by Gail Dines
No matter how much these girls are grimacing, they say they are enjoying the sex, and moan intermittently as a way to mimic arousal. This actually reflects what goes on in real child pornography, according to retired FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning.13 Much of the illegal child pornography he has investigated indeed shows the child looking somewhat like a willing accomplice, appearing as if she is eagerly consenting to the experience. Of course this is a lie but one that, Lanning argues, many perpetrators—and indeed sometimes lawyers, social workers, and police—believe, since they view the image as the truth rather than as a carefully constructed representation of reality that is produced with specific goals in mind. In their research on men convicted of downloading child pornography, researchers Ethel Quayle and Max Taylor found that these men looked for “superficial clues which allowed the viewer to believe that the children in the pictures were consenting and enjoyed being photographed.” One such user explained that he was just looking for “images of girls mainly. Girls actually having sex. And they had to look happy. . . . I mean I wasn’t looking for rape or anything.”14
In the next type of sites to be discussed, those that can be classed as sadistic, the girls also look like they are enjoying sex, even though in this category what we are watching is physical, sexual, and verbal abuse being perpetrated against them.
Type 5: Sadism
The sites that fit the sadism definition fall within the gonzo genre, I argue, because the acts the women endure are sadistic. These PCP sites dispense with any attempt to project the girls as innocent yet ready to be gently introduced into the world of adult sex. These females, while also depicted as new to sex, are portrayed as wanting it as rough and as hard as all the other women in gonzo porn. The site Teen Dirt Bags, for example, boasts that its “slutty girls are taking cock in their fresh unused pussies” so the viewer can see “the cutest little tramps suck, fuck, swallow and beg for more.”15 Mention is often made of how innocent these girls look, but this is described as a ruse, as just below the surface is a raging slut for whom nothing is too painful, demeaning, debasing, or dehumanizing, as is illustrated in the following description of Keri who, according to the text surrounding the images, is “such a sweet young thing, you’d never believe that she has the mind of a pervert! She looks so innocent and prude but don’t let her fool you, this little slut is a dirty little whore! Keri demonstrated that as she spread her ass cheeks apart and begged him to drill her tight little ass! He granted her wish and gave her an anal pounding like she never had before!”16
The use of so-called teens in gonzo allows the pornographer to layer yet another level of abuse on the already abusive gonzo genre. The physical and emotional immaturity of teens makes space for a whole range of scenarios that heighten and intensify the violence, since they can be easily manipulated into doing just about anything, no matter how painful and cruel. Moreover, their bodies, not yet fully developed, have more potential to be damaged. Not surprisingly, throughout these sites, constant mention is made of the teen’s small vagina and anus, but unlike the solo porn sites, the goal here is not to stress her “innocence” but to highlight the damage that will be done to her body when she is penetrated by an adult male’s penis. The men’s penises are described as being extra large and thus have the power to “break,” “rip,” “tear,” and “split” her not-yet-mature orifices. On the site I Am Eighteen, the reader is invited to “watch us break her tiny body with some hard, pussy-splitting fucking,” while over on the Ass Plundering site, the tag line boasts that “we plunder these tight little virgin asses.”17 The level of cruelty depicted in the movies is made apparent by the accompanying text, which promises all kinds of injuries that the user gets to witness, some so severe that the “bitches wouldn’t be able to walk for a week after the utter anal demolishing.” The site is littered with pictures of “hot, little, innocent girls” with red, raw anuses. While these are standard images in nonteen gonzo, they have greater authenticity when attached to a “teen” or a “virgin” since her body is less able to deal with such violent penetration.
Many of these sites pair the teen with much older men and highlight the age difference in their names—sites such as Old Farts Young Tarts, Old and Young Gang Bang, Old and Young Porn, Old Men Fucking. These older men, some of them in their sixties and seventies, are depicted as using manipulation and trickery to get the teen, who, shown as naive and unsophisticated, is easily fooled. Not content with just eroticizing the age imbalance between the girl and the man, the pornographers throw in the economic inequality that exists between young and older people as a way to provide the male with even more power over her. On one such popular site, aptly named Teens for Cash, the site banner reads: “They’re Young, They’re Dumb and They’ll do Anything for Money.” Here, scenario after scenario depicts teens offering to do odd jobs for extra cash, only to be seduced into prostituting themselves by the promise of real money. A typical scenario reads: “Tatiana arrives to give the guy’s house a thorough cleaning. However, housekeeping doesn’t pay much, so when Dick and Rod offer her cash to clean her carpet Tatiana is all over them. Once she vacuums the dust off their old pussy punishers, Tatiana is the one left cleaning up the mess!”18 Surrounding the text are images of “Tatiana” gleefully holding money as she is anally, vaginally, and orally penetrated by men who look to be in their sixties at least.
Another scenario that offers much potential for exploitation by the pornographers is the teen girl as babysitter, since here the females are not only younger, but also in the man’s home, and in an employer-employee relationship. Given the multiple power imbalances here, it is no surprise that the teen porn genre is full of sites with titles such as Fuck the Babysitter, Drunk Baby Sitter, Gag the Babysitter, Dirty Babysitter, Babysitter Lust, and Banged Babysitter. While the scenarios may differ at the margins, they are all ultimately the same and tell the similar story of a young hot babysitter who is seduced by an older man.
This desire on the part of users to convince themselves that they are masturbating to images of consensual, thrilling sex explains the narrative found in another popular gonzo PCP subgenre, incest porn. Sites that sexualize and legitimize incest run the gamut of possible incestuous pairings (mother and son, sibling and sibling, extended family, and so on) but without doubt, the most common portrayal is of a father and daughter. While it is clear that any sexual relationship between a father and his minor daughter is rape, the sites go to great lengths to provide the user with an alternative framing of father-daughter incest. This is especially clear on the site YoungDaughter, where the first thing on the home page is the following “explanation”: “The disapproval of incest, especially between father and daughter, is a classic example of ‘projection.’ The alleged reason for diasproval [sic] is that incest is the same as sexual abuse, aggression and violence. These are all rational arguments, but they are used to justify an irrational opinion. In fact, most cases of incest have little to do with violence.”19
Indeed, if these sites are to be believed, then incest is what happens when a seductive and manipulative “daughter” finally gets her reluctant “father” to succumb to her sexual advances. On the site Daddy’s Whore, the reader is invited to watch “sexy naughty girls seducing their own fathers” and on My Sexy Daughter, the female performers are defined as “sweet, irresistible angels teasing and tempting their own daddies.”20 The site First Time with Daddy asks the user to “check out forbidden love stories,” where sexually curious daughters are eying their fathers’ bodies with lust. A typical story line reads: “I have fancied my father for years. I thought it was a perversion and was afraid to reveal my emotions. . . . Once I saw him in a wet dream. This was a sign. Still half asleep I went into his room and jumped onto his bed.”21 Of course, it doesn’t take much to get the father to acquiesce, and surrounding the text are images of the “daughter” being penetrated orally, anally, and vaginally by the “father.”
In those stories where the father is seen as the active
seducer, the girls are generally only too happy to oblige. Once the sexual “relationship” begins, it is clear that the sex is better than either one could ever have imagined. Even in those occasional stories where the daughter is somewhat afraid, the end result is orgasmic sex. In one story a “daughter” explains that “my mom died 3 years ago. Since then dad never brought home a woman. Soon I started noticing very strange looks he gave me. I was even a little afraid. One evening dad came to my room. I was sitting on my bed. He approached me and . . .”22 A sequence of eight images surrounding the text tell the story of a clothed, anxious girl succumbing to the sexual advances of the father and ending up naked and orgasmic on a bed.
What stands out in this story, and indeed in most of the scenarios in these sites, is the absence of a mother to protect the daughter from the father’s abuse. Some of the scenarios, such as the one mentioned above, describe her as dead, but most make no reference to a mother at all, thus creating a family scene where the girl is isolated and at the mercy of the perpetrating father. This lack of a mother is actually not unusual in cases of father-daughter incest. Psychologist Judith Herman found in her study that over half the sexually abused girls she interviewed had mothers who were absent from the daily routine of the family dueto ill health or death. Herman describes the fathers in these families as controlling and patriarchal, noting that “as the family providers, they felt they had the right to be nurtured and served at home, if not by their wives, then by their daughters.”23 For some of these fathers, being “nurtured” extended to being sexually serviced by their daughters, who were turned into surrogate wives, even though they were physically and mentally children. Of course, the real-life consequences of such abuse look nothing like the fairy-tale world of incest porn, since these girls all exhibited numerous symptoms consistent with PTSD.
The reduction of the daughter to an object to be used by the father is most stark on the UseMyDaughter.com site (the banner reads: “Want to Fuck My Daughter?”), which tells the story of a drunken father pimping out his daughter to any man who will pay. The images and the sex in the films are standard gonzo porn, but the stories that contextualize the images tell a tale of economic degradation and poverty, with the way out being the prostituting of a daughter. The text (presented here as posted) introducing the site reads:
Meet my daughter Janessa, she’s 19 years old and like her mom, she is so freakin’ hot. And its no fucking secret to the world that she loves to fuck. What a fucking slut! i think she got that from her mom. God damn her womb is so polluted. aaanyways. My daughter fucks some stupid guys anywhere she goes. I was like WTF!? for free? Shit! I didn’t raise her to get fucked for free! Well, im a bum old, and im always fucking wasted so fuck that, now i let her fuck any guy she wants as long as the guy pays me some cash bucks. . . . Aww fuck that, why dont you hit join now!!! Watch this slut take cocks for cash in my pockets.24
The “daughter,” or slut, as the father constantly refers to her, is depicted as an active and willing player in the scenarios, often leaving her father by the roadside as she speeds off with the latest john. The text makes frequent reference to the father’s drinking and poverty as a way to minimize his culpability in turning his daughter into a prostitute and also finds a way to put the blame on the absent mother by mentioning her “polluted” womb.
All the sites discussed so far, even the gonzo ones, depict scenarios where the men do not use overt force to get the girl to comply with their sexual demands but rather seduce, manipulate, and cajole the girl into submission. This picture actually mirrors what goes on in the real world of child molestation where most of the victims are subject to a seasoning process in which the perpetrator first seduces the child with gifts, affection, calculated acts of kindness, and offers of friendship and/or mentoring. Having forged a bond, the perpetrator then manipulates and exploits the emotional connection to erode the child’s resistance to sexual activity and to ensure the child’s silence. For perpetrators, this is a safer way than overt force since it does not leave visible scars, and because it is an act of breaking the child’s will, the victim is more likely to keep the abuse hidden for fear of appearing disloyal to the perpetrator. Moreover, the bond acts as a kind of emotional glue for the child, keeping her connected even when the adult is perpetrating awful acts of sexual violence. Pornographers are well aware of this seasoning process since they do an excellent job of depicting it in their movies by showing a whole range of techniques: from gift giving to strategic acts of kindness, where the perpetrator poses as a kind (sexual) mentor. Always brazen, the pornographers constantly use the word “breaking” to refer to what they are doing to the girls, and one site even calls itself Breaking Them In.
Probably the most detailed, graphic, and violent example of PCP porn that acts as an instructional manual on how to break a girl is the Cherry Poppers series, produced and directed by Max Hardcore. During a scene from Cherry Poppers, volume 10, Hardcore, on finding the younger sister of his girlfriend alone in her house, proceeds to show her “what boys like” and warns her not to tell her sister what happened because “she’ll get mad.”25
Hardcore begins by showing the girl how to fondle his penis, instructing her to “give it a little kiss, don’t be afraid to suck it. Just like a sucker, just like a lollipop.” He continues to instruct her in a soft, gentle voice. She removes her clothes and continues to perform fellatio on him; “Take a deep breath,” he tells her, taking his penis out of this mouth at times to let her breathe. He also shows her how to produce enough saliva to make the oral sex pleasurable for him. After Hardcore puts her on the sink and shaves her pubic area, he penetrates her with his fingers before vaginal intercourse, something rapists of girls often find necessary in order to stretch the child’s vagina so that it won’t be torn or ruptured by an adult penis. He then does the same with her anus. Throughout the sexual activity, Hardcore alternates gentle talk of her being a “good girl” with rougher reminders that she is a cunt. “Say it,” he demands, yelling, and she repeats, not looking at him, “I’m a little cunt.”26 This alternating between being gentle and being abusive goes on throughout the film, and is a strategy pedophiles use to terrify, seduce, and confuse the victim. The very last scene is Max Hardcore taking a picture of the naked and semen-covered girl, as she smiles for the camera.
This is a very telling scene, since studies show that in the real world many child molesters take pictures of their victims to document the abuse for several reasons: (1) to use for their own or other men’s future masturbation; (2) to blackmail the child into silence as they threaten to show the photos to family and friends if the child reveals the abuse; and (3) to show future victims how to perform sex. Max Hardcore’s behavior in Cherry Poppers resembles some of the behaviors discussed by Ken Lanning in his exhaustive study of child molesters, and man watching him may find pointers on how to season a child.
Cherry Poppers, and indeed all the other sites mentioned, is carefully crafted to give the user a sense that the girls depicted are indeed girls and not women. How these images play out in the real world has yet to be researched, since these sites have not been the focus of empirical analysis. What we can explore, however, is how these sites may act as socializing agents for their users by constructing a particular set of ideologies that normalize children as legitimate sexual partners for adult men.
Images and Ideology: The World According to PCP
Once he clicks on these sites, the user is bombarded, through images and words, with an internally consistent ideology that legitimizes, condones, and celebrates a sexual desire for children. The norms and values that circulate in society, which define adult-child sex as deviant and abusive, are wholly absent in PCP, and in their place is the message that sex with children is hot fun for all. As the user clicks on the PCP sites, he enters a virtual community that welcomes him in through constant use of the word “we,” rather than the singular “I” or “you.” Through the use of “we,” it seems to the user that he gets to participa
te in a ready-made group of like-minded men who actually know him so well they can anticipate his likes and needs, as is shown in the teaser for MySexyDaughter.com: “We know you enjoy rough and bewildering incest action, so we have a very special thing for you.”27
For those men whose primary sexual interest is children, PCP is an obvious first step into the world of child pornography since it is a relatively safe way to access images that can be used for masturbatory purposes. With their use of uninitiated porn performers who look young, the strategic placing of childhood props, and a written text that highlights and sexualizes the girl’s supposed child status, the PCP sites are a workable substitute for those men not yet ready to break the law and open themselves up to possible prison time, not to mention the stigma of being caught with such material. This “community” the user has found by typing into Google a collection of words that speak to his most secret sexual desires plays an important role in validating his feelings and desires, as the sites constantly highlight just how much the object of his lust enjoys the sex.28 For these men PCP sites can be seen as a kind of low-stakes primer nudging, encouraging, and in a way seducing them into joining the club with promises of community, friendship, and understanding—the very things that a nascent pedophile may lack the most. In a perverse way, the sites are seasoning the would-be user in much the same way a professional predator seasons his prey, since they first find out what the mark lacks and then tease and manipulate him into compliance with the promise of fulfilling these deeply felt needs.