Tag Archives: porn

Paying for school via a career in porn

News, Politics, Relationships, Religion, , , , , , , , ,

One of the big “stories” this week has been a woman who attends Duke University, who was outed as a porn star by one of the guys who attends university with her. To me, it was only a matter of time, but she decided to “out” herself, by revealing her porn name, which happens to be Belle Knox. Personally, I’ve never heard the name before, and as much as I’d like to say it’s because I never look at porn, to be honest, I just never heard that porn name before.

Part of the effort she is currently going through is to get on top of the story, so that she can tell her narrative, rather than have the media drive the narrative for her. Just last week, there was a story through the media of the woman who suffered the scandal with Anthony Weiner. She decided she needed to somehow become involved in the story of this woman who was now being outed at Duke University.

Now, this is one of those stories that can attract all sorts of sensationalism, but that’s not why I wish to discuss it. Instead, what interested me about this story was the ramifications involved in a woman’s desire to utilize a pornography career in order to pay for her education. It’s easy to take an overly moralistic perspective and condemn such actions, as well as it’s just as easy to take the pro-prurient perspective and state unequivocally that what someone does with his or her body is really his or her own affair, and who cares. Instead, like I indicated, I would like to talk about the ramifications.

For that, I’ll bring up the case of Sasha Grey, a porn star who attempted to leave the business and become a non-porn actress. All fine. But then she was booked to give readings to children, and suddenly the moral majority of America went up in flames, believing that if a porn star should ever read children’s books to children, somehow that would cause the world to explode. Or whatever was their concern.

But getting back to the original issue, which is a porn actress being outed for her extracurricular activities that paid for her education, I find myself going back to my own experience in college, where I started to discover how many of the women around me were actually paying their bills through the adult entertainment industry. Some were strippers at night clubs, some were professional dominants who got paid to tie up guys and sexual arouse them, while others were making pornography, and a number were working as call girls to afford their tuition and living expenses. If it was just one woman or two, I could see it being anecdotal, but it was extremely prevalent during just a few years back when I was going to college.

What I think a lot of people don’t understand is that the behavior is not that unusual. Yet, what seems to be the situation here is that people are under the impression that somehow this is some kind of outlier situation. What they don’t want to believe is that there might be a lot of “normal” women out there who are funding their education through prurient methods. It’s nice to believe that everyone is following the Biblical moral standards they want to push forth, but in reality, people are living in the real world, doing real world things, and sometimes those things involve sexual behavior.

The problem is that people who tend to be as guilty as everyone else, as the purveyors of pornography and adult services is far greater than anyone wants to admit (it wouldn’t be that profitable if it wasn’t), really want to believe the reality is much different than it actually is. I’ll give you a simple example that people don’t even address, and that’s something as simple as literature. As a fiction writer, I find the market for my fiction to be very limiting and very difficult to break into. However, if I was to publish a book of erotica instead of espionage fiction, statistics have shown that even if the writing was atrociously bad in comparison to my normal writing, my sales would go through the roof because of the genre alone. Someone’s buying all of this stuff, and it’s not some strange people living in caves (although there’s nothing wrong with you if you do live in a cave…just saying).

Which brings me back to Belle Knox. I don’t know anything about her. She could be a great person. She could be better with children than I am (which isn’t that hard to be, by the way). Or she could hate kids. Who knows? And really, who cares? What’s being thrown out there is the idea that because she did pornography that somehow she’s going to be a disruptive influence on “normal” people. Really? How is that? Does someone who makes his or her money from pornography somehow become delinquent around other people now, constantly trying to force them into sexual situations. Or perhaps because someone once had sex for money, that person is now likely to be a bank robber who might gun down a school bus filled with penguins. I’ve never really understood the connection.

What I can ascertain is that people who are highly religious might not like the idea that someone who lives a life of pornography might not have a lot of room for an institution that likes to put people into categories of good and bad. To be honest, I live a more chaste life than a priest (one actually doing what he’s supposed to be doing), but I’ve never felt the need to point fingers at other people and demand they live a similar kind of existence. Back in my day, I was a lot different than I am today, but I would like to think that responsible people wouldn’t have condemned me back then for exploring life and its many nuances any more than I have any intentions of doing the same kinds of negativity to others today.

What really saddens me (and you’d have to read the woman’s article to understand where I’m coming from), but that woman has now been forced into a corner where she feels the needs to condemn people who consume pornography as being just as bad. I don’t even think she realizes that her article makes the same mistake that those make about her. Unless she’s ashamed of her career in pornography, then there should be absolutely no negativity waged towards the activity or those who participate (and consume) it. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get pulled into that sort of thing.

One of my books actually addresses this issue at length, but does it through humor. My book The Ameriad, has a section that redefines Plato’s three metals by explaining how the perfect life is that that involves pornography, the creators of pornography and those who consume it. By exploring as much of carnal desires as possible, one is capable of achieving “bowlness” which is a state of having a completely filled (and full) life. Yes, it was a running joke through the book, but there was a point to it, basically to show how our values are set by those who set values, not by any higher power that hasn’t actually taken the opportunity to explain it to the rest of us stupid people. Well, there are a few “sources” of that explanation in the multiple religions out there, so I won’t quibble over that. What I will quibble with is the idea that no two segments of the same religion can agree with each other what their official texts even mean, and that should cause someone to at least think about it. Or not.

Either way, I wish this woman well, and I hope that she finds some peace while at Duke (or after deciding to leave it, hopefully by her own choice and not through intimidation). The life she led may have been horrible, enjoyable, unfeeling, or whatever. But that life she led shouldn’t have to dictate how she is forced to spend the rest of her life, or even how she has to feel about waking up as herself in the morning. Who she is right now is how she should be treated right now, and unless she killed people, kicked a puppy or hated stuffed animals, pretty much most things can be forgiven, forgotten or ignored.

Our Constitutional rights are decided in the strangest places

Business, Economics, News, , , , , , , , , ,

When it comes to the rights of men and women in the United States, quite often the very limitations of those rights are fought in the strangest of places. When it comes to freedom of speech, some of those rights were decided by the Supreme Court when analyzing whether or not pornography should be authorized as a version of “speech and expressioin”. The right to protest was decided by a case involving someone who burned an American flag. Now, taxation is being argued in an equally unlikely place: A strip club called Nite Moves.

Nite Moves argues that its exotic dancers are conducting performance art, and therefore, are not subject to sales tax, because that is a right under its state tax laws if the act can be construed as “art”.

Now, if I didn’t know the “adult” entertainment business as well as I do (I’ve talked before about how I used to design web sites for that industry back when web pages were new), I’d say this is a great battle, and that it’s about time there was a movement to represent women who are often exploited (by both customers, and unfortunately, their employers), but in reality, I’m not convinced that the company involved is looking out for the interests of their dancers rather than their own bottom lines. Unfortunately, that business model has always been that way. This is one of those industries (and I’m not talking about Nite Moves, specifically, as I don’t know their personal business model) where quite often the female workers (who do all of the work that actually attracts customers) are treated as independent contractors for any reasons that benefit the management and as employees when it benefits the management. Let me explain an example: When it comes to taxation, the business holds the girls as independent contractors so they’re not paying taxes on their intake (and other such little schemes), but when it comes to paying them a required minimum wage, they’re independent contractors who are not obligated to pay, legalized employee rights, health care and sick pay. Yet, they’ll be required to come to work on specific days, work specific hours and do specific employee-like things. One of the biggest gimmicks these types of companies do is charge the girls a performance charge (or skim from their profits somehow), so they can’t work unless they pay rent on the stage or something like that.

Sadly enough, this is the kind of atmosphere where this Constitutional fight will take place. Now, if Nite Moves is nothing like I just said, that’s great. Unfortunately, these rights will be fought for the many disreputable companies out there that are that way, and that’s unfortunate, but that’s how many of our rights first make it into the legal process.

Personally, I think lap dancing is one of the greatest forms of both art because it involves not only dancing but acting. The dancing makes sense (regardless of whether or not it’s actually great dancing or just gyrating on a guy’s crotch until the time is up), but the acting is a little overlooked by the industry at large. I would imagine that a young woman has to be one of the greatest actresses around to act like she’s really enjoying giving a lap dance to some loser that equates his interactions with women by how many dollar bills he carried into the strip joint (honestly, I have no idea what the going rate these days is for this, so if it helps the post by replacing “dollar bills” with “twenty dollar bills” I’m fine with that, too.

Why Sasha Grey, the Porn Star, Isn’t Allowed to Read to Children in School

Business, News, , , , , , ,

 

In case you missed the ground-breaking story, the former porn star Sasha Grey, was discovered reading to little children at a public school, Emerson Elementary School. She claimed it was for Read Across America Compton, but according to Read Across America, they do not show any record of Sasha Grey ever having any affiliation with that group, or that she was reading for their program. Regardless of any of that trivial stuff, the uproar that came along was that a porn star, or ex-porn star, dared to read literature to little children who might be so impressionable that they’d start up porn careers, or whatever it is that paranoid parents assume is going to happen because of this. Believe me, they’re a lot safer around Sasha Grey than they are any Penn State football coach who might be volunteering to help out. I’m just saying.

But what’s even more interesting is this whole fascination with redemption that Sasha Grey is attempting to go through, and miserably failing. You see, if you’ve ever been a porn star, you’re doomed to be a porn star forever. In the United States, any sex-related career is about as low as you can possibly go, and any attempt to “better” yourself will always end up with some sanctimonious asshole holding that previous career against you because it’s so easy to do in our prudish environment.

Personally, I have zero problem that Sasha Grey used to be a porn star. So, I don’t care if she reads to children, administers mass during Christmas, or continues having sex with blindfolded midgets. However, I can’t speak for the rest of our society that seems to have problems with anything involving sex, even when serious incidents of hypocrisy are screaming in our face.

The real problem for me is that Sasha Grey is attempting to capitalize on her fame as a porn star and turn it into fame as a mainstream star without suffering any of the backlash for tying her fame to a questionable past. If she wants fame in our society, a society that frowns upon porn activity, then it’s really hard to cry foul when she has done nothing to separate her desire to be famous from her desire to be famous as a porn star. You see, Sasha Grey is most likely not her real name. It’s her “porn” name. If she wants to be seen as mainstream, she needs to completely separate her porn name from the name that she uses as a future star. But she’s not willing to do that because she’s gained a certain amount of notoriety for being a porn star.

The problem is the baggage she brought along with her. And that’s really no one’s fault but her own. While I don’t have a problem with her being a former porn star, I’m not the one she has to convince. She has to convince the rest of mainstream America, which is founded by a bunch of prudes who are two steps away from being a fundamentalist church state. If she wants to make her way as a famous actress, she’s going to have to live with the fact that a lot of people are going to hold her to her past, as long as she’s going to keep using that past to propel herself into a productive future.

And that means facing the fact that the majority of our nation is pretty shitty when it comes to holding people to standards they themselves can never reach, nor would they even try. That’s too bad, but no one actually has the right to be famous and rich. To do that, you have to actually go to the people who allow you to become rich and famous. And they’ve spoken. And what they said amounts to not wanting a porn star reading to little children.

Sure, it’s wrong in so many ways, but when has the path to fame ever been based on right and wrong?

The Problems with Facebook & Google No One Talks About: Censorship

Business, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Some years ago, when the Internet was very young, I was one of the early adopters of the new technology and started building web sites for companies, organizations and individuals who wanted them. In the beginning, it was interesting in that the people who needed web sites tended to be in three categories: adult businesses, churches and social celebrities. To be honest, the social celebrity market wasn’t really launched yet, so you really relied specifically on adult businesses and churches, a somewhat unique duo of activity.

My first web site I built was for a church. So was my second one. And then members of those two churches contacted me, asking me if I could build a site for them as well, as there were no web designers around yet. It turns out that the people who contacted me were professional dominatrices, looking for new ways of attracting clientele. Not really one to care where business came from, I built their sites, and almost out of nowhere, dozens of brand new clients showed up, all wanting my business. What I discovered then, and later, was that I was one of the few web designers around they came across who just wanted payment (not the rest of what their activity had to offer). What had happened to them in the beginning of the Internet was potential clients saw a way to get free sessions from them, and then basically held them hostage (they would have control over their web sites) until they got all of their “needs” met. With me, they paid me money, and they got everything they wanted without any hassle.

This was great for me, and them, and lasted for years until I went back to school and had less time. Then I slowly pushed my clients off onto other designers I came in contact with, and slowly ended doing that sort of business. It was good to do so, too, because that’s when everyone started to learn how to do web sites, and a specialty designer like me was easily outnumbered by paint by number designers who really dirtied the whole industry. I kept a few clients over the years who knew I was a designer first, and not just a spaghetti code generator (the kind of people who used pre-packaged software that was impossible to maintain and change without continuing to use the same pre-packaged software, and it was also impossible to personally configure if you wanted to do something different than the software did out of the box).

Anyway, the reason for mentioning this is that one of my clients was an adult bookstore, and at one point, we were using a shopping cart service (before I learned to design them in php from scratch). In the middle of the night one evening, they shut down her site, deciding that they didn’t like her “pervert crap” and no longer wanted to do business with her. To them, it didn’t matter that her business had been around longer than theirs had, and that we had put a LOT of work into designing the site. They shut her down in the middle of the night because their owner suddenly “found God” and no longer wanted “smut” on his sites. The thought that he didn’t “own” her site meant nothing to him; however, his control of the shopping cart software, which configured the site’s business end, practically ended her business overnight. So I had to learn php, build a brand new shopping cart (when people weren’t doing that sort of thing yet) and then relaunch her site over a weekend during a week of tests at school. It was a nightmare, but I got her going again.

What I most remember about that incident is that the shopping cart manager wouldn’t return a phone call, and when I finally got a hold of him, he was the rudest person I ever spoke to. He really felt that he was talking to scum, so he didn’t have to address that person as a human. It was an eye-opening experience.

Years ago, I was asked to fix a woman’s business site because Google had shut her down completely. She was a pro dominant, and she knew about me through mutual acquaintances who had known someone who had done a site through me years ago, so she contacted me in the middle of the night, crying, saying that Google had just shut down her online business and she couldn’t even get anyone to answer why. She had followed all of their rules to the T, and she was in compliance with everything she could imagine would need compliance. Yet, out of the blue, they shut her down. Which meant everything that was tied to Google for her was also shut down. I tried to contact Google, and kept getting the run-around from them. Finally, I told her she could rebuild her site from scratch with a new Google account, or she could be smarter and just build her site from scratch using a non-Google tied server. So I ended up building her a clean site that had no connection to Google whatsoever. She’s still going strong today, although she’s probably not an early adopter of Google Plus for the crap they put her through.

Last night, I received a frantic phone call from a woman who said that she was shut down on Facebook a few days ago. The person she spoke to wouldn’t even give her a reason, quoting some obscure rule about “compliance with rules” and wouldn’t elaborate. Her gazillion friends are all gone, and much of the networking she designed through Facebook is now gone. She asked me if she should jump to Google instead now that she realized that Facebook is adult-unfriendly. I couldn’t give her a happy answer that she was expecting because I knew what her future would probably be with Google.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. Two of the biggest kids on the block are fighting for supremacy in social networking sites, and they’re probably the two biggest unfriendly social networking sites around. If you’re doing anything with which they disagree, they don’t just turn their head and disagree, they shut you down completely, forcing their morals upon you because they have the power to do it. Like that shopping cart company from years before, they don’t care that there are thousands who feel as you do. Their personal desires are more important than yours, and if you don’t comply, you lose. And of course, you have nowhere else to turn, so screw you.

That’s what we have to look forward to with Facebook and Google. Now, I know the majority of people won’t ever do anything to worry about being forced out, but honestly, you don’t know that. What it means is that an organization that is trying to gain your business by promising to let you network with people like you is quite willing to shut you down if those people like you are not in agreement with what they personally think is cool, or okay. It’s like the old line of “when they came for the Polish, I did nothing because I wasn’t Polish, when they came for the French I did nothing, because I wasn’t French, and then when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.” Now that’s not an exact quote, but you get the idea. Years ago, when there was a huge backlash against the gay community, I was an avid spokesperson against the backlash because even though I’m not gay, I felt that if thugs were able to hurt people who were gay, there’s only a matter of time before someone starts coming after me for whatever weird things I might be into (yes, I know, being gay isn’t a choice or weird, but I’m stretching for an analogy here). For the longest time, I had colleagues thinking I was gay because I was an out spokesperson for gays, and they couldn’t understand why someone would advocate for something they weren’t personally. That’s why that misquoted quote is so poignant. People won’t speak out for others without a personal stake, and that’s why so many atrocities continue to happen in this world.

I’m just saying.

XXX: The Domain That No One Wants

Bizarre, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, , , , , , , ,

An interesting thing has happened to the Internet. It’s adding porn. Yes, in case you didn’t know it, porn has not existed on the Internet until someone decided there was a need for it. Up until now, anyone involved with porn has been required to keep in off line, but some kid with a dream (supposedly a wet one) came up with this pie in the sky idea of creating a web domain so that all of the poor porn purveyors could one day experience pornography on the Internet. So, the government decided to invent XXX as a domain suffix (affix?) that now leads people directly to whatever their heart’s desire, as sick as that might be.

Okay, all sarcasm aside, porn has been on the web as long as the web has existed. You might even say that it led the growth, so to speak, of the Internet. But for the longest time, pornography has been integrated with non-porn sites so that quite often you ended up on a porn site instead of the one you were trying to get to. At least that’s the excuse I’ve been using, but that’s probably another issue. Anyway, the government decided some time ago that if they could create an area of the web where porn could be “controlled”, then everything would be great. So the idea of a XXX suffix was designed. And of course, because porn makes a lot of money, they decided they would charge $100-200 for the usage of the XXX domain.

Here’s the problem with their plan. No one wants it. And I mean “NO ONE.” The pornographers don’t like being separated from the rest of the web because they realize that most legitimate Internet providers will be cajoled into just blocking any XXX area. I’m sure someone will say “it’s for the children”, but whatever the reason, someone is going to make sure that people are unable to access this area of the web. The people who don’t like porn don’t like it either because they think that all of the bad people will suddenly come to the web (like they weren’t on it before). And I’m sure they’re convinced that because “of the children” they’ll need to somehow shut down this cesspool of depravity.

And no one else will like it either because it will mean more crap on the web that they don’t want to deal with. You’ll probably have all sorts of privacy issues and scams and whatnot because of this. What will end up happening is that the porn people will continue creating and making porn on the regular sites, and XXX will be relegated to a few choice names that most people won’t pay attention to. The government will probably step in and surreptitiously design some kind of monitoring system so that they can see who accesses pornography on the web (which they’ll argue is for good reasons, but will eventually be used to shame, humiliate and then blackmail people), so that the only people who use XXX will be those who are clueless at the problems they’re causing by accessing porn the “right way” instead of the logical way.

In the end, the whole project will be abandoned, much like the old newsgroups were destroyed when they were spammed to death by, well, porn. What started out as a great idea always ended up being destroyed by someone trying to make a quick buck, doing whatever he can do to scam you before you figure out what’s happening to you. The only victims will be the ones who went into it innocently because they felt it was the proper way to do things. The bad people, the criminals, and those smart enough to realize the value of anonymity, will continue to do things the way they have always done it. In secret and not where government and censors can find them.

(Update: Turns out I was incorrect on the price of the domain registration. According to Daily Tech, it is $200-300, not $100-200 as I thought).