christ-on-a-stick

luvluv -

I am going to have to respond more in-depth tomorrow but for the moment I just want to clarify one thing, because I feel that you are missing my point in a big way...

I am not just "appealing to ownership". As a woman, sexual activity *and* (in my personal case) "using" my sexuality as I see fit is NOT "valueless". The VALUE it has for me (owning my own sexuality) is PLEASURE. *MY* pleasure.
luvluv... what I own IS valuable - it is mine to be used for my own pleasure. Your comment about "the love of a boyfriend, popularity" etc. is ignoring the fact (or perhaps you really don't believe that women as well as men like sex for its own sake!!! What you seem to be saying exemplifies the attitude that I was talking about - that it (sex) is something women "give" and men "take".

I share my sexuality for my own pleasure (and can also take pleasure in my partner's pleasure). I share my sexuality for money AND pleasure, as well. Pardon my French but this is B.S. How can I say this differently.... sexuality *is* precious for its own sake. (I wouldn't use the word precious actually... I like valuable better). Sex is NOT "meaningless and valueless in my ideology" - its meaning and value is pleasure. The only thing my "ideology forbids" (or, I would rather say, disagrees with) is the characterization of sex as being something inherently "sacred".

More manana!!!

luvluv

Michaelson:

This is the question, here. Is there anything common or natural or appropriate to all human experience such that we can evaluate behavior, or are all of us individually so different that it is literally impossible to make any predictions about how a person's behavior will affect them?

What do you mean by this? Specifically the word judge.

I would think their decisions do affect more people than themselves. Most decisions do.

I'm not sure I agree. Certainly, a person can and probably will have sex with their loved ones for different reasons. I think any expression of sexuality between committed partners involves a certain level of validation of worth, even if it is plain doin' the nasty. I think that trading sex for popularity, for example, cheapens the gift (in the euphemistic sense, Lauri) of sexuality. Certainly, one can RECOVER the value of sex when devoting it to a person you care about, but that doesn't really mean that it's value was not in some sense lost while you were trading it for money or "love" or popularity.

The question at hand though is how the concept of ownership enables one to make better decisions. I don't think it does. It tends only to lend a sense of authority or propriety to terrible decisions. It says, essentially, it is my right and special priviledge to make terrible decisions with the things I own. Well, certainly. But this gets us no where.

I'm going to intentionally and stealthily avoid this question at this time.

Loren Pechtel

How many brides are virgins for other than religious reasons? Not very many these days!

luvluv

All right but we were discussing this in terms of how this sense of ownership could help the young women who become involved in the seamier side of pornography make better decisions. I don't have experience with women in pornography but I do have experience with young women who have made (and are making) highly questionable decisions about how to express themselves sexually. On a certain level, I think I am the one being realistic here with all due respect. It is certain that women enjoy sex for pleasure, but it is just as certain they often trade sex for something they consider to be more valuable. And, quite often, they are mistaken in their valuation. They believe a certain person, or a certain social status, is worth sleeping with someone, and they often discover, later, that they were mistaken to think this.

Sex can be simeltaneously pleasurable for the woman AND a means to an end. Quite often the young women I come in contact with (high schoolers, generally) are probably not engaging in sex PRIMARILY for their own pleasure (though that is involved) but for other things they value more. They have sex FOR THOSE THINGS (money, popularity, love) when they would not have had sex for the pleasure ALONE. The pleasure in these situations is, for the most part, a fringe benefit. So they are still bartering with their sexuality and still getting hurt.

Frankly thinking of their bodies as a pleasure machine they own isn't really going to solve the issue either. The next logical question such a young lady would ask herself is "how much do I value pleasure?" Should a person value sexual pleasure highly or moderately? Would they be willing to trade things for sexual pleasure? Would they be willing to trade sexual pleasure for things? It amounts to the ownership issue. It's a question of appropriate value. Is it worth having sex that is less than pleasurable for money?

I suppose, to a certain extant, the sex that an abused, emotionally distraught girl who has been coerced into going beyond her boundaries on a porno set can be to some extent pleasurable. But is it the value of that (probably relatively low) pleasure really her motive in participating?

I think it is a general rule of economics that people only trade commodities for things they consider to be of greater value. I pay five dollars for an item because I value the item more than I value the five dollars. What does it really say to value ANYTHING above your own body, and to trade your body for ANYTHING? It says that my body, and the intimate expression of my sexuality, is worth LESS than money or fame or popularity or whatever I am trading it for. This is the case even if the exchange is pleasurable.

I don't know that pleasure is a form of value or if it is, more rightly, a recipient of value. Pleasure in itself is not a valid reason for doing anything in and of itself. One must decide how HIGHLY one values pleasure. To say something is pleasurable is not to say that it has value or to what extent it is valuable. Pulling scabs can be pleasurable (for some people) does that mean pulling a scab is a valuable enterprise? I know the subjectivitst temptation is to say "yes, if this person finds pleasure in it." But, really? If you saw a person putting the energy and resources into pulling scabs that normal people put into sex, wouldn't you think that AS A HUMAN BEING they were off-centered and unhealthy? So somehow, divorced from pleasure, sex has some value that makes it a worthy pursuit. Drugs (I'm told) can quite often be more pleasurable than sex. Yet we do not really consider drugs therefore more valuable than human sexuality. So I think there must be some higher reason other than pleasure to value sexuality. And I don't think pleasure is a value.

Pleasurable does not equal valuable. Pleasure is an experience for which we must choose an appropriate level of value.

If that is the case, then was the sex you were having earlier in your career precious?

Do you mean that sex is valuable because it is pleasurable?

That would lead us to the conclusion that all activities which are pleasuable to a person are valuable (even if their pleasure was pulling scabs) but that leads us to obvious absurdities. Pulling scabs is not a valuable activity, no matter how pleasurable it is. This also leads us to the assumption that we should pursue pleasure at all costs, which most people would also disagree with. The conlcusion we must therefore reach is that pleasure is a recipient of value, not a designator of value. We decide how much we will value pleasure (what are we willing to give up for it?); pleasure does not determine how much we will value other things.

As such, I don't see how saying the value of sex is pleasure will help a young lady who values pleasure less than money or popularity or something like that. And if she values pleasure above all else then she will probably still make some pretty bad decisions.

luvluv

Consider these scenarios:

1) You are deceived into giving a man your hamburger because you believe he loves you.

2) You are deceived into having sex with a man because you believe he loves you.

Now, given your take, one would expect that you would prefer scenario 2 because sex is more pleasurable than eating a hamburger.

How could you prefer scenario 1 to scenario 2 without affirming that sex has some value other than pleasure? My guess is that you would rather be caught in scenario 1 than 2 because you would intuitively feel that you would have given up something more valuable in sleeping with the deceitful man than in giving the decietful man a hamburger. This would be the case despite the fact that sleeping with the deceitful man might have been more pleasurable than eating the hamburger. But this would mean that sex must have more meaning than simply pleasure, wouldn't it?

You are deceived in either case, but you seem to be saying it would be better to be deceived into having sex with a man than to be deceived into giving this man a hamburger because sex is more pleasurable.

tronvillain

*sigh* Saying that sex can have some value other than pleasure is not the same as saying sex always has some other value than pleasure.

Michaelson

It's an interesting example you give, however your twisting things to an extent.

You're presuming that sex is something that can only exist between two loving and committed partners. I doubt many people on this board would deny that in such situations, sex is an affirmation of the love you share. It's why monogamy is all the rage.

The fact is that if you pretend to love someone because it is the only way you know that they will agree to sleep with you then you are talking about someone with a certain belief system, and you're offending that belief system.

You're ignoring the fact that people can also enjoy non-committal sex. Quite a separate thing, for those who enjoy it. Society has evolved to a stage where more people than ever are willing to accept and embrace that sex can be enjoyable with a committed partner and also with some spunk in a night club. And no doubt the act means a different thing in each of those scenarios.

My answer, though: If someone pretended to love me to sleep with me, they wouldn't know me very well, for starters, but the anguish I'd feel would relate to the deceit rather than the sex. "They only wanted me for the sex" is just as bad as "they only wanted me for my hamburger" in my books. What would hurt is that they pretended to love me when all they wanted was (in case a) my hamburger or (in case b) sex.

christ-on-a-stick

luvluv,

(Yeah I know I said more manana and there *will* be more manana, but one quick thing... )

I echo Michaelson's thoughts above. No offense, luvluv, but I really do sense that you are having trouble understanding that people (both men AND women) can enjoy non-committal sex. Without guilt. Without inherent "damage" to the psyche. Also... I agree with this.

And to answer one of your questions, Don't be gettin' twisty with me here What I said was that sexuality is precious (and I still prefer the term "valuable") - not necessarily all sex.

I did indeed have some negative sexual encounters earlier in my career, which is why I left the industry temporarily. However, I also had some negative sexual encounters while in the bonds of holy matrimony with my first husband (while I was still a Christian). In neither case did said negative sexual encounters somehow damage me, my psyche, or my sexuality.

I will have more to add on the morrow when my brain is less fuzzy.

BTW, ROFL at the hamburger analogy. It just made me laugh for some reason... and hungry too dammit!

christ-on-a-stick

...this will probably be my longest post EVER, as I am going to do my damndest to reply to the parts of luvluv's most recent posts that I didn't cover last night. For the faint of heart (or just easily bored!), turn back now!

luvluv - First off, apologies if I am redundant in any of this as I already replied to some of your points, but I want to be as thorough as possible.

After my post explaining what I meant by "owning one's sexuality", you wrote: I will admit that this totally confuses me. How can a sense of ownership over their own bodies *and lives* NOT empower someone? "It's my body" is not a necessarily a "defense" - someone saying "it's my body" as an explanation for doing something harmful to themselves is NOT THE SAME THING as someone saying "it's my body and you don't have any right to tell me that I shouldn't be able to use it for my own pleasure, and if I am comfortable doing so, for profit as well."
I fail to see how this analogy relates to the discussion of porn, in which you are trying to argue that a majority of women are being coerced. In your analogy, driving the car without changing its oil is the "thing that is bad for the car". Is someone trying to force you to drive your car without changing the oil? If so, just as you as the car-owner can say "screw you, I'm changing the oil anyway", the women who "owns her sexuality" can say "screw you, I don't want to do an anal-gangbang." OR "hell yeah, that sounds fun! Bring it on!" I think the uncrossable impasse that we keep finding ourselves at is that you don't think it's possible under any circumstance for a healthy, well-justed female in control of herself to *want* to do such carnal things and enjoy it, OR do them for the money and not be permanently damaged by it.

I would like to clarify one thing that perhaps I have not made clear enough throughout this dialogue.

I do believe that their are girls/women out there in the porn industry who are not mentally and/or emotionally healthy - for a myriad of possible reasons ranging from emotional to physical to sexual abuse or all of the above. These women may well be entering the industry for all the "wrong" reasons or just be ultra-susceptible to the coercive tactics and pressure that are sometimes used. In these cases, I have no doubt that being in the porn industry *is* further damaging these women, and I do not have a "hard heart" (euphemistically) toward their situations any more than I am un-empathetic to women in abusive relationships or trapped in cycles of addiction and despair.

However, I DO NOT believe that this represents the majority or even a large percentage (say a quarter) percentage of the women in the industry. I would be more than willing to consider any evidence to the contrary, but in absence of such evidence I have only my own experience to go on, which I feel is fairly extensive.

Most importantly - I do not believe that the SOLUTION to this problem is a blanket indictment/condemnation of all pornography any more than the solution to domestic violence is getting rid of marriage! Or that the solution to alcohol abuse is Prohibition... and so on and so on.

All that being said, I find that your position of pornography being inherently immoral on the grounds of the existence of exploitation and coercion within the industry to be untenable. A blanket moral indictment of an industry based on the undesirable elements within it is simply ludicrous to me. I find the concepts of a) more stringent legal regulations and b) protections of performers to be a vastly more practical and responsible remedy, and going back further, I cannot state emphatically enough that I believe a lot of the phenomenon of abuse and coercion can be directly traced to the lack of self-esteem and lack of "sexual empowerment" that females are taught (or not taught), as it were in our hypocritically puritanical society.

Whew! *wipes sweat from brow*

Harumi

COAS:

*claps*

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy: