by Chris Hedges
Thrill spends about six or eight hours on scripts, most of which have five scenes. A script runs about a dozen pages. “Once you get into the actual sex, we like them to stay in character,” he says, “but these are no Academy Award-winning performances.”
The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most porn stars are also prostitutes. They charge a range of fees, usually in the thousands of dollars, to fans on porn escort Web sites.
When I ask ex-porn actress Jan Meza, thirty, who once did a scene in which twenty-five men had sex with her, how she would describe the producers and directors of the porn industry, she answers curtly: “Pimps.” The porn stars make anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 an hour as prostitutes. Roldan would, along with other porn actresses, be flown into a city, including New York, and stay at a hotel for a week. They would meet clients in their hotel room.
Lubben says the AVN convention and awards ceremony brings together high-priced porn stars and clients.
“Ninety percent work as prostitutes,” she says. “They meet a lot of their big clients in Vegas during this convention. There is really big money being made by some of these women at night, as much as $2,000 an hour.”
The most famous porn actresses can make as much as $30,000 a week as hotel-bound prostitutes. Clients “would see you in the film and they wanted you to be exactly the same way,” Roldan says. “It was uncomfortable to meet some married stranger. I would walk around these cities and feel sad and empty. No one cared about me. My agent didn’t care. All I had was money and nothing else.”
The most successful porn films keep pushing the physical and emotional boundaries of the women onscreen and incorporate an expanding array of physically and verbally abusive acts.
Ariana Jollee, twenty-one, is sitting in a motel room beside a particle-board desk and a bare white wall, giving a pre-film interview for 65 Guy Cream Pie, produced in 2005 by Devil’s Film. She has sex with sixty-five men beside the indoor pool of a Prague resort during the film. She is smiling at the camera. Jollee has sleek, dark hair with bangs, a tribal tattoo encircling one bicep, and wears jeans and a loose black tank top. She has rounded arms, full cheeks, and a slightly heavy chin. Jollee started doing porn in 2003, when she was twenty, debuting in a film called Nasty Girls 30. She has done hundreds of films and was one of the industry’s premier gonzo girls, purportedly enjoying extreme abuse. Jollee tells the camera that she performed in a twenty-one-man gang bang on her twenty-first birthday. She says she is looking forward to doing the same now with fifty men, although this number climbs to sixty-five on the set. “Cream pie” refers to men ejaculating in a woman’s anus or vagina, rather than ejaculating on her body.
“I’ll be banging fifty guys—fifty, fifty, fifty!,” says Jollee. Maybe even more. That’d be cool. . . . So I’m like really excited.”
She laughs and plays with her hair. “And it just so happens that all these guys are going to be coming in me.” She looks coyly at the camera. “In the ass and pussy,” she grins, wrinkling her nose. “See I like it in the ass the best. I wanna find the biggest pervert and get him to suck all fifty loads out and spit it in my mouth.” She reaches up and fiddles with her bangs. “That’d be so good. That’d be fucking hot. It’d be disgusting.” She giggles. “I get off on that.” She runs her fingers through her hair, fanning it out behind her.
“It’s a big, big fantasy, always been a big fantasy of mine to be with more than one guy at a time. Many women have that fantasy. . . .” Her voice drops to a whisper. She wrinkles her nose and narrows her eyes. “You have all these men, and they all wanna fuck you, and they’re all there, and it’s just like, cock, holy shit. It’s so good. So good. Now I’m getting wet,” she says, giggling. Her feet are up on the seat of her chair, and the camera pans down briefly to the exposed crotch of her jeans. She demurely pops her thumb in her mouth, still smiling, gazing at the camera.
“If you’re watching this before the scene, you’re in for a fucking treat. . . . Each one of those motherfuckers is gonna, you know, it’s gonna be the ride of their lives.” She nods thoughtfully. “But, who knows?” She throws her hands in the air. “Maybe they’ll fuck me up. Maybe they’ll really, like, teach me a lesson.” She tosses a small smile at the camera. She scratches her knee absently. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe I’m not as insatiable as I think I am. We’ll see. I’m excited.”
She concedes that when it is over, she will “look like shit” but will be “well fucked.” The interviewer asks what condition her vagina and anus will be in after having sex with that many men. She speaks of her genitals in the disembodied third person: “They can take it. They want it. They like it. They go back to size after. Pussy’s tight. She always goes back to size.”
Jollee talks briefly about her private life. She says that before she did gang bangs in films she once had sex with twelve men on a fire truck. “I won’t say how old I was,” she giggles. “It was so good. I will thank the man who took me there every day for the rest of my life. I still talk to him. He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s a pervert, but I love perverts. I like free people.”
Her enthusiasm, as she relates this story about the fire truck, appears to momentarily fade. A brief tremor crosses her face. The fleeting impression when she falls out of character is that the experience of being taken to a firehouse by a friend who is “a pervert” and having sex with twelve men on a truck was not sexy or exciting, that for a young girl the experience was perhaps not the result of being free or the product of sexual desire. She quickly snaps back into the façade. She says, “I hope everyone gets off. I plan on coming.”
Her smile broadens. “If you’ve just watched it, well, here’s me beforehand.” She chortles. “It should be cool.” The camera zooms in and pans down her body as she fiddles with her hair. She reaches down and grabs her crotch. “Everything’s intact at the moment, it’s all intact.” She grins and wrinkles her nose as she rubs her breasts happily. She sits up and hisses at the camera, “I’m ready, I’m fucking horny, dude. It’s bad.” Then, in her enthusiastic college-girl voice: “I’m so excited, can you tell? Like I can’t sit still!” She rocks back and forth in her chair, raising her knees to her chest and putting her thumb in her mouth again. She giggles and swipes her bangs with her other hand.
65 Guy Cream Pie takes six hours to film. Jollee has oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal with sixty-five men. They ejaculate into and onto her body. When the shoot is finished, the last man heaves himself off Jollee. In a behind-the-scenes DVD bonus, she clambers up and stands on the curlicued iron bed. She is naked. Her body is covered in semen. Her hair is tied back. She jumps off the stained, pink mattress onto the tiled pool deck. She bounces up and down in front of a large potted palm, laughing gleefully.
“Grab your IDs really quick,” says the director.
“Can I just wipe off?” she asks, holding out a sticky hand. “My stupid IDs. I’m not going anywhere. Let me just wipe off really quick. Really quick.”
Jollee walks gingerly on her toes into the hallway. She holds her arms stiffly out to her side, fingers splayed. She glances down at herself.
“No hug?” a production assistant teases.
“I would hug you, but . . . I would give everyone big fucking kisses,” she throws back.
She walks naked past a group of fully dressed men in a post-production huddle. She is the only woman visible. The men ignore her. She rummages through a duffel bag. She pulls a white towel out of the bag and holds it in her hand, away from her body, as she walks naked to the bathroom. She laughs and banters with the camera crew. “No, no, no, don’t touch me. Trust me. You don’t want to.” A camera flash goes off as she opens the bathroom door. The
counter in the white marble bathroom is littered with crumpled paper towels. Jollee roams back and forth distractedly. She continues to hold her arms out stiffly.
“Good show,” remarks the man holding the camera.
“Yeah, huh?” Jollee puts down the towel. She tears off a piece of paper towel. She wipes her belly with the paper towel. She bends over to wipe cautiously between her legs. “Oh, my God. Wow,” she says, examining the paper towel.
Her laugh, as she straightens up, sounds like panting. “What’d ya think?”
“I think—I think you wore those guys out,” answers the cameraman.
Jollee laughs again raggedly. “They wore me out, I won’t fucking deny that,” she says as she takes out a baby wipe from a packet on the counter. “Look at me. I’m about to pass out.”
She pauses, unfolding the wipe. Then she looks at the camera. Her smeared eyeliner gives her the appearance of two black eyes. The corners of her mouth are pulled down. Her chin is tilted up. Her expression is hard to read. “Good gang bang?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was intense. Great job.”
Jollee nods for a moment.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “I tried.”
She looks down and wipes her belly with the baby wipe. She blows her breath out as she holds the wipe to her vagina, bending her knees. “Oh my God, I gotta douche. I gotta douche real bad.” She inspects the wipe and sighs. “Fuck.” Suddenly she looks up with a wide grin and laughs. “D’you have fun with the camera? It’s fun, right? It’s like power. It’s like, whoo! It’s so much fun. It’s so much fun. . . . It’s like you’re allowed to be a pervert, now you have the camera in your hands.”
She catches sight of herself in the mirror and bursts out laughing. “Oh, God. I give up.” She throws the used wipe on the counter and heads back out, naked, into the lobby, among the milling production crew.
Jollee was also featured in the 2005 JM Productions release Swirlies, in which the male performer dunks the woman’s head into a toilet after sex and flushes. The company promo for the film promises that “every whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her.”
In Swirlies, Jollee comes to the door of a house and meets a man named Jenner. She tells Jenner that his little brother has given her little brother a swirlie at school. There is less than a minute of the usual stilted dialogue before the sex scene begins. There is oral, vaginal, and anal penetration in a variety of positions, with many close-up shots of the performers’ genitals. The oral penetration includes deep thrusting that causes Jollee to gag. Jenner finally ejaculates on Jollee’s face. He then takes her to the bathroom for a swirlie. During the sex scenes Jollee says to Jenner:
• “Shove it up my fucking ass . . . fuck that fucking tight little motherfucking asshole. Ah, that’s so fucking good.”
• “Fuck that motherfucking filthy asshole, motherfucker. Fucking amazing. So fucking amazing. Fucking fuck me, motherfucker.”
• “Fucking cock in that little asshole. That fucking dick in my fucking tight little filthy motherfucking asshole.”
• “Fucking love it. Fucking love it.”
• “Fuck, motherfucker is fucking me. Ride that fucking cock, huh.”
• “Fucking nice, hard cock in fucking tight, little ass. Fuck me like a fucking little puppy, huh. Little puppy dog, huh. Fuck me with that fucking, hard cock so hard. So fucking hard, shoot your fucking hot come all over my pretty, little motherfucking face like a dirty, little, filthy, motherfucking whore.”
• “Fucking dirty. I’m a filthy, little, fucking whore.”5
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of unlimited male power, but today it also involves the expression of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.
The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified, could be stills from porn films. There is a shot of a naked man kneeling in front of another man as if performing oral sex. There is a naked man on a leash held by a female American soldier. There are naked men in chains. There are naked men stacked one on top of the other in a human pile on the floor, as if in a prison gang bang. And there are hundreds more classified photos, many privately viewed by members of Congress, that show forced masturbation by Iraqi prisoners. Prisoners are made to pose for the camera in simulated sexual acts. And there are reportedly pictures of sexual intercourse among the guards. The photographs reflect the raging undercurrent of sexual callousness and perversion that runs through contemporary culture. These images speak in the language of porn, professional wrestling, reality television, music videos, and the corporate culture. It is the language of absolute control, total domination, racial hatred, fetishistic images of slavery, and humiliating submission. It is a world without pity. It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects. It is a reflection of the sickness of gonzo porn.
Torture and pornography inevitably converge. They each turn human beings into submissive objects. In porn the woman is stripped of her human attributes and made to beg for abuse. She has no identity as a distinct human being. Her only worth is as a toy, a pleasure doll. She exists to gratify any whim that a male decides is pleasurable. She has no other purpose. Her real name vanishes. She adopts a cheap and usually vulgar stage name. She becomes a slave. She is filmed being degraded and physically abused. This film is sold to consumers, who, in turn, are aroused by the illusion that they too can dominate and abuse women. They, too, can be torturers.
Three of the alleged torturers in Abu Ghraib were women. They appeared to be willing participants. Porn has become so embedded and accepted in the culture, especially among the young, that sexual humiliation, abuse, rape, and physical violence have merged into a socially acceptable expression, once fear of retribution is removed. Absolute power over others almost always expresses itself through sexual sadism.
“My whole reason for being in the industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t much care for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up,” Bill Margold, a performer and producer of porn, has said. “I strongly believe this, and the industry hates me for saying it. . . . So we come on a woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually: We’re getting even for their lost dreams. I believe this. I’ve heard audiences cheer me when I do something foul onscreen. When I’ve strangled a person or sodomized a person or brutalized a person, the audience is cheering my action, and then when I’ve fulfilled my warped desire, the audience applauds.”6
A performer known as Max Hardcore, currently in prison in Florida on obscenity charges, pioneered many of the forms of physical abuse now widely embraced by the industry. He was the first to perform anal fisting and “face-fucking.” He placed lighted medical specu lums in the vagina and anus. He urinated on women, often directly into their mouths. He slapped women around, tied them up, thrust their heads into toilets and flushed, pulled their hair, threw them onto the floor, and called them bitch, whore, cunt, and slut.
The women i
n porn plead to be abused. They call themselves whores and sluts. They are beaten and penetrated by groups of men. Their faces are covered with semen from dozens of masturbating men, their anuses penetrated repeatedly by lines of partners, and they are raped. The women portrayed in the films exist to fulfill the desires of men in the most degrading and painful way possible. Nearly all porn dialogue includes lines from women such as I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.
I find a man named Barry who refuses to give his last name sitting at a table selling bulk packages of 100 DVDs filmed by his company, Pain and Orgasm. He does business using the names Torture Portal, Masters of Pain, and Bacchus Studios. He admits his torture porn is outlawed in many states, and I find out later that he has been charged by a federal grand jury in Billings, Montana, with distributing obscene DVDs through the mail. The specific films named in the indictment are Torture of Porn Star Girl, Pregnant and Willing, and Defiant Crista Submits. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on each of the three counts charged in the indictment.
Barry is fifty-eight and is wearing a gold Star of David around his neck. He has graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. He has been making movies since 1998. Not surprisingly, he feels the government is too intrusive in the business. He has a Web site where subscribers can see his bondage and torture films for $24.95 a month, along, he said, with “one live show.”
“There are more restrictions, more government involvement where there shouldn’t be,” he says. “People should be able to watch whatever they want to watch as long as it is between consenting adults and there are no kids or animals. Stay out of our bedrooms.”
