Replies To Danielle's Journal and Video Logs

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

I just watched video log 713, wherein you reply to Anoree's questions about the future of the adult film industry.

While I have encouraged you to look into Virtual Reality and related technologies by visiting a Phoenix arcade, I suspect it is still too early for you to try launching into anything like full-scale VR production. I think arcades will help acquaint more people with the experience and lead to increased deployment and the evolution of gear which keeps getting more standardized, inexpensive and capable.

But that's not to say that doing experiments is prohibitively expensive any more, as was the case a decade ago! Spend a few minutes to see what one can accomplish with the Ricoh Theta S, a "360-degree" video camera which TODAY only costs about $250, Amazon page here, by watching the OLD review here.

Eager to promote VR and related technologies, both Facebook and Youtube host the sort of video produced by cameras like these for free. You could shoot a free promotional video and post it on Youtube for signed-in "adult" users to enjoy, soliciting feedback. And if the results were good, you might even start a for-profit "side hustle" shooting similar matter for your fellow metro-Phoenix adult film talent!

As to the question of what to do about media piracy, there is no simple answer. First, appreciate that it is not a problem peculiar to porn. ALMOST ANY information product is subject to the same abuse: other types of films, books, software, and most famously of all, music.

Video games are an exception for a couple special reasons:
(1) Although distribution media naively appear to be conventional optical disks, they are NOT, being incompatible media which proprietary game consoles alone can easily read.
(2) Multiplayer online games ADDITIONALLY require the coordination of a chaperoned server, which makes the end-user software useless absent a paid subscription to such a server.

One book which tries to intelligently discuss how commercial artists of all sorts can try to cope with a post-Napster world in which piracy is unavoidable is Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, Amazon page here.
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You will recall that I have continued to encourage you to leverage and embellish your film-making skills to enable yourself to enjoy a vocation that cannot be attacked by piracy, such as making sex tapes for private couples. And as a video production professional, there's no reason you couldn't venture into things like making videos which advertise firms, or instruct in the use of products and services - which are paid for by clients who would like nothing better than for them to be reproduced and distributed wthout limit.

As to creating adult films with better production values and deeper emotional depth, to make stories which escape the fungability of austere porn (which aesthetically resembles action stunt matter) - the world seems to be there already! Four decades ago the late porn pioneer Gerard Damiano said the day would come that adult films and conventional films would approach one another in content, creating the all-but-seamless continuum we enjoy today. For example, consider the STARZ cable-TV serial "The Girlfriend Experience," inspired by the Sasha Grey film of the same name. In season two, one of the episodes clearly shows, on a smartphone video screen, a woman fellating what looks to be indistinguishable from a man's penis.

Now, that's not to say that cable TV episodes escape piracy any more than the type of stuff you produce, but at least for now, the convenience of a cable subscription provides enough incentive for enough people not to seek it out to save a few bucks a month, that the business remains sustainable.

As always, you have my best wishes for success in our rough-and-tumble Brave New World. Please continuously make serious long-term savings against the uncertainties everyone will face, and need overcome, in the future.

Ron The Logician

[RonTheLogician]

Hello Dani,

I am wont to let several months pass between the times I binge-watch your new video logs, so forgive me if I raise old issues about which you may have even forgotten. I had been editing the following material on and off over several months. Now, having just seen your video log 714 (which addresses disparagement of sex workers), I've decided to get off my butt and finally publish it here!

I was sad, but not surprised, to hear your report about being harassed on Twitter. Almost everyone even slightly in the public eye has been subject to that sort of thing, whatever occupational career they pursue. The New York Times article here about Twitter co-founder Evan Williams reports: "Four out of 10 [ordinary!] adult internet users said in a Pew survey that they had been harassed online." It quotes Williams as saying "I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place... I was wrong about that... I think the internet is broken..."

Let me elaborate concerning the additional factor of your career as a porn player.

I remind you that you've made money by doing stuff like Public Humiliation. The key question today is: Where does Danielle the porn player end, and you, the real-life person you are, begin? Why should you be suprised that clients might reach you by Twitter to verbally abuse you in ways which are much less transgressive that what happens to you in video products? If you can play a role, why can't they?

Further, I caution you there are sick people who can't separate fantasy and reality. It only takes one such person to come close to ending your life, as sadomasichistic porn veteran Sharon Mitchell discovered one horrible day in the late 1990s! I strongly encourage you to explore the issue I raise by watching the 2017 Lifetime television "biopic" of Duke University student and porn star Belle Knox titled From Straight A's to XXX. (Alas, as I write this, I can't find a legitimate source for it, e.g. Amazon or NetFlix.)

Should you want to continue exploiting Twitter, there are ready methods to protect your feelings. Most celebrities never reply to non-celebrities who post on their feed, denying any provacateur the satisfaction of seeing any of their irritation succeed. In the end, no one knows if celebrities only post, and leave any reading of responses to a personal assistant (PA), if anyone at all. And those with thick skins sometimes pose as their own PA if they elect to occasionally respond to someone making a post, as there is no practical problem if a person wants to use multiple Twitter accounts. And finally, Twitter provides limited faclities to censor irritating posters.

In the two posts which will follow, I'll address two particular provocations you decided to detail in a vlog last year.

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[RonTheLogician]

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First, insults leveled at your voluptuous figure.

What people find sexually attractive variously ENORMOUSLY between eras, societies, and individuals within a particular society of a particular era as well. Your type of figure often set the standard of beauty before the Industrial Revolution, likely because it meant that you were well fed, unlike so very many poor souls, the vast majority of which literally knew starvation every generation. The classical examples are the beauties of the celebrated Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), such as portrayed in the work below, The Judgment of Paris.

Aside: This painting also appears in a wonderful textbook titled Discovering Human Sexuality, 3rd ed (Sinauer, 2015), Amazon page here, which I'd heartily recommend for your study, based on my cursory perusal. Among other things, it includes a revealing photo of your would-be friend, the birth-gifted DoubleDickDude!

And according to one layman, quoted in The Atlantic issue of Dec 13, 2011, curvy was also the rage in the (much more recent) Victorian times:

Bob Fitzpatrick, a finance student at the University of Michigan [says] 'Back in the Victorian age, it was sexy to be really pale because it meant you didn't work in the fields,' he says. 'Or it was sexy to be fat because it meant you could afford to eat lots of meals.'

Further, please note that even today, it can be very helpful for an adult film player to stay very far away from anorexia. Just listen to the words of wisdom from your often-funny sometime-pal, the full-figured Ron Jeremy, here.

If you are willing to look further afield, to cultures from which very few if any Americans reckon their descent, you can find all types of physicality embraced as erotic, as evidenced by the carefully researched new book Sex Rules! Astonishing Sexual Practices and Gender Roles Around the World (Mango, 2017), Amazon page here. In part, it writes:

Somewhere in this world you’re a perfect 10... Whatever your looks, you are a fabulous beauty… You just need to be in the right place... Thick, fat calves? Adorable, according to the Tiv of Nigeria... Rotund body with big buttocks and large, round legs? The Baganda of Uganda will lust after you... Huge, protruding rear end? Makes you stunning, say the Khoikhoi of southern Africa—the bigger your butt, the more alluring... Bulbous stomach and big hips? You’re the pin-up girl for the South Pacific Mangaia Island.

All this BBW love reminds me of a song from a record-breaking off-Broadway musical which began playing over a dozen years before your birth, titled Let My People Come. It is sung by a chubby girl who aspires to be the peer of the leading female porn stars of her day: Linda Lovelace (star of Deep Throat), Marilyn Chambers and Georgina Spelvin. Give it a listen here and smile!

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[RonTheLogician]

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Now, second, onto attempts to use the word "whore" to insult you and your work.

The word "whore" originally simply meant a woman who practiced free love, without any implication of material compensation:

The Germanic terms hore/hure/whore and whoredom are well known from ecclesiastical legislation and theology, but they had no clear direct reference to paid sex. On the contrary, they referred to all kinds of extramarital sex, independent of whether one earned money from it. A whore normally would be not a prostitute but a loose woman.

- Chapter 10, Love For Sale: A World History of Prostitution (see below)

In that double-standard world, men who behaved exactly the same way would be celebrated as a "Don Juan" or a "Casanova." Is that sensible or just? Also observe that starting with the Baby Boom generation, the number of lifetime sex partners the average ordinary American engages has exploded, multiplying about a dozen-fold. Damn near "all" of us are now "whores"! Indeed, the book The Porning of America (Beacon, 2008), Amazon page here, argues that in this century, porn stars have become more like lay (snicker!) people, and lay people more like porn stars. But sadly, this is not the case when it comes to STIs. The increased promiscuity of people today has created an STI crisis, EXCEPT when exclusive resort is made to tested and sequestered brothel prostitutes, or the regularly tested members of the adult film profession, such as yourself. Listen to what a contemporary USA physician says here.

Prostitution, i.e. sex (especially coitus) in exchange for money, has always been illegal in Communist bloc and Muslim nations. The United States is rather unusual, in that as a nation never so described, it has made prostitution per se illegal and untolerated almost everywhere - but ONLY in the last century or so. I suspect that this is related to the fact that today it is so anomolously religious for a First World nation. (Btw, it is little appreciated that USA church membership rates were enormously LOWER in its early history of independence.) Ironically however, the (Catholic) Church of the Middle Ages in Western Europe was in the very business of operating brothels, for the sake of obviating adultery by married women (but NOT their husbands), thereby protecting the "sanctity" of marriage.

Learn more about the history of prostitution in America here.

Other good references on this occupation spanning many societies and ages are:
Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Greenwood, 2006), Amazon page here &
Love For Sale: A World History of Prostitution (Grove, 2005), Amazon page here.

The bottom line is that whether someone tries to hurt your feelings by calling you either a whore or a harlot, I hope you now have ready emotional ammunition for blowing it off! I'll leave the final word on the matter to 12-year-old Violet, the protagonist of the famous 1978 English-language French-made film Pretty Baby, as portrayed by then-young Brooke Shields. Watch the clip here.

If you don't know this film, surely as a Bossier City baby you should want to see it, as it is set a century ago in the famous Storyville legal red-light district of Louisiana's Big Easy, the city of New Orleans. Note also the aformentioned encyclopedia has a couple of articles titled New Orleans and Storyville. By the way, at the time (1978) that Pretty Baby was made, many Americans were shocked at the idea of a 12-year-old hooker, because they had also forgotten how low the age of consent had been in centuries past, including that era.

Childhood and Sexuality: Contemporary Issues and Debates (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017) states:

When Hirschfeld made a survey of the age of consent in 50 countries at the start of the twentieth century, he found variances from 12 to 16. Whilst the necessity of an age of consent became accepted, the age itself was still subject to debate. For example, in Catholic countries the age was 12–13...

And The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) states:

Colonial America adopted the form of statutory rape laws from English law... Cocca’s research reveals that the age of consent to sexual intercourse for girls was most commonly 10 in 1885, though 12 in some states.

Btw, do you know the 2007 Cajun-style song Bossier City? Find a recording here, and lyrics here.

And what about the much-older 1974 C&W song Bossier City? Find a recording here, and lyrics here. Yeah, I recall you don't like C&W!

[RonTheLogician]

Hello Dani,

I'm sorry to hear that after all the sexual liberation we've enjoyed this century that your mom continues to cling to attitudes quite common when she was growing up concerning things like adult films, to the point that you report she is ashamed to reveal the nature of your work to her colleagues.

Even as I hope to make suggestions you can undertake to try modernizing her attitude, I also counsel that you try to show some understanding of where she's coming from. You probably cannot BEGIN to imagine how sex, much less sexual art, was denigrated as "dirty" and "shameful" during her childhood in America, whatever her social background. To start, consider these milestones:

Until 1952, film had NO First Amendment protection. States could, and did, prohibit the display not only of sexual matters, but also things like "blasphemy" - things that particular religions found insulting! So much for freedom of religion, as well as speech!

Until 1958, states could pass laws making photographic portrayal of ANY type of nudity criminal. That year, the courts ruled that "nude is not automatcally lewd," finally protecting folks who published magazines and films concerning America's naturist (non-sexual social nudity) movement. The KEY word was automatically: circa 1971, the courts landed up holding that individual communities could impose their own local obscenity standards concerning the type of films that could be shown in theaters. Such a constraint only became substantially moot when adult video moved to electronic tapes, and later, to the Internet, beyond the practical reach of local pressure groups and prosecutors.

And it wasn't only "porn" which was stigmatized. To a large degree, sex itself, including MARITAL sex, was crippled by all sorts of laws. In the 1870s, Comstock made sending virtually ALL sex-related materials through the US mail illegal, including stuff like information on birth control. When Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in 1917, New York State shuttered it. Not until the 1930's did the courts finally protect sending birth control information through the US mail.

Until 1965, states could, and did, pass laws preventing MARRIED couples from buying birth control products. The same protection of freedom did not reach unmarried (straight) couples until 1973.

And of course, until the early years of THIS century, states could, and did, pass laws making "sodomy" illegal. This not only made gay sex illegal, but ALSO oral and anal sex between straight couples, EVEN married couples!

So during most of your mom's life, especially her impressionable childhood, repression of sex and sexual art was very severe and uncompromising, and she had to at least appear to acquiesce to same. More, being human, she almost certainly found it less humiliating to rationalize these restrictions as just and sensible, if Stockholm Syndrome wasn't enough to do the job.

I'd like to commend to your attention a wonderful new HBO series, The Deuce, of which I've seen only three epsiodes. It concerns the sexual culture and evolving sex industry in early 1970s New York City, in particular the area on 42nd Street near the de facto red light district around Times Square. As a teen resident in that city back then, I can assure you it does a very faithful job of capturing both the sexual and non-sexual cultural details of those times!

Things like prostitution and porn were half-tolerated for the sake of keeping them out of other places. As they were illegal, there was no protection by law - meaning that "protection" came from pimps who'd beat up clients who hurt or short-changed their girls - at least when they weren't hurting their girls themselves for not working hard enough for them. The same deal applied to drug abuse and the illegal drug trade, and there were perhaps half a dozen serious violent crimes EVERY day in that area!

This sort of reality reinforced the idea in people like your Mom that sex trades are "inherently" unhealthy, dangerous, etc - and a SURE route to poverty! Of course, the only thing MAKING that so was the absence of protection which every legal activity enjoys! Today, you don't hear about all the violence and death surrounding the sale of liquor - because there is very little. But when it was illegal in the 1920's, there was more than enough of that to go around!

To start your Mom on the route to reform, I'd like to have you read a book: Sex in the Museum: My Unlikely Career at New York's Most Provocative Museum, Amazon page here. It is a wonderful book on three levels: the story of how any museum gets started up, the story of the romantic life of a young woman of today, and a serious look at the nature, history and culture of sexuality. Sarah Forbes, the book's anthropologist author is quoted here, so:

When I first started working at the Museum of Sex in 2004, the institution wasn’t allowed to advertise in the subways due to the taboo of the topic. Now the Museum can be found on billboards across the city and spotted on your morning commute.

While, in some ways, this is due to people’s understanding that the Museum of Sex is actually a museum, it is also a part of a larger cultural shift in which the mainstream is more aware of and open to the diversity of sexuality. The Internet has exposed many to the depths of definitions of sex that were once considered fringe... While we still have a long way to go, over the last decade working in this field, I have seen a tremendous cultural normalization when it comes to sex.

When you finish this book, I want you to urge your mom to read it as well, so that it can form the basis of a discussion on sex between you. Mom's formal sex education was likely quite limited, and I'd be surprised if most of what she knows about the subject was wasn't gleaned from whispered discussions and the school of hard knocks.

When I have more time, I'd like to suggest additional material you may find useful in enlightening Mom to an alternative point of view concerning sex and sexual art.

Best always,
Ron The Logician

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

After all the serious stuff I wrote above, I thought I'd treat you to a little music which celebrates the liberation of porn we have been lucky enough to enjoy in recent times.

Above, Sarah Forbes asserted that

...the mainstream is [now] more aware of and open to the diversity of sexuality. The Internet has exposed many to the depths of definitions of sex that were once considered fringe...

To prove her points, the singing group DaVinci's Notebook offers up the tune Internet Porn, here.

And as to your assertion that porn itself is now mainstream, the smash hit Broadway musical from the previous decade, Avenue Q, examines this hypothesis in the tune The Internet is for Porn, here.

Keep smiling!
Ron the Logician

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

I heard you when you complained in a recent video log about repressive sex laws which undermine your social and economic freedom. And by now you know how much worse it was in previous generations. So it is all the more amazing that almost a half-century ago the musical Let My People Come came along to stand up and say, "Enough is Enough!" (Indeed, following up on feebler similar protests over the previous decade.)

First, I'd ask you to hear what inspired such a project - supposedly the highest grossing Off-Broadway production in history - by downloading and viewing the 4-minute video clip here.

Then, listen to the wonderful song from the show which tells off the jerks behind so many repressive sex laws, I Believe My Body, here. And do enjoy the religious fervor with which it expresses its message, given that sexual repression has so often been religiously inspired.

You might even share this post with your mom and see what she thinks about it!

Ron the Logician