Well I think it's obvious that saying "all pornographers are misogynists" is false, though maybe she meant it as hyperbole and was not being literal?
That said though I really do wonder how abusive the porn/sex industry is towards their female actors. I haven't done much research on the topic but I have heard a few things about it.
What I have heard is that many of the female porn stars abuse pain medication because they deal with physical pain in their porn acting.
I'm pretty sure this is especially true of the porn actresses who act in the BDSM/rough sex stuff.
One problem here with me though is that I'm a virgin, so I don't have a good intuition of how rough someone has to be to actually physically hurt someone while having sex.
A few years ago I read a book by an author named Chris Hedges (If you're into liberal intellectuals you either already know who he is or you should go check him out if you're into class issues in America. He used to be a New York times journalist until he left because he was pressured by the newspaper to not be critical of the war on Iraq), and he wrote a book called Empire of Illusion (or something like that, forgot the exact title of the book) and in one chapter he talks about his experiences of interviewing porn actresses.
He talks about how after the porn actresses did their acting they would have bruises all over them, cuts, and as I said in order to deal with this constant physical pain they experience at work they abuse pain medication, get addicted to it, which obviously leads to other much more serious problems (drug/alcohol addiction, psychological problems, etc, etc).
Now a person may say "Well a lot of people experience physical pain at work, so what?" And yeah that's true, but there's an obvious psychological distinction here. Getting physically injured if you're say a construction worker is a fundamentally different emotional experience than getting physically injured from having sex.
You also have to factor in the reality that the truth is that most of these porn actresses probably don't want to actually have sex with these random men. I would bet the only reason some women go into porn is because it's a way to get paid a decent amount of money without being educated.
So you have to factor in that:
A. Porn actresses are being physically harmed in their job (Probably not all of them, but as I said I'm a virgin so I don't have a good intuition how much physical contact it takes in sex to bruise someone. Most of you guys have a much better take on this than I do).
B. Even though they are consenting to the sex so legally they are not being raped, it's probably true that these women really don't want to be a porn actress. If they could choose to be a porn actress or choose to have a white collar job that paid the same amount, the vast majority of them would go with the white collar job. Most of these women don't want to have sex with the men they are having sex with in this porn films.
So the point is that while I'm not saying the porn industry is doing anything illegal or that the male porn actors are doing anything illegal, what I am saying though is that I think there is a serious moral dilemma here.
I mean is it really morally acceptable to allow this to take place?
Personally I think it's kind of ******** up, just my opinion. I don't think people should be so desperate that they feel like they have to put themselves in a ******** up situation like this.
I mean really, you have porn actresses getting constantly physically injured from sex they don't want but only do to get money, so they then end up taking pain medication and getting addicted. When depression and hopelessness is mixed with a drug addiction it just leads to even more serious drug/alcohol abuse which just leads to even more psychological problems. It becomes a giant cycle that fuels itself and makes the person's life worse and worse.
So yeah I mean I'd have to agree to an extent that some porn probably really is abusive to these women.
I want to make it clear though that I have not done a lot of research on this. So I do not know how prevalant the issues are that I'm bringing up. This could only apply to a small handful of porn actresses, or this could be as prevalent as this being the case with the majority of them. I really don't have a clue, I just want to make everyone know that I am not an informed individual on this topic. All I'm saying are the small snippets I've read about which is not much at all. If anyone is more knowledgeable on this (perhaps a female in the porn industry could comment?) than I am, I am all ears and ready to admit that what I'm saying is false/misleading.
I do have to say though at the same time that women like the user you're quoting who focus a lot of attention on how porn in their opinion "degrades women" are really self centered and narcissistic. The victims of porn are the porn actresses, it's not women who are not involved in porn. Using porn as a vehicle to victimize women in general because it "degrades them" in some abstract sense is extremely self centered because the people saying this are not focusing on the women who really are experiencing abuse and those are the porn actresses. And unlike them, they aren't being degraded in some abstract sense, no they are literally and physically experiencing physical pain that leads them down the road of drug abuse and psychological problems.
I don't have very much patience for assholes who want to victimize themselves 24/7 because they are being degraded in some abstract sense. Meanwhile real people out there are actually experiencing abuse in the real world and you don't hear a peep about that from these people. They are self centered narcissists in my opinion who want people to think they care about others but in reality they really don't and they are very selfish people.
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