Three recent news stories combined to start me thinking. The first was on cable news, and it attempted to put a sexy spin on the dire economy, and feature Lucite heels and fishnets in the process. The gist was, in the financial meltdown, laid-off workers — especially white-collar, former employees of banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies — are stripping to keep the recession from the door.
While strip-joint attendance and bar receipts might be down, clubs have more potential performers than they can possibly use. The tone of the story was luridly archaic — here in the new depression, good-looking girls and boys are selling themselves into shame and degradation.
The second was an Internet item I discovered by accident. A New York University student claimed she was paying her rent and tuition by working as a professional dominatrix under the pseudonym Mistress Ava. Although an obvious new twist on a girl turning tricks to put herself through college, Ava took some pains to make clear she was no prostitute. “A lot of girls are genuinely into dominating a man, and while I find it extremely fun; it is not a sexual thing.”
In the comments that followed, someone calling herself Mistress Galatea even claimed pro doms were superior to conventional hookers in a sex-worker pecking order. “To me the hierarchy comes from the power role. If I have sex with a man for money, I am allowing myself to be penetrated, therefore I am allowing myself to be violated.”
To find even sex workers supporting an outdated, 20th century stigma that, for far too long, has attached itself to every kind of commercial sex, was both disappointing and significant. To embrace the illusion that, here in the post-Paris Hilton, cyber-wired, 21st century, pornography is nothing more than another sector of legitimate entertainment, no better or worse than (say) stand-up comedy or rock ’n’ roll, is a comforting ideal, but a long way from the general reality.
The tired concept that to perform a real (or even simulated) sex act for cash — instead of a hundred other dubious reasons — is degrading exploitation, and maybe even criminal, lingers long after it has outgrown any social usefulness. A prurient tabloid morality permeates far too much of the mainstream media, and sex is still treated with an unhealthy combination of disgust and snigger. The media like nothing more than to jump on any story of the addicted or suicidal porn star, even though such problems beset performers of every kind, from comics to guitar players.
The idea that hard times will force the young and poor into porn and prostitution is just another prop to outmoded prejudice. The struggle to make sexual attitudes less destructively repressive has been waged for as long as I can remember, and still there’s no guarantee of eventual success. Which brings me to my final, though-provoking news item.
Most of us reacted with amazement to the Harvard Business School study that discovered how, in the U.S.A., the most conservative states consume the most porn, and that Utah is the highest per-capita consumer — averaging 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users. Utah? Where the conservative and the religious rule? In the words of Benjamin Edelman, who headed the study, “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by.”
Could this mean that many — maybe even a majority — of this industry’s customers actually like their pornography dirty, expoitative, and illegal? Must we assume that, up in Salt Lake City, they want their porn stars to be wretched victims of criminal exploitation, because that’s what gets them off? If true, this bodes ill for any golden age of mental health and sexual openess, and also means that, far from defending national decency, the anti-porn crowd just want to keep their smut smutty. Maybe I watch too much cable news, but, if I’m right, a whole new dimension just opened up in the War on Porn.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
This article originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
