Violet Blue tweeted on Saturday: "Bad night. Discovered that companies that were friends, who I've done promo for, are selling porn 'starring' me. It's NOT me. It's not okay."
But V, I thought you were a friend to the porn industry and its stars. So why does that tweet smack of a condescending "not that there's anything wrong with that" attitude toward pornstariness? (Or is that residual anger from the case of the porn star who "stole"and besmirched your good name?) And I thought that certain hip and cool porn companies were your friends, your buddies, your pals. I thought that those "good" porn producers--your so-called friends--were sexual freedom fighters, breaking down the oppressive hegemonic depictions of sexuality and...
Oh, wait, some porn producers--even some of the cool ones-- might just want to make money? They betrayed a "friend" to help their cause? Porn might NOT be an awesomely liberatory force, as some pro-porn feminists might suggest? Porn companies might, in fact, place greed ahead of good?
Isn't that basically what I've been saying all along?
Even the "coolest" and most outspoken pro-porn feminist on the Web can get bitten in the ass by the business of porn.
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To make sure I've got this right, let me try paraphrasing:
ReplyDeleteVB was claiming that porn was more than just business. While it may (or may not) have effects outside of the purely business side of things, she found out, rather dramatically, that porn is at its heart, still just business.
Right?
Basically. If you read VB's pro-porn manifesta, she defends porn primarily from the consumption side: http://ourpornourselves.org/about/. Unfortunately, that is not the only side to the equation. My argument has always been that feminists have a right--an obligation, really--to question the workings of the industry that churns out the porn, and that pro-porn folks may disagree, but they should do it based on logic, not on underhanded snark and clear misunderstandings of how academics operate. Pro-porn feminists certainly may defend their rights to enjoy sexy movies--but if in doing so they're aligning themselves with porn companies, they should consider with whom they're getting in bed. VB mentioned three specific porn companies she was annoyed with in a subsequent tweet but didn't elaborate more precisely on the nature of the betrayal. And I wasn't compelled to troll the Hustler site in search of the offending materials. :)
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