by Chris Hedges
He has little time for traditional porn and tells me, “I couldn’t tell you anything about porn. I don’t shoot porn. I don’t watch it. It’s boring. I shoot bondage. Tie ’em up and fuck ’em and maybe I will watch.
“I am not really involved in the industry,” he goes on. “All I know is that large segments around the world like to watch young girls being tortured.”
Barrett Blade, whose real name is Russell Alex Heil, is a porn actor who directs and is often filmed in porn movies with his wife, Kirsten Price. He started acting in porn films a decade ago when, he says, a girlfriend who shot porn brought him to the set.
“When I came into the business, gonzo was very small,” he tells me. “There were more features, more films with story lines. As a performer, I don’t do a lot of the gonzo. I’m a lover. I film it as a director, but I don’t do it. I can’t do a scene with some girl who before we start is crying and sitting scared in a corner. I can’t do a scene if the girls are not enjoying themselves.”
Most porn films have dispensed with the thin fantasy plots of older porn. The raw sex scenes begin almost immediately. And porn is overtly racist. Black men in porn films are primitive animals, brawny and illiterate studs with vast sexual prowess. Black women are filled with raw, animalistic lust. Latina women are hot and racy. Asian women are sexually submissive geishas. In this year’s AVN Awards, nominated movies bore titles such as Get That Black Pussy You Big Dick White Bastard Muttha Fucka, My Daughter Went Black and Never Came Back, and Oh No! There’s a Negro in My Mom! Porn, as Gail Dines writes, is a “new minstrel show.” Porn allows white males, safely removed from the black culture and the inner city, to be voyeurs into a depraved and frightening world of racial and sexual stereotypes. Porn, as Dines writes, functions asa peep show for whites into what they see as the authentic black life, not on the plantation, but in the “hood” where all the conventions of white civilized society cease to exist. The “hood” in the white racist imagination is a place of pimps, ho’s and generally uncontrolled black bodies, and the white viewer is invited, for a fee, to slum in this world of debauchery. In the “hood,” the white man can dispense with his whiteness by identifying with the black man, and thus can become as sexually skilled and as sexually out-of-control as the black man. Here he does not have to worry about being big enough to satisfy the white woman (or man) nor does he have to concern himself with fears about poor performance or “weak wads” or cages like poor hubby in Blacks on Blondes [an interracial film in which the husband is literally in a cage while watching black men have sex with his wife]. Indeed, the “hood” represents liberation from the cage, and the pay-off is a satiated white woman (or man) who has been completely and utterly feminized by being well and truly turned into a “fuckee.”7
Dines writes that the black body that is celebrated as uncontrolled in interracial pornography is the same body that must be controlled and shackled in the world of white supremacy: Just as white suburban teenagers love to listen to hip-hop and white adult males gaze longingly at the athletic prowess of black men, the white pornography consumer enjoys his identification with (and from) black males through a safe peephole, in his own home, and in mediated form. The real, breathing, living black man, however, is to be kept as far away as possible from these living rooms, and every major institution in society marshals its forces in the defense of white society. The ideologies that white men take to the pornography text to enhance their sexual pleasure are the very ideologies that they use to legitimize the control of black men: While it may heighten arousal for the white porn users, it makes life intolerable for the real body that is (mis)represented in all forms of white controlled media.8
Male porn stars make about a third of the money paid to the women. They possess the singular talent of keeping an erection for long periods of time while a small audience of actors, directors, and production crew watch. Barrett Blade tells me that many male stars take Viagra or inject Caverject into an open vein in the penis. “Some guy will be waiting to go on and reading a book and their cock up like this,” he says, indicating an erection with his fingers. “These guys who inject keep an open wound at the base of their penis. They bleed on the women. Pretty soon they can’t get it up without it. They need to get a vial from the fridge every time they want to have sex, even when they are home with their girlfriends.”
Jim Powers stands in his booth with a large, glossy poster behind him that reads, “Wanna Fuck a Porn Star?” The poster invites the reader to visit Fuckafan.com and “see Super Stars of XXX Cinema with Real Guys.” Powers, who has directed films such as Detention Whores, Mexicunts, and Squeel Like a Pig, films “real” fans screwing porn stars and puts it up for view on the Internet for paid subscribers. The booth next to his is a cosmetic surgery company that offers “breast augmentation, liposuction, Tummy Tuck, Buttock Implants, Nose Refinement, Botox, and Facial Fillers and more.”
“I find real guys and they get to fuck a porn star like Kenci,” he says, turning to a young woman beside him in cutoff shorts, a bra, and a baseball hat.
Powers says he tried to film a scene the night before with a fan that “went really bad.” “It was hours of heartache, but he got a free sandwich out of it,” he says. “It is tough once the camera comes on.” He is perturbed because three fans who had previously agreed to be filmed with Kenci this afternoon had not appeared. He says he “makes stupid content for stupid people,” that porn is a prime example of the “stupidifi cation of America.” “This is a YouTube world,” he continues. “It is a Jackass world. Everyone has short attention spans. You need a catchy trailer. You catch their attention, they buy the film and jerk off.
“There was a day when porn stars were veiled actresses,” he says. “They took the job seriously. They were twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Now they are nineteen. They are hookers. They don’t care. They are a throwaway commodity in a throwaway world.” He turns and looks with disdain at Kenci and says to me, “She doesn’t know what a book is, I bet.” He asks me if I want to be filmed having sex with Kenci. I decline with a quick “No, thank you.” He explains he doesn’t have anyone else. He has a house nearby to film, a camera crew, a porn actress, and no fan. At no point is Kenci consulted.
Sharon Mitchell, an ex-porn star, is the founder of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation. She tests and treats actors in the porn industry. She runs her clinic out of Los Angeles.
“The type of performances that they are doing, basically they walk on the set and it is wall-to-wall sex, and the type of sexual encounters they are having are extremely high-risk, much, much higher-risk than when I was involved,” Mitchell said in a 2007 interview with National Public Radio. “When I was involved, I had the choice to use a condom, the choice to do whatever sex acts I preferred. Today, anyone pretty much with a handful of Viagra and a High-8 camera: ‘Hey, I want to be a porn director and producer.’ And they can literally go about this and sell these things on the Internet. So they recruit very young people, and my concern is, ‘Are you ready to do this?’
“When I founded the Adult [Industry] Medical Healthcare Foundation in 1998, there was actually an actor who was knowingly and willfully infecting women with HIV,” Mitchell said, “and finally I caught up with him and realized that he was going to county health clinics and getting anonymous testing. And he would put someone else’s name on this test. And not everyone was testing, and the tests were not centrally located back then. Denial is the backbone of pornography when it comes to health care.”
“I am a clinician that serves a world that I know very, very well because I come from it,” Mitchell told NPR’s Scott Simon. “And I know the pressures that these talent members go through not to use the condoms. They are offered more money. They are told, ‘Look, these films will not sell if there are condoms on it.’”
“Not to get graphic, but you would think that in these days of computer enhancements and special effects, it would be no more necessary to endanger a performer that way than i
t would be to require Tom Cruise to jump off a twelve-story building,” Simon said.
“Absolutely,” Mitchell answered, “but they are not looked at as performers. They are looked at as commodities. They are looked at as body parts that are going to be edited into a product that’s going to make money. And this industry, albeit mainstream as it’s become, they are not going to say, ‘OK, let’s go ahead and spend half a million dollars, let’s just digitally edit out the condom,’ which can be done, obviously. They just don’t want to spend any money.”
“In helping porn performers are you just enabling them do something that is destructive?” Simon asked.
“You know, some days I feel like I am sweeping back the ocean with a broom,” she said. “I wake up and I think, ‘This is amazing.’ I mean, we do catch a tremendous amount of HIV that would have ended up in the industry. And I can literally say I have saved lives. We have put a lot of people into rehab. We help a lot of people leave porn and get an education. We have a scholarship program. And with all this, some days, you know, when I see a young girl walk in, and I just know she is just going to get run over by all these producers and agents and types of things that she probably hasn’t experienced or even thought of experiencing, I think, ‘Am I just fattening them up for the kill? What am I doing?’”9
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.”
Did you ever want to just want to find a little SUBMISSIVE fuck toy and fill her full of your man seed? At Creampie Thais, I do just that. I pick up hot Thai whores off the streets of Thailand. In clubs, supermarkets, the beach and off the streets, I wreck their young slick pussies and fill them full of my spunk. After I have these whores suck my cock and dump my sperm into their receptive cunts, I throw them back to the world to fend for themselves. These girls are willing to do anything to receive my spunk inside their hot tight asian twats. Maybe they think it’s a ticket to the promise land, or maybe they just want to breed. Are they on the pill? Who gives a fuck. Protection. Fuck no. Do I have illegitimate children in Thailand? Probably. This is the REAL FUCKIN’ DEAL.
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.”
