Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Abeeb. A weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex political, spiritual, and philosophical ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

This week's guests and I are talking about porn and porn work. One of the guests is Dr. Heather Berg, who has studied and written

about labor and the porn industry. The other is Sovere, who is herself a porn performer,

also a stand-up comedian, and a writer. And we go all over the plays about the porn quote unquote industry,

and I do think those quotes deserve to be there,

as well as labor concerns in porn

and how those kinds of labor concerns can sometimes come up

against issues of sex and culture.

What some of the problems of the sex work is work movement

face when they ignore sexuality and also porn. And also porn performers sometimes ignore when it

comes to labor concerns. It's really a great conversation because there are three different perspectives that

all overlap. So I've worked with Heather before on an article called The Problem with Sex

Work is Work, where she and I sort of hash out a lot of the issues around labor and consent

and the wage relationship. As you can imagine, Heather has a deep critique of capitalism.

Sovereign, Sire and I talk all the time

about pornography and her experiences in it as a performer.

And she is a completely different way of coming to it

and understanding the problems and benefits of doing porn work.

One of the things I think is really important is that when we talk about sex work,

a lot of times pornography is left out.

It's seen as some sort of special case,

either by people who are okay with pornography and not okay with other kinds of sex work,

...