Are We Greedy? Stupid? What?
I look at this industry and I am appalled by what I am seeing. let’s take the recent AVN show. The over riding theme of the show was stopping piracy, there were speeches, PSA’s run during the awards, it was on everyones mind.
Yet who was the sponsor that AVN chose to put front and center? Brazzers, the biggest tube site owners on earth. Was the money worth selling out your entire industry? Are you that greedy? or that stupid? What? I really dont get it.
Then the industry trade association says hey we have the solution…we will PAY the tube sites not to pirate our content, if you dont pay, well yer on yer own….It’s the age old protection racket.
So that’s not bad enough? Lets kill off our most valuable asset, our performers. They are easily replaced, who cares if the STD rate in porn is over 10 times the national average, it don’t cost us nothing, they pay for their own testing at OUR clinic that does substandard tests with a make believe doctor, all at a 120% profit margin. They believe whatever we tell them because they are young, dumb and expendable, not unlike 18 year olds who join the Army.
Bill Margold once testified before the Congress and he simply told them that if they want porn to go away all they have to do is leave us alone and we will destroy ourselves.
He was chastised for it by the industry. Looks like he was right.
10 Responses
[New Post] Why Are We Killing Ourselves? – via #twitoaster http://www.mikesouth.com/porn-idiocy/why…
I been telling people this for the longest. Sadly, nobody see the big picture any more. They accept quick solutions to make things go away. Also they rather bow down than fight. The lawsuits are a waste of time because of the people who are supplying leaked content are adult industry professionals. They want companies to buy scripts to protect their content ans site but give the knowledge to hack the site to others for a price.The way the industry is battling privacy is cowardly and a joke especially since they attack the users and not the suppliers who steal illegal content.
This biz, at least on the Internet side of things, has always been incestuous, cannibalistic, short-sighted, penny wise and dollar foolish… Pick a cliché and it probably fits. Due to the relatively low cost of entry the vast majority of people in this biz have never had a business before, nor do they have any business education.
The difference over the last four or five years is the lack of exponential growth in users that made up for all the other shortcomings. Without that growth the consequences are coming home to roost.
How many times do I have to say it? I culture’s political system is determined by it’s moral ideas. By “political system”, here, I don’t mean how to the government is organized. I mean it in the literal sense of the word “politics” – from the Greek “polis” (“city”), to the Greek “polites” (“citizen”), and finally to “politikos” (“of citizens or the state”). What this means is that *EVERY* interaction between two or more human beings – not just directly affecting government – is political.
Anyways, the porn industry has either inherited or established (it doesn’t really matter) a culture full of “citizens” who think that it’s okay to have what they do not deserve. I don’t mean have material objects – I mean spiritual values. Do you want fame and prestige? Don’t waste your time trying to do something that is actually admirable – simply convince people that what you’re doing IS admirable. Do you want a vibrant social life? Don’t bother acquiring knowledge and wisdom that is actually WORTH sharing at social events – simply impress people with what you own or what you look like (even if it makes you completely one-dimensional).
The bottom line is this: our culture – our “politics” – is completely dominated by people who want the unearned. Unearned virtue, unearned fame, unearned mercy, unearned LOVE.
When you are involved in an industry that either causes or exacerbates this view of existence (again, which one it actually is doesn’t actually matter), what do you expect? When you, in every movie you make, implicitly tell your customers that it is okay to be a fat hairy slob who lives with his mother – he’s still entitled to the mental sensation of fucking a beautiful woman – what do you expect? What PRINCIPLE makes you think that he will restrain himself from taking the unearned MATERIAL value that is your intellectual property? An out-of-context appeal to tradition or authority (“America is supposed to be about private property and individual rights”) is not a principle – it’s a mindless, unteneable rule.
Your industry either created, or helped to inflame, the state of cultural affairs you are seeing now. YOu have ABSOLUTELY no right to complain when cause and effect work themselves out.
sad but so true
Deepak Chopra in the house!
Yes let’s blame the porn industry for vanity, egoism, entitlements and materialism, I mean it’s not like those things even existed before the 1970s right?
Ya Nate….using his logic the jews got what they deserved … and so did the Nazis….
I like taking my destiny into my own hands and not relying on someone else’s beliefs about balance and who deserves what
Way to ignore what I said – both of you. Again, it doesn’t matter if porn “created, or helped to inflame, the state of the culture” – all that matters is that the proper political principles cannot be reliably held by people with a pathological committment to having what they do not deserve. What could be any more sure to cause, or prolong, that in people than the idea that the mental pleasure that comes from a sexual experience with a beautiful woman requires nothing more than $14.99 and a DVD player?
You’re both trying to maintain an unteneable balance between two conflicting facts. The fact that you want to enjoy the benefits of a society that respects property rights and freedom of expression, and the fact that such a society DEPENDS DIRECTLY upon a more fundamental respect for reason and logic. Your every dollar is the result of pandering to the unreasonablness and illogic of people – you shouldn’t be surprised that they carry it further.
You have abused the political freedom that the personal integrity of those who came before you created. No amount of ineffective complaining about things like piracy, or pointlessly screaming your love for Libertarian political ideas, is going to change that. The uncomfortable feelings that you live with as a result – the ones that make you do those things (as well as ignore the crux of my argument) – is the price you must pay for trying to make more money out of dirty movies than you should have ever wanted to make.
I know it disappoints you that I’m not going to argue that porn is inherently worthless. It may have some MARGINAL value in a rational life. Maybe so, maybe not – I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that a society that is capable of maintaining a republican form of government can only tolerate so much irrationality and hedonism before it becomes INCAPABLE of maintaining such a government. So really, what difference does it makes? Either, in some hypothetical past, you realized this beforehand and foregoed trying to make any more than a little bit of extra spending money by filming women naked (you did this for the sake of maintaining the culture, and thus political structure, that makes your more important values possible), or you fuck up – or at least contribute to fucking up even more – the culture, and as a result they start undermining your profitability through piracy to a certain a degree? Six in one, a half a dozen in the other.
Oh, that’s right, I know the difference. The reason why the first is acceptable to you and the second is not is because you, personally, don’t have any more fundamental values than the possession of money. There’s nothing to protect underneath your ability to use money to get the kind of women you have in your life. There’s no reason NOT to do what you do since, to you – just like your “sucker” customers that you in secret despise – your self-estimation (ie: a self-made fat ugly slob) means that the only way you could ever “deserve” such women is to pay them to fake it. The fact that you do it in front of the camera, and your viewers do it behind it, changes nothing.
You don’t deserve the women you’ve had, the money you’ve made, or the political system that’s made it all possible.
http://www.literalmayhem.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/fuck-you-tomato.jpg
Dantes (or Goodwill, whichever you prefer this week),
It’s pretty obvious that neither Mike nor Nate ignored you. They simply didn’t waste alot of unnecessary time addressing a pointless and erratic argument.
While in effect, parts of your statement are totally true. There is a certain class of people who feel they are entitled to enjoy the same success, fame, money, women, power, pleasure, whatever, you name it, as those who have made an effort to pursue said endeavors, regardless of whether they’ve actually done anything to earn or deserve it. Here, I’ll be quite blunt. In a rational society, we refer to those people as either thieves or bums.
Where your theory gets really warped is the idea that the producers of such material have a hand in creating this attitude. The idea of “unearned entitlement” probably predates your inane definitions of the root words you offered. There have always been those who by one means or another have what others don’t and wish they did. Throughout history, those who haven’t made an effort to obtain such goals have taken any opportunity to seize what they believe they are rightfully entitled to. In recent years, the advent of the internet has given rise to an entire new breed of thieves by facilitating the anonymous theft of not only porn, but mainstream movies and music, software and games, and a variety of other products that have been created, developed, and produced by artists, technicians, businesses, and entrepreneurs who actually DESERVE a financial gain on their investments and efforts. In my humble opinion, these are among the lowest class of thieves, in that they would never rob a bank or mug somebody in a park. That would not only take a physical effort, but would also have a risk factor involved that most cowrads aren’t prepared to take. The bottom line, however, is that taking something you don’t own is stealing. Blaming the theft on the original owner is over the edge of ludicrous. And in your case, a thinly veiled attempt to continue an attack you’ve already lost so many times in the past.
We get it, dude. You don’t like porn. So find other sites that don’t cater tot he porn industry. I’ve heard that sites do exist on the internet that have nothing to do with porn, although I’m not personally familiar with any.
Oh, and speaking of the internet as a facilitator to theft. Remember this, in case you ever become a victim of identity theft. The poor sole who empties your bank account, runs up all your credit cards, uses your social security number for nefarious purposes, and takes out a second mortgage on your house is NOT at fault. The blame lies with you for possessing what he was so obviously entitled to.