Aardvaarkman said:
awsome117 said:
Most people who do porn, actually enjoy doing it, not just for a paycheck.
Where did you get this idea from? Was there some peer-reviewed study of porn actors? I'm sure the industry wants you to believe this is true, I have my doubts that it is supported by reality.
While it is true that there are
some women who enjoy working in porn, the sex industry is generally rather exploitative. There are many links to organized crime. A significant number of women depicted in porn are not doing it out of choice. There's a large international trade in in women used for sex. Women are kidnapped, locked in bedrooms and used as sex slaves. Young girls (not even teenagers yet) in poor countries are sold by their families into the sex trade. Many are smuggled internationally. For some girls, being a sex object is literally all they know.
You enjoy porn, so you want to ignore any of the serious issues involved and pretend that it's all just fine. It's all free will, and everybody involved is happy and being treated properly. But that's not actually the case. Even with the "legit" porn producers who do things legally, there are tricky questions around sexuality and choice.
Of course the porn industry wants you to believe the girls love what they are doing. It's all about artificial satisfaction, after all. Why do you think they fake orgasms?
Yes, and no. Most of what your talking about is forced prostitution, not porn per se. In the USA at least porn by definition is illegal, but getting something defined as pornography in a legal sense is very difficult as it must be "obscene and without redeeming merit" and go through a very specific review process to be banned. Most "porn films" are actually defined as "art films" and hold onto some pretension of a plot or message for that reason. The studios operate pretty publically, and have a lot of people keeping close eyes on them, looking for any excuse to shut them down or go after them.
Whether having sex on camera for money is demeaning is subjective, and arguements about exploitation are ambigious, as there is no real guarantee that the ladies doing this could be making better money for an equal amount of effort in another area of work. Going by a lot of things I've read, the actresses aren't getting rich off of this, but they do generally get to shoot a couple of scenes a week and make enough money to live off of, with a lot of free time. Looked at it from that perspective, it's not a bad deal.
The kind of thing your talking about is forced prostitution, where some pimp gets his hooks into a young girl, sells her out to guys, and probably videotapes her having sex as a side business, with her not really getting paid. That's something else entirely and is treated considerably differantly. Girls in that situation generally don't work for porn studios, do interviews on TV, and so on.
Outside of the US, yes... legalized slavery is a big deal. In the US we like to go on about our massive racism and sexism, but in reality we're probably the most enlightened place in the world, closely followed by other first world nations that largely keep to our example. The first world however makes up a relatively small portion of humanity, with us being outnumbered by the second and third world. China represents roughly 1/3rd of the human race and while it has huge, modern cities and a well educated elite, large portions of the country might as well still be in the middle ages. People talk about the education of the Chinese elite (who are sent to represent the country), but tend to overlook the massive hordes of factory workers, or the farmers who started the SARS epidemic due to them living alongside their animals, and so on.
The plight of women in China is bad, given their sexism, but gets even worse when you look at places like "The Middle East" where our attempts to bring about women's liberation to nations like Iraq and Afghsnistan failed because we refused to force the issue and work to destroy the central culture of the region. All our promises fell false when the new constitutions in those nations specified that they were going to be Islamic nations.
Then of course we have Africa, India, and even parts of eastern Europe which have problems, not to mention south and central america.
So yes, your correct to an extent about the plight of women, but that has little to do with the US "porn industry". Being a major market you could argue that the US shares some responsibility for consuming porn made in such countries, but honestly we do try and limit the import to some extent, which is why the underground exchange of extreme foreign pornography can be a big business.
In this paticular case we're looking at a couple of US porn stars, who are starting their own bloody business... which pretty much flies in the face of pretty much everything being implied here. If they were slaves it's doubtful they would be setting up a game-oriented webcam site.
What I think of the business itself, it does seem they are very much their own bosses, and are deciding what to do without having anyone holding a gun or syringe over their heads.
