I'd like to refer people to this thread, wherein I collect a few texts written by people (mostly women) working in the sex industry.
After reading a few of them, it's pretty obvious that the answer to the question:
Are the participants "stupid"? is pretty obviously "No, they're not."
There's a lot of money to be had, and for many there's an inescapable frisson involved in the sexual transaction.
Asia Carrera is a fine example of this: she's not only a Mensa member (whatever that's worth), but also very much in charge of her own career and runs her own website on servers she's set up in her house.
And it's not just a porn site - she's very frank about her own history (running away from a too-strict home, etc.) and gives some pretty fascinating tips on giving yourself a porn-makeover (including fairly brave pix of herself in the process of being transformed from ordinary girl to porno queen).
On the other hand, I'm not sure at all about the question:
Or, to look at it another way, are the participants being systematically victimised by a business culture that can afford to do so because the shadowy legal status of the participants means they have limited legal recourse?
Or rather, I'm not sure of the presupposition I'm reading behind the question, that the system is inherently exploitative.
The "Notes from the Catwalk" piece (the first essay in the first link I put up there) is interesting because it goes into the trouble behind sex industry work, the addictive nature of it, the way it interferes with one's feelings of humanity and one's sense of intimacy with others. In other words, the object-ness starts seeping into everyday life.
(this is also very much the case in the would-be porn filmmaker diary recently put up on memepool.)
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While watching "Sex: the Annabel Chong Story" - review here, I was struck in particular by the comment that she never actually saw any money from her starring role in "the World's Biggest Gang Bang", and also the attitude of the man being quizzed about whether the men who had entered her (presumably including some when she was bleeding from a fingernail-cut on the inside of her vagina) without condoms had, as she believed, been tested for HIV.
As I mentioned elsewhere on the site, I had the opportunity to see Chong in person handling a Q/A session after a showing of "Sex" at a film festival. A *lot* of people at the screening were very concerned with the exploitation angle, that she should have seen more money from the video, etc.
Her reply was, "I did it because I wanted to. It was my idea."
With the subtext that the spectacle wasn't all about the money. And, after all, she's the one who brought the whole thing to a close when she felt she couldn't take it any more.
I was much more unsettled by the woman who set out to beat Chong's record, seemingly* very much at her (male) manager's insistence and apparently without the same level of control over the process.
* "Sex" was made by Annabel Chong's ex-boyfriend, and was actually filmed as their relationship was coming apart. For instance, note that during the intense scene where she's cutting herself, a. they're both drunk, because b. they had just decided to end their relationship, and c. he's cutting himself too... off-camera.
"We were both testing our limits, seeing how far we could go," she said, or something like that. She seemed more ticked off by the guy editing himself out of that scene than by anything that happened in her porn career. |
