I saw three documentaries about a six billion dollar industry. Bigger than music, and bigger in annual takings than all sports events combined, they say. Why aren’t there eight pages in every newspaper dedicated to porn? If a ball going over a goal line is ‘news’, why not a double blow-job? In these documentaries I met people that millions of men know better than any mainstream celebrity, but they’ll deny knowledge of them. I saw porn watched by tribes in mud huts in Africa. Porn is educating the world. Yet I saw porn performers giving to charity and having their donations returned. From the ‘sex negative’ to Cameron-Gove feminism, porn remains a place for outlaws, and no-one is surprised when its content reflects outlaw status.
In 90s music video monochrome, Deborah Anderson’s ‘Aroused’ (2013) stages a selection of stylish interviews aiming to find the ‘real women’ underneath today’s porn stars. It’s a Cosmo article, Anderson looking for ‘common threads’ and ‘what makes them tick’. Women talking about Being Women, celebrated au naturel (no make-up, self-analysis) then in some confessional chrysalis, getting their hair tonged and face on (women at work), to a final stage women-as-beauty, rolling on a plush bed for photographer Anderson’s lens. Porn becomes philosophy. Pure PR for a coffee table hardback to come.
This is an advert for porn. Porn grounded some of them, or bought them a home. Porn drew the shy ones out of their shell. For every naturally promiscuous runaway, there’s one who’ll admit that she doesn’t always enjoy the sex, but loves everything else. The money, the travel, the fan base, feature dancing, Expos, the leisure time. Belladonna, who runs her own rough sex label, says she did feel like a piece of meat in the early days. Not what was happening, but how it happened. The men were instructed on what to do. She wasn’t even asked. Everyday feminist critique flies around, objectification and reclaiming one’s sexuality, liberation and body confidence being better than repression, and stuff about people being chewed up and spat out by a wiener machine, by people happily doing precisely that, no irony or surprise. Happens in acting, why not this business?
‘Business’. The word dawns on me. Business is what I’m watching. Business plus Debord’s notion of Spectacle. Two generations have been educated into valuing one another on how well they play the Business-Spectacle. All of us, half-acting all the time and not lying when we say we love things we hate. Business talk is superego and second nature, and when some West Coast guru selling us meditation tells us to lose our ego, it’s only because Business is happier that way. Real revolution, real escape, real expression. Can they happen?
“It’s show business not show show,” tubby agent Mark Spiegler explains helpfully, between cell phone calls. “Girl-girl plus BJ is one thousand.” He’s in no mood to haggle. There’s a good documentary to had about sarcastic, Dorito-munching Spiegler if he could only say something funny once in a while. It’s show business, not funny business, ya mutt. The girls seem to trust him (he’s Business). When Business works it’s mutual exploitation and a leveller. When asked how she feels about her co-stars, Sasha Grey admits “They’re props.” Dehumanised body parts, unless they make a name for themselves (everyone wants to be ‘bad boy’, it seems. There’s no other archetype rendering men more than props) or run their own Business, and they’re even more disposable than the women. Sasha Grey arrived fully formed at eighteen, a porn fan with highbrow tastes who saw herself on a personal ‘journey’ through extreme sexuality.
Bryce Wagoner‘s ‘After Porn Ends’ (2010) is a mad bag of where-are-they-now nuggets. Real estate (favourite interest of people with no interests. Stoner Taylor Rain is now a North Hollywood realtor under the name Nicole Price. Her prices are NSFW), right wing politics ($300k a year Mary Carey) and stay-at-home mom (Mensa member of IQ 156, yet refused a link on their site, and genuinely nice woman Asia Carrera) feature heavily. Sharon Mitchell became a doctor and now runs the AIM adult industry health checking program. If you wonder why this industry has less STIs than the same demographic in civilian life, look no further.
“In life, nobody gets everything,” explains an aging Randy West as he unpacks his golf clubs. He’d love to have met the right woman and he’d love to have had kids. He liked Tera Patrick, man, a lot. But it couldn’t happen. Not in this Business. The irony of a life packed with barren, fruitless intercourse, with over three thousand women and no condoms, is not lost on the camera’s pause for poignancy. Randy’s ball plops into the first hole, he fishes it out and moves on up the fairway.
Some of those interviewed joined anti-porn outreach or religious groups. But most alumni need a decent second career, not discussing their feelings. Perverted by capital, usually. The overriding aftertaste of these documentaries is that if you went into porn a stable person, you’ll emerge as one. If you went in flaky and/or sensitive you’ll emerge a self-pitiful child of Christ. Women with bullish manliness (cigar-chomping Seka is impressive, as is gun-toting Tiffany Million, whose fans liked her because she clearly ‘wasn’t faking it’, but who describes a penis going into a vagina as about as significant than a fingertip wiggling in an ear) emerge victorious. Every porn performer, you would think, must worry that their children will be undone by their past. No biggie for Million, now a single mom bounty hunter and bailiff. “She is my role model. And my hero,” her daughter addresses the kitchen table flatly, holding back her emotions. One swordspersons’s daughter is grandiloquent about her father’s back catalogue. “When you can differentiate between sex and love and everything else in between, that’s a huge gift that you can give yourself, your lovers, partners, friends and family. And I’m grateful that that’s my world.” It was like the Wonder Years. All he did was fuck people.
Broken backgrounds, bible-bashing and absent dads are discussed in all the films, but many of the women admit that it’s less hardcore Freud and more basic practicality — the less family you have the less people can be disappointed by your life choices. Wastrels are free. Free to do Business. That a new generation of women got into porn via their father’s DVD collection doesn’t raise eyebrows. That fathers might watch their daughters’ careers with pride doesn’t much either.
No-one seems to ask why porn got rougher and darker, or what comes after dark. It is disconcerting to watch a soft focus Dove commercial of a beautiful young face say “I love to be choked. I love to be slapped.” Is she saying what Business wants to hear? Why would it? No-one asks why porn got nasty because it’s so obvious, so under the nose and taken for granted. Porn thrives on the consumer’s alienation. Of course they’re pissed. Free the repressed! You’re free inside your cage, dude. Free inside your cage!
Business seeks to maximise itself, and that means mechanisation and efficiency. Humanity bows out, something caught in small glances and whispered asides in Jens Hoffman’s flywall ‘9 to 5 — Days in Porn’ (2008), probably the best study of porn-making as a desperate kind of daily grind. Market forces are the new pharaohs. The fool can parody his master only so far, and the punk rock ethic and kick-ass feminist freedoms need to work within what already works, what sells. Otto Bauer might bark at his partner Audrey Hollander, and fail to tell her exactly what her next scene entails, but when she finally wins an AVN award, it’s him she thanks. Thanks for pushing me, Otto. On set, porn is chain-smoking or bongs, Walgreens enemas, Vicodin for anal and boots-up male bonding by failed rock musicians. Even US females seem pretty male to the unprepared European viewer.
A plethora of talking heads disturb the Olympic butt gapes and high fives, to explain why porn dissolves the ability of people to form robust human bonds. Conversely, the Business also comes across as a close knit family. More than many other Businesses. When a retired Asia Carrera’s husband flipped his car and died uninsured, fans donated enormous sums. There’s an innocent pre-social media sense of caring about these people. Porn can’t be blamed for not repairing people. Real sex rarely affirms, let alone repairs. Why should porn? The top shelf stocks a wider range of body shapes than any fashion, beauty or wedding shelf beneath it and these documentaries exposed me to more female personality than Hollywood’s feisty parade and aforementioned sports pages.
Soaked in Business, I thought about what the escape from a Spectacle that puts the eye and Business at the centre of the universe might look like. Fool, how it looks is not the issue. Perhaps liberation is a catastrophe for any real sense of play, as Herbert Marcuse believed. Perhaps repression’s cage is a part of our head for a reason. Perhaps there are new kinds of liberating games yet to be invented. Sad that sex is still a boy’s game, though, with female desire reduced to saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a male methodology. Feminism says ‘no’ emphatically, impressively, but real change needs more than that.
