The porn picketers

Well I walked around Adultcon today. I wasn’t signing, although I did end up signing things that fans just happened to be carrying in their back pockets, like slicks of my vagina. Small world. I was media. It said so on my little red media wristband that one of the employees strapped to my right wrist with the greatest of care, being sure the make it tight enough that I could never ever slip it off and share my prized access with a fellow wearer.

Never ever. I walked around in high heels and eyeliner, of course, because I do porn and these habits will attach themselves to our DNA, but the mic pack sticking out where I maybe should have been wearing a bra really made me feel legitimate. Media. I was an information highway.

And once we got all set up with our wires and our sound checks and the bouncers treating us like we were special, we realized there wasn’t a whole lot to report on. It was 4pm on a Saturday. There was nothing outrageous. Nothing really worth making fun of. There were some hot chicks. Sophia Santi, Dana DeArmond. A few others. Some naked superheros. Naked is a debatable term of course, because they were dressed in paint. We got pictures with them and they signed their first names over our faces. We were unhappy with the outcome. We went to the dungeon room and the violet wand had a comb attachment. We are a creative species.

But overall, there was nothing shocking. Nothing worthy of my debut media attention. We got restless and decided to bug the picketers.

The picketers were stationed in front of the entrances with signs that accused pornography of either hurting children or exploiting women. I would argue that it exploits men more than women, but what can you do. They’re a hardheaded lot. My cohost, the lovely and talented Dane Hanson, pointed out to them that their signs were rather unimaginative. It was plain black text on a plain white background. The church brought them. There’d been one of two choices. It was funny though, because when asked what they would write if they had their own signs, and could dress them up with glitter and slogans and maybe bullet points, they all stuck with what was already on their respective signs. They had two opinions to choose from and seemed content with it. Maybe I’m greedy. I want my own opinion.

So we asked them to talk more about their signs. We didn’t ask the blind person about his sign because we were suspicious that he didn’t actually know what was on the sign he was holding, or that he was holding one. We were also suspicious that he might be deaf. Talk about exploitation. But the man whose sign said pornography exploited women said he was upset because one time a relative left a stack of porn in his home and then he ended up spending too much time watching it and his wife didn’t like it. Then he speculated that women hated doing it. I asked if he had ever been a woman who did porn. He had not. I asked if he had ever spoken to a woman who did porn. He had not. I asked if anyone had every seen his sign on the way into the convention and then chosen to turn around because of it. Also no. This was his third year protesting.

And then we spoke to the woman holding the sign stating that pornography hurts children. I asked her how. Others of her kind gathered round and spoke openly because of my media badge. And probably because I wasn’t a pornstar, which they assumed was the case, because I told them I wasn’t a pornstar. I was in no mood to be saved. She immediately jumped on the child porn thing. I told her that child porn was not shot in the US, and that it was highly illegal, and that no one walking up the stairs to that convention was going in for the child porn. Then she said that it didn’t matter, that grown men sometimes went down to the south and befriended young girls in poor families, and bought them food, and that those men watched porn and took advantage of the girls in the south in the grocery store. Or maybe she said they took them to the grocery store, then took advantage of them. But she definitely said people like that watch porn. I told her I’d never heard of this scam.

I asked her how else porn hurt children, considering her first two examples were based on myth, or as they like to call it, belief. She said it’s a slippery slope. She said that men start out watching soft porn then work their way into harder and harder stuff and next thing you know they’re desensitized and can only get off on child porn. I pointed out that pedophilia is actually a disorder, and that men who are attracted to children are not attracted to adults, and therefore never had any interest in the very porn they were protesting. She was not sold on the idea. She wanted something besides my word. I recommended the DSM-V. She had driven three and a half hours to make it to this protest. She was not going to let it go easily.

And then we argued our way back to square one. I asked her, again, how porn hurts children. This time she said abortions. She said porn causes abortions, and that porn is a multi-billion dollar industry. How truly uninformed this poor woman was. She said that doctors make millions off abortions, and porn works with them, because people who watch porn are sexually irresponsible and more likely to conceive unwanted children. The logic started to make my head hurt a little. I asked her more about the doctor-porn-abortion conspiracy. She didn’t know much beyond it. The workings of that world are top secret.

But we finally found common ground. Because I asked her, again, how porn hurts children. And this time, she said it’s the Internet. We agreed that children and sex should be kept completely separate (this surprised her, because she thought people who side with porn like to force sexuality on children from an early age). We agreed that children should not watch porn, or be involved in porn, or even know what the shit is. And we agreed that it shouldn’t be so accessible online. I tried to explain to her that porn is a business and we actually don’t want people to be able to grab our product for free, not even kids. I told her we were capitalists, and we want money in exchange for our goods. This concept shocked her. I felt like maybe I was making some headway, but the she’d worn me down, and I was too tired to go on.