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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two segments today, and I just learned on Twitter that some listeners like this formula, and I don't really need to change it up.

We'll hear from Heather Berg, author of the book, Pornwork, about laboring in that field, and then from Kevin Young and Leonard Seabrook, co-authors of a paper in the contrasting organizational styles of the Chicago free marketer,

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Centrist, Keynesian schools of economic thought.

Most analyses of sex work study it from the consumption side, how viewers and customers experience the product, what it does to us as a society, or how it affects individuals' views of human relations.

Here's a different perspective from Heather Berg, assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the book, Pornwork, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

It's not screamingly new, it was published a year ago, but hey, we're not hung up on commercial norms here on Behind the News.

Berg looks at the people who make porn, how workers see their work, and how they fight to maximize their control over their conditions of labor.

How much of an escape from the world of wage labor is it? How free or unfree to the performance feel?

How is the transformation of the industry from the era of blurry stag films to today's DIY world of only fans affected the people who make it? Heather Berg.

Reading your book reminded me of an old friend of mine on first hearing the term culture workers, snarling, we got it to culture so we didn't have to work.

Yes.

Is porn something like that?

Yeah, I love that. I think it really can be. Folks get into porn often so they don't have to work and often find a lot of work on the other side, but one of the things I'm trying to hold on to in the book is that that initial refusal still matters.

Most writing on porn and a lot of stuff on sex work generally has focus on the consumption side, the effects on those who watch it, what does it mean for human relations, those sorts of things, but you're looking at to use the Marxist terminology, relations of production, boss worker, conditions of labor, things like that.

Why do you think there's so little attention paid to the people who actually produce this stuff?

Yeah, I think part of it and this is something that I started to do is I got deeper into the research is to read writing on porn, whether it be academic or journalistic, then kind of get clues as to whether the author imagined themselves more as a consumer as a worker.

Part of this is about sex work stigma and also about how hard it is for sex workers to gain footing in the academy, but so often you can read this work and get a pretty clear idea that the author imagined themselves in the position of either primary consumers of people who watch porn or what we might call secondary ones.

So often anti porn feminist imagine themselves there, people who will be impacted because other others watch porn.

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