Posts by giovanni tiso
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Tangentially, it is very clear in quite a lot of mainstream porn that the women are faking their orgasms. That also weirds me out. Why on earth is that still hot to anyone if the woman is so obviously 'lying' to the audience? It's just like a normal film to me: if I don't believe the actor playing the part, the movie is ruined.
It's a genre, with conventions, a form of coded lying if you like. Think of the exaggerated acting in the silent movie era. Hard as it is to figure, that must have been seen to convey actual human emotion. I know, in hardcore porn the whole point is that the sex is real, and you must have, er, something to show for it, but of course everything that surrounds the moment of proof (and it's such a narrow definition of sex, isn't it) is acting and accepted as such. Somebody who has bought into the conventions of the genre will find the faked orgasms believable, and a hypothetical real orgasm not conveyed in that way conversely would seem not believable, just as restrained, naturalistic acting would have been in a silent film.
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I’ve never been a cellphone sort of guy. I freely admitted from the outset that I would eventually own one, but I’ve never felt liberated or otherwise blessed with the idea of being able to ping my friends and foes on the move. But there was something truly quite exhilarating in receiving my first email, in the (northern) summer of 1997. I had just finished the military service back home and was waiting for the visa from London to come over here. Suddenly the Internet seemed just the thing, and I had to learn it fast, fast enough to teach my mum how to use it. If you’ve never tried to teach a visually impaired, computer illiterate retiree with no English everything she needed to know to use email, from turning the machine off to switching it off and all the little steps in between, I promise you it will test your pedagogical skills some. It resulted in a couple of typed pages of instructions, a real idiot’s guide (sorry mum) that fell over every time she unwittingly dragged a window one inch to left of its usual place. Fortunately I had a couple of friends who’d pay her a visit when that happened and put everything back in kilter.
The first six months in New Zealand were hard. It doesn’t matter how friendly the local populace was, and how relatively easy it was to find work and a place to stay; they don’t call it uprooting for nothing. But at the same time my immigrant experience - which was rather cushy to begin with, compared to most - seemed almost unfairly easy thanks to the Internet. I could read the paper, email my family, chat with my friends (one of whom had designed a fantastic little IM programme), follow politics and sports. And it was alienating, too, after a couple of hours of such activities you became quite unsure of your geography. I toyed with those programmes that let you know where you are in the world, tracing the route of the information packets, but of course they don’t mean a thing. On the Net - even on dial-up - you really are everywhere at once, or perhaps in a single place of scrambled coordinates. It’s one of those things that really shouldn’t work, but it does.
And it becomes a second skin, so quickly. Everything is still there, those first emails I received thanks to a friend’s account at uni, to the tune of the high-pitched screams of a brick-like modem in the little flat that we occupied above my father’s workshop. (One of them read just, Have you been to the toilet yet? Because my friend-come-tutor had warned me that I’d start checking my email in the morning before all else). All the emails I exchanged with my family are also there, those sanitised and optimistic accounts of my first weeks on the other side of the goddamn planet. My mum got a bit carried away, I suppose: when my father died, she informed me via email. Fortunately, in the circumstances, it happened overnight and I got the phone call before I could read the message. Which is still there, although it’s nine years later and I still can’t bring myself to open it.
Now she doesn’t email anymore, it just became too hard. So last year I got her a new machine and now all she has to do is sit down and turn it on; within a few seconds the grandchildren appear thanks to the magic of Skype. And it still seems almost unfair, that it should be so easy, that it should make us feel so close. Almost, but not quite.
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If you drink coffee, there's a good chance you're a party to opression. If you use oil - by eating, driving a car, taking a plane, using the bus - you definitely are.
Tsk, we source our gasoline directly from a co-operative in Venezuela.
(But seriously, would fair trade oil be a tremendous idea or what? I'm putting it in parentheses cause I don't want to end up like Enrico Mattei.)
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That was a beautiful, beautiful post. I have nothing else to say.
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And the commodification of pretty much anything will tend to map onto already established isobars of power, as inflected by gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc etc etc. Or is it a chicken and egg thing, and those fault lines create the commodification in the first place? In any case, claims of empowerment inside that structure might well be approached sceptically.
That's what I was trying to express yesterday, although you put it a great deal better. But it's not as if I don't see how a sex worker who happened to enjoy her work and was pretty comfortable with herself might feel verily annoyed to be told that she's trapped in a power structure built by some guy back in the day when we were hunter gatherers.
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Like the Huffington Post, except, y'know, properly paid.
Thanks Jolisa, very interesting article. I always assumed the likes of Shearer and Maher were treating HuffPo like a nice, easy avenue of vanity publishing, jotting down opinion pieces without the stress of a deadline and with the certainty of being published and read. And it bears noting that they both make in the area of 20 million plus a year, I would imagine (pretty sure in the case of the former), so if you offered to pay for their posts they might laugh at you unless you came up with a pretty indecent figure.
I'm more concerned with the posters on the site who don't otherwise make a princely living, especially since they're the ones providing the real substance. If they in fact don't get paid (the article is not terribly clear on that, it would appear so even though the only contributors mentioned are the celebs), then it's a concern but surely if they do in fact get compensated in terms of visibility, and with the visibility come offers of paid work, HuffPo will have to start paying them to retain them. I'm pretty sure the frontpage bloggers on DKos and MyDD get paid.
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One in three women uses porn, one out of every four dollars spent on porn in the US is spent by a woman.
Whoa nelly. Do you have a link or reference for that? Not because I'm doubting you or anything, I would love to know more about the money side of this.
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Also, I think to say, as some people do, that how a man feels watching a woman pole dance is more important than how a woman feels when she's pole dancing is, well, sorry, sexist
Yes, that's a major point. And yeah, that comparison to belly dancing is quite provocative, although one could point to substantial differences in the histories of the two dances. One was a social and religious dance, and much later became highly sexualised (especially in the eyes of westerners); the other started off as a highly sexualised dance for pay (the circus variety is very different, no?), and now it's perhaps becoming a social dance. And I'm all for it, people of all genders races and creeds doing their own thing is fine by me. Especially in the absence of cohercion or money changing hands.
But so long as money does change hands, and let's face it it's mostly men giving it to women or other men, then I think the male perspective matters, and by reflection a kind of feminism that celebrates women who feel empowered pleasuring men for pay - again, fine by me, in and of itself - does give me a little pause. Because at the end of the day, once you've taken the stygma out of pornography and the exploitation out of prostitution, you realise hey, it's never been a better time to be a guy, has it? And that's okay too, some of my best friends are guys. But I suspect that the femimnists of yesteryear weren't planning to let us off quite so spectacularly easy.
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Still, its not clear if they actually turn a profit.
In a country with five times our population. So let's say we can rack up 2,000 subscribers, but we'd still have more or less the same overheads, in the sense that it'd still take the same number of people to produce the thing.
Still, 2,000 subscribers at $100 per head is 200k. If the ads produced enough revenue to pay for the technical cpsts, servers, etc. we'd (you'd, someone'd) be in business. You could pay 3 full-time staff writers with that kind of moola.
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I omitted to say this in the last discussion the PA contributors had about this, but I regard Crikey as the most viable model to emulate. It works.
Do you have insider knowledge of how much money the contributors actually make? Are we talking need for a second job, breadline, fair pay?...