From The Perspective of a Pervert: The Plea.

NOTE: This article contains very explicit and sensitive information regarding sexual violence in the author’s personal life, and her experiences working as a salesperson in an adult entertainment shop. If you are squeamish or not interested in personal anecdotes regarding sexual violence, do not continue to read the article. The author offers her own history of self-destructive sexual behaviours as an example of why mainstream pornography is not a representation of healthy sexuality, and why we should consider more deeply the debate around ‘personal choice’ and ‘individuality’ in regards to the adult entertainment industry.

When I first considered working in a sex shop, I realized how quickly a job becomes just that – a job. My family was on the poverty line and without me getting an extra income, we were facing homelessness. I needed a job. I sent out countless resumes and applications in the months leading up to my decision to apply at the sex shop, and I didn’t get a single interview. Then when I went to hand in my resume there, I was given an interview immediately.

I was lucky that all I had to do to get paid was sell manufactured products and not my own body. Remember that word – lucky. Then tell me later if you consider yourself lucky to be in a position to CHOOSE to do sex work. If you do consider yourself lucky, what would you say to a woman whose only option is to sell her body or see her family starve or starve to death herself?? Will you tell her she is one of the lucky ones, she is truly liberated, and she should enjoy her work, ignoring everything else?

Let’s discuss.

My mother, a staunchly anti-porn feminist, also saw how quickly a job becomes a job. She put her beliefs aside to support me because she knew we needed money. Not once did she imply that I should not work at this place because of what it sold and what the products represented to society. It even became a novelty, and the general consensus amongst everyone I spoke to about it was that not only was it a perfectly acceptable job to have, but that it also might be quite funny and enjoyable.

When I look back on this, I am actually deeply upset that nobody I had in my life at that time called me up on it and said, “Hey, have you considered the ethical implications of what you’re doing??” But it is very hard to have ethics and morals in this world. There’s no money in it.

My experiences at this business were, on the whole, horrific, but not due solely to the moral implications or even the somewhat disturbing clientele. The business was run by a pair of exceedingly unpleasant, egotistical, underhanded psychopaths, and by the end of my 6 month stint there I was finishing every shift in tears. The anxiety made me throw up on several occasions whilst at work, and sometimes I was so ill and light-headed that I would have to sit in the office, unable to stand up without falling. The bosses spied on me on the store’s cameras. After what would become my final shift, I came home and said to my mother, “I know we need the money, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t even work one more shift – I can’t bear it.” I was twenty years old at the time. Two days later I handed in my resignation, and left, after a few more of the boss’s underhanded jibes at my lack of skills as a sales assistant and a few more minutes of him staring at my tits. (His perceived lack of skill – he didn’t have the insight to realize that being under constant threat of shouted verbal abuse and at the mercy of the constant ‘up and down’ glances men direct at women thinking they can’t see them, tends to affect a person’s performance negatively.)

And I was lucky I was able to walk away when it got to the point of being intolerable. Some people aren’t that lucky.

He also had no knowledge of what else was happening in my life at the time and the effect it was having on my ability to function. He, however, was allowed to screech abuse at me when he was having a bad day, even when there were customers in the shop. On one occasion I couldn’t use the computer to complete a sale because my hands were shaking so badly, and I had to ask the customer to wait for a few minutes while I calmed down. He had witnessed the scene and was very understanding and implied that this was not exactly a good model for a business.

Not exactly the most liberating of environments.

So what did I actually learn working in such a place? Once the initial ‘I finally have a job and therefore will not starve now’ phase had passed, a continuous internal moral and ethical conflict kicked in. Funnily enough, the porn was the product that I engaged with the least in my job, because there were rules against talking to customers about the content of the DVDs because, and I am not even joking, “Some of them just want to hear you talk dirty”. I also wasn’t required to clean the DVD room or the products in it, so I only went into the room once a shift to cast an eye over the shelves to make sure they were neat. Once a shift was more than enough, as the products made me feel so physically ill that I had to avoid looking at the proclamations on the covers about the activities being ‘barely legal!’, and the images of unsmiling female faces covered in jizz or a woman with five penises being shoved into her face or that facial expression people get when deep-throating. You know, the one where they look like they’re about to vomit and cry at the same time.

So romantic.

Not exactly McDonalds.

But, a normal part of daily life in such a business nonetheless. Another normal part was the constant concern that a man might decide to start ‘servicing’ himself in the DVD room, and the notion that, as a twenty year old woman, I would then have to approach him and insist he leave the shop. It had happened several times before I started working there.

Comparatively, this was a very clean business. Nothing illegal, no ‘back room’, nothing. I had multiple people come into the shop trying to buy illegal drugs like amyl nitrate, and on one occasion a man came in who tried to sell me some, but that was it. One customer came in and told me he had inserted a toy into his anus ‘a few months ago’ and it had never come out. That conversation went for about an hour. One customer called the shop and demanded to know what specific ingredient in the prostate massager he had bought made it glow in the dark and was it radioactive. He demanded to know my name and told me that he would not be ‘fobbed off’ with a non-factual answer. Of course we would sell radioactive sex toys, of course! There was only one occasion where I started to feel really unsafe, when a customer came in looking for something he could discreetly slip his partner so she would want to have sex when he did. He kept trying to touch my arms during this conversation and I had to hide behind the cash register so he couldn’t get near me.

Considering the obvious dangers of putting a young woman in a position like this, it might surprise you to hear that the owners of this particular shop hired young women exclusively. They claimed it was because they made other women buying toys more comfortable……

…..but I didn’t sell toys to women. In the entire time I worked there I sold one toy to a woman, and she said she was in a rush so our interaction was limited to me taking her money and putting her purchase in a bag. She didn’t need to be made comfortable. I sold toys to men FOR women. I sold male toys to men. I sold lingerie to men FOR women. Couples, gay and straight and of both genders, sometimes came into the shop but never purchased anything. And I certainly didn’t sell any porn to any women, ever. I only worked there for 6 months, but I can swear that I never sold ANY porn in any format to any women.

The place wasn’t big on female sexuality, basically. A wall of toys for use by women means nothing if no women are buying them, and a room of pornographic DVDs relates to nothing but men’s sexualities when no woman ever buys a thing from it.

So who was buying the porn?? I hate to present a stereotype, but the people buying porn were 90% men over the age of about 50. The other 10% were men younger than middle aged, and they tended to buy things that involved urine. (I wish I was joking). ‘Pissing Swinger’ was a big seller.

Our most popular DVD section was the transvestite section. The boss told me that on my first training session, and I didn’t believe him. But he was right. Porn that involved women with penises was the most popular.

The second was the section featuring girls who looked as young as they could get ‘em and still be legal.

Mmm. Liberating. Holy.

And you were lucky if you made any sales anyway. The most common scenario would be men coming into the shop, looking at the DVD room for a good half hour, then walking out of the shop ‘awkwardly’… So, yeah, most of the clientele wouldn’t even pay – they got their kicks for free, a good indication of the level of respect they had for the people in the films and a good indication of the amount of thought they had put into their desire to view pornography: none, bar the desire for the inevitable masturbation session.

The average person watching pornography isn’t deconstructing it or thinking about the bigger impact it has on society. We NEED to acknowledge this fact when we talk about this topic.

I want to share with you one of the scenarios I remember most vividly from my time there. An elderly man came into the shop and said, “I’ve got these four school friends and we are all turning eighty next week. I’m looking for something really hardcore. I’ve been to a few different places and I haven’t found anything yet.” So I sent him into the DVD room to look. He scoured the room for half an hour and then left empty handed.

We catered to absolutely every genre and fetish that people could possibly want, bar underage girls and boys, bestiality, necrophilia or anything else illegal.

So, what did this man consider to be hardcore?? What did he want that we weren’t selling?? This incident really stuck in my mind – I found it very concerning, considering the content of some of the DVDs we sold, DVDs I, a self-confessed sexual weirdo, couldn’t even look at the covers of without feeling sick.

I have to stop here and speak a bit to cancel out the notion that people with any sort of an anti-porn stance are prudes, etc. I am the opposite – a demented and damaged pervert. Without going into too much detail about my private life, I am at the other end of the spectrum. If anything, I am unhealthy. Or, I should say, I was, and am now in recovery. And I am the first to admit it – there are some dark places in my psyche and they manifest in bizarre behaviours that a lot of people would deem ‘not normal’. I don’t deem them as normal either, because I know where they come from – they are results of trauma. In my personal life, promiscuity and strange sexual behaviours ARE related directly to deep-seated psychological issues. I have a personality disorder and am a depressive. My father abandoned me when I was seven years old. I’ve seen him once in the subsequent 14 years. I crave really strange kinds of contact with other human beings, often of a nature that is punishing to me, and why?? Because I has issues. And I know that.

Buuuuut other people see these kinds of behaviours normalized in pornography and watch other people do them and think it is all fine and normal. From my own personal experience my strange desires come from a place of severe dysfunctionality and a very negative self-image. When I used to watch porn, it was because I either wanted to identify with a woman being abused or I wanted to see abuse happen. Fucked up, I know. But it gets worse – I didn’t have to try very hard to find the kind of thing I wanted in mainstream porn. In fact, finding something that didn’t fit my criteria would have been harder.

My reasoning was sadistic, inappropriate and quite disgusting –

What’s your excuse??

WOMEN SHOULD NOT HAVE PEOPLE WANTING TO SEE THEM BE BRUTALIZED AND VIOLATED AND WOMEN SHOULD NOT WANT TO BE BRUTALIZED AND VIOLATED.

I am almost a cliché of the issues that anti-porn spokespeople spout as the reasons for why women get involved in any sex work. Now, I never actually exchanged money for the use of my sexuality, but at a point in my life I considered it as a viable option and that is the issue I am addressing.

I remember once at the age of about fifteen, a friend of mine told me she was planning to become a stripper when she was eighteen.

Like it or not, we gotta address this stuff. It’s real. It’s out there. Probably happening to your daughter.

I do not indulge in these self-destructive sexual behaviours or seek these things from my lovers anymore, and I am proud of myself for at least that, despite my other much stronger feelings of shame and self-disgust regarding my past. Overcoming the traps of sexual intimacy has been very difficult. There’s always an inference between two mutually loving and respectful people, that ‘since we respect and love each other and we know that, what we do to each other doesn’t actually matter because it is something from a place of respect and part of respect is respecting the other person’s wish that you should hold them down and fuck them while they struggle to get away, it is only a kinky sex game, come on’. It gets dangerous. The boundaries get bigger and bigger and the line to toe gets further and further away. I choked someone into unconsciousness once. If he didn’t want me to he could easily have fought me off – but he didn’t. Does that make either of our positions in the equation acceptable?

……….

I’ve lived through this and I don’t understand my own reasoning, because it isn’t reasoning – nothing like that comes from mutual love and respect. You’re going into a whole different game there. And I can certainly say right here and now that I have dated equal numbers of men who would never do any of these things to a woman even if she asked for it. My current partner will probably have an aneurism when he reads this article.

Knowing and admitting that you are at least a bit perverted and a bit odd is in itself odd, in a world where people are presented daily with the things you do BECAUSE you have severe psychological issues, but they are presented as totally normal sexual behaviours to be emulated and seen as ‘good sex’. Hello, mainstream porn. And here I come to the crux of the problem –

I am dysfunctional and severely damaged.

What’s your excuse?

But I’m functional enough to be a few weeks away from completion of my first university degree, to be an award winning writer at the age of twenty, to have and maintain good friendships and loving romantic relationships. I have a good relationship with the family I have left.

Trust me; we’re out there, walking the streets where your children are. How would you feel if your son came to you as a parent and said that a girl made him hurt her?

Conflicted, I bet.

Anyway. Back to the story. So I worked in a sex shop. At the time I was very involved with a chap who was also big on the whole violent sex thing. He wasn’t when we first met, and that transition was my fault. I have no knowledge of his subsequent sexual relationships, so I can’t say for sure whether or not I actually changed him, but the most important point to be made here is that by the end of our relationship, he was violent with me even after I told him to stop, and he continued to do these things to me on multiple occasions, no matter how many times I asked him not to or said that I wasn’t enjoying it. Our relationship was rocky at best, he was even more psychologically disturbed than I (ergo, vulnerable), and our interactions with each other grew increasingly more and more depraved, demeaning and degrading, as a reflection of how miserable we were as people, and our individual self-hatred and self-disgust. I could see some weird parallels between my work and my personal life. Constantly being surrounded by sex makes you numb to it, eventually. It just becomes a product you’re selling, and it HAS to become a product you’re selling, otherwise you might stop and realize that humans selling themselves is a little twisted, especially if you believe the human body to be sacred or sex to be sacred. I had to dehumanise the women in the films I was selling in order to justify myself selling them, and I had to dehumanise the women in pornography that I watched myself, because I KNEW that what I was doing was disgraceful. But, rather than stop it, I continued. I wasn’t ready to face my actions yet.

Toys, lingerie, magazines, DVDs, whips, ropes, it is all just a part of sex as a product. I flat out reject the concept of selling sex as a product now, and of using sex to sell other products, and you can blame capitalism and patriarchy for that little phenomenon. Actually, you can blame capitalism and patriarchy for pretty much everything, including the reason men feel compelled to watch porn in the first place. When you become numb to something you become more extreme in your behaviours in order to continue to feel, a similar principle to a common reason given for self-mutilation. My relationship got worse, and as a result I had to dehumanise myself. He kept hitting me even though I asked him not to. Forcing me into bed when I wasn’t into it. I had a lot of physical pain inflicted on me that was way beyond what my threshold could handle. And, I let him take photographic evidence of a lot of this stuff (which I later destroyed when he wasn’t home after we split up). He also thought it was appropriate to attempt to remove articles of my clothing in front of his friends. But I let it continue, because I had lost the connection to my body, and to the idea that sex was anything more than just a product. My mind made the person and my body was just an unrelated object. I didn’t feel intimate or loving at all when it came to sex anymore. So I let myself be degraded and dehumanised over and over again, and I actively participated in it.

But, our bodies AREN’T separate to our minds!! In reality, our bodies are the only thing in the entire world that we ourselves actually OWN.

And all I did in the industry was sell the things other people made. For the most part I think the realities of the porn industry scare me because I see how easily I could have, at that stage in my life, been assimilated into it, without deconstructing it AT ALL. When I heard that one of my friends had been paid $700 to give a guy a blowjob on the internet, I even considered it – I was poor, and the idea of earning $700 for a few minutes work was mind blowing. And my point is that, people decide to work in the industry for a reason. It might just be money, my own motivation for working in a porn shop selling films in which women are continuously abused, and my reasoning behind considering ‘doing porn’ myself and my friend’s reason for actually going through with it, but does that make it a liberating, progressive or good industry? It might be because they enjoy degrading physical experiences as I did, but does that make it a liberating, progressive or good industry? It might be because they think that it doesn’t matter what we do during sex because all sexuality is normal and it doesn’t matter what we do to each other because it comes from a place of mutual respect between two people. As I did. Some of them might just like sex and might only make non-violent films where they are worshipped instead of degraded or objectified. Ok, but – if one person’s sexual desires are allowed to be shown in pornographic films, then we can’t say ‘hitting women (or men for that matter) is bad, not to mention illegal, and we aren’t going to show that in porn’. Or can we? But then what happens to the people who now don’t have an outlet for their desires? There’s the rub – we either attempt to protect ourselves and other women and men from people who might become predators by continuing to manufacture pornographic material that satisfies their violent or abusive urges. Or, we run the risk of excluding these people and leaving them to their own devices. Out on the street. Where actual potential victims are.

This is why people who work in the sex industry don’t want to believe that their actions have a negative effect on the broader community: because admitting you are part of the problem is a lot harder than claiming you are part of the solution.

But we don’t let people have porn with children in it, even if that is their only sexual interest, so why isn’t it the same with porn that degrades women?? Because child pornography is illegal? Because paedophiles won’t assault children if they can’t see child pornography? Why isn’t porn that portrays violence against women illegal then? From a human rights perspective, why is porn that debases or degrades ANY HUMANS not illegal??

I guess because law enforcement is so soft when it comes to sexual violence and violence against women. Even rape isn’t a big enough deal for them to prosecute accordingly, and the notion that anybody, with the way things are now, would bother policing pornography is just stupid. They don’t even care when women get raped or beaten in reality, we are kidding ourselves if we believe that they care about what happens to women in porn.

What will keep me safe on the streets at night? This is the world we live in. I can’t support pornography when things are as they are.

I come now to the use of the word ‘liberation’, which is the fundamental basis of my argument against a pornography industry that allows these images of women being violated to not only enter the public domain, but that demand others pay for the viewing privilege. My argument is not black and white and that watching images of people having sex is bad and people shouldn’t make porn and people shouldn’t watch it.

As someone who has learned the hard way the true value of the human body and of human intimacy in life, MY argument is that, when individual choices have an impact on every other human being on the planet because they are perpetuating a severely damaging and dangerous stereotype, we need to consider humanity above people’s individual choices to indulge in self-destructive violent behaviour. Don’t lie to yourself or anyone else and refer to it as liberation, and if you have psychological problems that cause you to want to brutalize others or be brutalized yourself, SEEK HELP! And keep in mind, I indulged in these behaviours myself for years, convincing myself that it was all ok and it was natural for me to want to be brutalized. It really is not. In my defence I was young and naïve and I have the psychiatric reports to prove that I AM NOT NORMAL. So, resultantly, I do not see these behaviours in anyone as normal.

I would love to see what human sexuality would be like in a world where we didn’t have the mainstream porn industry we have now, where all sorts of behaviours are normalized because we can see them in a film. I’d love to see what my own sexuality would look like if I hadn’t been a victim of so much psychological trauma during my childhood and adolescence. It took me many years to just get to the stage where I could admit that my personal self-destructive sexual behaviours do not come from a place of normal, healthy sexuality. It is difficult to accept the consequences and the resultant damage I have inflicted on myself and others in all of this. It is difficult to admit that just because you think, for whatever reason, that you enjoy something and that it is a good thing to be doing, it is actually destroying you, not to mention the negative impact it is having on society as a whole, and that you NEED to stop, not just for you, but for humanity’s sake and feminism’s sake. And the other part to this puzzle is that I found plenty of men who WOULD agree to do these terrible things to me, who wouldn’t refuse just based on principle. Which, surely, they should, right?? Unless it is from a place of mutual love and respect, of course, because that is how we treat those we love and respect. With abuse.

There is darkness lurking under the surface of most people. This still doesn’t make it ok to abuse each other or enjoy watching others be abused or enjoy being abused or enjoy abusing. Humans are sick animals, poisoned by capitalism and consumerism and religious dogma. My friend in high school once told me that her extremely Catholic uncle had hanging in his house side by side an extremely graphic pornographic poster of a woman, and a crucifixion ornament. When she told me this, she shrugged and said, “That’s Catholics.” That’s cognitive dissonance – conflicting feelings that make coming to a concrete decision impossible without forsaking at least part of what you believe in. And we wonder why humans are so conflicted and dysfunctional.

The world intervened in my case. I got out while I still could, and I was bloody lucky. I found the support of feminism and of the ‘radical’ feminists who speak out against women being brutalized in pornography and I realized just what the world had turned me into. I became an extremely political person. I am in a very good relationship now where I am well cared for and highly respected (I met my partner at a meeting of a feminist group). But when I compare the person I am now to the person I was about ten months ago, I almost reel at the shock of remembering what I was thinking and doing at the time. Change is good. I advocate change in the sex industry. If people want to watch videos of respectful sex to make their own sex better or to have better sex on their own, ok great. Maybe eventually the need to not have this option will arise, but that will be then. But if you want to get off on images of women (or anybody, to be honest) being brutalized, violated, gang banged, verbally abused, insulted, etc., no no no. If you need that shit to have an orgasm then there is probably a bigger issue you should be worrying about and seeking psychological help for. But then, isn’t it safer for these people to have porn that satisfies their desires so they aren’t out on the streets preying on women??

Well, no, because porn normalizes these behaviours for them. As if rape hasn’t been normalized enough in this world, we really can’t afford to continue to normalize ANY sort of abusive or violent or degrading behaviour towards women, or any form of patriarchal domination of women. We just can’t. Nope. Or more girls will decide at the age of 15 that being a stripper is the way to go, and more girls at the age of 19 will request their partners beat them. Remember the whole patriarchal oppression thing that has been happening since the start of civilization?? Can’t ignore it, can’t pretend it isn’t there, can’t pretend we are equal, can’t pretend the fight is over and everything is fine. Can’t pretend it is all just double standards, as an ex of mine claims (I sure know how to pick them) – to do that you would be ignoring hundreds and hundreds of years of oppression, oppression that is still totally prevalent, and now quite sinister and underhanded a lot of the time. And consumerism is the blanket society uses to hide inequality between people in privileged countries – we have everything we could ever possibly desire, what more do we want?

Umm, freedom, maybe? Just for starters. To not have vulgar things shouted at me by men from passing cars in a public street? To be able to walk around at night without nearly shitting myself every time I hear a leaf rustle? I’d swap my MacBook and my Coca-Cola for my personal safety any day of the week.

A focus on reforming the sex industry rather than eradicating it should be our priority, for now. We have no way of knowing if simply making nicer porn and stopping the circulation of anything promoting violence against and the domination of women will have any positive effect whatsoever – we have never totally reformed the porn industry before. We’ve never tried to tackle the ideology behind what is portrayed in mainstream pornography. The eradication of the industry is something we should only think about if our attempts at changing the industry don’t have any effect, but we owe it to the women working in the industry to try and give them a better life, rather than demand they all cease work and earning an income instantly. We should certainly offer them some kind of reform program, for those who do not want to be in the industry, that provides them with financial support and help while they look for new work and provides them with whatever counselling or psychiatric help they might need, if any, to help deal with their experiences in the industry. Because it isn’t all positive and we all know that – but a blanket ban on porn and the manufacture of it still won’t fix these problems. Banning something, no matter how bad it might be, will not remove the reasons it existed in the first place from the world.

People are already trying to change the industry, make ‘woman friendly’ porn, develop better conditions for the workers – whether we like it or not, it isn’t a black and white issue, and we don’t have the option of just saying yes or just saying no. It would be great if it were that simple and we could stop all abuse towards women with a two letter word. It would be great if all women stood up and said, “Hey, we’re not going to participate in our own exploitation anymore – we are tearing this system down.” Personal ideology is great and all, but it isn’t directly helping anything, and demanding that suddenly thousands of jobs not exist just is not the way to do this thing. There are actual humans at the bottom of all this ideology, living actual lives, and I believe in human rights and worker’s rights and the rights of the children of these workers to not go hungry or be plunged into poverty because suddenly their mother or father has no income and must find a new line of work.

But. Don’t get me wrong here. I am definitely of the opinion that pornography as it exists now IS NOT liberating in any sense of the word. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist, it just means we should not refer to it as liberating, and if it isn’t liberating, then we should probably start considering what it actually might be. That’s the first step in this process, and we aren’t even there yet. Selling your body is not liberation – it is kind of the opposite. Selling your body, the only thing you have in the world, is THE deepest kind of oppression – and one you are facilitating yourself. And prostitution may be the oldest trade, but that is only because it comes from a time when women had either very few or no other options to earn an independent income for themselves. So, in effect, a time of extreme repression of women, prompting women to make desperate choices in order to survive. As we all know now I have a tendency towards disrespect for myself and therefore am the kind of person who might have gravitated towards such a thing, had I not identified this and worked tirelessly to change my behaviour and attitudes since. It would be so easy for me to be paid to be fucked. It would also be easy for me to hate myself on the deepest possible level and for that to manifest in me deciding to be paid to be fucked, as it manifested in the past in me becoming a participator in extreme sexual violence. Basically, I can’t trust in myself or in anyone that these decisions aren’t the result of a deeper issue, even if the issue has not yet been identified. And if humans really do just have a natural propensity towards wanting abuse and violence, then why am I still bothering to get up in the morning?? The species is fucked and it needs to be annihilated for its own good.

But then, the idea that, in order to SURVIVE, my only option would be to sell my body… well, that just isn’t comprehensible to me, and probably isn’t comprehensible to women of privilege who defend their choice to work in mainstream pornography – I am safely here in Australia where I have countless other options to earn an income and that situation probably will never arise, so my opinion is an opinion and nothing more, because there is no actual threat of this in my life. Therefore, the claims of women who make the choice to work in pornography or prostitution is liberating are also only that, opinions, and should not be taken at face value as any sort of an actual answer to this debate. The idea that some women HAVE to sell their bodies to survive and support their families is just horrific and we should all recognize it as such – it ISN’T a choice for a lot of workers and they need to be taken into account as well as the workers who entered the industry by ‘choice’, whatever they define that to be. We can’t ignore a sector of women forced into a brutal demeaning lifestyle they have no control over just because liberals in the west think porn and prostitution is all about a person’s individual choices. We have a duty as humans to protect other humans in threatening situations, regardless of anything else.

Selling my labour isn’t considered liberating – are you seriously still going to argue that selling your BODY is liberating?

You have nothing in this life except your body. That’s why the sharing of physical intimacy is special to humans, because it is a human saying to another human, “Here. Please take everything I have in the world – I want you to have it.” And the other person says, “I will take everything you have and raise you everything I have”. If someone slaps you across the face throughout this act, then that isn’t exactly respectful to the monumental thing you are doing for them. And you wanting to be brutalized during this act isn’t exactly respectful to yourself.

You might have noticed that I present countless different views and opinions that all exist within my mind on this issue. This is because, the more I think about it, the more analysis I do, the further away I get from any concrete answers. I’ve thought about this topic a LOT, and talked to a lot of people about it, and most people agree with me – the more we analyse, the further we get from answers, because the situation is just so infinitely complex. But anything is when it is a battle between what people perceive as an individual’s right to make their own choices, and other people saying ‘well, maybe just because they want to do these things doesn’t mean it is right or that their actions aren’t hurting other people, and hey, maybe we should step in’.

But, it’s my body and I’m not allowed to smoke pot or inject heroin or stay up 5 days in a row on meth and people say I shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions and want to take that right away from me and some people say I’m not allowed to have sex before I’m married, and people say my friends aren’t allowed to be joined in a loving legal union. It’s their choice to want to get married, but in reality, the choice that they are not allowed to is made by other people, or by a previously existing system with a hell of a lot of problems.

So, why do people think that it is so important to have personal choice when it comes to porn and prostitution, when so many other areas of our lives are so heavily dictated and personal choice doesn’t exist?

Because a hell of a lot of the people advocating FOR mainstream pornography and for prostitution are already consumers of it and don’t want their privilege and personal choice of being able to consume these things to be threatened. Or they are workers within the industry who obviously have their livelihoods at stake – like I said, you’d be surprised at how quickly a job becomes a job. People have to convince themselves first that what they are doing is right and ok, and on an issue like mainstream pornography, the damages caused by it are so immeasurably huge that people NEED to form strong opinions about why they should be allowed to continue to do it. To be a member of a fascist army, for example, you’d have to believe pretty strongly that killing members of the proletariat army was the right thing. Or, you’d have to want to not die enough to kill other people, no matter how wrong you thought it was. Or, you’d just have to enjoy killing people……

Does this sound familiar? A very similar process of thought. Sadly, so often the choices humans make are prompted by a ‘do or die’ scenario, and this in itself is shameful. Either that, or society rewards and legitimises our tendencies toward violent psychopathy.

We are a horrible species, really, aren’t we?

The people who oppose the individual choice to partake of any behaviour that harms oneself or other people instantly become repressors, repressing people’s individuality – I am a socialist first and a liberal second, and I am also of the Socratic opinion that even if the majority of people want something, it doesn’t automatically make it right. That isn’t to say that I personally know what is right, either. As a socialist I have humans as a whole in my thoughts. The choices made by individuals have the power to totally destroy things for big sectors of humanity and this is the only reason I would intervene in anyone’s personal choice and this is the crux of the problem that people love to deny – whether you like it or not, your actions can affect society in untold ways. This is why a privileged woman says she chose to join the trade and being paid for sex is liberating, and an underprivileged woman says ‘I am only doing this because I have no other choice’ – the punters look at both sides of the argument and of course they side with the woman who says it is liberating, because it is just easier for them. They don’t need to challenge anything or take a look at themselves and their desires that way, and they continue to get what they want. It’s not fuckin’ rocket science – of course people defend their right to get what they want personally, without any thought to its affect on the rest of humanity. Most people aren’t socialists or humanists. Most people have no insight into the world because they buy the ideas that capitalism and patriarchy sell to them without thinking, and because when facing the actual realities of the world, most people don’t have the stomach for it and choose a life of escapism. If this wasn’t true of humanity, the world would look VERY different right now.

The choice to perform in a violent or degrading piece of pornography, as a woman, fucks things up for ALL WOMEN ON THE PLANET. Not to mention all the men who are conned into believing that this kind of behaviour is not only normal, but that women like it or even expect it – they are victims of the system too. Who knows, their masculinity might be under threat if they don’t appear to know instinctively how to behave in the bedroom, so what do they do? They emulate what they see. It’s safe and easy. And like I have stated before, clearly resultant from a deeper psychological issue regarding self-esteem and self-confidence. Vulnerable people are also on my mind – they need to be protected, from themselves and from each other and from any predators. If a man thinks what he has seen in porn is normal and copulates with a vulnerable woman and convinces her that it is also normal, well, are you starting to see the connections in the chain?? If a woman copulated with a vulnerable man and convinced him to brutalize her, and he only did it because she said she wanted it – again, it gets bleak pretty quickly. I’ve done a fair bit of desecrating the human body in my time and it is probably my biggest regret, that I didn’t work out what was wrong earlier and didn’t get help earlier.

And, still, all I actually did ‘in the industry’ was sell someone else’s product. I didn’t make it.

You don’t need to sell your own soul – I’ll do it for you.

But I made money by selling people films within which women were abused. I will be atoning for this for the rest of my life.

One of my most loved friends is a female who was raped. When I was younger I had a male friend who, at the age of 15, narrowly escaped a sexual assault from another man in a public toilet. I can’t help but feel like my ‘individual choice’ to have violence inflicted upon me in the name of sexual gratification contributed to those events. My ex pretended to rape me on multiple occasions, and when I think about that now I actually want to throw myself off a bridge. How many women did I hurt with my ‘individual choice’ to simulate a rape scenario within the privacy of my partner’s house? Every single person on the entire planet, because I was responsible for perpetuating a disgusting stereotype of sexuality that is slowly destroying us all. But, role-play is ok in any circumstances though right, because it’s all part of normal healthy human sexuality and it’s an individual choice and we know it isn’t real and it comes from a place of mutual love and respect –

Be quiet.