Empire of Illusion (13 page)

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Authors: Chris Hedges

BOOK: Empire of Illusion
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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 in 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.”
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 as
a 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 Blonde
s [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 it 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

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