they like it that way?

Someone just said “… Them blondes and brunettes (bless them) that pose in playboy do so out of their own will. This happens to be their chosen profession. I am pretty sure that if you were to offer these chics an alternative source of employment they would not take it up. This is easy and fast money. There has been a history of really well to do film stars baring it all for the centre fold of this magazine. For these hollywood stars - money ain't the only reason they do it. Its the fame that comes with it and they have chosen to achieve it by this way….”

This is about women in prostitution and pornography. wilfully or naively, what we do not see is that yes, these women have taken up these professions on their own, but were driven to them as a final resort. ive heard so many people claim that these women have chosen to earn their living that way after all, so whats the big deal. heres whats the big deal.

Choose to earn that way? You don’t get employee benefits, pf, insurance, medical cover, perks. you don’t even have a set of labour laws to protect your rights. Yours is the first head to roll when the cops and politicians want to look good. You also lose the right to call your person – your body – yours. Because you stripped once before the camera, people assume youre always "available" – its never a rape.

“...... of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis”- Andrea Dworkin.

A quick brief of what a shoot entails: you spend a couple of weeks on a totally unhealthy regimen designed to make you look more “sexy”. This would include a course of diuretics to make you lose water and look thinner, applying hormone ointment on your breasts to make them look bigger (who knows the long term effects). Of course there’s good old silicon as an alternative (whose long term effects we do know but don’t care to reveal). So much for quick money. This is the maintenance of “stock” in this trade. Im not even glancing at the perpetual near starvation or the sick sexual fantasies that your audience has which youre forced to act out. Easy money?

“It costs a lot of money to look as cheap as I do” – Dolly Parton.

Get real. For every 1000 women barely making ends meet, living as prostitutes and starring on porn magazines and movies, maybe one will “make it big” – and pay the price dearly for that. (tell me, even for the one who makes it big, where are our ethics when we are ready to dole out more money to some woman's slavery than to some woman's bid to break free of her chains?)

“A person working as a prostitute to fund a drug habit is the least free individual on the planet.” – Germaine Greer.

In India, we have no idea of the real extent of substance abuse. So I don’t know how many women take up prostitution or pornography to fund a drug habit. Tell you what I do know : ive been to a few red light areas in my city. The women don’t do it for “kicks”. It is a way of earning money to feed the kids, and sometimes a husband whos a boozer. Glamour? youre talking sex under a truck, in a bus terminus, next to a public bathroom. Just anywhere where theres place to lie down. Foreplay? Talking? Caring? Forget it - it’s a matter of in and out again – literally.

God help you if youre “famous” and “well known” - that wont make sure that your vegetable vendor doesnt leer or feel you up and treat you with respect when youre paying him with money that you earned with much more pain and effort than he ever did.

no, not all the women in prostitution and pornography are pushed into it. only some, whose husbands beat them and “lease” them out to pimps and porn film makers. The remaining do it because that’s the only way societys ready to employ them…. when did you last see a recruitment ad saying “wanted, retired or practising prostitute (or porn star) with 5 years experience?” we have a sanctimonious attitude towards these "fallen women". (fallen where, because of whom)

they are not able to get jobs. And before getting sniffy or condescending about that, lets just quietly sit back and remember how the most brilliant and well qualified amongst us was worried and desperately looking for “placements” in our final year, or after we graduated. these women are illiterate and don’t have “job skills”. Please… look at the state of education here: amongst the literate population, which gender fares better? Which gender at least gets a chance to learn to read and write? Even if they were literate, capable of getting a job and did land one, how seriously do you think they will be taken with a previous career of prostitution/ posing for porn?

For the women in Hollywood whom you say are rich and have done it for kicks…. I think they deserve to be quartered. They help to further push down every one of the desperate struggling women in prostitution, and reinforce the vicious system that these women are victims of. Sex workers prostitute their bodies. The Hollywood “chicks” prostitute womanhood and womenkind.

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual" - Gloria Steinem.

we're not joking.