Thus I Refute Chyng Sun

A big brain in the adult entertainment industry almost since it's inception, Nina Hartley has an unassailable record as a free-speech and feminist activist. Read her recent article refuting the same tired, anti-sex arguments we're hearing a lot of in Northampton and ask yourself who (if anyone) is being "exploited."

It was with a growing sense of outrage that I read Prof.Chyng Sun's report of her visit this past January to the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. I couldn't help wondering it the author had done any prior research whatsoever into the active, twenty-year debate among women over the impact of pornography on their individual lives and their status as a gender. There's nothing new in her indignation, nothing fresh in her insights and nothing unfamiliar in her arguments. As a sex-worker and sex-worker advocate for over two decades, I've heard and read it all before.

The professor appears wholly unfamiliar with the work of accomplished, feminist women who reject her fundamental contentions about porn and sex-work. If she bothered to consider the writings of Nadine Strossen, Carol Queen, Pat Califia, Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy, Sallie Tisdale, Linda Williams, Annie Sprinkle, myself and others, her homework wasn't reflected in what she showed me. Clearly, testimony that failed to corroborate her pre-conceived notions of what porn is "really" about, or what it "really" means didn't register on her radar screen.

I am an R.N., a third-generation feminist and a First-Amendment activist as well as a porn performer with the longest continuous career in the history of the industry. I'm easy to find. In fact, I was in one place for four hours each day on the floor at AEE. She certainly found my husband, writer-director I.S. Levine, (whose videos and magazines appear under the name Ernest Greene). At her request, he granted her a two-hour, on-camera interview in good faith, hoping but not expecting to receive an open-minded hearing. Why did Professor Sun not speak to me? Could it be because she knew that my very existence argues against her core assertions? Where was the honest, fearless intellectual curiousity that is hallmark of the pioneering academic researcher?

Full Text at Counterpunch