Porn v. Prostitution, Prolific Profits.

Warning, salty language ahead. Porn star Lisa Ann on the difference between porn and prostitution.



Note the central thesis: the profits earned by corporate interests are evidence that pornographic actresses provide a great deal of consumer surplus. She contrasts this with one-on-one prostitution, in which the workers are relatively anonymous, there is no corporate structure in the US (with some exceptions for Nevada bordellos), and profits are low.

High-end golf courses often hire professional players to instruct members on the finer points of how to select and swing a club. These same pros earn more on the PGA tour, bring more enjoyment to more punters if you will. Would anyone claim that pro golf instructors are being exploited in the off-season?

Not everyone has what it takes to be a Jack Nicklaus or a Lisa Ann. Not everyone wants to be a Jack Nicklaus or a Lisa Ann. It might be a fine thing to share your talents with more people, to bring more felicity to the world, but the labor calculus is up to the worker as much on the links as between the sheets. Assessment of opportunity costs can be a hard slog, but it's made no easier (or more accurate) when done on others' behalf.

I appreciate that Lisa Ann acknowledges that prices contain information, but I'd appreciate it more if she would refrain from assuming others' BATNA. The world is a large place, and there is a great deal of space for a multitude of careers. Consider the possibility that some sorts of sex work can be complements rather than substitutes. Perhaps some of Lisa Ann's feature films are used by working girls to prime clients for one-on-one attention, similar to how pro golf instruction helps recreational golfers better appreciate the skill and finesse on display at the PGA's Masters Tour.

h/t Mistress Matisse for the link.

Mai Waifu

Great headlines write themselves.

Middlesbrough man creates legal history after being convicted of possessing illegal images of cartoon children

We happy few who take residence in Anglophone nations are fortunate enough to be heir to a proud legal tradition ground in common-sense jurisprudence. The common law with its juries and its precedents and its peer system strive for Aristotelean excellence by drawing on the wisdom of crowds at their most placid and reflective. It is true that law-by-tort can still err, but it does possess the distinctive feature of being able to correct errors through deliberation.

Dragging a dude before the court for the possession of hentai is a perversion of the common law. This is the substitution of matters of personal taste for matters of public interest. There is quite literally no victim, no crime being committed here apart from raising the bile of men with the authority to wield the truncheon of the state. I cannot press myself to identify the EE condition under violation apart from the shadow #7 I suggested some time back: "the transaction is not aesthetically offensive."

No other explanation can warrant this wanton disregard for the great tradition of English common law.

Rubber

A dear friend of EE recently severed affiliation with an advocacy group (start here, more here). Her leaving, or rather her leaving in this particular fashion, has sparked some discussion. I'd like to briefly address a point that came up yesterday.

If you read through the first link above, you'll see that one of The Peej's complaints about YV was that their decision to hire Miriam Weeks was marred by the Duke University student's "few libertarian bona fides." In conversation yesterday, A-Cast called into doubt the economics acumen of Ms. Weeks.

.@VGLuttrell @amelapay @CathyReisenwitz The economics in the TIME piece were p bad. Demand for porn is not inelastic.
— Andrea Castillo (@anjiecast) August 18, 2014

The offending passage in the Time piece is here (preceding ¶ included for context)

But my porn work pays the exorbitant tab for one simple reason: Demand for porn actresses, especially extremely young ones like myself, far exceeds supply. How interesting that the same basic principle explains why my tuition bill is so high in the first place.

Demand for education, kind of like demand for porn, is pretty inelastic. Kids like me have been told our whole lives that higher education is the only way to be successful in America. President Obama made it clear he wants to keep that demand high in a speech in Austin, Texas.

As far as the misuse of terms of art from economics go, I am well-convinced that you've seen worse in print over the years. Heck, just turn on C-Span and listen to any randomly selected Congressman yak for more than 20 seconds. I don't expect A-level economics from a lower-division undergrad, not even a Blue Devil. But Anjie? From her, I expect nothing but the best. So it is that I feel entirely comfortable parsing her comment.

With apologies to Leonard Cohen, everybody knows that the [price] elasticity of demand for a good is just (∂Qd/∂P). Convention typically drops the negative sign. Essentially what we speak of when we discuss the price elasticity of demand is how responsive consumers are to price signals. Perfect price inelasticity of demand means that consumers would be willing to spend infinity for a marginal unit of consumption. "My kingdom for a horse." "Houston, we have a problem." Taco trucks in the desert. Perfect price elasticty means that even the tiniest fraction of a cent hike in the price would eliminate consumption altogether. "I could take it or leave it." The ideal forms are logical bounds on behavior and are not likely to ever actually be encountered. The middle bound between "elastic" and "inelastic" is quite plausible however, and is something of a golden snitch in price theory. If the partial of quantity demanded relative to price is 1, the good is "unit elastic."

When Andrea claims, "Demand for porn is not inelastic," that has a specific technical definition. She means that (∂Qd/∂P) > 1. The advent of cheap Internet porn has shown that dropping the marginal cost of watching others making the beast with two backs has indeed increased the quantity demanded by a whole lot. Pity the poor researcher in 2014 who can't for love or money obtain a control group of men who've never consumed porn.

What Andrea didn't do (and forgive her, she only had 140 characters to work with) was identify the error made in the two paragraphs I quoted above. Look closely and you'll see how Ms. Weeks transitions between the supply of porn ("Demand for porn actresses...far exceeds supply") and the demand for pornography. These are two different phenomena, as anyone who's kept a small stash during a months-long deployment can attest. It's entirely possible for the demand for pornographic actresses to be inelastic while the demand for pornographic products to be quite elastic indeed.

The interesting thing for me, at least as far as the economics goes, is how we think about this market when we get into discussions of elasticity. One of the determinants of demand (distinct from quantity demanded) is the price of substitute goods. If substitutes become cheap, demand drops. If you are employed by a studio, then is amateur porn shot with off-the-shelf equipment part of your market, or is it a substitute? The division of analysis is limited by the extent of the market, so to speak. What is the "right" way to model and measure the elasticity of porn? Is there a "right" way at all? And if it's troublesome to get the positive analysis right, how much more difficult is it to get the normative conclusions right?

Is porn euvoluntary or not? How do we know?

Episode 3: Maggie McNeill

Today's discussion is with Maggie McNeill, the Honest Courtesan. We discuss sex work, criminalization, misinformation, the abuses inherent in the sex offender registry, the courage of Belle Knox, and many other things. I hope you enjoy our chat.


download

Additional material mentioned in the podcast:

The Honest Courtesan
Maggie's Resources Page
Lies, Lies, Misconceptions, and more Lies
Stats on Transgender Sex Workers Misrepresented by Police Reports (the estimate is closer to 10% rather than the 5% we noted in the discussion)
Radley Balko: Rise of the Warrior Cop
Mustard Seeds and Vampires
Bruce Yandle on Bootleggers and Baptists
Arnold Kling: The Three Languages of Politics

You can follow Maggie on Twitter here: @Maggie_McNeill
And me here: @Spivonomist
And Belle Knox here (Not Even Remotely SFW): @belle_knox

Also, apologies for the plosives. I'm working on that.

Porn v. Prostitution: What is the Difference?

What, really, is the difference between porn and prostitution?  Why is prostitution generally illegal, in the U.S., and porn generally legal?  Following up Saturday's post....

Now, there is another thing, a third thing, erotica, which is the genuinely artistic depiction of love acts, including sex, for the purpose of...what?  Does art need a purpose?  (Which reminds me of this NSFW "commercial" about HBO, blurring the distinction between porn and erotica...)


For the record, yes, I think ALL "porn" that does not involve children or violence should be classified as "erotica," and therefore unregulated, by the state.  I don't want elected or appointed perverts pre-screening our HBO shows to make sure they have redeeming social value.

But I do always try to make students think about that porn/prostitution difference.

And the idea of "virtue" for women is one our feminist sisteren (rightly) object to, because it implies a double standard.  (Of course, it is a standard where men simply lack virtue, so maybe it's accurate!).

What feminists say they want is for the woman to have choices. If it's (eu)voluntary, and for a reason the woman chooses, it should be okay.

 I ask students to imagine a woman being paid for sex, and the transacted services are being carried out. Police burst in. Woman points out there is a camera, and they are filming a porn movie.

On one hand, it's evidence that the act took place. But the woman argues that this is a performance for the (later) onanistic pleasure of OTHER males, in the privacy of their own homes. Both the male and female actors are performing roles, not for their own pleasure. The male actor may need to exhibit the ejaculation of bodily fluid, but again that is part of the performance, not PRIMARILY for his own pleasure.

In most states, the police have to leave and allow the filming to continue. Of course, before leaving, the policeman asks, "So, you're filming porn? Do you need anyone else? Like maybe a policeman? I could go back out, and come in again, and...no? You sure? Okay, sorry to bother you."

Does that distinction make sense? The woman cannot perform a (paid) act for the pleasure of a man, but can perform exactly the same act, and many other, more acrobatic, acts, for the (later) pleasure of OTHER men, just because in a physical sense those other men are pleasuring themselves?

Again, thanks to Gabriel Rossman for his challenges to orthodoxy and his questioning of distinctions.