Rape/Sexual Assault Culture

I suspect it takes more than quarters to buy their services.

 

Why have your own vehicle impounded?

 

I must say, that sounds like a whole lot of effort.

I've never heard of the like in the Chicago area. It would be easy to do. Dress up some women, put them in the streets or parks, or have an Internet ad and a hotel location, you could just round up the guys as they come. But pretty hard to fund in these days of declining city budgets, and pretty hard to justify with 400 children a year being shot within Chicago city limits.

 

Sting operations like that aren't really about prostitution, though. They're more about dealing with the negative secondary effects that street prostitution causes.

Here in DC, street prostitution is pretty much non-existent because the police have actively targeted it, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods. On the other hand, you can go into any nice hotel in DC and find higher-end working girls at the bars. The cops don't target them because there aren't any real negative consequences to the rest of us if some traveling businessman wants to pay some woman $1500 to go back to his suite at the Ritz.

Human vices will always exist, and trying to stamp them out is an impossible task. We'd be better off as a society if we treated vices like prostitution and drug use like we treat vices like alcohol and smoking.

 

That makes sense. Although once again, the poor fella gets prosecuted for something that the rich guy gets away with. But it does make sense from a policy perspective.

Porn is an interesting addition to the list. Porn went from being fully underground (until the mid 1960s) to technically legal but so thoroughly disapproved of that those who worked in the business were in constant secrecy (through maybe the 1990s?) to being technically legal and sorta semi-respectable. I don't know anybody in the porn business, but it certainly seems from the outside that this development has been very much to the benefit of women. One used to hear stories about drugged porn performers, and suicidal performers, and just general misery, and that does not now seem to be the case. It appears that women enter the business with their eyes open, work in it until they no longer wish to be in it (or are no longer offered jobs as they get older), and then leave. As with other types of jobs.

 

Maybe the answer is amateur porn.

A John pays a 3rd party (lets call him/her a pimp) to film a movie and recruit the 2nd talent in the film (lets call her/him the prostitute) and then a Porn movie is made, seems perfectly legal (I am sure there would be some licensing and maybe health checks needed).

The downside is that there would be a high risk of black mail and probably more expensive for your average john.

 

Drug use and high suicide rates (compared to societal averages) are still problems for current day porn stars.
It's just a very, very exploitative industry, both for its female and male performers, one in which only a tiny few achieve real wealth, and most of those are producers(-performers).
The going rates are relatively so low that they have to work a lot if they want to make a half-decent amount of money (not even a fortune).

 

I bet that data is hard to gather.

But let's assume that there are still high suicide rates. What do you think is the cause? Working for low money with stress? Plenty of occupations are like that. Being on public display? Hmmm, not sure if strippers kill themselves to a high extent. Correlation but not causation? That might be likeliest. Porn is semi, sorta respectable these days, more than in the past, but it's still an outcast industry. It might well attract outcasts who joined the industry in part because of problems that they had.

If the latter is the case, banning porn presumably wouldn't solve much, because unhappy people with problems would still be unhappy people with problems.

Just thinking out loud.

 

I don't think you and I disagree on anything you just wrote.
My point was more to question the morality of an industry that feasts upon vulnerable people (financially and emotionally).
Of course people will use counter-arguments of that one starlet who has been in the industry for 10+ years, made a ton of money and is still happy, but those are a tiny, tiny minority. Most of them don't last very long and are off slightly worse (having made only a little money in exchange for the life-long stigma that is still attached to porn) than they were before when they call it quits.

 

Not really. A few summers ago we had one of the locals come by offering her "services" for only $10. My dad was still pretty active down in the shop and one of the guys told her we weren't interested but the old guy in the back might be. I don't think I have ever seen him as mad as he was that day!

 

Of course after I write this ... drugs, suicides, partying, emotional instability ... sounds like nonporn Hollywood to me. Or rock music.

 

or the Financial industry. Or manufacturing. Or an IT shop.
Or any group of people you choose to mash together to generalize about

 

No, I think the artistic community is the best comparison. If somebody wanted to go after the popular music business, they could point to all the substance abuse and suicides among rock musicians and say that the problem is rock music. But people don't do that. They do it about porn but not rock music.

Hey, maybe both are bad things. Maybe both should be banned. I don't know. Just saying, it's really hard to understand the issue because the underlying discussion is loaded, in ways that people often don't realize.

 

How do you know this?

 

All kinds of people are intrested in being musicians or actors or whatever. The select few who make it to the top to be able to have a career are generally going to be a diverse group of people. It's safe to say that the people in porn on the other hand, would have likely experineced sexual abuse as children, which leads to a whole mish-mash of problems.

In any field you're going to have healthy people and those with huge amounts of baggage, but in porn you can pretty much be assured that anyone in the biz has some serious problems to begin with.

 

Not always. There are some, to be sure , but it is more of a profession than it once was. The money has dried up some due to the internet and drug use is frowned upon in some studios. People who enter the industry today are often given financial advice and told to not squander what they earn. For some it works others not so much.

 

Man, this is a broad brush. I don't know if it's safe to say this at all. My guess (hope) is that Nina Hartley was in for the positive effect she had on young (at the time) men like myself...

I do think we've got a logn way to go before we can start looking at porn with a healthier attitude than maybe we do right now.

 

I knew some 20something strippers who said they bring in what would amount to six figures if they didn't waste so much of it. I know a couple of others who saved enough to open a liquor franchise down the street from the place they used to strip at. Theyll never be rich, but they are business owners now and their own bosses (for the most part- still a franchise).

 

I don't think that's at all safe to say. I don't know boo about the backgrounds of 2013 adult actors and I doubt that many other people do either.

 

It's a mixed bag. Some have been abused some do it for the money and treat it like a job. I think a lot of people are stuck on the idea that it is like the 70s where porn was a 24/7 drug infested party. Times have changed and so has the industry. If you are using drugs the amount of people who will work with you is reduced. If you are too much of a party animal and can't do your job the amount of people willing to pay you declines. It's not a perfect industry but the stereotype that exists isn't always correct.

 

A friend of mine who is a prosecutor in DC told me the undercover vice cops have a competition to see how low they can get a prostitute to go in price. The winner last he heard was $5 and a free happy meal coupon in exchange for sex.

 

Absolutely. Lots of these people go on to other things and those who were good with their cash aren't always in a horrible place. Many use the money for college or going into their own business.

 

I'm saying that it's a horrible place because we as a society haven't matured enough to see sex as a form of entertainment, the way we do theater or athletics. They're supposed to go on to other things, because at a certain age, fewer people want to see them naked. It should be no different than an aging GK who can't get to that not-so-perfectly-placed free kick anymore- he goes on to other things and no one wonders if he was abused as a child.

 

It's getting close, in some places. Ever seen the website I Feel Myself? Or Beautiful Agony? Fascinating from a sociological view (and decent porn too). For the princely sum of $250, ordinary lasses and lads, mostly Australian, strip and masturbate.

The sites do some interviews with the subjects. It's pretty clear they're not trafficked, forced, drugged, or anything else. Mostly college kids or post-college grads; a well-spoken bunch on the whole. I would guess most are from affluent backgrounds. It's sex as performance art. The entertainer enjoying being the entertainer.

Pretty much 100% the opposite profile of the porn star.

Of course, they are not porn stars, they are something else than that. But it's the same idea, sex in front of a camera.