Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Economy Notes from the Unemployment Line
Posted by Eli Sanders on Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Working as a part-time porn production assistant isn't what "Chastity," 27, really wants to do. But it pays better than software technical writing, which is what she was doing before the great recession hit, and it helps her stay afloat as she wrangles with the unemployment office and tries to find other work. Still, it's causing her a good deal of internal angst.
This weekend we had our biggest shoot to date—five couples before a studio audience. In such a situation, I try harder than usual to keep my emotional distance from our models and lock down my natural curiosity about their backgrounds or their interest in the industry, mostly because I'm not sharing much about myself, either.
I love to hear about personal lives when it comes up in conversation, however. I chatted briefly with Jenny, a pretty college-age girl who I hadn’t worked with before. She came to us through another girl who modeled with us a few weeks ago. Jenny was doing it half for fun, half for money; so far she had only done nude photos once before. She rambled on about how she had a friend who liked to take “crazy pictures” of her, but “not with [her] clothes off or anything like that” and laughed while she struck an America’s Next Top Model-style leonine pose. My heart kinda broke. By the end of the evening, she had gotten naked on stage and given another man a blowjob in front of a hollering audience.
Most surprising to me is that the some of the girls who do this work very regularly seem to have their fuses blown out, sexually. There isn’t much they won’t do, but they never orgasm. Not really, anyway—and they’ll cheerfully announce this fact when the cameras aren’t rolling. Nor do they frequently have sex at home. For those who actively choose sex work, this creeping sexual numbness seems to me the greatest tragedy of this way of making money. The loss of my desire would provoke a fundamental shift in my character—my sexuality is my sixth sense. The sensual and the erotic make up a considerable portion of my interior life: they are private—to put them on display would be to capitalize on my most fragile and vulnerable self. The irony, however, is that for me to work in this business, I have to be a little numb, too.
The camera provides a substantial shield. I focus on what I see on my little screen, rather than what is just a few feet in front of me. I do periodically find scenes to be exceptionally hot, but just holding the camera denatures the eroticism, reducing it to a series of mechanics as I angle for the right shot. I—and the camera—are a merely a conduit for the masturbatory fantasies of R’s paying customers. This weekend, however, I stood physically between the subject and viewer. For the first time in my porn career, I felt a bit like I was part of the show. R had the luxury of wearing the headphones and standing behind the tripod; I got the hand-held and the position crawling around on the floor. At critical moments audience members laughed or cheered—and at even more critical moments—grunted, groaned or sighed.
It was an interesting weekend, and I have been struggling with whether to block it out altogether or to think-write-think-write-think-write as I try to evaluate my mixed feelings over this whole affair. I quite like R, I like working for him, I like many of our models, I even like some of the people from the audience I met over the weekend, but I can’t shake the conviction that pornography is exploitation, however much everyone involved insists it isn’t. As long as it remains the last viable resort for a young woman, I don’t know how it can be anything else, and I don’t know how I can be anything other than complicit in Jenny’s eventual sexual anesthesis.
Chastity
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Photo by Kelly O
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Nuff said.
So, when is anyone going to talk about the teen sex slave prostitution ring busted in Seattle that may or may not have been advertising in a certain mag's pages ...?
Pornography is harmful to everyone it touches and steals something from their souls.
Healthy sexuality is one of the greatest joys in life, pornography cheapens and coarsens it and robs it of it's vitality.
Your critical perspective and writing skills are a rare combo, and perhaps the world would benefit from your applying them to something with a greater potential to shift paradigms that technical writing?
I'm a recovering SOC major myself, currently working in high tech and hating it, but there's a current in your writing that I REALLY enjoy. Keep it up.
It's only exploitation if they are under age.
The industry certainly can be exploitative, but there are relatively ethical production companies out there (Burning Angel). Let's create the conditions in which people who don't want to do sex work don't have to do it, and those who do can do so without being 'rescued' jack ass crusaders.
@7 (and the rest) that commented that 'Pornography is harmful to everyone it touches and steals something from their souls,' - I find that a little far fetched. Sometimes people do it for the money, sometimes for the thrill, but you can't denounce the entire thing just because, unfortunately, the majority of people in front of the camera are probably not making the most informed decisions. You forget about an entire realm of people that are empowered by being able to hold the grubby gaze of a stranger.
Amateur porn: If it were food, it'd be organic!™
Not only is it degrading to everyone involved but the internet has extended it's reach into every home in America.
People (including kids) who would not have been consumers before now have ready access.
And the 'do-it-yourself' porn posting is extending wide into the population of young girls.
It is sad at best.
Please don't ever come to HUMP. You would be such a depressing to sit next to, clucking your tongue the whole time and probably praying to Jesus for the souls of people on the screen. Please go away and read the Seattle Weekly or something...
Making sex is like making art, inspiring and life affirming. But once money is on the table, a lot of that is lost.
I am confident that this is not a work of fiction.
That said, these Chastity post are very interesting. I agree with those that like her writing & insight.
It is what it is, and I'm actually a tall, strong, muscular attractive male.
It's also a way to take some control back for myself. I don't feel like I'm exploiting women. I also don't feel like I'm being exploited for my issolation. When it comes to sexuality, I generally put up with too much shit due to the issolation. In turn, I rarely ever take these women seriously ... lest I get tied down by some gold digger ... or I find that I'm thinking with my underappreciated dick and not my heart.
But that's my two cents ...
Something here doesn't add up.
is there something i'm missing?
sure, there is sex magic, but sex ain't Magic. it's just like everything else.
So how much do I have to pay you for a happy ending?
I like the point you make, though. It's never been clear to me what the supposedly high percentage of abused women in sex work is supposed to prove. That sex work is itself abuse? There's a logical step missing from this argument.
I am willing to bet that the individuals contributing to the HUMP festival are doing so for reasons that more closely approach recreational than professional, which is why it's billed as an "Amateur Porn Festival"
I certainly don't believe that the sociological factors at work in that environment can be realistically applied to people who actually make a living in porn because they cannot work elsewhere.
I agree with you that commercial porn is a different animal, and I would agree with you that much of it is non-beneficial (at best) to its actors and, to an extent, its consumers. We've just established that porn is not, of itself, degrading. So we need to look elsewhere for the problematics here. This is less about defending porn (which I will gladly do any day), but about directing our efforts toward the actual site of the problem. The pathologization of sex and sexuality in the US often makes it difficult, as the real issues are obscured by strong but generally unexamined emotional responses.
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