The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Mothers Tell Your Children’

Posted on | August 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Legend has it that the original “House of the Rising Sun” was a New Orleans brothel, its name derived from a literal translation of the name of its first proprietor, Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant. Destroyed by a fire, this notorious establishment inspired a folk song about a woman lamenting her fate, having stumbled into a life of degradation:

Oh, mothers tell your children
Not to do what I have done,
Spend your life in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun.

After that old song became a hit for the Animals in 1964, attempts to find the factual basis of the legend failed, but New Orleans certainly was (and still is) one of the most wicked cities in America, so the idea of a broken down whore lamenting what happened to her “down in New Orleans” conveys a definite sense of historical reality.

What shall we say, then, of “sex workers” in the Social Media Age? In 2015, a Netflix documentary about young porn performers, Hot Girls Wanted, was nominated for an Emmy Award. One critic called it “the most depressing documentary you’ll ever watch.”

The brutal supply-and-demand equation of what is euphemistically called “the adult entertainment industry” results in a premium for so-called “barely legal” performers — girls 18 or 19 years old — and as one of the men involved in this loathsome business says in Hot Girls Wanted: “A lot of them know it’s a trap but the money’s there in their face, right now — cash! They take it and just hope for the best.”

Being lured into a trap by the offer of quick cash produces some very sad stories. Consider the class-action lawsuit filed against the producers of the “Girls Do Porn” series. The plaintiffs claim they were misled, told that their performances would only be distributed overseas in limited-edition DVDs and, instead, the videos were all over the Internet, where the performers were identified by their real names:

On Monday, the first of these women, identified as Jane Doe 15, finished her testimony. During three days of examination, Doe 15 recounted for the court a nightmarish sequence of events, which started with a Craigslist ad in 2016 and ended in doxxing, harassment, job troubles, expulsion from her cheerleading squad, fleeing her college town, and fractured relationships with her family, classmates, and boyfriend.
Girls Do Porn, a San Diego-based adult subscription service formed in 2006 by New Zealand man Michael Pratt, trafficked in XXX videos with amateur actresses, ages 18-22. . . .
“If I had known that, not only was it going on the internet,” Doe 15 said in her testimony, “but that they were posting it on the internet, that my name would be attached to it, that it would be in the United States, and that I wouldn’t be paid $5,000, but $2,000 less, and insulted because I was pale and bruised; if I had known that it was more than 30 minutes of filming, if I had known any of that, just any one of those; if I had known that other girls had been harassed and kicked out of school for it, if I had known that I would be kicked off the cheer team; if I had known any of that, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Oh, so she wanted to be a secret whore, not a public whore, and therefore she is a victim of . . . what? Her own stupidity, I’d say. What happened, you see, was that whatever the producers were telling these girls verbally, when they signed a contract, the fine print gave the producer unlimited rights to distribute the videos. One of the porn whore lawsuit plaintiffs described the impact on her life in a court filing:

“I have contemplated suicide. I have cut myself. I became depressed, could not leave the house, and considered dropping out of school. People started to message me with video screenshots or they would send screenshots to my friends making fun of me. My mom knows of the video, which shames and humiliates me. I had to drop out of college to avoid ongoing harassment from classmates. I have been harassed at work about the video to the point that I had to quit. I am now scared to apply for new jobs. I get random requests on social media from strangers asking me to have sex with them. I live in fear every single day that I will run across someone that knows about the video. I am trying to move to another state soon.”

Oh, the unbearable shame of it all! You were whoring around and thought nobody would ever find out what a nasty whore you are? Oops.

What is happening, obviously, is that the parents of these girls have failed to warn them of the dangers, and probably most parents would not believe how common such behavior has become. Consider a criminal case that recently made headlines in Maryland:

Maryland’s law against distributing child pornography applies even when the person distributing a pornographic video is the video’s minor subject, Maryland’s highest court ruled on Wednesday in a 6-1 vote.
The girl in question, identified only as “S.K.” in court documents, was 16 years old when she performed oral sex on an unidentified male. The act was captured on video — he appears to have been holding the camera — and S.K. shared the video with two friends via a text message. She eventually became estranged from one of the friends, a 17-year-old boy, and he showed the video to a police officer at the school.
The government charged the girl as a juvenile for distributing child pornography and displaying an obscene item to a minor. . . .
It’s not clear if anyone else will be charged in the case. By the time S.K. was charged, the video of her performing oral sex had begun to circulate more widely around her high school. She says she only shared the video with her two friends, which implies one of them shared the video with others.

Well, of course, the video was circulated all over the high school — and who knows where else? The sharing of obscene photos and videos has become shockingly commonplace among young people, who don’t seem to understand the potential consequences. Parents have to warn their teenagers explicitly against this kind of behavior: No nudes, ever.

Don’t send such pictures of yourself, and don’t solicit them from others. If someone offers to send you such photos, tell them “hell, no,” block their phone number and avoid associating with them. Otherwise, you might “live your life in sin and misery,” and that’s a sad song you don’t ever want to sing. (Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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  1. Sunday Linkage « Bacon Time !!!!!!
    September 1st, 2019 @ 3:14 am

    […] The Other McCain:    ‘Mothers Tell Your Children’ […]