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• What a load of bullshit. Paying performers $200 for a scene because they're fighting "Patriarchy" (while the producers sell it for market prices) is not a "fair labor practice".

  I've had run-ins with Stryker and Trouble, pictured above, and they're both detestable people. The whole group is so pretentious and condescending it's ridiculous.

  Eithical adult production is a wonderful idea. So-called inclusivity has little or nothing to do with this, and feminism even less.

• Some of them used to like me but they don't anymore, despite the fact that I opened a door or two for a couple of them along the way.

  Personally, I don't care what kind of picture anyone else makes. I just play my own game and let them play theirs.

  But that's the annoying difference. Not all of them have that same live-and-let-live attitude. They mean their work and their comments to be a critique of how everyone else does porn and does it wrong. That's an odd perspective for people who make a big deal out of being inclusive. Really, "for a lot of them that's just code for "non-heteronormative mainstream porn" of the sort they regard as unenlightened. Of course, if any of those patriarchal producers came along and offered them deals to do bigger pictures for more money they'd be all over it. I'm not going to name any names here but I'm speaking from personal experience with at least one of the individuals named above.

  It you really favor diversity in porn, you don't feel obligated either to defend or deride what other directors shoot. You let your work stand on its own and if it doesn't find an audience that's not the audience's fault or the systems fault. That's your own fault for not making a picture enough people wanted to see.

  The real annoyance is the way some of these directors take advantage of their friends. As you say, they pay them nothing and get them to work anyway because it's for the greater good, but whose good is it really for? Will what they do significantly impact how most porn is made? I doubt that. And when they manipulate others into cutting their rates for the privilege of being a part of something thought to be important, aren't they just playing the same game a couple of pretty well-known male directors of the type they don't much like always play?

  How many times have I seen directors of the old-fashioned kind hammer performer rates by making it sound as if said performers should feel honored to be part of some big, important feature? That the big, important feature had plenty of money in the budget to pay them what they deserved and that said money will end up in the director's pocket doesn't seem to keep the trick from working but it's still a trick.

  The trick object in those cases is some kind of dubious prestige. The trick object in these is some kind of dubious political statement.

  At the end of a long day, it's really about how you treated the people that determines what kind of person you are and the real excitement the movie generates is the proof of what kind of director you are.

  I'm just not a fan of handing out ribbons for political reasons, whether there people do it or AVN does it. I'm stubbornly meritocratic and the only merit in any porn picture is how effectively it arouses those who watch it.

  Otherwise, as a certain well-known studio head of Hollywood's golden age once put it, "if you've got a message, send a telegram."

  That we no longer have telegraphs only makes the observation more trenchant. The more things change, the more they stay the same.