“I was a dancer in L.A. and I needed to make money. And it seemed as if it was a chance to use my body and support myself.”
“You started in L.A.’s mainstream porn industry. Did you have any bad experiences?”
Jiz hesitates for a moment and replies: “Well there were some not so awesome moments.”
There is a long pause. I am not surprised. Reticence regarding the ugly side of the mainstream porn business is something that I experience again and again when I talk with porn actresses who have worked in L.A.’s porn valley. I cannot help but wonder if there is a desire to play down the bad stuff, so that civilians won’t blame them for being involved in the business in the first place.
Our discussion continues the following afternoon at a bar near San Francisco’s LGBT center, a building in the Mission District of the city. Emboldened by mojitos, I ask the question that I am most curious about: “Are you out as a porn star to your family?”
The pause is prolonged, before Lee responds: “. . . not all of them.”
My next interview is intriguing. It is with a female academic I shall call “B,” who has been interested in porn, as an intellectual issue, for some years. After much thought she decided that she wanted to do a porn shoot, but her partner was not happy about her doing it without him. They decided that they would do the porn shoot together, and chose a well-established filmmaker who prefers to work directly with couples; or would matchmake those who didn’t know each other, making sure that they genuinely fancied each other.
B was reassured by how collaborative the process was. The couple discussed what they would or wouldn’t do. An attractive house was rented. There was good catering and champagne. Silly porn names were chosen. Discussions were held with the director about how they wanted to do it. A minimal crew was used to make the pair comfortable. “At first it was awkward,” she said. “I thought about everyone and everything. But very soon I forgot and got into the situation . . . I am very good at focusing on my own pleasure. It was fun. We felt like naughty kids, doing something rude and kinky.”
The result was something of a surprise. The film was a revelation: “To see our sexuality onscreen—the rapport that we had built together—made me proud; we were beautiful. And the dance that our bodies made on film was lovely.” Watching herself was a surprise, she said. “I always wondered about how I looked when I was having sex, but my body was fine.” And like most people she was curious to see what her face looked like when she came. She was reassured. “In a film you can see yourself being desired. Best of all, looking back at the rushes, I could see the way that he looked at me, how truly he desired and loved me.” I asked her if she would do it again.
“Maybe a couple of times but no more than that,” she said, almost to herself. “Then it might become routine; and our actions self-conscious.” She hesitated again, shook her head, and added, “No—I have got what I wanted.”
B’s experience fascinated me. It illustrated that it was not that she had been filmed having sex that was the issue—indeed, for her that was liberating. It was that she didn’t rely on the porn business for her bread and butter, that she was already a financially independent, professional woman who could chose to do this or not. She could remain largely anonymous, and thus avoid the taint (however unfair) associated with sex work. It illustrated, in other words, that a woman can only be sexually free if she is also in control of the means of production.
It made me wonder whether, in these, the best of circumstances, it is more rewarding to be the performer than the voyeur; doing, living, and touching, rather than merely passively watching. In an age where more and more of us conflate doing with watching, it is important to remember that porn is not sex; it is merely its fleshless representation.
San Francisco, the metropolis that once nurtured the feminist porn industry, and previously one of my favorite cities, is changing. Once the mecca to which gay, lesbian, and trans folks flocked to find their queer tribe, San Francisco is now one of the most expensive cities in the United States. Queer seekers are priced out of the market, and go elsewhere, to Oakland across the bay, for example, or to other American cities like Seattle or Austin; their place in the city taken by young people with more prosaic goals. In this newly gentrified and increasingly conservative city, it is no surprise that San Francisco’s last lesbian bar closed down in 2015.
Despite feminist porn’s influence on the media, art world, and academia, it has never been a financially viable undertaking; not least because women are not interested in buying porn in large quantities. The free products available on sites like Porn Hub are a disincentive, too, to pay for porn of any variety. And so the huge and thriving alternative porn product that the San Franciscans dreamed of generating simply has not come to pass. Piracy, too, which is rife online, has had a hand in undercutting the monetary stream that should fill the coffers of feminist pornographers. A sign of the industry’s stagnation is the fate of the Feminist Porn Award, designed to recognize the talent of the sector—it has not been put on for a few years now. A number of notable feminist porn producers, too, who once aspired to make a living in this milieu, have moved on to other professions.
The great black feminist poet Audre Lorde once wrote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But feminist porn director Shine Houston countered this by saying: “What I’ve learned in this business is that you absolutely can dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.” Houston’s retort was made in the hopeful days of the San Franciscan feminist porn scene, when practitioners believed that they could establish a thriving feminist porn industry. But this has not proved to be the case. The master’s tools have not dismantled the master’s house. And the dominion of the mainstream porn industry is unassailed.
JUNE THUNDERSTORM
Revenge of the Mouthbreathers: A Smoker’s Manifesto
FROM The Baffler
The powers that be say antismoking legislation is for our own well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth. The attack on cigarette smoking does not improve the lives of those it claims to protect, be they the “self-destructive” workers who smoke or the moralizing professionals who complain about having to smell them. Antismoking legislation is, and always has been, about social control. It is about ratcheting up worker productivity and fostering class hatred, to keep us looking for the enemy in each other instead of in those who are making a killing off cigarettes and antismoking campaigns alike. It legitimates the privatization of public space, limits popular assembly, and forces the working class out of political life into private isolation via the social technology of shame. It whitewashes the violence exacted on the poor by the rich to make it all seem like the worker’s own doing. It is, in short, class war by another name.
It is easy to charge hypocrisy on the part of supposedly benevolent governments concerned with “public health.” Alcohol and sugar damage the consumer to an extent comparable to cigarettes, and hurt “nondrinkers” as well—ask any woman familiar with drunk men, or the cane cutters of Latin America. But the class character of the war on smoking is so pronounced that one begins to wonder just who the “public” in “public health” is anyway. It certainly does not include Nicaraguan plantation workers, nor most black Americans—unless we can call police murdering Eric Garner for selling single cigarettes some sort of “pro-life” operation. Of course, cops in the United States also kill black men simply for walking around and breathing, so maybe cigarette packs should read: “Smoking Is a Leading Cause of Death Unless You Are a Black Man, in Which Casesmoke ’em if you got ’em.”
Neither does the “public” protected by public-health initiatives include people of the working class, no matter what color they are. If it did, initiatives would be directed first and foremost at the process of production, not consumption. And I mean production of everything. After all, anyone who works for minimum wage already expects organ damage, physical pain, a reduced quality of life, and an untimely death
. And that, no doubt, is why the “If You Smoke You’ll Get Sick” warnings on packs aren’t working very well to inspire this particular group to quit: working shit jobs for shit pay is making the working class sicker, faster. And yet the promoter of “public health” does not concern herself with how the workers must soon enter the building to demolish rotten fiberboard all day. She is interested only in what they consume outside the door on their brief ten-minute breaks. Why should this be?
The Polluting Poor
This apparent contradiction clears up once we understand that the public-health campaigns of modern government have never been about protecting everyone. They are, rather, about protecting the most privileged citizens from the dangerously contaminating poor. “Health and safety” provided the rationale for corralling dispossessed peasants into England’s workhouses and slave-trading navy, just as “health and safety” was the slogan of British imperialists working to justify colonialism and the slave ships themselves. In fact, it seems when civilized governments discuss “health and safety,” what often follows is “sickness and death,” so we are wise to stay on guard.
From early modern times, the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie worked to articulate its particular value in contrast to the “hedonistic” aristocrats and the “irrational” underclass, both imagined as grotesque. The masses, in particular, came to be defined by a supposed excessive enjoyment of bodily pleasures. This was in pointed contrast to the new self-denying entrepreneur, who pretended not to have any bodily functions. Orgasms, eating, sweating, and shitting were impolite, dirty things, which anxious bourgeois moralists projected onto others in a fit of collective neurosis.
Indeed, women, the poor, and “primitive” colonial subjects were all conveniently constructed as porous and leaking “mouthbreathers” driven by primal desires, while elites were rational, well contained, and ultimately decoupled from the body and its practical functioning. The poor or racialized woman, imagined as spreading disease with her unbridled sexuality and infecting touch, was of particular concern to the new social hygienists. Hence the trope of dangerous servant women such as Typhoid Mary, the New York cook who was quarantined for more than two decades after being apprehended in 1915 as a “symptomless carrier.”
This social imaginary persists today in many guises, one of which is the dehumanization of the polluting smoker via her depiction as a series of dismembered rotting body parts (such as the nasty impaired lungs we keep seeing in antismoking propaganda), all in the interest of public health. Car emissions, soda pop, pharmaceutical medications, and nano-weaponized drones all have the potential to disturb the healthful existence of the young white bourgeois child, yet her mother supports these ventures with her taxes and consumer choices while spitting insults at the smoker waiting at a bus stop: she’s just a toxic bag of body parts, after all.
I recently saw a woman brandishing the Mercedes-Benz of strollers walk through a sea of idling traffic toward a smoker only to say the smoker was “murdering her baby” by polluting the air. Such an act has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with venting bourgeois malaise by attacking powerless people whom state authorities have constructed as abject and undeserving of respect. These same state authorities allow corporations to poison our food and water supply—so of course they don’t mind if we lose our shit over some smoking neighbors instead. Indeed, the mouthbreathing neighbor with nasty black lungs is apparently more threatening than cigarette smoke itself: although the smoky wisp that has not yet been inhaled is more toxic, the great danger to nonsmokers, according to public-health authorities, is secondhand smoke. Ultimately, the cigarette stands in for what bourgeois bystanders have always been most afraid of—the notion that they, too, have bodies, and that these bodies materially coexist with, and indeed create, the “vile” working class.
Public Space, Reclassified
I am not suggesting any sinister conspiracy of technocrats here, but rather a confluence of vested interests. The push to ban smoking in the workplace in the 1980s did indeed stem from research on “Increasing Productivity Through On-Site Smoking Control”—but of course not everyone concerned about tobacco was a profit-seeking vampire, nor were foes of workplace smoking specifically targeting the poor. Smokers at the time were still considered “classy.”
This is why the 1980s campaign to vilify smoking was one and the same with a bid to de-class it. Much as women were sold sophistication by way of Benson & Hedges, Holiday, and Parliament, with men offered similar (simulations of) power and mobility in Marlboro Country, cigarettes were to be made unappealing through new associations with foulness, odor, dirt, depravity, uncontrollable desire, and the inescapability of body parts—concepts that the bourgeoisie, in their efforts at distinction, had long projected onto the racialized working poor. In other words, cigarettes were symbolically associated with the lower classes before the poor were the majority of those (still) smoking, this being part and parcel of constructing the act of smoking as unhealthy. Smoking was consistently depicted as both unhealthy and an emerging professional-life taboo that might derail an eager yuppie’s career advancement. “Cigarettes May Burn Holes in Your Career” was the alarm sounded in a 1985 magazine feature in Career World, with other savvy works of eighties career counseling echoing the same theme.
Now, in 2016, cigarette smoking in North America is indeed more common among people living in poverty. They smoke because they do not have the time or money to eat properly, because other, more respectable mind-altering drugs are not available to them, because it is something to enjoy. They do it because their jobs (when they still exist) are so boring and physically painful that they would rather die. Yet professionals in the wellness industry routinely describe their smoking social inferiors as “stupid” and “irrational” on the basis of their supposedly self-undermining lifestyle choices.
It’s by now an iron law that whenever the poor are discussed, so are their “bad life choices.” If professionals can’t do something properly or fast enough, they can readily avail themselves of a diagnosis of one or another “health problem”—even something as vague and generic as “stress” or “burnout.” These are conditions that are imagined to have stricken them randomly—as opposed to a malignant, self-inflicted malady tied to their lifestyle, upbringing, or that sketchy antidepressant they stupidly decided to take. Even though so many children of the professional class clearly have asthma due in part to the persistent bourgeois hygiene neurosis (the antibacterial hand gel all but mandated by this neurosis being a proven contributing factor), they and their germophobe parents deserve empathy, time off, and specific disability rights. By contrast, working-class smokers deserve only reproach and are asked to tiptoe around the expansive sociomoral and self-induced sensitivities of the rich.
This wildly differential diagnostic treatment, which draws on age-old caricatures of the poor as case studies in lapsed self-control, parallels the entirely differential structure of empathy in the working-class workplace: whenever low-income workers can’t do something properly or fast enough, they are simply fired, and anything that would otherwise qualify as a health problem or disability is chalked up to “personal failure.” After all, this is someone who made the “bad choice” to live in poverty in the first place.
It is no coincidence that these same workers are widely perceived to deserve the exemptions of “health” as little as they deserve proper pay. “Public health” has always reinforced class divisions through such unequal attributions of “choice” versus “constraint.” As a university student, I could not get a proper note from the Office of Students with Disabilities prescribing some time off to quit smoking because, as the nurse said, “Starting smoking is something you chose to do.” My peer with back problems also chose to get into the car that crashed during her European holiday, yet it seems to be taken for granted that professionals simply “need” vast cosmopolitan mobility. (One can almost hear a public-health flunky confronted with this counterexample gasping at the
suggestion that this health outcome was also, in some deep sense of things, an earned one: You can’t suggest that was her own doing! . . . One needs to get around somehow!)
No equivalent concept of structural “constraint” is applied to the working-class smoker, who is rather imagined to enjoy (but mishandle) infinite power and choice. This is so even though the smoker in question is brought up to smoke just as the jetsetter is to fly, and continues to do so largely because state and capital consider her undeserving of food. In fact, the smoker needs nicotine to function just as the suburban professional needs his car, and if she can’t perform at work for even just two days, it will actually matter. She may lose what little food access she has. Furthermore, this smoker’s daily activities, paid and otherwise, which would be curtailed by the pains of nicotine withdrawal, are generally important for the greater social good. An obvious early casualty is the caregiving labor involved in the “second shift” duties of working mothers in the domestic sphere. Huffington Post writer Linda Tirado says it all:
When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.
And so the lowest-paid workers continue to smoke, with public smoking restrictions serving only to inspire working-class shame and ruling-class belligerence. Whether because workers smoke or their friends do, the traditional places of working-class congregation are now closed to them—the pub, the diner, the park, and even the sidewalk. It is no coincidence that fifteen feet from the door stands the gutter. And how convenient for the boss that shooing smoking workers from the door downstairs makes it less likely for them to bond in conversation.
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 35