Pornland
Page 7
As soon as the GGW bus pulls into a vacation resort, the staff creates a party atmosphere, whether it be on the beach or in a nightclub. Francis’s team members are typically in their twenties and early thirties, attractive, casually dressed, and bathed in celebratory status by virtue of their connection to GGW. These men shoehorn their way into student peer groups by using their “cool” status to ingratiate themselves with the women, and they adopt a “fun-loving” persona as they begin to scout for potential recruits. In this way, they work their way into a group of women who are most likely (at least) ten years their junior.
The team is coached to always be on the lookout for a “10,” which translates into a young, white, blonde, blue-eyed female with big breasts and a toned body. The cameramen even get bonuses for finding and filming such women.13 Women of color, especially black women, appear to be completely off-limits. For example, in one painful scene from GGW ’s Sex Starved College Girls 3, the cameraman homes in on three girls, two white and one black. All three look excited to be on GGW, but it is the white women who get all the attention. As they begin to kiss, the camera focuses on the white women. The black woman stands perfectly still, not knowing what to do with herself as her two friends get into a heavy make-out session. As the scene continues, the camera blocks out the black woman completely. This exclusion of women of color from GGW suggests that the targeted audience is white men, because there is a general belief in the porn industry that men on the whole prefer to watch porn that features women of their own racial group.14
If you watch enough of these videos, you’ll spot a pattern: the GGW team targets a woman who is surrounded by male and female peers. The cameramen then proceed to encourage the surrounding students to nag the woman to flash. Some of the women agree quickly while others take a lot of convincing. Because many of the young women are in the developmental stage where peer acceptance is all-important, it is not surprising that they cave in. If Francis and his team were themselves to be seen to pester a woman into flashing, then they would appear as adult predators of adolescent girls. Instead, they cleverly manipulate the peers of these girls to do their “dirty work.”
The GGW team, by setting up camp in student-dominated places, is actually infiltrating the private space of these students. Spring break (or similar times when students get together on vacation) is typically a time when young adults congregate without older adult supervision. There is an expectation on the part of the students that while on vacation with peers, they will be able to experiment sexually with minimal consequences. According to one study: Activities on spring break . . . were described as exceptions to everyday experience, outside of usual standards, expectations, norms. Students used phrases such as “what happens in Daytona, stays in Daytona,” “nothing that happens here comes home” and “nothing counts.” They portrayed an atmosphere in which the usual rules and moral codes did not apply. Students provided detailed descriptions of how some had behaved “totally out of character” or in ways that “they never would at home.” These illustrations and the results of the statistical analysis support the picture of spring break as the environment in which personal codes are temporarily suspended.15
This sense of having a “pass” to experiment sexually on vacation with unforeseeable long-term consequences is precisely what Francis exploits as a way to recruit young women. The alcohol-soaked, sexually charged, no-holds-barred atmosphere of spring break provides a perfect atmosphere for the GGW team to manipulate the girls into behaving in ways that would normally be outside their repertoire of behavior.
The videos in which the girls are seen actually performing sexually (this is usually masturbation, girl-on-girl sex, and/or inserting dildos into the vagina and sometimes anus) show just how predatory the GGW team is. The first scene often reveals the cameraman walking into a room and approaching a woman or a group of women, who giggle as he begins dishing out the compliments. He then, in a gentle voice, starts to give them instructions on how to undress and what to do with each other. He will say things like “Why don’t you touch her tits?” “Give her a slap,” “Open your legs wide,” and so on. If we consider the power imbalance in the room at that moment, then it becomes easy to understand why it’s so difficult for a woman to change her mind once a scene has been set in motion. The cameraman is older, has celebrity status, and, most important, is clothed. She, on the other hand, is a late adolescent, most likely drunk, and naked in front of men she does not know.
Adolescents, by definition, are trying on identities to see which one fits. They are seeking out ways of being in the world that make sense for who they are and who they want to be. Since the most visible identity on offer for a young woman is one that emphasizes her as a sexual being to the exclusion of anything else, then performing sex on camera becomes one more way to express who you are.
One of the major problems associated with being on GGW is that the young women’s behavior is forever frozen in time on tape; they can’t take it back, hide it, or deny that they did it. For some of the young women I have spoken with, the aftermath of appearing in GGW was devastating. One young woman who flashed for GGW told me that she felt like the image would follow her for the rest of her life. She said that she had agreed to flash “because I was drunk and it seemed like fun. Well, it isn’t fun now because what people always seem to find out about me is that I was on GGW.” While they might have thought sexually performing for the camera was fun at the time, their families, communities, and peer group turned against them once they found out what they had done, labeling them as sluts, a label that they carry with them wherever they go. These young women grew up in a media culture where women such as Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and Kim Kardashian seemed to have benefited from having sex tapes of them in public circulation. What these young women find out after performing for GGW is that while celebrities can get away with such sexual performance on camera, the average female stripped of wealth and glamour gets treated not as a Paris Hilton wannabe but as a “slutty” girl who deserves to be ridiculed and shunned.
For many of the young women I have spoken with, life changed dramatically after an appearance on GGW, and some even suffer symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. One woman told me that after she had girl-on-girl sex with her friend, she felt like “a stupid whore and I can’t stop people watching me. All the guys at school watch me and I feel horrible.” Their moment of recklessness has been captured on film, and they feel that it will define them for the rest of their lives, overriding all other parts of their identity. For some of these young women, wherever they go, be it a new school or job, their GGW images dog them. Some drop out of school, others become depressed, and many carry a deep sense of shame. What I found was that their lives had been derailed as plans for school or careers were dropped. Ellen started college with the hope of being a business major but after the tape of her having sex with her friend was shown at a frat party during the first semester, she dropped out of school. In Ellen’s case, as in that of others I interviewed, depression prevented her from even leaving the house. Trisha told me that “my life will never be the same. I had so many plans and look at me now, a dropout with no future.”
As these women struggle to rebuild their lives, Joe Francis gets richer and richer. He has hit on a winning idea and in spite of the many legal cases against him—he has been accused of racketeering, drug trafficking, child pornography, bribery, possession of a controlled substance, and introducing contraband into a Florida jail—his company continues to grow. By developing a brilliant marketing campaign and brand, he has helped to make the culture more porn-friendly and by so doing, he has further blurred the line between pop culture and pornography.
Jenna Jameson
Her breasts are scarred from having her breast implants removed, her face looks like it collapsed, and she still has her silicone injected lips! Not to mention her puss and ass are probably as big as a car garage. . . . It is a good thing she retired because this is one old slut that
needs to be put down.
—Blog post
Jenna Jameson achieved what seemed like the impossible just a generation ago—she became the first-ever real porn star. She managed to break through the porn barrier by moving seamlessly between the porn world and mainstream media. In the past, porn performers couldn’t shake the sleaze factor and were hence considered untouchable by most mainstream pop culture industries. Jameson changed all this as she became a household name, thanks in part to the many stories on her life in celebrity magazines such as People and US, her best-selling book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, shows about her that appeared on VH1, E! Entertainment, and HBO, and her appearances in ads for companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Pony. That no other woman in porn has ever penetrated the mainstream to such a degree is not lost on the porn industry. Playboy in its January 2009 issue named Jameson the first porn performer to “become a mainstream icon.” The Adult Movie Awards run by Adult Video News has a category called Jenna Jameson Crossover Star of the Year, in which female porn performers compete to see who has come closest to emulating Jameson’s mainstream status.
The story told by the media of how Jameson became a porn star is one that highlights just how carefully the porn industry crafts its image as fun, chic, and hot while ignoring the reality of what happens to most women in the industry. In interviews she often says that she got into the industry because she is a very sexual person and pornography was an obvious career choice. Interviewers take this at face value, buying into an image of a highly sexual woman who luckily finds her niche in porn. Numerous stories underscore how she is in control of her own life and how she is a living example of the way a woman can make a successful career in the porn industry. In these accounts, porn is cleansed of its sleaziness and Jameson, a white, blonde woman with an all-American look, becomes the walking (wholesome) image of the industry, rather than the men who own and control much of the porn or the many women who end up poor with damaged bodies and STDs, working the streets to pay the rent.
Missing from most media accounts of Jameson is the real story of her life, which is much less glamorous than her public image. In How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, she gives a detailed account of a childhood and early adulthood marred by neglect and abuse. Her mother died when she was two and her early life was chaotic, not least because she was at times neglected by her father. As a teenager, she was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead and later raped by her abusive boyfriend’s uncle. When she was sixteen, her father threw her out, so she went to live with her boyfriend, who encouraged her to start stripping. She was so desperate that in order to get her first gig, she removed her braces with a pair of pliers. Later on she became addicted to a cocktail of drugs and nearly died.
While articles occasionally mention the abuse, they gloss over the actual amount and the ways that such experience shapes choices and decisions in later life. The story of a neglected teenager being turned out of her home by her father and encouraged to become a stripper by her boyfriend is much more seedy and unlikely to paint the porn industry in a positive light. Most of these articles instead focus on her wealthy lifestyle and the way she has built a one-woman porn empire. Indeed, she made many millions from her films, from her Web site, called Club Jenna (now owned by Playboy), from selling computer games in which the user gets to masturbate Jameson as well as have “sex” with her, from her sex toys, T-shirts, mugs, action figures, and ring tones that feature her moaning. She even has an anatomically accurate model of her vagina and buttocks molded in soft plastic. An article in Forbes on Jameson demonstrates the way that mainstream media cleanse the porn industry by focusing only on her success. It summarizes her life as follows: By day Jameson posed for nudie magazine covers, and at 19 she quit stripping to act in adult films—mainly to retaliate against her beau, who had been cheating on her, as she tells it. She shot her first scene in 1993 and a year later landed a contract with Wicked Pictures, which paid her $6,000 a month to perform in eight to ten feature films a year, doing three or four scenes in each. Even better money came in from a return to the brass pole: “After I became famous, I made sick money stripping,” she says with a laugh. At her peak she got $5,000 a show, typically did four shows a night and made extra cash posing for Polaroids with panting patrons ($40 per), selling her latest movie ($50) and gouging gawkers for tips. She claims she often made $50,000 a week.16
Nowhere does this article, or most of the other ones, point out the physical and emotional cost that the industry extracts. For example, in a particularly vacuous interview with Jameson, Anderson Cooper (he calls her “the reigning queen” of porn) says, “You know, as you say, I think, in the book, [pornography] can be very demeaning to women.” Jameson responds with, “Well, it can be. I think that nowadays, the American public, they’re much more accepting of the adult industry, and it goes to show that we should give the American public much more credit than we do.” Jameson clearly avoids answering the question and Cooper, rather than pursuing what is a crucial issue, moves on to another topic.17
Were these interviewers to delve more deeply, they would find that Jameson’s relationship to the porn industry is complex and vacillating—she insists that she loved her work and yet at times her anger at men and at the industry shows through. This was most clearly demonstrated at the Adult Video News Awards in 2008, when she stated in an angry voice, “I will never, ever ever spread my legs for this industry again. Ever.” What was surprising was that the golden girl of the porn industry was booed by her colleagues, possibly because she hinted that she, the woman who made more money from performing in porn than any other woman in the world, was negatively affected by the industry. In some interviews Jameson tells the truth of her life, and in so doing, shows just how much the industry uses up women. One particularly instructive interview Jameson did was with publisher Judith Regan. Asked what her experiences have taught her about men, Jameson replies, “You start to hate men a little bit cuz you see them in a really awful light. They’re drunk, they’re, you know, rude, they’re out of control. You put some alcohol in them and it gets ugly.” She continues by saying that her work as a stripper “showed me what they [men] are capable of.” When Regan asks, “Which is?” she replies, “Total degradation.” What follows is a startling admission by Jameson. When she is asked by Regan if she felt degraded she replies, “Yes, when you are young you are not able to rationalize exactly what is going on. I had a few troubles with it but then, you know, you grow up quickly and I understood what it took to do what I did.” But rather than taking this any further, Jameson quickly turns the interview on its head by saying that “I wasn’t being objectified, I was being empowered.”18 It is difficult to fathom how being degraded is empowering, but it is important to remember that Jameson is on the job when she is being interviewed and thus she can only go so far with her criticisms.
The usual mantra from the porn industry is that women are empowered by doing porn, and this is one way to claim one’s sexuality. Digging a little deeper into Jameson’s life actually illustrates just how disempowered she has felt while making porn. In her book she describes her first photo shoot: “Spreading my legs was the worst. I had no idea it would be so intimidating to sit spread-eagled under bright lights in a room full of clothed people. The photographer keeps shouting ‘wider!’ Now ‘show me pink!’ . . . Though I really wanted to please him, I couldn’t . . . exposing my insides to strangers was so daunting that, instead of spreading my lips with my fingers, I kept trying to cover them up.”19 This does not sound like a woman who ended up in porn because she loves her body and is a “very sexual being,” but rather a scared and embarrassed teenager who was in way above her head. Her account of stripping in her book also illustrates the physical harms these women endure. These include whacking their head on the pole, catching a nipple piercing in their hair or somewhere else, ruptured breast implants from landing/rolling/hitting the pole wrong, bunions, corns, bone spurs, constant sprained ankles, swelled knees, shin splints, lower
back pain, degenerative muscle tissue on the pads of feet, neck problems (bulged or degenerative discs) from whipping the head around, joint problems from constant bending and unnatural positions, rotator cuff injuries, a swollen sacrum, hearing problems from loud music, and “bruises on the ass from guys pinching it.”20
But probably the most damning statement on the sex industry is her description of how women are treated in porn: “Most girls get their first experience in gonzo films—in which they’re taken to a crappy studio apartment in Mission Hills and penetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch. And these girls . . . go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience. But, unfortunately, they can’t take that experience back, so they live the rest of their days in fear that their relatives, their co-workers, or their children will find out, which they inevitably do.”21 This is a very different Jenna Jameson to the one showcased on E! Entertainment or interviewed by Howard Stern. On a show in 2008 Jameson was asked by Stern if her boyfriend likes to “bukkake” (ejaculate) on her face. Playing along, Jameson laughs and says that her boyfriend likes it so much that she’s requested bejeweled goggles for Valentine’s Day. This is the more common public face of Jameson, not surprisingly, as she still makes money from her movies, toys, and gadgets and were she to be angry or truthful most of the time, her fan base might well decline.
But for all of her popularity, there are many porn users who actively dislike Jameson because they think she is too sanitized and that the sex she was willing to do is considered “vanilla” by the porn fans that post on the Adult DVD Talk discussion board. Chief among their complaints is her unwillingness to do anal scenes. Gonzo 420 puts it best when he says, “newsflash to all you Jenna Jameson fans . . . she sucks and is overrated!! Thank god she retired from the business. Now people can focus on whores that actually like sex and like being a whore. When did Jenna Jameson ever do anal? Oh thats [sic] right she didn’t, because she’s not a good whore at all.”22 An example of how these users are obsessed by anal sex is the thread that discusses a scene in one of her movies that looks like she was anally penetrated. Sam W starts the discussion with the following observation: “I know other than dildos Jenna didn’t do any anal scenes. However, I got in a Jenna mood the other day and put in ‘Jenna Ink,’ and watched the last scene (the Army scene). I noticed that when she is taking it from behind while kind of just bending over, the guy was going in and completely out of her. Anyway, one time he went to go back in her he actually ‘misses’ and goes into her ass. Jenna pushes him off and says something I think and has a smile on her face. I slowed it down and he definitely goes into her ass.”23 There follows a spirited discussion of the scene, with most fans agreeing that for a short time she was indeed anally penetrated. That this is important to users speaks volumes about the role of anal sex in porn since the act is often used to thoroughly subordinate the woman, and that Jameson has reached mega status without being used in this way irks many users. The way many of the users feel about Jameson is summed up by Bornyo when he writes: “I think it’s become pretty clear that she had no real impotance [sic]. I’m sure Playboy will tell you she is worthless. Porn is a revolving door or a conveyor belt if you will. Her flavor of the month has long expired and it was only thru shrewd marketing that she was able to keep herself afloat as long as she did. Her performances are lacking when compared to her peers and there are fresher and better girls coming along every day.”24 Eye Balls a Bleeding agrees, as he comments that Jameson’s porn star status is a “lot of hype over nothing. There is nothing really to distinguish her from any other porn chick.” He goes on to say, however, that she does deserve praise for the fact that “she is idolized by hundreds and hundreds of lazy young girls who rush into porn thinking that they are going to be the next Jenna Jameson and make millions. Thus ensuring a never ending supply of 18 year olds hopping on a bus and heading to Chatsworth.”25