I found another excellent piece written by Susannah Breslin about the recent death of porn star Stephen Hill. I’d thought about posting the incident as a news item, but Breslin, who has written fairly extensively about the sex industry, is far more qualified than I am to put it in perspective, so I’m glad I came across her article, written in Salon and titled “Stephen Hill’s dark life in porn.”
What’s really remarkable about Ms. Breslin is that she is a female writer who actually cares about men – even “losers” like Stephen Hill – and isn’t faking it. These days, that’s a rare quality, even in men.
Here’s an excerpt:
If porn is a joke — and, particularly these days, it most assuredly is — male porn stars are its punch line. Reams of text have been written about how porn supposedly victimizes the women who work in this branch of the sex trade, but inside the straight porn industry, it’s the female performers who have the greater power, higher status and bigger paycheck. (The gay porn industry is a different beast altogether and to compare the two is to compare apples and oranges.) So-called woodsmen are paid significantly less than their female counterparts, for their efforts are treated like props on the movie sets where they perform near Herculean sex acts of which most men can only dream (“Get it up, get it on, get it off” is the woodsman’s mantra), and more often than not end up as decapitated, frantically thrusting tubes of meat in this industry’s final product. Due to the hardcore nature of the porn business and the toll it takes upon all its workers, the porn industry functions as a meat grinder for the human condition, and men are its offal. They may score bragging rights as professional cocksmen, but the reality is these are the working stiffs of a business that has virtually no interest in the men it employs and all the interest in the world in the women with whom its movies are forever preoccupied.
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