Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Pornstars and Their Careers
jonmillward.com
jonmillward.com
However, I must thank you because I think you just demonstrated why western society is such a complete mess better than anything I have previously read or seen. A hair trigger reaction with out even bothering to consume the point, let alone understand it. And how could you understand it, you didn't even read it? The sad thing is that you're not even giving yourself a chance.
And that is leaving aside the sheer blinding irony of you criticising people for making assumptions.
Like I stated: I read it as if he was upset because OP excelled at this kind of research.
Like the dictionary: ex·cel , ex·celled, ex·cel·ling. verb (used without object) to surpass others or be superior in some respect or area; do extremely well: to excel in math.
Do you really think I would have reached over a 1000 karma if I had a hairy trigger? Oh, well, I do find it funny you're criticising me for making assumptions.
Perhaps you should approach reading other people's English with the same caution and lenience you're asking of your readers?
I'll also state the obvious: your excuse lacks grammatical support. You were wrong, move on and stop making a scene.
That said, given your now seemingly playful use of the language, and my experience of the excellent English the Dutch generally speak, I'm not sure I entirely believe your reply. Although, as I'm not a mind reader I guess I'll have to let that go.
Ironically, my reply to you put my Karma to over 1000...
Sometimes when I hear people railing against porn, declaring it as the downfall of society, a poison infecting masculine minds and demeaning female ones, I wonder what kind of porn they’re talking about.
[...]
So when I hear somebody claim that porn is ‘degrading’, I can’t help but ask: which porn?
If you think most porn isn't degrading, then you need to look a bit closer and think a little harder. I've already posted my views [1], but I'll copy & paste the relevant part here:
First of all, there's very little porn out there where the woman truly enjoys the experience. It's not always glaringly obvious (although we'll get back to that in the next point), but if you actually stop and look, you'll see the discomfort and/or indifference very often.
Second, a lot of porn out there focuses on and glorifies the woman's suffering, pain and degradation. Seriously, you only have to read the word "painal" once to realize that. However, if that's not enough, you might also look for the occurrences of "choke", "gag", "destroy", "slut", etc.
Third, even the porn that doesn't focus on pain teaches wrong stuff. One might get the idea that the only thing a man need do to make a woman enjoy sex is to pound her fast and hard. On top of that comes the whole issue of hygiene: the way anal is portrayed means that if you try it at home, your female partner will likely end up with an infection.
Fourth, it creates unrealistic expectations. Let's just say that gag reflex is not as easy to suppress as the porn makes you believe and that anal sex is not a matter of just sliding in any time you want.
TL;DR: No, it's not just about whether the sex if fun or boring.
Finally, I find the claim that "female porn stars dictate the type of sex they have by listing in their modelling profiles the acts they’re willing to perform on camera" to be disingenuous. It propagates the idea that everything is okay and whatever isn't okay is "her fault".
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499803
EDIT: Since I'm obviously not trolling, I was wondering whether anyone could help explain the drive-by downvoting. I don't expect everyone to agree, but it might be nicer to have a discussion than to suppress it ;)
I might be mistaken here, but as far as I can tell this kind of porn is the minority. Also, isn't this 'degrading porn' meant for people who identify with the person being degraded? Whether you like it or not, the power dynamic is an integral part of human sexuality. That you see this in porn is just an effect of the phenomenon, not the cause. It's completely natural and benign. People saying that this is "wrong" and taboo are doing far more harm than good to the women and men (!) who enjoy being on that side of the power dynamic.
Secondly, porn isn't meant to be realistic. Complaining about that is just like the people complaining about violence in video games and movies. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing reality from fiction. The reason people enjoy porn is exactly because it is not realistic -- it satisfies a fantasy, whether that is sex with a person who is far out of your league, or rough sex, or otherwise. The way to go here is to improve sex education, not to blame porn for not being sex education.
I've dated women (note the plural) who were into this sort of porn. I'm not a random sample, obviously, but take a look at books like A Billion Wicked Thoughts and The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality, or Meredith Chivers' work: bdsm-style desires appear to be more common than is commonly depicted in the media.
In terms of why a large amount of porn is like this, its simple, its theatrics. Emotion and body language is exaggerated to capture an audiences attention.
It has become only less taboo to talk about recently, coming to the mainstream in books like "Fifty Shades of Grey".
It's for both. There is an entire subculture of people whose fetishes involve degradation on either side. Two important points to take from that:
1) It is silly to extrapolate to all porn from that. Those genres are targeted at relatively small demographics.
2) The fetish has nothing to do with those people's attitudes about society at large. Men who are into degrading consenting women in the bedroom are not, by and large, misogynists, for example. It's a sexual fantasy, not a political stance.
However, fetishes notwithstanding, I don't think it can be said that most mainstream porn is sex-positive or embraces healthy attitudes.
I'm not sure I understood you correctly. Are you suggesting that "Hot Japanese Girls [sic] gets fucked and abused in every way" is marketed primarily to people who identify with abused women?
But again, the videos that explicitly and specifically portray violent and/or degrading male fantasies don't bother me as much as so-called "normal" videos that seriously misrepresent what is enjoyable to most women.
Whether you like it or not, the power dynamic is an integral part of human sexuality. That you see this in porn is just an effect of the phenomenon, not the cause. It's completely natural and benign. People saying that this is "wrong" and taboo are doing far more harm than good to the women and men (!) who enjoy being on that side of the power dynamic.
Something tells me that men and women who enjoy being on the submissive (or "less powerful", if you prefer) side of the power dynamic are still the minority of the market. While I'm sure that there are people who watch Mandingo videos because they identify with the lady or because they enjoy watching big penises, I'm pretty sure that most people who watch it are men who like to identify with Mandingo and fantasize about having a penis that big.
So, to sum it up, I don't claim that it's wrong or "taboo" to be on the less powerful side of the power dynamic. Hell, there's nothing bad with fantasizing about being on the more powerful side or about having a huge penis or what have you.
Secondly, porn isn't meant to be realistic. Complaining about that is just like the people complaining about violence in video games and movies. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing reality from fiction.
I wouldn't be so quick to equate these things. It's a lot easier for kids to confirm that the world is not really violent in the same degree and way as videogames than it is for them to find out what women find enjoyable in sex.
The way to go here is to improve sex education, not to blame porn for not being sex education.
Precisely, but how? How do you improve teaching kids about sex in terms of pleasure, not only reproduction and health, which seems to be what most sex ed focuses on?
There's a lot of porn out there that has no women at all in it.
I agree with you that there is a lot of bad porn, and that there are a lot of bad things prevalent in porn, but that specific point of the author stands pretty strong. You have to preface the discussion by asking "which porn?". In your comment you've already narrowed your definition of "porn" into a specific segment.
I honestly don't understand how you come the conclusion that women controlling their working conditions ends up propagating victim blaming in sexual assaults. Hopefully you can clarify.
>Second, a lot of porn out there focuses on and glorifies the woman's suffering, pain and degradation. Seriously, you only have to read the word "painal" once to realize that. However, if that's not enough, you might also look for the occurrences of "choke", "gag", "destroy", "slut", etc.
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You're searching for that specific type of porn - of course it's going to be degrading. Your whole argument falls flat on it's face I'm afraid.
Of course it stands to reason that porn marketed to men will put more focus on the parts that men are more likely to enjoy and the marketing will also reflect this.
So a scene showing fairly vanilla sex will be labelled "slut gets destroyed by huge cock" or something.
To be honest I would suspect that women in porn who truly hate the experience wouldn't last too long. It's more likely that they simply find it boring after a while than outright unpleasant. In other words doing anal to them would be like debugging to us.
Usually men have the dominant role during sex whilst women prefer to be submissive (though obviously not always the case). Using hyperbolic language is a safe and effective way to demonstrate dominance.
And it really doesn't matter that destroy isn't meant literally - it's still used as a term intent to degrade and humiliate. It's about male power fantasies.
Women also read romance novels set in Victorian times - are you now going to claim that we'd all like to wear corsets and swoon at the arrival of our heroes?
Also: I don't see guys clamoring to become pizza delivery drivers, either, and yet it's a common porn trope.
Producers have to have some way of making their product grab your attention, and "two people fucking" isn't going to do it.
1) Yes, most porn focuses on the male's pleasure, which is a common complaint. That's why James Deen makes money: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/11/17/porn_that_wo...
2) Yes. Some women are into that. I feel like you are unnecessarily close-minded about the idea that women might like a range of experiences. I also agree with other commenters on their ideas that naming porn conventions do not actually indicate suffering, pain, and degradation.
3) True. Porn is not meant as educational material; be safe.
4) It does create unrealistic expectations, but almost nobody expects porn to be like real life.
Female porn stars do get to choose what kind of sex they have. I hate victim blame just as much as the next woman, but saying that porn stars can choose what to do is not victim blame. Porn stars live in a world where they get paid for what they decide to do. The skin industry does have some people who are not there by choice but necessity...but the vast majority are there because they chose to follow that route. Though I think concern for the performers is admirable, most performers are ok with where they are. It's actually a little bit ridiculous that men get up in arms about women when they choose to go into the industry; it's a mostly free choice. Men act like the performers can't like what they do, which is wrong. http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/its-a-lap-dance-a...
And an entire subgroup which focus on the same with the man -- but most people don't look that far, because they just want to look down on porn.
It is religious bullshit, repackaged as concern for women(TM).
If her decision offends you then don't watch porn.
Here's the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dine...
There was another article that mentioned that an explosion in access to [western made] pornographic materials in many African countries has distorted the views across the male population (from adolescents to old men). As a consequence the stats on rapes being committed has gone up very significantly (Alas: I cannot seem to find a link)
While I'm not about to argue that porn is a particularly accurate depiction of sex, I always find it interesting that these kinds of criticisms of it always seem to ignore the frequent cunnilingus in it. One of the things I like about this article is that it's about data mining rather than selection bias. Not to say that the article isn't biased, but that it's less biased.
It's not that I ignore the frequent cunnilingus in porn, it's that I don't see the need to mention it because I don't look at porn as an equation, as in "Well, he's going from ungentle and obviously painful anal directly to rough fellatio, but that's perfectly okay because of the long cunnilingus at the beginning."
I'm not trying to portray all porn as bad and degrading, nor am I denying that there is good (and sometimes even realistic) sex in it. Nor do I claim that it all should be realistic. What concerns me and motivates me to comment on porn are the following things:
1) the prevalence of casual degradation of women in porn.
2) what people learn to expect based on porn.
3) how many people seem to be either unaware of some (or all) of the above or aware but believe it's normal and acceptable.
That being said, there's a lot of different types of porn. Saying "I watch porn" is like saying "I read fiction". It certainly tells us a bit about you, but isn't particularly definitive - do you read lightweight trash like Dan Brown, do you prefer mysteries, bodice-rippers, fantasies, war novels, or the complexities of writers like Eco? Perhaps a little bit of everything depending on the mood?
Well, I guess that depends on how accurate the database is. To the extent that it might miss performers, it would certainly be biased towards those who have fewer credits, or whose credits are for smaller outfits.
BIG: iafd doesn't cover loops ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porn_loop ) or their descendents, internet scenes, unless they were eventually compiled into a movie. I would expect 'one scene and out' performers to be more common at the lower end of the market (not shrewd/no body of work) and most of that is going to be internet.
small: The fact that porn tends to cluster around samey names, plus the fact that people who are just dabbling in porn don't put a lot of thought into their names means that a lot of one time performers end up accidentally rolled into another performer's filmography.
Here in the UK where prostitution is legal there already exists websites where people can basically browse online directories for various sexual services.
Combine high employment with women realising that they can make a solid 4 figures a week by working < 8 hours a day with the male tendency to "seek variety".
It's only a matter of time before some business manages to take advantage of this on a huge scale.
So how exactly does prostitution work? It seems like it is effectively illegal.
Basically it is illegal to advertise paid sex or go looking/asking for it - but if by chance during some other encounter someone who is willing to pay meets someone who is happy to be paid for it, then there is no crime.
Another oddity is pornography. A small brothel in Grimsby got around the brothel thing by having a camera in every room - that way porn was being filmed which sidesteps the wording of the law nicely by instead being a film studio that happened to work on adult material (apparently customers walked away with the tape afterwards, though to be honest I'd not trust that wasn't the only copy!).
There is a certain website known for this which I will not link to here.
Women who work as prostitutes will usually pay taxes as self employed people and can actually claim advertising (as well as various other things that are best left to the imagination) back as business expenses.
Escorts pay tax and deduct expenses for the "Escorting" work they do, not the sex. If they declare the income as income for sex, the police quickly come knocking to arrest you for "living off immoral earnings" (a few have done so in the past as a "protest").
“Public place” includes any highway and any other premises or place to which at the material time the public have or are permitted to havea ccess, whether on payment or otherwise ”.
I wouldn't think a website constitutes a "place" under such a definition. Otherwise posting a picture of your genitals on a website could be viewed as indecent exposure, though IANAL.
In general two consenting adults who have sex and then exchange money is legal. But being a pimp is illegal; running a brothel is illegal; offering sex for money or offering money for sex is illegal. And there are some fierce laws about coercion and trafficking - the punter is guilty if the sex-worker is coerced even if the punter didn't know. And the UK has a stricter definition of trafficked than most other countries. A woman who is assisted to travel willingly and knowingly to the UK to do sex-work has been trafficked. And the punter is guilty even if they didn't know about it.
So, in the past you'd have someone offering a length of time for £X, and anything else that happened between consenting adults was just good luck, oh, and btw, here's a list of sexual practices that I like, and here's what I do not do.
For a grim website you can have a look at adultwork.com
Japan is just the opposite: prostitution is illegal, but prostitution is defined by law as "penis in the vagina for money". So a lot of institutions have sprung up to offer every other kind of service.
You advertise your phone number/email in relevant forums and wait for people to contact you.
Maybe jiggy2011 is right, but I'd have to see some numbers before I accept it. As I said, people are used to getting porn for free - how many will be willing to pay for cams?
A lot of people are born in big cities, so a lot of pornstars will be born in big cities. I'd be interested to see which cities have a disproportionally low/high number.
Even with the hair color, I'm wondering what the deviation from the national averages looks like.
p.s. obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1138/
Er, no, it just means there's no geographic component to your appeal within the limits of the map. Could be a very narrow slice, but even distributed in population.
Of course, this doesn't mean it shouldn't be a pet peeve, just that being a peeve doesn't mean it's actually wrong or misleading, just that it's annoying to the... erm... 'peevee'?
Luckily there is a relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1138/
There are ways to adjust for that, but basically, you can't win:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/allm...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-t...
O...M...G...
Edit: there is something, levelling, and humanising about the sheer unexpectedness of this. Plus no showering in between clients, nope going back to OMG
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
For this and the sidebar, I'd guess he's an analyst for hire - sharing the raw data would let people scoop him. If you want the data, you can always scrape the IAFD yourself...