Chyng Sun
Investigating Pornography: The Journey of a Filmmaker and Researcher
I grew up in Taiwan and did not see a hardcore pornographic film until I was 31 years old, when I came to the United States as a graduate student in Boston in 1990. Unlike many women who are pushed to watch pornography by their boyfriends, mine was a shy one, and I was the one who sometimes rented porn videos. I would stand on my toes to reach the top shelf at the Video Smith in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, and then I went through the tortuous ritual of ignoring men peering at me out of the corner of their eyes, holding the extra-large video box with vivid pictures while I stood in a long check-out line, and then waiting for the clerk to slowly take the video out of its box and put it in a black box which everyone knew was for porn. There was something thrilling and daring about renting a porn video. I thought I was acting against the prohibition by both Chinese and American patriarchies of women pursuing sexual pleasure. I figured that if not being allowed to watch porn was part of sexual repression, then rebelling against it must be liberating and even feminist.
However, the act of renting the videos was for me more exciting than watching them. On-screen porn women seemed to be coy, infantilized, not caring who had sex with them, enjoying whatever was done to them, and wanting to be dominated. I asked myself: If these types of images appeared in a beer ad, wouldn’t I call them sexist? On the other hand, it was just so cool to be a girlfriend who was taboo-breaking and adventurous. Did I really want to ruin the fun? Although I felt unsettled, I did not have the knowledge and conceptual tools, or the willingness, to think it all through clearly.
I picked up my tangled thoughts 15 years later when I started making my documentary,
The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships
.
1 Approaches to the film
My film was aimed at exploring pornography as a media genre and an industry, through the examination of the 3 aspects of production, content and consumption.
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: