Her early blog posts and magazine articles were, if not exactly deep fried in moral outrage, heavily seasoned with a paradoxically tough sort of twenty-tween skittishness (imagine H.S. Thompson, freaking out but refusing to look away). And who could blame her? No doubt, journalistically lurking on a set where, for example, a large group of men cleared by the HIV screeners waited their turn to have a go at the once popular Houston (the woman, not the sun tortured city that hydrocarbons built) was deeply odd and a bit too fluid intense for a pre-lunch afternoon.
But then, she seemed to get over it. For awhile, I wondered what happened, what changed her outlook and, subsequently, her tone.
Well, age for starters but beyond that I think she let go of a concern about the one thing that lies at the heart of nearly all contentious porn debates: the relentless worry about Male Fantasies.
Do you notice how, when someone wants to make a killer point about the uniquely terrible nature of porn the phrase 'male fantasy' reliably makes an appearance? It's never used as part of a simple statement (i.e., people have fantasies, some of these people -- about 50 percent -- are men) it's always deployed the way you might say 'gunshot wound': something made from stone cold, unalloyed awfulness.
It's a handy rhetorical tool. You can say, 'what about movies that feature only women?' and your debating opponent will wave 'Male Fantasy' around like a picture of a clubbed seal. You might say, 'but, what about the clothed female, naked male sub genre? (purecfnm.com) and the atrocity exhibitor across the aisle will object that although the situation isn't overtly violent, the women involved are still serving the Moloch-like demands of the Male Fantasy Industrial Complex.
'Male Fantasy' is the Loki of debating widgets.
...
The other thing that changed Ms. Breslin's tone was something head slappingly simple: she interviewed and befriended male and female workers in the biz. She let them speak and listened to what they said. The gist: of course the industry is often destructive and exploitative, but so is just about every form of employment under capitalism which either wrecks your health (for example, coal mining) or warps your way of thinking or forces you to spend uncounted hours worrying about how you're going to get by. Also, guess what: sometimes it's fun to work out a female fantasy on camera. It happens. It happens a lot more often than the atrocity exhibitors (who're often too busy defending people from themselves while stuffing their ears or crying 'False Consciousness!' when the would-be rescued speak) will acknowledge.
In other words, the subject is as difficult to pin down as any other part of life.
.d.
-- "Is Michael Bay a toddler?"
Mike Nelson
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/