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The problem with most discussions of porn and the porn industry is that the vast majority of it comes from people outside the industry who are projecting their own hangups and/or fantasies onto it. Thus a lot of the talk (either saying that it is inherently awful and must be eliminated or that it is 100% fine and is an unalloyed good) ignores the voices of the people who actually know the most about what it is really like. So before jumping into any discussion I recommend reading what performers have written about their experiences Lorelei Lee's article in N+1 Cash/Consent is an amazing dissection of the contradictions of working in porn, of how poverty can make consent fraught for any sex work, and how her work was still work that deserved dignity. Lorelei Lee posted:Even in those early years I knew the work was not how anti-sex-work feminists described it. I knew it was as good and as terrible as other, lower-wage work I’d done. I knew, too, how quickly people stopped listening when they began to feel pity. So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates. That I did not watch movies about “college kids” with a gripping, painful yearning in every part of my body. That I did not come home from every sex-work job giddy at the possibility of ordering more takeout Chinese food than I could eat, giddy at having enough money to commit the thrill of waste.
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Apr 4, 2023 12:17
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Xander77 posted:So what are the options \ attempts to organize into a union in the mainstream porn industry at least? There used to be the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, which did all the regular testing and provided a lot of other healthcare services for adult performers. Oriana Small has a couple of chapters on it in her memoir Girlvert, where she talks about going to their clinic in LA. A lot of the staff were former performers themselves, and Small recounts one story of being all coked up and going to get her testing, only for her nurse to be the widow of John Holmes (who gave her a dressing-down that Small only later realized was an important step in her realization that she needed to get sober). Alas, they shut down when the database they maintained got breached and basically everybody in their system had all their personal info leaked. Today there is Performer Availability Screening Service, which is run by the Free Speech Coalition. The FSC is mostly a lobbying group for the industry but have started working more closely with various performer groups (mostly the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee) to make more resources available to help performers. As for unionization, there is the Adult Performance Artists' Guild, which gained federal recognition from the labor department in 2021. Since they're an actual union they're much more focused on labor issues and than APAC (which is much more closely tied to the FSC).
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Apr 5, 2023 15:25
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Shrecknet posted:what's the vibe with OnlyFans? Is the influx of B-list celebs like Bella Thorne monetizing nothing but bikini pics you could see in US Weekly sucking up finite money that should be going to content creators who aren't independently famous and rich? Or does their presence on the platform legitimize it in a way that gets more eyeballs and payments to other performers than they otherwise would? The OnlyFans pivot-to-SFW was at least in part an attempt to head off at the pass a round of hit pieces by Exodus Cry and their affiliated talking heads, trying to kneecap OF the same way they did PornHub. However, OF realized that they had a lot more support among performers than PornHub ever did (a natural result of making your money when performers make money as opposed to making money by pirating performers' work). Since they felt they had a stronger case in the event that Visa and/or Mastercard considered dropping them, they reversed the call. As for the remaining SFW OnlyFans content, they are taking things in some...weird directions. Like this roast of Bert Kreischer: https://onlyfans.com/558121094/onlyfans The weirder thing happening with OF right now are managed profiles. The NY Times, of course, called them e-pimps based on the words of one guy running one of the smaller agencies but who clearly gave a shitload of the kind of access they wanted for their profile (non-paywall link). quote:Two years later, Rosero has the OnlyFans operation more or less routinized. When he starts managing a new client, he asks for a bank of nude photos and videos. Rosero’s ghostwriters — known in the industry as chatters — will act as the model in private messages with the customers who pay to talk to her. These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos. They tell particular subscribers that a video was recorded just for them; in fact, the same clip might be sold to dozens of people. The chatters earn a small percentage on most sales, and the rest is split between the agency and the model. The subscribers presumably think they’re talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele — typically horny, lonely men — make it pretty easy. “Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us to just feel a connection,” reads a post on Think Expansion’s website. This desire, the post explains, is a pimp’s bread and butter, “e-” or otherwise: “Hustling simps has been an art since the beginning of time!” I suspect that this form of OF will burn out pretty quickly. It is pretty easy to tell when an OF profile has been taken over by an agency, as you'll suddenly start getting tons of unsolicited messages (and not the typical "here's my latest PPV video" ones, but stuff like "hey bb, 'sup?"). Then again, even not taking agencies into account, everyone I know in person who has an OF also has someone else answering their messages. For example, one local comic who has an OF as a side-hustle just has her boyfriend answer all messages. doverhog posted:If that is the consensus, ok. Full decriminalization is not the current law in most places. Legalization (setting rules and regulations under which it can be done legally) vs decriminalization (it is simply no longer illegal) was a big topic of debate among the sex workers' rights movement a while back. There are a few reasons that decriminalization is more popular among that crowd. The first is that a lot of "legalization" bills are actually Swedish Model criminalization efforts. Second is that a lot of cases of existing regulation/legalization end up exacerbating inequities (like, if you can only work in a licensed brothel, and the owner of the brothel is a loving shithead, the only way you can legally work is to work for that shithead). Third is that, for better or for worse, there is often a pretty big libertarian streak among many sex workers. That's probably a natural result of having to build a life and career outside the law. Maggie McNeil's blog is a great reference on the sex workers' rights movement, but man sometimes you'll see some stuff in there that feels right out of Ayn Rand.
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Apr 10, 2023 02:11
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Bar Ran Dun posted:But that’s just it isn’t it. We are forcing folks to work against it their will. As they say Did you read the Lorelei Lee piece linked earlier ITT? She directly addresses most of the points you are bringing up here.
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Apr 10, 2023 16:59
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. So is there a difference between needing/being forced by economics to take a construction job to have food and shelter and sex work for the same. At least for the vast majority of people there is.
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It should be noted that the Washington Examiner is a NewsMax-level conservative rag. Gibson lost by less than 3 points (under 970 votes) in a race that was so close it was one of the last to be called. Now, given her district's history she probably should have won handily, so her past sex work did definitely hurt her. Hopefully we will eventually have a world where someone who has done sex work will be able to run for office without that work hurting their chances of winning. Unfortunately, we aren't in that world just yet.
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Nov 10, 2023 17:03
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The Kingfish posted:That argument is an oversimplification, but I think there is a genuine discussion to be had as to whether the labor of performing sexual gratification is meaningfully different from other forms of labor. The discussion is already happening, and has been ongoing for a very long time. There is a lot of extremely thoughtful writing from actual sex workers & porn performers on this exact topic. One of those even got posted on the first page: LanceHunter posted:Lorelei Lee's article in N+1 Cash/Consent is an amazing dissection of the contradictions of working in porn, of how poverty can make consent fraught for any sex work, and how her work was still work that deserved dignity.
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Nov 13, 2023 03:58
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