“Oh, Foxy Loxy, the sky is falling!” said Turkey Lurkey. “How do you know?” said Foxy Loxy. “Goosey Loosey told me,” he replied. “And Goosey Loosey, how do you know?” “Ducky Lucky told me”. “Ducky Lucky, how do you know?” “Henny Penny told me.” “Henny Penny, how do you know?” “Chicken Licken told me.” “And Chicken Licken, how do you know?” “Part of it fell on my head!” “Make haste, then,” said Foxy Loxy, “and all come into my den!” – English folktale
I’m sure everyone remembers the story of Chicken Licken (or Chicken Little, as she is called in America); some natural object (usually an acorn) falls on her head and she runs about shouting, “The sky is falling!” The other barnyard fowl then join the panic until a clever fox offers them shelter in his den, where he quickly devours the foolish birds. The tale appears in many forms from all over the globe, including a 2500-year-old Tibetan version in which the animal who starts the panic is a hare, the frightening event a ripe fruit falling with a loud “plop” into a pond, and the predator a tiger. Weaker modern versions in which the silly animals escape disaster subvert the moral of the tale, which could be stated as “Those who panic due to perfectly natural events or hearsay will be taken advantage of by the clever but unscrupulous.” The “trafficking hysteria” is obviously an example of this, with ridiculous geese running about squawking “The sky is falling!” merely because someone else told them it was.
In real life, panics are usually a little more complicated; they are set off by a combination of events rather than one, and unfortunately do not generally end with the rapid devouring of the idiots who started the hysteria. But the phenomena which trigger them are still nearly always perfectly natural ones; in the case of “trafficking” hysteria, for example, the triggers are women trading sex for money, people ignoring arbitrary laws which wrongfully restrain them from what they need to do, people crossing borders to work, and xenophobia. The first two also combine with another natural event, young people doing things of which their elders disapprove, to produce a different but related moral panic we’ve discussed several times recently: university students having compensated sex to pay their bills. As Dominique Jackson pointed out, this isn’t remotely new; older men have always sought younger women since time immemorial (even when, as in my column of one year ago today, they get in trouble for it), and young women have always been willing to capitalize on it (as well they should).
But the fact that these things are as natural as the fall of a nut doesn’t stop media Chicken Lickens and Turkey Lurkeys from getting into a panic over them, as demonstrated by these two recent items which appeared on EconJeff’s blog. The first one appeared in Click On Detroit January 17th and Jeff commented on it the following day; since I have nothing to add to his insightful comments I’ll just embed an excerpt from the news story in boldface before quoting him:
A pornographic website features college co-eds having sex in dorms, and recent videos…feature students from the University of Michigan. The DareDorm.com producers have posted advertisements on websites to recruit new students for new movies. Anthony Kalil, a student at U of M, has heard about the campus porn invasion. He knows students are being offered up to $10,000 to do the videos. But he also knows the ramifications of shooting an X-rated movie. “For somebody to let a crew in to film something like that, you’re ruining yourself and you’re ruining your friends. It’s just not a good idea,” Kalil said. “It’s definitely a decision that you are going to have to deal with for the rest of your life. Twenty years down the road and you have kids, they go on the Internet, they are going to see mommy and daddy when they were drunk in college”…
Can you imagine? Students having sex in the dorms? Video cameras? The internet? Money? What is the world coming to? Surely the end times are near! …Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial. Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work? …Suppose that you can get $10K for a video. At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000. Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying. They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would. Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff? …In the age of Facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone’s life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story? How exactly will someone’s children find their parents’ Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet? …Note to Channel 4: there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area. This is not one of them.
I must point out that Jeff is a professor of economics, not a sex worker rights advocate, yet I couldn’t say this any better. The very next day, he posted a commentary on a local news item about “the medium-term paid relationship services market, informally known as the sugar babies market…[which] lies somewhere between paid escorts who charge by the hour or day and particularly mercenary marriages…[note] the obligatory scary remarks from local law enforcement (playing double duty here as moral scolds)…” The story appeared on January 18th in MLive:
Students at Jackson-area colleges and universities are among the “College Sugar Babies” signed up on a worldwide dating-for-dollars website. SeekingArrangement.com, which touts itself as the country’s leading…[compensated] dating website…recently released its top 20 list of colleges and universities with the largest number of sugar baby signups in 2011. [Local institutions]…did not make that list, but they did have…[a total of 33] students…who registered as “sugar babies” last year…SeekingArrangement.com advertises “mutually beneficial relationships” and has garnered national [media] attention…One in every two “sugar babies” who join the website today are college students, and college “sugar babies” now make up 40 percent of the site’s population, [a recent press] release said. The numbers and universities are identified by students who register on the site using their “.edu” email address. They automatically receive a free premium membership upgrade and are classified as “College Sugar Babies,” which receive three times more inquires from potential “Sugar Daddies”…
The website does not promote a direct exchange for sex, so using it does not directly violate the law, said Jackson County Sheriff Steve Rand. However, he said the website is potentially dangerous. “The Internet is the wild, wild west and there ain’t no sheriff,” Rand said. “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt on a site like this. It’s a recipe for disaster”…
Legal adults using their time and assets sensibly without busybody interference from self-appointed “sheriffs”? The horror! Sheriff Rand says it’s only “a matter of time” before “disaster” strikes; considering that this sort of thing has been going on for at least 12,000 years, I presume he imagines we’re overdue for “somebody to get hurt” and that the sky will be falling any minute now.
Young people and their antics … I have experience with this. 😛
Of course – I only had about 300 to watch over at any one time, and I was authorized to go full “ninja” on their asses if they stepped out of line. Even then, I picked my battles.
Busybodies man, I wonder how much of their thought and daily efforts go into controlling other people … while life just passes them by …
too funny. thats hard work running around trying to find people having more fun then you. \”/
>He knows students are being offered up to $10,000 to do the videos.
??? Wow. Rates for porn work have really gone up since my day. Something sounds a bit fishy there.
You know, the other day it occurred to me. In all the uproar over sex trafficking, there’s a real kind of trafficking I just don’t hear as much about, and that’s marriage trafficking.
Brides are trafficked to China, since there’s a shortage there due to sexism.
Brides from Eastern Europe and Asia are trafficked to western Europe and the USA.
It’s all advertised, and legal. Yet no one seems bothered.
Alas, they’re panicking about that as well; Laura Agustin wrote about it a while back, and I mentioned it in “One Size Fits All“. And then there’s the Bride Trafficking India site, and probably others as well.
>Something sounds a bit fishy there.
You mean pornographers don’t tell the truth?! 😉 This is how they advertise on themselves on their site:
“Watch real dorm room sex videos from Dare Dorm. Real college babes having sex in dare dorm rooms. Dare Dorm is not your typical college sex videos. Daredorm has no director no lousy porn actors and actress just a bunch of amateur college girls goofing off and getting drunk and having college parties in their dorms then sends their sex tape to Daredorm to win $10,000. SUBMIT your dorm sex videos today!l”
Except:
1. As the original article above says, a commercial company cannot produce content on university grounds without permission.
2. Hard to see this as a successful businness model–waiting around for college students to send in sex vids that reaches certain standards (actractiveness, proper lighting, etc). After all, not only do they have a slick-looking website, but they also sell dvds of these scenes. And what if no vids come in?
3. I notice some professional porn stars in some of their scenes.
Of course, this has nothing to do with Maggie’s point, which still stands.
DareDorm is pretty fake.
I am pretty sure porn producers/purveyors are required to verify the age of the performers is at least 18. This is often accomplished on user submitted websites by having the performers hold up their govt. issued photo ID during the video. This information is entered into a database……
You can see where this goes. The data owner can do anything whatsoever with that data. It can and will be searched for all candidates for federal and/or state offices.
So, there is some future risk from performing in this sort of thing. It is certainly something to think about.
Unfortunately, today’s Americans (I suspect it’s the same in many other countries) have taken an entirely different moral from this story: “Anybody warning of potential problems can be safely dismissed, because such people are all Chicken Little. Above all, it is never necessary to take action to avoid disaster.”
The point about students ruining their lives with sex video reminds me of the prosecutors who want to show teen sexters that they can ruin their lives by … ruining their lives. Its circular logic, with the innocent caught it the middle.
I’ve said it a million times: eventually everyone is going to have some embarrassing photo, video or blog post out there. We’re just going to have to file those under youthful — or not so youthful – indiscretions.
Well, either that or grow up as a culture. But I’m not holding my breath over that one.
>Daredorm has no director no lousy porn actors and actress
Eh, nice.
Maybe it’s all different now, but back in my day, the producer was required to see your ID, and record certain things about it on a certain form, which then had to be kept and produced on demand by any authority. in addition, there were model releases to sign. But this was in California, and before so much internet stuff. I did work for one early internet site, and they did the same things.
And “then sends their sex tape to Daredorm to win $10,000. SUBMIT your dorm sex videos today!l””
Is a lot different than being paid $10,000. I’ll bet no one ever sees that money.
And even if somebody does, most do not. Let’s say one video in every hundred wins $10,000. Well, that averages out to $100 a video. And if it’s only one out of every thousand, that’s $10 a video.
Pretty good deal, that.
You add another point to what I was getting at, but I’ll just say it bluntly: DareDorm is a fake. Or, to put it in more neutral terms: It is all staged.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is normal in porn. If a DVD advertises Teen Cuties, I doubt any guy is gonna complain that one of them is actually 22.
So, no, it is not different now. There is no $10,000 prize. They’re just trying to cash in on the strong desire to see horny college girls “authenticaly and spontaneously” get nasty and sexual on camera.
I can totally believe that. And if it’s true, that makes the panic even MORE of a “Chicken Licken” incident.
She… she’s TWENTY-TWO!?!
NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
j/k
There is so much here:
I am reminded of the bars in Auckland (NZ) which would have these competitions where women were invited to get changed (behind a backlit screen) into pygamas then get into a bed on stage … win $5000 or so. There was a variation involving body-painting.
The judging was by audience approval and they tended to favor those who were prepared to be more revealing. Payment was made on the night in full public view. What intrigued me was that none of the professional strippers would go near those things – they saw it as too exploitative.
Dare Dorm kinda looks a bit like that – a studio made up to look like a student dorm, nothing is real. About the same as any reality show. In fact the reality model may make a good porn film (bet it’s been done).
I have observed feminist/abolitionist action group in um action. They had decided that it was the clients that needed rescuing (poor men, lead astray by their cocks, they just can’t help themselves) and picketed the (then) Geisha’s Massage and Escort (this was before legalization too) in the Auckland CBD. This looked like fun to me so I watched from the bus-stop at the foot of the stairs. The women would accost clients as they attempted to dart up the stairs earnestly warning them that they are being used and exploited. About one in three of the men who braved the picket turned around to say “I know” and “so what” and “works for me”. It was hilarious.
When I got to talk to the callgirls there and compare notes, I recall my surprise was how honest the industry was in general (a moments thought tells me I shouldn’t have been but you know…) and theirs was how many of the clients were actually OK guys who they’d be happy to know outside the club.
One of my clients was so very “OK” I married him. 🙂
🙂 I had heard of that but never seen it.
I did date two call girls for a time, and another invited me to her wedding.
The reality is so far removed from the media image I can entertain people at parties for hours … stories for another day.
Though: I’d caution anybody involved with the sex industry in any capacity to cool off about the romance possibilities though … it happens, but don’t expect it: it is not, after all, a dating service. I’m sure I’m not out of line here.
Actually the dating services are a lot LESS honest.
(Have you done an article on clients falling for you? I used to think of writing a manual.)
I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a whole column on it.