A Collapsing Society, and the Sex Industries
I am a young adult woman. I am white and raised middle class. I grew up in a U.S. city, in a multiracial and mixed-class community.
Growing up, many of my friends and I were aware that society was collapsing. We knew about poverty, war, racism, and the climate crisis. The world seemed like an unstable and uncertain place. I had no picture that my life situation and relationships were permanent, stable, or solid.
Some of my friends thought that sexism was a problem in their lives, and some didn’t. Sexism became more obvious to some of them over time. I knew from a young age that it was a problem in my life and in the world.
I went to schools with “good” sex education, meaning that they offered condoms. But I mostly learned about sex from boys at school and from movies. My parents didn’t talk to me about it.
I got a very inaccurate picture of sex. I grew up believing that only men enjoyed sex, that men were entitled to sex regardless of what women wanted, and that women’s job in sex was to be “sexy.”
My friends and I had early exposure to the sex industries. We listened to music with sexual lyrics. We watched music videos with sexual dance moves. I was first solicited for sex by a stranger in my early teens.
I remember a few moments of feeling horrified by the sexual parts of the songs, books, and movies around me. My parents were horrified and didn’t want to be anywhere around the sexual content. But my friends didn’t seem horrified.
It was confusing. We got very different messages from different people. There was no attention anywhere to figure things out. Mostly we ended up numb to the sex industries.
Many of my female friends developed pornography addictions in their late teens or early twenties. Using pornography was seen as “normal” and a personal choice. The first porn I ever saw was rape fantasy porn. I watched it because the person I was dating sent it to me.
During the pandemic lockdown in early 2020, many people were losing their jobs. Many younger women thought it was a good time to start making pornographic content of themselves and posting it online for money—it seemed like a good “work from home” option. Many of my friends joked about it; I don’t know if any of them did it.
As society collapses, more people are going to get more desperate and try things they wouldn’t have previously tried.
Discharging in RC on the sex industries has been useful for me. I am excited about building more space to work on the topic.
USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 209, October 2022)