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The broader issues now coming under feminism is the intersectional stuff. It's basically a counter to the push made by rich white women to be as rich as white men and then call it Feminism Accomplished. Intersectionality is a strand of feminism that says, "Either we're all getting equality or none of us are", which is why you see it conflating with issues of race, disability, trans rights and so. It's well meaning but can often be very militant and unwelcoming. I've seen a lot of perfectly nice people get burned by those folks, but I've also seen those folks have to put up with waves of crap from all sorts of places, so I figure it's about even. Good news though, they're probably not going to actually hurt you or do anything worse than call you a name. Now in my experience (and weirdly enough I know a few of these folks) a lot of these people are very sex positive, very kink friendly and very supportive of sex work, pornography and all that good stuff.vadimfv wrote:I wanted to respond to Dogfish: I understand what you say about second-wave feminism being against pornography, but that is not entirely the case. I think it was mainly an extreme anti-porn segment of 2nd Wave (your Andrea Dworkin types) who were against porn. Among the second wave, you also had your pro-porn types, such as Camille Paglia (who is now 68...definitively 2nd wave). You even had your extreme performance artists in the 1980s, who used sex, violence, bondage and body fluids to convey their art and messages (such as Karen Finley or Lydia Lunch), bridging the gap, in some ways, to the 3rd wave, the basic texts of which (such as bell hooks 'feminism is for everybody') were just starting to bubble at the time. And women's issues were clear-cut back then: things like equal pay, abortion rights, and so on. I think movements like riot grrl (zines/music/self-defense, etc.) which allowed the young Gen-X women license to explore their bodies and rights in every manner imaginable, drew the final dividing line between 2nd and 3rd wave.
The third-wave is a lot different. Because of more political correctness, extreme anarcho/leftism, intersectionalism, anti-globalism, and the explosion of gender studies depts on campuses (2nd wave feminists didn't grow up with any of that)...the number of "issues" that a third-wave feminist could worry about has exploded..on the one hand everything from racism to economic inequality to police brutality..and on the other hand to the likes of FGM and worldwide girls' education, etc., which are all technically valid concerns. But because of the wide fractionalization of issues, there are a lot of issues they address which just seem childish and silly compared to the big picture (like whether comics and games are too sexy)..and that's where you get your Anita Sarkeesians and the like, and then you finally end up with the MTV cunts like Franchesca Ramsey and Laci Green who try to inculcate impressionable Youtube kids with untruths like white people are always bad and privleged, people of colour can never be racist, First World micro-aggressions are so damn important (god forbid you should criticize a 3rd wave feminist on Twitter, you'll get doxxed or banned) and plenty of other bullshit that never had anything to do with feminism before.
Sure, there are plenty of sex-positive 3rd wave feminists..but I think they parse the issues in minute ways that could still result in plenty of attacks against porn. For example, they wouldn't want to ban the entire porn industry (that would eliminate the lesbian-porn-for-lesbians category) but they might want to make it "safer" with lots of regulations to "protect" women (hence this Weinstein bullshit). They also might want to increasingly ban certain types of porn that they feel are specifically exploitative, whether it's a forced-sex scene or really almost forced-anything scene (which a whole lot of porn includes, including SHIP) or they even might want to go so far as to discourage porn where the man does not *look* at the woman...anything involving "objectification" (which, much of the time, is the whole IDEA of porn to begin with...you use an object to get your sexual desires off, instead of a person..a practice as old as the Venus of Willendorf).
I think a great idea for producers would be to move *away* from the traditional centers of entertainment. The internet, to some extent, makes things decentralized: I've seen actresses in this genre who are based in Portland, Seattle, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, and right in my own city [location deleted]. And there are other growing entertainment capitals such as Atlanta. FInd the area where you can keep your costs to a minimum while retaining as high a quality as possible, and keep plugging!
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong on any of this if you like. I like to learn as much as anyone else. Oh, and to respond to Revenger's OP, I too have resisted temptation several times to purchase Cory Chase's videos because of how mediocre the quality of the sets and costumes looks. Might have to break down eventually, though
A lot of that is down to Twitter, because back in the day you could set yourself up as either a religious puritan or a no-fun-allowed progressive and you'd be able to control the story. You could say to the media about how horrible X and Y are, how people are exploited, and so on. Nobody could question that, because you were 'The Expert'. And this went on for decades. But then Twitter appeared and sex workers, models, producers and other people connected to that world are able to speak out, and what they are saying is demolishing the narrative of both the religious and the radical progressives (often called SWERFs, Sex Worker Exclusive Radical Feminists). And if you pay attention to the prevailing social trends it's pretty clear that this is the side with the momentum in terms of the argument, these new sex positive folks, but they're mostly either too young or too marginalised or disenfranchised to do anything about it with regards to the law. But that'll happen in time.
There is a battle for freedom of speech going on at the moment and there is, at the same time, a gigantic decoy of a battle for free speech going on. The decoy is the one about safe spaces, about campus censorship, about political correctness. That's Fucking Nothing. I cannot stress enough how meaningless that all is. Seriously, there's a openly racist guy on TV literally about to win the GOP presidential nomination, the idea that there are things that you 'cannot say because it's un-PC' goes out the window in the face of a Trump candidacy. You can say those things, and people will make you President, so, y'know, maybe that threat is a tad overblown.
The actual battle for freedom of speech is being kept quiet and is being fought on a broad range of fronts. It's internet censorship (in the UK, in China and in other parts of the world where the government wants to use porn as a justification for blanket Internet censorship). It's also corporate censorship, because if you can't pay for porn using your own money because a bank doesn't approve of what you're buying, that's censorship. We've sleepwalked into a situation where Visa, Paypal and a range of other companies have de facto control over the content that can be sold online, which is a more dangerous brand of anti-capitalism than anything some goonbah in a Guy Fawkes mask would ever come up with, because they're basically preventing markets from functioning.
End of the day, way I see it, external hard drives are huge and cheap, and so I am going to stockpile everything I want like some sort of porn squirrel before it all gets locked down. The short term future might be very bleak (I'm actually kind of optimistic for the longer term, but we're definitely headed into rough waters).
