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• Wednesday, March 1, 2006 08:32 AM

  I think my rhetoric was just fine.

  The Porn actor/coal miner analogy is invalid. The point about porn work is that it's considered immoral. That's why you don't want your daughter doing it. Coal mining is brutal work, and you might not want to do it for a number of reasons, but it's not because coal mining (or flipping hamburgers,...) is considered immoral. Geez, isn't that obvious enough? Do we need to pass out smart pills?

  I write fiction based on copyrighted characters owned by other people. Sometimes I write them having sex. Lots and lots of people think this is immoral. I don't care, and I'm not ashamed of my hobby, and when I can make money doing it I have (I've sold Star Trek fan fiction to a contest sponsored by Pocket Books and legally made money off it.)

  The opinions of *other* people as to the morality or immorality of an action are irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. If my daughter wants to grow up to provide abortions to women who need them, I will be a bit concerned about the danger involved from nutjobs out there, but I would totally support her decision, because *my* moral belief is that this is a noble calling, despite the fact that lots of people would consider her a murderer of babies.

  I'm sure there are people who don't want their daughter doing porn work because they consider it immoral. I don't want my daughter working for tobacco companies because I consider that immoral, but I don't want her working in porn because it's not safe (high rates of STDs) and she has life skills that could get her a better-paying job and/or a job that does humanity more good. Morality has nothing to do with it.

  There are many people who think it would be a fantastic idea for their son or daughter to join the military, or for a child who's an engineer to work for the Department of Defense. My son wants to grow up to be an inventor, and my husband and I have strongly encouraged him to *avoid* ever working for anything with a military application, because that violates our sense of morality. Other people would strongly disagree and would want their sons to invent weapons for the Department of Defense if it were an option. So personal opinions about the morality of a line of work vary between people and are not necessarily *the* reason why a person would not want their child doing a kind of work. If my daughter's only choices were coal mining or porn work, I'd rather she did the porn work... it's less likely to kill her and it probably pays better.

  —alarajrogers Read alarajrogers's other letters
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