Porn documentaries (the bad news)

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The Price of Pleasure DVD cover

The bad news is, they’re hard to come by. And when you do come by them, they are usually negative or superficial. Even Frontline, which I normally adore (seriously, go watch Hand of God or Abortion Clinic, or practically anything else), put out a fairly lukewarm documentary called American Porn. I giddily rented Thinking XXX from Netflix, but it turned out to be a look at pornstars being photographed for a book, comprised of interviews that offered me very little new information about the porn industry. Similarly, a multi-part HBO documentary called Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley presented a refreshing, but narrow, view of the porn industry.

But none of this compares to the abomination that is The Price of Pleasure, a new anti-porn documentary that is currently being screened at colleges around the country. Luckily, pornographer Ernest Greene has written an exhaustive account of the entire film (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), so I will never have to subject my eyes and brain to it.

Greene’s description of this film is wonderfully sarcastic and pointed, perfectly detailing the propaganda-like editing, shoddy and cherry-picked “research,” and likely illegal usage of much of the pornographic material in the film. Green also deftly points out the filmmakers’ exclusion of feature porn films, and their gross misrepresentation of BDSM in porn and in life. Some especially great points:

no one ever appears in this film to say a thing I often hear in the real world: “Porn? Never seen any and don’t care to.” The option of simply ignoring all this evil propaganda is never addressed in the Manichean world of TPoP, where there exist only victimizers, victims and recovering victims. That is the paranoid lens through which our entire society is depicted in this airless, lightless reinvention of the much broader and more diverse reality of daily life for most people.

. . .

But then, as Jensen would have it, women in porn are particularly exploited as laborers because “they sell the most intimate parts of themselves.” . . . Anyway, last time I checked, porn performers generally take those parts home with them from the set, so they could hardly be considered to have sold said parts.

A less demeaning description might be that they sold their time and labor as performers using those parts of their bodies among others, but not demeaning porn performers is no more a priority for the ever-so-humane Dr. Jensen than it is for anyone else connected with this stinker. If he cares so much for the poor darlings, could he not thing of some way to defend them without simultaneously accusing them of the same things in exactly the same tone as fire-and-brimstone religious patriarchs? Seemingly not.

If that doesn’t bother you enough, the crew for the film interviewed Joanna Angel under the guise of making a film about porn and feminism. Then they misrepresented her work and used her own words against her. Awesome, huh?

It infuriates me that there are people in the world who refuse to look at the truth of the porn industry, which is that there are some amazing people out there trying to change it. The film apparently makes no mention of Tristan Taormino, Candida Royalle, Suze Randall, or any other female director, nor does it consider films like those made by Comstock Films, nor does it consider any queer porn at all. So, wow, great job narrowing the field so that it just barely validates your skewed viewpoint. Ugh. It saddens me to think that college kids are being shown this documentary as though it is the “truth” about the industry. Must stop now.

Soon: porn documentaries — the good news.