Porn with a teacup
Every so often, when we’re not working and there’s nothing good on telly, F and I look up names of people we know on the Internet. Not with any aim in mind other then the usual conversational I wonder what happened to….? Its a great game - just type their names into Google and you too can keep track of people that you’ve lost touch with, without talking to people you’d rather not speak to. No subscription necessary - you don’t have to register with Friends Reunited (which lets face it for 75% of the users is just a case of “my kids got a computer and I’m gonna use it” and for the other 25% is some weird exercise in masochism ) or paying $39.50 for some weird programme that’ll give you their credit rating and inside leg measurements. Just names, addresses, phone numbers, career updates spiralling hopelessly round cyberspace.
Now part of it’s definitely the LA connection which means that F tends to score more highly than I do, as you only tend to move to LA if you want to be famous and therefore its a simple equation - some of the people who moved there will have become famous and will therefore have a web page, and the rest want to be famous so will have a web page or at least a couple of (dis)honourable mentions in a fanzine somewhere to further their ambition. But every so often you’ll get thrown a curved ball, something more interesting than “hi my band is called …and my albums called…and we’re playing the whisky on Saturday and we’re touring Buttfuck Idaho in November and our musical influences are… and NME wrote… this…”
Sick of the monotony of the glitterati, a few nights ago we started looking up the boring people we knew - you know exflatmates, old employers etc - and discovered that one of F’s LA flatmates is now a famous Hollywood porn star.
Now I know that F has had a somewhat chequered past…chequered? I hear you say…ok… his past makes tartan look plain. I’ve heard the stories: the finger found in the rehearsal studio, the lifelong ban from the biggest studio in LA because of the fender through the glass wall (unfortunately it missed the manager), being stuck in a LA apartment with a loose tarantula (called Blossom) in the big earthquake, the tale of alphabet city, the infamous Strasbourg recording, the balcony at Marriott hotel (no Jim Morrison wasn’t the only one to walk that particular railing) and if I didn’t hear the stories then the chances were that it was because I was there. Through F I have met all sorts of weird and wonderful people, (remind me to tell you the tale of the Buddhist drummer who joined the army in order to learn how to play the snare properly or the chef who was travelling by motorbike to Tibet, took a wrong turning and ended up living with us in London for eighteen months) but even he was a little taken a back at this news.
Chloe is the ex-ballerina F shared a flat with at some point in his stay in lala land. As the saying goes, its the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
Of course she wasn’t called Chloe then but she was the same strong, feisty, thoughtful and intelligent woman that Martin Amis has managed to be so patronising about. Read between the lines of his article and the subtext simply screams “I’m so broadminded, right on and trendy that I can write about this without revealing my middle-class morality. I can paint the porn scene in its popart colours without appearing to be judgmental and still come across as a guy watching all this with a sad smile and a bleeding heart.” In fact you don’t even have to read between the lines, the last paragraph spells out his superiority complex loud and clear.
“No, Chloe, you are not a prostitute, not quite. Prostitution is the oldest profession. And porno is the newest profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator. Of course, the gladiators were slaves - but some of them won their freedom. And you, I think, will win yours.”
Thank you Mr Amis - what do you do for an encore, suggest that the meek will inherit the earth?
As you may have gathered, I didn’t like this article. I found it patronising and supercilious. He comes across like a bad shrink who gives you the uhmm and the aarhs with the smile that never quite reaches the walled off eyes. Winning her freedom? From whom? From the nasty people who make porno films? From herself? Will she suddenly discover self respect, stop welcumming people to Chloesville and do good works instead? How dare he so blatantly put himself up as her intellectual and moral superior? Even the one sensible comment he made about the porn industry was negated by his need to put an intellectual literary twist at the end. “And porno people are a hard-grafting, ill-paid fraternity who, by and large, look out for each other and help each other through. They pay their rent, with the deaths of feelings.” Now are you looking at this through your Nietzschen goggles - that as jokes are the epitaphs on the death of feelings and therefore always a new low - that in order to pay their rent porn stars are forced to plumb new depths of degradation. Or are you suggesting that in order to be a porn star ones finer feelings are subjugated to a point whereby the person is no longer capable of human emotion. Because if you’re trying to make either of those points - you’re incorrect.
Pornography, in fact the whole sex industry, is something that I have very mixed feelings about. What made me so angry about Martin Amis’ article was not just the tone it was written in but the fact that, like the Iraq War, it forced me into a situation whereby if you aren’t with us - you’re against us. If I’m not for Bush then I must be for Saddam. By disliking and disagreeing with what Amis wrote I’m being forced into a situation whereby I have to defend the Max Hardcores of this world and I don’t intend to do that. I’m not attempting to defend exploitation and violence whether its in an office, a sweatshop, a relationship…or a porn film. Exploitation of the vulnerable happens in every industry at every level so why are we so self righteous about porn? Are our sensibilities offended by the exploitation or by the fact that porn forces us to confront our own views and taboo’s about sexuality. I have a feeling that its the latter. We can almost hear Martin Amis breathe a huge sigh of relief when he tell us that he didn’t find being around the film set arousing but the fact remains that he will have sexual responses and they won’t necessarily always be triggered only by a smile from the person he loves and wants to spend the rest of his life with.
Human sexuality is a glorious hotchpotch of strange triggers. Different things push the buttons of different people. Some of these things are scary, some of them are fun, some of them work in theory and not in practice, some of them are downright weird. Some of these things are on the borderline of what should and should not be filmed, photographed, hung up on a web page or written about. Some things cross that line. Some people cross that line. Anything involving anyone who isn’t doing it through their own free will crosses that line. So long as we take account of that last sentence then where we draw the line is up to ourselves, consenting partners and how much we care what the neighbours think.
I’ve known a number of people in the porn industry - usually glamour models and escorts more than actresses and a nicer bunch of people you’re never going to meet (and doesn’t that make me sound patronising - its like saying some of my best friends are black) For most of them, its a job. They go to work in the same way that you and I do. The only difference is that they take off their clothes. Some of them have sex in front of a camera, some of them have sex with people and there is no camera. Where’s the big deal in that. It puts food on their table. Their feelings are no more numbed than yours are at the end of a day. They have in-jokes about the job they do. Some days they enjoy work, other days they don’t. They haven’t been forced into it. True, their friends are often in the same business, or else they’re people who have known them forever or people who don’t judge them - aren’t yours?
When F and I first moved up here we moved into an area which had recently become a tolerance zone. A bit of a misnomer really as immediately all the NIMBY’s got up petitions (which I didn’t sign) and held protests. We used to see the girls lining the road on the way to the gas station when we did our mid night Marlboro and Nescafe dash. They looked freezing. They were putting themselves at risk from their clients and they were (I imagine) extremely badly paid. This wasn’t why those people (mostly women by the way) were racing around gathering signatures. They didn’t care about the women. They didn’t care about their exploitation. They cared that it was happening on their street. I would have understood and agreed with someone who’d knocked on my door saying “the council has just turned this street into a tolerance zone, I’m trying to get signatures so that the council goes one step further and allows these women to ply their trade in safety. We’d like the council to set up a legal brothel that’s properly run, so that the women don’t have to stand for hours in subzero temperatures, where women get a fair price for what they provide, where women pay their taxes and NI contributions so that they can function as legitimate members of society, where no-one looks dodgy or drunk can get through the door, where they don’t have to be afraid of a pimp, where the women who provide this service are doing so because they want to” But to the NIMBY’s, people who would have shot themselves rather than be thought of as racist, homophobic, anti Semitic or any of the other ists, ics, isms that make up modern society, the fact that these women were prostitutes immediately placed them on a lower rung of the social ladder. These women could die in a gutter for all they cared - so long as it wasn’t their gutter.
The glamour models and escort girls I knew in London went into it as a career. Perhaps a short term career but if you have the mentality to take the money and run, then why not? I don’t happen to have that mentality but I don’t have the mentality to do a lot of jobs. They weren’t being exploited. As far as they were concerned it was exactly the same as being a temp, except you could arrange the hours to suit yourself, the pay was better and since many of them were single there was no difference between getting paid to have sex with someone or seeing someone in a nightclub they fancied and having a one night stand. Bimbo’s tended to be the exception rather than the rule. Some were paying their way through college, some didn’t want to work a nine to five (as one friend put it - why should I slog my guts out in a shop all week when I get paid the same for two hours work), some just plain enjoyed it. Some were in long term relationships, some weren’t, some had children, some didn’t. Very few were doing it because of low self esteem, childhood abuse or a drug habit. Their clients weren’t (usually) weirdo’s or perverts they were people who bought sex in the same way that you buy a tin of baked beans. Because they felt like it. None thought they were in a remake of Pretty Woman.
It’s too easy to lump it all into the “its dirty, its nasty and it exploits women category” because what if the person doing it doesn’t think its nasty, dirty or exploitional? Are they wrong simply because they don’t agree with you? Do you have a better view from the high moral ground? And if it really is dirty, nasty and exploiting women then we’d better stop watching programmes like Sex And The City, we’d better stop watching anything that has nudity or sex in it. Someone, somewhere, will be turned on by the most arty of art-house films if there’s a bit of bare flesh in it. So what’s the difference between Sex and The City and a porn movie? Is Kim whatshername being exploited when she’s simulating sex. Or does the fact that she’s simulating it mean that because its not real it doesn’t count? Because penetration doesn’t take place. But we’re made to think it does. The point of the story is that we’re supposed to think that she really is having sex. So actually there’s no difference. Is it because bouncing on top of someone is essential to the story line (yeah right - like we didn’t know why Scarlett O Hara had a smile on her face the morning after Rhett broke down her bedroom door and there wasn’t a bounce in sight). Is it the fact that porn movies don’t tie-up sex scenes in the pretty pink ribbons of love, romance and high art but simply intends to provoke a reaction. Isn’t one of the definitions of Art to provoke a reaction in the viewer? Can we only deal with sex when its wrapped up in all the baggage of “proper” emotions. If that’s the case then there are a whole lot of people who should really throw away their contraceptives, bonkbuster novels and tv sets and convert to Catholicism. Sex in the missionary position for the sole purpose of procreation should be the law. We should flagellate ourselves when we think of **********insert name of tingle inducing actor/actress, musician, fireman, co-worker here. (actually on second thoughts we better not do the flagellating - we may find it arousing.) We should throw away most of our records, hide all those great paintings and stop reading anything that’s not on the Index. If we’re so terrified of the rampant desires unleashed at the sight of a naked female body then lets go back to wearing ten petticoats and ankle length skirts.
Maybe what gets us up in arms about the whole sex industry is that it is exactly that - an industry. Maybe we’re getting upset about the money rather than the money shot? People are getting cash for pandering (and there’s a good old fashioned word) to peoples desires. But does the exchange of money for sexual services make it wrong? Because once you’re in a relationship of course there is no cost. Is there? Would I be upset if F visited a prostitute. Of course I would. But why should I be upset at the prostitute, she didn’t break the trust. I’d be pissed off at him and yes I’d feel insecure about the failings (real or perceived) in me that would cause him to look elsewhere, but the truth is that I’d be more upset if he started to have real feelings for someone else. What am I gonna do - get rid of all the other women in the world on the off chance that he might have sex with them. I know women get predatory when threatened. Hell I should know, I’ve had my own battles with the green eyed monster at every gig I’ve ever seen F play at. I know what a good gig can do for the libido of the performer and the audience. Music’s all about the hip. Do you think the plaster casters were moved by a love of music or the adrenaline rush of a thumping beat and the sight of a guitar gently bumping a lithe pelvis? Ask anyone who’s partner works away from home and I’ll bet that most will at some point worry about what the other might get up to. That’s human. (I learnt to deal with it very quickly, firstly by realising that you couldn’t police someone’s movements 24 hours a day and deciding to trust F and secondly by ensuring that any woman I saw get within a certain radius of him felt the weight of my stiletto heel twisting in that narrow gap between the bones in her foot. These reactions are also human - and the second is extremely effective both in terms of warning the other woman off and making you feel empowered.) But what if you’re not in a relationship? Is there any difference between hiring someone for sex or picking them up in a nightclub. I personally think that the latter shows a greater lack of respect especially if that scenario is tied up in the usual bullshit of ” I don’t usually do this…if course I’ll respect you in the morning…I’m just not looking for commitment right now…I need my own space…so you’ll call me…right?”
I made a bad joke the other day when I pointed out that Here Be Monsters got a book deal without taking his knickers off. Obviously it was a (very) cheap shot at Belle De Jour and to be honest I’m ashamed I wrote it now as the vitriol that’s surrounded her success has left me reeling. Because she’s an escort, wonderful things aren’t ever allowed to happen to her? Because she isn’t a victim and seems to be quite happy with the career choice she’s made is she somehow threatening the status quo? Or is she threatening our own relationships? Are we secretly scared that maybe some of her clients are our own lovers? That they need to go elsewhere? That we aren’t enough for them? That the world is full of women who are just waiting to take our men away from us? . Haven’t we moved away from those double standards? As a “fallen” woman is she supposed to walk quickly past with her head bowed? Do we still subscribe to the virgin/whore stereotype? Nice girls don’t and bad girls don’t write about it?
I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the fact that she’s writing about it and getting rewarded for what’s she’s writing which is upsetting people. All that kerfuffle when she won the Guardian blog prize. Forget flying pigs - there’s a herd of green-eyed monsters just escaped into blog land and now she’s got a book deal the monsters just grew teeth. Working girl makes good. The Pretty Women myth just came true. Don’t we all resent that? Don’t say you don’t unless you have no hits counter, no links to other blogs, no membership of blog lists and no desire to make your humdrum life more interesting by writing about it and hoping that other people might think that you’re interesting/funny/ depressed/literary etc… Don’t we wish that some publisher would just pluck our blogs from obscurity and make us proper published (and paid authors). I do. It would save me time, disappointment and stamps. Would it be all right if she was writing about how much she hated her life and how her pimp kept beating her up? From our moral high ground we’d probably be incredibly sympathetic and supportive. If she was writing about the number of guys she was dating would that be OK? Probably we’d think she was a bit of a floosie but we’d consider it her right to do what she wants. But the fact that she’s making a living from selling sexual services means that she’s a second class citizen and gives people the right to be downright rude? Does it? Just a quick point - if we’re so down on what she apparently does for a living then shouldn’t we be thrilled that she’s now got a way out of it.
Lets leave aside any literary criticism we may feel inclined to make - whether or not we like or dislike the writing style is really neither here nor there. We’re all perfectly entitled to disagree with who the Guardian feels is the best blogger and if we’re so strung out about the fact she’s got a book deal then it’s quite within our rights not to buy the book. For the record I don’t think she’s writing great literature, but I don’t recall her ever saying that was her intent. Entertaining? Yes. Titillating? Oh come, on she’s less steamy than a Mills and Boon and I don’t think anyone on the net is reading her to get turned on.
Or is it the sneaking suspicion that it might be a scam. From what I can gather she’s been outed as every author except St Paul (and you should read him on the subject of carnal desires if you want steamy stuff). But consider this. If it is a scam, and she is a “proper” author, where in the great unwritten rulebook of blogging does it say that you have to tell the truth? If that was the case then 90% of us would have blogs that read something like; got up, dishes were not washed, partners/kids/parents/pet getting on my nerves wish I could beat them to a pulp, late for my crappy job again, meeting “friends” after work, they piss me off too, this wasn’t what I wanted to do/be with my life why has everything turned out so shit. If Belle de Jour is a cynical manipulation of the “next big net thing” I take my hat off to him/her/it and wish I’d thought of it. Smoke, mirrors and keep your eye on the card. That’s beautiful, that’s showfolk and as we’re all writing for an audience then we’re all showfolk.
At the end of the day it boils down to self respect and self respect is exactly that. The respect of the self. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror. What it takes for each of us to do that differs. When F knew Chloe she had self respect, she still does. She has dreams and goals and ideals which may not necessarily be the ones that we have but why should we throw stones when she isn;t throwing stones at us. She’s doing what it takes to make them happen. If we consider people who work in the sex trade as second class citizens then how come they aren’t the ones whichare righting hurtful and defamatory statements. In fact their exhibiting better manners and more tolerance than the majority of us. So I’m going to requote Martin Amis based upon what I know - of Chloe, and other girls like her who are doing what they’re doing because they choose to and because they can look at themselves straight in the mirror in the morning. How many of us can really say we can do the same.
“No Chloe you are not a prostitute - not at all. Prostitution is the oldest profession. It began the first time we compromised our own truth for what society found acceptable. It began when we were unable to hold our heads up because of the judgement of the slaves over the masters. It began when we learnt to hang our head in shame. So you aren’t a prostitute - you tell it like it is and do it without lying and without shame. Porno is not the newest profession - porno has been around in one form or another since men and women looked on each other and liked what they saw. Since sex was discovered to be more than just procreation. You are more like a gladiator, you recognise that life is a fight, that you do what you have to do to survive and prosper, materially and spiritually and emotionally. That selling sex is not the same as selling your soul. Of course the gladiators were slaves - but in the arena all were free, for where there is a fight for life there can be no slavery. And you - I think will not win your freedom, for unlike many of us you never lost it.”