>Also, perhaps I'm full of myself, but I think I made a valid point
>earlier: moralizing about one particular kind of wage labor is
>divisive (e.g., saying sex work "isn't peachy keen" rather than
>emphasizing that all wage labor is alienating). Am I full of shit?
>Is that trivial?
I think it was a good point. I also think that, while unions may be incremental improvements, that's missing the point. unions are supposed to bring people together in common struggle, they create an institutional infrastructure through which people nurture practices, resources, skills, and so forth. BEing in a union means you work on improving not just your lot, but the lot of others in your workplace, industry, whatever. Realizing how you have that kind of power, when organized, means that you will be more likely to support the union struggles of others (and this has empirical support) by honoring picket lines, perhaps even being willing to engage in support strikes, etc. Unions are about solidarity -- and solidarity all over the world is the ideal, yes? So, unions are not frivolous things and _never_ merely about improving working conditions.
I'm reminded that I was looking up the numbers and it's pretty interesting that support for unions is actually increasing and we aren't that much different than places like Canada and Australia.
Oh, and also, I'd say it's vital to support unions for sex workers. One of the problems, as Carrol has alluded to, is that unionizing today is somewhat more difficult because you don't have the advantage of masses of people working in one plant. As Yoshie, I think, pointed out, it's hard to get freelancers to unionize, though they see the advantages of it, because they are independent producers, often working out of their homes. It's a tough row to hoe. If you can organize sex workers, it may just be on a somewhat different model than the model upon with 20th century unions were built. That model may prove to be far more useful to us in organizing a lot of other professions -- in terms of just the lessons learned from such a venture.
Happy Mother's day, the second oldest profession. :)
At 11:17 PM 5/7/2005, Leigh Meyers wrote:
> > Try this instead
> >
> > http://www.janesguide.com/
> > ___________________________________
>
>
>Is janesguide supposed to be alt? How?
Nothing about 'alt' was required when you mentioned that we should hit google to get a random selection of pr0n sites. You didn't claim that Googling would give anyone a sense of what's "alt" on the Internet. Carrol just pointed you at a site that would give you a range of what's out there, from high art erotica to raunch, all with reviews. You can't even say with much predictability that Google will give you the _most popular_ sites since the pr0n industry is usually on the cutting edge when it comes to web development. that also means they spend a good deal of money staying one step ahead in the search engine ranking game.
(Wish Laura were here so we could get a rant about why it seems that nearly every kind of kinky sex is fetishized, but we don't hear much about menstrual sex, damn it!)
Aside from which, wouldn't you say that, if anything, you're going to find a lot more "alternative" (and how are we defining the term anyway?) pr0n -- a lot more than you'll find in your local XXX video den ya think --where the production, distribution, and marketing costs are going to be higher.
>Now you can check my "cookie" snit.
No cookies needed. Referrer logs are the inevitable result of the very mechanism by which the Internet works. Your computer has to tell any server it visits which site it was at last. If you were visiting lbo-talk.org before mine, your computer tells my server and I have a record. You have them all for your site, too.