A Meat Grinder Amongst Meat Grinders

Yesterday, I posted "What Does Obama's Attorney General Pick Mean For The Adult Movie Industry?" Later, reader Dwayne Monroe emailed me his perspective on the matter. (Title by Dwayne; video via Boing Boing.)

"You wrote:

This is not say that I'm not a staunch supporter of free speech. This is to say that porn, to paraphrase Martin Amis, is a rough trade, indeed. More succinctly put, it's not easy to get fucked for a living. While liberals would like to believe a hands-off approach to porn by the Obama administration is what's best for America's collective free speech, it may be of interest for the new party coming into office to note that the last time Porn Valley was left to its own devices, life was hard, really hard, in Porn Valley.

Excellent point (even if you pressed that clever idiot Martin Amis into service to make it).

It leads to a question: how do you suppress Porn Valley's tendency towards making life hell for its workers? My answer is that you consider that tendency to be only one expression of a general capitalist habit of abuse. In polite society (and the most feverish segments of the 'gender difference' school of feminism -- wherein the difference is that men are pint sized Mephistopheles and women their relentless victims) porn is seen as other, as totally outside of normal discourse.

So, if you're a nutter like me who insists that a crazy and abusive porn director -- and the crazy and abusive world he helps create and inhabits -- is not crazier or more abusive than, say, the CEO of a coal mining firm which pays little attention to worker safety and the hard living that often develops when people know their situation is precarious, you're looked at as if you've announced you're marrying the cat. To most people, porn is the big 'Other' whose abuses are somehow even more spiritually destructive than the spiritually destructive practices of other 'rough trade' industries (or life itself under capitalism, with its never far away threat of destitution).

To bring it back to the point, to 'tame' Porn Valley you treat it as a business -- with all that entails, including the aforementioned tendency towards excess and seeing people solely as means to an end -- and put worker safety regulations in place.

As far as I know, the government's only interventions are verifying performers are of age and that obscenity statutes and 'community standards' are more or less obeyed. More is needed. Auto workers, for example, gained some amount of protection from once common dangers such as losing limbs and employers using head busting tactics by organizing and lobbying for labor friendly regs. This is a model worth following.

Instead of being seen as a business, porn is treated as an emergency -- or, to quote Giorgio Agamben, a 'state of exception' -- requiring crisis tactics. Even people who openly acknowledge the business-ness of the thing tend to slide into emergency descriptions.

The language of censorship vs. free speech is fed from and feeds back into this rhetorical state of perpetual emergency. I think the only way out is to accept that porn, in one form or another, will always be with us (and indeed, may be a necessary niche inasmuch as loneliness, sexual dissatisfaction or simply the need for some visual stimulation now and again are also permanent fixtures).

People appearing on camera for our pleasure are workers in need of protective structures which restrain owner behavior. If workers feel more secure, perhaps less crazy shit will be common.

The 'gonzo' craze can be interpreted as being both a response to falling sales (due to free or nearly so media available via the Internet) and also as a desperate effort by workers to maintain their usefulness to the industry. That is, you can see why the business wanted it and why performers consented.

On the surface, this may seem to be dramatically different from, for example, Walmart compelling its workers to do unpaid overtime (after all, no bodily fluids or filmed records are involved...well, maybe the filming) but my argument is that they're cut from the same cloth if differently shaped."

On that note, have a great weekend, because you're a homo sacer living in a state of exception, and there's no other kind of weekend to have.