Porn 'actor' interviewed in the guardian's work suppliment..?!

[Monkeytrousers]

To an extent I think that porn performers, when interviewed, are so fed up of endless attempts to get them to admit that they are victims of abuse or drug-addled fuckups that they can perhaps come across as a bit too in-yer-face. MT: that something is a minority taste/preference/opinion doesn't make it wrong.

I'm not saying it's wrong, not as a personal free choice anyway.

Women who sleep around, for money or just for fun incur a cost to their reputations - this has been observed in every culture around the world. I'm not saying that's right or wrong too, agian just saying this is what happens. Porn performers, especially, in fact only, women, will probably always be on the defensive because of this too.

MT: I do take your point, to an extent, though I do think it's wrong that a woman's "reputation" is only going to be preserved if she refrains from having sex when, how, where and with who she wants. It's one of the reasons I found the press treatment of Abby Lee so annoying (though I am not saying that Abby Lee is a porn performer; she isn't).

It is unfortunate, but lets not forget that we do live in a culture that allows women sexual freedom, regardless of the fact that it's human nature; it only shows that while human nature can't be rubbed out, it can tolerate things that go against it's grain.

It's only since the invention of the pill that women (and men) have been able to explore and discover female sexuality unhindered by the consequence of pregnancy, risky birth and prolonged parental investments ? the first two something men don?t ever have to consider. What has become clear in the last 50 or so years is that women do enjoy sex, something the Victorians would perhaps be surprised by ? and if you think about it, if, every time you had sex, you had to worry about whether you would get pregnant or not, if you did to bring up that infant, suckling it for perhaps 5 years (all that time your sex drive being suppressed by hormones)- this all with more kids in the background sapping your energy so that even if your husband was the best lover on the world, you just needed to sleep - then after suckling ended and your menses returned, thinking the next time you had sex, it might start the whole cycle again (one you could expect to go through many times, especially if you enjoyed sex, you kind of start to understand where this myth of women not enjoying sex might have came from.

But back to the point, given half a chance, women like sex; and being freed for the first time in human history from the cycle above (ironically especially suffered by the ones who liked sex more than average, though rape was endemic within marriage anyway, another reason to develop a dislike of intercourse), but we cannot be divorced from our evolutionary heritage, which evolved, actually building and shaping our bodies and brains to deal with these and more challenges and dilemmas.

Our genes know more than we do, and instruct us (we are not slaves to this, as it evident all around us) to think before we jump into bed with just anyone; what if the condom were to break, or some chemical compound we have recently ingested were to interfere with the pill? Our human nature and specific female (not male, who has different whispers when it comes to sex) sexuality is the sensible voice on our shoulder, telling us of the possible consequences when we want to be reckless. We can go ahead and be reckless, many of us today are and trust in the freedom medical science has given us. But we are an anomaly, billions or women around the world don?t have these privileges and they depend on that voice, their lives and the lives of their current children depend on it, from it telling them that they just cannot support another mouth to feed or that if they are alone and come across a man in the bush they should run, or better still, go around in groups to lessen the risk of rape. We are no different from these women, we just live in a culture that drowns out our primitive evolutionary consciousness with the din of consumerism and instant gratification ? with no apparent consequences. That voice is always there though, murmuring in the background, which is why women will always be more discriminating than men (on average) but today are less discriminating than our female ancestors ? and that voice will come back to the fore, should our circumstances change.

oh, that's a bit long, sorry

Exactly, Fio. A little imagination goes along way. But that's right down the pan with common sense, personal and social responsibility, and resourcefulness.

true Fio!
Interesting MT.

INteresting, MT (and if nothing else, yet another good reason to regard the pioneers of efficient contraception as secular saints). But sociobiology is not an exact science and what you are describing is theory, rather than fact. I am always very, very wary of stuff that describes men and women as evolutionarily different in what they want/need (as opposed to biologically different in terms of having wombs/penises(penii?) and the rest). Theories like these are too often used to justify social inequality... "women are biologically evolved to do housework and men are not" etc.

It's incorrect to label it sociobiology Madamez (and belies an ideological bent on your part); it was called that in it's infancy but it has matured into evolutionary science now, encompassing, biology, psychology and is making inroads into the social sciences; and I?m afraid you have been misinformed about the nature of the evolutionary sciences; they very much are exact sciences, just as exact as the sciences it works with, biology and psychology. To name something a theory, doesn?t make it spurious, as the creationists would like to be the case with Darwin?s theory of evolution. I don?t know what you mean by being ?evolutionary? different ? if you mean men and women faced different challenges in their evolutionary past, especially when it came to sexual reproduction and parental investment, then I don?t see what the contention is ? women have babies, men don?t; of course they faced different challenges. Who would disagree? The biological difference created these disparities or symmetries in reproduction.

Theories like these are not used to justify social inequality at all, on the contry in fact. No one who knows anything about evolutionary theory would ever assert that "women are biologically evolved to do housework and men are not" ? you can only know that by knowing what it says yourself though, not listening to idiots and pseudoscientists spout rubbish and then concluding that the fault lies in the science they are misrepresenting, not the speakers themselves. If you ever hear anyone saying such a thing as that, you?ll know they don?t know what they?re talking about.

Unfortunately today, feminists seem to care more about what the idiots say rather than the real scientists.

MT:apologise for the wrong terminology. But psychology is not an "exact" science by any means, there are way too many variables for any experiment to show more than vague general trends (which are always going to be interpreted in the light of the experimenter's particular agenda, prejudices, experiences, etc).
Agree with you about the prevalence of junk science, though.

Psychoanalysis isn't exact, it isn't even a science - but psychology is. Dunno where youre getting this from.

Again, it has been tradionally rejected within traditional feminism, to feminisms' detriment unfortunately.