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Is anyone else getting the impression that since the start of the Great Awokening it has become standard practice in the mainstream media to portray the porn industry and its consequences in a categorically negative light, even if it's done in passing, like in this case? This wasn't always the case, as far as I can tell.
When was the porn industry seen positively? It’s a categorically sleazy business.
Depends by whom and how you define the porn industry. Playboy was mainstreamed through the 1970s. The 1980s saw somewhat of a reaction due to AIDS and the Traci Lords scandal that revealed that some (many?) pornstars were underage. Val Venis was a wrestler on children's TV, with a pornstar gimmick, in the 1990s. By the 2000s, Jenna Jameson was a celebrity who could be at a Holywood party without people particularly noticing. Nudity and simulated sex has long been common in Holywood films, with fairly artificial distinctions from "real" sex, and even then, softcore "porn" indicates that the difference was supposed to be a blurry line of genre/artistic merit. Wild Things circa 1950 would be regarded as a pornographic film, albeit one with high production values, yet it was a mainstream movie in the 1990s.
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The culture used to be different. Today, the arguments that porn addiction is a big problem among young men which causes impotence and has wide-ranging negative repercussions (although I’m not sure the evidence from scientific research actually bears this out clearly, but anyway), that porn actresses have an unusually high suicide and drug addiction rate, that porn companies are exploitative and are closely intertwined with international human trafficking networks etc., that the expectations of teenage boys regarding sex are warped by online porn all find acceptance in mainstream discourse today. They aren’t even controversial.
But this wasn’t always the case. I wouldn’t say pornography was ever portrayed positively in mainstream discourse, but at least It was more tolerated and given much more leeway than today. Naivete and lack of foresight were probably part of it, because people generally didn’t assume that high-speed HD online porn will ever be freely available on touchscreens and become a widespread source of addiction. The industry was portrayed as just another branch of the entertainment industry which was actually doing a great job regulating itself voluntarily, it had mainstream crossover ability, it became normal to put porn actresses in music videos and invite them on talk shows etc. I remember there was even a time when Bill Clinton was photographed with a bunch of porn actresses at some PR event after his presidency and so on. The industry was also peddling a lot of BS about appealing to normal people’s tastes and becoming legit, creating “couples’ porn” (whatever the heck that is supposed to be) etc. Also, the idea that women should be able to live without sexual shame was getting normalized.
And again, this was all before the Culture War turned hot. Mainstream discourse used to feature less rage and negativity, the overall mood in society was less negative and dire, much more laid back, and there was no sense of malaise.
See e.g. the Friends episode where Phoebe discovers that her twin sister is a porn star. This is played for laughs, with the only shame being (some) men's enjoyment of porn and implicit inability to get the real thing. The idea of this being truly scandalous would be about as out of place in the Friendsverse as a serious episode about fighting communist infiltration or one of the women being kidnapped by cruel Native Redskins.
Indeed. Also, accessible online porn did not practically exist at the time of this TV series. Having a porn career and keeping it largely discrete was still feasible.
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It was a useful weapon against the Christians: "come with us, and have all the sexy fun times those awful prudes won't let you!" Now that the Christians are out of the way, that can be reneged upon, especially because a lot of those formerly-forbidden sexy fun times actually are bad. Similarly, I see gerrymandering of the definition of 'consent' so that 'nonconsensual' can be identical with 'bad.'
An interesting parallel with the Russian Revolution, which started out being sexually liberatory, until it was decided that sexuality outside of marriage was "uncommunist" and "bourgeois decadence" (for the non-nomenklatura).
As Orwell discusses in Nineteen-Eighty Four, there is a tension between totalising ideologies and sex, because if you're thinking about the latter, you're not thinking about the revolution, and it forms loyalties that are transient, chaotic, personal, and potentially conflicting with loyalty to the ideology's preferred authority. And Dionysus unleashed really IS dangerous.
I think another factor is Mrs. Grundy. When Christian conservativism is the norm (at least when she is growing up) her prudishness will take a Christian conservative form. However, when progressive liberalism is the norm, it will take a progressive liberal form. I remember noticing this with the Feminist Society at university 15 years ago, who literally dressed like puritans (modest all-black clothing) and would almost literally march on stage to give their pre-agreed speeches at student meetings, like a set of militant evangelicals, to explain why "Pimp My ..." marketing or "Lads' Mags" should be banned from campus.
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Yeah, it’s probably no coincidence that the increasing normalization of pornography, and its widespread marketization and distribution via VHS technology coincided with the emergence and increasing influence of the Christian Right. It also served as a useful bait to them, for sure. It also bears mentioning that, as far as I know, they naturally brought up all sorts of arguments against porn consumption, but these were markedly not the anti-porn arguments that have become normalized in current discourse (see my other comment above). Had this not been the case, I guess they’d have had more appeal among non-religious centrists.
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It's schizophrenic. It's always going to be seen as tawdy and low-brow, and earnest arguments that its consumption is sexually healthy ring hollow to most ears. At the same time, my weekly news feed seems to regularly drop an article or two about 'empowered porn stars and all their money' or 'a porn star was invited for a school book reading and incels can't handle it'. Few people want to be porn stars or would recommend it as a career, but there's a reflexive defensiveness against anybody who might ask 'what special qualifications does this whore have to read to my 5th grader?'. There's also 'former porn star, despite being forewarned, has trouble getting a normie job after exiting and isn't that so unfair'.
Hardcore straight porn is ugh the worst, but exploring your mommy kink with roleplay and bizarre anal insertions for the viewing pleasure of strangers is both normal and an exotic frontier you should explore assuming you're not close-minded. No, there is no sense to be made from this.
This makes me wonder if there ever was a male porn actor who got a normie job anywhere, for that matter.
Not a normie job, but Sylvester Stallone's career went ok:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_at_Kitty_and_Stud%27s
That's a good point, although calling him a male porn actor is a bit of a stretch.
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Closest thing I can think of is Ricardo Milos of meme fame, who very much tried to distance himself from that moment in his life once people found him.
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I haven't checked this factoid or watched the video, but the guy from the meme porn with a female pool guard in his bathtub apparently became a priest afterward.
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My intuition is that no guy watching (straight) porn -- which is the overwhelming majority of its market, from what I can tell -- actually pays any attention to the male actors. I'd bet eye tracking would show a big lack of interest in that part of the screen, and I'd bet relatively few viewers could pick such a guy out of a lineup even an hour later if not prompted to pay attention beforehand. So I'd bet getting outed for that is much less of a concern, although probably not unheard of.
But I would be curious if there are any data or anecdotes the other direction.
Men are typically aroused more visually and often engage in sexual comparison.
Some examples that results in this engaging with the male participant in porn:
Is my dick bigger? Smaller? Better looking? Also studies show men are more engaged with the penis in porn than woman typically (because again, visual). Lesbian porn is more popular with straight woman than you'd expect, and less popular with straight men than you'd expect for this (and other) reasons.
In the case of amateur porn especially, "can I get this girl" which involves look at the involved male model and figuring out if for some reason the watcher can steal his woman.
Self-insert. Sometime the fantasy is "I could be the one here." As with video games this involves observing the avatar for similarity.
A lot of this is unconscious behavior so people without an excessive amount of insight into their porn habits are unlikely to be aware, but eye tracking would likely be supportive.
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I will not tolerate this disrespect to the greatest american alive. Soldier, doctor, firefighter, astronaut, viking warrior, loving father, Johnny Sins has done it all.
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There's also plenty of straight porn where the only parts of the male's body that's ever visible on screen are parts that are normally not visible except in extremely private/intimate settings. Even if someone paid maximal attention to the male in the porn, there simply isn't enough information in the video for the viewer to identify the male in non-intimate settings. And even in those, our brains are very well developed for distinguishing between and identifying individuals based on things like the shape of their face and, AFAIK, not very well developed for doing so based on things like the shape of their penis.
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I knew someone who embodied this confusion, from a very generic middle-class Western background. She was very excited to do "Slut Walks", but she was worried that they were being appropriated by "actually slutty women" i.e. strippers, prostitutes, pornstars etc., and she's opposed to the sex industry in all its forms. Her ethos was basically that sex workers should never be judged negatively (at least if women or gay) but also that their industries should be abolished.
It’s kind of comical, actually. Average liberal feminist women seemingly believe that “sex work” is real work and should carry zero shame and no woman should be disadvantaged or discriminated in any way for engaging in it, should be legal etc., but at the same time society should not normalize it in any way i.e. there should never anywhere be even a hint of social expectation of unemployed or cash-strapped young women engaging in sex work. For example, if you’re some fat, sleazy, hairy, balding landlord, the idea of asking that unfortunate young college student barista renter who’s 2 months behind payment to pay off her debt in the form of blowjobs and sex should not even begin to enter your brain, because if it does, this evil society failed her.
All of this makes zero sense, of course. And let’s not even mention that sex work, by definition, is, you know, work, i.e. something you do even if you hate doing it, because you need the money. Also, it gets taxed. I wonder how many of these feminist culture warriors actually thought this through.
I think a lot of people on the left have a power model of sexual agency (and agency in general, e.g. low wage work) which is extremely dangerous, because there's no way to translate a power model into a predictable legal system, in the same way that e.g. a classical liberal or (Abrahamic) religious conservative model can be predictable. Classical liberalism: people have freedom and responsibility, outside of some explicitly demarcated boundaries. Abrahamic religions provide a textual basis for law that can be either consulted directly by the literate, or at least (in a functioning Abrahamic society) there is probably a set group of widely respected interpreters (priests, ministers, imams, rabbis etc.) whose advice is a reliable guide to what is acceptable behaviour, even if you (or they) don't know the whole system of laws.
In turn, this inherent unpredictability of power models of agency transfers huge power onto those social forces with the authority to determine what power relations make interactions "exploitative" or "not real choices", as well as who gets victim status and its perks. A cheap but clear example of this chaotic authoritarianism is given by the handling by the MeToo movement of sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh vs. those against Joe Biden: there was no predictable and explicit principle, so what you end up with is trial-by-media of a partisan and special-pleading sort.
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An uncharitable assumption, but I think the easiest way of cutting this Gordian Knot is to presume that certain women, straight, lesbian, or otherwise, are fine with performing/acting sexually at/with other women. So long as no men are involved in the production of the act or the consumption thereof, there will be no contradiction.
Or, alternatively, women do like the idea as a high concept, just not so much the actual implementation thereof.
I'm pretty sure that female sex workers servicing other women exclusively don't actually exist.
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Contrast the total lack of sympathy scabs got despite the fact that they were just trying to scrape by.
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None of the allegedly contradictory statements you quoted are actually contradictory.
Well, either society normalizes a trade, in which case it carries no stigma or shame, or doesn't, in which case it does. I'd say it's that simple.
Not really, no. The stigma has at least two types, and a society (we'll assume a monolith society for maximum simplicity) can stigmatize both, one, or neither.
One kind of a "stigmatized practitioner" is shunned because he is seen as if he unduly extracts value from society as a whole, particular strata or random victims. Examples: street thug, politician, john, pimp, top 0.001% OF model, business owner.
You shun those from a position of morality, good-thinking and justice. At the same time, you recognize that those people are better off in some way, even if you try to sour grapes it.
The second kind of a stigmatized practitioner is shunned (or at least, their job/patronage is) because it is seen as viscerally, materially disadvantageous for himself. Examples: beggar, hermit, retail clerk, street sweeper, common prostitute, alcoholic barfly, OF whale.
Those people are either looked down on or pitied, but very rarely envied. Those who think of those people with disdain use the stigma on the field as a weapon against the practitioners (while often being fine with perpetuating/patronizing the trade itself, like those who eat at mcdonalds and still believe mcdonalds is not a real job for real people), while those who pity them weaponize the stigma against the field (which usually has type 1 beneficiaries, to boot).
Regardless of how you feel about individual participants or whether you are one, it is not incoherent to stigmatize the trade as a whole. It does not "make zero sense" for women to want to end sex work in its current iteration (which they see as mostly exploitative of women) while minimizing collateral to type 2 sex workers. That you don't empathize, or perhaps see ending sex work or ending the stigma against sex workers as against your interests, doesn't make it illogical.
Wait retail clerk and prostitute are equally shunned? I feel so out-of-touch.
Who said equally? I said that they are. Have you never heard anyone sneer at unskilled menial/service labor and insinuate that to stay at such a job for too long (or at all, in some cases) is a failure of living life? The way customers treat them, or the way approximately no one ever in the history of the earth wanted to work in retail if they had a choice?
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The myth of hypoagency rears its head again. Women are always victims: they might end up being part of something worthy of condemnation, but it's always because men forced them to as part of a plot to subjugate women. They're hapless objects who aren't capable of meaningful agency.
Popular feminism is infested with this ideology, which manages to be deeply sexist and reductive against both men and women.
Yes, it's a strange yet common view, where women are both inert objects AND people whose autonomous choices regarding abortion, adultery, prostitution etc. are sacred.
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It’s not a myth. Women really do have less agency than men, and less ability to do things like resist pressure to do stupid things or go against the crowd.
Yes, we should stop pretending they have agency in other areas, too. But acknowledging that a large percentage of female sex workers do not actually want to be there and that sex work is inherently more prone to exploitation than other shitty low wage jobs for this exact reason isn’t wrong.
There are plenty of people who hate literally every job out there, but like Stuff. Depending on how expensive the Stuff you want is, you compromise more of yourself. Women don't like selling themselves, but if they didn't like Stuff so much they could just pick up a shift at the macs I literally see 'Now Hiring' every macs in every country I go to.
Pop feminisms influence on the concept of selling sex is adequately examined by others in this thread, but given my own (relatively extensive by this boards standardsl) experience with hookers, there is extremely little evidence of them lacking agency or awareness. Barring the women exploitated by Moroccans/Turk johnnys in Amsterdam/Denmark and the weird shit for western slavs, most working girls seem to by exercising an excessive amount of agency. At least here in Asia they have large freedom in changing managers, are literally on a high-take commission structure, and are freely able to reject clients (Indians are effectively banned from Singaporean brothels, for example, and no one gives a shit about the racism).
The dark side of the focus on OF parasites and escorts is that the real threat of female sexual exploitation is relatively unnoticed. Girls in debt and forced into prostitution are rarely streetwalkers, they are children whose shitty parents pimp them out in their private shitholes and bring in johns via darknet meetups (strictly speaking the girl is not the one in debt, but their shithead family instead).
This is a real vector of abuse that is extant and is being addressed, but I strongly suspect that the invective against sex work while hailing it as simultaneously feminist is simply due to it being another tool in the 'MEN BAD' bag. Pedos are already castigated and hunted, so theres no value in propping up the plight of these kids.
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Yeah, it’s Schrodinger’s porn when it comes to the NYT types.
Porn is good as a form of female empowerment and good for pissing off their fathers and pwning the socons.
Porn is bad as depictions of women being submissive sex objects (because everyone knows IRL women are strong and independent and their revealed preferences totally show they hate being sex objects) and as a substitute for IRL women on the margins, lessening men’s dependence on women and their desire to monkey-dance and jump through hoops for women. Court-jestering for a 5 with no guarantee of getting laid sounds less appetizing when you can crank it to 9s doing various kinds of fatherless things.
One recurring complaint from lipstick feminists is that online porn streaming sites post a lot of disgusting content featuring choking, slapping, spanking and other forms of submissive female behavior, and they do so in order to pander to icky White dudebros.
Yeah. Or maybe not.
I can't express just how penis-shrivelling this type of porn is. I wish the industry didn't cater to the other half of population so I couldn't see it even accidentally.
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Unlike IRL women of course, who definitely don’t get aroused by getting spanked, choked, slapped, or otherwise dominated in bed.
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Maybe this is your point, but this always struck me as them telling on themselves. I've seen my share of online porn - almost certainly far more than all but the most extreme of the lipstick feminists - and I've never once just stumbled on porn of women being choked/slapped/etc. and extremely rarely do I even run into women being submissive. It's not my thing, so I don't seek it out, and as a result, whatever algorithm these sites are using don't make it visible to me.
Given that males and females both tend to prefer submissive to dominant roles in fantasy (if I recall the surveys correctly) the intended audience for that sort of thing might generally be generic women consumers of porn, rather than you.
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In terms of revealed preference, the NYT-type stance would be inverted. I guarantee the vast majority of NYT male writers and readers regularly watch porn. And the vast majority of NYT readers and writers of either sex would be quite upset if their 18 year old daughter came home and announced that she was going to be a professional porn star and needed a couple hundred dollars for anal training devices.
And a commonality among cigarette smokers is that they will tell you not to start. Reading too much into revealed preferences is as big a mistake as taking everything at face value.
No doubt most NYT readers and writers sit somewhere in the middle.
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I think there's some "sense" to be made from this, in that we're seeing multiple principles supported by the modern progressive left running into conflict with each other. One set of principles is that women should have full and complete autonomy to pursue whatever they want, and that any stigma, pressure, suggestion, or differential treatment whatsoever (even imagined) denies women complete autonomy. By their lights, if you treat a prostitute or porn star differently to a teacher or doctor (in settings where their professions aren't directly relevant) because of their professions, then you are denying those women complete autonomy. Furthermore, these people should actually be celebrated, which can be justified on multiple bases: equal treatment (we celebrate teachers, so why not prostitutes?), historical rebalancing (we've stigmatized prostitutes in the past, so we should celebrate them to make up for it), or personal bravery (we've stigmatized prostitutes, so any woman who takes it on in the face of that stigmatization is clearly stunning and brave and someone worthy of presenting as a role model).
The other set of principles is that straight male sexual desires are highly suspect at best and most likely evil and ought to be suppressed. This translates to celebrating porn stars while denigrating the people they serve.
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"The woke don't like straight men" is not difficult to understand.
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The timing might be coincidental. I soured on porn myself whereas I used to be for it. The woke also seem to be some of the most enthusiastic coomers.
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Part of the new puritanism fueled by feminist disgust at "sexualization" and "male gaze".
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