Why Chris Yeh dedicated his porn-lovin’ post to me, and why I don’t have much to say about it here
I have a lot of brilliant friends, but Chris Yeh (aka the Harvard MBA behind Ask the Harvard MBA) is definitely one of the most intelligent and creative. Our conversations push my mind in new directions, and I also get a huge ego boost whenever he agrees with me or suggests that something I’ve said is a new idea to him AND that he agrees with it. This is just one reason why I highly suggest surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you (a topic for another post).
Chris is an investor, marketer, and entrepreneur (not to mention that he has a design degree from Stanford, too - like I said, much smarter than me). One subject that he and I come back to time after time is that of the porn industry. It’s fascinating and enlightening to examine the business models it uses, discards, and innovates way before the rest of the world takes notice. For example, with the advent of free and easy online file sharing, porn entrepreneurs realized that their money had to be made in niches (fetishes, sometimes extreme), personalization, and the live experience. Notice that this is where non-porn industries are now trying to make headway.
So that’s why Chris dedicated his excellent post, “Why I Love Pornography,” to me (and Penelope Trunk; I can’t vouch for why she got a nod, too, but I suspect it’s for similar reasons). The piece is totally safe for work, and is worth checking out for the chart alone.
In doing so, he challenged me and Penelope to respond. Sadly, the paragraphs above are about as much as I’m willing to say on the topic. There’s nothing salacious about discussing business models and marketing strategies used by the porn industry. Nonetheless, people get really weird and gross when a woman is the one with the thoughts and opinions on the matter. Last night on Twitter, after Chris posted his link and I re-tweeted it, some guy thought it was “satirical” (his word) to ask to see a porn video featuring me. When I told him off for that, he said I was “so cute” (again, his words) that he thought I’d be able to take the joke. (My response: “It didn’t read like satire. I don’t know you. We’ve never met. You made me uncomfortable. Please be a gentleman and stop.”) Sadly, the world is full of idiots like that, and I don’t plan to deal with them any more than life forces me to.
So I’ll confine my discussions of this topic to meatspace, with people who have big brains and know how to use them. Luckily, I know lots of those.
Filed under: Life
It is a crying shame that women aren’t able to discuss pornography without being subjected to harassment by low-class cretins.
You would think they’d want to encourage such behavior, in hopes of achieving a world in which men and women are free to talk freely about pornography and their personal choices.
Except for slash fiction porn. Those people are freaks.*
* I kid, I kid! There’s only two kinds of people I hate–the prejudiced, and the Dutch.
I tried not to sound whiney in this post, since I hate whining, but yeah - it sucks.
- Hugely dispiriting, the whole inability for adults to discuss pornography and/or erotica objectively without making it personal - particularly where women are involved in the conversation.
Given that it’s been a huge innovation driver since Gutenberg (porn was printed prior to bibles) you’d think some of the blunter blades in the drawer would finally realize how foundational it is.
But no, despite VHS format famously beating Betamax because of the porn industry, DVD & HD production being underpinned by porn consumption and on and on, as soon as you try and discuss it some people immediately start getting fixated by the content and not the medium and the business strategies.
If you say to people porn sites have had Bing style interfaces with movies that start playing when you mouse over them for aeons (megaporn.com for example) the conversation almost immediately turns to personal habits/preferences and in some cases prejudices. I can’t imagine, outside certain circles, many places where a woman could even begin to discuss that.
It’s incredibly sad and pathetic how limiting that is, and also how you have to immediately start being jocular, ironic and humorous around this incredibly sensitive topic with most people.