Amber, of Being Amber Rhea provides one of those brilliant-because-it’s-so-obvious insights into how most of us can enjoy pornography in the face of so much genuine awfullness.

If you say, “I like music,” no one assumes that you like every piece of music ever created. In fact, usually the follow-up question is, “What kinds of music do you like?”

There might be some kinds of music that you thoroughly, passionately love; music that you can listen to over and over again and never get sick of; music that speaks to you on a deeply personal level; music that is theraputic for you – or just downright fun to dance to.

Some other kinds of music? Eh, you might feel like you could take it or leave it.

You might be annoyed by some of it.

You might find some of it downright weird.

You might be disturbed by some of it – e.g., violent lyrics in some rap music. On the other hand, you might see that as a healthy outlet for anger.

You might think that the commodification of “boy bands” stifles true musical creativity from getting the attention it deserves.

You might think that in the music industry as a whole, there is too much focus on monetary gain, and the barrier of entry is too difficult for small-time musicians starting out.

You might have strong ideological and/or pragmatic reasons for supporting independent artists – and still sing along with pop music on the radio.

Read her whole post here

She’s got a wonderful point coming from the content/consumption perspective but if you include the underlying work behind the music and porn industries Amber’s point begins to turn the argument right around.

The music analogy works extremely well for me, in part, because of my peripheral but lifelong relationships with performing musicians I gotta tell you that no matter how behind-the-scenes bad the aggregate pornography industry might be it simply can’t be more exploitative, more destructive, more false-hope-building, more genuine-hope-shattering, or more sanity, health, and soul robbing than the aggregate music industry.

The difference being that you leave your pants on slightly more often to play music. But! If you really think about it which industry do you think has the most deaths by overdose, suicide, or murder? The most liver failures? The higher rates of drug and alcohol addiction? The greater number of promising-but-naive talents ruthlessly exploited by cynically jaded money bags? The more low-paid or unpaid hours working in inhumane conditions? Even more transmission of STDs than in porn, even more nonconsensual sex than in porn, and more violence than in porn.

Eww!

I say all this not because I particularly approve of pornography but because until I read Amber’s piece I’d never considered that — for all it’s genuinely lovely bright spots — the production end of the music business is a shockingly high-risk enterprise. More so, when I think about it, than coal mining, or copper smelting, or commercial fishing.

Enough so that anyone who owns an iPod probably needs to do a little introspection before tossing stones at anyone else who downloads porn.

For the record I think pornography, and music for that matter, are both fine but I have an even lower tolerance for most of the stuff that’s out there than I have for advertising.

(Note: I thought about getting all clever and interpolating links to music-related examples of addiction, exploitation, violence, and woe throughout this post but do I really need to say more than “Hank Williams, Marianne Faithful, Janice Janis Joplin, John Fogerty, and Curt Kurt Kobain” to make the point? And they’re just some of the people you might have heard of and there are more unheard of than any of us could begin to count.)

[Note: Spell-checkers don’t help with given names, let alone stage names. Worse luck. :-) —fl]