>Not only Rob but all men who enjoy porn surely _know_ that female models in
>porn posing or acting to appear as if they had an 'intention to arouse' men
>are doing just that--posing & acting, for money they need or want. The
>same for prostitutes who sell sexual services with physical contact.
a) I thought this is exactly what Marx was on about when he talked about alienation - when he talked about the commodity hiding behind it the human relations that actually constitute it. I couldn't enjoy a cup of tea if I thought about Sri Lankan pickers with aching backs and tyrannical foremen, could I? But I have to enjoy at least my cuppa ... surely? What would you leave me with, Yoshie?
b) Tommy Lee Jones acts, too - and I like watching his movies. I suspend disbelief so to do. And let my imagination make the best of it. And making the relations of production invisible is all too easy to do, eh? (check marvellous monologue attached below)
c) Generalising about sex workers can be useful (we do need to generalise in these debates), but let's not go further with it than we need to. A friend of mine, whom I've known since we studied classics together twenty-three years ago, took her Honours degree and rather posh ways to Sydney and has been a sex worker there ever since. Her life is not the life of Gorris's women, and it's not the one you would have her live either. Class has something to do with this, I think. It'd be hard for her pretty well-off clients (she's not cheap) to take her for a gormless object of gratification even whilst the transaction was in progress - easier to think like that if the 'object' is not of one's own class, I think.
And service work is not universally work where those you serve are the enemy. As a waiter, I've felt like shit and generally disliked the diners (a class differential was presumed and built into the relationship, I think). As a barman and a teacher, I've felt very close to, and respectful of, those I serve (no class differential assumed and none catered for). Were people inclined to buy my sexual services, the median of attitudes towards me by my clients would have a lot to do with how I felt about those people (and I reckon class, and assumptions about it, would be pretty determinant).
d) Promised Marvellous monologue - It's out of a Wallace Shawn monologue *The Fever* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).
One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep -- Volume One of *Capital* by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers -- the coal miners, the child laborers -- I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.
His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things -- one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money -- as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the *coat* and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."
A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history -- the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people -- the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer -- who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.
For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.