By Whoselaw
This article deeply bothers me. I am with the author
on what I think his core message is, which is that acting in
pornography has real costs and that, as a result, it’s
distressing when people ignore those costs, harm themselves,
and, in doing so, also harm professional actors by driving down
the going rate for porn work to below cost.
What I can’t forgive is the author’s
repeated statement that sex work simply -can’t- harm people
who have already been abused because those people have already
been ruined somehow: “It’s a great job for someone
who is dumb, unambitious and devoid of sexuality. In fact, the
only way you can do sex work (as naïve feminists like to
call it) is to have no sex left in you. Some perverted uncle
or disgusting friend of the family robs a girl of her most intimate
and valuable asset and it’s like a light switch goes off.”
“When the religious right rails against pornography and
portrays it as male predators taking advantage of vulnerable
women, I roll my eyes. Porn is simply victims of abuse making
the best of a terrible situation. Porn producers aren’t
predators. They’re entrepreneurs.” “Lawsuits
that include violating a woman’s chastity are a very big
deal because the courts understand a woman unanimously seen
as a slut is in for a lonely life. Now, if someone already took
your chastity and threw it in the garbage, selling it isn’t
such a big deal.”
The horrible classification of women that he sets
up here – women who are still innocent, who should be
protected, and women who are damaged and who therefore have
nothing anymore to protect – is horribly dehumanizing
to survivors. It’s possible that if you interview women
in sex work you’ll hear a lot of this kind of thinking
but accepting it and passing it along as a rationalization the
way this author did is incredibly harmful. Plenty of people
who have done sex work and left have talked of being hurt by
it “despite” the fact that they’d also experienced
abuse earlier in life. Being abused in the past is a -risk factor-,
not a bonus, in terms of being able to get out when one wants
to, being able to recognize what isn’t okay, and being
able to resist internalizing the things that producers and the
rest of society say about your sexual and personal worth. You
can’t actually justify telling someone their sexuality
is totally worthless by saying that someone’s already
told them that before and they believe it.
I can’t speak for every sex worker, and
never was one myself, but then again I get the impression that
neither was he. And that’s the problem with that article:
he thinks he did his research by interviewing a few sex workers
and having a failed relationship with an ex-stripper. But then
he writes this article devaluing a population that already has
a really hard time speaking for itself, in order to protect
a bunch of relatively healthy, educated women who have, comparatively,
little trouble talking for themselves.
By Spirit of our Time
I agree that the blithe lumping together
of sex workers based on no doubt limited experience is one of
the problems in the article, though I also think that the quotes
you provide as intended by the author as a strange mixture of
sarcasm and psychbabble about trauma and downstream sexploitation.
I also think that while drawing attention to the
hipster porn phenomenon is worthwhile, your take on where is
action is on the marginalization of “sex workers”
is bang on. Like other forms of sex play during adolescence,
this one has a lot of variation in it, and the vast majority
of people who participate emerge with the same level of control
they had going in to it, and then some. But there’s already
a skew in the population profile here. As much as we like to
think of the internet as the great equalizer, flashing yourself
in front of your web cam or via your cell for experimental kicks
isn’t something that everyone can do.
