Amateur vs. Professional

In my seminar on New Media this semester, I've realized that the distinction between amateur and professional pornography -- as well as the latter's incentive to craft products that seem amateur -- provides a useful point of entry for discussing a whole range of issues, from user-generated content to reality television to the nature of selfhood in the era of social networking. I'm even tempted to say that, had there been no amateur pornography, New Media scholars would have been forced to invent it.

Needless to say, the fact that the distinction between amateur and professional pornography is so helpful proves problematic in a classroom setting, where -- with the exception of a very limited number of cases, such as the courses Linda Williams has taught on the subject -- the topic can be discussed but not tackled directly. That's why I find today's interview between San Francisco Chronicle sex columnist Violet Blue and Bay Area porn actress Lorelei Lee so intriguing. In this case, the words that can be spoken do an able job of standing in for the film that can't be shown:

B: How does a performer distinguish between sex work and sex-not-for-work?

LL: I think every sex worker has a different idea about the answer to this question — people seem to have very individualized physical and emotional boundaries and processes of compartmentalization. Some people choose to only perform certain acts on camera, in order to save something for their personal lives or for their significant others. Some women I know who primarily date men decide to only have sex with women on camera. Some women I know who primarily date women, decide to only have sex with men on camera.

Personally, I don't choose to draw that line in terms of physical acts, but rather, I have an emotional boundary between work sex and personal sex. That is, work sex, for me, is not an intimate experience. I don't choose to become vulnerable or emotionally open while I'm having sex at work. I enjoy having sex at work, and I often have affectionate feelings for the people I work with — many of them are my good friends — but I don't expect them to react to me in a vulnerable or emotionally intimate way and I don't react to them in a vulnerable or emotionally intimate way.

I'm not sure that I have good advice about how to do this, because I do think that strategies for this are entirely individual, but I also think it comes back to the importance of remembering what you will and won't get from a day at work. You will get a certain kind of attention for a limited amount of time and you are likely to get an intense physical experience. You are far less likely to get that attention for any extended period of time or to develop a romantic and/or emotionally intimate relationship with your co-workers. Even though you are having sex with some of the people you work with, you are still likely (perhaps advisedly, considering the prospects of your continued employment) to have a somewhat formal working relationship with them.

I'm wondering, in reflecting on comments like the ones Lee makes here, whether the appeal of amateur pornography is not simply a result of our craving for reality, but also -- the word "dialectical" seems hard to resist here -- a testament to our desire to forget the work of sex, whether it's performed for money or not. After all, it takes effort to make even truly amateur pornography, just as it does to produce any cultural artifact. But the pleasure we derive from it, as well as other content imbued with the aura of the amateur, seems to be grounded on the fantasy that it's possible to produce without working, at least in the sense that a market-driven economy defines work. We don't just crave reality per se, but a reality in which production and consumption bypass the circuits of capital. And we're willing to buy into the illusion that such a detour is possible to such an extent that commodities like professionally produced amateur pornography are the hottest thing going.

Yuppie White Trash

I had occasion yesterday, for the first time in ages, to revisit the second piece I wrote for Bad Subjects, way back in October, 1992. I had distanced myself from it because of the buttons it pushes and my memories of having written it very quickly. But, as I shared it with a student writing about shifting notions of masculinity during the Clinton Era, we realized that it was strangely prescient, particularly in light of the direction his wife Hillary's 2008 Presidential campaign has taken:

A polished, well-spoken Baby-Boomer with a strong, independent wife, Clinton initially appears the consummate Yuppie. When addressing bureaucrats, leaders in high- tech industry, educators, and other professionals, it is this appearance that Clinton cultivates. At the same time, however, Clinton is also the son of a lower middle-class Arkansas woman who married four times. Emotionally scarred by an abusive stepfather, born far from the 'loop' of power and success, this Clinton rises from obscurity to fame without forgetting his humble roots. He remains regionally-fixed, an outsider. Thus we have a Yuppie Clinton on the one hand, a 'White Trash' Clinton on the other. How can these two identities be linked together?

In his address to the convention, Clinton suggests that they can be linked discursively. In other words, he intermingles the fashionable high-tech language of Yuppies with the religiously inflected, humble yet hopeful language of what the Cultural Elite derides as 'White Trash America'. America's 'oppressed' middle- class consists of those who "play by the rules and keep the faith": Yuppie game-theory language is made synonymous with the language of Ol' Time Religion. Similarly, Clinton gestures toward an America full of high-tech jobs, but labels its promise a 'New Covenant'. At this point in the campaign this sort of intermingling of discourses is working, Every day it seems a new bunch of high-tech executives flock to Clinton's camp while the Bush campaign's 'family values' strategy fails to win a majority of the White Trash Reagan-Democrats appealed to in the New Covenant. Regardless of whether it is coherent of theoretically unified, Clinton's campaign strategy seems to be working because it links radically different elements of white America on a discursive level.

In closing, I would like to emphasize that we bad subjects must find ways of linking all oppressed Americans together, not just white ones. Clinton's apparent success suggests a model for this undertaking, despite the exclusions it practices rather than because of them. Looking at the Clinton campaign's appropriation of popular music, we can see both its strategic intelligence and politico-moral limitations. Clinton had Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" played at the end of the convention. This quintessential Baby-Boomer song was juxtaposed to Clinton's obsession with that quintessentially white trash icon, Elvis, whom Clinton identified himself with in his speech, saying Al Gore felt he was doing the "warm-up for Elvis." Like matter and anti-matter, these are two kinds of music that normally shouldn't be brought into contact with one another; it is, however, precisely this fact that makes their juxtaposition so compelling. Still, both artists remain very mainstream and very white, even if their 'whiteness' differs radically.

Given the success which Hillary has had among people over fifty, including those who were Yuppie thirty-somethings still back in 1992, I wonder if it makes sense to regard her come-from-behind strategy as an attempt to activate nostalgia for her husband's approach to whiteness. Maybe all the talk about Bill's popularity among African-Americans deafened us to the real strength of his politics, namely its realization that there are enough white people who might vote Democratic under the right circumstances to counterbalance those who refuse to do so.