I went on holiday by mistake - or at least on the spur of the moment - this week, hopping up to the Lake District town of Staveley with a friend to spend a night in the unique surroundings of the Eagle and Child Inn, then have a wander around Ambleside. So far, so not exactly Withnail and I, but I hadn't figured on one thing that would cause a problem: tha lack of a decent mobile signal in the wilds of the Lakes, particularly on a stormy night like Friday.
Stranded in the pub, twitterless, I would have been stuck for something to read in the quiet moments while I waited for my friend to return from the toilet or the bar. Fortunately I had just subscribed to the Kindle edition of the Guardian this week and still had an issue backed up on the machine to work through. This would do, I figured, until I got to somewhere I could connect to wi-fi and download the weekend edition. And so it was that I wound up reading and agreeing with - up to a point, anyway - an article by Julie Bindel. (trigger warning: graphic descriptions of sexual abuse in pornography)
There are a lot of things I don't like about Bindel: her transphobia, her islamophobia, and her selective amnesia and special pleading when called out about both; her inability to take criticism, to the extent of siccing her good buddy, disgraced journo Johann Hari, on people as a kind of big fluffy attack dog; or the fact that I know, from personal experience, that she searches Twitter for her own name on a regular basis and chides people if they're not positive about her. But I think what we would both agree on is that the activities of the sleazebag 'Max Hardcore' are an affront to any notion of decent behaviour. Where we differ is on the inferences we draw from this privileged, cosseted little man's antics. Bindel sees this case as an inherent problem with pornography itself, comparing pornography as a medium to great human rights abuses of history:
'Other human rights campaigners rely on disturbing imagery to add strength to their arguments: footage of animals being caged and tortured; images of men being lynched in the American south by the Ku Klux Klan; pictures of mass graves in conflict zones.'
But there's a problem with this analogy. While what Max WankyNickname does to the women in his films is wrong, and while I for one would love to see him punished for it (at length, in a steel cage, by people wearing sap gloves - but then we all have our fetishes, don't we, Max), the fact remains that the porn industry is not the equivalent of the genocide against black people carried out by the KKK in the American south, or the genocide of other groups carried out by the millitias in Bosnia or Rwanda. I find this comparison both ludicrous and offensive. Porn - whatever problems you may have with it - is not the moral equivalent of genocide.
I do think Bindel is on to something with her analogy between the porn industry and the meat and animal research industries. Though I reject the dehumanising comparison between porn industry workers and livestock implicit in this analogy, it holds inasmuch as both industries are guilty of low standards of welfare, both represent the ugliest side of capitalism, both need tighter and better regulation, and both produce a homogenised, low-quality product which is a cheap perversion of the natural and desirable aspect of life - whether husbandry or, ahem, husbandry - which they distort to create factory-produced crap.
Prior to arriving in Staveley, I had been reading my friend another new Kindle acquisition of mine - Caitlin Moran's most excellent new book How to be a Woman. Moran takes a different attitude to porn, arguing that we need 'free range' porn and 'a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available'. What Moran means by this is more than just the shallow 'variety' offered by the sexual Woolworth's pick-n-mix of DVDAs, hot grannies and interracial creampies, but a variety of approaches, of styles, of genres and ideologies underpinning the stuff people fap to.
This is an attitude to porn I can support, because to me the behaviour of someone like Max MyDaddyNeverLovedMeEnough is an industry issue, a workers' rights issue, and a rightness of content issue rather than an issue which suggests the entire genre in which he works should be banned. By way of a more fitting analogy, consider the action film, particularly the martial arts action film as popularised by Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme et al in the late eighties, early 90s. This genre of film has many similarities to pornography (many heterosexual women and gay men could argue with some justice that in the case of the early van Damme ouevre the distinction between the films' ostensible genre and pornography collapses completely) in that the 'plot', such as it is, exists primarily as a frame on which to hang a number of fight scenes of increasingly graphic character, in much the same way that the 'plot' of a porn film exists as a frame on which to hang a number of fucking scenes of an increasingly graphic character.
So far so good. But now imagine that someone decides to start making 'hardcore' action films, which contain only the fights - and make them real and basic, rather than choreographed and balletic, at that; which show no regard for the health of the participants, and in fact seem to delight in injury or trauma being inflicted upon them; and which dispense with any semblance of a plot, a moral, or an emotional core beyond vapid, dead-eyed ultraviolence. Would we allow someone to continue making such films? Would we accept it? No. We would not.
And this is where, despite my disagreements with Bindel, I part company with the extreme free speech advocates on the pornography issue, because I do not believe all porn is justified under the 1st Amendment or the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Pornography in which workers are abused by pathetic, petty tyrants who style themselves 'stars', in which audiences are abused by being pandered to with substandard content, needs to be regulated out of existence. Like the food industry, pornography is capitalism at its ugliest; and, like the food industry, it needs to be regulated more strongly and more aggressively, because the products of an UNregulated porn industry are bad for us all.
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Sunday, 17 July 2011
Friday, 23 April 2010
Hangin' on the Telephone
Like what must be about 77% of the UK population, I now find myself working in a call centre. And it isn't exactly a bad job, and I'm reasonably good at it - working in the book shop gave me a chance to develop a certain manner with customers that's served me well, and my always charmingly weird voice seems to have a kind of beguiling effect on the callers - but it does mean that, about once a day, I find myself having the same recurring thought: if I'm going to spend my days talking pretty to people and occassionally being verbally abused, why not just work on a sex line?
Maybe the problem is that, while I'm good at selling stuff to people I'm a lot more service-oriented, and the job that I'm in - while providing a lot of opportunities to be of service - also involves having to make what are called 'add-on sales' i.e. having, at the end of the call, to try and sell the caller some additional product they don't yet have. People wouldn't buy the things we sell 'em if they didn't want them, obviously, but still, it can sometimes inject a certain sense of grubby commerciality into an otherwise pleasant transaction.
And, as filthy as you might consider the phone-sex industry, at least it's founded on a solid and honourable transaction: the customer phones up, you talk dirty to them until they make a funny noise, they leave happier (if somewhat wetter of trouser) and you pocket a slice of the 85p-a-nanosecond they've been paying for the privilege of wanking without the use of their own imagination. You say your goodbyes in a stilted and embarassing fashion, and you don't move in when they're at their most vulnerable with some kind of additional spiel.
Or do you? See, that's where my fantasy falls apart, crashing against the harsh rocks of reality. You see, I've never actually worked in the phone sex industry, nor, indeed, have I ever called a phone sex line myself (due not to some overly-developed sense of moral hygeine but because my mind is filthy enough already without me having to outsource my fantasising to somebody at the other end of a phone line). What if it is actually like working in a legitimate call centre? What if, at the end of the call, as the punter sits there, a shaking human battleground for the forces of relief, loneliness, pleasure and shame, you're expected to chime in and say 'now that I've brought you to orgasm, sir, I wonder if you'd be interested in buying our new DVD, Bukkakic Park: The Tossed World?'
That isn't even the worst possibility, though. You see, as part of the service we're expected to demonstrate, one thing we're supposed to do is summarise the call at the end. Imagine that: having to summarise a sex-line call before letting the customer go. 'Well, sir, let me just check on this for you: you called us shouting that you needed to come, dear fucking god we had to make you come, I've outlined a fantasy scenario in which I get on the floor and you fuck me hard in the ass with your big bad monster doomcock until I scream and call you 'daddy', and as a result of this erotic freestyling you've now reached a physical climax and are weeping gently on a soiled matress and wondering where it all went wrong. Would that be a fair summary of the situation? And is there anything else I can help you with?'
It's a terrifying thought. Perhaps, all things considered, it's best to stick to the respectable end of the phone biz, and content myself with slipping the odd innuendo into my customer conversations as I service them queerly...no sir, I said service your query. It's a bit of a crackly line.
Maybe the problem is that, while I'm good at selling stuff to people I'm a lot more service-oriented, and the job that I'm in - while providing a lot of opportunities to be of service - also involves having to make what are called 'add-on sales' i.e. having, at the end of the call, to try and sell the caller some additional product they don't yet have. People wouldn't buy the things we sell 'em if they didn't want them, obviously, but still, it can sometimes inject a certain sense of grubby commerciality into an otherwise pleasant transaction.
And, as filthy as you might consider the phone-sex industry, at least it's founded on a solid and honourable transaction: the customer phones up, you talk dirty to them until they make a funny noise, they leave happier (if somewhat wetter of trouser) and you pocket a slice of the 85p-a-nanosecond they've been paying for the privilege of wanking without the use of their own imagination. You say your goodbyes in a stilted and embarassing fashion, and you don't move in when they're at their most vulnerable with some kind of additional spiel.
Or do you? See, that's where my fantasy falls apart, crashing against the harsh rocks of reality. You see, I've never actually worked in the phone sex industry, nor, indeed, have I ever called a phone sex line myself (due not to some overly-developed sense of moral hygeine but because my mind is filthy enough already without me having to outsource my fantasising to somebody at the other end of a phone line). What if it is actually like working in a legitimate call centre? What if, at the end of the call, as the punter sits there, a shaking human battleground for the forces of relief, loneliness, pleasure and shame, you're expected to chime in and say 'now that I've brought you to orgasm, sir, I wonder if you'd be interested in buying our new DVD, Bukkakic Park: The Tossed World?'
That isn't even the worst possibility, though. You see, as part of the service we're expected to demonstrate, one thing we're supposed to do is summarise the call at the end. Imagine that: having to summarise a sex-line call before letting the customer go. 'Well, sir, let me just check on this for you: you called us shouting that you needed to come, dear fucking god we had to make you come, I've outlined a fantasy scenario in which I get on the floor and you fuck me hard in the ass with your big bad monster doomcock until I scream and call you 'daddy', and as a result of this erotic freestyling you've now reached a physical climax and are weeping gently on a soiled matress and wondering where it all went wrong. Would that be a fair summary of the situation? And is there anything else I can help you with?'
It's a terrifying thought. Perhaps, all things considered, it's best to stick to the respectable end of the phone biz, and content myself with slipping the odd innuendo into my customer conversations as I service them queerly...no sir, I said service your query. It's a bit of a crackly line.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
BBC in 'total balls deficiency' shock
Tonight, I watched Hardcore Profits, a BBC2 documentary (which looks a lot like it was originally made for BBC3) about how 'legitimate, respectable companies' are making out like gangbusters from people accessing porn via the net, pay-per-view TV and mobile 'phones.
This is a massive, world-shattering shock - as long as you initially subscribed to the idea that mobile phone networks, credit card companies, and the Marriott hotel chain were paragons of virtue to begin with.
If, however, like any intelligent adult, you're aware that mobile phones can be used to detonate bombs, credit cards can be used to purchase all kinds of illicit commodities (and are also damned handy for chopping out lines of coke), and hotel rooms can play host to all kinds of kinkiness without the TV even being on, you'll think, meh.
Y'know what would be a good angle, though?
You could investigate a moralising middle-market newspaper which gives column inches to extremely conservative commentators and prints scathing reviews of films it considers pornographic, yet which turns out to be owned by a corrupt porn baron who runs television companies whose websites promise 'immediate access to hundreds of hardcore videos and images'.
You could follow up that angle. But they didn't. Why not?
This is a massive, world-shattering shock - as long as you initially subscribed to the idea that mobile phone networks, credit card companies, and the Marriott hotel chain were paragons of virtue to begin with.
If, however, like any intelligent adult, you're aware that mobile phones can be used to detonate bombs, credit cards can be used to purchase all kinds of illicit commodities (and are also damned handy for chopping out lines of coke), and hotel rooms can play host to all kinds of kinkiness without the TV even being on, you'll think, meh.
Y'know what would be a good angle, though?
You could investigate a moralising middle-market newspaper which gives column inches to extremely conservative commentators and prints scathing reviews of films it considers pornographic, yet which turns out to be owned by a corrupt porn baron who runs television companies whose websites promise 'immediate access to hundreds of hardcore videos and images'.
You could follow up that angle. But they didn't. Why not?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)