Today's work/fandom collision

[rivkat]

So I am at this intellectual property conference, and the first panelist (who I like a lot) started with two provocative questions: How many in the audience thought of themselves as authors? (All of us.) How many had had positive experiences producing or performing in pornography? (Nobody raised a hand.) And here I am, sitting in the audience with the fic nicknamed “Kryptonian Sex Secrets” open on my desktop. How am I supposed to react? Would I have been more honest to raise my hand? I do think of some of my fiction as pornographic, even though it’s not a great term and even though it causes me some discomfort.

The panelist was talking about porn made with real bodies, not porn made with words based on imaginative conceptions of real (actors’) bodies. So she didn’t mean me, not exactly. But should she have?

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I agree -- there's no way she expected a positive answer. But then again, we're not a group that had much reason/need to participate in filmed porn, and we have lots of reasons not to admit so if we did -- probably we'd admit to being Republicans first.

The most sympathetic take on her position -- which I probably agree with -- is that law, including intellectual property law, treats porn of all types as speech and creative work. But there's another aspect to some types of porn, which is how it gets produced, and there are important questions about the participants and the true level of choice they have and the risks they face, from physical to emotional to social.