NP - Porn hurting male libido/attitude towards women??

[Daniel Harper]

If people who live off of their attractiveness are exploiting themselves,
how about people who choose careers where you have to be expressly strong?
Or have an unusually good personality? Or even be highly intelligent?

We all work with our strengths and weaknesses to choose a career. I tend to
think of modeling as a sort of "paid to work hard to be really thin and to
look stereotypically pretty" kind of job, which is why I think it's silly
when models complain about how hard they have to work to keep their figure
-- that's their frickin' job!

I think you touch on the larger point when you say that the producers are
the ones exploiting here, and that's not too far off the mark, if we expand
it to society as a whole. I help people find books and run a cash register
for a living (at the moment -- hoping to hear about a new position soon); is
my ability to run the register being exploited by the company that makes way
more money in an hour of my effort than I do? Should I be paid a proportion
of the sales I ring through in that hour?

Should those who build railroads share in the profits of those railroads? Is
it fair to say that the rich and powerful can pay people the lowest possible
wage to get them to build things and do things that increases their own
wealth exponentially, just because they have the power and resources to do
so? (Brought it back around again, I did!)

People get icky about porn because people get icky about sex. Sex is
"special" and "unique" and nothing at all like other activities that we
commercialize. Hunger, for instance, is a much more basic drive than sex,
but no one complains about the commercialization of the restaurant industry,
or the exploitation of chefs and servers who use their talents for the
profit of large restaurant companies....

We think about porn as a sort of twisted version of sex because it creates
loving intimacy, but your grandmother's home-cooked pecan pie can be just as
powerful a force towards loving intimacy of a different sort, and we don't
complain when you can buy a mass-produced, frozen pecan pie at the grocery
store.

My opinion: we need to leave our hangups about sex behind and understand
that it's just one of those things that we do together, and that it's no
more or less special than anything else that can build relationships. Maybe
when we have perfect birth control and disease prevention mechanisms....

--Daniel

On 5/21/07, Bryan Snyder <wilsonistrey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Very good question… I would say both actors are… by the producers….
>
>
>
> But I'm obviously someone who doesn't think much of people who choose to
> live off their attractiveness… in modeling, acting, porn.. all of it… so I
> think all porn actors are victimized by those funding the film, buying it,
> watching it…
>
>
>
> In the case with women I think it's more intense, this idea of victim and
> victimizer… in a most straight porn, I think the women is clearly being used
> as an object to do all sorts of things with, to and on.
>
>
>
> But that's a great question…
>
>
>
> PS – Of course in lesbian films… everyone's a winner!! Lol… double
> standards are fun.
>
>
>
> *From:* Joe Allonby [mailto:joeallonby at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Monday, May 21, 2007 3:41 PM
> *To:* wilsonistrey at gmail.com
> *Cc:* Daniel Harper; pynchon-l at waste.org
> *Subject:* Re: NP - Porn hurting male libido/attitude towards women??
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> But I am certainly not revolted by porn, I'm a human… watching sex is
> certainly a turn on, but I do have a habit of feeling bad for the ladies.
>
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>
> What about gay porn? There are no ladies. Who is being exploited and
> victimized there?
>
>
>
>
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