"Beginning in the Thatcher and Reagan-dominated 1980s and continuing to this day, the rise of pro-porn feminism has accompanied a general shift within feminism in which individualism has replaced what was once a collective struggle. In a typical statement, Jennifer Baumgardener wrote in 2000: “Feminism is something individual to each feminist.”
It's as if every choice that a woman makes is feminist, simply because she makes it. The fact that her “choice” may have been limited by sexist, racist, or other social structures is conveniently ignored, and the impact that her choice might have on other women is never questioned.
But unequal social structures do exist, and they often limit choices and alternatives available to women. In Canada and the US, women continue to earn 25-30 percent less than men. Like all averages, this number is subject to variation, so that middle- and upper-class white women earn more (in absolute terms and relative to white men) than do women of color, for example.
For an educated white woman who can afford to produce her own pornography and write books about how “empowering” it all is, the pay gap can be brushed off as a minor inconvenience. For a woman of color without a college education, like Belmond, this gap can mean the difference between having to sell her body vs working long hours to make ends meet.
“I thought it would be glamorous and exciting to be in porn,” Belmond explains. “I thought it would be this thrilling lifestyle. I’d read books about porn, like biographies, and I thought if I could just avoid some of the bad things, I’d be able to make all this money. But like almost all of the women in porn, I left with nothing. And now my pictures and videos are on the internet forever, for everyone to see and for the industry to keep making money off of.”
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