I interviewed 130 people, including porn performers, producers, critics, social workers, therapists, sex columnists, physicians, and users. My genuine curiosity, nonjudgmental attitude, and my respect for the interviewees, I believe, were felt by most of them. When I started making the film, I was most curious about pornographers: who are they, and what are their views of women, men, and sexuality? How do they justify the mistreatment of women?
Mark Kernes, editor of Adult Video News, the so-called bible of the pornography industry, provided me with contacts, including Ernest Greene, editor of Hustler’s Taboo Magazine, a prominent pornographer active in the BDSM community. Greene was eloquent and knowledgeable, with a tendency to exhibit his intellectual and cultural sophistication. After I asked him a few questions, such as “Why do male performers ejaculate on a woman’s face or in her eyes? Would it hurt?,” he became defensive and said: “I never experience a single moment of guilt or shame or anxiety over the prospect that the pictures that I make might inspire people to do things that would be evil. I believe evildoers do evil things and don’t need pictures to tell them how.” When asked if there were a certain trend in pornography, Greene replied:
There’s all kinds of porn, there’s everything for everybody who likes any kind of erotic depiction … It’s very easy for outsiders, particularly those who have a hostile agenda towards porn of some kind [it was clear he included me in this group], to seize on ugly porn or mean porn, or porn where the object seems to … where the purpose seems to be to inflict some kind of abusive sexuality on one or another party involved.
Greene led me to ask the question of exactly what is the pornography that I was analyzing and how I could justify my choice.
I decided to focus on mainstream pornography for heterosexual audiences, the type of material that comprises the bulk of the market, has the widest viewership, and has the biggest potential impact. Not finding literature on what kind of pornography content people are really watching, my associate producer, Robert Wosnitzer, and I decided to design and conduct our own study, together with Erica Scharrer, Ana Bridges, and Rachael Liberman. With the support of Robert Jensen, we directed 3 female students to code films according to the scheme we developed, our focus being on sexual acts and sexual aggression. We randomly selected 50 out of 275 pornographic movies from Adult Video News’s best-selling and most-rented lists.
The full report has been published in the journal Violence Against Women (Bridges et al., 2010), so I only summarize the findings here. The popular pornographic movies depicted a world that mixed sexual excitement with aggression. Verbal aggression occurred in almost half of the scenes and almost all the expressions involved name-calling (e.g. ‘bitch’, ‘slut’). Physical aggression appeared in almost 90% of the scenes, with spanking being the most frequently observed physically aggressive act. Here there were drastic gender differences: women were spanked on 953 occasions, while men were spanked only 26 times, less than 3% of the total. Gagging, where male performers’ penises were inserted deeply inside a woman’s throat until they induced a gag reflex, had not been noted in previous content studies, but appeared in 28% of the scenes. Other types of aggression included open-hand slapping, hair-pulling, and choking. Most targets of the aggression were women who usually responded with expressions of pleasure (encouragement, sexual moans etc) or with no change at all in facial expression or interruption of action.
Apart from aggression, sexual acts causing pain or discomfort or those that may be interpreted as degrading, were frequently noted. For example, external male ejaculation (the ‘money shot’) occurred on women’s mouths or faces in over 60% of the scenes. Anal sex, rarely reported in previous studies, occurred in more than half of the scenes. Extreme sexual acts such as double penetration, where two men penetrate a woman anally and vaginally at the same time, occurred in 20% of the scenes. The ass-to-mouth (ATM) sequence, in which a man inserts his penis first in a woman’s anus and then in a woman’s mouth, was never recorded in previous content analyses. But this act was seen frequently in our study, occurring in about 40% of scenes. Compared to studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, our study revealed that pornography has become much more aggressive in both frequency and type of act.
2 What I’ve learned from pornographers
Scholars have observed 2 paradoxical trends in current pornography: on the one hand, it has become more acceptable, and on the other hand, its content has become more violent and degrading (Jensen, 2007; Dines, 2010). These researchers refer to the popularity of gonzo pornography where there are non-stop, aggressive sexual acts, in scenarios meant to degrade female characters. Max Hardcore – some call him ‘the father of Gonzo’ – wrote on his Website:
Everyone knows that Max Hardcore is the undisputed KING of Filthy Fucking! He takes these luscious ladies and turns them into cum drooling, anal gaping sluts just begging for his piss! Max really knows how to turn tight assholes into massive, gaping fuck tubes. Using speculums he stretches these holes nice and wide so he can get a full load of piss squirted in without missing a drop. Then watch them slurp up every drop through a tube!
Some pornographers, like Jeff Stewart, have described Max Hardcore as their inspiration, and Stewart has in turn inspired others. Stewart said:
Before the scene starts, [Hardcore] does basically violent, throat-fucking before he does ass-fucking. I used to approach him and tell him, ‘Look, you know, you should probably just do – just a movie with just the gagging.’ And he wasn’t interested. So after six months, I decided to do it myself. We’ve won Best Oral Series [Adult Video News Awards] three years in a row. There’s like, twenty-five other companies that are copying our Gag Factor series.
Stewart is the creator of Gag Factor, in which the women choke and cry because men’s penises are inserted in their throat deeply, thrusting in very fast and aggressive movements. Stewart stated, “We also started the American Bukkake craze. American Bukkake is … a group of men that ejaculate on a woman’s face. There’s no sex. It’s just like just gallons of cum being drenched on a girl.”
Sex has been endlessly explored in art, literature, and film, but what makes those depictions stand out are the emotions the characters experience when they connect with one another in different circumstances. Pornography has much less variability. As one pornographer said bluntly: “There’s only so many ways to have sex. They’ve all been shot. All you can try to do is make it a little more sensational, but it’s been so sensationalized, what can you – how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?” He answered himself: “At one time, three. Well, I guess you could make it four, one in her mouth, two in her ass, one in her pussy, maybe.” So where else can pornographers go to make pornography more exciting? Sam Benjamin, the author of Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer, reflected on his experiences as a gonzo pornographer:
While my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as the director was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female ‘targets’ were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.
The pornographers who punish girls in these ways are not marginalized outsiders. For example, Stewart has won awards sponsored by Adult Video News, the leading trade journal. The AVN Awards Show, the porn Oscars, has been broadcast on Showtime to an audience of millions since 2008. Titles such as All New Beaver Hunt, Innocent Until Proven Filthy, Fresh Meat, Daddy’s Lil’ Whore, Teens for Cash, and Deep Anal Drilling also enter the lexicon to be articulated to the masses. Gonzo pornographers such as Max Hardcore, Jeff Stewart and John Stagliano are rich men, who have made their money from verbal degradation and physical humiliation.
Even pornographer Joe Gallant said: “I hate to say, but I think the future of American porn is violence. I see the signs of it already … the culture will become much more accepting of gang rape movies and abuse movies.” What illustrates his sentiment most vividly is the popular S/M
Website kink.com, where women are tied up, chained, gagged, whipped, electrified, immersed in water, and penetrated by machines. Even though my film concerns mainstream pornography, and does not include BDSM materials, I included clips from kink.com because this type of image has become popular, even mainstream. Kink.com has been featured in The New York Times as innovative, technologically savvy, and profitable, and is touted as a company just like any other company, but in some ways better (it gives its employees good benefits and retirement plans).
3 Porn performers: Beyond choice
When discussing issues related to Gag Factor or kink.com, the conversation often drifts into the question of choice: did the woman who was gagged or whipped freely choose to go into the industry? Such questions concern the autonomy and agency of women in pornography. Christine Stark, a writer and anti-porn activist who has worked with hundreds of women in porn and prostitution, problematized the focus on choice to me:
What difference does it make how someone gets into pornography? Why do you have to have this extreme amount of violence incurred in getting into pornography in order to make it matter, to make you matter? It’s like you have to prove that you’re a good victim. Do we sit and have endless conversations about domestic violence victims? ‘Did you choose to walk down the aisle with that man, because if you did, I’m not sure if this is really a form of sexual violence.’
Stark raises an important point regarding the need to shift the focus from the conditions that shape porn performers’ decisions to enter the porn industry and towards the conditions created by both the pornographers and the consumers, under which those performers work.
Diane Defoe, a black woman from Hawaii, entered the porn industry in 1999, first as a performer and then later as a director. She has seen many performers come and go:
This industry definitely attracts a certain mindset. You normally have to be a little bit liberal … but you also have to be very young … eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old with little education, little business sense, little financial skills and they’re making ten, twenty times more than that seven dollars an hour they were making at Jack in the Box …
“Making ten, twenty times more” than in a low-wage job is indeed a strong allure for young women getting into the porn industry. For example, Annie Cruz started in pornography when she was 19; at the time of our interview she had worked for a year and already had appeared in 150 movies. She constantly receives emails from women seeking employment in the industry, who write, “I only got eight dollars in the bank account – to my name. I really want to get in bad.” Both Cruz and Defoe observe that there are many women who do pornography for emergency reasons, such as paying off credit card debts or back-up rent, and then get out. Defoe also reports:
People are entranced by the idea that you can go and make an entire month’s salary in a day, and they think that they’re going to be able to do it everyday, and you’re not going to be able to do it everyday. You may not be able to do it, you know, next week. No matter how smart you are, beautiful you are, how many people you know, if there’s a girl coming behind you … that’s better than you, you’re going to be out … It just has to do with who’s … going to do something cheaper than you.
4 Not Easy Money
In mainstream porn, men perform acts on women, while women have acts done to them, so it is mostly women who bear the brunt of pain and discomfort, physically and psychologically. Annie Cruz matter-of-factly gives the price list for each sexual act:
For blow jobs, regular blow jobs, I get three hundred for those, for a girl on girl scene with me and another girl, that’s usually six hundred … me and a girl, anal, which means, you know, penetration in the butt, that’s usually eight hundred. Me and one guy, that’s nine hundred. Me and one guy, anal, that’s a thousand. Me and two guys, whether or not it be anal or regular, is eleven hundred. Double penetration, which is one in vagina, one in the butt, that’s twelve hundred, and gang bangs … I start at thirteen hundred for three guys and then add a hundred for each additional guy, so you know, it’s like two thousand for six guys [it should be 10 guys] … double anal, fifteen hundred, and double anal would be two in the butt …
This pricelist was verified to me as the standard pay for the industry’s more established film companies. For a low-budget, small company, or in amateur movies, the price could be significantly lower. Anal sex is prevalent, but based on my interviews with both men and women, it is not something many women are eager to do. P.T., a female 20-year-old porn performer, a pre-med dropout, explained why she was reluctant to do anal sex: “In porn, they tend to be rougher than in real life, and it tears the capillaries, and it can spread some diseases.”
Sharon Mitchell, a porn performer in the 1970s and 1980s, founded the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM) to provide medical and testing services for the porn industry. Mitchell has been very vocal in criticizing the industry, particularly the extreme and brutal gonzo genre. Mitchell stated that in the film Porn Shut Down, for example, “I sat there everyday and I saw anal tear and anal prolapses. The physical condition people put their body through is getting very far away from the sexuality as we know it.” AIM’s Website also lists some of the health risks of standard sexual acts in pornography – from tears in the vagina, throat, and anus, to HIV, hepatitis, and rectal chlamydia and gonorrhea of the throat.
But beyond each individual woman’s experiences, the crucial question is why an economic system would pay a woman 50 times more money to be gagged than for her to take a McDonald’s job? As Sarah Katherine Lewis, a former stripper and porn performer, said: “When your best choice is taking off your clothes and sticking toys in your cunt for money, I think there’s a real problem with the labor system.”
Conclusion
In my conversations with male porn users, many of them expressed some ambivalence or even guilt. Pornographers attribute this ‘guilt’ to sexual repression or religion. But that is not its only source. I ended my film with a quotation from a 20-year-old college student, Gregg, who said:
When you’re watching porn, you’re in the heat of the moment, you’re in the passion of it, you’re aroused, you’re actively masturbating or whatever, sex can seem very, very fun. It can seem like, ‘Oh, maybe someday I want to lube up a woman and flip her over, and you know, fuck her from behind.’ But, honestly, the second I have an orgasm and that passion kind of sinks out of my body and you’re still watching the movie, you start to really see what’s going on and it’s kind of just foul, you know? … and you’re left in the end, you’re done masturbating, you’ve had your orgasm, you’re not really feeling passionate anymore, onscreen is this woman who’s naked, get down on her knees, has cum all over her, and the man’s just standing there in his power position and he’s loving it, and you just kind of wonder like, this is not sexy, this is not sex, this is not how I want to experience sex.
Most of the men I talked to knew that it was wrong to treat another human being the way women were treated in pornography. It was empathy that induced Gregg’s guilt, as he so eloquently articulated.
What has driven me through this long journey of 7 years, from making my documentary to engaging in various research projects on different aspects of pornography, is a genuine curiosity about human sexuality, identity, and relationships. What propels me to continue is my optimism in our ability to care, connect, and love ourselves and another human being. My question is whether making and consuming pornography may hurt those capacities. So far, my evidence suggests it does.
Bibliography
Bridges, Ana, Robert Wosnitzer, Erica Scharrer, Chyng Sun and Rachael Liberman (2010) ‘Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update’. Violence Against Women 16 (10) pp. 1065–1085.
Dines, Gail (2010) Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality. Beacon Press, Boston; Spinifex Press, North Melbourne.
Hardcore, Max (n.d.) ‘Max Hardcore Porn’,
Jensen, Robert (2007) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. South End Press, Cambridge, MA.
PART THREE
Harming Children
“All the while, there was a part of me that was disgusted with what I was watching … but the self-hatred part was so strong that I couldn’t get past the idea that this violence and degradation was okay, and even right. I felt like it was the kind of treatment I deserved and, by extension, the treatment that all women deserve. It was about my feelings of worthlessness being reinforced in me by watching other women being treated as worthless objects.” – Ellen
“It’s not just the trauma … I live with the constant fear the photos taken of me being raped as a boy by older men will surface somewhere someday … I have children of my own now and would give my life for them; I love them so much … [M]y childhood is like another world I try to forget; there is this terror that is always there that my photos are out there somewhere circulating amongst filthy perverts …” – Richard
“He’d make me sit and watch porn videos with him and I’d feel sick. He’d then make me do to him what they had done and he took photos of me naked on the bed and he wanted me to look at the photos and you can see my face frozen and twisted with fear and I have no idea where the photos are … I live with this terror that they are going to surface or that he will die and the photos will be found and everyone will know then what happened and I think that would kill me.” – Natasha
“The damage to my self-image and confidence has been huge – I used to be so confident but found myself feeling completely unattractive and unlovable. I fear for my gorgeous baby girl – if porn is so permissible now, how much worse is it going to be when she is older?” – Linda
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 28