% protection for sex workers as possible and you’re willing to settle for mere 22% compliance and call that good enough, but supposedly *I’m* the one not putting the health and safety of people front and center of this discussion?

    21 March 2005, 3:19 pm

70. Nina Hartley:

    Sam,

    Evidently, you missed my specific description of the testimony from sex-industry participants at the hearing. I see no need to repeat it. Go back and read it again if you’re at all interested in the facts.

    I have not spoken here to the condition of sex-workers around the world, as I have mainly been preoccupied with responding to false charges against myself and others directly associated with the making of X-rated entertainment in the U.S. I am well aware of the terrible conditions confronting sex-workers in other environments, which is one reason why I have campaigned for the legalization of sex-work everywhere, as much ot the misery asssociated with sex for pay arises directly out of the illicit status of sex-workers in most places, which makes them easy prey to corrupt officials, brutal pimps and dangerous patrons by denying them the protections of legality. Likewise, in places where prostitution is illegal, access to social and medical services for sex-workers is essentially non-existent, as the terms of their employment prevent them from seeking assistance. None of these conditions can be addressed until the definition of sex-workers as status-offenders is abolished.

    As to the STD situation in the domestic porn industry, you once again misrepresent the reality to suit your preconcieved notions. In fact, voluntary testing has, as I stated earlier, proved highly effective in making the porn community safer from STDs than the surrounding socieites. For every disease you list, the incidence among porn performers is less than 10% that of the general population, according to the statistics kept by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

    Which is not to say that I don’t favor much, much broader use of condoms in the making of sexually explicit materials. They are a feature of every picture I make and I will not work for producers who will not allow performers to use condoms. Again, I have been misrepresented as an opponent of practices I have spent years advocating in this industry, at whatever personal cost to myself. Though you may prefer to think I’ve done well be telling men what they want to hear, I have in fact done well by telling the truth as I see it from the day I got into this business. That may not square with your interpretation of things, but my candor in matters related to sexuality has been the foundation of my labors here and the source of my greatest rewards. And that is why I continue to enjoy the respect of many women and men who identify themselves as feminists, whether or not they qualify for that title by your definition. That is how I identify myself as well, and I refuse to allow the language of feminism to be hijacked by a small group with a narrow agenda unopposed by the great majority of us who do not share that agenda.

    Nina Hartley

    21 March 2005, 4:39 pm

71. Sam:

    Anytime you’re ready to share research proving you’re listening to what real sex workers themselves say they really want instead of imposing on them legalization and normalization they explicitly say they do not want, I’ll be ready to read it.

    I’m used to this being the point where the pro-sexual capitalism folks indignantly storm off talking about how out of touch with the reality of sex workers lives everyone else but they are, but never yet has one produced evidence that most prostituted people want to stay prostituted people, willingly identify as prostituted people, and wouldn’t mind continuing to prostitute if working conditions were better. They want out Nina, they say it over and over again and very loudly that they don’t want your “help” staying men’s whores, they want your help getting out of prostitution.

    That you know sex workers around the world overwhelmingly say they want out of prostitution and still you pursue your pro-corporate profiteering agenda despite their direct requests to get out of “the life” makes you either intentionally deaf to their well-documented pain or incredibly elitist to assume you know what’s better for global sex workers than they themselves do.

    21 March 2005, 6:08 pm

72. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    “Anytime you’re ready to share research proving you’re listening to what real sex workers themselves say they really want instead of imposing on them legalization and normalization they explicitly say they do not want, I’ll be ready to read it.”

    Excuse me, but what the fuck do you think me and Nina are?

    You have not actually dis-proved what I said on PIMC but just quoted a whole lot of right wing sites and then implied my evidence isn’t valid because it comes from actual sex-workers rather than accademics (or faith-based groups like some of the ones you qwoted?).

    You and others then personally attacked me saying that I was “very damaged”, “mentally impared”, “accepting rape” etc. You reffered to me as “you poor thing”… etc. What does that say about your attitudes to sex workers?

    Why have you not responded to the proposals by sex-worker groups like AIM, Scarlett Alliance, DMSC, etc?

    I don’t believe for one seccond that you actually support the rights of sex workers when you not only speak to us in such a disrespectfull way, but also campaign for our work (and by extension us) to be criminalised.

    21 March 2005, 6:37 pm

73. Sheldon:

    Oh, Ricky!

    Did you read my earlier post where I said I have twins? Did you know that twins = 2 children? Perhaps I was assuming too much on a website where one side of this debate equates about 30% as an absolute majority. Serves me right, I suppose.

    And what was the point of asking how many children I had, anyway?

    You claim that my literal interpretation of Stoltenberg’s words is “hysterical male logic” [without offering any counter-argument]. Doesn’t that imply that women who share my view on that point are…hysterical women??? Gee, where have we heard THAT before…

    21 March 2005, 7:15 pm

74. Sam:

    “Excuse me, but what the fuck do you think me and Nina are?”

    I’m pretty sure you’re two women and not representative of the 92% of 475 sex workers in five countries who said they want out of prostitution immediately. Perhaps you represent the 8% minority that did not express a desire to stop prostituting immediately, but when 100% of 475 respondees say they wouldn’t want anyone they loved to have to be a prostitute, I’m thinking you probably don’t have a strong claim even on that 8%.

    As I already told you, I believe in the Swedish model of decriminalizing prostituted women, not in arresting poverty-stricken women when it is predatory men’s demand for vulnerable bodies to use for masterbation that drives prostitution. Don’t mistake my lack of respect for your ill-put, baseless opinions about the effects of legalization in Australia as an attack on all sex workers. I listen when prostituted women repeat over and over again that they want to get out, I don’t tell them they should adopt a different frame of mind about being sexually abused that if they believe in strongly enough will make men stop raping, beating, burning, smacking and abusing them so very much.

    I listen to the women who say they want out and I do everything I can to get them the services they explicitly say they want and need. It’s not a very sexy stance, but it’s what sex workers around the world say they want.

    21 March 2005, 7:23 pm

75. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    Also, what exactly does this mean?

    “I’m a good lefty woman, vegetarian, bicyclist, writer, sexual health activist and antiwar protestor.”

    So am I a BAD woman because I eat meat, drive a car and sell sexual services for a living? I don’t think that our personal histories are relevant (as I’ve said before), but I can assure you that I am also a very commited activist. I think that you are implying that there are “good” and “bad” women (just as people have – unfairly as far as I can see – accused others of saying here) and that this is somehow determined by lifelstyle and personal choices.

    21 March 2005, 7:23 pm

76. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    “It’s not a very sexy stance”

    More snide comments. Your hatred of sex-workers (at least those who don’t do exactly what you want) just oozes out of you.

    Even in the anti-prostitution letter that I posted a link to on the previous thread the author said that 75% of women in prostitution would change jobs given the same pay and flexibility. THat means that 1/4 of australian prostitutes love what they do so much they would never change jobs. That fits with my experience – about 1/4 of people I have worked with love their job, 1/4 (or less) hate it and the majority just see it as a job.

    You also clearly DONT listen to prostitutes (we have NOT been “prostituted” which, given the way the word is used in other contexts sounds like we have sold our souls or something – sex-worker or prostitute is the respectfull and neutral term). I work with them and my experience is not as an academic doing surveys on “the poor” or a so-called “feminist” trying to save their souls or a social worker trying to assist those who were forced or trapped into it and are looking for assistance to change careers, but as an actual prostitute.

    You don’t listen to the views of grass-roots groups like Scarlett Alliance or 3rd world grass-roots groups like DMSC or even communityu health innitiatives. None on them – NOT ONE – actually believes that prostitution should be criminalised.

    I also DONT support the idea of criminalising clients; aside from the fact that 90% are nice normal people (some of whom actually see prostitutes as sexual therapy or councelling), I think it would just increase the violence against prostitutes due to the fear of management of clients of being arrested.

    21 March 2005, 7:36 pm

77. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    And btw, Australian sex-workers have a LOWER rate of STDs and STIs than the generall community due to the education and care they take with safe sex practices.

    And unlike YOU I realise that all sex-workers are individuals – some want to leave sex-work, others don’t and other love it. I would never tell a fellow worker that she should take ANY kind of attitude to her work. What I encourage and what most other workers here encourage (many have supported me at times when I needed help – I have even had a women I worked with for only a couple of days offer me a place to stay when I needed it) is solidarity and encouragement to know that they have right not to be abused by either clients, management, puritans (right winger or religious variety) or judgemental do-gooders.

    21 March 2005, 7:43 pm

78. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    NT sex workers move to change legislation
    by darwinindyreporter 2004-10-15 12:07 PM +0800

    ——————————————————————————–
    “Why does the legislation concerning sex workers contain the term “prostitute?” What has been “prostituted?” And how is it relevant to legislation concerning sex workers?”
    ——————————————————————————–

    Interview with a Darwin sex worker by darwin indymedia reporter. (Thursday 14th October, 04) The worker wished to remain anonymous.

    Q: Are there moves in the Northern Territory to change legislation affecting sex workers?

    Darwin sex worker: Yes. Sex workers have joined with legal representatives to form a legal working party. Our group intends to meet with government agencies to discuss changes to the Act.

    Q: Which sections of the ‘Prostitution Regulation Act’ concern you the most?

    Darwin sex worker: The entire Act is an insult to sex workers. It is based on moralistic views that have nothing to do with our profession.

    Q: For example?

    Darwin sex worker: OK. Why does the legislation concerning sex workers contain the term “prostitute?” What has been “prostituted?” And how is it relevant to legislation concerning sex workers?

    Q: How do sex workers feel about having to register with the police?

    Darwin sex worker: Sex workers are very unhappy about police registration. It means a permanent record with police for workers who may only be in the industry for a short time. Other professions that insist upon police checks prior to employment, don’t have to register with police.

    Q: Does this police involvement stop sex workers registering?

    Darwin sex worker: Definitely. Once again due to the permanancy of the record with police and the criminal implications of such registration. Workers with criminal convictions are forced to work privately.

    Q: So what does this all mean to you as a sex worker?

    Darwin sex worker: The ‘Prostitution Regulation Act’ legally designates me as an immoral person in need of registration with the police.

    - ends

    _______________________________

    - “prostitution” (meaning)

    \Pros`ti*tu”tion\, n. [L. prostitutio: cf. F. prostitution.] 1. The act or practice of prostituting or offering the body to an indiscriminate intercourse with men; common lewdness of a woman.

    2. The act of setting one’s self to sale, or of devoting to infamous purposes what is in one’s power; as, the prostitution of abilities; the prostitution of the press. “Mental prostitution.” –Byron.

    Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

    _____________________________________

    - Sex workers double murder highlights need for change in NT sex industry
    From http://darwin.indymedia.org/?action=default&featureview=1

    The bodies of Somjai Insamnan, 27, and Phuangsri Kroksamrang, 58 were found by cruise operators on the Adelaide River some 70kms south of Darwin. They had been bound and possibly thrown alive from the Arnhem Highway bridge crossing the river, a height of over 15 meters to the river below. The Adelaide river has been described in the media as “croc infested”, although neither of the women showed signs of having been attacked by crocodiles.

    Two eighteen year old’s, Ben McLean and Phu Trinh were arrested in Brisbane for the murders.

    - The dead women, who were reported missing by friends on Wednesday, had worked as freelancers in the sex industry.

    Industry spokespeople have demanded changes to the laws governing registration and brothels in the NT. Many sex workers are reluctant to register given the criminal implications of registering with NT Police.
    ________________________

    Scarlet Alliance – http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/

    21 March 2005, 9:14 pm

79. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    A report by Empower Chiang Mai on the human rights violations women are subjected to when “rescued” by anti-trafficking groups who employ methods using deception, force and coercion

    June 2003

    “Anti-trafficking measures shall not adversely affect the human rights and dignity of persons in particular the rights of those who have been trafficked and of migrants, internally displaced persons refugees and asylum seekers.”
    — The Primacy of Human Rights; Number 3, Pinciples and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking. Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Economic and Social Council

    Empower Foundation is a Thai organization since 1985. Empower promotes opportunities for women workers in the entertainment industry. Empower strives to promote these opportunities and rights to all women workers regardless of their country of origin.

    Far from being a “bold new method” as being proclaimed, Empower Chiang Mai has been dealing with the issue of “raids and rescues” of women working in brothels for the past 11 years.

    Empower abhors the trafficking of any persons; forced labor including forced sex work; and the sexual abuse of children, whether for commercial exploitation or not.

    Over the past three years there has been an increased international and national focus on the situation of women who have been trafficked.

    However, the focus on trafficking in persons has meant many groups with little or no experience on the issues of migration, labor, sex work or women’s rights have been created to take advantage of the large sums of money available to support anti-trafficking activities. Their inexperience and lack of contact with the sex worker community has meant they are unable or unwilling to differentiate between women who have been trafficked and migrant workers. They also show a great deal of trouble differentiating between women and girls, often applying identical standards and solutions for both. It is obviously inappropriate to treat a girl as an adult and just as obviously inappropriate to treat an adult as a child.

    Empower has monitored the methods and results of these group’s activities and we are very alarmed at the increasing violations and inhumane treatment women are subjected to by unworkable and unethical methods.

    Empower has used the most recent experience of “rescue” to further highlight our concerns.

    Rescue by Trafcord with the support of the International Justice Mission, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2nd May 2003

    Prior to the 2nd of May women from a brothel called Baan Rom Yen had been studying Thai daily with Empower, joining our outside activities e.g. attending a workshop on migrant’s rights, going to swimming lessons, going to a local water fall. Women also had access to the public health weekly and were provided with safe sex equipment and skills by Empower. None of these women had talked about being trafficked and when they discussed their work, plans and dreams none showed any need or wish for outside rescue.

    On the 1st of May three of the women collected their savings from the owner and contacted a van in order to take them home to Burma on Friday 2nd of May. One of these three went with a customer on the 1st of May and didn’t come back. Her friends and employer were worried for her. The other women postponed their trip home in order to wait for her.

    At 11 pm May 2nd women heard people yelling “police”. Those that could get away did and the others were “caught”. Everyone, including the brothel owner saw the missing woman in the police car, saw her name on the arrest warrant and assumed that she had gone to the police.

    “Ensuring that trafficked persons are effectively protected from harm, threats or intimidation by traffickers and associated persons, To this end there should be no public exposure of the identity of trafficking victims and their privacy should be protected and respected.”
    — Guideline Six (6), Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking, Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Economic and Social Council

    Journalists and photographers also accompanied the police and “rescue team”. Photos of the women were taken without their consent and appeared in the local papers and TV the next day.

    “States should protect the privacy of identity of victims of trafficking in persons, inter alia, by making proceedings confidential.”
    — Article 6, UN Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementary to The UN Convention On Transnational Organized Crime 2000

    Women who were “rescued” understood they had been arrested. They had their belongings taken from them.

    “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of her property”
    Article 17(2), Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    They were separated from each other. They were unable to contact friends, family or Empower.

    “No one shall be subjected to arbitrarily interference her privacy, family home or correspondence.”
    — Article 12, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    In all 28 women were “rescued”. Some of the women were not employees of that brothel but were simply visiting friends when they were “rescued”. Women were transported by Trafcord and the police against their will to a Public Welfare Boys Home. Nineteen women were locked inside and have remained there for the past 31 days. We have no information on the whereabouts or situation of the other ten women.

    “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of her liberty except in such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as established by law”
    — Article 9 (1), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

    “Women suspected of being trafficked must not be detained for longer than 10 days.”
    — Article 10, Measures of Prevention and Suppression of the Trafficking in Woman and Children Act 1997 (Thailand)

    As soon as they had their mobile phones returned women contacted Empower. They are only permitted to use their phones for a short time each evening and must hide in the bathroom to take calls outside that time. They report that they have been subjected to continual interrogation and coercion by Trafcord. Women understand that if they continue to maintain that they want to remain in Thailand and return to work that they will be held in the Public Welfare Boys Home or similar institution until they recant. Similarly they understand that refusing to be witnesses against their “traffickers” will further delay their release.

    “Migrant workers and their families shall have the right security and liberty of person. They shall be entitled to effective protection by the state against violence, physical injury threats and intimidation whether by public officials private individuals groups or institutions.”
    — Article 16, International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members and of Their Families

    “States shall ensure that trafficked persons are protected from further exploitation and harm and have access to adequate physical and psychological. Such protection and care shall not be made conditional on the capacity or willingness of people to cooperate in legal proceedings.”
    — Protection and Assistance Principle 8, Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking. Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Economic and Social Council

    Five days after the “rescue” four women who had escaped the rescue team came to Empower Chiang Mai. They were still shaken and very worried about their friends and their own safety. They were shocked to hear that the raid had not been about arresting women but rather in order to ‘rescue” those women who were victims of trafficking.

    Each of the women were emphatic that all the workers were well informed before coming, had made satisfactory salary arrangements with the employer, had the freedom to leave and all were 19 years and over.

    One woman who has a 50,000 baht advance from the owner had traveled home twice in the past two months to visit family etc. Although she had borrowed the money as an advance against her wages she felt no fear or threat. She and the others were all supported by the management to refuse customers, attend to health care, access safe working equipment, education and training. They were receiving an average of 600 Baht a day (the minimum wage in Chiang Mai Thailand is 133 Baht a day) They now find themselves unable to work.

    “States will ensure the rights of women to protection and working conditions as well as the right to choose a profession.”
    — Article 11 c & f, Convention on the Elimination on All Forms of Discrimination against Women

    “Everyone has the right to work to free choice of employment to just and favorable conditions of work and protection against unemployment.”
    — Article 23 (1 ), Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    They had fled the brothel leaving their possessions and savings behind. The brothel was now locked and they were unable to regain their goods.

    “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of her property.”
    — Article 17(2), Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    These women have nowhere to stay, no money and therefore are unable to access basic needs including medical care and education.

    “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well beingh of herself and her family including food, clothing housing and medical care and necessary social services and the right to secure in the event of unemployment, sickness disability widowhood old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstance beyond her control.”
    — Article 25 (1), Universal Declaration of Human Rights

    Many of the women come from Shan State in Burma. In an area where systematic rape, forced labor, food shortages and a multitude of other human rights abuses have been well documented. (One of the most telling and relevant reports “License to Rape” released just last year) There is no real process whereby people fleeing the situation can claim refugee status in Thailand. After “rescue” their situation will be made known to Burmese authorities, local village officials and family members. Under these circumstances a safe and beneficial return home is impossible.

    “Repatriation of victims of trafficking: When a State Party returns a victim of trafficking in persons to a State Party of which that person is a national or had the right to permanent residence, such return shall be with due regard for the safety of that person and shall preferably be voluntary.”
    — Article 8, UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially women and Children, Supplementary to The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime UN 2000

    On May 16th we found we were no longer able to contact the women by phone. On May 26th we called the Public Welfare staff where nineteen women were being held. The majority of women have been transferred to a rehabilitation center in central Thailand and the other seven will be sent to the same institution for an indefinite period. They are homesick, worried and furious and in the meantime their families are left without financial support. All the women being held plan to return to work as soon as possible after their inevitable deportation. This will of course result in them paying yet another transport fee and facing more risks, including the risk of being “rescued” again.

    Traffickers and many anti-trafficking groups employ very similar methods to achieve their goals. Both groups deceive women, transport them against their will, detain them, and put them in dangerous situations.

    Recommendations

    On the 12th of May Empower held a meeting on trafficking and anti-trafficking responses with 64 female entertainment workers from 3 major centers in Thailand. The large majority of the group was women from Burma, some of who had at some time been “victims of trafficking” and all of who had at one stage or other enlisted help to migrate for work in Thailand.

    They were unanimous in their recommendations that:

    1. No person should be trafficked, or forced to work in work they have not chosen to do and that no child under the age of 18 years should be abused sexually either commercially or domestically.

    2. Methods to combat trafficking must be revised and solutions found that do not violate the rights of workers but support true victims of trafficking.

    3. The rights of adult trafficked victims as workers must be acknowledged. We should receive recognition of our work and compensation, so we are not financially worse off after our “rescue”.

    4. All women affected by trafficking or anti-trafficking measures must receive adequate compensation and if we are victims of trafficking we be given full support to seek asylum and/or residency with the right to work included.

    5. The primary goal of prosecuting traffickers must be altered to a primary goal of assisting trafficked women and children. We propose that if trafficked women and children (whether trafficked or not) are continually rescued and assisted, the use of trafficked women and children will become unprofitable and entertainment places will only wish to employ those women who are over 18 years, informed and willing to work.

    6. Understand that all women, who are unable to access travel documents and need or wish to migrate, must secure the assistance of an agent or broker. If our situation as refugees from Burma is not recognized we must secure work for the survival of our families and ourselves. While we are willing to work our illegal status leaves us with no recourse against exploitation by agents or employers regardless of the work we do. Anti-trafficking groups must work toward improving the human rights situation in Burma, securing the ability for women to travel independently, and fully supporting the recognition of our refugee status.

    7. Currently women who work in entertainment places have their own methods of assisting trafficked women, those being forced to work, and those under 18 years. Anti-trafficking dialogue and groups have yet to consider us as anti-trafficking workers and human rights defenders even though the numbers of women and children we assist far out way the handful women and children serviced by the recognized anti-trafficking groups. Instead we are ourselves caught up in the “rescues and repatriation”. The latest stance from the USA government calling us “inappropriate partners” is just the latest example among many of the way we are ignored and our expertise sidelined.

    Empower appeals to anti-trafficking campaigners, funding bodies and policy makers to urgently and very carefully consider these recommendations and ensure that they protect the rights of the women they propose to assist.

    http://www.nswp.org/mobility/mpower-0306.html

    21 March 2005, 9:36 pm

80. Nina Hartley:

    Your words:

    “I listen to the women who say they want out and do everything I can to get them the services they explicitly say they want and need.”

    This would seem to imply that you have some direct contact with sex-workers and attempt to be helpful to them. Good. I would be very curious to know how you come to encounter these sex-workers, what services you offer them and how effective those services have been, either in assisting them in finding other careers or in dealing with the problems they face at present. I would also be curious to know if you would deny such services to sex-workers who aren’t motivated to change their current occupations. Nothing you’ve said so far demonstrates any first-hand knowledge of sex-work, and while I don’t regard that as a necessity to make valid arguments on the subject, the relentless hostility that you display toward sex-workers who disagree with you doesn’t suggest that sex-workers in need would find you particularly sympathetic.

    Perhaps you can enlighten us all as to how your efforts have actually improved the situation of a single, specific sex-worker anywhere in the world.

    In two decades as a sex-worker activist, I’ve yet to observe one example of an anti-sex-work feminist reaching out constructively to a woman who makes her living in a sex-related trade.

    For what it’s worth, which won’t be much for most of the readers here, not only have I never encouraged anyone to enter the business I’m in, the Porn 101 tape we require new clients at AIM to view before their first test has sent more wannabe porn performers packing than all the feminist diatribes ever written or spoken against this business. That’s one reason why a small but noisy and persistent group of “agents” and “producers” regard AIM, Sharon Mitchell and myself with such rancor. Unlike them, I don’t want anyone in this line of work who doesn’t know what she or he is getting into, isn’t fully prepared for the potential consequences and isn’t absolutely certain of the decsion to proceed.

    As I’ve said before – and I am done repeating it to the relief of all, I’m sure – I am well aware of the deplorable conditions of most sex-workers globally and absolutely agree that the vast majority would prefer to be doing something else. This, of course, can also be said of many other classes of worker and I agree that broad economic reforms are ultimately the only way in which all labor-related grievances can be addressed.

    However, this thread is not about all forms of sex-work or the conditions of sex-workers everywhere. This thread is very specifically about pornography and the pornography business, which is currently the target of a deliberate propaganda campaign to associate it, directly or indirectly, with all of the worst and most abusive forms of sexual commerce around the globe.

    It is typical of the illogic of those making this case that while on the one hand insisting that all sex-work everywhere is essentially the same, they regard the insights and experiences of people like Sex-worker Feminist Acitivist and me as irrelevent because our situations are somehow privileged and unrepresentative. In other words, the only legitimate sex-worker opinions are those that support the positions of sex-work abolitionists.

    I don’t believe for one minute that the principle advocates of those positions know or care what most sex-workers think, feel or want, or what would best serve sex-workers’ interests. They despise sex-work on priniciple and regard with pity at best and contempt in most instances anyone who has ever been actively associated with it.

    I don’t claim to know what all sex-workers want or need, but I am quite certain that shame and animosity from feminist intellectuals isn’t it.

    21 March 2005, 11:25 pm

81. Andrew Smart:

    I don’t want to diminish these very serious issues. But I would like to perhaps broaden the discussion slightly by including some insights from biology and anthropology.

    When the first Europeans came to the highland area of New Guinea in 1943 they found stratified tribal societies. Men and women lived for the most part isolated from one another, execpt for marraige ceremonies and other rituals. In some of these groups it was believed that males were born without semen and were unable to produce it. Thus, when a boy reached a certain age, around 10, he was paired with an older mentor. Part of the boy’s duty to this mentor was to give him oral sex. In this way it was believed that the boy’s stores of semen were filled with semen from his mentor. After the observance of rituals, the boy was then ready to enter manhood and marry. This was the practice for every male in the group (Vicedom, 1943-8).

    A number of our mammalian relatives engage in mock battles that have erotic overtones. Although they superficially resemble aggressive behavior, these battles do not involve any physical violence and are clearly distinguished from actual cases of aggressive or territorial behvior in these species. Male African Elephants frequently become sexually aroused and develop erections when they perform ritualized jousting matches (Bagemihl, 1999).

    In many primate species aggressive wrestling between both males and females can develop into sexual activity. There is evidence that our own highly ritualized sexual practices evolved from primate homosexual activities (Smuts and Watanbe).

    I don’t not mean to suggest that we are intrinsically violent or aggressive, I merely want to distinguish between forms of ritual sexual violence and actual aggresstion (i.e., warfare, murder). I don’t not wish to diminish the impact of social-class differences on sexual behavior, nor the deleterious effects of child-hood abuse, nor the trauma of rape.

    What I am suggesting however is that sexual diversity is the rule rather than the exception in the animal kingdom, as well as in human cultures. Were the boys in the highlands of New Guinea molested and raped by the older men of the society? There seems to be two possible approaches; the first I would call a universalist approach. According to this approach the answer is ‘yes, those boys were raped and molested by males excersising their patriarchical power.’ This approach applies a well-defined Western set of ‘intellectual class’ values to all cases in all cultures.

    Another approach is a relativist approach. In this approach we would look at the cultural norms of that particular society and weigh the evidence according to those norms. Here, an attempt is made to avoid applying Western moral standards to the practices of other cultures.

    How do we approach this in the case of animals? I am not sure, but it would seem strange to argue about exploitation and objectification among animals.

    It is only our uniquely developed cognitive capacities and intricate social organization that allow such concepts to develop. This of course does not make exploitation or objectification any less real.

    But what many seem to be arguing for here is a kind objective set of rules for subjective human experience. The anti-pornography camp seems to have the underlying assumptions that a woman engaged in this kind of activity is 1) either forced into or 2) does not understand her own choices, because if she did she would act otherwise. This is also called “false consciousness”. The problem with this is how do we develop standards for determining who is falsely aware of his or her own experience?

    This also raises another problem of applying a certain sort of rationality to subjective experience. The premise seems to be that if a woman who is not otherwise forced into pornography does so out of her own (apparent) free-will, she is unwittingly contributing to the dehumanization and oppression of women. And, if she is a rational woman she cannot desire this. Thus, the anti-pornography camp must assume that women who choose to make pornography cannot be aware of the fact that they are contributing to dehumanization and oppression, otherwise it is not possible that they would choose to do this.

    The other option is that women who choose to do pornography do not subjectively experience dehumanization and oppression, or that they through their participating in pornography contribute to the reproduction and enhancemnet of patriarchical social structures etc.

    I do not claim to be able to resolve this problem.

    22 March 2005, 9:27 am

82. Sam:

    Once again, disagreeing with you isn’t “hostility” towards sex workers, it’s disagreeing with you. I have said all I care to say to you about my personal involvement with sex work, for more info you can check out an organization I volunteer for, the Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation http://www.prostitutionrecovery.org

    “In two decades as a sex-worker activist, I’ve yet to observe one example of an anti-sex-work feminist reaching out constructively to a woman who makes her living in a sex-related trade.”

    That is because you are being willfully ignorant of the truths around you. It’s a good thing for Evelina Giobbe of WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), Norma Hotaling of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), Anne Bissell (Sex Industry Survivors Anonymous), the survivors that have worked with the Baldwin Foundation and many more survivor-begun, survivor-staffed assistance programs around the world that they don’t need you to see their existences in order for them to exist.

    “I don’t want anyone in this line of work who doesn’t know what she or he is getting into, isn’t fully prepared for the potential consequences and isn’t absolutely certain of the decsion to proceed.”

    Lara Roxx didn’t know what she was getting into, wasn’t prepared to become HIV+ at the age of 19, and made it damn clear she didn’t want to do anal penetrations, especially not without a condom. Her words after being told she would not be participating in the kind of regular sex scene she expected but anal sex with two men at the same time, “I freaked out. My heart started beating really fast and I was like, well, uh – I don’t know. And he’s like, well, it’s either that or we don’t need you.”

    Nina said, “In other words, the only legitimate sex-worker opinions are those that support the positions of sex-work abolitionists.”

    No, your opinions are are legitimate for you, but when taking in the opinions of prostituted people around the world and listening to the picture that emerges from their tesimonies it becomes clear you are exceptionally privileged and this privilege is preventing you from listening, really listening, to what prostitutes are telling you they want. When they say they want out, when you admit most of them say, I WANT OUT”, why do you insist on paraphrasing for them, “What they really mean is they want the conditions under which they are whored to improve so they can keep being whores (and BTW, ‘whore’ is now a pro-feminist term that gives power to women)”?

    Nina said, “I don’t claim to know what all sex-workers want or need, but I am quite certain that shame and animosity from feminist intellectuals isn’t it.”

    Sweet that you call me an ‘intellectual’ though you have more years of formal education than me. And such a terrible person I, for shaming sex workers when I…I…I’m sorry, when exactly did I cast fire and brimstone on sex workers, cause considering my life’s situation it would be kinda weird to suggest I’ve tried to diminish the dignity of sexually exploited women here or elsewhere. Good for me that I know how much I love women and that I can read what I wrote here and see you’re wrong about the emotions I’ve expressed towards some of the people I work with.

    “The anti-pornography camp seems to have the underlying assumptions that a woman engaged in this kind of activity is 1) either forced into or 2) does not understand her own choices, because if she did she would act otherwise.”

    This is a mischaracterization of my position. I don’t need ‘assumptions’ that every year millions of human bodies are forced into sexual slavery to satisfy men’s demands, there are lots of records attesting to the widespread truth of sex trafficking. Around the world, the average age of entry into prostitution is never older than the early teen years, in Western nations like the USA the average newbie prostitute is generally 13-14 years old.

    It’s so really not about suggesting women don’t understand their own choices because if they did they would act otherwise when mainly it’s teenage girls coerced, raped, kidnapped into prostitution around the world. Your way of viewing the anti-sexual capitalism position places all the burden upon prostituted women to either choose or deny prostitution, as if I or anyone else thinks most women exploited by pimps just don’t know how awful being treated like sex workers are treated is or some mumbo jumbo about “false conciousness”. I think prostituted people understand their lack of alternate choices very clearly. I’d rather focus not on trying to understand why desperate people do desparate, dangerous things for survival ( I already know), but on why men with greater legal, social, sexual, and economic power use their greater powers in these areas to force vulnerable others into doing desperate, dangerous acts for their personal pleasure. We didn’t need a law to stop white people from feeling disgusted at the thought of negro minstrel shows, we needed paler human beings to willingly stop entertaining themselves with humiliating caricatures of darker people’s animalized, dumbed down, paid-to-suffer indignities.

    Prostitution is not a choice for almost all who are forced by demanding men to engage in it, it is mostly where women and children without other choices wind up. Don’t point out the middle class white woman with the press agent, media connections and glossy magazine columns and suggest she is the face of Earth’s prostitution in 2005 because that’s a lie. How can anyone speak of the “choices” of runaway, drug addicted, child abused, poverty-stricken youth doing what they have to do to stay alive? This is the true face of the average prostitute, no matter what the public relations spinsters for sexual capitalism’s billion-dollar business say about happy hookers and contented courtesans. Please investigate the numerous global research, educational and outreach projects compiled at http://www.prostitutionresearch.com

    If women as a class of people could possibly fuck their way to the ‘top’, there would be a lot more women at the top by now.

    22 March 2005, 11:14 am

83. Sam:

    Sex Worker, aren’t there already laws against murdering people in Darwin? And yet you’re convinced the 18-year-olds who killed two prostituted women would not have murdered those two women if only there were better laws passed, maybe if the law against murder had the words, “and we mean sex workers too” amended to it?

    Do you think men just don’t understand that murdering sex working women is wrong and all they need is a change in the legal code and then viola, no more sex worker mortality rate 40 times that of non-sex working women (according to one Canadian study)?

    Men know what they do to women, sex workers or not, and they know it’s wrong. There haven’t been rape laws invented yet that adequately prevent sexual violence against women, sex workers or not, because laws without social substance to back them up are less than worthless, they’re false hopes.

    It was in the decriminalized province of British Columbia Canada that Pickton raped and murdered 50 prostituted women, so you’ll have to excuse my lack of faith in decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution in preventing violence against women. Considering the places in Australia with the worst domestic violence and child rape are the same places in Australia with legalized prostitition, there’s a good case to be made that legalizing prostitution leads to the increased sense of male entitlement that has caused male acceptance of violence to rise in those legalized Australian provinces.

    22 March 2005, 1:02 pm

84. Ricky:

    **Did you read my earlier post where I said I have twins?**

    No. I read your post up to “The anti-porners here keep saying you are a paid lobbyist when you are not – and they have no proof that you are paid.” Barely got past “A comradely disagreement with Nina – are you sure these are intellectuals?” Thought you were talking to Nina, so I bailed.

    **Did you know that twins = 2 children?**

    I was about to say knowing that gave you a human face… oh well.

    **Perhaps I was assuming too much on a website where one side of this debate equates about 30% as an absolute majority. Serves me right, I suppose.**

    As you say. I have observed that you assume much. And you know what they say about statistics (besides fact that 84.5 percent are made up on the spot).

    **And what was the point of asking how many children I had, anyway?**

    Wondered how much of a factor your tribe was increasing by, given your assumed potency.

    **You claim that my literal interpretation of Stoltenberg’s words is “hysterical male logic” [without offering any counter-argument].**

    Alright…

    **Stoltenberg was (and I assume still is) preaching impotence for EVERY man, not just for himself and a few individuals. As if to say, erections and feminism are incompatible. And that’s one good reason among many why anti-porn feminism is indeed sex-negative.**

    So much could be said.

    John is not “preaching impotence” – for himself, much less EVERY man. It’s bad form to start with a premise that’s based on a previously disproven conclusion. A hearsay argument that appeals to an ad hominemed authority – that’s… hysterical.

    John Stoltenberg is a man. He has never claimed to be a spokesman for feminism.

    Nevermind…

    Sex-negative…

    That isn’t logic. It’s pin the tail on the donkey.

    **Doesn’t that imply that women who share my view on that point are…hysterical women??? Gee, where have we heard THAT before…**

    You also infer much. Men of Science made up that word. It’s fun to turn the tables once in a while. Frued might have seen it coming – “the concepts ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’… are among the most confused in science.” Funny he should mention it. Sure, Siggy – it’s just a cigar.

    Like I said, Sheldon – careful where you point that thing.

    22 March 2005, 1:45 pm

85. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    Firsly Sam, I have lived in both Darwin and NSW and know both from living there and from statistics that Darwin and the Norther Territory are the most violent and mysoginist places in Australia. This has nothing to do with sex-work laws, but with isolation, extreme poverty among the Aboriginal community (who make up about 1/3 of the population) and because men outnumber women by a significan percentage. The culture their is extremely violent, racist and mysoginist and alcohol abuse is rampant. People dissapearing and being found murdered is very common. It is actually tourists (especially backpackers) and Aboriginal women who are the main targets – anyone who is in a vulnerable position.

    The sex-work laws in the NT are much more strict than in NSW – this has actually nothing to do with it. Also, even where I am living now (Tasmania) has a higher rate of domestic and mysoginist violence than NWS and the laws here are again, more strict than in NSW. I actually think this has to do with the culture way more than any laws. But the point is that criminalising prostitution only worsens the situation. The rise in reported crimes since prostitution was de-criminalised is the same as the rise in reported crime since rape-within-marriage and domestic violence were also criminalised. People start reporting these crimes when they think that something might actually be done by the police and when they feel safe that they themselves will not be persecuted.

    I actually have not seen any evidence that there is a correlation between sex-work and violence against women or children at all. A lot of my fellow workers in Australia believe that prostitution reduces the rate of rapes etc but I really don’t agree with them either. I think that they are not recognising that abuse is about power and not “sex-drive”.

    The point about the sex-work laws is that:

    a) Because brothels are illegal in Darwin (tho not all parts of the NT), sex-workers (there are a lot of males too) have to work through agencies or privately. This means that the higher level of protection of working in a brothel is not availiable to them if they want it.

    b) An even bigger issue is having to register with the police. This reccord is permanent and availiable to the whole police force. It’s not supposed to be availiable to all police or part of the criminal reccord – but it is. My friend who is interviewed above discovered this because she had registered as a sex-worker, left Darwin and returned a few years later. After she returned she had not been working as a sex-worker, but after being arrested at an (unrelated) political protest the police brought this up as her current occupation on the computer. It also became apparent during subsequent court appearances that they were ALL aware that she had registered as a sex-worker. On several occasions she experienced harassment from police (eg whistleing out of cop-car windows at her, slowing down and staring and making comments etc).

    The point is that violent people target sex-workers, not because they have less respect for them than other women, but simply because they are easy prey due to their semi-legal or criminal status and the social stigma that is placed on them. The PIMC article is a good example – do you think that a report about any other women being kidnapped and raped by police would be dismissed (even mocked) by so-called progressives the way that one was?

    If you want an example of the kind of change that self-organising by sex workers can make just look at the DMSC article I posted on the previous thread:

    22 March 2005, 6:43 pm

86. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    Sorry – quote dissapeared off last post, here it is:

    ‘What impact has it made on you personally?’ I ask Kajol Bose, the President of USHA.

    ‘Before, if someone was dying we could not get money except at exorbitant rates of interest,’ she replies. ‘Now I’ve built a house for my family. Paid for my daughter’s wedding. I have money in the bank. But USHA is about more than just money. I am called in to settle local disputes. My word counts. I’m someone here. Not just a nobody like before.’

    Bharati De adds: ‘Our condition is a hundred times better than before. Before Durbar, the police would treat us like dirt. Arrest, beat, rape, abuse us, call us filthy names. Now when I go to the police station, they say: “Have a seat.” Can you imagine – the police saying “have a seat” to me!’

    She continues: ‘Today our women stand in front of a mike, in front of thousands of people, and demand our rights. Yes, life has changed for us. It was a hard fight, but now we can hold our heads up high.’

    22 March 2005, 6:44 pm

87. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    By the way, even though I have no personal experience with porn, the experience with forced registration of sex-workers in the NT in Australia is why I tend to think that Nina’s position presented to the Meese Commission is probably entirely correct.

    22 March 2005, 7:18 pm

88. Sex-Worker Feminist Activist:

    Also Sam, you really shouldn’t talk as though Nina or me is somehow presenting the face of sex-workers as white and middle class. On that PIMC thread, when I tried to discuss some possible action (such as ugly mugs lists) to the issues raised in the article and tried to explain why raping prostitutes is as bad as raping anyone else, you openly mocked me and positioned yourself as superior:

    ““If a client attacks, abuses or rapes me that is no different than a client attacking, abusing or raping me in any of the other jobs I have had.”

    You poor thing. The tough girl talk you play won’t stop me from lamenting your defeated acceptance of rape, attacks and and abuse as just what you and all other women have to put up to pay the rent. Like most people, I have never been raped or physically attacked at a job by a customer. Like most people, I would never accept such violations of my person as par for the capitalist course. Like most people, I didn’t drop out of school and learn through prostituting my body that if only I could accept occassional attacks, abuses and rapes as normal I’ll be able to better remain mentally intact when they happen to me over and over and over again.”

    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310374.shtml

    22 March 2005, 7:51 pm

89. Sheldon:

    Ricky:

    The mere fact that I was addressing Nina doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to bail – it’s meant for everyone here to see.

    “John Stoltenberg is a man. He has never claimed to be a spokesman for feminism.”

    John himself might well disagree with you. He is the author of “Refusing to Be A Man.” And John holds the position, as does Andrea Dworkin, that anti-porn feminism is the only true feminism.

    “John is not “preaching impotence” – for himself, much less EVERY an. It’s bad form to start with a premise that’s based on a previously disproven conclusion. A hearsay argument that appeals to an ad hominemed authority – that’s… hysterical.”

    Really? But, as I said earlier, what I’m saying is based on what he said on July 14, 1986 when I interviewed him [along with Margot Adler of Wicca fame] on WBAI. He said that men – all men – should give up their erections as part of building a just world for women and men. Since all feminists believe that the personal is political, I respect him enough to deduce that he has followed that advice in the most PERSONAL manner possible.

    Now, what part of “giving up their erections” don’t you understand?

    “Careful where you point that thing”? Is that some kind of threat, Ricky?

    22 March 2005, 9:29 pm

90. Andrew Smart:

    Sam -
    I appreciate your heartfelt comments and agree with many of your points. Obviously child prostitution and violence against women are things that all of us need to work to end. I do not know the best ways of going about doing this. Of course kidnapped children who are forced into prostitution had no choice in the matter, and these children need protection from predatory men. I was addressing was the type of mainstream pornography that is being disucessed here. I think there is a distinction between child slavery and pornography made by adults. My point was about people who produce and consume pornography. And a specific kind of pornography – not child pornography or ‘underground’ pornography.

    However, I still have the same reservations about the assumptions of the anti-pornography camp. I think that there alot of implicit assumptions necessary in order to reach the conclusion that this is the ‘truth’ about pornography. Whose truth? Is there some objective fact of the matter here about pornography? Again, I am not talking about child prostitution, prostitution or violence against women.

    Do you mean that pornography and prostitution are the same thing? You site studies which show that the majority of prostitutes want to stop being prostitutes. Do a majority of pornographic actors wish they were doing something else?

    Furthermore, I wanted also to point out that representations in films of violence and misogyny are not the same thing as real violence and misogyny. Even if pornography shows real people having real sex somewhere in the world, it is highly ritualized and structured to represent fantasy situations. This type of ritualization and symbolic representation of sex can be found in every human culture and even in myriad animal species.

    And this also has to do with my point about sexual diversity. How is it possible to have objective 3rd person knowledge about subjective 1st person experience? I think it is possible, but it is very difficult. For example in all known human cultures, there is a strict taboo against incest with close relatives. However, in some cultures, like the New Guinea case I mentioned, there is no taboo against homosexual sexual activity with children. Are all the men in this culture pedophiles?

    What I mean is that human beings display incredible behavioral and sexual plasticity. There are limits to this plasticity of course, like the universal incest taboo I mentioned, which probably culturally evolved because of negative genetic fallout (in other words cultures that practiced close-relative incest probably all died out).

    Our success in evolutionary terms as a species probably benefitted greatly from our ability to adapt to novel environments and social arrangements. Many species display similiar sexual diversity in terms of non-reproductive and alternative heterosexuality, as well as homosexuality.

    Regarding whether or not women in pornography do not understand what they are doing, of course I think that people can wrong about their own psychological states. In fact, we have conscious access to only a fraction of the processes going on in our brains. Is everybody involved in pornography deluded about what they are doing?

    I am not talking about children who are forced into prostitution.

    23 March 2005, 5:39 am

91. the burningman:

    Thanks to Stan for bringing a supressed discussion back to light. Robert Jensen’s piece is dead-on, and if anything is too charitable to what this industry is. Much of the “re-appropriation” argument, eg: porn is like black people saying “nigga” so misses the content of it all. It assumes the current range of relationships between people are the only ones that can exist.

    I grew up entirely in an era with relatively unrestricted access to pornography. It’s ubiquitousness on the internet only caught up with it’s availability on the streets of Manhattan very recently. Some guy can look at 800+ porn sites doing “research,” but I’ve been looking at pornography my entire sexual life. Pornography helped to develop my sexuality and some of its effects are just not good.

    This isn’t some kind of religious guilt. It’s just an observation. What the internet has freed us from is a fake argument about surpression. Access to porn isn’t going anywhere. So once access is effectively universal, we can see it for what it is. This is where Jensen’s argument on the escalation curve comes in. The porn that is most “raw” is what is most degrading. The impossible acts, now largely categorized by acronyms such as DAP (double anal penetration) and A2M (ass to mouth) are less and less SEXUAL. Porn is not about sex. That’s the whole fake argument that promoting “sex culture” is more sexual. I think the opposite is the truth.

    The tiny minority of libertarian types (Nina Hartley, Suzie Bright) who justify the industry to varying degrees, while criticizing blatant coercion of performers and prostitutes, are missing the big picture: capitalism and patriarchy are normalized coercion. It’s like Tomas Friedman arguing for “free labor” in the New York Times. They don’t like slavery as such, where the slave has only one master, but prefer a system of generalized slavery where workers are beholden to capitalists in general.

    The radical position is to argue for breaking down THAT whole system. The reason the discussion is so important, and gets so sharp, is that patriarchy is one of the few “systems of oppression” that we all have some kind of agency in. I CAN choose to stop degrading the women I love. We CAN develop ways of relating to each other that are life-affirming, not draining and cynical. We have to make moral choices in our actions because our actions have real consequences. The “industry” doesn’t rape most women, everyday men do. Stopping rape culture is something we do OURSELVES.

    Dealing with what porn IS, is one way we can begin to look at the psychology of “masculine constructions of sexuality” in their own glorified presentation.

    ———

    The women posting as “sex worker” makes many interesting points and I value this discussion very much. I’d like to speak a little about my own interaction with the “sex industry” so that we’re not so hypothetical about everything.

    One of the first great loves of my life, Nelly Velasco, was a prostitute in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. She died at the age of 19 of a heroin overdose. She has hustled the streets since the age of 15 after leaving her families modest home in San Jose. She hustled for dope. She hustled for a home. She found a community of outcasts and the degraded and shined like a light to people who had so little love in their lives. But the REALITY was constant degredation. It was being raped. It was men paying her to do the things no woman would CONSENT to do with them. It was awful. She organized street hustlers, with harm reduction and feminist consciousness and has a room named after her in San Francisco’s Women’s Building. She was a special person.

    But one thing she never hid was the reality of male domination of women that was bound up in prostitution. She “went there.” I’m not saying that prostitution killed her, drugs did that. But there was a dynamic at play where it was acceptable for young people like her to be available for all the liberal rich assholes of San Francisco and she found herself unable to escape from it.

    In real life, it’s not just a “choice.” There are compulsions of all kinds. Nelly wanted to escape from a drab working class life, she wanted the ecstatic. She had a deep identity with the most oppressed in this society and in an almost Jesus-like way brought herself there in a kind of ministry that I think “sex worker” could appreciate. But even with all her “consciousness” of what she was doing, she was still DOING IT — that is, she was getting fucked for money to buy dope.

    She told me once how in Amsterdam, they had fully embraced “harm reduction” as a principle. That the industry was “clean” and “well-regulated.” The health of the prostitutes was looked after and they were paid a fair rate. Because of legalization, prostitutes couldn’t be beaten without recourse and weren’t just at the mercy of pimps. I didn’t think much of all that until I actually went to Amsterdam.

    It is pure capitalism. Amsterdam is a male paradise built around servicing the cock in a thousand different ways. From the resources Dutch imperialism has extracted from all over the earth, to the traffic in Eastern European, Latin American, Asian and African women who make up MOST of the women on display under the red lights. Women are certainly “free” to sell the themselves. But the issue those of us challenging the sex industry keep returning to is simple: when will women be free NOT to “sell themselves?” How can we limit the harm now, and directly challenge a system that views women as something to be consumed while demanding they smile?

    23 March 2005, 10:46 am

92. the burningman:

    Regarding John Stoltenberg and his promotion of impotence: well, whatever. I appreciate his and Dworkin’s willingness to question everything, but the solution to drunken wife-beating isn’t prohibition of booze…

    To me that’s just a failure of imagination. The point isn’t that sex is just cuddly and all nice and shit. Or that sex is supposed to be a moral passion play. There is some value in Queer theories of sexuality that get us off the grid of the man-on-top mentality by saying the world of sexuality is much more polymorphous than that, including among men and women.

    I think this is why people who criticize the pornographic relationship aren’t railing about the ways men and women HAVE consensual sex so much as the COMMODITY relationship inherent in porn and prostitution.

    And to Nina: I think the Bay Area makes people crazy. I’ve never seen more denial of general realities than there as if “choosing” a given set of relationships inherently transforms their reality. It’s what Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys called “zen fascism.” I think your points would be lot stronger if you dug into the industry more, such as the fact that women cannot choose to use condoms and still perform for major gonzo companies.

    People can talk about Candida Royalle’s films, but men don’t watch them. People can discuss cable soft-core, but given the choice it’s pretty clear that in the DVD market, the drift is towards the circus-acts, choking, slapping, face-spitting and so on. It’s widely discussed by pornographers, so if we can note it here then what?

    AIM is great, sure. But to use one recent example I found on Jules Jordan’s website bulletin board, he states plainly that a well-loved performer Avy Scott can’t be in his films because she insists on using a condom to ensure she isn’t infected with HIV. That’s not consent. That’s raw coercion and life-threatening. But that’s what the women are expected to do.

    John Stagliano’s Evil Angel is the vanguard of American porn. The only time I can recall seeing a condom on a performer was in a recent film “Buttman Comics Presents” and that was because a MALE performer demanded it. Let a woman do so and she is utterly replacable.

    Max Hardcore is THE innovator in porn and anyone watching it knows this to be true. Not Candida Royalle, and frankly not you. 18-year-old girls getting pissed on and sucking cum from tubes out of their own ass. Which you know full well about, but treat as an aberation when it is THAT GUY that has introduced many of the practices now ubiquitous. He is hated in the industry because he ADMITS the misogyny straight-up and makes it a fetish. That’s what gives his work its charge. The rest just show the acts, but in their origin we can see.

    For anyone who thinks I’m a hypocrite for admitting I watch porn while criticizing what it is, perhaps I am. But I’m not untypical. I live in this world even while I struggle for a new one. This is part of why I appreciate what Stan is doing by highlighting this discussion so much. He has chosen not to be confessional, which is entirely his right. But men need to start saying what it is they find in the “sex industry” so we can cut through the sophistry and get to the real. Porn is not about sex. It’s about power over mediated by money. Just like marriage in essence. Just like so many of the “choices” we make.

    If Nina is so game for sex radicalism, maybe she can start by helping get the money out of sex. Then we’ll BEGIN to see what a free sexuality looks like.

    23 March 2005, 11:21 am

93. Andrew Smart:

    burning man -

    I think you make some excellent points. Escpecially about the penetration (no pun intended) of abstract wealth into the network of personal relations. I would say that this is a more general phenomenon than capitalism. But the two are linked since it is only the capitalist economy that providess the possibility for the total commodification of social life.

    Is the consumption of pornography and sex a strategy of self-definition? In other words, part of the sum of products that I configure into an arrangement that expresses what I am? In this sense “zen fascists” might say that consuming pornography or not consuming pornography is the same thing. That is, every person is a consumer or at least must define herself in relation to the world of goods as a non-consumer.

    Is this what men find in the sex industry? Self-definition? Is the only authentic act in this system an act (like extreme sex) that encompases both the real act and its commodification – like your engaged cynicism.

    We happen to live in the declining centers of the world system, whether this decline is reversible or not. I don’t mean moral decline, but a strictly economic decline. The decentralization of the global accumulation of capital is accelerating, as witnessed by the explosive emergence of China and the simultaneous efforts of the old centers (Europe, USA) to negotiate strategies to deal with China. American military adventures in the Middle East are further signs that the american ‘node’ of the global system is disintigrating.

    And I agree that perhaps women like Nina Hartley, by fully integrating in the larger system, are essentially dependent on a set of group symbols of sexuality. In this way the material production of sex becomes a central focus of a sort of social movement, albeit a consumerist social movement. But as I mentioned, is there any other kind of social movement?

    I agree that it would be better if we didn’t have identities as such at all. We could avoid all these forms of categorization “X is a member of population Y, therefore she has the characteristic set of traits of that population.”

    But there are properties of human culture that are common to all specific cultures. One of these properties is ritualized and symbolic sexuality, and I am arguing here that whether this is commodified by abstract wealth, or mediated by witchdoctors, it amounts to species wide behavior and therefore must bear some trace of a common evolutionary history. I am not making the argument that sexuality as a social act has some function, rather that, like all of our higher cogntive capacities, it works in a variety of environments and societies.

    This of course goes to another part of your argument about ‘choice’. What characterizes the relationship between structure (capitalism, culutre, biology) and agency (an abstract quality of individual free-will)?

    23 March 2005, 1:16 pm

94. Sam:

    I totally appreciate the discussions on patriarchal capitalism’s co-optation of human sexuality and think ‘the burningman’ has injected many popularly-known but unpopular-to-speak truisms about pornstitution (deliberate spelling because pornography is watched acts of prostitution).

    As a radical, I’d like to keep reading what y’all have to say about the structural relations between the “roots” of capitalism, patriarchy and imperialism, but I think I’ve said pretty much what I can say about what I know so I’ll let others have that debate.

    I wanted to leave on a positive note, specifically with information about the great successes of the Swedish model of decriminalizing prostitutes while focusing on the men who prey upon and sexually abuse vulnerable people, the tricks (in Swedish, torsk).

    How many times in recent history have Scandinavian cultures paved the path of the future for the rest of the world? Too many to count. Sweden tried normalizing sex work for many years and in the end concluded, “Prostitution is inherently harmful.”

    The end of prostitution in Sweden?
    http://www.sweden.se/templates/cs/Article____2295.aspx

    Sweden’s prostitution solution: Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?
    http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html

    23 March 2005, 3:58 pm

95. Sheldon:

    Some comments:

    1) As a pro-feminist man, I certainly agree that being obsessed with performance and getting it up is not healthy. Both Margot Adler and I gave John Stoltenberg plenty of opportunities to say that he and Andrea Dworkin intentionally said something over the top as a form of shock value to wake people up. As an acquaintance of Abbie Hoffman (whose first wife was once friends with Andrea), I can appreciate the value of street theater. But the problem was, they REALLY mean it. Irony and they are like two ships passing in the night. How sad.

    2) Nina Hartley is certainly no libertarian in the Ayn Rand sense. Since when did all libertarians suddenly become right-wing? Emma Goldman, anyone? And while not classically libertarian, Rosa Luxembourg’s critiques of Lenin revealed a serious sensitivity toward civil liberties. That’s where Nina Hartley’s coming from (I can’t speak for Susie Bright). Merely mentioning that a market exists does not make one a believer in the Invisible Hand of the Free Market- there are leftists in this country and in Eastern Europe who for years have advocated market socialism. And yes, just as folks have differing tastes in clothing, music, art and legit movies, so too do they have differing tastes in sexual fantasies. One’s taste in all of these categories (and, of course, there are others) is influenced by the dominant culture, or, to paraphrase Stan, not “innocent of the power structure.” But not SO influenced as to negate the human agency of free will, with all the attendant individual responsibility.

    23 March 2005, 7:11 pm

96. Sheldon:

    More Comments:

    3) Sam’s link to Sweden’s experiment in abolishing prostitution are fascinating…in the sense that folks gather around a car wreck to check out the gore.

    If you criminalize being a john, then how can a prostitute make a living as a prostitute? Where is the money for that sex worker’s basic needs going to come from?

    Obviously, the sex worker will be FORCED to quit or else face starvation. And that’s what the state does in Sweden – put a political gun to the sex worker’s head and say, “Quit sex work or die.”

    So, it’s no surprise that the Dworkinites love that scheme.

    Given their legendary respect for facts, I’m sure we’ll find out more about the dark side of Sweden’s policy in the near future.

    4) Speaking of Ayn Rand, former president of Los Angeles NOW, anti-porn feminist Tammy Bruce, is a professed admirer of Ayn Rand AND a good friend and supporter of Andrea Dworkin. Her first book, including an introduction by DR. LAURA, includes a reading list recommending three books each from Ayn and Andrea.

    The readers of “The New Thought Police” find out that Tammy Bruce had voted for Reagan, a fact that she did not disclose to the NOW membership that she allegedly served.

    23 March 2005, 7:39 pm

97. Ren Galskap:

    Sam,

    I’m afraid that the articles you link to are highly suspect sources. The second in particular is giving numerical figures that are difficult to support and makes numerous factual errors.

    Since the criminalization of purchasing sex services in Sweden in 1999, there’s been a big reduction in *street* prostitution. Other forms of prostitution persist and no one knows how much of it there is. The police admit that they have no oversight of prostitution since criminalization and the prostitutes themselves claim that it continues at the same levels, but hidden. It is no longer possible to get reliable figures on prostitution and human trafficking.

    Sweden, for reasons of its own, has chosen not to evaluate the effects of its policies. However, neighboring countries have made attempts to evaluate Sweden’s experience, and their conclusions are not positive. Here’s a link to an article written by Ulf Stridbeck, head of the Working Group on Legal Regulation of the Purchase of Sexual Services in Norway. Norske Aftenposten. I looked to see if there was an English language version but didn’t see one. Someone else may be able to find one.

    Stridbeck’s overall conclusion was that the Swedish approach was not a good approach for Norway. Among other things, it made it harder to prevent trafficking in women and children, it exposed prostitutes to more violence, it increased the spread of STDs, increased pimping, and made it harder to provide social services to prostitutes who needed it. These problems combined with the impossibility of documenting a decrease in overall prostitution made the Swedish experiment very unattractive.

    There have been two attempts to pass laws on the Swedish model in Norway. The first failed when Norwegian prostitutes persuaded infl
    uential female lawmakers that it was a bad idea. The second failed due to a split in the governing alliance, and due to lobbying fro
    m a sex worker organization created in response to the proposed law. Opposition from prostitutes makes it unlikely that there will b
    e any new attempts in the near future.

    24 March 2005, 1:12 am

98. the burningman:

    There is temendous resistance to discuss what porn IS because when a hard light gets shined, it isn’t good. And if it isn’t good and is, as Dworkin pointed out, a relationship built on patriarchy not just a generic form of speech, then the implications get complicated. So there is endless sophistry that assumes we NEED a sex industry or that it can’t be eliminated or that eliminating exploitation from sex will destroy sex itself. That is a failure of imagination and we should demand more of ourselves as men.

    No one HERE is judging people who work. I don’t see it. I certainly don’t even if I discourage friends from doing it. Nina is very defensive, but even a cursory glance over the literature brutalizing Andrea Dworkin still gets is enough. When it comes to that, there are no “safe words.”

    I’m not saying Nina is a paid shill. She seems quite sincere in her beliefs and I have little doubt that for HER, by and large, she has had an interesting and fun life in porn. For her, an educated, smart, presumably sober, self-directed person with good friends and fam looking out for her interests. Which is not typical of the larger sex industry — in San Fernando Valley, Brazil or Budapest. Which is not international sex tourism and the traffic of women into the city I live in. It’s not the crackhead prostitutes I used to watch get picked up in SUVs outside my brooklyn apartment who turned their money over to pimps. It’s not a conceptual, “intellectual” discussion. It’s a reality that can be observed and participated in. Sheldon’s right to be a hard-cocked John is just not the most important thing. It is typical liberal BS, demanding the right to exploit others based on cash exchange and generalized poverty. Eliminate capitalism and we will eliminate prostitution. Free love (and fucking) is FREE.

    I’m not an anti-porn ideologue — I’m anti-exploitation and hope we can develop a sexuality not built around men dominating women. That’s my first priority insofar as this disucssion goes and perhaps a little common courtesy all around based on the values we share in common would make it more productive.

    Sheldon sure likes ripping into John S., but given the overwhelming misogyny I’ve encountered among men (on the left and otherwise) when it comes to the personal relations, John’s weird pro-impotence spiel is almost refreshing. He’s willing to give up his own erection. I’m not, but again — egalitarianism just MIGHT involve some loss of privilege for those on top. I think of all the “frigid” women in the world who, unable to experience sex they liked because every man they trusted betrayed them, stopped pretending. Frigidity is the oldest form of direct action in the world. It’s not a solution, it’s a failure of imagination, but for many it has been a form of harm reduction.

    ——

    Forget Sweden. What should be done with Tijuana, Bangkok and Budapest? As a student in NYC, many(!) of the women I loved went through the sex industry in some shape or form to pay tuition or rent. What the fuck? Why is this treated as acceptable? They didn’t find it “empowering.” They ran the stripper rap, “I’m in control and these men are under my power,” for about two or three months until the obvious stupidity of it wore off. They were COMPELLED to whore themselves to escape the working class and get a college education. They are now journalists and teachers, a full-time mother and so on. But none of them look back on it as any expression of “free choice and agency.”

    24 March 2005, 1:28 pm

99. Sheldon:

    First, let me commend you, Burningman, on your respectful tone.

    I ‘rip’ into John Stoltenberg mostly when others defend him in ways easily vulnerable to criticism.

    Who knows what will happen if/when we abolish capitalism? Is your crystal ball any clearer than mine? Given the fact that the Left has been terrible at prognostication, a wee bit of humility is advised.

    I don’t recall any of the well-known sex-positive feminists claiming that most women in sex work do it primarily for psychological benefits that you describe. I do recall several of them claiming that most jobs in any industry in this country are sought after for primarily economic reasons.

    For example, I entered computer science for the money, not because of any idealistic belief in gadgetry, so I know that my experience backs that up. I made a meaningful, free choice nevertheless – it just wasn’t a perfect choice because this isn’t a perfect world. That is also true for many who enter sex work – they were ‘compelled’ in the same sense that many women who had an abortion felt
    ‘compelled’ to have one.

    I suspect that the immensely talented Nina Hartley would be atypical in any profession that she chose. But that does not, by itself, invalidate her observation that virtually all of the heinous suffering endured by sex workers is caused by the illegal status of that industry.

    I don’t see this as about my right to be a John. Far from it. I see this as about defending the human rights of sex workers to engage in their labor without violence, harassment or stigmatization. That’s why I put a lot of energy into supporting unionization of sex workers, for example.

    24 March 2005, 6:58 pm

100. charlie:

     Sheldon, I see a trend where the vitriol on all sides is being toned down a bit, and I will try to stick to that trend. You said something about Nina in your last comment that might get to the crux of the main dispute I see here. Something to the effect that Nina’s being atypical in any chosen profession does not invalidate her observation that virtually all the heinous suffering endured by sexworkers is caused by the illegal status of that industry.

     If this is truly what she (and yourself) are saying, then both of you are absolutely wrong, and what Stan, Robert, Sam, Rickey & burningman are saying is right. The illegality of the sex industry is not the problem, it’s the commodiification of sex and the vulnerability of so many of the world’s young women and girls to be involutarily forced into the “sex industry” that is the problem.

     Forget the charges of Nina’s being falsely characterized or whether she is a shill for the porn industry. If she really is saying the horrors stem from illegality she is ignoring reality. Maybe she should speak for herself. You, sheldon, are ignoring reality. Why do you defend Scandanavian prostitution? Do you really think that wage slavery in another industry is worse for the workers? Do you really think that entering prostitution is a “choice” for 90% of the “sex workers” of the world, and legalizing the industry would solve the problems. Actually, I think you mischaraterized Nina. She did condemn Asian trafficking in child prostitution. So I don’t think she would think that “legalization” of that industry would end the heinous suffering.

     25 March 2005, 5:37 pm

101. Nina Hartley:

     Much as I had hoped to stay away from here, there seems to be some doubt remaining concerning my actual views, though I’ve stated them so frequently, I find it difficult to imagine that any real misunderstanding still exists.

     Once more, then, let me make clear that I categorically oppose all forms of forced labor, whether in the sex industry or any other. I do reject the assertion, which I regard as a purely ideological construct, that all labor in the sex industry is forced by definition.

     And, yes, I do believe that prohibition of prostitution not only does nothing to prevent coerced labor in sex-work, but in fact contributes to the problem by stigmatizing the workers and making it that much more difficult for them to escape from their captivity or seek assistance from officials. In most of the countries where sex-trafficing is common, prostitution is brutally suppressed by law, and women who come forward seeking protection are often arrested and frequently returned to their trafficers by corrupt police. The burdens of prohibition invariably fall most heavily upon sex-workers themselves, not those who profiteer from their labor.

     The European model, for all its faults, is vastly superior to what exists here, much less in the Third World, in that it recognizes the legitmacy of sex-work and extends legal protections to sex-workers that they do not enjoy elsewhere. While legalization – or as I would prefer – decriminalization, would not end sex-worker abuse, it would remove one vast source of misery to sex-workers: their total lack of protection by, or from, the criminal justice systems where they live.

     An inconvenient fact ignored by feminists who support sex-work prohibition is the common practice of using that prohibition to force women into prostitution by falsely arresting them for the charge, making them into status-offenders and social outcasts unable to survive by any other means. Anti-prostitution laws are a danger to all women everywhere, and the societies with the most repressive anti-sex-work laws invariably hold women’s rights in the lowest regard.

     If some here so dislike the Scandanavian approach, I would ask them what existing system they prefer, that of Iran? Prostitution is certainly illegal there. It is also extremely prevalent there and working conditions in every way exhbitits “the horrors” denounced so vocally on this thread. The question that remains in my mind is simply this: Do those making here making the arguments for keeping sex-work illegal really care about the lives of the women (and men) involved, or are they willing to sacrifice those lives, as so many others have before them, in favor of some abstract notion of the Common Good? Obviously, I strongly suspect the latter motivation.

     In fact, sex-trafficing in Europe has grown in recent years in direct proportion to the increase in commerce with former Eastern Block countries where sex-work has traditionally been prohibited. Sex-trafficing and prohibition go hand-in-hand. Both, like some of the posters here, regard sex-workers as “damaged goods” with no claim to the protection of decent people. That attitude, especially when written into law, is the greatest source of sex-worker misery and the greatest obstacle to any real improvement in sex-workers’ lives.

     Sheldon is correct. I do favor decrminalizing prostitution, not because I believe that doing so would end all suffering for sex-workers, but rather because it would foster conditions under which they could act to do so themselves without fear of legal repression.

     I still find it astonishing that those who consider themselves allies of women struggling for equality and autonomy could find this position controversial. But then, I’ve long ago accepted the fact that what really drives this particular debate, behind all the political rhetoric thrown around by anti-sex-work partisans, is personal prejudice.

     Nina Hartley

     25 March 2005, 9:16 pm

102. Sheldon:

     The adult sex industry in the San Fernando Valley has been fully opposed to the participation of children and has co-operated with local and state authorities in California for many years in helping them turn in pedophiles and other child abusers – this despite the fact that these same authorities have pursued obscenity indictments against San Fernando.

     When adult sex work is decriminalized, the knowledge of said adults can be of invaluable assistance in bringing child prostitution to an end, thereby making viable the total criminalization of child trafficking.

     In general, the commodification of sex is no worse than the commodification of other basic human needs underway in capitalist society. In fact, what’s remarkable about the adult pornography industry is how relatively benign it has been when compared to its counterparts in Hollywood and in other industries here (in the USA).

     I find it amusing that charlie sees my stance as being worse than Nina’s when, in fact, Nina and I share the same view here. I think it’s patronizing for charlie to say to Nina, in effect, “Well, you’re a sex worker, so you’re entitled to your misconceptions, but Sheldon isn’t. He’s not a sex worker, so he hasn’t paid his dues.” As if one needs a degree in mathematics to state that 2 + 2 = 4…

     25 March 2005, 10:00 pm

103. the burningman:

     Nina writes: “I’ve long ago accepted the fact that what really drives this particular debate, behind all the political rhetoric thrown around by anti-sex-work partisans, is personal prejudice.”

     Oh come on.

     Okay, I’ll admit it. I do hate pimps and I’m “prejudiced” against “sex management,” of which precious little is mentioned in these discussions. I think pornographers don’t have the “right” to get filthy rich off filiming anal cream pies. You got me.

     http://maxhardcore.com

     Oh yeah, the “industry” is real down on “child porn.”

     Nina and Sheldon are totally ignoring what Robert Jensen actually wrote. Which, if “prejudice” isn’t the word, then “talking points” will certainly do. Who is saying that sex workers should be arrested? I’m for decriminalization of workers and strict prosecution of “management,” including pornographers. But I don’t trust THIS government to do any of it.

     Nina’s point about Eastern Europe would be interesting if Budapest hadn’t turned into a brothel after the fall of the wall. Throughout much of the socialist world, regardless of their other problems, prostitution was largely erradicated for DECADES and women were able to not fear for basic necessities. It can happen. It should happen.

     25 March 2005, 11:47 pm

104. the burningman:

     I just re-read Jensen’s piece and the pro-porn talking points are so well ingrained that apologists for “really existing porn” no longer even bother to note that you can analyze what something is without calling for any kind of prosecution or prohibition. This is why Sheldon is so quick to talk about who is “entitled to an opinion” as if anyone is saying he isn’t.

     John Lennon said “woman is the nigger of the world.” All this moaning about “repression” reminds me of nothing so much as Scarlett O’Hara pleading for her plantation. Poor, “repressed” lass that she was… If I remember correctly, the slaves were clamoring to get back on the plantation…

     I would also note that the two of the three most high profile prosecutions in recent years were against the above mentioned Max Hardcore for INTENSE simultation of pedophilic rape and the charming people at Extreme Associates, who aside from fetishized women-hating, took the leap to simulated snuff films and niche markets like “Cocktails” which involved female performers drinking enemas mixed with cum, vomit and piss. I hate to be all anti-sex and shit, but really.

     Women can “choose” not to do these acts, but if you’re trying to break into a competitive industry and that’s the standard, unless you’ve got some good friends or are so knock-down gorgeous you get to bend the rules, a quick trip to Max (or the Meatholes consortium…) can establish your “professionalism” right quick.

     Again, for those who think Jensen or myself are taking out-there material and passing it off as the mainstream of porn, please browse the discussion forums at http://adultdvdtalk.com … “where the industry meets the consumer.” There are CONSTANT discussions about how degrading porn has gotten, and regular apologetics from both the site moderators. There are also some real discussions and regular participation from several heavyweights in the industry.

     Jensen is saying we should discuss what porn IS. That today’s porn is totally dominated with degredation and abuse can no longer be disputed. So the discussion is constantly shifted into the “right to work” and typical liberal BS about “free speech.”

     Nina can see the sophistry of this when it comes to any other industry, but apparently this one is REALLY taboo. The one place where the eroticization of domination can’t be even described is the industry that profits from it while fostering it. She knows the sales figures for her instructional videos. How do they stack up?

     26 March 2005, 12:15 am

105. Nina Hartley:

     Burningman,

     FYI, my instructional series recently passed 500,000 sales. I guess I’m just not in the mainstream where porn is concerned.

     Nina Hartley.

     26 March 2005, 12:41 am

106. the burningman:

     yo, you’ve got some money!

     If you’re looking to unload some of that loot, http://nyc.indymedia.org

     We’re doing great work and we’re totally broke! Trying to build a radical media on volunteer labor is pretty hard. Sorry to be an opportunist, but you must be the richest person I’ve talked to in the last year.

     26 March 2005, 12:53 am

107. the burningman:

     Just out of curiosity, why doesn’t this series show up on the AVN sales charts? I’ve got no issue with the films you’ve produced, and should note that you do put your money where your mouth is. That’s why it’s so frustrating that you don’t dig into the very apparent “mainstream” of where porn is at, or to put it another way… what it is.

     Men drive the industry, and with the same logic that leads Bud and Miller to dominate beer, the core consumers of the industry are seeking out this degrading material and shifting the industry’s production to where the money is at. Alcoholics drink shitty beer. Porn’s core consumers want A2M. If you were in the mainstream, I suspect Red Light District and so one would be popping out one relatively vanilla instrucitonal after another. But that’s not what I see, nor what I see discussed on the boards at ADT or the sales figures of Adult Video News.

     By the way, I am so not kidding about the fund pitch. Here’s our “sex issue” from this winter that we put out in response to reader complaints about running ads from Toys In Babeland.

     http://images.indymedia.org/imc/nyc/application/7/Feb10_ALLforweb.pdf

     (Stan, cut me a break! I know this is totally shameless, but it never hurts to ask.)

     26 March 2005, 1:05 am

108. Nina Hartley:

     Shameless is the right word for you, burningman. You dis me in one breath and hit me up for money in the next. I generously support organizations in whose work I believe, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and Amnesty International, but porn-bashers need not bother to apply.

     Since you’re such an expert on our business and a regular reader of AVN, I’m surprised you missed the announcement at AVN Online when the Guide series passed the half-million mark. You can find it here:

     http://www.avn.com/index.php?Primary_Navigation=Articles&Action=View_Article&Content_ID=218573

     And no, as I said before, I’m not rich. I make a comfortable living with the support of a company that’s committed to goals I can endorse without reservation. The success of the series testifies to the interest and curiousity of a large, adult public that wishes to enrich its sexual experience through self-education. I guess they just don’t register on your radar.

     As to those pornographers who do, I can only say that in this branch of the entertainment business as in others, it’s not uncommon to see self-promoters inflate their own importance out of all proportion to the sizes of their actual audiences.

     Hostility-driven porn gets a lot of attention here and elsewhere, and I don’t dispute that it exists and that a lot of people buy it, but there are many other kinds of pictures out there and people buy a lot of those too.

     Which returns us to one of my original points in this discussion. Porn is a vast, diverse, creative endeavor, the contents of which defy simple categorizations of the sort I’ve seen here.

     Regarding the kind of porn of which you make so much, I have no taste for it personally, but I recognize sexual hostility as a legitimate subject for creative interpretation. I draw the line at physical harm to performers, and I’ve been drawing that line, literally, since before anyone here had ever considered the subject. But as far as content is concerned, I am indeed one of those hated personal libertarians who believes that people should have the freedom to project their fantasies through popular entertainment media, whether in a gonzo porn video or a straight-to-cable slasher movie. I believe that anything that it is lawful to do should be lawful to depict, period. My sensibilities need not rule the world in order for me to be at home in it.

     BTW, if you really believe that prostitution was all but eradicated in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, you ought to spend a little time with some people who grew up there, as I have. Performing sexual favors for a member of the nomenklatura in return for a bump up the waiting-list for a better flat isn’t any more ennobling of the human spirit than working a street-corner. It’s just less visible.

     N ina Hartley

     26 March 2005, 4:53 am

109. Sheldon:

     To say that misogynist porn is the dominant mode today is simply not true. Stan tried to prove this with the Pornliving website, but as I showed, just under 30% were arguably woman-hating. And I say ‘arguably’ knowing that there is a feminist magazine called
     “Bitch” and there are women running many of these websites who call themselves and others just that. Any man who sternly chastises those women for that by saying, “How can you say that when that’s what rapists say to their victims?” would quickly be met, I suspect, by an equally stern slap upside the head. [Rapists frequently use condoms, so I guess condoms shouldn't be used for safe sex, right, Stan?]

     Burningman, why would a slave yearning for the plantation join NOW or at least support the ERA, a woman’s right to choose, etc.? It would make more sense for them to hook up politically with Phyllis Schlafly or Dr. Laura (which, in fact, is what pro-Dworkin Tammy Bruce has done).

     I am fully aware of the discussion threads on ADT. I’ve partaken in a number of them, and have seen how a number of envious, low-self-esteem folks there have slandered Nina and her husband, Ernest, and AIM director Sharon Mitchell as unindicted conspirators in a scheme to get rich by monopolizing health care within San Fernando. At the same time, over at ADT are any number of other posters who have raised the issue of misogynist porn for years, who first brought that the attention of the public the problems with Max Hardcore and Robert Black. It’s so typical of Jensen & Co. to have claimed to have discovered that first, totally ignoring the prior denunciations of porn makers like Veronica Hart and others, going back to the late 1990′s.

     As if Jensen & Co. weren’t always against porn, looking for some excuse to stir up the usual crap.

     Yes, there has been a sizeable increase in this type of porn in recent years. Prior to the first Bush administration, all you had was pretty much Max Hardcore and Robert Black making that stuff – no more than 10% of the market. But after 2001, others joined in and it took off to where it is now about 1/3 of the market. Is it really because porn makers sensed a new craving among fans for ‘extreme’ stuff or because the climate was more ripe for government censorship, which tends to target mainstream porn more than the extremes? Porn that is poised to go, or already is, underground tends to show more abusive scenarios and take more chances with the health of its performers because of less accountability.

     The multiple count indictment last week announced by the government against Eddie Wedelstadt, a mainstream porn distributor, suggests that folks like him were the real targets all along, whereas the disproportionate publicity focusing on Robert Black was just the opening sideshow. While porn is still around, the government, I maintain, prefers misogynist porn because it coincides with their own retrograde views toward women, and will use whatever tools at its disposal to ensure an increasingly larger part of the porn marketplace for it.

     26 March 2005, 11:09 am

110. Sheldon:

     One more point, burningman. XXX-rated educational videos are not easy to make – they require a bit more intellectual thought than anything made by Red Light District. Most porn filmmakers are lazy, set in their ways, and prefer easy money in the short term to more money in the long-term. They’re more addcited to their credit cards than to sex.

     26 March 2005, 11:20 am

111. the burningman:

     Nina — I didn’t bash you. Hardly. One of the reasons I included a link to the Indypendent’s “sex issue” is that these are living debates among “comrades” on the left. Several of the articles are quite “personally liberatarian,” including on BDSM and consent, stories about gay cruising in Central Park and so on. Even my story, which defends the intellectual integrity of Andrea Dworkin does NOT call for government censorship… even that article was about trying to look at how real, not “fantasy” domination is ingrained in heterosexuality and not talked about nearly enough. I linked it because your claim that anti-pimp people are “prejudiced” is just not true. It diverts the discussion.

     The only peep show I’ve ever been to was at the Lusty Lady and it was a gender-fucking queer girlfriend who took me. My only visits to the male-suprematist utopia of strip clubs was to pick up my girlfriend. Again, out of four serious lovers in my life, three of them worked in the sex industry as prostitutes or strippers. So I’m not hating on anyone. I’m trying to figure some things out and as a man in a man’s world, I’m trying not to be part of the problem. Maybe some “good faith” in this discussion is in order. Maybe I’m not vanilla in my personal life. Maybe we’re all a little more complex than Jerry Falwell and Susie Bright would have us be.

     I’m not a regular reader of AVN and so on, but I was doing research for a piece on Andrea Dworkin… and not wanting to talk out of my ass, went and looked around for what was being said inside the industry. I’ve grown up in a porn-saturated world. I was born in the post-Deep Throat era and have used porn since I was 12, as it was widely available in downtown Manhattan where I was living. I’ve seen your movies, including in your heyday as a performer.

     Like you, I’m a red diaper baby and have looked at that mess full square. I’ve always rather liked you and appreciate the line you straddle. So, all that said — Gag Factor is not Debbie Does Dallas. As Sheldon noted, the last five years has seen a serious escalation of the explicit misogyny in porn and a reasonable discussion among users and performers of conscience does not have to be a simple-minded polarization. For every Fashionistas, an excellent movie, there is a bushel of hate-filled crapola and sociological statistics dueling aside, it has an effect. Of course it does. I know it does.

     If you draw the line at what is harmful, give a call to Jules Jordan. He is the best young director in porn and has stated categorically that female performers will not be cast in his films for insisting on condoms. That is harmful. The bottom line is money, not “expression of transgressive sexuality” or anything of the sort.

     Or, considering the very real clout and respect you have in the industry among the pornographers and performers, why don’t you unionize it.

     I no longer buy porn because I don’t want to give money to those people and the internet makes it free as a bird. But if major companies were compelled to deal with collective bargaining, perhaps the “physical damage” such as A2M and creampies, which are inherently unhealthy, could be eliminated.

     If anyone could pull it off, it’s you.

     26 March 2005, 12:04 pm

112. the burningman:

     And about hustling in the former Soviet Union et al: Sure, those were pretty corrupt regimes. But I live in Brooklyn right now and there is a lively traffic in sex slaves from Eastern Europe that is qualitatively different in an obvious way.

     To be absolutely clear: I don’t think prostitutes should be arrested. I do not think there is anything “immoral” in sex work. I DO believe that the VAST majority of sex work is economically compelled in a real world system of white supremacy, imperialism and male right to women’s bodies. Eliminating the sexual slavery of women is a major motivation for why I dedicate my life to revolution, not just libertinage. I believe a better world is possible and that the status of women in society, including their own agency and choices, is perhaps the greatest measure of the progress made. My heros are the girl guerillas in the mountains of Nepal, eliminating arranged marriages and fighting for land. We can make a better world. Men can stop hurting women and getting hard at tears. It’s not just that porn is an “expression,” it is social relationship that I want to rise above. Something we all do with each other, not through Bush’s Department of Justice or opportunist DA’s in California.

     26 March 2005, 12:10 pm

113. Nina Hartley:

     burningman,

     I apprecaite the respectful tone of your post, and generally agree with many things you say, but looking back over your previous comments, your general position still seems to be that, from inside porn or out, somebody should be trying to put a stop to the creation of materials that you find unworthy of protection based on their content. That is a fundamental difference of opinion – and while you may not have bashed me as hard as some others here, I counted many a derisive aside attached to my name in your previous comments.

     I certainly don’t consider it inappropriate to discuss the content of porn in a politically critical fashion, but I entirely reject the argument that porn you don’t like represents a vast social harm, or that I am required to denounce it.

     When it comes to unsafe practices, check out the AIM Web site and you’ll see exactly where we stand when it comes to getting specific about risks to performers. We’re already doing that gig.

     http://www.aim-med.org

     Were porn not the object of a newly-revivified campaign for prohibition, fronted by the same alliance of anti-porn feminists, religious fanatics and cynical, reactionary politicians I helped face down fifteen years ago – in other words, if porn’s right to exist weren’t still the key point of the debate – I might be more interested in debating the fine points of this or that genre. But if you read what’s gone on here, much less in even more hostile forums, I think you’d see why my concerns must remain more fundamental.

     From my side, I have never, contrary to charges made here over and over again, opposed outside criticism and/or analysis of porn and its content, or tried to silence any debate concerning these matters. However, I do not intend to join the chorus howling for my own blood.

     My activism dedicated to making porn in particular and sex-work in general better for those who work in these fields is conducted where it counts – within the world where I live and work.

     As for unionization, I’ve been down that road already too, and the problem is not, as so many outsiders would suppose, suppression from management as it is apathy from performers who belong to a transient population and aren’t prepared to make the committments of time and energy needed to create an effective performers’ organization.

     And judging from Stan’s sneering (sorry, but that’s the only word the fits) dismissal of sex-worker unions as hoping, at best, to limit the periods of gang-rape supposedly used to “break in” new sex-workers, I wouldn’t get much real help from over here with any organizing efforts, which we surely be dismissed as cynical and self-serving public relations gambits in any case.

     Until there is some basic agreement regarding the right of porn to exist, I’ll leave the criticism to the outsiders. They do that job with far more zeal than I could ever muster.

     Nina Hartley

     26 March 2005, 1:54 pm

114. the burningman:

     Nina — we’ve got to flip the whole script. The liberal/conservative debates always keep us in the “realm of the currently real.” I don’t trust this semi-fascist government to engage in censorship. I don’t even recognize them as my government.

     But…

     The way that black people migrated north to escape Jim Crow and be “free workers” is very similar in my mind to women who seek the “flexibility” of sex work. Within capitalism, we are all willing to make various concessions to “the real” in order to live our lives. But this is only freedom in relation to straight-up slavery and it’s just not good enough. The effect of making our sexuality into a commodity deeply alienates women in sex work from their own bodies in much the same way that capitalist “free labor” alienates all of us from each other. But it is particularly intimate and tied to women’s general subordination as such.

     Stan is pissed, and you guys had a whatever back and forth. I watched the arguments between NOW-type bourgeois feminists and anarchistic sex workers all through my teenaged years and always just shook my head.

     Let’s raise our sights fundamentally. Stan is making a real point. Rape culture is normal. He’s not interested in confession. But let’s suppose that as a career soldier stationed all around the world, he might have seen a few things and maybe, just maybe, it deeply effected him into being one of the few men making a stand against rape culture and it’s deptiction. Maybe he just can’t sidestep the way that prostitution works internationally (and here!) in order to make a point about liberal “free sex.” And it so obviously has nothing to do with the Christian right and THEIR arguments and intentions. They are radically different.

     I’m not a liberal who thinks that “rights” are real. Rights mean nothing without power. I work in left-wing publishing and without MONEY, we are marginal and scrap by. Meanwhile, the Village Voice makes as much off of every week’s advertising for third-world prostitutes as we pull in during a whole year’s fundraising. They clearly have the “right” to do it because they do. Where is the “right” NOT to do this?

     My starting point in all discussions of sexuality is how we break down the millenia-old system of female subordination. I see it all around me, in my own experience and behavior. It’s not my right to this act or that, or to consume or produce porn. It’s getting to the core of it. Because if I, or you, stay contrained in the liberal discourse about “rights,” it will always go back to who has money and can DICTATE whatever relationships they can finance.

     I’m quite perverse and pretty unembarassed about it. But along the way, in my own sexual practice, I’ve learned that spoken “consent” just isn’t enough. Women (and girls) let men do all kinds of shit. Some are certainly bottoms with “agency” — others have never experienced anything different and put up with it as the price of male affection, financial support and attention.

     As a youngish man in the movement for years now, I’ve met many women who gravitate to the left seeking refuge from the brutality they experience elsewhere only to be rudely disappointed. I think the men speaking here are trying in ways that are sometimes clumsy, sometimes exasperated, to break through to the raw core of a masculine sexuality defined by power over women. Again, I can’t speak for Stan or Jensen, but I’m not against ANY particular acts or fantasies between consenting adults free of financial coercion. But I will “disrespect” men who pay poor women for sex. I will disrespect pimps and the men who collect the vast sums generated by porn. Of course. I’m a communist who lives my life to bring down world order based on exploitation and maintained through violence both personal and institutional.

     You have become prominent in this discussion nationally. You personally have the power to “raise the stakes” in this discussion in a way none of the rest of us do. Your choices and priorities matter. That’s why I’m prowling this discussion.

     This isn’t about critiquing one “genre” or another. It’s about the essential reality of porn. It’s about why men use porn, which as someone above noted is largely to “escape” intimacy and love. I don’t think your instructional videos are porn. They are sexually explicit, but guys are not jerking off to it. Jensen is right that tens of millions of men ARE jerking off to very intense, even brutal violence against women that is sexualized. This is an issue that must be discussed and dissected even if we’re all united against the Christian fascists making power moves in the larger culture.

     26 March 2005, 2:47 pm

115. Nina Hartley:

     As much as I may dislike a company that will not hire a woman (or man, as we also have male all-condom players) who wants to use condoms, it’s that company’s right to set that policy. It’s also within the right of EVERY woman working in porn to decide not to work for said company. I can easily imagine the angry response this may inspire from some here, but I stand by the principle of individual rather than collective responsibility in this situation. A performer may not get as much work, which certainly sucks, but it’s that person’s responsibility to look after her/his health. I know this makes some people crazy, but it’s the kind of reality-based thinking that makes constructive reform possible. Personal responsiblity begins with the person. I’ve never engaged in activities that I felt were super-risky, and I’ve lost work because of it. I don’t care, as my health is more important to me than the day-rate. This is why, at AIM, we talk at such length to the talent about risk reduction and making better behavioral choices. If we grant the performers the dignity of being adults, we must speak to them as adults and let them make their own mistakes. Though we constantly urge the companies (and your incessant characterization of all producers as pimps and predators doesn’t make our job any easier) to adopt more progressive policies, and though we have had some success in doing so, at least regarding testing protocols, we don’t expect them to put our interests ahead of their own. In fact, our appeal to them on the basis of self-interest has been our most effective tool in getting them accept what has turned out to be a very effective anti-STD safety protocol. Since there is no union, and one is not going to happen any time soon, all we have is client education. Some get the mesage sooner or more completely than others, as would be expected in such a diverse population.

     We keep lamenting the situations of young adults who find themselves, for whatever reasons, and toward whatever purpose, in porn. We’re starting at the wrong end of the cow, people. By the time an 18-20 year old person finds his or her way to porn, their attitudes about themselves, their worth, as well as their understanding of sexuality are already well established. For every person who finds his or her way to porn or prostitution, there are tens of thousands of others who suffer abuse and exploitation in private, at the hands of family members. Where is the outrage for them? The marches for them? Abuse in the home isn’t as sexy an issue as the evils of porn, but it’s more widespread and pernicious.

     We’re at the tail end of nearly 10,000 years of culture and, yes, most of the world’s cultures are patricarchal, and use all sorts of means at their disposal to regulate the expression of sexuality, especially that of women. Ours is no different. What is different, though, is that, in our society at least, women can have this discussion.

     What are we, as a society, doing to address the lives of our young people? Not enough, it would seem. We keep our children ignorant of sexual matters by forcing abstinance-only sex “education” down their throats, we permit the government to gag health-care providers so they can’t mention birth control or abortion options, we keep them in homes where there is abuse so the family can remain “intact.”

     In a culture that has such puritanical roots such as ours, we shouldn’t be so surprised to find out that people are conflicted about their sexuality, and that some of that conflict is reflected in pornographic expression. It’s not the expression that’s the problem and to that very small extent, I see some merit in certain issues raised in this debate.

     However, I part company even with some outspoken members of my own industry, including my personal friends Jane Hamilton and Larry Flynt, for attempting to demonize pornographers whose products they regard as deleterious to our collective image. Opinions about porn, as the debate here reflects, are already highly polarized and now amount of self-censorship from within porn production is going to significantly change those opinions. I support freedom of expression as a greater good than the dubious benefits of disengenuous image-buffing by some of the larger players here.

     One more point, burningman. I do indeed make pornography for indviduals and couples to masturbate to or make love to. I happen to think both activities are healthy. I don’t construct heterosexual intercourse as rape and/or exploitation by definition and I think generating sexual arousal is a legitimate creative goal. I don’t care to be made out as the exception that helps separate the good pornographers from the bad pornographers. To those who hate porn, those distinctions are meaningless and I won’t play that game.

     Nina Hartley

     26 March 2005, 4:31 pm

116. Sheldon:

     Burningman, Robert Jensen is certainly NOT right about tens of millions of men jerking off to what HE deems as porn hateful to women – his data and ‘facts’ are faulty. For example, he can’t even define ‘gonzo’ porn correctly. In a prior version of the aforementioned piece, in Ms. magazine, he totally screwed up the facts about a Vivid couples porn film called ‘Delusional’. I posted a review of ‘Delusional’ on the web site which called into question his very credentials as a journalist, let alone a teacher. I suspect Jensen doesn’t post his porn stuff on Counterpunch because he suspects that the fact-checking rebuttals would damage his career.

     Jensen doesn’t consider that millions of women ARE jerking off to that stuff. Women are increasingly coming into their own, thanks in large part to the anonymity of the Internet, as a serious XXX-consumer base. Many women have been critical of Candida Royalle’s material as being too gentle for them, and it appears that the rougher stuff out there is more to their satisfaction – something that, quite frankly, has surprised even me. Robert Black’s videos may be produced by him, but his most notorious stuff – “Forced Entry” – was written and directed by his significant other, Janet Romano, a.k.a. “Lizzie Borden”.

     I certainly jerk off to Nina’s educational videos. Of course, they’re porn. Duh! Her gorgeous body is on display there, and the camera angles deployed are no different than those used in narrative porn or wall-to-wall porn. If you’re sincere about carrying on a constructive internal dialogue about the porn industry, you can post on the Free Forums on Nina’s website. But frankly, burningman, I have my doubts about someone who starts off insulting the only socialist porn star in the country and then hits her up for $$$. That’s cold, man, real cold.

     26 March 2005, 9:03 pm

117. the burningman:

     Who said Nina was the only socialist porn star in the country? I doubt that’s the case. She has a solidly liberal donation pattern (ACLU, AI, etc) and isn’t advertising her socialist contributions or activism. That’s not a slam, just an observation. I also don’t know exactly what brand of socialism could generalize her right-to-work notions across the board. It’s very much the rationale of Southern “right-to-work” anti-union laws. Let the market decide.

     Coal miners can “choose” not to work mines that don’t provide adequate safety mechanisms… but they don’t. Because they need to eat. Woman can “choose” not to work at restaurants where sexual harassment is normal. But they don’t because there’s really no escape from it. And so on. Liberal freedom is the right of capitalists to exploit us as they see fit. In work in general as in porn in particular, we can choose to get fucked by this guy or that guy. But we still get fucked right in the ass. (Except in porn we’d have to lick their shitty dick clean.)

     The result of sex management’s position on condoms is that gonzo companies, which produce the bulk of porn I have seen available for rental at my local video store, in Times Square and on the internet, is condom-free.

     Young women in FACT cannot make this “choice” if they wish to work in the industry. Most of them can’t “choose” not to take it in the ass either. This is why socialists tend to believe that capitalists have no RIGHT to set the standards for workplace safety. Pornographers choose to keep condoms out because they will make more money and THAT is the only principle that seems to matter. This is why I bring it up. There is no better measure of the basic power relations in the industry than this question.

     The companies which do buckle up are the corporate porn sites that make money through monopolistic distribution practices… which is a whole other kettle of fish.

     Nina is neatly illustrating why I am a socialist and not a liberal. Liberals accept that money is the barometer of choice and I do not because I can see exactly how it works, not just in porn but throughout every aspect of the economy. Don’t like the way the boss treats you? You’re always “free” to get another job. But no — I will not accept sex as an industry to be regulated by the profit motive of pimps and pornographers. I’ll keep on the path of free love. That’s my kind of socialism.

     ———–

     Fact-checking? Sheldon…

     evilangel.com
     elegantangel.com
     platinumxxx.com
     anabolic.com
     maxhardcore.com
     julesjordan.com
     jerkoffzone.com
     meatholes.com
     seymorebutts.com
     bangbus.com
     hustler.com

     These are the major producers of pornography that is available for DVD rentals and onlline. Maybe not ten years ago… but today. This is what is in the front of the porn shops and is getting the web traffic. This is just what it is. Why are you claiming otherwise? Is Seymore Butts a raving misogynist? I don’t think so. Neither is John Stagliano, who I will give definite credit to for breaking down homophobia in the hetero industry and also including strong, sexually empowered women (amidst the usual objectifications) in leading roles. But the exceptions prove the rule, as does Stagliano’s larger catalogue.

     Read the industry’s discussion boards and mouthpieces and browse through the back discussion:

     avn.com
     adultdvdtalk.com

     Or just do what TENS OF MILLIONS of other men do and:

     google.com

     The evidence is on plain display. You can keep your head in the sand, but I just moved out of a college dorm not so long ago. Every single man there had porn. Every one I knew,anyway, and I’m quite the gregarious one. We had a joke that you could just press play on any guy’s dvd player and watch what would come on. Nine times out of ten it was porn. And the content of what they were watching is largely degrading, often with seriously violent tone. Not IMHO. From reading the fucking box covers. They BRAG about it. And these guys aren’t demons. They are my friends and loved ones.

     I know some women who have watched some porn. But, again, in YEARS of watching and purchasing porn and living with men and women who (largely) have agreed with the pro-porn arguments, it is OVERWHELMINGLY men who buy and use these materials. Your claims are just flat-out bogus. I’ve never seen a single woman in a porn store who wasn’t on the clock. Ever. Ask the clerks at any rental shop in the country what percentage of their income comes from porn, and what percentage of the porn rentals are by men. It’s laughable to claim otherwise.

     Just because men do it, that doesn’t make it wrong. And because some women participate in the industry at multiple levels (thought generally not as high-profile producers and directors) is not a claim for the contrary. That’s sophistry. Africans helped in the transcontinental slave trade. Some free blacks owned slaves in the Antebellum south. Again, it’s the generalized and obvious degree to which women are kept at men’s collective disposal that has to end. I believe “right” is almost always a codification of existing power relations. Viewing porn as a “speech” issue is perhaps the most perfect example of this general principle.

     ——

     And if we’re going to talk about what’s “cold” — Making media that in no ways profits off the sexual exploitation of women is NOT profitable. The newspaper I’ve dedicated the last two years of my life to, The Indypendent in NYC, lost our largest advertiser because we didn’t want to have typical objectifying ads of women. Fact. The capitalist who ran that trend-setting clothing company literally shouted, among other things he ranted at me, that “I like to come in a chick’s eye and so what!” So we lose that money. Because it’s his RIGHT to do whatever his dick tells him.

     We bust our ass to provide original reporting and community-based commentary that assists a wide variety of social and labor movements in New York, but can only wonder as the corporate-owned Village Voice pulls in MILLIONS off of typical sexist crapola and third-party pimping.

     So in order to meet the very real financial needs of this “free paper for free people,” I have to ask literally every person of means I talk to for money. But guess what? Rich people have the RIGHT not to give us money. Because America is all about the RIGHT of capitalists to do whatever the fuck they want and the rest of us can eat shit. And in porn, that’s literal.

     26 March 2005, 9:53 pm

118. Nina Hartley:

     My, my, burningman, just a tad bitter are we? Seems the socialist business model doesn’t compete well in a capitalist society. That shouldn’t really be such a shock to someone steeped in Marxist class analysis.

     Though I try to preserve my socialist ideals, and do BTW also contribute money to the SWP along with my predictably liberal causes, I have become over the years a pragmatist of the sort just-out-of-the-dorm idealists particularly disdain. Having accepted the fact that I’m unlikely to save the world, I’ve decided to try and save a few lives in the neighborhood. Would you rather I didn’t? Would it be better if no one in porn did anything to improve conditions for those working in it? I know many anti-porn fanatics hold exactly that preference, because any reduction in the misery level of sex-work would tend to impeach their argument that only total and instant abolition of sexual commerce can bring benefit to women. Thus, they are perfectly willing to add to the suffering of real, live, specific women for the ultimate good of all.

     It’s that kind of thinking that makes moralists of any political stripe dangerous. They love humanity, as the cliche goes, it’s people they can’t stand.

     Now, one more time, as to the question of what constitutes mainstream porn content, based not on your visit to your local video store or to the rooms of your buds, but rather on the one standard capitalism recognizes, which is dollar-value, mainstream defined by sales is Jenna Jameson, Vivid, Wicked, Andrew Blake, John Stagliano, the Adam&Eve group (including me), Sin City, Metro and Playboy and its various affiliates. I would assume that few of the products of these companies or individuals would meet your standards of political correctness, but neither are they the extreme, aggression-driven materials that give you such distress.

     While undoubtedly very popular in some circles, Max Hardcore, Rob Black and Khan Tusion, inevitably the focus of Chyng Sun’s “documentary,” are not mainstream in porn. The combined sales at the harshest end of the spectrum are about one third those of the balance of the porn industry’s output, based on the figures AVN compiles every year. While these figures, like the International Conspiracy of Pimps, bulk large in the febrile imaginations of sex-work prohbitionists, they have fairly little impact on the lives of most sex-workers. I can see the name of Lara Roxx bubbling up here already, and I can only say that the circumstances under which she was infected were highly unusual, to say the least. That we have had exactly four instances of HIV transmission via porn work in Los Angeles County during AIM’s seven years of operation, with tens of thousands of sex scenes shot over that time, suggests that some extraordinarily bad judgment came into play last spring.

     Many within the industry are as upset as you are about the high visibility of what they consider ugly porn, though for different reasons I’m sure. Bigger players who have cast their lots with corporate cable providers are very eager to position porn closer to the rest of the entertainment industry and regard harder products as an obstacle to that goal. Personally, I have no dog in that fight. For as long as there is diversity in the range of porn avaiable, I’m not much troubled by the existence of images that offend me. I simply don’t look at them. I don’t make them and I advise other performers not to do so for their own sakes, though I’ve learned not to lecture those whose decisions differ from my own, as this rarely proves persuasive.

     Before trying once more to depart from here for good, let me just point out to you that porn isn’t an employer of last resort for young performers, regardless of gender (and I do wonder why it is that gay porn always seems to be omitted from these discussions), though other forms of sex-work certainly are. What we observe every day at AIM is the intensity of the competition to get into this business. People come from everywhere, flying on their own dime, not “trafficked” by anybody, determined to secure employment as porn performers. Far from being the naive victims portrayed by some here, many of them surprise us with the detailed knowledge of porn they bring along. It seems you’re not the only person outside of LA who reads AVN. Half the newcomers here contact production companies directly before making the trip. Many have their first gigs already lined up prior to their initial tests and head off to the set as soon as their results come in.

     None of which is to claim, as I’ve been accused of doing, that the work-place abuses upon which you dwell at such length don’t happen to them. The fierce pressure of so many aspiring porn performers contributes to the atmosphere of raw, frontier capitalism that prevails at the outer edges of porn production. There are, to be sure, many who will and do exploit a person’s willingness to do anything, and I do mean anything, for the money and attention that draws people into porn in the first place. Are performers coerced? No. Are they induced and manipulated? Certainly. That is how the entire economic system of which porn is just one part operates. On the fundamental cruelty of that system, you and I would find considerable agreement. Our disagreement lies in what is to be done.

     Until the coming of utopia, I believe it is the ethical obligation of anyone capable to do what he or she can to mitigate the destructive effects of the marketplace. I long ago stopped waiting for a more perfect world, rolled up my sleeves and got to work on improving this one. That work, I’ve found, is best served by clear-headed realism and an acceptance of human frailty. I’m well aware of the evils that can be rationalized in the name of realism, but I’m equally aware of the evils done in the name of higher purpose. I don’t share your inchoate nostalgia for Stalinism, or your belief that a command economy would be kinder or more just. I favor the mixed economic model of the E.C. and continue to support those political efforts intended to bring about similar reforms here. I have no interest at all in any political system that offers some abstract vision of justice at the price of individual liberties, including the liberty to make wrong decisions. Correct ideas, says Chairman Mao, come from social practice and from social practice alone – not from the guidance of the Party.

     Nina Hartley

     27 March 2005, 4:04 am

119. Sheldon:

     Hey, burningman, I already posted about my familiarity with those discussion boards. I was a writer for AVN in the 1990′s, so you’re telling ME about those boards??

     You haven’t seen women patronizing sex shops? Well, I have. They usually shop or rent in pairs (perhaps out of fear that a male customer might hit on them), but they’re there. I never said they were there in equal numbers to men IN THE STORES. But on the Internet, they order the videos in quantities far more closer to men. Even studies that draw dubious conclusions about sex addiction demonstrate that the number of women who are ‘hooked’ on Internet porn is equal to the number of men similarly ‘afflicted.’ Thus far, every woman I’ve seen quoted as being open (giving out her name) about her porn use is a supporter of mainstream feminism.

     Ex-performer Candida Royalle is a very high profile producer, but I guess that makes her, what, a freed slave running a plantation? That’s exactly what John Stoltenberg meant when he referred to her as a pimp on my radio program. Ms. Royalle has been a member of NOW – would an ex-slave-turned-slave owner join the NAACP??

     So, even for you the Village Voice is some kind of sell-out? Last I checked, they still do solid exposes of government corruption and other muckraking, and are certainly more likely to make a difference for a better world than your freebie is.

     On what basis do you doubt that Nina is, thus far, the only socialist porn star in the country? Hell, you don’t even think SHE is a socialist because of your destructive sectarian games. But since you put more faith in your college buddies’ “research” over mine (which is far more easily verifiable), perhaps THEY will tell you who the OTHER socialist porn stars are that I missed…before you proceed to discredit them as socialists as well. Oh, I can definitely see this country being transformed for the better with the Left being typically composed of folks who think like you.

     Do you really insult people to their face before hitting them up for a donation, or do you just do that to folks like Nina Hartley because picking on sex workers has social approval? If your attitude is typical of The Indypendent, then not only will it fail, but it will DESERVE to fail.

     27 March 2005, 7:21 am

120. the burningman:

     Sheldon — Going back to Jensen’s piece that started the discussion, I think it’s clear who’s “picking on sex workers.” But Nina’s not simply a sex “worker” at this point. Her advocacy of “mixed economy” neatly dovetails with her “mixed” role in the industry.

     And yes, Sheldon, I speak frankly to people all the time. Bitter is not the right word, exactly, but there is a fair amount of anger beating in my heart — not least because women are to this day, by and large, still second-class citizens of the world even when we can’t just deploy a hackneyed “class analysis” to blame “the man.” It’s a tyranny we are all a part of. So our ability to make changes in the here and now is so much greater, and so much harder.

     Is the Village Voice “some kind of sell-out?” Are you kidding? The Voice, for those not living in NYC was once a powerhouse of independent journalism and commentary and has for many, many years been a lifestyle rag for yuppie scenesters. They are solidly liberal, which means they say mean things about all those icky conservatives. That’s just recognizing their market, which is clearly what drives their coverage. By page count, there are more ads for prostitutes than original journalism. Thanks for the vote of confidence on what “makes a difference,” Sheldon. It’s great to see where your priorities lie, what kind of media you are willing to pay for and how quickly you denigrate modest efforts to build a non-sectarian, radical media.

     But this is all silly talk. You should send some money, too, Sheldon! Here’s a suggestion: send 1/4 the money you spend a year on images to jerk-off to and just use your imagination the rest of the time.

     ———-

     Where the argument gets to the nut is in this: “The fierce pressure of so many aspiring porn performers contributes to the atmosphere of raw, frontier capitalism that prevails at the outer edges of porn production.” And it continues when Nina upholds European social-democracy as an example of the “mixed economy” that she supports. Because there is a link.

     French chocolate comes from African plantations. Sex workers in Amerstam are from Colombia and Russia. And it’s less and less “mixed” all the time. The core of capitalism depends on ruthless exploitation of the “outer edges.” It’s just that the outer edge is generally much larger and more crucial to the rich core than those in the bubble like to recognize. Which is why there is ALWAYS an intense desire to enter that wealthy core, whether it be African on rafts in the Mediterranean or prostitutes hoping to hit the dance circuit with porn bonafides.

     Nina wants to save one life at a time? That’s great, even if she’s willing to let pornographers enforce “no condom, no work” rules. Talk about sacrificing real lives to make a point about “rights.” Could there be a better example of the jacket you’re trying to fit on me?

     And whoever these people are (on the left) wishing for the pain of sex workers to prove their points, I’ll take your word they exist. But “the left” I’m a part of, perhaps in my (relatively) fresh from the dorms world, is filled with people also fresh from the sex industry and other forms of hustling. The woman I discussed who passed away in my first post here was a harm-reduction worker in San Francisco’s Street Survival Project, who gave out clean needles, condoms and feminist counseling to underage street prostitutes in the Tenderloin. So the strawman you’re used to dealing with is not here — if they are in fact anywhere.

     Oh, Nina. Mao was right. And the specter of totalitarianism always shrouds the tyranny of the liberal free market. People in Cuba can blame Castro, but here? The genius of capitalism is that the poor just about always blame themseves for their “chocies.” Because we’re always playing with a loaded deck and the house takes the money nine times out of ten.

     Socialism, in a decided less “mixed” form, holds the promise that money is not the measure of all things, including sexuality. My point isn’t about compelling anybody to do anything or sacrifice (effectively non-existent) rights on some dogmatic alter. It’s about dealing with the real: capitalism is not a choice for most of us. It is entirely totalitarian even if it gives us the right to “choose” how we are exploited and even aspire to join the upper classes should we be gifted, clever and ruthless. Women should have the freedom NOT to be prostitutes. Which they don’t.

     Going back to the”frontier model,” my favorite TV show is currently Deadwood. I think it’s a pretty good example of the frontier, where settlers raped and pillaged their way across this continent in search of gold. Where poor whites were given the power over the heathens to turn the sanctified Black Hills into brothels and gold mines. Where genocidal racism was the ideology and free use of enslaved women one of the perks. I think the “frontiers” of Africa and Asia subsidize the “mixed” economies of Europe and provide the most degraded participants in even their domestic economy.

     You also go with the 1/3 ratio for the explicitly degrading porn, which you say is based on AVN sales totals. If we take out cable distribution of Vivid and Wicked, where monopolistic practices are in effect and go by what is on display at rental outlets and in the East Coast distribution hub of Times Square… that ratio would tilt considerably. But even assuming it is correct… Porn had a smile in it’s “golden age.” That ribald grin has been replaced with a sneer.

     This is why you two go to such pains to dismiss what Jensen noted about the drift of porn and try to act as if it is “peripheral” Larry Flynt or Paul Cambria complaining about the “good name” of porn would be hilarious if I hadn’t seen enough Hustler (and Barely Legal) in my time to know better.

     ———-

     A good friend of mine, an Arab, told me perhaps the smartest thing ever about pornography. She said, “porn is the American veil.” In that simple remark, the way that power over women is eroticized became crystal clear to me. You mock Iran, which by the way has a thriving sex industry, but many Arab feminists are quick to point out that different cultures have different means of keeping women in primary service to the cock.

     Karl Marx broke it down as simple as can be:

     “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man (and, in this case, woman) to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconsciounable freedom — free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

     In other words — we’ve got to do better than this. The choice isn’t between the veil and porn, Falwell and Larry Flynt. If we’re serious about human dignity, let alone socialism, recognizing capitalism’s “choice” for it’s intrinsic lie is certainly a good place to start.

     Just because you’ve lowered your horizons doesn’t mean the rest of us have to follow suit. I respect those who run soup kitchens and needle exchanges. I got “toys for tots” when I was a kid and know a band-aid is often better than nothing at all. But so long as we are constrained by the tyranny of the real, we will not be able to solve the basic problems effecting the world, problems which manifest in each of our precious individual lives every single day. I don’t want better conditions on the cell block. I want the prisons torn down.

     Dead Prez said “it’s bigger than hiphop.” I’d add that sexual liberation, if it is to exist at all, is bigger than the rights of pimps to buy and sell women. Defenders of the pornocracy can’t abide by ANY real criticism that threatens the ability of pimps to get rich off the lie of porn. Nina and Sheldon continue arguing with strawmen about stigmatizing sex workers, when that capitalist advertiser who pulled his money out of a radical paper put it best: “I like to come in a chick’s eye and so what.” Who takes him to task? No one. And even if they did he could just hire a new fan club.

     So, Nina, you’re right about that too: radical media doesn’t survive on the market. Neither would The New Republic, The Nation or the National Review. Ideological papers of any stripe require rich people of conscience to give money. We’ve all got to hustle, baby. So forgive my wanton passion for something besides defending the colonization of desire by commodity.

     ——–

     Since this discussion appears to be wrapping up, I’d just hope that Nina, Sheldon (and by extension Suzie Bright, etc) can stop arguing with strawmen and start dealing with the real. There is a “really existing porn” and real men and women of conscience who see it as a social system, not just a form of speech. There is a truth to this position and it bears discussion.

     I am not “offended” by any porn. I’m not vanilla or a prohibitionist. I love sex workers, I just don’t partake in their exploitation and when I think of free love — that means free from commodification and coercion in all it’s forms. And I think we can have the intellectual and emotional honesty to be genuinely concerned at the prevelence of sexual sadism in this culture.

     Sheldon can note that a woman wrote “Forced Entry,” a simulated snuff-film recently under obscenity indictment, but I’ll just note that it was a woman who had that Arab prisoner on a leash at Abu Ghraib. So fucking what.

     Nina can claim whatever political identity she wants. But her arguments here are liberal, not socialist. Applied to any other industry and you get the jackals clamoring against OSHA.

     My doubt is that she’s the “only” socialist porn star. I imagine there are many more than her, even if they aren’t as outspoken. I’ve only known one porn performer, hardly a star, and she was also a libertarian socialist — though her meth addiction made any kind of activism kind of moot.

     27 March 2005, 11:17 am

121. trace:

     Quite the thread!

     I looked Nina up on Wikipedia and here’s what they say: “.

     In recent years, Hartley has become an advocate for the adult film industry, and is often called upon when television news programs and talk shows require an industry representative.”

     “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Hartley

     I’ll say one thing for porn, how many industries have socialists representing them?

     27 March 2005, 11:24 am

122. Nina Hartley:

     Just a few quick points before I get back to my usual business of “representing the porn industry” (as opposed to expressing my own opinions on the subject, since everybody knows I don’t have any because, after all, sex-workers who don’t agree with prevailing dogmas on the subject are obviously speaking for somebody else):

     I’m a big fan of Deadwood myself, and for many of the same reasons. I see some interesting parallels between gold-rush capitalism and sex-industry capitalism. The two rather go together, historically speaking. My husband grew up in Denver, the biggest gold camp in the West. He points out that in 1889, one quarter of the 40K residents there was a prostitute. Miners and prostitutes eventually formed the nucleus of the local middle-class and some of their children and grand-children ended up on the Social Register. I’m not a great believer in the myth of upward mobility, but one thing frontier capitalism did produce – along with millions of victims – was a measure of social mobility for those who would otherwise not have had a prayer of escaping permanent poverty. Sex-work has served as a route into the middle-class for women since capitalist class structures first developed. In porn, along with all that suffering and degradation we keep hearing about, we also find women from poor backgrounds buying houses, financing educations, and otherwise working their way out of this business into new lives. Of course we see plenty of the opposite – women who squander the money on drugs, bad boyfriends (not pimps in the usual sense, but parasites of a different stripe) and useless consumer goods. Success stories are less entertaining than horror stories, both to corporate media and anti-porn partisans, so we don’t hear about those, any more than we hear about happy marriages in porn, of which there are a number, including my own.

     Frontier capitalism is capitalism with the bark off, and I think people should get a good look at that. It has some virtues and affords some chances, even to deserving individuals once in a while, but I’ve already said I regard it as a cruel system, though I favor restraining rather than abolishing it, as no system, including that of Soviet communism, has yet succeeded in bringing forth a less brutal, advanced, industrial society. The possibility certainly still exists, but so far the experimental results haven’t been encouraging. This season, civilization, with all its benefits and additional sins, is clearly coming to town. Interesting to see what happens.

     Now, on to the absolutely false and completely slanderous charge that I am willing to let porn producers enforce a no-condom, no-work rule. I’ve made very plain here and elsewhere what I think of such producers and their rules. Willing is the last thing I am when it comes to this. I refuse to work with such producers and I remind every performer who comes within earshot that they don’t have to. Because of my opposition to a government regulations scheme that would have resulted in the unraveling of the voluntary testing system and resulted in even lower use of condoms by driving a substantial portion of the industry underground, I have been painted as an opponent of condom use in porn, “one of the jackals clamoring against OSHA,” when in fact I’ve spent twenty years pushing for condoms. I use them in my shows and I deny the still-substantial pulling power of my name to products made by companies that don’t allow condom use. As to letting non-condom producers make their pcitures as they do, I can only speak out against these practices at every turn, but I have no power to stop them by myself. This is an effort of consciousness-raising, and it will have to proceed from the workers upward, as all reforms do under capitalism. Just as miners in the early labor movement had to absorb the personal risks of resistance and organization to create unions, sex-workers must at the very least be willing to sustain the loss of a few gigs if they want to see more condoms in porn. Players who insist on condoms take direct hits on the bottom-line, as I have. My director SO, who started refusing to shoot for anti-condom companies ten years ago when doing so was even more controversial, and who now heads AIM’s board of directors, has waved off tens of thousands of dollars in directing fees in return for being able to sleep at night. Neither of us has any regrets. I tell performers and directors that if they’re willing to wait on the new rides and plasma TVs, they can and should insist on reasonable safety precautions in their places of work. It’s happening too, though not fast enough for any of our preferences. In your incessant harping on the actions of the most predatory producers, you overlook the fact that performer initiatives have resulted in a doubling of scenes shot with condoms over the past three years. Still not good enough, but progress unthinkable ten years ago.

     So, in a word, no, I’m not comfortable with the idea of companies refusing to allow condoms. I argue with them directly in a language they understand – that condoms don’t significantly impact sales (and with numbers to prove it) when the videos are otherwise well-made and that the long-term self-interest of producers lies in creating a safer working environment that will prove more sustainable in the long run. Calling people names and shouting at them rarely wins arguments. Porngraphers are used to being called names and otherwise hassled. They consider that par for the course and pay no heed.

     I am not willing to sacrifice a single life in the making of entertainment products, which sets me apart from mainstream Hollywood, where a few professional stunt players are killed or severely injured every year in the creation of trivial entertainment no one could defend as necessary. There are occasional grumblings about tighter safety regs for stunt players and the odd lawsuit here and there, but the loss of a life or two isn’t considered too high a cost to pay for an unending stream of mediocre action pictures.

     My point is that dangerous labor practices in the entertainment business are hardly limited to porn. At least we recognize those dangers and make what has so far proved to be a very effective effort to limit them.

     As to the drift toward what you call sexual sadism in porn content – this week’s new bogeyman – I don’t ignore it. I recognize it as a passing trend of the sort that sweeps through trendy industries. I consider most reality TV to be essentially sadistic, along with Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie. Sadism sells in many places other than porn, and frankly when it’s expressed via entertainment media that do no actual harm to the players, I find it far less troubling than the guilt-ridden Professor Jensen. Cruelty isn’t just a part of capitalism, it’s a part of human nature, which is why capitalism commodifies it. If you think there’s anything new about sadism as entertainment, check out Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which starts right out with the gang-rape and mutiliation of a young princess. Now, if somebody had actually been gang-raped and mutilated in order to produce the play, we would be talking about actual criminality. As it is, we’re talking about the fictional depcitions of human vices. Much is made by anti-porn activists of the heinous acts somehow forced on porn performers in the name of sexual sadism, but there is, in fact, a pool of performers who specialize in the grand guignol sort of spectacle that, frankly, I don’t like myself, but who have mastered the circus magic that allows them to do so without sustaining bodily harm. One thing that gets lost in these conversations is the fact that certain players show up in these videos over and over. Mysteriously, they’re not dead, have not fled and when interviewed or speaking for themselves on ADT, ferociously insist that they prefer to do these videos. I know many of these players (some of whom work in my shows, which they consider pleasant if a bit quaint) and I wouldn’t presume to tell them what they ought to do instead. They get plenty of advice, and plenty of criticism, from other sources. Sexual sadism just isn’t the hot-button to me that it is to you and Jensen.

     Final point: Since you’re so eager to dispose of straw-men, you might consider the one about women not being free not to sell their bodies. Avarice and ambtion should not be confused with force and compulsion. Porn is, as I’ve said, a very competitive business and by no means the only employment available to those who beat down the door to get in. The alternative jobs have their own problems, but the usual issue is that they don’t pay as well and are more highly regimented. Like Deadwood, it’s not easy getting out here and those who do are pretty determined. No one is drafted for this work and they do have choices, whether or not you acknowledge those choices, just like I can choose not to give money to causes I don’t believe in, however unfair you may find this.

     I guess you’d prefer a system under which I would be compelled to contribute to your newspaper. Of course, under such a system, you might be unable to publish at all if those deciding who gets funded don’t like what you have to say. That’s another kind of risk I’m unwilling to take.

     The fact that my convictions differ from yours doesn’t mean I don’t have any.

     Nina Hartley

     27 March 2005, 2:52 pm

123. Sheldon:

     “I don’t want better conditions on the cell block. I want the prisons torn down.”

     Yes, we all want that socialist utopia now, don’t we? But wanting it isn’t going to make it happen. The first place to start is to level the playing field. Then you plan to level the stadium. And that’s what Nina Hartley has been doing, brick by brick, along with Dr. Sharon Mitchell.

     When the sex workers at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco first planned on improving their lives there, they first unionized. It worked because they were all working in one location and had acquired enough class consciousness to stay disciplined and focused. Then when the opportunity arose, years later, they bought the place from management and turned it into a sex worker’s collective. Folks like you, burningman, would have shouted at them for being sellouts for unionizing in the first place instead of going for immediate collectivization. And those workers would have kicked you out for acting like an agent provocateur.

     And what was the stage name of this ‘libertarian socialist’ porn film performer who was on crystal meth? Gee, why am I not surprised that you couldn’t supply the name? All smoke, no fire from the bizarrely appropriately-named burningman. It wouldn’t surprise me if your so-called capitalist advertiser with a taste for facials was a straw-man of your own dubious imagination.

     Janet Romano is not part of a chain of command – she writes and directs what she wants, even if she doesn’t think it will sell. On the other hand, uniformed officers openly encouraged Lynndie England to do what she did and probably would have stalled her career if she chose not to indulge her sadistic impulses.

     Burningman, do you really think Stan Goff would be flattered that you are referring to him as a “straw man”? He and others have made the arguments that I, Nina, Sex Worker and Anthony have responded to. So, what are we supposed to do, say nothing and only talk about what you consider ‘real’? Don’t the actual facts matter?

     Don’t waste your time with your self-serving swill about your Indypendent being truly a good thing – the first impression you’ve left is all I need to know it ought to be consigned to the circular file. If the Village Voice is good enough for the National Organization for Women [of which my wife, I and Nina are all proud members], then it’s good enough for me – heck, NOW’s only beef with the Voice is with Nat Hentoff, for his continued diatribes against affirmative action and the pro-choice movement.

     It’s kind of difficult to take rhetorical flights of fancy seriously from someone who insults people before asking them for money. You pull that shit in my face, on the street, and you will wind picking up your teeth off the cement pavement.

     27 March 2005, 5:44 pm

124. Sheldon:

     Thanks, Trace, for the heads up about the Wikipedia site. I’ve already edited the entry on Nina for accuracy.

     The San Fernando porn industry is rare in a number of ways. In addition to having someone like Nina Hartley advocate its RIGHT TO EXIST, female workers get paid about five times the wages of their male counterparts.

     All in all, among the least repressive of those U.S. capitalist industry without unions. I’d rather have my kids work there than for Walmart.

     27 March 2005, 6:45 pm

125. Nina Hartley:

     Much as I appreciate Sheldon’s spirited support for my position, I don’t have the same first impression of burningman, who strikes me as sincere and sincerely conflicted. Unlike some other contributors here, I have a feeling burningman and I could reach consensus on some issues. I take him at his word that he has some personal experience with sex-workers, has no personal beef with them and doesn’t harbor profound resentments toward others based on their personal sexual orientations. That he’s even willing to acknowledge the possibility of a picture like Fashionistas having some artistic merit puts him much closer to my end of the political spectrum, and that of Activist Sex Worker, than to that of Andrea Dworkin.

     Stan may be willing to make common cause with theocrats over pornography or lotteries, where I would not, but burningman and I might be able to make common cause over measures aimed at improving the lives of sex-workers, where he and Stan may not.

     As this conversation turns from doctrine to practice, it gets much more interesting and potentially more useful.

     Nina Hartley

     27 March 2005, 8:30 pm

126. the burningman:

     Instead of just telling Sheldon to blow it out his ass, I’ll say this: Trying to figure out who is “genuine” from what they write on the internet could be quite a pastime and I wish Sheldon the best of luck. As he’s a former writer for AVN, I suspect we have different takes on what matters so I’ll avoid being defensive for his obviously ill-informed ideas of what contemporary, collective Independent Media looks like. He couldn’t even be bothered to read the link I provided above which shows that my beliefs are distinctly in the minority on the paper, even if The Indypenent is willing to print a genuine diversity of ideas…. hard as that might be for him to swallow. I don’t think AVN ever ran serious anti-porn criticism, so the image of us “forcing” anyone to do anything is absurd at face when he worked for pornographic trade journals that so not tolerate any dissent from the industry’s party line.

     I knew one woman who I worked with at a San Fran nightclub where I was barbacking. She was a go-go dancer. She was in an early installment of John Leslie’s Voyeur series, which I’ve never seen but she seemed awful proud of. She was a part of San Francisco’s vibrant autonomous culture. Her name is really her own business and if you do the math is was several years ago. I’ve had sex workers in my family and brought them to meet my family. But really, my bonafides are besides the point as I’m really not impressed with “the industry” and, like Dworkin and Stan, think it is essentially a particularly intense manifestation of women’s subordination.

     Regarding the clothing manufacturer with a penchant for not just facials, but “coming in a chick’s eye and so what,” I assure you he is quite real and that I discussed his views on porn and what women are good for in some detail as he pulled his ads from out paper because we were “too pc.” His right, no doubt. Because “right” is about power. He has it because he gets rich off the Mexican workers who sew his clothes and we, as a volunteer-run leftist paper in Bush’s America, do not.

     Sheldon can say that women make five times what the male performers do, but it’s not the performers bringing in the serious money. It’s the pimps. From what I can see, many of the producers are now male “performers.” There are enough exceptions to note, but I’m not anti-male. I’m quite “the guy” and I don’t play sensitive for the women. But my debatable authenticity is not the issue…

     The point is that the content of the relationships define the system. Call that Marxist “class analysis,” or flip your wig with Foucault. I don’t care if a black woman is running the US Department of State. I care about what that state does. Many prostitutes are now “free agents” and don’t have pimps. Prostitution is still a form of generalized sexual slavery. Though it is important to note who the owning class, whether economic or gender — and in porn it usually ends with a rich white man, JUST LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE.

     You mock the very idea of socialism as an ever-receeding horizon and make your choices accordingly, Sheldon. But I can’t think of too many other occupations where vomiting is considered an acceptable occupational hazzard or having two INSANELY large dicks thrust up your ass so that you have to take Oxycotin to bear the pain is normal just so some jaded porn addict can get his ever-increasing fix. Or where running the risk of HIV infections through having a dozen guys ejaculate in your perforated ass is just a “choice.” So please.

     Nina is a libertarian socialist and makes her calls accordingly. I would probably grant her more good faith than Stan, particularly after their funky altercation a little while ago. I don’t know Stan and feel no need to impress him. I’m not writing for him.

     I’m not particularly conflicted at all. I’ve taken my share of drugs in this life, and while I support decriminalization — I believe in pretty severe punishments for traffickers and removing the stigma from addicts so we can help them get sober. I like (non-addictive) drugs and I’ve learned to be careful in the choices I make. Sex work is basically decriminalized in New York City, as is porn. You can get bestiality flicks and “German” films by going to the heart of Manhattan. I didn’t support Giuliani’s war on strip clubs or any of that. I don’t support this government and don’t trust them to make “moral” or political choices for me or you or the whole world like they seem intent on doing. And I don’t see Jensen or Goff calling the Department of Justice on San Fernando Valley. I see them sparking a discussion as men about the content of our relationships with women in a world system that effectively enslaves women as a class in many ways including through economic coercion into the sex industry. That’s it.

     Like Jensen, I know what I see with my own eyes. I know what I feel in my own heart — and I, like many men I’ve known, feel an erotic charge from sexual power over women. That’s why I’m learning to speak about it. Because I want to grow as a person, as a man and member of the human race. Not just through some glorious proletarian uprising, though I’ll do my part for that TOO you cynical old bastard.

     I’m not a Christian and wasn’t raised with their concepts of sin and salvation. I don’t believe some things are “dirty,” even if I can see real harm from actions and some kinds of culture. This country is awash in sexual sadism which I do not exempt myself from by hectoring others. I haven’t done that here and I don’t do it in my life. I seek out and practice consensual, conscious sexuality and have found that with women who had little patience for hypocricies and repression. Nina is right about the relationship between vice and repression. Of course. We’ve all read Reich here. Because these urges are so powerful and eroticized, I think it is crucial that the means by which society has found to promote AND regulate male sexual sadism, particularly through pornography, prostitution, racism and religion, be recognized as a part of that system, which they essentially are even if there are exceptional exceptions.

     The reason I noted Stagliano’s Fashionistas is that it made a conscious effort to overcome the typical homophobia and rape undercurrents so prevelant in vanilla porn. By making the implicit explicit through it’s exploration of BSDM with women as conscious agents of their own sexuality (and Rocco Siffredi as a bottom), Stagliano was engaging in not just top shelf porn, but also a deconstruction of the industry in which he’s made his life. I don’t respect his occupation, but I can note his art. Hell, my favorite novelist is Dosteyevski and no one’s tried to revoke my commie card for that one.

     ———

     Before I continue with Nina’s suggestion that we discuss “what is to be done?,” I’d like to mention that I respect Andrea Dworkin’s writing immensely. She is a tremendously courageous philosopher of the bedroom who has paid a heavy price not just for her mistakes and essentialism, but more fundamentally for the deep truths she has written about the core of patriarchal sexuality.

     I recently wrote a very short reconsideration of Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. There are scores of comments debating this as well:

     http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/140928/index.php

     ———

     Oh hell, I have work in the morning and I’m writing this craziness. More later.

     28 March 2005, 1:48 am

127. Sheldon:

     Dworkin’s unwillingness to ‘bow before the cock’ is no different than Louis Farrakhan’s refusal to bow before the white man or Meir Kahane’s refusal to bow before the Gentile: over-the-top supremacist rhetoric designed to divide and conquer progressive movements. The real agenda of all three come out for those wo wish to see: in Farrakhan’s opposition to Malcolm X and his continuing anti-Semitism, in Kahane’s hatred of all things Arab and strengthening the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and in Dworkin’s enthusiastic alliance with Christian fundamentalists, such as Stop ERA operative Beulah Coughenor, and her oppostion to feminists who share a core belief in democracy. There is nothing courageous about targetting porn in a puritanical culture even if the rhetoric is not strictly textbook. Would an outbreak of Stalinist anti-Semitism be courageous in Nazi Germany?

     And as some of the comments over at the Indypendent make clear. Jed, Dworkin has been a supporter of bestiality and incest/pedophilia even while opposing pornography(see her book “Woman Hating”), an argument even conceded by Jensen’s writing partner, Ann Russo in her book with Cindy Jenefsky, “Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin’s Art and Politics.” What’s courageous about raping animals and kids, neither of whom can give meaningful consent? But you better not take pictures of those acts, because then that would be OBJECTIFICATION!!!

     Dworkin’s movement came of age during the Reagan-Bush I era, wilted during Clinton, and is now back again under Dubya. Coincidence?

     And it seems to me that you’re still on drugs if you seriously believe that the sex industry in New York is decriminalized. Mayor Bloomberg is carrying out the repressive work of Giuliani as faithfully as he can, and prostitutes talk about police abuse happening now. There is only one kind of genuine decriminalization, and that’s removing adult sex work off the law books entirely.

     28 March 2005, 6:45 am

128. Sheldon:

     And speaking of courage, let’s remember that Nina went to JAIL for her beliefs. She was arrested in 1993 in Las Vegas under Nevada’s ‘Infamous Crimes Against Nature’ statute for staging lesbian sex acts, along with 11 other performers (including, IIRC, Sharon Mitchell), and subjected to the ‘usual’ humiliating search-and-seizure.

     In contrast, all Dworkin has been subjected to since she declared her jihad against porn is what? Marginalization by the liberal press? Aww, poor baby! But fear not – she is adored by her patriarchal allies on the Far Right, who will conveniently ignore her lesbian identity, just as they do Mary Cheney’s.

     28 March 2005, 6:55 am

129. the burningman:

     Sheldon, you are an asshole.

     Aside from your dogmatic refusal to look at the content of porn, or the realities of sex work in general, with anything approaching honesty — your disrespect of me seems part and parcel of your general method. I hate the rape of women, like Dworkin, and therefore you see me as a threat to the buying and selling of women’s bodies and the commodification of desire. This seems to be the only value you hold truly dear.

     Instead of engaging what I wrote, what I “dishonestly” linked to, you drag out unrelated and sideline issues, along with using my name clearly against my wishes. The reason I’m not using my name is because I wish to argue IDEAS, not PERSONAL POSITION. So fuck you.

     Dworkin’s writings on children’s sexuality and her over-the-top ideas about besitality are related to what I would criticize as her philosophical “over-determinism.” But frankly they are really irrelevent, which is why I ignored them.

     The idea that the left, which is fundamentally opposed to the sexual caste system, is in league with Christian fundamentalists is fucking absurd. But no matter how much I’ve tried to have a serious discussion without distorting the ideas of others, you can’t abide that and come in with your slash-and-burn lies. It’s the same demagoguery that says people who oppose Zionism are ipso facto anti-Semites, even if they are Jewish. You want this discussion to turn into a shithole, so readers tune out because it’s all a mess. That way the status quo reigns and you, as a defender of the dominant power relations can continue on you merry way.

     It’s the same demagoguery happening on college campuses with the debate about Israel. The Zionists don’t have to win anybody over, they just have to shut down the debate. You just want the discussion to go away, and will try to shame your self-selected opponents into silence. That you have the balls to accuse me, or Stan or Dworkin, of the very vice you revel in is almost funny. Almost.

     I think prostitution can’t be eliminated by criminalizing prostitutes. Sex laws, which I’ve stated repeatedly in this thread, often serve to REGULATE the sex industry, not get rid of it. You can’t fight exploitation by criminalizing workers. I believe that only a movement with a broad social component based on OUR choices, combined with an end to commodity relations generally, will get rid of the compulsion that means millions of women have to whore themselves.

     When I say sex is effectvely de-crimalized, it’s because I can go online right now and have a prostitute delivered to my house. I can open up the two largest “alternative” weeklies and browse hundreds of explicit prostitution listings. There are hundreds of working brothels in New York and they take credit cards. As is typical in this city, the most proletarianized sections of the working class are viciously persecuted, particularly trannie street hustlers and black women who don’t get hired into the brothels, but prowl the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn subject to police harassment, rape and robbery.

     ———

     Nina is not the only person in this discussion who’s been arrested and jailed for her beliefs, so take your petty debating tricks back to the liberalish parlors of NOW. When they were busy sucking the Democratic Party’s dick, some of us were dealing with the rise of the Christian right on the ground, defending abortion clinics in Buffalo and Witchita and aren’t impressed with your pro-industry myopia, distortion of who is allied with who, apology for pimps in the name of whores or personal attacks in lieu of dealing with the real.

     Puritanism and porn are two sides of the same coin. This country is not “puritan.” It is awash in pornography. I can’t take a piss in a bar without a semi-pornographic ad using women’s bodies to sell me beer being placed right in front of the pisser. Entire buidling facades are wrapped in the pubescent bodies of sexualized girls all over Manhattan. I walked into a kiosk on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue last night and decided to count what percentage of magazine’s used women’s bodies to sell their goods. Out of 75 magazine covers on display, 60 of them used women’s bodies. It’s omnipresent. Texas is in a hot competition between fundamentalist churches and titty bars… and they have the same customers.

     Nina’s comments which mention how “Jackass culture” isn’t just percolated thorugh porn, but through TV and so on is quite correct. I’m not JUST talking about Pornography Inc. I’m talking about how men and women relate to each other every day, how food is served by sexualized teenaged girls, how clothes are sold and what funds the media in general.

     But to you, it’s all about YOUR access to women for money, by representation or in reality. You quoted Marx about Stan’s arguments “dissolved into air.” I bothered to include Marx’s full context for that qote that seemed to fly right by you. I’ll do it again:

     “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man (and, in this case, woman) to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconsciounable freedom – free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

     Again, the American “veil” is pornography. The choice is NOT between barbaric sexual feudalism and “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” I’m a communist, not a liberal. What was “solid that melts into air” is all the sanctified garbage of Medieval despotsim with its religious halo sanctifying traditional bondage. The “freedom” of capitalism is a lie for the people being bought and sold.

     Nina is right that there is a special kind of autonomy women in the sex industry have. It is liberal freedom. But that is not enough. Which is why obscuring the real differences between the high-profile porn stars and the rank-and-file prostitute/stripper doesn’t help us understand what they share in common.

     America’s special charm is that it never fully did away with the racial or sexual caste systems, while still putting everything up for sale. White settlers on the frontier could make it up into the middle classes, but at what LARGER price? What social cost does their PERSONAL upward mobility come at? We end up with the worst of all worlds, and a lot of rich motherfuckers willing to tell any lie to keep their MONEY rolling in.

     28 March 2005, 1:40 pm

130. the burningman:

     Nina — please send me an email (click on the link in red to access my blog and contact information).

     28 March 2005, 2:07 pm

131. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     Well..I’m going to try one more time to post my thoughts on this debate..I believe since my name was bandied about lately and others far more aggressive and personal than I ever was are allowed to continue, I beleive that I am entitled to at least one defense here.

     First off…huge thanks and major props go to Nina for taking the time to clear up her views here in the face of some real distortions…and for being her usual concise and respectful, even when such respect is sometimes not returned in kind.

     And props to Sheldon for his strong defense of both Nina and her basic principles, too.

     One correction of note on his last post, though: Nina was arrested and jailed along with the others in Vegas in the “Erotic Ten” case..but unlike the rest, she wasn’t charged under the infamous “ICAN” statute since she didn’t actually perform the lesbian sex on stage (she simply gave a lick-by-lick descriptions while the others performed). She was charged and ultimately pleabargined to a pandering/solicitation count, and was sentenced to probation. Yet, she still did suffer both emotionally and professionally from that incident; she was banned from performing Canada for five years due to their immigration laws which forbid entry to those involved in “trafficking in women” (another wonderful byproduct of the McKinnon/Dworkin antiporn ordinances), and must even today gain approval to enter that country.

     What I find most interesting in going over this debate is the way in which antiporn feminist men like Robert Jensen and burningman (to a lesser extent, because at least he allows for some variation and diversity in sexual media) are so willing to import their beliefs about what women performers in porn do and how they feel…yet seem unable to accept that these women have their own minds and feelings and are perfectly capable of speaking and feeling for themselves. Does it ever enter their minds that some women (both in real life and in porn) might actually LIKE anal sex (or oral sex, or even double penetrations) because it really does turn them on and get them off?? And while sperm in a woman’s eye can be more than a bit irritating, it is still sperm, not battery acid; and to say that men who ejaculate on a woman’s face (or anywhere else on her body, for that matter) deliberately seek to harm the woman who gives them such pleasure, is simply conjecture..or just reading one’s prestated biases about sex into his interpretation.

     Jensen, for example, touts in his “research” the fact that women seem to be in pain when they fuck these men..but couldn’t their facial expressions and sounds be equally interpreted as pleasure and sexual arousal??? (And I should note that the men in such scenes also tend to look quite pained when they come as well..but since they are merely men exercising their “dominance” over these women, I guess that their feelings don’t quite count. doesn’t it?

     —————————-

     I am also just as tickled by how antiporn feminists are so willing to reduce the experiences of women in porn to their most extreme fantasies, as witnessed in this blast by burningman:

     “You mock the very idea of socialism as an ever-receeding horizon and make your choices accordingly, Sheldon. But I can’t think of too many other occupations where vomiting is considered an acceptable occupational hazzard or having two INSANELY large dicks thrust up your ass so that you have to take Oxycotin to bear the pain is normal just so some jaded porn addict can get his ever-increasing fix. Or where running the risk of HIV infections through having a dozen guys ejaculate in your perforated ass is just a “choice.” So please.”

     Please, indeed…..do you really believe that ALL women in porn are reduced to that extreme, burningman, or is it just a figment of your fantasies? I know of many women who actually do anal gangbangs for free in their real lives just because they happen to love that kind of sex, not because of any pressures from anyone. Besides, no one forces these women to do anything…they still have the option of walking off the set and saying “Hell, no” to whatever or whomever acts they don’t want to do. How many other occupations have that option available? Not that many, I would guess.

     And you forget also that most of those actiivies that you find so offensive and “sadistic” (such as double anals and DP and anal gangbangs) aren’t even promoted in the majority of porn produced by the major players in the San Fernando Valley, which generally focus on couples-based and women’s pleasure-based sex), they tend to be isolated to smaller, independent outfits or the Internet, and mostly homemade by the participants themselves. Indeed, many women themselves will make videos of such to promote themselves as willing to engage in such kinky, off-the-wall sexual gymnastics. Are you as willing to dismiss their eagerness as part of the “system” of “sexual sadism”, too?

     And since Nina and Sheldon have already established beyond proof that the transmission rate of HIV in the sex entertainment field is one-tenth of the general population, I will set aside bm’s crackback about ten guys shooting off inside a woman’s ass as excessive enthusiasm on his part. Again, some women in real life really do get off on that for free; so why not do what you enjoy already and get paid highly for it? If you have any proof that any woman is forced against her stated wishes to perform such, then now is the time to show it; otherwise, I believe I’ll accept the words of the women who do such things more than I’ll accept your second hand accounts.

     ——————————–

     Now…on this issue of who is and isn’t a socialist: It;s so easy to throw around quotes from Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Lenin (and Chomsky and Luxemborg, and Goldman, if your socialism be the more libertarian, anarchistic bent) and proclaim yourself a socialist based on mere citations…but the real proof should be in how you actually live these beliefs. burningman talks a really good game in attempting to bring his own socialist beliefs into his personal antiporn philosophy…but does he bother to actually look at those from whom he taps for their committments?? Last time I checked, Robert Jensen was far more a Naderite antiglobalist than a Marxist; his critique of capitialism is more centered in its social effects than in the more traditional impacts on the means of production. (I take Stan at his word that he is a socialist, since he has promoted his beliefs in numerous venues.) But Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, however, are definitely NOT socialists; indeed, I don’t really believe that they have expressed any political beliefs of any kind outside of their antiporn, “radical feminist” philosophy. And considering their willingness to utilize the most traditional capitalist institutions to promote their ideas and philosophy, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that they downplay all economic theory to the margins, focusing on the “pornografication” and “sexualization” of women as the foundation of all women’s oppression. (And it should be noted that the original antiporn anthology — in which site Stan contributed his original slam against Nina, Carol Queen, and most other “sex radicals” — includes contributions from people that don’t neccessarily fit the mode of radical Leftists — or liberals, for that matter. If Nina is going to be attacked for her suppossed “libertarianism”, then why shouldn’t antiporn feminist pandering to conservatives be equally noted?

     Besides that..there are so many variations of socialism (Social Democracy, Marxism/Leninism, Gueverism/Castroism, Maoism, Anarchism), and so many variations within these categories, that for one tendency to promote itself as the only socialism at the expense of the rest is sheer sectarianism at its worst. Why not instead simply agree to disagree in the tactics and agree in the fundamentals about capitalism as a overall tendency? Because that would mean having tp accept the beliefs of those that deviate from the “party line” that Stan, Sam, Jensen, and bm has established..and you know that simply isn’t acceptable to their crusade against porn and sex work and those who enjoy it openly and freely.

     Actually, it’s been the sex radicals and the “libertarian socialists” like Nina who have bent over backwards to be as evenhanded to their opponents as humanly possible and to support a openminded and constructive debate on the meaning of sex work and porn. In my view, the only people who are being abrasive and abusive are those like Jensen and Dworkin/MacKinnon who have slandered, distorted, and marginalized their beliefs, and attempted to deny them their rightful place in the discussion through intimidation and abuse.

     ————————————

     Finally, since buringman saw fit to bring his own personal life into this debate, allow me to do the same. I happen to be a middle aged working class Black man who is single, who has managed to avoid all the usual “vices” (read, never smoked, drank alcohol, or used drugs, and never married), and who only recently with the purchase of my own personal computer, has been able to assess the type of sexual material that is the subject of such debate. Most of my experience with erotica/porn prior to today was in the form of reading magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, and watching softcore PPV and late-night erotica on cable TV. But as a college student, I read up on a lot of feminist, sex radical, and Left philosophy..it was through that that I first discovered Nina Hartley, who was the first porn actress (other than Marilyn Chambers, Seka, and Desiree Cousteau) that really attracted me. But it wasn’t just her open love of sex and her positive view of men (and her obvious physical attributes) that really attracted me to her; it was just as much her intellect and her strong belief in the progressive principles of anti-racism, feminism, and workers’ rights activism. In short, Nina was and still is far, far more than just a “sex object”, or simply a great “piece of ass” (even one as delectable as hers); she was a complete woman in all her beauty and glory. Through her and a few other intellegent, lively, and sexy women who refuse just as she does to seperate her sexuality from her essential totality as a woman, I discovered my present belief that the sexual entertainment industry, like any and all other industries within the capitalist system, has its benefits and liabilities, but should be treated as any other industry..on ite own merits and demerits; and that the feelings of all women (not just those who hapen to support your particular viewpoint, but ALL women) should be acknowledged and respected for what they say. And being a consumer of explicit sexual media AND a socialist/feminist/sex radical has also taught me the value of giving more respect to those who consume and enjoy such material; they are hardly the computer programs or the lemmings that certain activists of the Left make them out to be. Yes, some porn is indeed quite nasty and brutal; it reflects the brutality and the nastimess of the people who produce it. But it is hardly the foundation of abuse and inequality against women; and it doesn’t even compare to the brutality and nastiness of traditional institutions such as organized religion, the military, and the State..and last time I checked, “pornographers” were nowhere near in charge of any of those places.

     It would be a far better place, and the Left would be a lot more active and vital place, if we could just get over ourselves and our own biases over what people do with each other sexually with their consent. A woman who likes anal gangbangs, or a man who enjoys masturbating to a movie depicting such activity, is hardly the greatest threat to human equality; why not instead focus your rage on real insanity and misogyny, like, say forced cliterectomies or the denial of reproductive care and rights for women worldwide (by the same forces, intrestingly enough, who are at the forefront of the war on “trafficking in women”). Most of all, we should remember that although misogyny against women is certainly a valid and legitimate concern, it has to be placed in the context of a movement that confronts violence against all equally..and that includes violence and inequality that is directed at men as well as women and children. Not all men have the same amount of power even in patriarchy, any more than all Whites have the same power in a racist society or all capitalists are equally repressive in capitalism; it is the system, not the people within it, that should be opposed in its entirity.

     OK..I’ve said enough, or maybe too much. if this does get posted, then my thanks to Stan for at least giving me the time and the vine, I mean no malice towards him or anyone else whom I criticized,; I simply wanted to give my opinion. To each his or her own.

     Respectully,
     Anthony

     28 March 2005, 2:12 pm

132. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     In the mist of my last post, I missed burningman’s latest missive to Sheldon, I shall now make a rebuttal on my own.

     First off…could you once and for all please make up your mind what you think Nina is politically? First you acknowledge her as a “libertarian socialist”, then you attack her as a liberal?!?! She can’t be both at the same time, my man.

     And you are just as off in your linking of Nina with NOW feminists…you probably forgot the basic fact that NOW is mostly dominated by women who are more supportive of Jensen’s views on porn and prostitution than of Nina’s. Indeed, Ms. Magazine, which serves as the main house organ of most “liberal femiinists”, has frequently featured Jensen’s essays in their pages, while specifically attacking or ignoring more sex-positive viewpoints. I remember hearing about a “debate” on porn in their magazine that featured Catherine MacKinnon and Dorcheen Leidholt of Women Against Pornography debating Gloria Stienem and author Ngkote Shange (sorry for the mispell), yet excluding any voice from sex workers or pro-sex activists. (It was that exclusion — and the refusal of Ms. to publish any letters in response to that debate from such critics — which motivated Jill Nagle to develop her sex worker anthology Whores and Other Feminists.)

     And while no one is more critical of classical liberalism and its complicity in maintaining the present inequalities, their general respect for individual self-agency and their principle of social pluralism and acceptance for the maximum of free expression makes them far more preferable, in my view, to the use of the State to impose a narrow, restrictive system of society. Would you, bm, like to live in a state such as China, where even the most intimate bodily function is regulated by the state under the guise of “communism”?? Or how about the fundamentalist Muslim states where women are certainly protected from the evil of the “male gaze” and porn…and are also forbidden from such activities as driving cars in public and serving in public offices, among other things?? Compared to these societies, (and especially to the developing fascism of the Reagan/Bush Right that is attempting to sweep over this country), I’ll take classical liberalism any day of the week until we can develop something better.

     And all this talk about critics of antiporn feminism “sucking the Democratic Party’s dick” is a bit much (especially since Nina is an Independent just as I am); saying that those who defend sex worker’s right to determine their own fates and transform their own occupations from within is certainly not just “liberal”. Imdeed, to say that after the “revolution” sex and relationships between men and women will be so different from the present that sex work will simply “wither away” is simply mere conjecture…mostly because the same people will continue to relate and associate with each other. Your example of Texas fundamentalist Christians frequenting strip clubs (and what about those who are not fundies who enjoy such entertainment??) simply proves my point about the power of sexual desires to overcome any repressive upbringing. After all, if fundies who are raised to reject such “sin” and “filth” can’t help themselves, what does that say for the rest of us who aren’t so repressed?

     Anyway…Patrick Califia has written an excellent essay called “Whoring in Utopia” that directly challenges the belief that the need and desire for sex, sexual commerce and sex work will simply melt away with “the revolution”; I strongly recommend reading it as an antidote to bm’s ramblings:

     http://eserver.org/cultronix/califia/whoring/

     But until that happy day comes, we will have to deal with the world we live in right now, the people whom we live, eat, drink, sleep, and fuck with every day, and the social institutions we live in right now. If you don’t mind, burningman, I’d much prefer that we respect and listen to the voices of those women most involved in the industry who are in the center of the issue, rather than attempt to lecture them on their essential “objectification” and their appeasment to capitalism and patriarchy.

     And BTW….calling people who disagree with you “assholes” doesn’t help your cause one bit, bm…even assholes have a legitimate social purpose in ejecting wasteful products.

     

     Anthony

     28 March 2005, 3:46 pm

133. the burningman:

     “Does it ever enter their minds that some women (both in real life and in porn) might actually LIKE anal sex (or oral sex, or even double penetrations) because it really does turn them on and get them off??”

     Look, there’s a limit to how confessional I’m going to get, especially since Sheldon has seen fit to bandy my name about. (Asshole.)

     But let’s assume for the sake of argument that my sexual practice involves many of the acts we’re discussing here. And that I might have an intimate and immediate knowledge of not just the range of consensual sex that many women, sex workers and otherwise, engage in — but that I also know the CONTENT of my own sexual fantasies and those of the women I’ve loved. I know what gets me hard and gets them wet. And it is deeply informed by the sexualization of power. It’s not just that men want to rape, for lack of a better word. Many women want to get raped. The reason their is so much vitriol in this debate is that patriarchy is the tyranny we are all complicit in.

     I entered this discussion because shame informs all these debates, and since it’s been established exactly how shameless I am — I’ll say some things many men and women would prefer not to.

     Many men are deeply ashamed of their own fantasies, even if they indulge them through properly anti-sexual porn, prostitution, rape and grinding pressure on the women in their lives. I’ve know many women and men who eroticize “power play” in order to bring what in other circumstances would be abusive acts into the realm of consent. That’s better than the dominant “bitches ain’t shit” rape culture. But the harm reduction of BDSM, or medation through images, does not eliminate the HARM. It merely mitigates them. That counts, to me no doubt. But just as clean needles don’t help free junkies from chemical slavery, consensual domination and submission don’t free us from the sexual caste system.

     I’ve also known many women who just gave up fighting for their own sexual dignity because they’d never met men who would respect their choices. They “learned to like” their own abuse. They learned to smile and take it like a champ. Lonely women, women without many sexual options (eg “fat chicks do it all”).

     Like Anthony, I, too, have masturbated to images of Nina Hartley. I still own pornography. I do not believe in censorship under the current regime. How clear can I get on these points? We need to rise above the liberal/conservative duality that ignores the broad range of options humans really have. Jensen isn’t on some “crusade.” And that kind of distortion helps nothing. He wants us, particularly as men, to ask ourselves why images and realities of sexual abuse are arousing? That it is, that there is a growing market for it — no one is disputing, even if Sheldon and Nina are being slipperty in describing it’s extent.

     It’s as if we lack the vocabulary to even engage in critical thinking about such a critical aspect of our lives. That’s why the exhausting porn wars of the 1980s were so unsatisfying.

     It’s not just that “some” porn is brutal. Pornography is, as Dworkin defined it, the act of “men possessing women.” Even when it is vanilla and soft, it still embodies the objectification of women. It isn’t the ONLY problem. I’m not aware of a single socialist organizations that have made attacking porn even a peripheral activity, even if as a movement it is intensely critical of the social content of porn. Not one. The communist critique of porn, heterodox as it is, is qualitatively different from Radical Feminism — and that’s why those, like Sheldon, who apologize for the industry as such don’t want to engage it frontally.

     Anthony came to porn in a different time.

     I’m glad Nina speaks up for condoms in a personal capacity and through AIM. But let’s also notice that no matter how much good ADVICE she dishes, young performers get the real choice they have to make. And if they want into the big money game, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Her position that basic safety standards can’t be enforced ensures that the industry can continue to do whatever it wants.

     She can refuse to work without condoms, and more often produce films that use them. But this is a real privilege that any frank discussion will note a reality where young women entering the . Not taking it in the ass, which most women DON’T like is also not really an option, save for exceptionally beautiful women and even then… There is a subterannean discussion in the porn industry about the reliance on pain killers among performers to deal with acts that are impossible for the vast majority of people without dope. That’s wrong and it should stop.

     My central point regarding consent and choice is that they both take place in a social fabric that does not allow for the full agency of oppressed people. Oppression is real and we make our choices within it. Enough women will obviously “choose” to engage in unsafe practices to keep the DVD market in hetero porn effectively condom-free. That means something. And not that pornographers have the “right” to impose “choices” where one choice is the price of admission. I’m not saying Belladonna, for example, is “forced” to do anything. Quite the contrary. Choice takes place in a given system and it with that SYSTEM that I am at war.

     I’m not particularly interested in the debate about who is a “real socialist,” except to note that “right-to-work” arguments are, as Stan pointed out at the start of this thread, integral to capitalism, not socialism. For clarity’s sake, I’m a fairly unorthodox (and unorganized) Maoist — if that shorthand means anything here. Robert, Stan and myself are undoubtedly sympathetic to different Parties, even if we share a common interest in that big party line called REALITY.

     28 March 2005, 3:47 pm

134. the burningman:

     I called Sheldon an asshole becuase he used my name against my wishes in this discussion and continues to misrepresent people in not just this discussion, but more broadly with a constant stream of horseshit. His disagreement is the least of my beefs at this point.

     28 March 2005, 3:49 pm

135. Sheldon:

     “Respect”? You get back what you put in. If you keep hitting up folks for money after badmouthing them, getting a lack of respect is going to be the least of your problems.

     “Shithole”? Are readers really tuning out? How can you tell – just because over the past several days there have been no more that 5 or 6 different posters? When have there been much more than that here? Sorry, but Marxists like me prefer a little scientific cream with their socialist latte.

     Dworkin is…just “over-philosophizing”? Now that’s an apology for pedophilia/bestiality advocacy one doesn’t hear every day. Would you be as kind to an overtly right-wing male who said the exact same thing?

     Of course, you know I look honestly at the contents of porn. I’ve been doing this publicly since the late 1980′s, when I organized panels at the Socialist Scholars Conference (1989 – 1996) where I presented facts and figures and brought in some samples of progressive pornography, including the socialist porn film, “Shades of Ecstasy”. The fact is – and I’m going to trample all over that exposed nerve of yours until it cracks – most porn is not misogynist and the non-misogynist stuff still outsells Max Hardcore, Robert Black, etc. by lots, as Nina has already demonstrated earlier. You’re the one who’s lying and dressing up your lies into pseudo-Marxist claptrap.

     The feminist movement that I belong to teaches that the personal is political, so any attempt to separate your personal life from the ideas being discussed here is disingenuous. I use my real name, so I don’t have that issue of posing as someone else to exaggerate support for your position among the commenters of The Indypendent. That’s what you, Stan Goff, and Robert Jensen do – you exaggerate and you extrapolate from a few bad apples to make grandiose generalizations. I counted 30% of Pornliving’s websites to be sexist – using Goff’s own criteria – and Goff & Co cry, “Absolute majority!”

     Nina nor I never said liberal freedom is enough. That’s why we’re socialist – democratic socialists – not state Communist regimes who are fond of using a gun to force folks out of sex work (while keeping a few of them on the side for the privilged nomenklatura), the type for which you have repeatedly expressed fond admiration. In addition, I tirelessly promote and publicize the successful efforts of the sex workers of the Lusty lady in San Francisco to unionize and take collective ownership of their means of production.

     Your dig at NOW is laughable – their absences at abortion clinc defense rallies are as frequent as appearances by Halley’s Comet. I helped organize several such rallies and lobbying of elected atate and municipal officials in the 1990s when I was on the Reproductive Rights Task Force at NOW-NYC (I was the only man there).

     So what if pornography ‘seems’ to be everywhere? Popularity is not synonymous with legitimacy. Does the fact that out gay people, especially celebrities, ‘seem’ to be everywhere mean this is not a homophobic country?? When the Supreme Court overturn Miller vs. California, then and only then does it make sense to talk about whether the Puritan status quo has been overthrown.

     Bringing up what Nina has gone through in 1993 was meant to provide a telling contrast to what Dworkin has NOT gone through since she left the Left and embraced patriarchy’s war on pornography. As evidenced by their non-fiction writings, both MacKinnon and Dworkin are right-wing feminists – so their alliance with other right-wingers is really no surprise. Self-proclaimed anti-porn lesbian feminist Tammy Bruce’s positioning of herself as the link between Dworkin, Dr. Laura and Ayn Rand is only the latest development of that tendency.

     28 March 2005, 4:22 pm

136. Nina Hartley:

     burningman,

     Though we’re obviously getting closer to some degree of accord and are at least debating some substantive points about how porn is made and what it contains, I really think your use of the term “slippery” to describe my assessment of the current controversy over the amount and degree of “abusive” material in the porn market is uncalled for. I’ve made it quite clear that I don’t personally like some of this material, that I also find some of it, on closer examination, much less hostile and offensive than it first appears. I’ve acknowledged that it represents a significant market segment in porn. But I don’t think I’ve been disengenuous by injecting an element of balance into the discussion over how representative this niche is of porn in general, which includes everything from Danni’s Hard Drive to Extreme Associates. I’m going by statistics I consider reliable when I assert that the most hostile content chraracterizes a minority of pornographic material available. Since I’ve already stated my willingness to defend such content, even though I don’t care for it, for as long as it’s made within the confines of performer safety and consent, I’ve declared my position unambiguously enough.

     In what way is this being slippery? We can agree to disagree about the symbolic importance of mean porn, but the numbers are the numbers, and they don’t support the contention that most porn being made and sold fits that description.

     Nina Hartley

     28 March 2005, 4:22 pm

137. the burningman:

     Last one for the day to Anthony:

     I too know women who enjoy getting gang-banged consensually and don’t really have a problem with that. Except for the time I was trying to work in the other room… but that’s a whole other story. I know a hell of a lot more women who’ve been raped, molested and badgered into those acts than freely enjoy them. As it bears directly on the point in question — the several women I’ve known who set up consenual gangbangs had also each been raped and molested repeatedly prior to developing these particular tastes. Call that anecdotal, but I call it like I see it.

     And I’m sorry, but “most” porn is not centered on women’s pleasure. It is soooo about the dick. When was the last time you saw a wall-to-wall filled with “four hot hours of unreastrained pussy eating?” By content of productions, Jensen is dead on. On the global sexual economy and the red herring of “sex positivity,” Stan is dead on. And in the eroticization of power, sorry to say… I’m just keep hitting that nail on the head.

     Regarding Nina and the liberal/libertarian socialist split: it’s her ideological quandry, not mine. Suzie Bright, Carol Queen (who “listened” so carefully to Linda Marschiano that she had the nerve to call her, “Linda-he-made-me-fuck-that-dog-Marsciano”) and other consistently distort what the critics of porn culture are saying. Look at this thread, what Sheldon rants about and what Jensen actually wrote. Or me, for that matter.

     The very idea of equating support for the porn industry and pimping with being “pro-sex” is a case in point. I think, on the left, we are ALL pro-sex. The issue is it’s content. Some of us stop at capitalist notions of liberty, while some of are trying to articulate a vision of liberation.

     Calling the freedom of pimps to buy and sell women “freedom” is a failure of imagination and a lowering of expectations that lets us settle for the desert of the real.

     28 March 2005, 4:46 pm

138. Sheldon:

     Anthony, just as you properly corrected me on the 1993 Las Vegas incident, let me point out that NOW’s leadership is everchanging. Patricia Ireland spoke out against the Dworkin/MacKinnon anti-porn Model Ordinance at Bates College(Maine) in November, 1992, and shortly thereafter, Dworkin and Stoltenberg openly attacked NOW (while still, somewhat surreptitiously, maintaining their membership).

     California NOW had worked well with Nina’e ex, Bobby Lilly, in getting free expression resolutions passed, and NY State NOW, under Mailyn Fitterman’s tenure, did likewise. National NOW basically ousted Tammy Bruce and Los Angeles NOW actually had a fundraiser in the Playboy Mansion several years ago (I would have preferred the Lusty Lady as the venue).

     I’ve never found any well-informed criticism of this-or-that policy of the porn industry to be objectionable in and of itself. That’s what Nina, Ernest, Anthony and I do all the time at Nina’s website. However, singling out the porn industry for wholesale abolition IS indeed a sex-negative, puritanical bias, just as singling out the State of Israel for wholesale abolition IS indeed anti-Semitic. I respect consistent anti-capitalism and consistent internationalism, but Jed’s persistent falsehoods about the content of pornography, as well as his apologetics for Dworkin’s horrifying support of child rape and animal rape, render his desire to be seen as a genuine opponent of censorship suspect.

     28 March 2005, 4:48 pm

139. Sheldon:

     Once again, you got the contents of porn wrong. There are dozens of different 4-hour compilation DVDs of unrestrained lesbian pussy-eating.

     I must admit, you did surprise me. Yoiu actually posted earlier that “women WANT to be raped”? (Emphasis mine). Yup, you’re a real feminist all right.

     28 March 2005, 4:55 pm

140. the burningman:

     Nina undoubtedly has a more intimate, and invested, interest in these figures. But… this is the crux of the argument.

     1) the amount of fetishistic degredation (Extreme, Anabolic, RLD, Evil Angel, Max Hardcore, JM Productions, Meathholes) is clearly on a strong upswing. That wasn’t mainly what I saw when I was a kid, but it’s what comes out now whether I look for it or not.

     2) The porn that is “couples friendly” is not the driving force of the industry, aesthetically or by sales. Browsing ADT, which seems as neutral a baramoter as any, clearly shows that the vast amount of “site energy” goes towards gonzo porn — because that’s what the core consumers are demanding. And this has a ripple effect on the actual number of scenes being produced and what the performers have to do.

     3) Even porn which does not fetishize degredation and abuse still is, vanilla and soft sax aside, about women as embodiments of male right, not largely conscious agents. Much of the rougher porn, particularly at Evil Angel, involves a level of “consciousness” that is different in kind and that should be noted. It’s queer friendly and often is “sex positive,” warts and all. That said, it still presents an extremely tiny window of sexual possibility and is “all about the cock.”

     4) Fashionistas is an important part of this discussion, because as you say “on closer examination” it is not as rough as it seems. True that. But even here it has the Sadean twist that the main female character played by Belladonna finds her release in true submission. And even while hammer-cocked Rocco is willing to play at being the submissive, in the end he, too, realizes his true nature as the guy who rams it home right up homegirl’s ass. Even in the BEST of it, it can problematize these relationships without escaping them. Another film series which is pretty intense is the Girlvert series and in some other forum there could be an interesting discussion about satire, self-awareness and how this intensely brutal (rape, pedophilia simiulations, drug addiction) series is also more “complicated.” But that complication can only be seen in a broadly pornographized world. Hegel was wrong, sis, self-consciousness does not free us from the relations of the real. This confusion is why it took me so long to figure out why cynics make poor rebels.

     5) The soft porn sells because of lack of availability and control of cable distribution rights. In the TOTALLY free market of Times Square, I’ll take product placement in the stores as an immediately accurate representation of what sells when the core consumers are given “choice.” And that’s why I linked to all those production companies above. I don’t think they even stock Vivid anymore and Wicked doesn’t produce nearly the NUMBER of titles coming out from the Gonzo companies.

     Anthony’s claim about amateur productions etc… I’m not against amateur porn where participants with agency create public expressions of what they do for others to jerk-off too. Great. DIY. But that’s not what’s in the front of the house and judging from what comes up on p2p downloads, not their either.

     And the fetish of degredation has grown every year. It is prevelent and dominant in the industry at this point. It’s why Jensen is concerned about why men get hard when women cry.

     28 March 2005, 5:08 pm

141. the burningman:

     Sheldon clearly wants a reasonable discussion to be impossible. I’d like to request that site moderation at least remove references to my full name. Sheldon — I’ll be seeing you.

     28 March 2005, 5:17 pm

142. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     OK…let me get this straight, burningman…if Nina quotes the fact that her “Sex Guides” instructional series (which is substantially different from the porn videos he criticizes) sells over 500.000 copies, that’s prima facie proof of her conflict of interest in analyzing her profession. Yet, your accounting of your friends’ history of rape and abuse is more than enough to prove your (and Jensen’s theories about the innate, essential misogyny of porn.

     Your grasp of logic really amazes me.

     And for the record…merely professing that porn isn’t about female sexual pleasure doesn’t make it less so…almost all the porn movies I’ve seen include some form of female sexual agency, such as cunnilingus or kissing, and the woman is universally seen as enthusiastically enjoying the experience. Also, most porn movies also happen to include some form of girl/girl sex and solo masturbation sex scenes as well…is that more evidence of how the industry panders to “male domination”, or is it evidence that the men who consume porn really do care about the women’s self agency and their enjoyment???

     And didn’t Sheldon (who resides in the NYC area, so he knows better than most) tell you that the old Times Square porn is mostly unavailable due to the antiporn busts of Giuliani and Bloomburg?? For that matter, if so-called “smash-mouth” porn sells so well in “unregulated capitalism” then why in the hell doesn’t it sell in other areas??? The fact remains that such content is indeed a very small portion of the XXX video market, and mostly sold by independent small outlets on the Internet or in VoD (video-on-demand) markets.
     None of your pronouncements will change that fact.

     How interesting, also, that you say in the first sentence that you have no problem with women doing gangbangs, but in the next paragraph you continue to denote the depiction of such as male “degradation”. You just can’t have it both ways in this one. my man…if you support a woman’s right to do something like that in private, it’s kinda impossible to deny her the right to do the same for other’s pleasure and get paid for it.

     The rest of your comments are simply the usual baffle and boilerplate that make absolutely no sense to anyone except you and your supporters, so I will respectfully decline any comment.

     And if Belladonna likes being submissive and enjoys taking it up the ass from Rocco (who has also fucked men in gay films, too), that’s all right by me. I might not be turned on by it myself, but it’s not my issue..the important thing is that SHE is turned on by it. If she is, then all commentary from outside is moot.

     So much for you and Nina reaching a consensus…it seems that you, like the rest of Stan’s and Jensen’s supporters, simply are incapable of respecting her (or any other woman who doesn’t goosestep to your narrow vision) choices.

     BTW…comparing all those “gonzo” companies (and you should remember that “gonzo” refers to style of shooting films, not sexual content; one of the first successful directors of gonzo porn happened to be a woman named Shane, via her “Shane’s World” series; and she not only does NOT do the kind of sexual gymnastics that you rave on about; but she also has a strict “condom only” policy) on the basis of more titles vs the sale of Vivid features disregards the point that Vivid has a natural base (that is, the cable networks like PlayboyTV, the Hot Network, and Spice, as well as their VoD services) to deliver their content. The “gonzo” producers don’t..which is why they have to push more titles on their sites. Also, the “gonzo” distributors are far more likely to deliver shorter “vignette” features that emphasize the sex more than the Fashionistas or Vivid, which do have the liberty of creating more tradition movies featuring art and plot and acting.

     Besides. if you are going to rant about how “gonzo” is the “cutting edge” of porn (reading press releases from AdultDVDTalk or AVN just won’t do), then why not also add to that the role of softcore cable erotica outlets like Playboy or Danni’s Hard Drive (which is owned and operated by a woman, and which features erotica without ANY men present..yet sells nearly as much by itself as the “hard stuff”).

     It may even be that porn is becoming a bit more aggressive and less erotic and sensual than from the past..but rather than apply the hammer of full-time censorship and guilt-tripping, I’d rather that porn consumers exercise their rights as consumers and defend people like Nina Hartley who are attempting to transform the industry into something better and more progressive. If only people like Robert Jensen and you would more support her in that rather than condemn her and deny her that right by attempting to trash her occupation and her legacy…but since you won’t, well, you made your decision and she made hers, and let our paths not cross again.

     But I appreciate your willingness to a amicable discussion, even if we will never agree on the fundamentals.

     Anthony

     28 March 2005, 7:34 pm

143. Sheldon:

     Well, to be fair, then all links to the Indypendent should also be removed, so that we don’t have to stumble upon your real name.

     It’s sort of obvious that you can’t answer my rebuttal, so you dodge. Typical.

     28 March 2005, 7:36 pm

144. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     BTW, Sheldon..the correction on NOW’s evolving stance is duly noted.

     I should point out that Ms. magazine’s founding foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation, was the main sponsor of a recent antiporn seminar about two weeks ago at DePaul University in Chicago. The list reads like a Who’s Who amongst antiporn activists: Catherine MacKinnon gave the Keynote Address, Dr Chyng Sun (who wrote the original essay for AlterNet and CounterPunch that Nina responded to, and who is currently developing a documentary) gave a panel discussion there, and Robert Jensen also contributed greatly.

     So I would guess that although NOW (especially its California branch) is becoming more openminded and progressive (probably a deciding factor in former NOW-LA President Tammy Bruce’s conversion to New Right libertarianism…now THERE’s a REAL right-wing libertarian for you), a bit of the old antiporn feminist establishment still lingers on with Ms….too bad for them.

     Anthony

     28 March 2005, 7:59 pm

145. Sheldon:

     burningman’s methodology fascinates. He makes grandiose political conclusions about today’s porn idustry based on the numbers he “thinks” a certain company makes. He doesn’t actually go into some of these stores and does a count, does he? No, he only supposes. Why be bothered with actual fact-checking? From this he concludes that most of today’s porn features degradation of women.

     If I did an actual count and came to different conclusions, he would say, what? That he didn’t have the time to check out the entire inventory, and then he would change the rules of the game? Sounds like the old Pornliving ruse.

     Of course he has his anecdotes…which tell him that if a woman actually likes to be at the center of a gang-bang, then it’s probably because she was raped at a previous time. Sounds like the Far Right’s propaganda about folks ‘turning’ gay because they were previously raped by members of their own sex. But why should we be so upset by that, anyway? burningman tells us that “It’s not just that men want to rape, for lack of a better word. Many women want to get raped.”

     Oh, imagine the outcry if Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt had said that!
     Do anti-porn men who praise Andrea Dworkin get a free pass?

     28 March 2005, 8:05 pm

146. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     Incidently, br and Sheldon, on that subject of “women wanting to be raped”:

     There is a sort of a phenomenon called a “ravishment fantasy” that many women do indeed admit to having, and which some romantic novels (and even a small portion of porn) play to. In it, a woman is propositioned, gives some resistance, but then succumbs to the sexual advances of a man (or in some cases, another woman). This is sometimes misconstrued as a “rape fantasy” by some observers; but I beg to dissent from that sentiment because in the “ravishment fantasy” the woman does ultimately consent; there is no force or violence involved, and she does ultimately get pleasure from the encounter. This is qualititavely different from the traditional concept of rape, where a woman is simply viciously attacked without warning and completely against her will, and which involves direct trauma and injury.

     Perhaps bm just got his fantasies confused here…I would hope that he really doesn’t believe that women do want to be raped. Not even Rob Black or Rocco Sifferdi believes that to be true.

     Anthony

     28 March 2005, 8:51 pm

147. the burningman:

     Sheldon, I think you heard my answer.

     28 March 2005, 10:19 pm

148. the burningman:

     Anthony, you are correct in you clarification of “ravishment” fantasy. In context, I think that’s pretty clear. Why I want or don’t want my name being used is entirely my fucking business.

     I’ve written at some length over the last week in good faith and with interest in what several people here actually think. I’m not getting caught up in a flamewar with a dogmatic twit concerned about Andrea Dworkin going to the dogs.

     Thanks Stan for letting this conversation more or less take its own flow, and please remove the use of my name.

     28 March 2005, 10:30 pm

149. the burningman:

     According to AVN current sales charts:

     This weeks #1 dvd seller is “65 Guy Cream Pie.”
     A cream pie is when semen is deposited in the “hole” of the female performer, in this case I think we can assume 65 guys did their job.

     The number one rental is “The Dark Side of Rocco”
     Rocco is the premiere “hard fucker” and gained fame for, among other things, flushing women’s heads in the toilet while he fucked their asses. I don’t think that fully does justice to his complexity as a performer, but since we’re on the subject…

     The number one Gonzo “pro-am” film is “Breakin’ ‘Em In 7″
     The advertising on the RLD site says of the series, “Young, Eager-to-please, wannabe Porn Stars willing to do whatever it takes!!! Anal, DP’s, ATM’s, Cum Swallowing…”

     The #1 Speciality Tape is: “American Bukkake 25″
     A “bukkake” is what Howard Stern will be treated to for all eternity in hell.

     So, Anthony Kennerson and Sheldon, who a Google Search will reveal run scrimmage in these kinds of debates elsewhere, are frankly obscuring the truth of the situation.

     Here’s the link to AVN’s Sales Charts:

     http://www.adultvideonews.com/charts/rent0305.html

     28 March 2005, 11:12 pm

150. Rose Keller:

     According to AVN current sales charts:

     This week’s #1 dvd seller is “65 Guy Cream Pie.”
     A cream pie is when semen is deposited in the “hole” of the female performer, in this case I think we can assume 65 guys did their job.

     The #1 rental is “The Dark Side of Rocco”
     Rocco is the premiere “hard fucker” and gained fame for, among other things, flushing women’s heads in the toilet while he fucked their asses. I don’t think that fully does justice to his complexity as a performer, but since we’re on the subject…

     The number one Gonzo “pro-am” film is “Breakin’ ‘Em In 7″
     The advertising on the RLD site says of the series, “Young, Eager-to-please, wannabe Porn Stars willing to do whatever it takes!!! Anal, DP’s, ATM’s, Cum Swallowing…”

     The #1 Speciality Tape is: “American Bukkake 25″
     A “bukkake” is what Howard Stern will be treated to for all eternity in hell.

     http://www.adultvideonews.com/charts/rent0305.html

     28 March 2005, 11:15 pm

151. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     Now, now, bm…I did attempt to be civil with you; please show a bit more respect for me as well.

     All those figures you quote mean little to nothing…especially since you forget to list the amount of sales each video recieves as compared to the total sales for that week.

     And just because a woman is willing to take 65 cream pies in succession (and that’s nothing compared to a 250 person gangbang or one double anal scene) or if she has her head shoved into a toilet briefly (gee, when the current governor of California does the same thing for a box-office classic like “Terminator 2″, I don’t see the outrage) yet manages to survive (I assume that the water was clean), or perform a DP and brag about it to Howard Stern, still does not make porn any more or less “degrading”…except in your mind.

     BTW…the only “scrimmage running” that I do is to state my views about sex and porn and politics on my own sites and groups, and join in on debates elsewhere whenever applicable. I don’t speak for anyone else but myself, and I am more than open to anyone who wishes to comment. I have nothing to hide, bm…why not join one of my groups and let’s have a good old debate?? I promise that I won’t even hit you up for cash, either…my groups are totally free.

     Anthony

     29 March 2005, 12:16 am

152. the burningman:

     You are impervious to facts.

     I’m not failing to list anything. If you think the porn industry’s trade journal is cooking the books, take it up with them. I figured that’s as good a source as any for where the industry is at.

     The coincidence that every single hetero best-seller has a degredation theme is kind of the point of this whole discussion. It’s not just degrading in my mind. It’s degrading in it’s self-conscious presentation. It’s all over the box covers. It’s what it is. And that’s what the alienated anti-sex consumer is looking for, what was called above “an escape from intimacy.”

     Don’t worry, Anthony, you’ll still be able to jerkoff after the revolution.

     29 March 2005, 12:35 am

153. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     No, burningman, I respect facts. It’s the bending of them to fit a repressive ideology that I resist.

     And since you bring up the “intimacy” card; I will remind you that the problems with male “intimacy” did not begin with, nor will they end with the development of the porn industry…they are part and parcel of the dance we call “human life”. And it will requite more than just men surrendering their erections, it will require mutual respect and give-and-take amongst everyone. Guilt-tripping men for their basic desires won’t solve the intimacy dillemma..it will only make things worse.

     And you don’t have to lecture me about “jerking off” after the revolution..but I’d rather choose for myself what I get myself off to, thank you very much.

     I believe that I will eject now before I get angry and say something I don’t mean to say. As much as I have enjoyed our little tete-a-tete, bm, it is getting late.

     Anthony

     29 March 2005, 1:02 am

154. Nina Hartley:

     Seems like the tone has deteriorated since my last visit, which is unfortunate, since some interesting things are being said on both sides in between the personal salvos, which I regard as utterly unconstructive.

     I have my own ideas about sexual hostility, which I consider part of a complex process that can be both over and under emphasized. I have no problems with consensual gang-bangs or consensual anything else. I recognize the popularity of rape fantasies among both men and women. I have them. I play with them consciously. I have never been raped – not even come close, and wouldn’t want to be. I know at least two women who had rape fantasies prior to being raped and continued to have them afterwards. Both insisted that the real experience was so different from the fantasy, they didn’t overlap. I don’t believe the imperitives here are political, but they are certainly moral. If we can’t change what we turns us on – and I don’t think we should even feel compelled to try – we can certainly regulate the expression of our desires, unassisted by those who think they know what’s best for us to a greater extent than we do. That’s the kind of help I don’t need.

     I never denied – in fact I fully granted – that there is a fad on at the moment for circus acts and extreme whatever – in porn just like in sports and commercial television – and some real harm undoubtedly attaches to the whole phenomenon wherever it shows up. However, I’ve been around long enough to see all kinds of crazes come and go in this business, and the steady sales remain with the higher-quality products. Trust me, the big players aren’t hurting in this market.

     I truly would perfer a more issue-focused discourse here, regardless of the positions taken.

     Nina Hartley

     29 March 2005, 5:50 am

155. Sheldon:

     Since Rose Keller and burningman posted in succession near-duplicate verbiage, are they the same person? Another misrepresentation designed to exaggerate Jed’s support on this blog?

     Since when does anyone other than Jed need to ‘explain’ whzt he meant by ‘women wanting to be raped’? Jed wasn’t discussing fantasies at that point – he was talking about how, according to him, women give in to abuse because they were brought up that way, etc. That’s a reality-based point he was making.

     Here is the fuller quote: “I know what gets me hard and gets them wet. And it is deeply informed by the sexualization of power. It’s not just that men want to rape, for lack of a better word. Many women want to get raped. The reason their is so much vitriol in this debate is that patriarchy is the tyranny we are all complicit in.”

     The sexualization of power is considered by Jed to be a real-world phenomenon that, while being connected to fantasies, also is reflected by the real-world desire of men to rape and women to be raped. The object of the sentence switches away from ‘fantasies’ and toward ‘sexualization of power’.

     Now, if Jed realizes he worded his thoughts clumsily and made a mistake, he has plenty of opportunities to apologize for any misunderstanding. Until then, as a pro-feminist man, I am not going to let this go. I’m not sorry if that interrupts the flow of the discourse here.

     The fact that Arianna Jollee is having sex with 65 guys is not inherently degrading, by the way

     29 March 2005, 7:19 am

156. Sheldon:

     One point of clarification: Like Nina, I would like a discourse based on facts and ideas. If my posts have inconvenienced her, for that I do apologize. But, while Nina is nice enough to politely challenge insults hurled at her and her comrades by you-know-who, that’s not who I am. I believe in struggling more forcefully to acquire the respect that we sex-positive leftists all deserve.

     Your mileage may vary.

     29 March 2005, 10:31 am

157. Dan:

     Wow! Lots of passion here, directed at the public space. I have a small point about the priviate space. Robert says “As with any political issue, successful strategies of resistance to injustice and oppression must be collective. There cannot be personal solutions to political problems.”

     That fits with the big theory — that we’re all just materialistically determined. We can’t help it, the lure of the porn video is too great. Give me a break! The one big advantage the Conservatives have is they seem to own the “individual” space, because the Left wants to focus on class struggle and Hegelian/Marxist Historical Determinism. But I don’t think you can have an effective struggle unless individuals have already made their own choices and changes.

     Stan described it in Hideous Dream: confronting. Constantly being prepared to confront, regardless of the consequences. Of course, that presupposes that we’ve already each stopped being part of the $10b flow of cash into the porn coffers. And that we’re willing to seem like assholes when we say “No, if you’re going to Deja vu, count me out.”

     I live in Minneapolis, which is a “nice” peaceful community of mostly white mostly Lutherans. We have strip bars all over downtown. No one seems to mind. It’s incredible, but I think people view it as some sort of “civility” that these places are tolerated. Ironically, Minneapolis is enacting a city-wide smoking ban in bars and restaurants March 31st.

     29 March 2005, 10:54 am

158. Dan:

     Of course, on second thought, we have high-rise corporate headquarters buildings all over downtown too. Maybe the strip bars spring from the same source and are somehow appropriate, like smallpox lesions…

     29 March 2005, 11:25 am

159. the burningman:

     Sure Sheldon, and getting your face pissed on isn’t inherently degrading either, I guess. Maybe nothing is. Picking cotton isn’t inherently degrading, either. Maybe Al Jolsen was giving a great tribute to his African-American inspirations and Amos and Andy were just making a few jokes and everyone should lighten up.

     Being a racist isn’t just saying nigger when you’re white. It’s a system of white supremacy. Those who wish to reduce the discussion of power in society to ettiquette and particular intentions aren’t just missing the point, they are obscuring the reality.

     Yes, I double-posted. Because since you have insisted on bringing my name into this discussion, which while not rape is some kind of violation, I thought I’d post under another moniker. Sheldon’s contribution to this entire thread has been to distort what one person after another is saying. That’s “running scrimmage” and if the site moderator’s won’t check his bullshit, it pretty much makes a discussion impossible.

     Sheldon equates the normalizing of degredation as sex-positivity. That’s his business and his “milage may vary.” This discussion has entered the realm of reptition.

     In that spirit I’ll just boil down what I think the key points are:

     1) Puritanism and vice are kissing cousins. As Blake put it, “prisons are built with bricks of law, brothels with bricks of religion.”

     2) Marx was correct that capitalism breaks down “all Chinese walls,” meaning that the old guarantees of tradition, which provided some protections for people while effectively enslaving them are shattered. Only the “cash nexus” remains with the “freedom” of capitalism meaning for most of us the right to be bought and sold.

     3) Sexuality is an aspect of our lives in which we have real agency, even while our desires are formed by the systems we inhabit. Power is deeply sexualized. For some who cannot even conceive of a sexuality not built around degredation, conquest, submission and commodity — the idea of sexual liberation is identical to sexual repression.

     4) Sexual liberation requires sexual agency. That means that prostitution and the pornographic propaganda of patriarchal sexuality are not freedom. They are among the forms of oppression. The answer to this is neither shame, nor legal suppression of the sexual proletariat. It is the struggle for consensual relations now as a bare minumum, as part of a larger political fight for full social agency. When the totalitarian imperitives of capitalism are overthrown, there will be no sex INDUSTRY. Not because, as Sheldon typically argues, some Stalinist boogyman will shove a pistol in a prostitute’s face, but because prostitutes themselves will be a part of the fight for liberation. Without the threat of eviction and the availablility of productive work, the vast majority of sex workers will no longer be compelled into that industry. The very “choices” we have to make will be qualitatively different.

     5) Particular sexual acts will undoubtedly continue to get off the reproductive track. The queering of heterosexuality will continue as there is no longer a compulsion for sex to be primarily defined by reproductive imperitives. Play parties, pan-sexualism and sodomy in the age of Astroglide are all quite fine and something I see no one arguing against. That John S. and Andrea Dworkin made XYZ arguments is hardly the end of the debate. Their CRITIQUE of sexualized male supremacy is invaluable and something all men should read, their solutions aren’t just repressive, they are impossible. This is why I’m a communist concerned with the systems of power not mainly the moral/amoral choices individuals make. In that sense I am NOT a feminist. I am a revolutionary with my feet on the ground.

     6) To get downright philosophical for a moment, Foucault’s analysis in his essay “We Other Victorians” is mind-blowing. He argues that modern bourgeois “repression” of sexuality is not, properly understood, repression at all. Rather it is part of the means by which implicit relations become explicit as sexual “discourse.” Suddenly “sex” is less genital and increasingly perverse and omnipresent exactly as “repression” of sexuality itself is promoted throughout Western society. By extension, you all need porn not because you are “sex-positive,” but because you are increasingly anti-sexual. Chew on that.

     7) All men are not rapists. But as Stan Goff noted, “perfect masculinity is sociopathic.” So true. And the means by which the masculine imperitive is regulated in this world — through porn, religion, prostitution and marriage — are all forms of social control, not liberation or escape. They are not neutral. That masculine sexuality is defined by “taking” and feminine sexuality by “giving it up” is not exactly a path-breaking observation.

     The drift of porn towards fetishized degredation is not debatable, nor is its prevelance. Those who do so are obscuring what is in plain sight. Porn as an industry is “all about the cock,” even if a few women do genuinely like it. Sheldon’s equation of hetero-lesbiana porn with a celebration of female sexuality is choice. I mean really, some of us actually do consort with real life lesbians and I hate to burst your bubble, but Howard Stern’s lesbians aren’t exactly the real deal. Some black people think Howard Stern is funny. He’s still a raving racist. Condaleeza the Skeeza is still a servant of white supremacy. The point isn’t pigment or genitals. It’s the systems of power.

     Soft porn objectifies women and provides men an escape from intimacy and the challenges of the real. It isn’t just in the San Fernando Valley. It’s in advertising, women’s fashion magazines, “lad mags,” pop music and so on. Treating prostitutes nicely is better than hurting them, but the core relationship is the same. Power mediated by money. Hard porn, that is to say porn which is explicitly what it is, hence “hard,” has an effect on both the women socially compelled to participate and the men who consume it in lieu of consensual sex. Like the larger pornographized culture, it is reaching new extremes of anti-sexuality. The acts are further and further from what people can do without popping pain-killers and both performers and consumers are complaining about what is going on — while the pornographers are laughing all the way to the bank.

     We will stop the pornographic relationship through the choices we make in our everyday life. The fight for women’s liberation from being the collective sexual property of men mediated by money will happen as a part of the struggle for socialism and proletarian revolution. This debate will no longer be constrained by the disiniformation of industry apologists or the limits of “bourgeois right.” But by the new world we are making.

     This isn’t the best of all possible worlds, not when our sisters are for sale to the highest bidder in the name of freedom. The first principle of sex talk is the liberation of women, not regulation of the market in their flesh (and “smiles”).

     Pending a larger change in the power constellation, we do have to live our lives.

     People like Nina have real power to effect discussions within the sex industry and to struggle for real reforms. Developing a mandatory condom-use code, unionizing sex workers, discussing the ways in which sex is NOT consensual even when contractual, the extensive growth of pornography in third world countries with no safety standards whatsoever and vastly unequal pay scales, dealing with the prevelance of painkillers and drug abuse to make the intolerable bearable, and drawing some lines against the worst forms of abuse — Max Hardcore and company — is a start. But everywhere we talk about these issues, and fight for real reforms, we should “keep our eyes on the prize” of real liberation.

     The greatest trick the capitalists ever pulled on us was the belief that we can’t do better. There’s a recent saying, “Another world is possible.” Let’s take that spirit with us everywhere we go and stop letting the tyranny of the real limit public discussion of these issues. That’s “real” feminism and “real” socialism. We have to take it higher.

     29 March 2005, 12:05 pm

160. Ren Galskap:

     AVN’s sales figures are widely regarded, both inside and outside the porn industry, as fiction. AVN is the voice of the porn industry in the sense of being a cheerleader, not in the sense that the Wall St. Journal is the voice of Wall St. because it reports carefully checked facts.

     Porn video sales is a highly segmented market. Hard core titles may typically sell 1,000 to 2,000 copies. 12,000 sales is a big success. A video can be a relatively big seller by targeting a very small segment of the porn market. A mainstream title can have unremarkable sales, even though it targets a large segment of the market, because it has a lot of competition and doesn’t stand out.

     The biggest, most profitable producers in porn are producing for the cable market. Their sales figures never show up in AVN’s sales charts. Neither the producers or the cable companies publish viewership stats for porn distributed on cable. Cable companies keep about 85% of the revenue from cable porn. That leaves producers with about 15% of the revenue to cover their production costs and pay themselves a reasonable return on their risk. Some of these mainstream porn productions have production budgets around $500,000. Revenue from the titles that Jensen and Bm are claiming to be high sellers wouldn’t cover the catering costs of mainstream porn productions, much less return a profit.

     Bottom line: AVN’s sales charts are dubious, successful VHS tapes and DVDs are viewed only by a small minority of porn consumers, and porn that is extreme in content isn’t going to be mainstream in sales. There’s no good method of identifying the porn movies watched by the largest number of men, but Jensen’s and Bm’s method is guaranteed to produce erroneous results.

     29 March 2005, 1:03 pm

161. Sheldon:

     1) Your rhetoric about taking things higher is laughable – you yourself don’t live by it, and you were the one who started the barrage of insults. You ‘praise’ Nina Hartley, grudgingly, on the one hand, and then accuse her of being ‘slippery’ on the other. And to restate for those lurkers who’ve just joined us, you hit people up for $$$ after insulting them. That is just as much a VIOLATION as the allegedly forced outing you accuse me of. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

     2) Why did you use the ‘burningman’ moniker on the Indypendent website when answering your critics there? No one outed you then, so why didn’t you just respond to them using the same name that you used in the byline, unless it was to say, “Look! Y’see? Someone else agrees with me, so I must be right!”? Your alibi stinks.

     3) Stan also accused me of what you call ‘running scrimmage’, and, like you, did not make a case. But since he wants to study the ‘playbook’ of sex-positive socialist feminists [as he mentioned aon another website], perhaps he’s just allowing me to post continually for the purposes of his study?

     4) Congratulations for admitting what some of us already suspected – that you’re not a feminist. Your trivializing sweeping of women’s rights issues under the communist carpet is precisely, by the way, one of the things that Dworkin has claimed to have found appalling about the Left of her time. If she was sincere, then she was certainly spot-on about that.

     5) You must have me confused with someone else – I never brought up Howard Stern. Nina is prominent on those 4-hour compilation DVDs, and she’s certainly no ‘Howard Stern’ lesbian. More to the point, she’s bisexual. And even more to the point, the videos depict sex workers performing as lesbians – no claim is made on the videos/DVDs that the performers are gay in real life. Porn captures sexual fantasy in sexually explict media.

     6) In my teens, I once volunteered on a kibbutz in Northern Israel as a member of my Zionist youth group. One the things we did very morning at the crack of dawn is pick cotton. It was hard work, but nothing degrading about that, and you know why? Because we weren’t FORCED to do it. We weren’t slaves.

     You characterize picking cotton and taking piss on the face as inherently degrading. In the particular passage of yours I am referencing, you did not look at the context in which those activities occur – and that equals puritanism.

     That one finds a particular sexual activity disgusting does not give one the right to declare it degrading. If I were forced to plant beautiful flowers, that would be degrading because I was forced to do it. Got that?

     7) The fact that folks say that utopia is not around the corner does not mean they don’t have their eyes on the prize – it’s being realistic, or what Michael Harrington referred to as productive socialist politics being “the art of the possible.” Folks have to be judged foremost by their actions, and Nina’s career-long resume of reform-oriented activism speaks for itself, especially when compared to your guilt-stricken whining.

     Any decent person who opposes divisive bigotry should give as much intellectual credence to any concept of Andrea Dworkin as they would Louis Farrakhan or Meir Kahane. They’re all three peas in the same pod – charismatc demagoguic stooges of the ruling class designed to keep workers of all religions, races and genders apart. Anything they say is properly analyzed in that context.

     9) Why is pornography “men possessing women”? Because Dworkin says so? Or is Blake the new God? Doesn’t the lack of systemic, non-anecdotal evidence mean anything? As for Linda Lovelace, Carol Queens’s skepticism was spot-on, and on the previous page of this thread [http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=2], I posted a full-blown refutation of the Dworkinite narrative of Deep Throat. Anthony Kennerson’s Yahoo group should also have a copy of it.

     Without pornography, what we have is do-it-yourself sexual fantasy, daydreaming accompanied by masturbation. In my mind, the imaginary figures, which may look like people I know in the real world, perform all manner of sexual activity. How is that any less ‘possessive’? In fact, sexual fantasy is inherently
     ‘objectifying’ in the sense that masturbators don’t focus on the non-sexual aspects of the imaginary figures but rather on the sex because that’s where the good stuff is, the pleasure, the rubbing, etc. In the realm of fantasy, the fantasist controls all the action. Needless to say, that precedes capitalism.

     Focusing on non-sexual aspects can occur in … non-sexual fantasies. When volunteering on the campaigns of various progressive but losing politicians, I would frequently fantasize while asleep about being able to reach every non-voter who would vote for my guy if only they were registered. Since there was no sex involved in this fantasy scenario, I didn’t jack off to it. But my heart got a nice pounding out of it. Did I objectify these non-voters by failing to consider their sexuality?

     What do porn viewers actually think about real pople, real women, and the affiliated issues? It couldn’t hurt if a professional pollster or surveyer actually asked them. But that has happened only once, back in 1989. In the November 1989 Journal of Sex Research, Vernon R. Padgett, Jo Ann Brislin-Slutz and James A. Neal concluded from their comparative study of 184 psychology students and 20 adult thater patrons that “Patrons of the adult theater, who viewed more pornography, had MORE FAVORABLE attitudes toward women than male or female college students.” [caps mine](“Pornography, Erotic, and Attitudes Toward Women: The Effects of Repeated Exposure”, page 479). These three academicians gauged such attitudes by asking the participants their views on the ERA, abortion rights and other isses of women’s rights. Some ‘possession’!

     Until a new study comes out covering the same terrain, that remains the gold standard.

     10) “When the totalitarian imperitives of capitalism are overthrown, there will be no sex INDUSTRY. Not because, as Sheldon typically argues, some Stalinist boogyman will shove a pistol in a prostitute’s face, but because prostitutes themselves will be a part of the fight for liberation. Without the threat of eviction and the availablility of productive work, the vast majority of sex workers will no longer be compelled into that industry. The very “choices” we have to make will be qualitatively different.”

     Well, my crystal ball says there will be a sex industry, just as there will be non-sexual industries, comprised of a collection of local worker collectives. I have no doubt the imagery then will be as stomach-turning as it is aesthetically-pleasing. The Lusty Lady points the way…

     29 March 2005, 2:16 pm

162. Sheldon:

     By the way, Ren’s well-informed skepticism of AVN figures is typical of much of what is posted at AdultDVDTalk.com

     Which means that folks who cite both AVN & ADT to make a general point as to what is prevalent in porn are caught in a contradiction. The only way around it, for those of bad faith, is to cherry-pick among the posters there – to select whatever fits one’s pre-conceived biases and ignore the rest.

     It’s safe to assume that Nina’s stats on the sales of her Adam & Eve series come not from AVN or ADT but Adam & Eve, a figure which she can verify by examining their books.

     29 March 2005, 5:20 pm

163. Ren Galskap:

     In the article that began this discussion, Robert Jensen made 2 claims:
     1) The films he reviewed were mainstream films.
     2) They told stories about experiencing pain while having sex with men.
     From this, he concluded that porn is about cruelty to women.

     I’ve already pointed out that Jensen’s method for choosing films to review guaranteed that the videos were low budget, low sales, hard core porn. If the producers were lucky, the titles sold more than 10,000 copies. Average titles of that type sell 1,000 to 2,000 copies. The videos from the Gag Factor series are classic examples of this type of title. The fact that Jensen included a Gag Factor title with his “mainstream” porn is a signal that something is wrong.

     In order to say definitely how men were interpreting porn, Jensen would have had to ask male viewers. Barring that, his claim that men are seeing stories about women in pain depends on showing that the scenes he reviews can’t be interpreted any other way. But Jensen’s own descriptions of the scenes contain many signals of female pleasure. First and formost is the fact that in each scene, the female said she was enjoying herself. Wherever there was an ambiguous facial expression, Jensen interpreted it as pain or despair. I know from experience that I can’t tell a grimace of pleasure from a grimace of pain. Sometimes I have to stop in the middle of lovemaking and ask. Furthermore, these are performances. What Jensen describes as a look of despair could just as easily be a female performer’s unconvincing attempt at a look of adoration. How would Jensen know which was which? How would the average male viewer know which was which? Given that the female performers claim to be enjoying themselves, why wouldn’t male viewers interpret the scenes as involving female pleasure, rather than pain?

     In two of the scenes described, the female is penetrated in the anus and vagina simultaneously. From Jensen’s article, it’s obvious that he thinks this must be painful and the male viewers must be interpreting it that way. In fact, there are women who enjoy this. I’ve had sex with a woman who enjoyed fisting. The fact that a sex act isn’t enjoyed by all women doesn’t mean that there are no women who enjoy it. If a man is watching a scene in which a woman claims to be enjoying an unconventional sex act, there’s no reason to assume that he doesn’t believe it.

     The only scene with a clear signal of unhappiness is the scene where the female sheds a single tear. But even here, it’s not a response to the sex acts she’s performed. It’s a response to a request for a tear. The context makes it appear that she’s showing off her ability to shed tears on demand, not regretting her pain and humiliation.

     Again, these are performances. If the male viewers wanted pain, it would be easy for the performers to provide unambiguous signals of pain. Shouting, screaming, copious tears, threats of revenge, even porn performers can do that. Rob Black and Lizzie Borden of Extreme Associates specialize in that sort of thing. Their titles are not huge sellers. The demand for female pain is not very big.

     Based on Jensen’s descriptions, it seems more likely that men are interpreting these scenes as involving female pleasure than that they are interpreting them as involving female pain. Even the Gag Factor title, which seems to be the most extreme of the lot, has clear signals of female pleasure. Rather than demonstrate that porn is about cruelty to women, Jensen has illustrated a claim made by some of his opponents; even extreme hardcore porn can be about female pleasure. Based on Jensen’s sample, that seems to be the case for the titles that sell well at video stores.

     29 March 2005, 7:31 pm

164. Ren Galskap:

     Whoops! My description of Jensen’s claims should have read:
     1) The films he reviewed were mainstream porn films.
     2) They told stories about women experiencing pain while having sex with men.

     29 March 2005, 7:34 pm

165. Nina Hartley:

     For the record, the sales figures on my educational series came from the accounting dept. at Adam&Eve and were given to AVN by the company’s publicist. I receive a small royalty on each video sold, so I can verify that the numbers are correct.

     Nina Hartley

     29 March 2005, 7:57 pm

166. Artdog:

     I find it ridiculous for anyone to take 3 films out of over 11,000 and then try to suggest that those 3 “are broadly representative” of all porno films. I hardly consider “The Sopornos” to be an accurate view of all “couples” porn. Actually I consider “The Sopornos” to be unlike any couples film that I have ever seen. I guess some people view accuracy as a matter of interpretation though.

     30 March 2005, 4:50 am

167. the burningman:

     Sheldon writes: “In my teens, I once volunteered on a kibbutz in Northern Israel as a member of my Zionist youth group. One the things we did very morning at the crack of dawn is pick cotton. It was hard work, but nothing degrading about that, and you know why? Because we weren’t FORCED to do it. We weren’t slavess. You characterize picking cotton and taking piss on the face as inherently degrading. In the particular passage of yours I am referencing, you did not look at the context in which those activities occur – and that equals puritanism”

     No, you weren’t a slave: you were a volunteer settler helping to steal someone else’s land. You CHOSE to take part in what the rest of the world calls “ethnic cleansing.”

     Earlier you wrote about how you support anti-capitalism, except when it comes to your write to buy women’s bodies. And that you support internationalism, except when it comes to maintaining the Zionist state of Israel on Palestinian land (from the river to the sea).

     There is certainly a link here. You support the left as a moral position when it is convenient to you and your kind, but reject the ability of the oppressed to stop oppression itself. Democracy is not the right of men to buy and sell women’s bodies. It is not the right of European Jews to establish a volkstadt on Arab land. Your inability to dig into the very real relations involved here says much about the choices you make and long-running hypocricies of “democratic” socialism. Right is defined by power and the little bit you have you aren’t willing to give up.

     Just as you are comfortable equating equating a living sexual liberation with a limp dick, so too do you equate principled internationalism with “anti-Semitism.” The method is the same, the result convenient. Marx hit the nail on the head 150 years ago and you still can’t wrap your head around it.

     Maybe it’s because your “crystal ball” is clouded with “non-degrading” 65-man creampies.

     30 March 2005, 11:28 am

168. Sheldon:

     Your ability to read is impressive. I never said that I support internationalism. I posted that I respect consistent internationalism. ‘Respect’ and ‘support’ may be synonymous in your thesaurus, but not in mine.

     All land in the United States is land stolen from the Native American. Perhaps you can accuse the sex worker collective of the Lusty Lady of participating in stealing land, since if you trace back its real estate occupancy far enough, you’ll find that a Native American Nation had been there first. But just as the sex workers did not actually partake of any ethnic cleansing, neither did the worker/members of Kibbutz Machanaim. Both sets of workers have been, at worst, beneficiaries of ethnic cleansing performed by others, decades (or centuries) before.

     My ‘right to buy women’s bodies’? Yeah, right. Renting a video is, first of all, renting, not buying. Buying is for keeps. And what I’m watching are performers enacting fantasies I happen to enjoy. Last I checked, none of those performers, male or female, leapt out of my TV set and declared themselves to be my slaves.

     Do women and gay men who watch all-male porn believe they have the right to own the bodies of other men? Or is that some zinger you toss at male breeders only?

     Of course, there is my collection of Star Trek DVDs, which is not a rental but an actual for-keeps purchase. That poses a real problem. I ‘own’ the Starship Enterprise now, complete with an entire crew, warp drive, and photon torpedoes. All those bodies at my non-sexual disposal to advance my agenda of..installing myself as the President of the Federation of United Planets.

     The Lusty Lady is located in San Francisco. Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy will be built in San Francisco. Obviously, not a coincidence.

     Your detour into Zionism-bashing is typical, since you did not actually address the point I was making about picking cotton, an activity that YOU first brought up on this thread. Remember?

     30 March 2005, 7:38 pm

169. the burningman:

     I love when apologists for Israeli ethnic cleansing make comparisons to the genocide of Native Americans to justify their own behavior. It’s truly choice and deeply telling.

     The logic is consistent, the allegiences are clear. This discussion, even when dragged down by Sheldon’s distortion sophistry and , has been informative all around.

     Some people believe in liberation and fight for it, others settle for the best they offer within the desert of the real — and others are jerkoffs. Pretty consistant with every debate I’ve every heard on the left.

     30 March 2005, 8:08 pm

170. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     Jeez… Does EVERY debate on the net have to degenerate to a flame war about Zionism?

     I am a supporter of Palestine and a Sex Worker, but I see no link what-so-ever between sex-work and Zionism. None.

     30 March 2005, 8:47 pm

171. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     And also, I believe in liberation which is why I believe in concretely supporting sex-workers organising, speaking out and empowering themselves. Campaigning against sex-work, then saying that we shouldn’t support sex-workers organising because it “legitamizes prostitution” (as our CPI-ML comrade at the APSC claimed – Stan probably knows what I’m talking about) just doesn’t help. It’s a cop-out and an opportunistic and dogmatically motivated abandonment of the most opressed section of the working class.

     30 March 2005, 9:09 pm

172. the burningman:

     The link is in the political method. But I’ll let it drop.

     30 March 2005, 9:40 pm

173. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     No, it’s a rhetorical method.

     Sheldon’s point was clearly that an activity that is degrading when FORCED on someone, can be not degrading when CHOSEN.

     However, I think that when there is ecconomic and psychological co-ersion involved there isn’t really a choice. That doesn’t just go for sex-work but also for cotton picking or any other activity.

     It is still however, like the difference between slavery and wage-labour. You cannot argue that they are the same.

     30 March 2005, 10:33 pm

174. the burningman:

     If you want to go back and read the orginal context, the general point is that some activities are degrading, some have degrading contexts and that for just about everything the system in which it is situated is how you can understand what it is. I think we agree.

     “Human agency,” a lot of electrons have been spilt in this argument and if you read back through what’s been written (and not Sheldon’s consistant distortions), you’ll see that the recurring theme I’ve been writing is that the choice isn’t between the “burqa and the boobjob.” Of course liberal freedoms beat feudalism, even if the freedom of the “west” is often dependent on the “underdevelopment” of the rest of the world. And even if the “freedom” of capitalism is the reduction of all relations to a cash exchange. This is why the solution to the sexual caste system is deeply bound up with the fight for socialism and not just a change in “attitude” towards the institutions of women’s oppression, such as prostitution, pornography and marriage.

     The reason civility broke down is that Sheldon isn’t interested in a thoughtful discussion, but has over and over again re-articulated arguments he would rather not face into strawmen he can dance with.

     30 March 2005, 10:56 pm

175. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     Yes, and the reccurent theme that I have been writing is about what to actually DO about it. I also dispute this idea that porn and prostitution are somehow the main support of women’s opression. I have taken this up before but you people would rather discuss how bad porn is for 170 comments than actually show any solidarity with real sex-workers. There are real, concrete issues here which you are studiously avoiding. This is not just bad because it ignores the practical side but also because you CANNOT understand something theoretically without relating it to practice.

     31 March 2005, 12:51 am

176. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     Actually, never mind… Clearly your “other world” is not meant to be created by or for people like us.

     31 March 2005, 1:29 am

177. Nina Hartley:

     dcwaha -

     May I just add a +1 to your comment? Obviously, I want no part in any world not created by or for people like you.

     Nina Hartley

     31 March 2005, 3:35 am

178. Stan:

     Having torn through this at lightspeed, I haven’t found all of them, but enough of Sheldon’s spleen and enough instances of his violations of the basic rules of the blog to jettison him. He has intentionally violated the chosen anonymity of list members, accused them of narcotics use, accused them of rape, refered to them as “punk” (a demonstration of the machismo lurking just under the surface), repeated his same “points” in a volume of posts desinged, apparently, to overwhelm his opponents with sheer weight. Find a flame site, Sheldon. This ain’t it.

     Bye.

     Anthony has been on good behavior, at least from what I see in a cursory glance.

     Also, to someone’s claim that MacKinnon et al have never engaged Marx… I posted an actual excerpt from Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in which she did exactly that, and in which the same book has a whole chapter on The Marxist Critique of Feminism.

     On Nina Hartley being a “socialist,” I can only say that so are Jacques Chirac and Lula de Silva. The worst red-bating I was ever exposed to was from “socialists,” who had become “pragmatic.”

     I want to post much more at length on this topic, but am squeezed for time right now.

     On whether there is a connection between the porn debate and Palestine, I say there is. I’m thinking of Maria Mies’ theme of colonization, re Luxemburg’s thesis on the necessity to exploit non-capitalist sectors to sustain capital accumulation.

     Gotta go.

     31 March 2005, 7:47 am

179. Nina Hartley:

     Stan,

     The worst woman-baiting to which I’ve ever been exposed has come from “feminists” who decided to become anti-porn. Do they rate quotation marks around their allegiances as well?

     Nina Hartley

     31 March 2005, 12:52 pm

180. the burningman:

     “human agency” — I am people like you. No one should be ashamed of the work they have to do. The issue is not that porn and prostitution are the “root causes” of women’s oppression. They are two of the clearest examples of the means by which women are oppressed. They are form, as is traditional marriage, religious hatred of the body and insideous ideology that says we are bound by the choices capitalism offers us.

     31 March 2005, 1:20 pm

181. Anthony J. Kennerson:

     Well, Stan, welcome back..and I really do appreciate the fact that you do acknowledge that I have been at least civil and tactful in my posts here.

     A couple of quick points:

     1) My point about MacKinnon was not that she never studied Marx, but that she was not a socialist (or for that matter, an economic critic of any kind); merely cherrypicking Marxist concepts and quotations for her own cultural feminist theories doesn’t make her a socialist. And in fact, her reliance on traditional conservative institutions (the majority Republican city council who passed her antiporn ordinances in Minneapolis; the mostly conservative Canadian Supreme Court who instilled her antiporn philosophy and principles into law there; the EEOC under Clarance Thomas which signed off on her “hostile workplace intent” sexual harrassment policy) to promote her principles prove my point exactly.

     2) That crackback about Nina being a “socialist” along with Jacques Chirac and Lula de Silva is a bit strained, I’d say…I would think that someone who continues to donate time and funds to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to this day would be considered far more a socialist than either a Conservative like Chirac or a nationalist politician like Lula. Or would you like to try comparing Nina to Whittaker Chambers or David Horowitz next?? Or maybe you’d like to call Emma Goldman’s or Noam Chomsky’s anarchism into question, too since they don’t meet your antiporn feminist “revolutionary communist” standards??

     No, I would say that Palestine has not much to do with the original topic of porn..but I should remind you, Stan, that it was burningman who brought Palestine into the debate when he attempted to crack Sheldon’s story of being raised in an kibbutz in Israel. (I’m not going to even touch the issue of the Middle East here with a 100-foot pole..it is totally irrelevant.)

     And of course, just as there are red-baiters around who will use the excuse of being “too socialist”, there are also sectarians who will just as much attack dissenters for not being “socialist” enough or “feminist” enough for their liking. The point being: Socialisn and feminism are simply too diverse to allow for one group to claim hegemony over another; it seems that anyone can throw out a few quotes of Marx and call himself a Marxist; or anyone who throws out verbiage about “patriarchy” can call his/herself a feminist. It should be in their actions and beliefs that they are judged.

     Finally, to burningman: My, but how you have mastered the art of verbiage to cover your own….aspirations. So porn and prostitution aren’t “the root causes” of women’s oppression; only “the clearest example by means which women are oppressed”??? Clearly, a distinction without a difference.

     BTW….MacKinnon’s chapter on the “Marxist critique of feminism” was designed to repudiate classical Marxist theory as not binding on her concept of feminism, not to adapt it. But if you want to draft her theories into your own beliefs, I can’t stop you, Stan…nor would I even try to.

     Can we agree to disagree on this one..without being too disagreeable??

     

     Anthony

     31 March 2005, 2:10 pm

182. the burningman:

     Yes, Anthony — the distinction is important. The issue isn’t Political Identity Politics or dubious acrobatics of authenticity — it is very much about how we will build a more egalitarian world.

     The communists in this discussion see that happening through the fight of oppressed people themseves, what is called “agency” or, by Marx in poorly translated 19th Century lingo, the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” NOT through accepting the permanence of the capitalist market and trying to pretty it up for the pimps in the name of the workers.

     My earliest posts here were about why we need to get beyond the liberal/conservative framework and how we can do that.Now that porn is ubiquitous, we can discuss it for what it is. “Really existing porn” is there to be looked at. Jensen did us the favor of asking a key question: why are men aroused by images of female subordination? Not, “how can we stick a gun in a prostitutes face?”

     The defense of an industry under the flag of the “right to work” is exactly as hackneyed with prostitution as it is with slaughterhouses. I put forward several real reform suggestions, including mandatory condoms and Nina and others just said it can’t be done, even if the producers who do so are indefensible. I don’t agree, but it can’t be said that real-life, practical examples haven’t been aired.

     31 March 2005, 2:23 pm

183. depreciated commodity with a human agency:

     “The defense of an industry under the flag of the “right to work” is exactly as hackneyed with prostitution as it is with slaughterhouses.”

     No it’s not, because we still DON’T actually have the right to work. Unless you people are actually willing to take on those who continue to support the criminalisation of sex-work that exists in most of the world then you just aren’t to be trusted. Just look at how your “radical feminist” friends on PIMC tried to downplay two prostitutes being kidnapped and raped by police. After reading more closely your posts Burningman I think that I am probably in closer agreement with you than Stan, Sam etc.. But you still are just ignoring the no1 main obstacle to prostitutes being able to organise which IS criminalisation, shame and fear. It IS hidden and Marx was quite clear about wanting to bring it out in the open btw – go back and read the bits out of the CM etc… It doesn’t fit at all with some of the stalinoid interpretations I’ve been hearing lately.

     Stan claims that the prostitutes wherever he lives can’t possibly be self-organised and that we are not “appropriate” poeple to help other prostitutes. FYI nobody looks like the qliche of a model trade-unionist, communist or whatever when they are standing around in 6 inch heels and lingerie but that doesn’t actually mean that we are un-organisable. How can the left be trusted when they slip in shit like that and then the rest of you just ignore it in favour of attacking people like Nina – who may be “liberals” but at least actually DO stuff for sex-worker rights?

     She is RIGHT to oppose regulation of an industry that is not even decriminalised yet. Any state regulation of sex-work while it is still criminalised or semi-criminalised is bound to drive it further underground and make life harder for sex-workers. I gave a concrete example of this earlier.

     As far as other stuff I have more to say but no time now.

     31 March 2005, 4:58 pm

184. get a new name:

     There are hundreds of thousands of sex workers in this country, just counting strippers and pros. “Rights” don’t mean shit. What matters is what is real. Ooverwhelmingly these are poor women with few options, thousands are sexual slaves and illegal immigrants. That is compulsion, not “rights.”

     It was none other than Nina Hartley herself, sex “worker” (and producer, sometimes freelance semi-official industry spokeswoman) who wrote in this very thread that the problem with sex worker organization is not industry repression, but the consciousness of the workers themselves. Careful getting caught up in conflicting talking points. Pornography isn’t just decriminalized, it’s perfectly legal. Pimps run explicit ads in newspapers all over the country. That is decriminalized in my book.

     Sex workers have the right to get fucked however rich men want them fucked.

     It’s tragic watching sex workers do their bosses work for them without even getting paid. You should really listen in some time to how men talk when they are alone.

     Do rich men have the right to fuck poor women however they want because they have money? Do pornographers have the right to insist that the women who fuck for money in their films can’t use safe sex practices in blatant violation of existing OSHA standards? Are there any rights more important that the right of men to buy and sell women, film their fetishized pain and call that liberty?

     31 March 2005, 7:50 pm

185. Stan:

     An excerpt of something I was working on… since I haven’t got time to respond directly right now. A piece of my simultaneous critique of marxism and post-modernism on the subject of sex. ‘Naturalization’ is the central point, I think. BTW, I have never argued for the criminalization of prostitution. Total straw man. My point from the very beginning is that the shouting about civil liberties seems to be the predominating response to a deeper critiue of sexuality as a system of power. And I drank a lot of beer with a lot of prostitutes, with whom I made friends in some cases, at different points in plenty of places where prostitution had been “legalized.” They still got their asses whipped whenever they broke the rules, and they still got tracked down when they tried to leave. Decriminalization is not a panacea. The overthrow of patriarchy is. -SG

     Leonore Teifer’s book “Sex is Not a Natural Act” (Westview Press, 1995) is a good example of the social constructionist argument (inspired by post-modern philosopher Michel Fouclaut’s essays on sexuality) against the naturalization of sex. In it Teifer writes:

     “Scholars in many disciplines identify postmodernism as a contemporary shift in worldview and the construction of reality. As one leading feminist author [J. Flax] has said, “Postmodern discourses are all ‘deconstructive’ in that they seek to distance us from and make us skeptical about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self and language that are often taken for granted within and serve as legitimation for contemporary Western culture.” Discourses, of course, can be scientific or academic treatises or they can be diaries, poems, productions on the analyst’s couch, lullabies, or film scripts. Postmodernism is about challenging absolutes in favor of multiple points of view. It’s about honoring the contexts of observations and concepts and contesting objectivity and privileged access to the “way things really are.” It’s about acknowledging change and the difficulty of definitive pronouncements. It’s about permanent instability.” (Teifer, pp. 37-38)

     Teifer, using this deconstructive approach – that is, deconstructing existing dominant ‘narratives’ (embodying our most basic ideological assumptions) – develops a powerful argument to support the thesis indicated in the surprising title of the book. Sex is not a natural act. It is socially constructed. Comparing the study of music with the study of sexuality, she notes that sexology “always dwells on the anatomy and physiology of the genital organs… [but] Open a textbook of music, in contrast, and you will not find chapters on the bones, nerves, blood vessels, and muscles of the fingers (for playing the piano), the hands (to play cymbals or cello), or even the mouth or throat (for flute or singing).” (Teifer, p. 6)
     Marx made precisely this challenge to biological determinism, when he wrote in Grundrisse that:

     “Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer. Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy—and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there—it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; by determining the manner of consumption; and by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer’s inclination by beckoning to him as an aim-determining need.”

     What are widely perceived as mere (‘natural’) bodily needs – drives – says Marx, are not ‘natural’ at all, but in every case structured and mediated by the organization of society and its culture, because we begin and end not only as biological creatures but as social ones. Marx says here that one cannot reduce eating – as it is actually performed and not in some abstract sense – to biology. Biological reduction is one manner in which ideology makes the structures of society disappear from our consciousness, whereupon it establishes norms.
     Prior to or apart from society, there is no such thing in nature as ‘normal.’
     ‘Drive theories’ of sex correctly point out that there is some biological basis for sexual behavior, but what value does a statement like this have? We are biological organisms; that is inescapable. So what? The abstraction out of history that is accomplished by attempting to explain sexual behavior through these ‘drives,’ is not only partially wrong, it is totally wrong. When these behaviors are in every actual case socially mediated then there is no such thing as a free-standing drive. This is like trying to describe the phenomenon of fire in the absence of oxygen. Desire is never produced by a simple ‘biological’ drive. Desire itself is a bio-social construction.
     This fact is the basis of understanding that sexuality itself is socially constructed, and that it is a system of power, and therefore deeply political.
     In the past sexual behavior and ‘misbehavior’ was explained by religion and characterized as an issue of morality.
     This biological reduction of sex now, says Teifer (and I agree), is part of a larger process of the twentieth century medicalization of sex (a new sexual epistemology) and a host of other human behaviors, that establishes norms (naming the boundaries of ‘normal’) against which we can describe non-normative behavior as pathological.
     The Law of God was replaced by the Law of Nature. Nature was rendered marginally more explicable (and radically more subject to dangerous manipulation) by empirical science, and with the twentieth century emphasis on medical science, good and evil were replaced by norms along a continuum of healthy (sometimes ‘well-adjusted) to pathological. The individual became the repository of normalcy, and once again social systems and their determinative effects on sexuality were eclipsed.
     A common abbreviation in the medical profession for summarizing laboratory results is WNL, ‘within normal limits.’ This is useful for identifying disease and injury etiologies and determining treatment. There is good reason to establish blood pressure and to know a patient’s hematocrit. But in fact a fever is perfectly natural – consistent with the laws of nature – during a malarial episode.
     Teifer’s critique, however, is against the extension of this way of knowing (what is ‘normal’ or ‘natural’) into every aspect of our social lives, particularly sexuality. She actually historicizes this approach, though her history here is reduced to the history of ideas:

     “Political philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries invoked a hypothetical state of nature, subject to the laws of nature, to support political theories based on individuals’ free and rational acceptance of the social contract. Such theories were intended to support the right of people to resist the doctrine of the divine right of kings and to resist the abuses of power of the church. Recourse to the concept of the state of nature and its laws represented an effort to invoke a presocial design for the world that would trump the mere historical legitimacies of states. Appeals to the reason and dignity of man as given by nature supported claims for individual human rights [for some] and aspirations and for equality [for some].
     “At the same time, nature, this time the mere material world… was invoked throughout the writings of seventeenth century scientists such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes as something waiting to be tamed and controlled through man’s use of reason. Emancipated from ignorance and fear, making use of the new economic and technological opportunities of the time, man (often the male of the human species and not the generic man) would master nature, rip the veil from nature, and so on. The rhetorical uses of nature as presocial, universal and biological thus arose as political rhetoric in this intense cauldron of social change and have shaped our language and imagery since.” (Teifer, pp. 34-35)

     In actuality, this is a portion of the critique leveled against the Enlightenment by Marx. At the center of Marx’s philosophical critique were both historicity and the idea of false consciousness – understanding a transient, historically specific phenomenon as if it were a universal law of nature. Naturalization, which I alluded to in the introductory passages, and as described by Teifer, is an important dimension of this false consciousness.

     Mystificaton

     Social systems, like capitalist patriarchy, have a powerful structurally-determinative effect on every aspect of our lives. These systems are neither static nor stable. Social phenomena, then, like sexuality or economic production, can never under any circumstances be explained or understood as universal or timeless abstractions like ‘drives’ or ‘nature’. They are historically contingent, existing only in their specific forms at specific times and places.
     This is in many ways the most radical proposition of Marxism, so it merits more than a passing thought. Once we begin to dispense with ideas that are abstracted or naturalized out of history, the ideological edifices of patriarchy and capitalism begin to crumble. That is why it every system is preoccupied with and devotes incredible social resources to the maintenance of its own supporting world view.
     Marx and later Marxists were very preoccupied with understanding capitalism, and the predominant application of their own deconstruction was to bourgeois economics, where the search for reified categories was – in the elliptical language of the military that socialized me – a target rich environment.
     Note that both Marx and Teifer speak of permanent instability as well. Teifer, however, as part of the post modern tendency and, as a feminist, applies her deconstruction of reified categories to sexuality. Marx and Teifer are both challenging male-bourgeois empiricism, even though Teifer refuses to name its class origins. Both share the premise that “human nature” is not fixed, but a rich mass of potentialities that develop in a thoroughly social context (socially constructed).
     The split between them has occurred in what they each neglected.
     Marxism has shown a powerful economic bias in its observations (economism), and Engels’ definitive work on sexuality, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, as well as many of Marx’s pronouncements “naturalized” women and sex, in spite of the fact that this treatment of the subject contradicted their own groundbreaking critique of bourgeois science and ideology, a critique reflected above in the passage from Grundrisse.
     In Capital we read:

     “The distribution of work within the family, and the regulation of the labor-time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon NATURAL conditions… Within a family… there springs up NATURALLY a division of labor, caused by differences of sex and age, a division that is consequently BASED ON A PURELY PHYSICAL FOUNDATION.” (capitalization mine)

     Unlike “social” labor (in a factory, for example) which is subject to human intervention, we might suppose. This is not a statement of incompletion by Marx, but an explicit statement about gender, that contradicts his own epistemological method as an historical materialist.

     “The production of life, both of one’s own labor and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship; on the one hand as a NATURAL, and on the other as a SOCIAL relationship… [A]part from local causes, principally… to the employment of the mothers away from their homes… there arises an UNNATURAL estrangement between mother and child… the mothers become to a grievous extent DENATURALIZED toward their offspring.” (capitalization mine)

     There is an error in common committed by both the Marxists and post modernists, and identification of that error goes a long way toward showing us the way out of the Marxist-postmodernist impasse, and to reconciling the Left with feminism so we can take up the revolution together.
     Post modernists, as we can see above in the scrupulous evasion of class and modes of production in the effort to confront sexual reification, have circumscribed themselves to the ideological realm (and then convinced themselves that it is a free-standing category independent of the material basis of socio-economic development). On the other hand, the post modernist project of discovering the genealogies of ideas – especially with regard to gender – has given us a rich body of new insights into the psychological/affective dimension of gender that does exist in a powerfully interfused relation with the so-called material conditions of gender – which are not always directly perceived as economic.

     Dualism

     Both these camps have committed the same error, and that is to accept the premises of the very Cartesian dualism they have struggled to deconstruct – that is, the arbitrary separation of mind-body, nature-culture, etc.
     Post-modernism is primarily an academic phenomenon, but