March 9, 2014

"Yes, there’s a paradox here in that I willingly engage in work that reduces me to a few sexual facets of myself but expect to be seen as a multifaceted person outside of that work."

"I participate in an illusion of easy physical access, and sometimes the products associated with that illusion — the video clips and silicone replicas of my sexual organs (seriously, and they’re popular enough to provide the bulk of my income) — do, in fact, exist without attachment to a person with free will or autonomy. But this same lack of context is something any of us can experience...."

Have you experienced that same lack of context? Explain.

30 comments:

The Crack Emcee said...

It's like those NewAge "powers" we hear anybody can learn,...

LL said...

If you have the right crystal, you too can have "NewAge powers". They are on sale in Sedona, AZ where the vortexes give them energy.

Shouting Thomas said...

What she describes, which is the reality that we are all just a pieces of meat seeking a buyer in the sexual marketplace, is something we all experience.

That is only one of our realities, but it exists.

Can a woman be a whore, and still be (in the gloriously stupid geek speak of the NYT) "a multifaceted person" when she's not whoring?

Yes. Have I experienced this with women who are whores? Yes.

Does this have anything to do with "New Age," as Crack suggests? No. In every generation there are some clever women who prosper as whores and are not destroyed by the attendant risks. Sally Stanford of San Francisco is one of the most obvious examples. The attendant risks are a bitch, however, and they destroy a big percentage of those who are willing to take the risk.

The attempt to build a legit, above ground identity for whores and the whoring biz, which is a current liberal obsession, will fail... because it always does. History repeats itself.

Anonymous said...

Yes, there’s a paradox here in that I willingly engage in comments that reduce me to a few sexual facets of myself but expect to be seen as a multifaceted person outside of Althouse.

Shouting Thomas said...

The attempt to legitimize homosexuality will also fail, as it always has. Legitimizing and glamorizing homosexuality has always been an obsession of the decadent, autocratic Mandarin class, of which Althouse is a member in good standing. Homosexuality is a class marker of the Mandarins.

Male homosexuality embodies the piece of meat thing ferociously, because male on male sex doesn't have any brakes. There's nothing to stop the descent into seeking wilder highs and outrages.

Don't you get the feeling from reading Althouse's weird posts about male gaydom that she's seeing homosexuality from the standpoint of lesbianism? Not surprising, since she's a woman.

Michael K said...

I do think that some women have been able to establish a career as "whores" and still maintain their own lives with some dignity. One such was interviewed in one of the "Freakonomics" books. She had become a high priced call girl with a limited clientele. I've never met one but I am sure they exist.

The girl in the Duke story is in a different, very public, setting and dignity and personal space is probably not possible for her. What I have read about pornography movies and video suggests that success keeps pushing the performer into more extreme actions.

Shouting Thomas said...

Althouse, if you haven't noticed, has an obsession with building a set of rules for a life of hedonism, which she believes has something to do with "more freedom."

She's been pretty forthright about her own obsessive obedience to rules. It follows that she thinks other people will share her obedience to rules, if only the rules are sufficiently "fair."

This isn't the way humans work. Hedonism always seeks to be outside the rules and the laws.

Althouse is a miserable failure at understanding the primal, irrational parts of human nature. She thinks they can just be expunged.

rhhardin said...

I assume the facets would be on a diamond.

David said...

During my divorce.

jr565 said...

She wants to be a slut but not have any of the slut shaming.

Anonymous said...

I am libertarian and on social issues, in fact pretty darn liberal, live and let live, legalize it all, yada yada.

I must admit that if I had a daughter, I would not want her to be a porn star any more than I would be proud if my mother was one. Is that prudish? Is it chauvenistic?

Our modern culture has murdered the emotion of shame, ie: if you do something illegal, you can be an expert and a consultant, maybe even get rich off of it.

Our modern culture has also murdered the concept of modesty. I must admit that, to me, modesty is very becoming in a woman.

Maybe it's time for this old baby boomer to just die off.

SteveR said...

I'm glad she's a "writer"

I don't view my life in terms of whether I've had a "lack of context" Is there a test I can take? If I have, I could post about it.

The Godfather said...

She says she gets paid for sales of silicone replicas of her sex organs. I guess that's like a copyright thing? If all cats look alike in the dark, why do the distributers find it profitable to pay to use her particular organs for their replicas?

Seriously.

William said...

The golden age of sexual repression was during the Victorian and Edwardian ages. The biographies of such men as Shaw, Yeats, Gladstone, Ruskin and countless others reveals how destructive of happiness such repression can be. But perhaps the energy that nowadays we put into Eros was more profitably directed towards other activities. Their sex lives weren't so hot, but you can't count their lives as failures. Two, four, six, eight, we really ought to sublimate.......Every life is an experiment. Porn stars are testing the theory that if you act out every conscious and unconscious sexual wish, fantasy and desire you will become a happier, better person. The evidence doesn't seem to support that finding. But neither does the evidence indicate that your life becomes irrevocably miserable after appearing in porn or indulging in too much sex....I do think that you can fairly say that people with cramped sex lives have done far more to advance the cause of humanity than those who have devoted their lives to getting laid.

jr565 said...

Larry Nelson wrote:
I am libertarian and on social issues, in fact pretty darn liberal, live and let live, legalize it all, yada yada.

I must admit that if I had a daughter, I would not want her to be a porn star any more than I would be proud if my mother was one. Is that prudish? Is it chauvenistic?

Our modern culture has murdered the emotion of shame, ie: if you do something illegal, you can be an expert and a consultant, maybe even get rich off of it.

Our modern culture has also murdered the concept of modesty. I must admit that, to me, modesty is very becoming in a woman.

Do you think that your libertarianism, with your legalize everything mindset might have contributed a bit to the murder of modesty? What are people supposed to feel modesty about?

Michael K said...

"I must admit that if I had a daughter, I would not want her to be a porn star any more than I would be proud if my mother was one. Is that prudish? Is it chauvenistic?"

How about a mother-daughter porn combo ?

Ick ! It becomes so mechanical that it turns off all the fetishists.

How many saw Boogie Nights ?

Pretty sad movie. There is also a woman who writes a lot on pornography, whose name I can't remember. The Duke college girl is in for some ugly times.

Michael K said...

"all BUT the fetishists."

Anonymous said...

Have you experienced that same lack of context?

different context for the lack of context.

Back from Vietnam, I was back in college (UC) and friends had a difficult time seeing me as a person, rather than a wacked out baby killer portrayed in the popular media and leftist propaganda (yes, i repeat myself).

Wince said...

It looks like Johnny Carson is going to get the treatment, retroactively.

Johnny Carson Sex Tape Hits the Market: Check Out THIS Mono-Log

According to sources who've seen it, the tape appears to be one of his wives -- it's unclear which one. The tape opens with a naked dark-haired Carson masturbating by a pool -- then shows the woman (with a bouffant hairdo) going all Linda Lovelace.

It goes on for about 5 minutes -- then we're told it cuts to a 20-minute sex scene in Johnny's bedroom ... and Johnny does NOT hold back.

Oh yeah, we're also told he's hung like a horse -- seriously, porn star status. One source said it was at least 10 inches. But for legal reasons it can't go to a porn company, so the only way to unload it is with a private collector.

George M. Spencer said...

Philip K. Dick, your table is ready.

Anonymous said...

William: The golden age of sexual repression was during the Victorian and Edwardian ages. The biographies of such men as Shaw, Yeats, Gladstone, Ruskin and countless others reveals how destructive of happiness such repression can be.

Meanwhile, a lot of other Victorians and Edwardians were having some pretty smokin' sex lives.

A lot of what we "know" about the prudery of Victorians of Edwardians is so much modern self-congratulation and projection.

Anonymous said...



jr565 said...
Larry Nelson wrote:
live and let live, legalize it all, yada yada.


Do you think that your libertarianism, with your legalize everything mindset might have contributed a bit to the murder of modesty? What are people supposed to feel modesty about?


That's a great point. The topic seems to be paradox's, and I definitly feel conflicted on the topic.

I don't care for religion in politics, but religion certainly contributes to the moral and ethical fabric of societies.

I don't care about abortion issues, but the easy access certainly has cheapened human life.

I don't care about gay marriage, but what is the logical path after that?

I think drugs, prostitution and gambling should be legalized, regulated and taxed. I do not condone the practice of any of it.

I guess I am more anti-authoritarian where the government treats us as adults to make our own decisions and reap those consequences. How else do we learn?

Someone once said "God is a libertarian".

Unknown said...

"If I had a daughter..." seems a popular thought experiment.

I've got several, so I'll play. Would I rather have Stoya or Lois Lerner as my daughter?

Who would disagree that Lerner could take a giant moral leap upward by working in porn?

If you value liberty, choosing which whore to back is automatic. I wouldn't piss on an IRS aparatchik if she was on fire.

Dr Hubert Jackson said...

I feel like it's more socially acceptable to be the Stoya of this story than the man who is paying money for a reproduction of her sex organs.

jr565 said...

I'm just wondering. How much does the manufacture of rubber vaginas contribute to our carbon footprint. Does she not care for the environment?

FedkaTheConvict said...

Consider the recent hysteria over the Duke University student who moonlights as an adult film starlet. Although it didn’t take long after the news broke for her fellow students and strangers to gleefully post her legal name online, “the Duke porn star,” as she has been called by media outlets from Forbes to The Guardian, has tried to control what she is called where. She used the pseudonym Lauren when giving interviews, and the pseudonym Aurora for her stage name in those same interviews. Finally, this week, she acknowledged her actual stage name — Belle Knox.

If doing porn is so liberating and empowering, why doesn't "Belle Knox" use her real name instead of hiding behind multiple pseudonyms and stage names? Its already well-known that her real legal name is Miriam Weekes, the daughter of a doctor in Spokane, WA.

And you can find the legal names of almost any porn star who has been tested in California by looking up Porn Wikileaks.

FedkaTheConvict said...

Miriam Weeks' Encyclopedia Dramatica entry: https://encyclopediadramatica.es/Miriam_Weeks

Biff said...

The author addresses some interesting points by examining her experience through the lens of a person who is a porn star, i.e. by viewing the balance of the professional and the personal through an extreme prism.

It's not so different from people (doctors, executives, actors) who maintain professional identities that have the constraints of single-purpose brands, often wrapped in bands of legal/regulatory liability, but who can find it tiresome or clumsy to be seen only as that primary identity.

Sometimes you just want to talk about the weather, rather than some stranger's rash. Or, you want to talk about politics at a cocktail party or in a blog comment, but you don't want that to impair your professional prospects.

Other times, a person might want to participate in a support forum for depression or abuse, but they would be mortified (or put at risk of genuine harm) if the "stage name" they use in a forum somehow gets linked to their "real" name.

Or maybe a person is a popular blogger who contends with readers who think they are part of something more than an author-reader relationship (albeit a particularly rich one).

Most individuals maintain a collection of personae, and, for many people, integrating those personae into a cohesive, comfortable identity is hard enough to do among one's most intimate acquaintances, never mind among casual acquaintances or strangers.

Anyway, I thought it was a very good commentary, and it wasn't about porn.

(As an aside, back when things like twitter and Facebook were new, I led workshops for physicians and other healthcare professionals on how to use social media for personal and professional purposes, without crossing legal/ethical boundaries or compromising personal or family privacy.)

Blue@9 said...

Fine, I wouldn't want my (hypothetical) daughter doing porn, but I watch porn and I'd be awfully disappointed if every woman quit doing it.

Why disparage this lady? She made a choice and she provides a service that probably 90% of American males enjoy (not to mention huge numbers of women).

It's like progressives who go on and on about the evils of big oil and how humans are destroying the planet and then get into their Range Rover on the way to airport so they can fly off to vacation in Madagascar.

Seriously, if you've ever watched porn for prurient interests, then stfu about porn stars being sluts or whores.

sojerofgod said...

I think the short answer is, "its complicated" Everyone is multifaceted. We all live multiple lives playing roles that are we take on or were more or less assigned to us by accident of birth.
One of those facets of life that never ceases to amaze me though is how a woman can be so dismissed as a non-person if she is labeled "A whore" Some people appear to think that a prostitute's life is of absolutely no value, and that they can be mistreated or even killed with no consequence. I watched the film "The girl with the dragon tattoo" some months ago, subtitles and all (which is rare for me unless it is kurisawa) In a scene one of the male characters dismisses the story of the Girl saying, "She's just a whore" Though he pronounced it more like hooore. The gist was that she was a disposable item, not even deserving of human decency. It doesn't say anything good about the person who holds themselves in such higher esteem than the object of their scorn, does it?

The older I get the less I like human beings. Regret having been one myself.