Empire of Illusion (14 page)

The Internet is the curse and salvation of the industry. It has vastly expanded the reach of the porn industry, but it has also made free porn easily accessible. DVDs and glossy magazines are going the way of newspapers. Playboy's stock is down 81 percent, and in October 2008 it announced it was selling off its DVD division. There are an estimated 4.2 million porn Web sites—12 percent of the total number of sites—
providing access to 72 million worldwide visitors monthly. One-quarter of total daily search-engine requests, or 68 million, are for pornographic material. There are 40 million Americans who are regular visitors to porn sites. Sites like
Youporn.com
and
xtube.com
allow amateurs with camcorders to show explicit porn. Illegal downloads and free video-sharing sites have cut into profits, say those in the industry, by as much as 20 percent.

The most successful Internet porn sites and films are those that discover new ways to humiliate and inflict cruelty on women. In the Web site
Slut Bus
, women are lured into a van, offered money for sex, filmed having sex, and then dumped on the side of the road. Money is held out toward the woman as the van pulls away. She is always left without payment. The message is clear. Women are compliant sex machines. They are good only for sex. And they are not worth paying for their services.

“The Mission?” the
slutbus.com
Web site asks. “Pick up the hottest girls we find. And get them to let us fuck them & cum in their pretty little faces all while videotaping the whole thing.”

“The Fun?” the site goes on. “Treating these slutty bitches like they deserve to be treated . . . with a slam bam thank ya ma'am & a swift kick in the ass! What? You thought we would actually pay these sluts? Haha hahaha. Think Again!”

The theme of luring women to have sex and then discarding them is common.

“Tired of stuck up bitches that want gifts, dinners, money all of your fuckin' time and attention?” reads an ad on a Web site called Creampie Thais, which charges subscribers $29.95 a month.”

Jan Meza worked as a porn actress in a genre known as “Big Beautiful Women” films. She made about forty movies and was filmed on some twenty Web sites. She left the industry addicted to painkillers, drinking heavily, and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She is currently married and is finishing her doctorate in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The more society loses touch with reality, especially in relationships, the more people do not know how it is supposed to be, how to react with other people, the more they turn to porn,” she says. “People look at this fantasy and believe it should be their reality. They retreat further and further into their illusion because porn can never be real. It does not work in real life. Porn is a sickness.”

Jersey Jaxin, as she was known in the industry, walked away from porn. “Guys punching you in the face. You have semen. . . . Twenty or thirty guys all over your face, in your eyes,” she remembers. “You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It's never-ending. You are viewed as an object, not as a human with a spirit. People don't care. People do drugs because they can't deal with the way they're being treated.” She estimates that the number of women who use drugs before they film are “75 percent and rising. Have to numb themselves. . . . There are specific doctors in this industry, if you go in for a common cold, they'll give you Vicodin, Viagra, anything you want, because all they care about is money. You are a number. You're bruised. You have black eyes. You're ripped. You're torn. You have your insides coming out of you. It's not pretty and foofoo on set. You get hurt.

“The main thing going around now is crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin,” Meza says. “You have to numb yourself to go on set. The more you work, the more you have to numb yourself. The more you become addicted, the more your personal life is nothing but drugs. . . . Your whole life becomes nothing but porn. I was a drinker. I drank a lot. Vodka was my drug. Vodka was my numbing toy. Before sets, after sets, and if it was a set where people didn't care, they'd have it there waiting.”

“You may see a forty-five-minute set that took us thirteen hours. . . . We're ripped, we're tired, we're sore, we're bleeding, we're cut up, we have dried semen all over our faces from numerous guys, and we can't wash it off because they want to take pictures. You have this stuff all over you, and they're telling you, ‘Hold it!'” Meza says.

“You can say anything you want [e.g., ‘Stop'], and they don't listen,” she says. “There's the ultimate thing where you squeeze their leg to ease up, and most of them don't care. They have another scene to go to. It's all about the money. They've forgotten who they are, and they don't care who they're hurting.

“You have no soul in the porn industry,” she adds.
¹⁰

Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about necrophilia. Mingled with the booths set up by distribution and production companies, Las Vegas escort services, and a vast array of sex toy displays. There are booths that sell life-size, anatomically correct silicone dolls.

At the Lovable Dolls display booth, three large picture windows are set in walls of faux brick. There is a replica of an iron streetlamp outside the windows. The first window has two life-size silicone dolls. One wears knee-high, black latex boots with stiletto heels. She is reclining on a small frame covered in red velvet. Her fingers gently touch the hand of another doll in a black, curly wig and wearing a bandeau top. In the other two windows are more dolls, one with pointed pixie ears and what Bronwen Keller, a sales respresentative, calls “a deliberate fantasy face.”

“They have removable heads,” she tells me. “There's a whole array of heads. The head cap pops off. You can reach in and disconnect the head and put a new one on. You can move the eyes. You do that from the inside so you don't damage the eyelashes.”

We stand and peer through the glass at the pixie doll, surrounded by huge plastic flowers, as if she is emerging from a tropical garden. She has a pierced naval.

“We ship them in lingerie, like a chemise,” she tells me. “They are fully made up. They have their nails done, and they have a wig. They have shoes. We ship with the heads on. It creates the effect of ‘Oh, wow, here's my girl, ready to go.'”

The dolls, which cost $7,500 each, are custom-built and come with various breast sizes, tongues, mouths, and vaginas, seven different skin colors, and eleven eye colors. Clients can create their own dolls. The dolls are the silicone replicas of the living porn stars signing autographs and permitting their fans to grab their asses and pose for a photo. The display next door, Reel Dolls, is even more disturbing. It has four silicone women's heads, lined up in glass cases, with their lips parted to receive an incoming cock. On top of the display case rests a headless, legless, armless female torso, complete with an anatomically correct vagina and a tuft of pubic hair. Men passing by the booth push their fingers into her red silicone slit.

Dr. Z—not his real name—has come to the convention to preach the joys of silicone doll ownership. He is a trim, bearded, fifty-two-year-old man who teaches anatomy. He is wearing khaki pants, an orange collared shirt, and a pair of boots. He owns eight silicone dolls, with names that include Lindsey, Danielle, Sunni, Trixie, Candy, and Shawna.

“You walk into a room and they are sitting or standing around you, and they seem real,” he says. “It's like having a family. They all have personalities.”

Dr. Z hides his hobby from most of his friends. He keeps the dolls locked in his bedroom closet. He positions them around the house, including in his bed, when he is alone. He shops for their clothing. He poses them for photo shoots. He carefully applies their makeup. And he talks to them. He began using blow-up dolls when he was married. He took blow-up dolls with him when he traveled. He kept his habit secret from his wife. He is now divorced. “Hey,” he says, “I wasn't cheating.”

“No one I dated was ever privy to it,” he says. “It was always a private side of me. It did improve my relationships because it gave me the ability to experiment. It also takes the stress out of a relationship. My last wife used sex as a control mechanism.”

“You have to be creative,” he explains. “You have to make them feel like they are interacting. I have been in relationships where women just lie there like dead fish. The same thing can happen with this, but it is more fun with some dolls than with some women. You can make them do things with their hands. You can wrap their arms around your neck. You can use bungee cords to put them in positions. Their eyes are adjustable.”

He uses the thick iron hook on the back of the dolls' necks to prop them up. He puts them in his sex swing. He photographs them using sex toys. He says it is a “really nice thing because you are in full control.” He tells me the dolls “take the stress out of wining and dining women.” He says he uses lubricants in the silicone mouth, vagina, and anus for sex. And he tells me that of the top three or four blow jobs he has had in his life, he would have to include those delivered by his dolls.

“You lie on top of one and it feels like you are on top of a person,” he says. He fixes their eyes when he has sex with them so “there is direct eye contact.” He explains, “I talk to them like pets,” and then smiles, saying, “but they don't shed.” He tells me that he has, over the years, “learned what works.”

“You can't beat them all you want,” he says. “They can get damaged, but spanking is OK. They jiggle like real.”

His dolls are body types that he says are not available to him with the women he meets socially.

“From my experience, women who look like these dolls are not mentally or emotionally in line,” he says. “It is hard to find someone who is smart, intelligent, attractive, and who wants to be with you. And then there are the breast sizes. I have one with ridiculous breasts. She is extremely hard to dress. I have become very appreciative of women's clothes.”

“Everyone has a desire about controlling the look, the environment, what women represent and how they come across,” he says.

We are looking at the dolls in the display. He points out the simulated veins in the feet, which he tells me are the dorsal venous arch. “To me,” he says, “That's really, really cool.”

“I have one doll, Sunni, who is blonde, hooker-style,” he says. “She's really good at blow jobs. She's like a California beach bunny. She has dark skin and is always tanning herself. She's happiest in a black bikini and a blonde wig. She looks great in her bikini. I keep most of them dressed in underwear and sports bras. They hang out together, like a sorority. Personally, I have never ejaculated inside my dolls. I use the rhythm method. The cleanup is easier. I have a hanging apparatus in my tub and use the shower massage. They can absorb body oil. Look, you have old people who need to be taken care of, you can think about these dolls as being in a coma. Your job is to keep them comfortable. I
am always a gentleman around them. I never have sex without asking permission. I sleep with them. I cover them with an electric blanket, and the silicone absorbs the heat.”

The dolls, like the porn stars, are a compliant mouth, vagina, and rectum. They exist solely to allow a man to penetrate, usually with a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, into their orifices at will. You can spit on their faces, slap them around, verbally abuse them, as is done with women in porn films, but with the dolls there is no chance of rebellion or complaint. The silicone mouths will always have the thick, slightly spread lips, offering themselves silently to their owner's penis.