Good read (and very funny). If anyone finds themselves having strong opinions about the marital status of a porn star, they should spend less time on the internet
I talked with an ex-evangelical once, who made a pretty good case for taking this kind of sexual moralizing as stemming from the doctrine that one is saved actually not through works, nor through faith, but through _the public performance of faith_.
Once you understand this idea, many things slot into place. It really doesn't matter what you do in private, as long as you believe yourself to be repentant for your sins, and each day renew your commitment to the faith. Perhaps, if you're a Catholic, you even confess your sins regularly and receive forgiveness. (Never mind that the Catholic Church actually says works are important -- in this regard, right-wing Catholics are just as much practicing the "cafeteria" style as liberation theology leftists.) If publicly questioned, you're allowed to discredit your critic -- as, for instance, the ex-family of Daniel Lavery has sought to do, by saying that as a trans person he has no standing to criticize his father (John Ortberg) for abusing young women and facilitating Daniel's brother's similar abuses.
Or see the practices of the Amish, in demanding that victims of abuse forgive their abusers, if the abusers perform a request for forgiveness correctly:
As long as the perpetrator _professes_ loyalty to the principles of the tribe, and encourages others to "do right" as the tribe defines it, he (and it is almost always he) _is forgiven_. If the victim says, "Fuck that, he shouldn't be forgiven, I don't forgive him!" then it's the victim who will be condemned and ostracized. Facing that kind of social sanction, most victims fold, and also profess to forgive.
From the perspective of a liberal individualist / humanist, this is of course monstrous, but it is internally consistent, and one can even see how it is _adaptive_, in the course of social evolution. The kind of society that runs like this is quite good at self-replication, because it is _profession_ of the values that _spreads_ the values. Actually _adhering to the values_ is almost beside the point. Hence you can have Victorian England where everyone professes to be incredibly morally upright, and then at night the Victorian Gentlemen all go slum it in the demimonde. Hence you have Southern Gentlemen who think nothing of raping the help. Hence you have modern Evangelical pastors who sexually abuse children and then say that those children were acting as instruments of the Devil. And hence you have these pathetic men blaring their madonna-whore complexes on the internet -- they profess to value the madonna, and hence cannot be held culpable for participating (financially) in the sins of the whore.
True! And a good chunk of the modern evangelical types who embrace the idea that they're "real Americans" in a blood-and-soil sense are descended from Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrants.
I'm given to understand that Riley Reid really hates her past life. On a personal level, getting married, and being able to make love to someone rather than being soullessly boned for money - it's weirdly wholesome to see.
I would say as well that there are definitely _are_ examples of porn in which exhibitionists are having sex that they personally delight in, while somebody rolls a camera. (A lot of what shows up in Dan Savage's annual Hump festival would fall into this class.)
Yeah fair enough. I definitely think it's a condemnation of our society as a whole that many people are desperate enough for money that they will work jobs they hate to get by. But this goes for working a retail job with a shitty harasser boss, too, not just porn. We should have a UBI that is high enough to get by on, so _nobody_ has to take a job under conditions they hate. Then abolish minimum wage, but give a large negative income tax at the bottom end of the income scale. So employers can offer positions at a wage level that matches the value actually being added, and people will have some incentive to take those positions -- they don't have to tolerate being abused, but as long as conditions are OK, they'll earn enough beyond the bare necessities to be worthwhile.
Nice article. As that wily cyrenaic once said when being chastised for entering a brothel: would you be mad if I bought a house after someone else lived in it?
People have far too much time on their hands...maybe that's the problem..
I don't know who said this but it was a podcast episode and the speaker it said as an advice to young people, " put yourself at the service of others. That's where you feel the most joy". I can personally feel that the world seems more like us people just staying behind a screen and just observing and making judgements rather than participating in the values of the world. Sometimes I see people not make an effort in festivals and gatherings because they don't feel connected and yet those who put in the most effort seem to be the happiest.
The article was very vibrant like a vivid poem. And good luck and happiness to all fellow human beings.
Sure but by the same token, here are 128000 men expressing (admittedly in a toxic way) that they’ve been harmed by pornography. Glad for Reid that shes achieved a happy marriage to a high value man, but this article reads a bit like celebrating a meth dealer who has helped destroy thousands of lives with no remorse moving on to a lucrative career in finance.
Regardless of the hypothetical rights and wrongs of a hypothetical more ethical porn industry, a lot of pornstars in the actual porn industry enter it because they have been harmed by others, and leave harmed by the experiences in all sorts of ways. The average pornstar faces far more harm than the average pornwatcher, so it’s hard for me to sympathise with a desire for vengeance, especially when it is so rarely expressed against directors, producers, male stars etc. and so often expressed against female stars, who often have the worst time of it.
Much the same is true of meth producers, who often face even worse prospects than the ultimate buyers, though I know less about dealers.
I do not think you will find universal agreement with the statement that "porn harms everyone".
I would agree that, like many vices, its unregulated distribution probably causes more harm than good. But there definitely are both exhibitionists who enjoy making porn, turn a profit from it, and go on to live healthy and well-adjusted lives; and people who are capable of enjoying erotic entertainment in moderation. _Many_ years ago, I dated a woman for ~6 months or so, who at the time was occasionally performing on streams for kink dot com, out of San Francisco's former National Guard Armory. She went on to marry and have kids -- all adult now -- and last I checked she was living happily as an ex-pat in Portugal. I think she still does some fitness modelling type stuff. She's absolutely gorgeous at almost-50. (I suppose it's even possible she still does stuff that is, or is close to, sex work; I wouldn't have any reason to know at this point.)
Similarly, there are people who can enjoy penny-ante poker with a group of friends, or even who are capable of playing for higher stakes once a year in Vegas (with disciplined attention to the odds); but most of the _profit_ in gambling operations comes from fleecing people for whom the attraction is compulsive. Similarly, most of the _profit_ in porn comes from feeding the addictions of those who are addictable. (These days often by running display ads, or sometimes web-page-embedded crypto-miner plugins, on sites where people are spending WAY more time than is healthy. Or, perhaps one step up in terms of moral status, via stuff like OnlyFans, where at least the party benefitting is a performer who's probably in financial straits just as bad as most of the customers, rather than some corporate entity engaged in negative-sum extractive economics.)
I am generally pretty in favor of rolling back the legalization of online gambling, and more-strictly regulating in-person gambling. I also would like to see ideas for regulating porn that seemed to be aimed at helping people control their usage, or avoid it if they can't. Instead all I ever see are regulatory regimes that seem obviously intended to reinforce a "morality police" type control of people's bodies and desires.
A good first step would be much better sex ed, teaching people about the role sex plays in relationships, and teaching them to recognize that most porn does not look at all like the kind of sex happy couples have most of the time. If you would like to be in a happy couple, you might want to learn about what kind of sex contributes to that, which you're much more likely to get reading Emily Nagoski, Erika Moen, and Dan Savage, than watching porn. But the types of people who propose regimes to regulate porn pretty uniformly count Nagoski, Moen, and Savage _as porn_, to be banned along with the gonzo stuff on PornHub.
This is a very well thought-out comment. I agree with mostly everything, and the stuff I don't agree with is just semantics and not what I want to draw attention to. Your comment about more sex ed is, I think, very poignant. Growing up in a rural private school, I had zero sex ed. The topic of sex never came up in a healthy classroom environment. I got my sex ed through the internet, unfortunately, and through the inappropriate jokes my friends and I would make. The lack of proper sex ed led me to try to understand my own sexuality and desires through pornographic material, and developed an unhealthy addiction to it. You know, schools that dance around sex ed are calling themselves 'protecting children,' but in reality they are just pushing them to find other unhealthy outlets for their sexuality... outlets that will wind up harming their development in the long run.
Sex ed is the answer to the quote on quote 'hyper sexual society' we find ourselves in. Pretending sex doesn't happen or that it is inherently bad is what has gotten us in this situation in the first place. Anyways, I really appreciated your comment.
This is sort of like saying that an obsessive stalker has been "harmed by movies" because he got upset that the movie star he was stalking got married. This woman was just minding her own business making fun videos to entertain people. She is not responsible if a bunch of sickos watch the videos and decided that because she made them, she is a person worthy of contempt.
If anything harmed these men, it wasn't pornography. It was being told that treating women with contempt is an appropriate reaction to pornography, and to sexuality in general. These men were damaged before they watched any porn. Normal people do not react to pornography in that way. Normal people think that porn stars are entertainers worthy of the same respect as any other type of entertainer.
Pornography is one of the few panaceas we have in society. Societies with wider access to it have greater respect for women and lower rates of sex crimes. It entertains and brings pleasure to millions of people. We shouldn't allow messed up weirdos to demonize it.
Thats a great comparison and I totally agree with it: such a person has been harmed by the sensationalism and idol culture intentionally curated by the movies since Lilian Gish & Mary Pickford. I’d say the same about female fans who lost touch with reality in Beatlemania, and John Hinckley Jr attempting to kill Reagan for the approval of Jodi Foster. Media has consequences for our minds! Just because liberal societies that support female rights tolerate the mainstreaming of pornography, violence in entertainment, gambling etc doesn’t mean these things are correlated with or conducive to a healthy and tolerant culture!
The question is, to what extent does media cause these problems and to what extent does it simply change how they manifest? Before the movies would someone like Hinckley have been fine, or would he have stalked someone he knew personally instead of Jodie Foster?
In the case of pornography, it's pretty clear that the people who it "harms" already have extremely toxic views about sexuality. It makes more sense to say that what harmed them was their toxic views, rather than what their toxic views reacted to.
I really don't think it's reasonable to tell someone that they shouldn't do fun and entertaining things because it will hurt terrible people. If those people don't want to be hurt, all they have to do is stop being terrible.
Regarding your primary point I agree with you and side with Riley. Your secondary, point, though... "You cannot regard another person as an object, without reducing yourself to less than a person, because if you regard a human as less than human, you deny what matters most about yourself- your humanity. In one way or another, you will grow poorer, whether you start with misogyny, racism, contempt of the poor, or even equal opportunity mean-spiritedness, you are denying the value of what lies at the core of you, humanity." Coaching? Editing? Sport? Transactions? And your tertiary point, that one has a moral duty to be hotter than Jessica Alba before presuming aesthetic judgment, ah...
Bravo, Philosophy Bear. If ever there was a sermon for the chronically online, terminally horny, self-owning sons of incels, this was it. Like Luther nailing his theses to the door of Pornhub Premium. What begins as a pseudo-ironic hate rally becomes a portrait of spectacular hypocrisy so vivid you can practically smell the Cheeto dust and desperation. And the final twist? That she got love while her “victims” got carpal tunnel and a parasocial hangover. Delicious.
To the boys: she’s married. You’re mad. And your moral compass is just a broken dick pointing due north to shame. Long may she reign. Long may your anguish taste like warm Monster Energy and unmetabolised resentment.
Good read (and very funny). If anyone finds themselves having strong opinions about the marital status of a porn star, they should spend less time on the internet
I talked with an ex-evangelical once, who made a pretty good case for taking this kind of sexual moralizing as stemming from the doctrine that one is saved actually not through works, nor through faith, but through _the public performance of faith_.
Once you understand this idea, many things slot into place. It really doesn't matter what you do in private, as long as you believe yourself to be repentant for your sins, and each day renew your commitment to the faith. Perhaps, if you're a Catholic, you even confess your sins regularly and receive forgiveness. (Never mind that the Catholic Church actually says works are important -- in this regard, right-wing Catholics are just as much practicing the "cafeteria" style as liberation theology leftists.) If publicly questioned, you're allowed to discredit your critic -- as, for instance, the ex-family of Daniel Lavery has sought to do, by saying that as a trans person he has no standing to criticize his father (John Ortberg) for abusing young women and facilitating Daniel's brother's similar abuses.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/29/menlo-church-leadership-acknowledges-abuse-going-back-decades/
https://thewartburgwatch.com/2024/05/17/all-that-glitters-is-not-gold-revelations-about-john-ortbergs-alleged-abuse-while-at-willow-creek-church/
Or see the practices of the Amish, in demanding that victims of abuse forgive their abusers, if the abusers perform a request for forgiveness correctly:
https://itvs.org/films/keep-quiet-and-forgive/
As long as the perpetrator _professes_ loyalty to the principles of the tribe, and encourages others to "do right" as the tribe defines it, he (and it is almost always he) _is forgiven_. If the victim says, "Fuck that, he shouldn't be forgiven, I don't forgive him!" then it's the victim who will be condemned and ostracized. Facing that kind of social sanction, most victims fold, and also profess to forgive.
From the perspective of a liberal individualist / humanist, this is of course monstrous, but it is internally consistent, and one can even see how it is _adaptive_, in the course of social evolution. The kind of society that runs like this is quite good at self-replication, because it is _profession_ of the values that _spreads_ the values. Actually _adhering to the values_ is almost beside the point. Hence you can have Victorian England where everyone professes to be incredibly morally upright, and then at night the Victorian Gentlemen all go slum it in the demimonde. Hence you have Southern Gentlemen who think nothing of raping the help. Hence you have modern Evangelical pastors who sexually abuse children and then say that those children were acting as instruments of the Devil. And hence you have these pathetic men blaring their madonna-whore complexes on the internet -- they profess to value the madonna, and hence cannot be held culpable for participating (financially) in the sins of the whore.
Very Calvinist.
True! And a good chunk of the modern evangelical types who embrace the idea that they're "real Americans" in a blood-and-soil sense are descended from Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrants.
This reply needs its own post
I'm given to understand that Riley Reid really hates her past life. On a personal level, getting married, and being able to make love to someone rather than being soullessly boned for money - it's weirdly wholesome to see.
“Being soullessly boned for money” is however a common description of marriage.
By unhappily married people, probably. You know that the problem is, the happily married keep their mouths shut out of pity, right?
I would say as well that there are definitely _are_ examples of porn in which exhibitionists are having sex that they personally delight in, while somebody rolls a camera. (A lot of what shows up in Dan Savage's annual Hump festival would fall into this class.)
In some cases, yes. But Riley Reid, post-retirement, has made it very clear that that's *not* her.
Yeah fair enough. I definitely think it's a condemnation of our society as a whole that many people are desperate enough for money that they will work jobs they hate to get by. But this goes for working a retail job with a shitty harasser boss, too, not just porn. We should have a UBI that is high enough to get by on, so _nobody_ has to take a job under conditions they hate. Then abolish minimum wage, but give a large negative income tax at the bottom end of the income scale. So employers can offer positions at a wage level that matches the value actually being added, and people will have some incentive to take those positions -- they don't have to tolerate being abused, but as long as conditions are OK, they'll earn enough beyond the bare necessities to be worthwhile.
It's funny. I see that picture on the right, and the only thing that comes through is how damn cute her smile is.
And as for the left, good for her!
Nice article. As that wily cyrenaic once said when being chastised for entering a brothel: would you be mad if I bought a house after someone else lived in it?
People have far too much time on their hands...maybe that's the problem..
A lot of them evidently have far too much of something else on their hands too.
Don’t get up, I can show myself back out.
never did i think id read such beautiful writing about a rage farm tweet about a porn star’s marriage. incredible work sir
How absurd and pathetic. Unfortunately, many men hate women and some men are incapable of desiring women unless they weave contempt into it.
I don't know who said this but it was a podcast episode and the speaker it said as an advice to young people, " put yourself at the service of others. That's where you feel the most joy". I can personally feel that the world seems more like us people just staying behind a screen and just observing and making judgements rather than participating in the values of the world. Sometimes I see people not make an effort in festivals and gatherings because they don't feel connected and yet those who put in the most effort seem to be the happiest.
The article was very vibrant like a vivid poem. And good luck and happiness to all fellow human beings.
Sure but by the same token, here are 128000 men expressing (admittedly in a toxic way) that they’ve been harmed by pornography. Glad for Reid that shes achieved a happy marriage to a high value man, but this article reads a bit like celebrating a meth dealer who has helped destroy thousands of lives with no remorse moving on to a lucrative career in finance.
Regardless of the hypothetical rights and wrongs of a hypothetical more ethical porn industry, a lot of pornstars in the actual porn industry enter it because they have been harmed by others, and leave harmed by the experiences in all sorts of ways. The average pornstar faces far more harm than the average pornwatcher, so it’s hard for me to sympathise with a desire for vengeance, especially when it is so rarely expressed against directors, producers, male stars etc. and so often expressed against female stars, who often have the worst time of it.
Much the same is true of meth producers, who often face even worse prospects than the ultimate buyers, though I know less about dealers.
Even more reason not to glorify its biggest stars! Porn harms everyone.
I do not think you will find universal agreement with the statement that "porn harms everyone".
I would agree that, like many vices, its unregulated distribution probably causes more harm than good. But there definitely are both exhibitionists who enjoy making porn, turn a profit from it, and go on to live healthy and well-adjusted lives; and people who are capable of enjoying erotic entertainment in moderation. _Many_ years ago, I dated a woman for ~6 months or so, who at the time was occasionally performing on streams for kink dot com, out of San Francisco's former National Guard Armory. She went on to marry and have kids -- all adult now -- and last I checked she was living happily as an ex-pat in Portugal. I think she still does some fitness modelling type stuff. She's absolutely gorgeous at almost-50. (I suppose it's even possible she still does stuff that is, or is close to, sex work; I wouldn't have any reason to know at this point.)
Similarly, there are people who can enjoy penny-ante poker with a group of friends, or even who are capable of playing for higher stakes once a year in Vegas (with disciplined attention to the odds); but most of the _profit_ in gambling operations comes from fleecing people for whom the attraction is compulsive. Similarly, most of the _profit_ in porn comes from feeding the addictions of those who are addictable. (These days often by running display ads, or sometimes web-page-embedded crypto-miner plugins, on sites where people are spending WAY more time than is healthy. Or, perhaps one step up in terms of moral status, via stuff like OnlyFans, where at least the party benefitting is a performer who's probably in financial straits just as bad as most of the customers, rather than some corporate entity engaged in negative-sum extractive economics.)
I am generally pretty in favor of rolling back the legalization of online gambling, and more-strictly regulating in-person gambling. I also would like to see ideas for regulating porn that seemed to be aimed at helping people control their usage, or avoid it if they can't. Instead all I ever see are regulatory regimes that seem obviously intended to reinforce a "morality police" type control of people's bodies and desires.
A good first step would be much better sex ed, teaching people about the role sex plays in relationships, and teaching them to recognize that most porn does not look at all like the kind of sex happy couples have most of the time. If you would like to be in a happy couple, you might want to learn about what kind of sex contributes to that, which you're much more likely to get reading Emily Nagoski, Erika Moen, and Dan Savage, than watching porn. But the types of people who propose regimes to regulate porn pretty uniformly count Nagoski, Moen, and Savage _as porn_, to be banned along with the gonzo stuff on PornHub.
This is a very well thought-out comment. I agree with mostly everything, and the stuff I don't agree with is just semantics and not what I want to draw attention to. Your comment about more sex ed is, I think, very poignant. Growing up in a rural private school, I had zero sex ed. The topic of sex never came up in a healthy classroom environment. I got my sex ed through the internet, unfortunately, and through the inappropriate jokes my friends and I would make. The lack of proper sex ed led me to try to understand my own sexuality and desires through pornographic material, and developed an unhealthy addiction to it. You know, schools that dance around sex ed are calling themselves 'protecting children,' but in reality they are just pushing them to find other unhealthy outlets for their sexuality... outlets that will wind up harming their development in the long run.
Sex ed is the answer to the quote on quote 'hyper sexual society' we find ourselves in. Pretending sex doesn't happen or that it is inherently bad is what has gotten us in this situation in the first place. Anyways, I really appreciated your comment.
These ideas of the fallen woman who becomes worthless because she’s had sex with men doesn’t require pornography.
This is sort of like saying that an obsessive stalker has been "harmed by movies" because he got upset that the movie star he was stalking got married. This woman was just minding her own business making fun videos to entertain people. She is not responsible if a bunch of sickos watch the videos and decided that because she made them, she is a person worthy of contempt.
If anything harmed these men, it wasn't pornography. It was being told that treating women with contempt is an appropriate reaction to pornography, and to sexuality in general. These men were damaged before they watched any porn. Normal people do not react to pornography in that way. Normal people think that porn stars are entertainers worthy of the same respect as any other type of entertainer.
Pornography is one of the few panaceas we have in society. Societies with wider access to it have greater respect for women and lower rates of sex crimes. It entertains and brings pleasure to millions of people. We shouldn't allow messed up weirdos to demonize it.
Thats a great comparison and I totally agree with it: such a person has been harmed by the sensationalism and idol culture intentionally curated by the movies since Lilian Gish & Mary Pickford. I’d say the same about female fans who lost touch with reality in Beatlemania, and John Hinckley Jr attempting to kill Reagan for the approval of Jodi Foster. Media has consequences for our minds! Just because liberal societies that support female rights tolerate the mainstreaming of pornography, violence in entertainment, gambling etc doesn’t mean these things are correlated with or conducive to a healthy and tolerant culture!
The question is, to what extent does media cause these problems and to what extent does it simply change how they manifest? Before the movies would someone like Hinckley have been fine, or would he have stalked someone he knew personally instead of Jodie Foster?
In the case of pornography, it's pretty clear that the people who it "harms" already have extremely toxic views about sexuality. It makes more sense to say that what harmed them was their toxic views, rather than what their toxic views reacted to.
I really don't think it's reasonable to tell someone that they shouldn't do fun and entertaining things because it will hurt terrible people. If those people don't want to be hurt, all they have to do is stop being terrible.
I wonder if some of the reaction wasn’t just pure racism, too.
More essayists should sneak lines by William Blake into their articles. Did he smile his work to see?
Regarding your primary point I agree with you and side with Riley. Your secondary, point, though... "You cannot regard another person as an object, without reducing yourself to less than a person, because if you regard a human as less than human, you deny what matters most about yourself- your humanity. In one way or another, you will grow poorer, whether you start with misogyny, racism, contempt of the poor, or even equal opportunity mean-spiritedness, you are denying the value of what lies at the core of you, humanity." Coaching? Editing? Sport? Transactions? And your tertiary point, that one has a moral duty to be hotter than Jessica Alba before presuming aesthetic judgment, ah...
Bravo, Philosophy Bear. If ever there was a sermon for the chronically online, terminally horny, self-owning sons of incels, this was it. Like Luther nailing his theses to the door of Pornhub Premium. What begins as a pseudo-ironic hate rally becomes a portrait of spectacular hypocrisy so vivid you can practically smell the Cheeto dust and desperation. And the final twist? That she got love while her “victims” got carpal tunnel and a parasocial hangover. Delicious.
To the boys: she’s married. You’re mad. And your moral compass is just a broken dick pointing due north to shame. Long may she reign. Long may your anguish taste like warm Monster Energy and unmetabolised resentment.
Given the far more common narrative of former porn stars… drugs, domestic abuse, conservative views, sucide… this seems at least ‘normal’.
This is what they want for her- then they can pity her, which would also put them above her.