Not Quite A Porn Review Tuesday- "The Price of Pleasure"

So this past weekend was the traveling roadshow of the anti-porn documentary The Price of Pleasure here in Chicago, and you can sure as hell bet the SWOP posse and I were out in full force. The showings were sponsored by the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, an organization whose literature states that "approximately 90%" of women and girls (not men, though) involved in the sex trade are physically and sexually abused at the hands of traffickers and customers and that "the average age of females entering the sex trade is 12." Where do they pull this information out of? Their ass? This is a group that seems to thrive on making up statistics about the sex industry and publishing them as facts.

Anyways, there were no less than six showings of the documentary in town over a two-day period, most occurring at the major colleges and universities here in town. Each screening was followed by a discussion and question and answer forum with filmmakers Chyng Sun and Robert Wosnitzer. We showed up to the screening at DePaul University on Friday evening, where we were greeted to a screen with the StopPornCulture website featured on it and the presence of everybody's favorite radical "feminist", porn hatin', Andrea Dworkin ass-kissing professor Robert Jensen. Jensen got up to introduce the film, thanked CAASE for flying him in town (another reason not to donate to their cause) and urged us to call him "Bob." Bob then informed us that the "naughty bits" in the film are blurred out (damn!) and that the film was rooted in the feminist critique of porn, the movement that had its heyday in the late 70's and 80's, but died out in the 90's. Sorry to hear that.

The film begins with a random sampling of college students confessing to their first experiences with porn, how they found it, what their initial reaction was, which was usually something negative. The narrator then stresses the ease of Internet porn, with 420 million pages of porn online for anybody and their mother to view at any given time. Porn is portrayed as a fun and "family" business and random splices of pop culture samplings are flashed before us, showing snippets of Family Business, Cathouse, G-String Divas, and other premium cable shows. The mainstreaming of porn seems to be the main concern here, with the blame being largely placed on Howard Stern and music videos that feature porn stars. "Watching porn is no longer dirty or shameful", a voice tells us, and really, why should it be? Were the days of dirty old men jerking off the back off seedy movie theaters preferable?

The segment on "Porn Star Myths and Realities" features a positive quote from Jesse Jane from the film Thinking XXX where she declares that "she's proud to be a porn star" and a spotlight on Jenna Jameson, easily the most profitable porn star in history, who has become a cultural icon and the most mainstreamed of the porn stars. However these positive notes are brought down by a quote from-guess who?- Bob Jensen, who states that "very few women sustain a career in porn and make money", as most of the major film companies are run by men, and "in capitalism, everything is commodified." If you're so critical of capitalism Bob, then please don't try to sell us your books, on porn.

Porn performer Annie Cruz then lists the typical pay rates for female porn performers, going over each sex act and how much it pays, which elicited gasps from the audience. Ex sex-worker and author Sarah Katherine Lewis criticizes the job market for women without higher educations saying "when your best choice is taking off your clothes and sticking toys in you for money, that's not much of a choice." Hell, it's a lot more fun than waiting tables! Or working retail. Or cleaning apartments. Or working as a receptionist. Or really, most jobs someone could get with their Bachelor's or Master's degrees. So that argument is just not working for me.

Next the filmmakers visit the Adult Entertainment Expo held in Las Vegas every year, where they spy on female performers promoting their goods and the horny males that arrive in droves with video cameras in hand, hoping to catch glimpses of their favorite porn star or capture the the sluttiest behavior on tape. We hear random soundbites of dudes who attend the conference... "women like to be controlled by men," "I respect women, just not women in porn as much. I usually look at them as sex objects", and a guy who uses the verb "enema-ing." That's a new one for me. The camera looms on a group of men, camcorders in hand, staring into their viewfinders hoping to capture the perfect shot. Eerie music intensifies our reaction, as we are led to be critical of "the male gaze," but instead this particular scene comes off as confusing and somewhat misleading. We never see what's being played out in their viewfinders, but should assume that a pack of men such as these are exploiting some poor woman's image for their own salacious purposes.

The filmmakers also seem to lack an understanding behind BDSM play, which they portray as all violence against women without any attention to male submission or any note about "safe, sane, and consensual" play, which is the philosophy behind this type of play. Images of women tied up in scenes from Kink.com are shown without giving the viewers any context of the scenes themselves or how much the women may be enjoying themselves. Porn director Ernest Greene is quoted as saying, "Evildoers do evil things, they don't need pictures to tell them how," and a clip of him dominating a woman in what appears to be a very safe and consensual scene is shown. I'm not sure if this is their way of getting the viewer to try to believe that Ernest is one of the "evildoers", but anyone with any knowledge of the porn industry knows that is clearly no true.

This same type of tactic is used later on when Joanna Angel from Burning Angel is profiled and declares that she's a feminist "because everyone is in control of what they're doing" (in her movies). They then show a scene of Joanna role playing as an incest victim saying "her daddy treated her like a whore when she was 5" and another scene where she's tied up getting fucked somewhat roughly. While neither of the scenes seem to be representative of the majority of the work Joanna does, they seem to ignore the fact that she started her own company from the ground up and has had a lot of success doing it. That, to me, is feminist. Instead, what the filmmakers try to do here is take down anyone who has anything positive to say about porn and paint them as hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

Later, more pop culture references are cited, as if to once again pound in our head that porn is taking over our everyday lives. Carmen Electra's Cardio Strip Tease video, a scene from Sex and the City, Girls Gone Wild, 2 Live Crew's "I Want Some Pussy" are all referenced at some point. A woman confesses to finding her husband porn stash and is disturbed to think that "any woman could do the job I'm doing." I could only laugh at this and think "yeah, and she might be doing a better job at it than you, too."

I will admit to being disturbed by the account of a female porn performer being coerced to do an Ass-to-Mouth scene and the director's claim that "I knew she didn't want to do it", but does so anyway to disgusting results. Behind-the-scenes footage of her vomiting in front of a somewhat unsympathetic all-male crew is shown. I'm not a fan of ATM myself, nor do I understand how one could be turned on by it, but I certainly think every performer should be informed that it will be expected of them before arriving on a set.

Still, the most frustrating aspect of the whole film is the blatant misogyny and misanthropy of the entire narrative. Woman are portrayed as helpless victims, unable to make decisions for themselves to work in the sex industry or constantly being exploited by the oversexed males around them. Men are seen as predators looking to degrade women in any way possible for their own sexual pleasure or made to feel guilty about their use or tastes in porn. Never do we hear from any male performers in porn or how they are treated in the industry. No attention is given to gay, trans, or lesbian porn, nor do we hear from any of the female filmmakers, such as Tristan Taormino, who have been producing positive and educational porn that is gaining notoriety in the industry. Instead we are left with a reminder that "the future of porn is violence" and a long steady shot on a woman with cum smeared on her face accompanied by dramatic music that was surely meant to make us feel sad and degraded by everything we just witnessed.

After the screening, Bob Jensen got up and reminded us that "he was in the film" (no shit) and that there were lots of difficult parts of the film to watch. Surely all the times he was onscreen talking were some of them. He introduced Robert Woznitzer, the co-writer and producer of the film who then criticized Michael Moore documentaries saying "you feel like you've been beaten over the head with a hammer when watching his films", but "hopefully we did not do that with our film." Who the hell is he kidding? This film was not objective in the least and for him to try to portray it as such is deceptively dangerous.

The first girl in the audience to comment said "I've never been so moved by a picture as this" and another girl commented "the S/M images were overwhelming, but sometimes that's what you need to do." Finally a guy in the back gave a well thought out voice of dissent noting that "women and men who act in porn are demonized (in the film)" and why do you not accept people in porn as people?" The same male noted that the film "seems to be portraying S/M and anal sex as not normal acts, yet many people practice these acts as normal sexual play." Jensen responded by saying that "nothing in the film is demonizing the women who are in porn," rambled on about Andrea Dworkin... again... and then dropped this bomb-"pornography is not just sex on film...sex is a way of eroticizing male domination and female submission." Somebody please stop this guy.

I raised my hand and raised my hand, but Jensen refused to call on me, possibly because my friend David sitting next to me had identified himself as a porn performer earlier. He went around the room, letting people ask their questions, but managed to avoid me at all costs until a woman sitting one row in front of us allowed me to speak when she was stumped by one of the filmmakers asking her a question (I know, it's confusing). I criticized them for not being objective at all and asked them why they didn't included more interviews with feminist female porn filmmakers. Jensen responded by saying "we use the term feminist loosely" when speaking of such people and Woznitzer mentioned that they had interviewed Candida Royalle, but "she didn't make it into the film much." So basically, here were these two privileged white men who call themselves "feminists" saying they don't value the opinions of other feminists because they work in the porn industry.

After the discussion was over, Chyng Sun, the co-producer and writer of the film, did come up to me and ask engage myself and my friends in a discussion, which was nice enough of her. She listened to our concerns and suggestions, but seems to refute nearly everything we suggested, saying that "she had a problem" with some of the content of Tristan's films and that Joanna had told her stories of rape and abuse that they chose not to include in the film. She actually asked me if I was a professor at the school and seemed shocked when I told her I was a sex worker. I gave her a SWOP brochure and she dangled it in her hands like she was either going to pass it off to someone else or throw it away as soon as I wasn't looking. I should hope that she at least read through it first and saw that the work we are doing is positive in nature and possibly even similar to the work they are trying to do, just with a different approach. We all want to prevent violence against sex workers, right?


The next day I attended another screening of the film at my Alma mater, a college with one of the largest populations of film students in the country. The screening was much smaller and more casual, with a handful of students sitting on couches in the common area of the dorm building. I wondered why they couldn't show it at one of the larger screening rooms in the film building, attracting some of the documentary and film students who might have had a better perspective on the lack of objectivity in the narrative. Instead, most of the kids here agreed with the message of the film and took offense to our small group of voices of dissent. It was here, though, that Wosnitzer mentioned that the targeted audience of the film is college students, which upsets me the most. "The Price of Pleasure" really reinforces the negative stereotypes about sex workers all being victims and used against their will, as well putting a guilt trip on anybody that uses porn. Most college students are still somewhat immature or just exploring their sexuality and this film seems to want to make them feel ashamed about viewing just about anything with sexual content.

So I'm really exhausted at this point about thinking about this film and writing about it, but I will add a few more reviews here, from Aspasia and Ernest Greene. And please, if you get a chance to see it, share your opinion with me here.