I'm listening to RevLeft's episode on proletarian feminism and wondering about this. I think we can agree that in a global socialist society, the sex trade disappears. Under socialism, people only have sex because they want to. At the same time, almost all pornography produced under capitalism is itself produced under coercion. (A small number of porn stars are relatively wealthy and produce pornography because they enjoy it, not because they have to.) If a socialist society decides to make access to that pornography free for all, doesn't that mean that the porn stars (and all other workers involved in the production of pornography) are still being exploited, even if they're dead? In a socialist society, does all desire to jerk off to pornography wither away, since a sexual revolution has presumably also taken place and most people are relatively satisfied with regard to their sexual needs? Will some pornography still exist, produced by the proletariat for the consumption of the proletariat? Will future socialist porn stars be considered heroes of labor? I don't think we ever catch anyone in Star Trek jerking off to porn.

  • drhead [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In all likelihood, it would look like free amateur porn (like most NSFW content on reddit, for example), since that already exists today. There are people who like the idea of "showing off", so to speak, so as long as those people are able to do so, it will exist. I would expect a socialist society to generally lower or even eliminate the average required workload for basic subsistence, so that would likely mean increased supply.

      • drhead [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I am honestly not sure how prevalent this is. I'm gay, and without going into too much detail about my personal preferences, I have good reason to suspect things are different with the specific type of stuff I look at, and that very nearly all if not all of it is or was initially uploaded by the people featured.

          • drhead [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Well for one, I would normally expect revenge porn to be uploaded in a huge batch, not as a trickle of content like most amateur porn social media accounts typically do (a lot of the stuff I'm talking about is predominantly solo content, for clarity). Like, some even have fan engagement videos (short videos for talking to fans) which is a surefire sign that it's legitimate. You could fake the appearance of someone regularly making and uploading content to an extent, even spacing it out over a long enough period to where they don't appear to age too fast, but I don't think it would necessarily be easy and it honestly sounds like way too much effort for revenge. I mean I haven't ever been in a state of mind where I thought it would be reasonable to leak someone's nudes so I don't know how far these people would go, but still. There is a lot that custody can't be verified on, though, like a lot of old content that has been reuploaded a million times from where sites have been deleted (like tumblr), because those are places where people voluntarily published a lot of content, but that can't be verified by people any more and we also don't know if the person is still okay with it floating around the web.

            Also reminder that the professional porn industry has been caught doing EXTREMELY coercive and bad things before as well. So while free amateur stuff clearly isn't the white whale of ethical consumption under capitalism for reasons you described, nobody involved necessarily is having their labor value exploited, and in some respects we can have a better idea of what's going on behind the scenes while in other respects we can't. As long as we have the Internet, someone is going to use it to show their dick to other people, who in turn want to see it. This is likely the least exploitative and harmful way for that to happen even though it still isn't perfect.