Linguist, MIT professor, and essayist Noam Chomsky said he’d never heard of “The Hustler” magazine, but consented to a 2005 interview because editors had sent him a list of his friends who’d also been featured in its sticky pages.
He said that, after the magazine had not sent him a transcript to approve, he had forgotten about the interview. He certainly would not have consented if he’d known Hustler was a porn publication.
So Chomsky seems irritated to be asked about his views on pornography in this YouTube video, as if that What Porn Does is degrade women and that is a foregone conclusion. In response to the argument that women in pornography concede to and are compensated for filming, Chomsky says that if a sweatshop burns down, are its workers not to be pitied because they agreed to work there?
I’d argue that porn’s real victims of degradation are the mopes who make $50 (or nothing) to hang around and jerk off in bukkake videos, but those guys like doing that.
Oddly enough, the issue of Hustler displayed in the Youtube video is not the one that was widely available: both issues featured an embracing Krystal Steal and McKenzie Lee (and Sheryl Crow nude), but the newsstand version bumped Chomsky off the cover for Lesbo Cherry Popping. Maybe that’s why he was peeved; he was all set to pose casually by his Hustler cover at Harvard Square’s Out of Town News and it was More Chomping, Less Chomsky.
Degradation surely is in the eyes of the beholder. I want to invite Professor Chomsky to an Anabolic shoot to prove my theory of applied generative grammar.
Previously: “You’re not one of us“
See also: Reason: Porn-loving people vs. Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s Hustler interview
Didn’t you do your undergrad at the Assachusetts Institute of Technology?
Assachusetts? I am shocked and saddened. No, I did not do my undergrad here, but I did pass it on the way, and know how far a Smoot will get me.
Gram,
I am glad that you are raising the IQ of Pornland with Chomsky’s lack of understanding of Porn. Maybe it is a senior moment.
Whenever I head someone saying that porn degrades women, I immediately ask: “so gay porn is okay then”? I mean, there’s not a woman 50 miles from a gay male porn movie. So that’s all okay?
The religious people usually don’t have a good come-back for that.