Pornocracy: The New Sex Multinationals -Reviewed
Please excuse my grammar, as I write this review because at the end of the day this is my blog. Just finished watching Pornocracy and my impression after watching it was a call for protectionism in the porn industry. The Director: Ovidie seemed very passionate about what she was doing. Now in case you didn’t know Pornocracy is a term that comes from the dark ages where the Rule of the Harlots notably Pope Sergius III who was the only pope to have allegedly fathered an illegitimate son who himself later became Pope (John XI). Now how I tied this into the film Pornocracy is that it appeared to me that the director was trying to paint the porn industry as an industry that started off moral and ended up in the hands of evil capitalist.
As a person who believes in free market capitalism Pornocracy came across as marxists where, the director wanted to inflate the value of the workers and deflate the power of the developers. There was only one section of her film where I felt she had a point and that was that too much free porn was being circulated around the internet which she felt was ultimately bringing prices down. It appeared that she was putting the blame on the company backing Porn Hub Manwin now known as MindGeek. It appeared that she felt that MindGeek had somehow monopolized the porn industry and that because of this monopoly workers were being underpaid.
There was a period in the porn industry, namely the era where VHS tapes and DVD sales would make pornstars incredibly wealthy. However now that people aren’t buying DVD’s or CD’s the entire industry has changed ad shifted into a realm that in my view protectionists, socialist the marxists type can’t really understand or appreciate. There are people that feel that things should never change, or I should say there are people that feel SOME things should never change. Prior to slavery being abolished there were people that didn’t even own slaves that wanted to see slavery continue. When Capitalism ended slavery people fought against the power of choice capitalism brought with socialism.
With socialism what some believe is that a regulatory, big government body should step into an industry and pick the winners and the losers. In so doing what ends up happening is innovation is stunted, now on the opposite end of socialism is capitalism and what capitalism does is it allows human beings to be creative and create things that weren’t there before. Prior to the internet, usb sticks and the cloud a video would have to be put on a disc, which would give that disc value and because that disc had value it gave companies the ability to distribute that disc all over the world, but what people forget is even during the VHS and DVD era there were massive frauds, there were people not respecting property rights back then, but because the profits were so large the business in charge often would concern themselves too much with it because everybody was still being paid well.
while participants in a well paying industry are being paid well, they rarely opt for government regulation, it’s when they’re met with competition, or when they’re industry is threatened, that’s usually when they cry out of regulation, but in the porn industry the cry for regulation isn’t that large and the reason in my view is because porn as of 2018 isn’t what most would see as a moral industry. It’s interesting to me listening that a webcam on average making I think it was $1200USD a month was bad thing.
Imagine sitting in front of camera, indoors and making $1200USD on average? Sounds like a decent gig to me, sure it’s not the $5000 per month everybody wants, but think of it, there are people in Africa and other poor countries that will be lucky to make $5USD for an entire week digging for gold, or working in the fields for farmers. I understand that everybody wants to be making $5000+ dollars per month, but in the real world it doesn’t work like that.
Live webcam can be done by anyone, porn can be done by anyone, in fact if you really think about it MindGeek and Live Jasmine don’t have a monopoly on anyone. Any person can start their own webcam using skype, but when they do, what they realise is that the platform plays a huge part in their success. Capitalism is about options marxism and socialism are about control. What the actual driving force of of the Live Jasmine and Mindgeek machine is their platforms.
They don’t really have a monopoly on anything, people prefer going to Live Jasmine because of it’s platform, but any man, woman or identifiable human entity can create their own platform if that’s what they want to do. But doing that part is hard and it’s something that often goes overlooked by people looking for easy answers. If listened to tons of people that have complained about Live Jasmine well, truth be told they’re replaceable, the problem is currently there’s nothing better.
Some people believe that if porn wasn’t so easily accessible it would cost the consumer more. In one part of the film one the participants mentioned that if China can stop it’s people from accessing Google, why can’t the internet stop piracy in porn? Well there’s also piracy in Hollywood films, and the problem with stopping it is well, a person can go to a theatre with a camera in their pocket and tape a film. This planet as billions of people, it will take a lot of manpower to enforce regulation online, not to mention it would take global corporation.
Plus who is going to pay the people being deployed to protect the porn industry? Remember, policing requires payment, it’s not a machine that are going to stop pirates. Are people going to allow the government to tax them, so the government can hire or create a police force to patrol the internet searching for pirated porn films? Software engineers don’t come cheap and they’ll demand een more money once they know they’re being paid by taxpayers.
Are regulations going to be created just to make sure that pornstars content is protected? It’s one of those things I don’t think some people look into before coming to a conclusion about what should be done. It takes corruptible human beings to enforce laws. Most humans are guided by morality. Is what’s happening in the porn industry today fair? Absolutely not, but there are lots of things that aren’t fair. I believe the director Ovidie is very passionate about the subject, but I think the porn industry is only going through a transition, the sex trade will forever be in flux, I’ve never been a fan of stagnant industries.
Although it appears the porn industry is dead, I do believe there will be another resurgence in the porn industry in areas that many of us probably can’t even imagine right now. Kudos to Ovidie for make a film she was passionate about. I wish her continued success.