Take Lana Rhoades for example, an "outspoken critic of the adult industry" with numerous anal gangbangs and humiliation scenes under her belt:
"One of the worst... honestly, I feel like I'm in denial sometimes and I can't accept some of the things that I've done.
"There was one thing that, ya know, I tried talking to a therapist about before something that I had to do for a scene that was really rough for me.
"Basically, this guy had a bowl and he, like, gagged me until I threw up into it and he, like, pissed in the bowl, and during the scene he asked me to drink it, and I didn't know how to say no.
"It was one of the most disgusting, foul scenes."
It was so traumatic .... Lena decided to go back two more times to do more humiliation scenes with same producer. $$$$
Honestly doesn't sound any different to the women who go from one abusive boyfriend to the next. There's something going on there, and I think it's more than economics.
https://lakesidemilam.com/blog/trauma-stress-repetition-comp...
More like PTSD and the difficulty it can produce dealing with normal situations.
Stockholm Syndrome is something invented on the spot, by someone integral to advising the police violence in question, to leverage misogyny to dismiss criticism of unnecessary police violence endangering hostages in a particular event, that remains a popular idea because media (both news and fictional) likes invoking it.
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply snarkily that because Lena went back to do more pornography shoots that she is lying about her experience and trauma. But just in case that is what you're implying it's worth me pointing out that repitition is a very common consequence of sufferring a trauma. The mental effects of trauma cause a cycle of trauma re-enactment behaviors.
https://lakesidemilam.com/blog/trauma-stress-repetition-comp...
Why should you need to prove that you're doing porn shoots for the right reasons ... and not when buying anything even remotely sharp (which may be used for self-harm), or for private sex acts (so why shouldn't there be limits on buying condoms or lube or ...)?
And yet when we put it in ways that would really make a difference, like requiring when a teacher buys a "barely 18" magazine, the police gets notified. Or, in Europe, when buying or surfing to anything extreme-right (a BIG no-no for anyone in public office in many WW2 participant countries, Germany, France, Belgium, ...). That would be totally unacceptable, and yet would probably protect more people than porn regulations.
And, lastly, porn (and ...) is a way people survive. If you take it away you are taking away people's livelihoods, which will have strong negative consequences for them. Is homelessness better or worse than porn? Because all these "protect women" efforts are a bit like youth care: any careful look at the alternative will make you question if these people have the good of those women at heart.
Just like the solution to drug addiction isn't making drug usage illegal, neither is banning porn.
Porn is a machine that turns drug addicts into money. It's objectively bad as far as I'm concerned.
Consider this[1]: "Belle Delphine is a hugely successful OnlyFans model making $1.2 million a month."
[1] https://www.insider.com/belle-delphine-net-worth-onlyfans-dr...
I guess sudden relative wealth isn't something many of these can handle properly and start doing stupid things.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/porn-s...
The producers know. And swap them out. As long there is somebody else, who can be abused by the same promises.
Did you read TFA that goes in explicit details of the amount of actual work involved in porn?
If you have lots of money, you can have sex with pornstars for money.
Here's an idea - regulate the porn industry so that anyone failing a drug test is cannot work in it, make the tests mandatory.
I did not express an opinion on the legalisation (or not) of any drug at all.
My point is that if performers are performing only due to promise of getting their next fix, then regulating the industry and preventing them from getting hired at all in porn is a good solution. After all, what are the alternatives?
Lots of industries have regulations on drug use (once again, it's irrelevant whether the drug in question is legal or not); why not add the porn industry to that list?
It's one thing to look at a story like this and say "oh, well, porn actresses knowingly make bad choices, I guess they just want the cash" and another to question what drives people to knowingly self-harm for money.
Because certain people (homeless, mentally ill, dealing with substance abuse) will agree to degrading treatment that no regular person would accept. Taking advantage of someone in these sorts of situations is predatory.
But in aggregate, this system creates a huge financial incentive to exploit anyone you can.
I'm all for regulation, if done in a non-puritanical, individual freedom-promoting way. People should be able to choose to be involved in producing porn. No one should feel forced into producing porn.
If we, as a society, aren't willing to ban porn (and I don't think we should), then we have a moral obligation to prevent workplace exploitation in its production via regulation, investigation, and social support resources.
IMHO doing obviously unethical work for money is also degrading and is much more common than porn. It's one thing if someone wants the money and doesn't care, but there are millions of people around the world in e.g. scam call centers that do this kind of work to stay out of the worst of the slums.
"fuck you money" is undefined. I am pretty sure that there are people that do not care about the amount, they care how they are compared to their peers. Just for these people, arguably most people, your solution already fails.
The other simplification is the assertion that degradation is a universal concept and that the threshold is the same. This is extremely difficult to define and i am pretty sure a catholic priest's definition of degradation starts at anything else than marital sex. We can define something more liberal but then we need to take the great step of saying what is acceptable regarding one's sexuality. Seems to me most liberal societies decide to bail that discussion, just deciding that if you did it without coercion it is fine. I also find that position objectionable by the way, as there are work contracts which are by definition illegal(eg, a contract for work of more than 40 hours per week), and i do not see why we could not go further.
All and all, maybe giving these people social security, requirements for mental and physical tests, a subsidy for change of employment, could help lower the chance of unfair and dysfunctional societies. At the same time if someone wants to do, distribute or consume this stuff, then we get the benefit that the chain is legitimate. I think that is really worth it. Sex workers do really important social work.
But agreed that the greater good would be looking at the structural facts that force people into unethical work and addressing those.
Brutal take, but I would argue it's just as valid as the opposite take:
"People who helplessly fell through the cracks become victims of those preying on the weak"
In reality its a mix of both and would come down to arguing over which is more prevelant.
Yes that's generally how jobs work. You need to take them to make money to survive. Porn is not special in this case.
You may argue that the difference is entirely cultural and if our culture were different, sex work would stop being special, but with things being as they are, there's no place on Earth where sex work isn't different from other forms of work.
Heck, just looking at it without considering the actual sex acts and sexual nature of the work, porn is mixing a lot of extremes from other fields of work (emotional labor, selling your physical likeness, intense physical labor, etc) while often involving extremely toxic work environments and abusive business practices. It's "easy money" in terms of money received as a function of time spent, but it's not at all an easy line of work even if you ignore all the social and cultural aspects of it (e.g. risk of losing your home, losing custody, being disowned by your family, difficulty finding romantic partners, risk of being physically, emotionally and sexually abused by people outside work, etc).
>can’t turn down due to other issues
Like what? The difference between soft and hardcore stuff is probably ~10x the payout at the extreme end. So instead of one $3-5K scene and lets go shopping you now have to work every 2-4 days.
so the term i’m dancing around is intersectionality. the opportunities afforded to these folks present them with artificially constrained options, and that constraint is the true issue here, not the porn. do not misrepresent my argument because you assumed i was being an ass, i’m just trying to call it as it is and for us to acknowledge it not change it lol
The contracts porn stars sign are often abusive of themselves.
American prudishness is a nasty force in the world. Sex work needs better regulation, less stigma, and maybe post office style banking isn't such a bad idea, since they couldn't discriminate against people in this arena.
So perhaps, given this dishonesty, we should consider how truthful her statements above may be.
Also, that's not how trauma works. People can't get out of it emotionally and mentally, like people who suffer abuse in other contexts. Also, people need money to survive, and exploitation is sadly not unusual.
Or is mental health generally not protected same as physical health?
In fact, many performers say they do not, and they are taken advantage of. Many say they are lied to. I've read them talk about using safe words, and the men ignorning them and cutting them out of the footage.
It explains why porn is mostly made in low income regions like Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. Lots of desperate people trying to get by who will get into dangerous activities trying to make ends meet.
Although the economy is now much better than it was in the 90's, even today in my Eastern European college town, the university campuses are full of adverts for "modelling agencies" that are basically fronts for bating young women into the porn industry.
Back in the 90's to the 00's, human trafficking here was rampant, with pimp gangs baiting young women from poor villages under the lie that they will work in hospitality in Western Europe to send money back home, but instead, taking their passports away, and sending them to forced prostitution in Western Europe, under punishments of beatings if they try to tell anyone or escape.
I abhor this concept of "Passport Confiscation". In middle east countries, this practice is very much prevalent. They hire poor people from Asia to construct roads, Fifa stadium, etc. Also, the first thing these bloodsuckers do is confiscate their passport. How is this different than slavery in China? Shouldn't we sanction such a toxic place?
Of course human traffickers don't care about the legality of the practice, but there's a difference between something being widespread among criminals and something being culturally (or legally) acceptable without having to buy off police or customs.
Pray give us some examples. Curious to know if this happens in Canada and USA.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/suit-fairfax-police-offi...
Notably, what is happening to Russia externally is different, because they first started a war by attacking Ukraine.
Because the governments have taken away or undermined all ability for people to organize. When you have to fear every single friend of you being a potential informant of the Secret Service, how will you find someone willing to do anything that goes against the government? Rule by fear is incredibly effective, it was what held together the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the GDR and modern Russia and China.
> Why would it be the business of other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of another?
Because we as humanity should have learned something from what my ancestors did in 1933-1945 - namely, to not stand aside in the face of obvious inhumanity.
Because in general, from my experiencing interacting with Chinese nationals, the Chinese people either don't believe or don't care that their fellow countrymen are undergoing a systematic genocide.
For the first the authorities in most western countries try to uncover it with raids on construction sites etc. The household situation is tough, as it is harder to see.
"Jail time + huge fines for anyone other than law enforcement with a legal order or warrant denying access any document a person requires for travel."
There are also some nasty privacy and autonomy implications to digitizing the passport system.
This is not primarily a technical problem, but that doesn't mean it's not a very hard problem. Tech people tend to assume that every non-technical problem is easy. Often people, legal, ethical, and institutional problems are quite a bit harder than just making shit work at the tech level, and it is not just because people are lazy or inept. It's because there are loads of competing concerns and stakeholders.
A UK passport is the property of the UK government; as far as I'm aware, it's forbidden for a UK passport holder to voluntarily surrender it to a third party.
Citation needed. Your claim doesn't match commonly reported data.
---
The global leaders in porn are the U.S, taking a 60 per cent share of global internet pornography, Two thirds of all U.S porn sites are hosted in California with the country hosting a total of 4.2 million domains containing porn.
---
There's a disconnect between where the models come from, and where the money goes.
I'm focussing on the claim made by OP which is contrary to what is commonly reported (I provided the paste from the news report). He stated "It explains why porn is mostly made in low income regions like Eastern Europe and South-East Asia."
Do you believe OP's claim to be accurate? Could you clarify what evidence you used to form that belief?
Nevertheless, there are a lot of Eastern European porn actresses, and also a lot of videos filmed there, because well, that's where the actresses live! It seems like a combination of bad economies and attractive[1] people - there's presumably less Swedish porn because Swedes can get rich[2] by working a "normal" job, and there's less porn from (exercice for the reader: insert a country here) because the average porn viewer wouldn't find people from there arousing.
[1] Attractive for the average porn viewer.
[2] Rich in the sense of being able to afford a lifestyle, e.g. brand name stuff and the newest iPhone - an average Swede can probably afford those things with a few months' worth of savings, but an average Romanian would have to save a lot longer.
I did not attempt a rebuttal. I merely pasted a paragraph from a news article to point out that his claim doesn't seem to match up with what is commonly reported. Is his claim based on data? Or how about your claims? Or are both based on what categories of pornography and porn actresses viewers watch?
How is "I merely pasted a paragraph from a news article to point out that his claim doesn't seem to match up with what is commonly reported." not an attempt of a rebuttal? And your counter-claim (which countries host domains) doesn't fit his claim of "in which countries are porn produced"?
It'd be like him saying iPhones are made in China and you quoting an article that says he's wrong because the majority of iPhones are sold in the US.
I don't look forward to be even more confused.
Would you like to clarify your meaning of "normal porn" and "toxic porn", and what data exists to support your claim?
Most of this thread boils down to "partial-birth abortion as an argument against the RU486 abortion pill" level reasoning.
Where something is produced and where the money goes are two totally different questions
The actual global epicenter of porn production is the San Fernando Valley near LA, where it's perfectly legal and there's a large industry offering everything you need.
Also, you do realize that you still need your passport for identification for basically anything right? Living in Germany, the first thing you always hear when visiting any institution, police, hospital, pharmacy, etc. is 'Ausweis bitte!'. Without an ID, you will not be served unless you're in a life threatening emergency.
And the girls would be too afraid to go to the authorities for help, for the fear of beatings or the pimp gangs taking revenge out on their families back home, since they knew where they lived.
In which western European countries are human trafficked girls afraid of going to the police? It's hard to imagine any western European country where authorities wouldn't take this extremely seriously, and where this wouldn't be front page news.
Spesifically in UK there was a scandal with local police basically ignoring the issue.
The girls are seen as illegal immigrants first, and any kind of victim second. Then there is the risk of blackmail, as in, if the girl's concervative family find out that she has been a sex slave, she would be disowned.
If none of the above issues apply, it is also important how the girls think the police will react, rather than how they will actually react.
And lastly, without your passport you are mostly stuck in an unfamiliar country, don't speak the language and probably you have no money either.
it is basically slavery.
Source?
> without your passport you are mostly stuck in an unfamiliar country
Without your passport you just go to your country's embassy and get a new one. Or if that's not possible because your country doesn't have them, claim refugee status.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environm...
A conservative, church backed organisatin (Edit: in Germany I have to add) promoting youth protection in the internet is currently pushing all kind of funny things against pron sites. Including limiting access, in a way that amounts to censoship.
The adult film industry is here to stay. It is profiting, as is sex work in general, from desperation and weakness (by no means to tue extend that is being pushed so). That means sex workers, regardless of the details, should be protected. Accusations of assault, sexual abuse and rape should be taken serious. In short, make it legal and regulate it. Enforce the rules, protect the actors.
If the abusive assholes forcing actors to produce extreme videos, should be of the internet. And that pressure is social and psychological. It builds up, I see parallels to abusive relationships.
In this case it's no different from any professional sport.
How much strife and suffering have we as a species created for ourselves because of our attitudes and jealousies about sex? Do you know how many people out there resent the amount of control that society tries to maintain over sexual expression and activity?
It's one of the best ideas people have ever come up with.
> Do you know how many people out there resent the amount of control that society tries to maintain over sexual expression and activity?
A small but increasingly loud minority. The vast majority of people benefit from social strictures and taboos surrounding sex.
Society benefits from family structure and family planning. And we have a deep desire to reproduce based on living in a world where there wasn't enough of us and too many died too easily. Unfortuntely there are now too many people and nobody likes it when someone dies arbitrarily, so we don't need to reproduce nearly as much.
Now that we have the technology, there is no reason why a rich family life and a rich sex life can't coexist.
edit, one other thing --
> A small but increasingly loud minority.
I suspect this is actually a majority but, sadly, religion and taboos have beaten this out of folks. The reason it is "increasing" is because more people are speaking up. Sexual unfulfilment is, I believe, one of the largest driving factors behind a lot of cheating and divorce
Maybe, but I don't think it's a root cause in most cases. Like, even if you had a social framework in place for the high libido partner to receive fulfillment outside the relationship, the issues (misaligned expectations, boundary issues, money stress, contempt, etc) that led to the breakdown in intimacy would still remain and and end manifesting in other ways.
I think probably a more helpful direction is to provide more guidance to couples for how to communicate around intimacy, how respond effective to a coalmine canary issue like "the sex isn't very good any more" in a way that uncovers the root causes rather than blaming one person for the symptom ("it's the LLP's fault for not doing the thing") or trying to fix it with band-aids ("just have more date nights lol").
Sometimes I think cheating and divorce is as much the norm as mating for life. I was reading a study recently that found that sexual intimacy steadily decreases over time in a long term relationship, and only seemed to go back up again if divorce/new partner happened. I will dig it out if anyone is interested.
There is a taboo around non-monogamy which I think is detrimental to many people, and certainly a lot of people make multiple partners work, despite all the barriers to doing this in most societies. It isn't a sticking plaster for other issues, that I agree though. If anything it needs the participants to understand well what they want and to be excellent communicators - something we can probably all work on.
I think people should have a realistic view of what sex is. It certainly is not a mechanical & purely physical act (perhaps thats what you mean by "primal"). Sex represented in porn tends be unrealistic and treats women as objects purely for male gratification, to use as some sort of sexual punching bag and evacuate feelings. Essentially it teaches viewers to dehumanise women and dissassociate from real life.
And I always find the 'dehumanizing' argument amusing, it's like saying that Nine Inch Nails represents all industrial music, or that all 90s rock is represented by Nickelback. If you go out seeking examples of dehumanization the systems are such that that is all you will find. If you seek out homemade videos by real couples happily posting them to Pornhub or Onlyfans, that is also what you will mostly find. If you seek out wild fetish stuff, then that is also what you will mostly find.
This is not the 90s, porn is quite diverse. For every headline out there manufactured to bring outrage to moralists, there are a hundred other stories which are much more benign.
Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.
And that somehow makes porn nice and healthy does it?
> Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.
I'm not sure I understand your argument, nor confident you understand mine. Just because a couple make homemade videos together and post them up, it doesn't mean the viewer who is getting sexual gratification has any sort of real connection to the performers. It's complete fantasy, dependant on the human body as solely as means of sexual gratification rather than any wholistic context. Now take that mindset to to the real world as see how maladapted it leaves you. Here in the UK there's an epidemic of highscool aged girls being pressured into sending nude images by boys. Of course porn can't be to blame for all of this, but I'm sure it plays a big part.
I'd also like to point out nothing I'm talking about is related to morality (since you mentioned it). Whatever people want to spend their time doing is up to them. I'm simply making the argument that porn can be harmful and lots of mainstream porn is really focused around turning women into sex objects and outlets for dealing with displaced emotions. I've no doubt that there's something deeper that drives your voyeurism too, maybe inquiring about that might make you pursue something more fulfilling than images on the internet.
Let's stop pretending there are no consequences to porn.
We just happen to live in this small blip in time that an almost libertine view of sex is normalized but this will not last forever.
Personally I wonder what raw human sexuality looks like before society tamed it into what it is today. From an anatomical perspective, there are clues suggesting that humans mated with group sex far more often than they do today (like the shape of the glans on a penis being as such because it is good at scraping out another partner's semen), and anthropologically, where other primates mate in (sometimes coercive) groups.
In fact the anthropological case for monogamy is incredibly mixed, as the animal kingdom practices a wide variety of relationship styles.
There are some human bonds that I consider emotionally harmful, fruitless, subpar, sad.. and most of free fun sexuality ends up there. I don't hear the words I care about when people talk about sex these days. Now as others said, people do what they want and if it's not harmful to any parties involved so be it.
[0] I lack the words to stress how much this is intimate and personal. Now to each his own brain, some people might have very few emotional attachment, I'm not like this.
> I lack the words to stress how much this is intimate and personal. Now to each his own brain, some people might have very few emotional attachment, I'm not like this
So are you a robot then? Wherever you are from, your mind is a product of your influences and local culture and customs, just as much as it is also a product of your schooling and your family life. Given that we humans just absolutely love to meddle in the love lives of others, I can promise you that some of that cultural training includes guidance on how to structure your romantic relationships, and it almost certainly proscribes one man and one woman.
Unless you have spent a considerable amount of time examining these beliefs and have specifically chosen to reject the ones that your society has given you, I would argue that your brain is very much not your own in that sense.
If the opposite were true then things like propaganda would have a much harder time existing. We would have a perfect, rational world society that I dearly wish existed. Appeals to emotion would fall on deaf ears! How amazing that would be!
Instead we have entire countries full of people that live or die because of "cultural differences" aka the shit that society pollutes your mind with. One might argue that we are watching that play out with Ukraine vs Russia right now.
> Stop, you have no idea about my personal life.
You told me how you feel, so I do in fact have a small tidbit of information on your personal life
Maybe I've just traveled to much, and I have certainly rolled my eyes at some of my less informed countrymen, but I have a hard time believing people could think that our culture is somehow a baseline.
I agree that we project our culture a ton, and I really wish we wouldn't. It's so annoying to try and share something cultural with a foreign friend only to find out they already know and have opinions about it because they saw it on Friends
Of course the consistent reaction of Americans to the use of terms like "USians" is a big giveaway to the fact that there's a national identity and thus culture. As, I guess, is the habit of down-playing of any such thing lol.
I'm sorry to insist, I had the displeasure to be off rail from the norm on extreme levels. Even deep introspection about norms and cultures would not register on a graph compared to the event that I had to go through.
I fail to describe more in details, but you're looking at the wrong layer, I'm talking about psychiatry/neurology levels, not social constructs.
Also, when you need to state your porn is legal, I kind of think it may be the case it shouldn't really be.
It does mean that labor costs will go up, especially in work places that pay low and require a lot of people doing physical work. It also mean we need to start having a different view about work places injuries. Every injury that occur because of work is a direct failure of either regulation or enforcement of said regulation.
do those people imagine you are stron man when your back gives out at the age of 30?
I'd say the people who benefit the most of someone's back giving out at the age of 30 are very happy that there are plenty of willing people that want to be seen as "strong".
They actively cheer for the bloodsport
Many sexually active adults, even gubernatorial candidates and wealth businesspersons, enjoy "chemsex" - how is this any different?
Perhaps we shouldn't pre-judge others and kink shame before we've walked a mile in their heels.
I'm sure the whole industry is horrible but this seems pretty clearcut and high profile.
Unrelated to TFA but Lidocaine gel works incredibly well on aphthae / canker sore / mouth ulcer. If anyone here is sometimes getting crazy because of one of these... (not a medical advice though).
> I’ve been nursing a serious prolapse injury from one shoot for Legal Porno. It was supposed to be one of 4. I’ve been dealing with blood and shit since the scene. Can’t believe they can sell my pain online but they can
Then the bits about applying lidocaine to anuses to help them get through the shoot... I'm gobsmacked... if you need a local anaesthetic, it somewhat implies that you're doing dangerous stuff.
LegalPorno (now renamed AnalVids apparently) is also owned by the people who own XVideos.
https://denikn.cz/552186/i-was-bleeding-and-ended-up-in-hosp...