On HU
Featured Archive Post: Jade Degrio and Desirae Embree on choice and agency in the Dollhouse.
Robert Stanley Martin with on-sale dates of comics in early 1946.
Chris Gavaler on the history of superheroes on film.
I wrote a bunch of posts about Quentin Tarantino and related matters:
Robert Rodriguez and diverse casting in Four Rooms.
On fatherhood and Kill Bill’s crappy ending.
On why Tarantino shouldn’t make a romantic comedy.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Pacific Standard I wrote about how actresses used to be thought of as sex workers.
At Playboy I wrote about
—trafficking laws and how they hurt sex workers.
—the new romance set during the Holocaust and why it and Schindler’s List both suck.
At the Guardian I wrote about American Ultra and how you (yes you!) can be a superspy.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
—Mission Impossible, and hating imperialism via hating Tom Cruise.
—the Democratic passion for the white working class.
— On the Man From Uncle and nostalgia for the days when other countries mattered.
At the Reader I had a short review of Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, a great retro-70s country outfit.
Other Links
Jonathan Bernstein on how the party decides on the nominee.
Imani Gandy on Margaret Sanger’s complicated history with racism.
Annie Mok on queerness and Tove Jansson.
Nix 66 on telling off her phone sex client.
About the sex work/actresses article–I agree that prostitution (both selling and buying sex) should be decriminalized and that sex workers should be treated with respect, but some of your arguments on the topic seem inconsistent and/or questionable to me. I remember you saying that Chester Brown’s lifestyle is immoral and even praising Matt Seneca’s (in my opinion, totally absurd) essay about how it’s wrong to buy Paying for It because that will help Chester to buy more sex. But if prostitution is just another industry that deserves as much respect as acting, then how is Chester visiting a brothel any worse than you visiting a movie theatre? Also, I’m not sure that the anti-prostitution arguments of middle-class or rich women are totally invalidated by the opposition and resentment of actual prostitutes. I remember learning on the DVD commentary for the movie Freaks that early 20th century freak shows allowed severely handicapped people to make a good living and that these people greatly resented the “do-gooders” who wanted to outlaw their industry. It’s hard to argue with the so-called freaks’ view, but if you accept it 100%, it leads to the conclusion that paying to gawk at handicapped people is a positive and praiseworthy act, and that seems blatantly absurd. I don’t know how to sort out the ethics of these issues, but I think the truth is somewhere between Meghan Murphy’s view that all “prostituted women” are the passive victims of rapist monsters and Chester Brown’s dream of a utopian future where buying sex is embraced by society.
The problem with Brown’s book is not that he paid sex workers. The problem is that he tends not to treat sex workers as actual people in his art.
I don’t agree that people shouldn’t buy Paying for It…? I don’t remember the essay you’re talking about.
I think making it illegal to for disabled people to perform, and arresting them for performing, would be a really bad idea.
Okay, I’d go along with all that. Sorry if I misremembered and misrepresented your opinions! Seneca’s essay no longer seems to be online.
I don’t have any memory of it! I might have liked it in part? I really don’t remember what he said though…
Huh, well, I talk about Matt’s review and some of my quibbles with it in this thread, if anyone is interested.
I also found his review via the WayBackMachine: http://tinyurl.com/p9vbpwc.
Looking at it again, I think I’m probably more leery of Matt’s john-shaming now than I was back in 2011. Some johns can be awful, but I’ve also heard sex workers talk about good experiences with them—sometimes better than with men in other settings. I don’t think paying for sex is evil (though I don’t think it’s some sort of liberatory good either, as Brown argues.)
All right, I guess your opinions aren’t contradictory and my original post was pretty pointless.
You’ve won this round.
One more comment about why I think it’s difficult to sort out the ethics of the sex industry. This weekend, I was rereading Lisa Carver’s very entertaining memoir Drugs are Nice, which she wrote in 2006. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Carver, but she put out a popular zine in the 90s called Rollerderby and also did some crazy performance pieces and music with her then-husband and friends. Anyway, one chapter of the memoir describes how she briefly worked as a brothel prostitute and really liked both the job and most of her clients. The first time I read that chapter, I though, “Boy, she’s a super-smart, talented, adventurous, worldly woman from the middle class who made a conscious decision to do prostitution and liked it. She’s the ultimate rejoinder to the view that all prostitutes are poor, oppressed victims. I don’t think there’s any way to argue that her clients were exploiting her.” But my rereading this weekend prompted me to Google her and find out what she’s been up to lately. It turns out that after writing the memoir, she went to therapy and dredged up what she describes as repressed memories of being molested and prostituted by her father when she was a child. I don’t think any outsiders can know whether her memories are real, but if they are, she actually conforms pretty well to the view of prostitutes as victims. And if her childhood abuse was related to her adult decision to work in a brothel, you could argue that her clients benefited indirectly from the abuse. Of course, she might totally disagree with that and be annoyed with the idea that she wasn’t responsible for her own choices as an adult; all I’m saying is that it seems like an ethically confusing issue.
I don’t know, Jack. She had a good experience in sex work. Maybe it was a good, healthy way of dealing with the abuse. I’ve heard sex workers say that was true for them (i.e., that after being abused, sex work was helpful and therapeutic for them.)
Lots of jobs can be (and often are!) abusive and exploitive in various ways. Sex work can be more than some, largely because it’s illegal, and so people who work in the industry lack basic protections and can’t go to the police about violence or labor issues. But I don’t see sex work as being more exploitive innately than any other service industry job. Treating it as more exploitive I think has more to do with stigma against sex workers than with the actual nature of the work.