QUOTE (Uncle Lewis @ February 22, 2008 06:03 pm)

Okay time to weigh in - one more time - although I think my position is clear enough already.
Live sex chat is a new, and distinct, kind of sex work occupation that occupies a peculiar market niche in the world wide sex industry. The service it provides falls in between virtual acts of prostitution on the one hand and the production of "reality tv," style porn shows that are personalized for the individual consumer on the other. It joins Gonzo porn production when either customers or websites record a model's sexual performance and produces it as a permanent video clip that can be exchanged or downloaded on the net.
It is extremely significant that this industry has recruited tens of thousands of university students and graduates in the countries of Eastern Europe, Latin and North America and Russia and trained them to work as amateur porn actresses. The Internet and the long-distance provision of safe sex services have made it easier for new social categories of women to be recruited by the sex industry. I fear that the "banalisation of commercial sex work" and its emergence an acceptable job alternative for middle class professional women in Eastern Europe; Latin America and the United States will have lasting consequences both in their personal lives and for the futures of their societies.
I don't think that Live Chat should be outlawed, but I no longer support its formal regulation by the state as a "normalized occupation" either. It should remain in a "grey zone" where it's legally tolerated but not protected - because it's the least of all evils as far as sex work is concerned and the safest form of prostitution imaginable for the workers in this industry. But safe or not, it remains sex work with all sorts of long term, psychological harms for both performers and users.
And the profits those performers earn on their back are taken mainly by a network of men - the affiliates, web-site managers, studio owners - who are really NOT simple "theatrical agents." They have earned their title of "web-pimps," because the global sex industry has ties to local mafias and transnational crime syndicates as well as transnational corporations. This is a global industry that uses women to "mass produce porn" - often under sweatshop conditions for little pay in countries like Colombia, the Philippines or the Ukraine - for the pleasure and profit of men.
I believe live chat ought to be critically censured because it's a kind of "action propaganda" for the world wide sex industry that feeds and legitimates the market demand of western sex consumers for other activities which are truly evil as well as physically dangerous to performers - such as sex tourism "outward bound" to Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Latin America, or the inward bound migration and trafficking of sex workers into the cities of North America and Western Europe.
There's much more that could be said about the cultural message embedded in porn images. I think that it's really a kind of political propaganda as much as it is mass advertising for the global "Adult Entertainment Industry." Porn re-establishes the old distinction between two unequal classes of women - the respectable "Madonnas" and the stigmatized "Whores," and then proceeds to demolish it in practical terms - so that in the end all women appear as potential whores "by their very nature."
Madonnas are those women who are to be publicly honored and worshiped as "mothers and wives," while the "whores" are "nasty sluts" who can be sexually used and be simultaneously despised and disrespected for having served us. This distinction opens the door to unlimited sexual aggression and emotional cruelty toward any women who fall into the category of "exotic, erotic servant." Isn't this what Froglover was telling us when she said last year that:
"We still live in a past when whole world belonged to men, when their everyday violence was counted as one of love's joys, and a man who has many girfriends is a stud or macho, while a woman with the same attitude was a slut or whore.“
But that sexual tyranny can also "blow-back" on the real women in our members' lives.
The twist in live chat is that the industry has recruited thousands of ordinary looking, women students to play the fantasy roles of the "College Coed," the "Au-Pair Girl," the "Exchange Student" or the "Girl Next Door." In all these roles they play the "nice girl" who's secretly a nasty slut - impatiently waiting for our magic touch to awaken them to their true "animal" selves. By taking a cam girl "down a peg" in private, website members demonstrate - at least to their own satisfaction - that all these girls really desire in life is to be our "cam-whores" and that they only live to serve our pleasure... And of course if we take the opportunity to secretly record them, then we have the video evidence of their "cam-whoring" that can follow them once they leave this business behind and get on with their personal or professional lives. In pirate lingo this is called "ownership."
Therefore, it seems that the main assets for which they are valued in the sexual market-place are reducible to a pair of hands, two "fun-bags" and three "hungry holes." Certainly consuming them sexually is all that Western customers and web site employers are ready to pay them for. So the humor, intelligence and personal charm - in short their humanity - that they display on-line are at best the "icing on the cake" - a complimentary side-dish that goes along with that order of "cream-pie?"
The propaganda discourse of Porn (and live chat) is one that eroticizes "gender inequality" and makes sexual fantasies about the command and control of women acceptable and emotionally rewarding. Isn't that the hard reality with which must cam-models must learn to cope? Is that what our former member Skyprintzesa meant when she told us:
"I’m working in this business for 5 months...For me it s quite enough...but i must admit i have learned many things.....although it’s an experience I could’ve lived without....
And isn't that repeated dose of humiliation exactly what Delfina was talking about the other week.. when she said of Zoey :
"In the end guys like Zoey make huge favor to such 'weak and naive' models - yes, i know that no one will agree with me in that but still it is true -"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger' - Friedrich Nietzsche."
I must agree with Robert Jensen when he writes that images of sexual cruelty and gender inequality are what we - as the "solo stroking customer" - are finally masturbating over. The lonely orgasm of the porn consumer is a "power trip" with a strong psycho-sexual charge that can re-wire his sexual libido - see the topics on "porn creep" and cyber sex addition for more information on that. The porn culture is a "fun-house mirror" that distorts our sexual desires even as it serves as a stimulus for further market demand. This only serves the profit sheets of the men who control the women in this industry.
As I have said many times in the end this "action propaganda" communicated through hard-edged sexual images and words hurts all the women and men who come into contact with it - unless they are ready to critically dissect its message and reject it. But who here stands ready to look in that mirror and see the image that it reflects back on us in the West?
So Grthngs, I know this sounds harsh but that's why I am not "Okay with this."
Clear enough??
UL
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