by Gail Dines
The degree to which users will fool themselves into believing that porn performers have found their one true vocation is evident all over porn discussion sites, where men swap stories about how most porn performers love what they do. On Adult DVD Talk, Nookie Monster contributes to the discussion on the “Porn chicks who Love it” thread by singing the praise of Cynthia in the movie Exotica 6 because, by the end of a three-way scene, “she is quivering all over and her legs twitching. Halfway into the scene she goes crazy as she gets the living hell fucked out of her. Its one of the best scenes I have ever seen in porn. . . . She starts out joking with the guys, almost taunting them before they even fuck, and by the end of the scene that have broken her pride and made her like a women [sic] possessed quivering and screaming for more cock and to be fucked harder.”9 If we take a close look at what is happening to this woman, with lots of men treating her body in ways that even this porn user describes as getting “the living hell fucked out of her,” then no wonder she is quivering and twitching, though it could well be due to exhaustion and pain, not sexual arousal. Needless to say, no one participating in the thread mentions this possibility.
The men10 who post to these porn discussion boards also buy into the myth that doing porn is not something a woman does for money, but that it’s a calling, and it is their love of sex—not the need to earn a living—that drove these women to the industry. Some of the men on the porn sites do acknowledge that these women get paid for what they do, but they assume that the money is seen as a kind of icing on the cake, since they would choose to do this even if no money was involved. Take, for example, a recent discussion on the Sir Rodney porn review site. The reviewer (Sir Rodney) is discussing the site West Coast Gang Bangs, which he finds “especially exciting because it’s real, featuring real amateurs (mostly swingers) fulfilling a fantasy. Honestly, we get extra hard just writing about it.” Well, it turns out that some of the users aren’t getting hard enough as they recognize some of the women from other porn movies and feel angry that they have been deceived. But Anonymous chimes in with a post to salvage the “real amateurs” fantasy by offering the helpful insight that even though they are porn stars, it doesn’t mean that they “cant [sic] swing on the side!”11
The more ardent fans who post on Adult DVD Talk attend porn promotion shows (such as the Adult Entertainment Expo) and talk about how these women are so hot for sex that they just spontaneously started making out with each other or talked dirty to the customers. Malte Decker, for example, evidently had firsthand experience of just how much Ava Devine is “hungry for cok [sic]” since during a signing and interview he was at “she grabbed most of the man’s [sic] dicks . . . and she was rubbing my dick throughout the whole interview and started sucking it after the last question.”12 Irrespective of whether this story is true or not, the point of the post is to reinforce just how much porn stars supposedly love their job.
Pornstarlover is particularly perturbed about a movie featuring one of his favorite porn stars, Delilah Strong, where she “fucks two black guys and has them cum into ‘shot’ glasses. She ends up swallowing 5 loads but after the first 3 she looks pretty uncomfortable. In fact, she looks like wanting to throw up at the last cumshot. In the end she is all sunshine again and it may have been just acting.”13 The way this fan, and indeed many others, talk themselves into believing what they want to believe is to construct an argument that Delilah was acting when she looked “uncomfortable,” and not acting when she was “all sunshine.” It is hardly worth pointing out here that it could well be the other way around and the real acting was managing to look happy after drinking five different ejaculates.
If porn performers truly don’t like what is happening to them, then the fantasy that users have erected about women and porn begins to crumble, and they are left with the stark reality that maybe these women are not “fuck dolls,” but are instead human beings with real emotions and feelings. If this is the case, then users would have to admit to becoming aroused to images of women being sexually mistreated. For those men who are not sexually sadistic or cruel, this could well be psychologically intolerable, so they have to work very hard at maintaining the fantasy that porn women are indeed unlike most women they meet in the real world.
Ultimately, however, the ability to keep porn women separate from the women they date and hook up with is eroded as the more men watch porn, the more the stories become part of their social construction of reality. Men may think that the porn images are locked in that part of the brain marked fantasy, never to leak into the real world, but I hear over and over again from female students how their boyfriends are increasingly demanding porn sex from them. Whether it be ejaculating on their partner’s face or pounding anal sex, these men want to play out porn in the real world. And from male students I increasingly hear how they thought that they could separate the two worlds, only to find out that industrially produced porn images do indeed seep into their intimate lives.
Boring Porn
Once the user has been socialized into gonzo porn, there is an abundance of images for him to choose from. At first these images may well be exciting, but the more seasoned user will soon find that porn, because of its formulaic nature, becomes predictable. There are X number of minutes given over to oral sex, often leading to the woman gagging, then anal, then double penetration, and then ejaculation. And while the next film may have a few more minutes on one particular act, or may have anal before oral, the story unfolds in much the same way as it did in the previous films, and the images begin to look the same. Missing from porn is anything that looks or feels remotely like intimacy and connection, the two ingredients that make sex interesting and exciting in the real world. Drained of these, porn becomes monotonous and predictable to the point that users need to eventually seek out more extreme acts as a way to keep them interested and stimulated. This is why, Robert Jensen argues, pornographers “offer men sexual gymnastics and circus acts that are saturated with cruelty toward women; they sexualize the degradation of women.”14
Realizing that heightening the level of degradation is what keeps men interested in and aroused by porn helps us to understand why today’s porn looks the way it does. The acts that porn amplifies are designed to deliver the maximum amount of degradation. Probably the most degrading of acts in contemporary porn is ass-to-mouth (ATM), where a woman is expected to put a penis in her mouth that has just been in her anus (or in another woman’s anus). What heightened sexual enjoyment is to be had for the man from going from an anus to a mouth outside of the actual degradation of the woman? That some fans enjoy watching this debasement is evident on the Adult DVD talk; in a thread called “Dirty A2M & Messy Anal-Bloopers & Unexpected Leak,” fans post their favorite scenes and discuss them in detail, with some listing hundreds of scenes where women were clearly shown having to suck a penis covered in visible fecal matter. Mediasmart 2, one of the most energetic of posters on this thread, describes a scene from Assault that Ass #1 in vivid detail:
There is intense anal pounding followed by the guy pulling out, sticking the dick in poor Paris’s face to cum, and as he cums the dick rubs on her chin and lips and lo and behold it smears brown-ness all over her. There’s no ambiguity whatsoever to this scene, it is crap, and lots of it. To cap it all, having seen the dirtiness on his cock, the guy then mutters “suck” in a low guttural voice, and Paris, perhaps not even realizing yet that her chin is entirely brown, sucks away. Its the closest thing to a moment of Zen you can ever get in porn, your eyes are just glued to the screen just waiting for her to figure out what is going on.
Similarly, Balou shares his favorite scene: “At 1:54:17 Rocco pulls his cock out of the ass of a dark haired hungarian amateur slut and makes ATM to a blond girl. He doesn’t hit her mouth at once, so his cock is first at her nose. When he slides into her mouth, you see a very little dark piece of shit remaining on her nose. . . . Gentlemen, this thread must never die, I love dirty anal so much.”15 The pleasure for many of these fans seems to
be in watching the real looks of disbelief, disgust, and distaste flash on the women’s faces when they realize just what they are going to have to put in their mouths. It is a pleasure gained from watching somebody totally dehumanized and humiliated.
The desire to see women utterly degraded and powerless explains in part why anal sex has become so popular in porn. In the real world this act is becoming more common,16 but I doubt that many women are seeking out the type of anal sex that the pornographers depict. What generally makes anal sex so appealing in porn is the potential pain and harm that robotic and mechanistic thrusting can cause women. One porn executive explains why users like anal: “Essentially it comes from [every man] who’s unhappily married, and he looked at his wife who just nagged at him about this or that or whatnot, and he says, ‘I’d like to fuck you in the ass.’ He’s angry at her, right? And he can’t, so he would rather watch some girl taking it up the ass and fantasize at that point he’s doing whatever girl happened to be mean to him that particular day.”17 Similarly, one producer at the Expo told me that he was specializing in anal-themed movies because “men like to see just how far the women will go with the cocks up her ass. I like to see them pushed to the edge, so I make films I like to watch.”
A quick glance at the Adult DVD Talk forum suggests that fans are indeed on the lookout for scenes where the woman is suffering real pain. A popular thread—called Painful Anal—has numerous posts where fans list their favorite scenes and discuss at great length their enjoyment at watching the woman cry, scream, or simply become too overwhelmed to do anything. Nunsploitation, for example, especially likes a scene from Dirty Anal Kelly in Rome where the male performer Rocco is very rough with “Kelly.” At one point, “he takes her arms, holds them behind her back and just plows her ass mercilessly showing no concerns for her yelps and howls. Her face goes from angry and defiant to overwhelmed.” For Nunsploitation, this is an “awesome anal scene.” Another post, this time by AC Cream, illustrates how users are quick to point out that they normally don’t get off on violence, but these scenes are especially appealing:
The most real painful scene I’ve ever seen is Gang-Bang Auditions #3 from Diabolic. The scene with Aspen Brock. When it gets to where Lexington is in her pu$$y & Mr. Marcus is in her a$$. The guys start asking her questions like “You like that dick in your a$$?,” but she is in such pain her answers are hard to understand. She tried to say something like “I loooove iiiit,” but then the tears started flowing. I think 1 of the other guys in the scene said “aaaah look, she’s crying.” . . . In this scene combined with the humor & the rareness of a porn chick not handling dick gave me major Bone-age I recall.18
For those men who really like to see pain and suffering, nobody is better to watch than performer Max Hardcore. I have seen many Max Hardcore movies, and it is hard to believe that he is anything but a sexual sadist. In a 2005 interview, he outlined the type of acts he “pioneered”: “Positions like pile driver, where I would gape the girls [sic] asses wide open, and provide a clear view for the camera, was unknown before I came along. I also created the technique of cumming in a girl’s ass, having her squeeze it out into a glass, and then chuck the load down.” He continued by boasting that over time he “developed many other unique maneuvers, most notably, vigorous throat fucking, creating gallons of throat slime over a girl’s upside down face, and even causing them to puke. A little later, I started pissing down their throats several times during a scene, often causing them to vomit uncontrollably while still reaming their throats.”19 The story of Max Hardcore is really the story of contemporary porn. Once considered an outlier by the industry for his extreme porn, he is now increasingly being brought back into the fold. A sign of his newfound status was an October 2007 appearance on The Howard Stern Show. As porn becomes more extreme and cruel, men like Hardcore move from the margins to the center of the porn world. Although he was found guilty on ten counts of federal obscenity charges in June 2008 and was sentenced to forty-six months in prison, Hardcore remains a major figure in the porn world, not least because he was one of the founding fathers of gonzo. Veteran of well over a hundred movies, possessed of a large fan base and a well-traveled Web site, Hardcore will likely find that his stay in prison has little impact on his popularity.
At the 2008 EXPO, I walked over to Hardcore’s booth, which was surrounded by male autograph seekers. It was easy to spot him in his signature cowboy hat, but as I approached, hoping for an interview, I froze. There was the real Max Hardcore doing what he does best, raging at a woman. Red in the face, sweating profusely, walking up and down like a caged animal, and speaking through gritted teeth, Hardcore let a female porn performer have the full force of his fury. The woman, who, I later found out, was his “girlfriend” Layla, sat perfectly still, not moving a muscle. At one point, Max Hardcore shook with rage and Layla began to cry. The scene was frightening, and she clearly was intimidated as she went to the bathroom to get away from him. I followed her to see if she was okay, only to watch a Max Hardcore security guard take her by the arm and firmly walk her around the convention hall, controlling her every move.
The scene reminded me of Hardcore, a British documentary that follows “Felicity” from London to Los Angeles as she attempts to break into porn.20 Felicity is shown being cajoled and manipulated by her pimp-agent to perform anal sex. Felicity steadfastly refuses, and we watch her pimp become increasingly angry, telling her that to make real money in porn you have to be willing to do anal. In the end, the pimp sets up a meeting between her and Hardcore, obviously in an attempt to get Hardcore to do the grooming necessary to persuade Felicity to agree. While she is clearly frightened about meeting him and has heard he is abusive to women, Felicity nonetheless agrees to go to Hardcore’s house. What follows is a dreadful scene where Hardcore walks into the room and within a few seconds is anally raping her. Felicity tries to defuse the situation by joking with him, and all the while he is thrusting his penis into her anus. She tells Hardcore repeatedly that she is scared of him, and he tells her to relax, that he is not really scary at all.
The next scene shows her agreeing to make a film with Hardcore, and while we don’t see what he does to her, we hear him gagging her with his penis. Felicity then runs up the stairs, crying hysterically. Hardcore runs after her and soothes the crying Felicity, stroking her hair and telling her that she is special and unique. As she begins to calm down, he suddenly changes his tone and becomes abusive, calling her “a fucking loser” and “fucking pathetic.” His rage builds to the point that he is red in the face as he accuses her of shirking her responsibility as a single mother. Thoroughly intimidated, Felicity agrees to continue filming, at which point the documentary crew members step in and talk her into leaving. But by then it is too late, as Felicity has been thoroughly brutalized.
The methods that Hardcore used to groom Felicity are the very ones he adopts in his best-selling series Cherry Poppers. The series features Max Hardcore bullying, coercing, and seducing women dressed as schoolgirls into agreeing to perform oral, anal, and vaginal sex. The techniques Hardcore uses in his movies to debase women are still among the most extreme in gonzo, and many porn fans who post to Adult DVD say he is too violent for their tastes. Another Porn Addict, for example, shares his current distaste for Hardcore movies:
A couple of days ago I took delivery of a couple of Max Hardcore discs . . . which I viewed soon after in anticipation. Until this point I hadn’t seen any of Max’s releases for a long time. Previous to this I had seen maybe 8 or 9 of Max’s films (all seen around 1997). . . . All I can say is this. His films are not the same as they used to be. One of the titles that I bought—Max Faktor 11—is so extreme in parts that I’ve actually forced myself to destroy it so I don’t watch it again. Yes there were parts here and there which I enjoyed seeing, and I loved Max previously for what I perceived to be his anal porn excellence/dolly-girl themed movies. But this was something else. I’ve heard some say that the girls in his movies are acting, but certai
nly with girl number 3 in this flick I’m sure that this can’t have been the case. In real tears in parts it was obviously too much for her and I hate to think of the mental mark it has probably left on her. Nobody deserves that Max. Also, girls giving head is one thing. But ramming your cock into their throats so that they have to suffer such obvious physical discomfort and unease? Hey Max, that’s really not right dude.
VirginSurgeon attempts to explain to Another Porn Addict how some women actually enjoy the treatment handed out by Hardcore.
You have to understand a’lot [sic] of these porn performers enjoy sex, enjoy being dominated to the point of tears.
Something tells me you didin’t [sic] have this problem until after you “popped your load” why else would you destroy the tape, you liked it, and that scares you.
This is a problem with your guilt, not Max Hardcore!!
Another Porn Addict responds by stressing that he did not feel guilty but rather disgusted, even though he makes clear that he did enjoy parts of the movie. To which VirginSurgeon responds:
Fair enough, you drew your line in the sand and don’t wish to cross.
You have to understand that many of the videos you watched and enjoyed may have had a women [sic] who disliked or didn’t want to be doing what she was doing, but she was a good enough actress not to show it. Therefore, is it okay to facilitate your orgasms just as long as your [sic] not intuned [sic] to the feelings of the performer, hence if you act well but don’t like the sex, it’s okay—you’re not being disrespected, however if you’re a bad actress, and don’t like the sex, I’ll boycott the manufacturer?21