I’m back on my bullshit today now that I’ve closed the book on Heather Berg’s Porn Work, a labor analysis of the relationship between pornographers and pornography, the tension between performers and their employers, and the various intersecting roles that performers play as producers, directors, and distributors.
It’s actually a little drier than you would think, no pun intended.
Berg is a Marxist Feminist and you can see it plainly in her analysis which is ultra structured, succinct, and devoid of fluff, but not necessarily devoid of flavor: Berg did a ton of fieldwork for this book and she has quotes from performers all over the industry about their experiences making a living, well, fucking.
Porn Work is serious, and it comes across that way—describing the chafing of latex and the performance of fellatio and anal with the clinical eye of a scientist, or a counselor. Still, the prose is unfailingly human and sympathetic, never stigmatizing her subjects.
She also doesn’t shy away from the innate contradictions of capitalism and how it intersects with sex. While it is easy to examine several tenuous dichotomies here (between porn performers and directors/studios for example) there are many instances where a performer is playing multiple roles.
Chapter 5, which examines the relationship between the State and porn is careful to point out that while performers are in general very against regulation (as are their employers) they cannot really escape it: it’s just a question of who’s doing the regulating, porn bosses or the government.
Porn is both regular work and irregular work. A ton of unpaid labor goes into creating the work (reproductive labor) and there is a ton of grinding and stress—and yet a porn performers job is to gift and receive pleasure for the titillation of an audience, while a regular “straight work” employee like myself deals mainly in the small miseries.
As porn actor Conner Habib puts it:
I’m tired of hearing people, especially feminists, saying “it’s just a job,” just like any other job. There’s a difference…I get to have and give pleasure every day for my job. Is that not in some ways a great potential to sidestep “I get to give and experience misery”? That makes it less of a job in some ways. And I know we’re not supposed to say that because we’re at this moment where we’re trying to prove to people that this is a job. But let’s take one step beyond that and say, “Okay, fuck jobs.”
Berg’s book is full of quotes and insights like this.
But then, it’s also full of the many small miseries and joys that go into being a porn performer. It also casts porn workers as undeniably based and awesome, we are constantly shown scenarios of them grappling with an unfair world and environment and managing to outwit everyone from managers to the federal government.
As dry as the prose can be, I couldn’t help but feel inspired and gratified every time I read a chapter. And I always learned something. For a similar but more stylized (and undercover) analysis of modern labor consider On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger.
Still, dry or not, Porn Work doesn’t pull any punches and it sits your ass down and teaches you a thing or two.