I don’t think this has to be the case with pornographic material. Like any other occupation, it should be regulated. But like everything else in our society, where ever women are involved, especially economically or socially disadvantaged women, things like exploitation are often overlooked.

I absolutely agree that someone working in violent porn is going to get hurt in ways that I find pretty unacceptable. My point was that the reason I find it unacceptable has less to do with someone getting hurt for money and more to do with the context in which they are getting hurt. S&M is always going to disturb me far more than a boxing match. The problem is that I’m not really sure how to create a worker regulation scheme that mitigates the danger present in the harder side of porn but doesn’t accidentally ban otherinherently injurious jobs.

It is absolutely important to maintain the right to free speech, but your right does not extend to where you are speaking through another. If you’re paying someone to be hurt on screen, you’re making them do the heavy lifting for your speech and introducing an element of economic coercion to boot. After all, you can’t force your employees to stand on the “not a step” of a ladder so as to express yourself. If you can get your friends to do it for free, that’s another issue,

I’m not so sure thats a workable standard, mostly because you would have to generalize it. Sure, it seems like a great standard for the extremes that porn represents, but it would cripple the film industry. Take a stunt person, for instance. The risks they face when filming a scene are often times greater than what you’d find on a porn set. They’re being asked to get hurt on camera for money in the name of someone else’s art. The only difference between a stunt woman being thrown from a car after a chase scene and a porn star participating in an SM sequence is context.

I think pro-wrestling is a pretty good analog. Like pornography, calling wrestling art is a stretch. Like extreme porn, wrestling focuses on people being hurt for entertainment, with the level of simulation varying widely from performance to performance. Nearly all of the people who work in that business are employees, doing what they do for money. While the vast majority of the violence is staged, there are many instances when the performers are asked to actually sustain the kind of injuries you’d see in extreme SM. People cut themselves so they’ll bleed for the camera, real thumb-tacks and barbed wire are sometimes used in “hardcore” matches, hard slaps are traded because they make a lot of noise but don’t actually injure, and the entire idea of the performance is to mimic blunt trauma.

Still, the men and women who wrestle not only consent to the activities, but worked for years to break into the business. Most of them take on this line of work because they enjoy it, though many of the older performers work because they don’t know how to do anything else. Should we use worker’s rights laws to take away their livelihood, to protect them from themselves?

Where do you draw the line, how do you decide in what context violence and risk on the job is acceptable and in what context it is not. More importantly, how do you make sure that the definitions you set to deal with disgusting porn don’t begin ripple outwards. How do you mitigate unintended consequences?

There are people willing to be pinched and paddled, but not willing to have vanilla sex on camera, and vice versa. And then there are many, many people who simply don’t want to have sex on film for money. These constitute the majority. So to impose a majority labor standard on porn is obviously problematic — most people don’t want to have sex on film, so when the job is having sex on film, how do we find a general standard? I mean, I guess it can occupy a category of outre labor along with fishing in Alaska and being an acrobat and other oddball or high-risk occupations; though porn is less high-risk than fishing in Alaska it’s probably about as oddball as being an acrobat, in that most average people off the street would not be suitable hires. I don’t know enough about government regulation of occupations, but if you refuse to apply for jobs with dangerous or abnormal working conditions, can you get an unemployment check?

Majority labor standards pose their own set of problems. Eight to five are normal working hours, judged sane and acceptable and healthy — which is great for those who can hack it, but I have a sleep disorder, meaning I’m probably going to wind up sleeping a maximum of twenty to twenty-five hours in a work week on those hours, and various of my normal immune processes shut down when I do that. It’s kind of scary. This drastically limits the number of jobs I can go look for, and when I try to explain it, people tend to think I’m lazy. I can’t really say, looking at all the people around me, that working eight to five is an outre, unacceptable labor condition that no one should be forced to accept. I can say that I really can’t force myself to accept it, at least not until they come up with a pill that makes my circadian rhythms work normally.

Posit:

1. No one should be forced to accept a working condition that’s bad for their physical or mental health.

2. There are degrees of bad. There’s kinda sorta bad and then there’s really bad.

3. “What’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.”

4. Certain normal working conditions can definitively be stated to be bad for the majority of people (porn, fishing in Alaska) but not every person finds these conditions bad, and for any given non-majority normal working condition, there will be a rare few people who find it ideal. An example would be: for me, the graveyard shift.

5. There are things that happen on the job that are not normal working conditions (someone dies, someone is badly injured, someone is infected with HIV, someone rapes someone else. “Minor infliction of pain” has precedents as a potentially normal working condition; “severe bodily injury” has precedents as not ever a normal working condition.) Any job with a high likelihood of these incidents needs to consider the risk to be a working condition, and plan accordingly as far as both lessening the risk and compensating for it.

…This is a totally unfinished thought, but that’s blog comments for you. Love to see what others have to say, etc.