In this 'debate' (which isn't much of one as it seems that both sides argue in parallel monologue rather than in rebuttal to the other) there are two unmaterialist, idealist positions, one against porn and one for porn.
Marxosaurus Rex has adopted an idealist, unmaterialist position which posits huge symbolic significance as if actual, and extrapolates personal feelings and experiences to universal truths in a moralistic way.
LSD and Bleeding Gums however, has in rightly opposing this unmaterialist position, taken an equally unmaterialist position to the opposite conclusions, where he has not only (rightly) dismissed the metaphysical garbage attached to porn and prostitution, he has also dismissed its material reality and taken an extremely reductionistic view which deliberately ignores the distinctive material features of sex.
The position compatible with Marxist social theory does neither of these, it both makes no attempts to abstract sex away from the real acts, but it also does not ignore the distinct material reality of sex.
Originally posted by (Marxosaurus Rex)+--> ( (Marxosaurus Rex))
However, as a male, I can't help but have the uncontrollable urge to fuck[/b]
Yah, as a male, because naturally thats something you'd experience as a male, because as we all know women have no natural interest in sex and would prefer to just bake cookies and ogle babies. Thanks for informing the women reading your post about how sex is for males since we obviously wouldn't be able to relate to wanting sex if it wasn't explained to us by a guy like you.
Asshole.
Therefore, I ask thee:
- Is pornography inherently degrading to women?
Pornography is not degrading to women as a gender, collectively, but some types may be degrading to the particular individual women depicted in them. Not all forms of unproductive service labour are equally degrading as LSD would claim.
- Is there a difference between porn and erotica?
People who attempt to draw a distinction between porn and erotica are really trying to say that depictions of sex that turn them on are acceptable, are erotica, whereas depictions of sex that turn them off and turn others on are unacceptable, are porn. This is clearly a stupidly narcassistic and unmaterialist position.
- Is there a way for lonely males to get off without degrading women?
The fact that you'd even have to ask this question shows that your position is inherently sexist and patronizing since it presumes that for a man to treat a woman sexually is to 'degrade' her, thereby ignoring any sexual agency on the part of the woman and viewing the interaction strictly from the man's perspective.
Its ironic that a position which truly objectifies women, as in, presumes them to be only objects (rather than subjects) in sexual interaction, is held by people identifying as "feminists" who claim to be against "objectification of women", when that is what they're doing in that very argument.
Originally posted by Everyday Anarchy+--> (Everyday Anarchy)
No. Pornography is no more degrading than sex.[/b]
Of course it is the same way that cleaning a rich person's bathroom is more degrading than cleaning your own.
I'm sorry but not all experiences of sex are the same, and why would you imagine they were? The experience of working as an actor, saying lines, is surely different than the experience of unscripted social conversation.
Doing something for pay is always more degrading than doing something for personal pleasure, this is one of the most basic elements of the Marxist theory of alienation as described in the 1844 manuscripts and elsewhere.
Originally posted by Everyday Anarchy
- Is there a difference between porn and erotica?
I've always seen the difference as erotica is sexual art, porn is to jack off to.
You might add to that that material labeled as "erotica" attempts to maintain a pretense that the principle intent is not to sexually arouse its audience but that it has intellectual or artistic value, whereas porn has no such pretense.
You might say that people who consume porn as such are maybe more honest than those who consume "erotica", they engage in less sartrean self-deception...
...but then a lot of people are only really turned on if theres some pretense. Sex after a long emotional conversation is hotter than sex without one.
Originally posted by Everyday Anarchy
The viewer is not degrading any women by getting off to their image. If that is degrading than we need to rethink our definitions so that they are consistent with natural biological tendencies.
Although i don't disagree that its not degrading to get off to someone's image (who doesn't even know you're doing that) your claim that we should rethink definitions for consistency with "natural biological tendencies" is extremely stupid.
You've both adopted the naturalistic fallacy in presuming that whats natural is somehow good and desirable, and you've presumed a unitary human nature the way rightwing 'evolutionary' 'psychologists' do rather than recognizing the biological reality that humans like all large brained animals adapted to have diverse and dynamic reactions to stimuli rather than a simple computational one which the notion of natural behavior presumes.
Originally posted by bootleg42
If people wanted to record themselves having sex and show it to the world, they'd to it themselves without having to sell it and to create stereotypes (ala girls are bi-sexual whores).
Showing people who fit a particular sexual fantasy doesn't create 'stereotypes' if anything it implies that these particular actors are especially desirable in a way that most women are not to the viewer.
Originally posted by Bleeding Gums Murphy
I think the problem with most critiques of pornography is that they specifically attack the dominant nature of the most mainstream heterosexual porn (as it exists now) - but instead of admitting this narrow focus (in which case the arguments are much more valid)- the critique is presented as a comment on ALL pornography (which it is not). When this happens the flaws are many and obvious.
I completely disagree because the "critique" is equally invalid for mainstream pornography aimed at heterosexual men. Mainstream pornography is not degrading to women in general or the individual women that appear in it. Mainstream porn for heterosexual men doesn't involve rape, shit, bdsm, animals, etc, it mostly involves large breasted white women making horny or flirty faces while posing or having sex.
All of the sexual fetishes which are degrading in an abstract level to most people are not mainstream precisely because most men do not get off on seeing women sexually degraded, they get off on seeing women enjoy sex.
And note to LSD or whomever brings it up, I'm well aware that theres lots of rape porn somewhere; however the reality is that this isn't "mainstream." Of course if you google for it i'm sure you'll get a lot of hits, as with *anything*, but without making any effort I see lots of porn for heterosexual men, on magazine covers in newspaper stores throughout london, on escorts adverts that litter virtually every pay phone in london, and in internet cafes at night i've seen dozens of guys watch pornographic videos on other computer terminals (which is probably the best sample you can realistically get of what most pervy guys actually look at). In all of those venues, what I said above applies 100%.
Originally posted by RedStarOverChina
The notion that the porn industry objectify women is true considering most porn videos showcase nude women to attract male customers.
The problem with the word 'objectify' is that it has two relevant meanings in this context, either being the object of attention in a grammatical sense or being an inanimate less-than-human object.
If you think that merely depicting someone is to 'objectify' them as in to 'reduce them to an object' than your position is clearly absurd since people do that in all non-sexual contexts all the time.
If your position is that depicting someone is to make them the 'object' of the presumed viewers interest than I would have to agree with you but it would be hard for me to see anything offensive about that.
Originally posted by RedSTarOverChina
And yes, woman are being exploited. But so are other workers in other industries! And that's where the notion of "working class solidarity" should come in.
Porn actors, and even more so escorts, aren't "workers" in the Marxist sense, they produce no commodities and are compensated in disproportion to the socially necessary value required to reproduce their labour. They are, like accountants, lawyers, all other entertainers, most doctors, heavily subsidized service providers. An argument could be made that they're petty bourgeois as they own the means to provide the services for which they're being paid for (just as the same argument can be made with doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc).
Instead of attacking these exploited young women who have no other way of affording a decent lifestyle, maybe we oughta help them fight for their rights instead. Ever thought of that?
In a capitalist society, being a porn actor is a valid choice (one that makes sense for some people); they're not exploiting anyone, but neither are they exploited in the marxist sense. They produce no surplus value, and are again, compensated out of all proportion to the socially necessary cost of labour.
There is just no way they can be conceptualized as workers if you have even the most basic understanding of marxian economic theory.
The only workers involved in the porn industry are the people who make the cameras, lights, dvds, etc, and the raw materials that go into those things.
Originally posted by Bleeding Gums Malatesta
There's no such thing as 'making love' - that is purely a romantic conception of sex - a type of sex that you have deemed to be distinct, better - than what you deem to be degraded sexuality. That is merely a subjective judgement, not a statement of fact about human sexuality or its representation.
There is such a thing as "making love", specifically its having sex with someone you're in love with with the intent of enhancing your emotional intimacy with that person in addition to getting off with them. It can then be seen as a sub-type of sex since sex itself requires neither of those two additional features, and its clearly a widespread aspect of human sexuality.
Why is prostitution worse than other forms of exploited labour?
For the same reason that cleaning public toilets or working in a coal mine is worse than shifting through papers at an office, the physicality of it is more draining and alienating. Not all labour is equal, especially when you're talking about non-productive service labour.
Originally posted by Spartan
Pornography is the only industry where women get paid more then men.
Actually women are also statistically paid more than men in the customer service industry: Source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/britainunco...1066306,00.html (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/britainuncovered/story/0,,1066306,00.html)
and a bunch of other jobs:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/commentary...table/index.htm (http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/commentary/everyday/sahadi_paytable/index.htm)
But old radical feminists tropes are fun to throw around ;)
Originally posted by Martov
There is no reason to differentiate between workers who are exploited in a factory, to workers whom are exploited in the film studio.
Of course there are:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch08.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch09.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm
Originally posted by Martov
To do so would introduce a moral argument that sex is somehow 'wrong' or that paying for the use of someone's genitals is more 'exploitive' then paying for the use of someone's labour.
Or alternatively that theres nothing 'wrong' with it but that its clearly not materially the same as working in a factory.
Just because you're being paid for something doesn't mean you have an identical relationship to the economy; if that were the case there would be no such thing as class at all.
And it certainly would take much more labour to create a 10 minute clip of caricatures having sex, then it would take for two consenting adults to fuck.
To extend your absurd conflation of porn actors and actual workers, were porn actors workers (which they are not) it might be that the rate of exploitation and relative surplus are higher with actual sex than with cartoons.
Originally posted by Martov
Yet not to heterosexual men? Faulty logic. wacko.gif
Not really. Even if you presume that heterosexual men and heterosexual women and gay people are all psycho-sexually identical apart from sexual orientation, the physical acts that straight men perform in porn are different than those that women and gay men perform and when you're talking about physical differences than there can be materially relevant differences.
Simply put, being penetrated is more physically invasive and entails a greater risk of pain, fatigue, injury, disease and pregnancy than being the one penetrating. Some jobs are more hazardous than others within the same "industry."
Originally posted by Citizen Zero
What's always interested me about mainstream heterosexual photographic porn (apart from the obvious) is that rather than objectifying the women, it subjectifies them. They are the active person within the frame. Quite often, it is the male who is objectified - shots cropped to remove the head or the face turned away, reduced to a drone-like status - whilst the woman looks into the camera and engages with the onlooker as a conscious, self-regarding person.
I agree with you completely and I think this particular line of analysis has been deliberately ignored by anti-sex "feminists" and other conservatives who are essentially denying female sexual agency despite all evidence to the contrary.
Originally posted by Citizen Zero
I think the big problem people have with pornography is that its used for wanking. It's the wacking off that people have an issue with. It's the same reason a lot of people oppose recreational drug use: a sort of residual protestant work ethic which considers pleasure you've not worked for as sinful or corrupting.
I think ironically the thing that bothers people the most about porn for straight men is precisely the opposite of the reason the radical feminists give for opposing it: its because porn for straight men depicts women wanting sex for pleasure (and not for babies or relationships).
And thats threatening if your ideology is essentially misogynistic.
Originally posted by LSD
Men and women are going to objectify each other, that's how sexuality works. And disallowing public displays of that objectification only serves to regress sexual liberalization.
That's certainly what the Christian right's doing, and it's why they're working so hard to criminalize pornography (and prostitution, strip clubs, etc...). It's somewhat disturbing, though, that self-proclaimed leftists are helping them to do that.
I agree
Sex is just a serious of repetitive physical motions, pleasurable ones to be sure, but physical acts all the same. Paying someone to have sex with you is no different from paying them to massage your back
Its true that sex is just a series (lol not serious, don't trust microsoft spell check) of physical motions...but it does not follow from that that paying someone to have sex is no different than paying someone to rub your back.
The implied assumption in your reasoning is that physical acts are in no relevant ways different from other physical acts. This is clearly not the case and it is an absolutely reductionistic, umaterialist position.
You have abstracted an essential, idealist attribute from 'physical acts' as a catagory, just as the anti-porn lobby abstracts other essential idealist attributes from sex in particular.
Some labour is simply more grueling than other labour, and prostitution is far more grueling than giving a massage, just as diamond mining is more grueling than diamond jewelry fitting.
From a political perspective, there is absolutely nothing "especially" exploitive about being a stripper. It's just your typical tertiary service occupation, like a janitor or a flight attendant.
The entire theory of 'tertiary service' is part of bourgeois economics not Marxian economics, you're already taking an unmarxist perspective, and even in the three-sector economic hypothesis neither janitors or strippers could possibly be tertiary sector because they don't deliver commodities, they would be quaternary or quinary sector depending on which bourgeois economist you agree with. Of the three only a flight attendant is a tertiary service occupation, again, in a bourgeois economic theory.
[email protected]
And it's disengenuous, not to mention disturbingly puritanical, to assert that sex work is somehow "special" or "different" from other forms of employment.
All forms of employment have variables that make them different from other forms, and some types of sex work (which is an absurd category anyways since it suggests that an escort who can charge more per hour than a queens counsel barrister or top cardiac surgeon and a quasi-slave being paid in cocaine and protection, and an 18 year old kid with a web cam in her parents house, are all doing the same thing) are clearly worse than most types of employment.
LSD
Your question may well be "perverted", but it's certainly not the hypothetical you're making it out to be. You see, rape fantasy is actually quite common. Studies on the subject show that 24% of men and 36% of women have recurrent fantasies about rape, and accordingly there are literally hundreds of websites and companies manufacturing the stuff right now.
Do you realize that you bring this up every time this topic comes up??
Studies like that which come from extrapolating from small numbers suffer from severe sample bias which makes them more or less useless for demonstrating anything; and you also consistently ignore the fact that the vast majority of respondents even in such a study have the "rape fantasy" of being 'raped' rather than being a rapist, which makes it somewhat absurd (since consensual rape is oxymoronic).
Like with any other fantasy, however, the mere imagining does not lead to action and, overwhelmingly, those who fantasies about raping or being raped do not go out and commit the act. Nor is watching pornography designed to satiate their needs likely to "inspire" criminal acts.
I agree but i don't think anyone including the obnoxious author of the original article are saying that.
Indeed, if anything, it is liable to prevent sex crimes as people gain an outlet for their "darker" fantasies.
Thats just stupid and another way of stigmatizing male sexuality, as if men are just animals who wouldn't be able to control themselves without an 'outlet.' It is not a good line of argument to defend pornography.