Ross Douthat responds to my post against Girls Gone Wild saying:
Yes indeed - thank God that regular, all-American porn doesn't have anything to do with rape or drugs or pressured consent or economic exploitation. It's a shame that bad apples like Joe Francis have to go and ruin a perfectly unproblematic industry.
Well, does "all-American porn" (I never suggested GGW was French, by the way) feature "rape or drugs or pressured consent or economic exploitation?" If it does, I'm all for bringing the long arm of the law, or the loud chant of activists, against it. But I get the feeling Douthat is actually suggesting porn itself is a clearly problematic industry that's inseparable from those vices, along the lines of Irving Kristol's "A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she's being paid minimum wage," which is slightly different.
Aside from the scurrilous insinuation that liberals condone underage sex (Mark Foley, anyone?), Kristol's not entirely off-base. I'd prefer a living wage, of course, and his quote says nothing about health benefits, retirement plans, or lunch breaks, but the conditions under which workers of legal age enter into contracts and labor is of concern to me. If they entered into their contract, however, without compulsion or intimidation and are being fairly compensated, their decision to have sex on camera doesn't much bother me. That said, if Douthat knows of other pornography companies that engage in GGW's labor practices, I'll happily join his coalition. Porn workers of the world rise up! You have nothing to lose but your non-work related chains!
