The Price of Pleasure: Documentary Screening Bares More than Skin
By Stephen Maouyo | Feb 24th, 2010
By Stephen Maouyo with help from Elisa Gill
Porn: The four-letter word that has ceased to be one within the past 25 years. With that in mind, this past Monday night, the Boston University Women’s Resource Center, in collaboration with BU juniors Eunice Ko and Amanda Ward, hosted a screening of “Porn: The Price of Pleasure,” a documentary about the porn industry. The screening, attended by about 130 people, was accompanied by a panel discussion moderated by Megan Andelloux, an ACS registered sexologist, a screening of “female-positive pornography” (which is difficult to define, but is by one definition porn that depicts consensual sex between REAL people) and a talk by Princess Kali, a dominatrix with 10+ years of experience in the adult entertainment industry.
Now, I’m sure most of us are familiar with mainstream pornography. I first came across porn in 4th grade, while trying to figure out what my orthodontic work the next day would entail. Who knew that asking Jeeves what a palate-spreader was would lead immediately to a sex-doll website? But despite our familiarity with porn, how cognizant are we of its more alarming statistics? For instance, the documentary (which, without a doubt had an anti-porn bias), reported that a random selection of 304 scenes from the most-rented pornographic films of 2005 yielded that 89.8% of them had instances of aggression and 94.4% of that aggression was directed toward women. Startled? Or how about the film’s report that “respectable” corporations such as Time Warner and CBS have their hands in the estimated 10-14 billion dollars of annual revenue (more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined) that pornography produces. Oh, and The Free Speech Coalition, that wonderful organization working to protect your 1st Amendment right by buying votes in Congress, was founded by the porn industry in 1991 to protect themselves. Sobering, huh?
Fraught with similarly themed facts (and wonderful commentary from porn consumers and directors: “Why on her face?” “Because she is so beautiful. It’s like a dog marking its territory”), it was hard to walk away from the documentary with anything but disgust for mainstream pornography. However, what comes out in the wash is that pleasure is personal. With complete exclusion to child pornography, of course, if you like it, and all parties are consenting, feel free to it. So what’s the problem with pornography? We can’t assume that no one likes a little aggression in the bedroom, and we can’t regulate preferences what bodily fluids go where during a sexual act. The problem with porn is this: it now dictates what pleasure involves. In foisting upon us depictions of sex that commonly involve men in dominant, violently abusive roles, pornography asserts and popularizes particular notions of what sex entails. Your pleasure is your (and perhaps your partner’s) business. Not that of a billion-dollar corporation with suggestions. And this self-perpetuating cycle between society and business (and not only the porn business), between the personal and the profitable, always pushing the boundaries of what is not just acceptable but expected, is one that is, quite frankly, horrifying.
Note: The authors would like to clarify a few things. The use of “real” to describe female positive porn was used, albeit somewhat offensively, to describe actors and actresses that have not undergone cosmetic surgery. Also, the website that first exposed Mr. Maouyo to pornography was, in fact, dedicated to sex dolls, not human actors and actresses.
Overall, the authors would like to make clear that they are not inherently anti-porn, however the statistics presented in the film left them concerned that so many films depict controlling, violent men, and women who receive pleasure from being controlled and handled violently. They recognize and accept the sexual preferences of individuals (including interests in BDSM and role-playing), but also realize that the regular occurrence and normalization of violence in films could alter what viewers expect in their personal lives. They were and remain unopposed to the existence of pornography, and the mere existence of violent sexual acts in pornography. The film’s statistics worried them, however, because they claimed that the majority of porn depicts aggression (89.8%) and that almost all of said aggression is towards women (94.4%). Additionally, they realize that these phenomena are inextricable from the complex relationship between the pornography industry and other influencing sectors of society (including the preferences of individuals), and that the ramifications of capitalism provide additional complications. The film did not inspire them to oppose pornography in total, but realize its role as both an effect and a cause of current societal expectations.
STEEEEVEEEE-OOOOOOOOO
Note: Edited to remove ad hominem attacks.
Mr. Maouyo:
As one of the pornographers who appeared briefly in The Price of Pleasure who happens also to be a journalist with about three decades of experience, I can’t help wondering if they still teach journalism, or critical thinking of any kind, at our major universities.
You swallowed TPoP’s clumsy, Reefer-Madness agitprop whole and regurgitated it here without raising a single question about this so-called “documentary.”
You never question the film’s definition of “mainstream pornography” when in fact it dwells at tedious length on obscure and specialized types of pornography that account for tiny percentages of the sexually explicit material consumed in this country.
You accepted the producer’s dubious survey of “random selection” of scenes from what they claim to be the most-rented pornographic films of 2005 without questioning the methodology used to establish that these were, in fact, the most-rented pornographic films of that year. The methodology used was entirely inaccurate based on a gross distortion of how the statistics the “researchers” cherry-picked from the Adult Video News sales and rentals charts are compiled. The scenes chosen were not from the most-rented pornographic films of 1995, which were largely fairly tame features that would not have met even the bizarre definitions of aggressive behavior used by these ideologically-motivated anti-porn activists. You quote their percentages of observed aggression, derived from criteria they devised, which are hardly objective, given the obvious connections shared by both the surveyors and the film’s producers with anti-pornography activist groups.
Do you have social science professors at BU? Did you consider showing any of them the part of the picture in which the survey’s protocols were explained to see if they meet accepted standards of academic research? if so, you made no mention of such routine cross-checking.
You repeat as gospel the unscourced claim that the pornography industry’s annual revenues are somewhere in between ten and fourteen billion dollars, when the most careful assessment, undertaken by The New York Times, estimates the correct number at approximately four and a half billion dollars. Did you go online to fact check the bloated numbers cited in the film? Evidently not.
You repeat the film’s allegations regarding The Free Speech Coalition as if they were accepted fact. Did you make any attempt whatsoever to contact anyone at The F.S.C. for a response? That’s called getting both sides of the story. It’s what journalists are supposed to do. The F.S.C.’s phone number is listed and spokespeople there who have seen this film are available for comment. When charges are made against individuals or organizations, it’s customary for journalists reporting such charges to allow those charged the opportunity to reply. Evidently, you don’t feel that obligation applies to your work.
You’re also apparently untroubled by the one-sided nature of the film’s presentation of the issues it claims to address. Out of its one-hour running time, less than seven minutes are allowed for peformers to talk about their experiences or their work in any way. Of the “experts” who take up much of the remainder of the pictures interminable length, virtually all are well-known figures in the anti-porn activist community. None of their comments are balanced with rebuttals from any of the equally well-known figures from the academic world, media studies, the legal profession or anywhere else who holds opposing views. A film built on such a framework hardly qualifies as documentary in nature. It falls more accurately into the category of propaganda. The absence of articulate advocates of contrary opinions doesn’t seem to concern you any more than the producers’ indifference to the performers they claim to regard as an exploited class deserving of protection.
Had you attempted to contact any of the performers whose images are used in this film without benefit of the legal requirments regarding proof of age and informed consent, you would have found that they were badgered in working situations by the film’s directors, in some instances for hours at a time, in order to generate a few sound bites juxtaposed with visual images calculated to show them and their work in a false and defamatory light. If you found anything troubling about the way in which performers were treated in the creation of The Price of Pleasure, you keep it well-concealed in your writing. One of them was reduced to tears by their hectoring and is still unable to dicuss the experience today without crying.
The film’s bold claims that pornography is a major influence on individual and social behavior at large are taken at face value on the basis of a small group of individual’s anecdotal testimony. Did you attempt to find a single shred of unbiased, peer-reviewed scientific literature that supports these claims? If so, you don’t bother to share whatever you may have learned from such investigation. Gail Dines, one of the film’s most visible presences, has admitted on national television that absolutely no such research exists. In fact, a growing body of research suggests exaclty the opposite (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201001/pornography-beneficial-or-detrimental). None of your readers would be aware of these things based on your commentary.
You seem to be no more familiar with what constitutes a fact than you are with the proper usage of the word “fraught.” Like the film’s producers, you seem more concerned with telling others what they ought to think than you are with telling them what they need to know. This ill-serves your readers and suggests nothing good about the future of journalism in this country.
The Price of Pleasure is, in fact, a mendacious piece of trash created with utter disregard not only for the truth, but for the individuals exploited in its creation, who were treated far more shabbily by Chyng Sun and her cohorts than by the industry the film claims to critique. That you raised not one single probitive question regarding either its content or the manner in which it was made in our entire piece is nearly as much a disgrace as the The Price of Pleasure itself.
If any of your readers would care to know what the producers left out of their little gem, I invite them to look here:http://bppa.blogspot.com/2008/10/price-of-pleasure-deconstructed-part.html.
No, they won’t find any porn. But what they will find is a bracing examination of the lies this ugly waste of celluloid attempts to pass off as the truth about a complex subject its creators have reduced to an entirely predictable and entirely false construction of their own overheated imaginations.
It’s no surprise that the producers are hauling their nonsense around from one college campus to another in the hope of persuading the young and inexperienced that up is down and black is white. That is to be expected of hateful fanatics.
That you would choose to be enlisted in this ignoble effort under the guise of editorial commentary is both reprehensible and disappointing.
Ernest Greene
Ernest,
Speaking of critical thinking, did your journalism school teach you what an ad hominem attack is, and why it’s not a logical argument? Your comment has a fundamental problem in that the reader cannot tell if you’re attacking the article, the film, or indeed the writer himself. Thus, much of what you wrote (IE attacking the writer for the film’s alleged transgressions) is, frankly, nonsense.
That said, we welcome your criticism of the documentary itself as a counter argument, and the article you linked is indeed interesting, which is why we’re letting the comment through at all. However, you should be advised of two things: first, personal attacks against our authors are not permitted, and have thus been edited out of your comment. Second, you are barking up the wrong tree. This is a blog post by a student recounting his personal feelings and experiences having attended an event at our university. It is not a news article about the documentary. I’m sorry that traditional journalism you grew up with is dying, but again, blaming the author of this article for that would be, again, rather illogical.
Thanks for your comment.
Gabe Stein
Associate Publisher
JEEEEEZ.
I guess I’m glad we’re gaining readers in this regard…at least it prompts the thought process. At least it inspires us to look at things from another’s perspective.
I guess.
Gabe,
I’m quite familiar with the use of the ad hominem attack dodge as a way of ducking responsibility for what people say and do. The writer is pretty clear about his bias in favor of the film and thus his failure to analyze its obvious weakensses has to be seen as a failure of his responsibility to render an informed opinion of what the film contains. Criticism of someone who sets himself up as a commentator and presents only one side of an argument is fair game, whether the person doing so is a college student or Bill O’Reilly. There is a difference between an out -of-context personal attack and a call for responsibility to seek the truth before making broad, unexamined generalizations and presenting them as if they were accepted fact. The author’s failure to ask questions is a reasonable basis for questioning the author’s reliability as a source. Or is questioning also forbidden by the standards of the modern journalism you embrace?
So the short answer is that I hold the film, the article and the author culpable for failing to address the issues raised in a fair and competent manner.Since the author clearly embraces the film’s dishonest claims without skepticism, the source of the nonsense lies not with my criticism, but with the material being criticized and all involved in its dissemination.
Traditional journalism is quite likely to survive for as long as anyone cares to be informed rather than deluded. That market is rather larger than some seem to recognize. And I do not blame the author for the content of the film. I blame him for substituting his own response to it for any attempt at a truthful analysis of it. Had you chosen to run a factual account or a more skeptical analysis to balance your commentator’s “personal feelings” I’d have had no objections whatsoever to your treatment of the film in question. As it is, opinions unsupported by facts represent neither traditional journalism nor anything likely to replace it. They’re simply special pleading for particular viewpoints that contribute nothing to a broader understanding of anything.
Thanks ever so for informing me of what you think I don’t know and should. I still hope that some of your students will take the time to seek out for themselves the facts concerning a rather important matter, no aspect of which was addressed satisfactorily by either the film or the only coverage of its content you have posted thus far. There is another side to this story and perhaps your readers might care to become familiar with it, as old-fashoned as that may sound.
Much as some would like to make them so, subjectiive impressions are not a substitute for basic accuracy and never will be. Even first-person commentaries worthy of seeing daylight should be able to meet the basic standards of fact-based opinion. This applies equally to the film and the author’s credulous representation of it. I still maintain that, whatever his emotional response to what he saw might have been, he bore at least a minimal responsibility to verify its assertions before passing them on as revealed truth.
I hope that clarifies my position to your satisfaction.
Ernest Greene
“a screening of “female-positive pornography” (which is difficult to define, but is by one definition porn that depicts consensual sex between REAL people)”
So people who perform in so-called “mainstream porn” either aren’t “REAL people” and/or the sex shown is non-consensual? I guess we know the author’s answer to the first one, considering that in the next paragraph, he points out that the performers are “sex dolls” rather than “real people”. I wonder if Mr. Maouyo would care to defend that characterization.
As for the second point, is Mr. Maouyo stating that “mainstream porn” is largely presenting rape scenarios? Or is in fact rape? That’s an even wilder claim than any overt one made in “The Price of Pleasure” or the rather biased study it quotes. Then again, its also hardly surprising that a piece of over-the-top propaganda like TPoP would intentionally lead viewers to conclusions well beyond the points that it makes overtly.
Ernest,
Clarification noted. Once again, thank you for your comments.
Hi Stephen,
I think you hit the nail on the head when you write:
“We can’t assume that no one likes a little aggression in the bedroom, and we can’t regulate preferences what bodily fluids go where during a sexual act. The problem with porn is this: it now dictates what pleasure involves. In foisting upon us depictions of sex that commonly involve men in dominant, violently abusive roles, pornography asserts and popularizes particular notions of what sex entails. Your pleasure is your (and perhaps your partner’s) business. Not that of a billion-dollar corporation with suggestions.”
This is the problem with many forms of mainstream media — pop music, advertising, blockbuster films, TV shows — not just pornography. It’s incredibly important to examine the stories that mainstream media tell us about sexuality, about gender, or race, or class. These stories tell us what is normal, what is desirable (and what is not) — essentially, how to understand ourselves. Pornography deserves to be examined just as critically and seriously as any other mainstream media form.
Thanks for reflecting on what sounds like an interesting screening and panel discussion.
Best,
Alex Peterson
Media Education Foundation
“Pornography deserves to be examined just as critically and seriously as any other mainstream media form.”
Actually, I agree with this one hundred percent. Which is why I find it so unfortunate that TPoP eschewed such analysis in favor of crude agitprop and is now being passed off “media education” when it educates no one about anything except the producers’ prejudices.
The truly non-judgmental and unbiased documentary that TPoP claims to be has yet to be made, and I find myself wondering why Chyng Sun found it so easy to get funding for her anti-porn bash-job while a more accurate presentation of the material never seems to get made or distributed.
Greg Dark, who later became a very successful porn director, made a similar anti-porn diatribe as his senior project in film school, from which he graduated with honors, and then went on to use it as a demo reel to get him work in the adult video industry.
It would seem the resources needed to shoot and distribute warped and distorted nonsense about porn are never in short supply, but when someone wants to tell the story straight, the money magically dries up.
Odd that.
Ernest Greene
For the benefit of anyone still following this thread, I note with interest that nobody has called attention to the fact that Alex Peterson, who posts above, affiliates himself with Media Education Foundation. Media Education Foundation distributes The Price of Pleasure by mail order. Though he oddly doesn’t bother to mention this fact, it would seem relevant to the objectivity of his comments regarding this particular film.
It should also be of some concern to someone here that MEF sells this picture, which contains stolen sexually explicit footage, to the general public in clear violation of federal law 18 U.S.C. 2257. The Price of Pleasure fails to identify a keeper of records as required by federal law for all sexually explicit materials produced for mass consumption, and a physical location where documentation of the true identities and ages of those who appear in the material can be examined. As some of the stolen footage used appears to have orginated on Web sites outside the U.S. where this law is not in effect, it’s quite possible that The Price of Pleasure contains sexually explicit footage involving minors.
The producers admit that the footage was used without the owners’ permission (which they justify as fair use and I can’t be bothered to argue about that), and that they do not possess the records required under the provisions of 2257. Each violation of this statute carries a potential five year prison term and a six-digit fine. Though there is an exemption in the law for narrowly defined purposes of education and academic research, screenings open to the general public and direct sales to individual customers via the Internet do not qualify under that exemption.
In other words, in addition to its many other failings, The Price of Pleasure is shown and disseminated by Media Education Foundation in blatant violatiaon of federal law. In exhibiting this non-compliant film to an unrestricted audience of university students, the producers made all those involved in organizing the event and everyone in the chain of custody of the physical recording complicit in this violation.
Perhaps that matter, in Mr. Peterson’s words, “deserves to be examined.”
Ernest Greene
Ernest,
I want to thank you for the comments you provided to this post. I “moderated” the evening event in an attempt to defuse the inflammatory and outrageous statements made by TPoP. I was lucky enough to have the BU Women’s Center agree to allow Princess Kali, Good Releasing Films and Pink and White Productions to present the idea that pornography does not equal the devil, that women do choose to get into this line of work because they enjoy it, that domination can be fun and all the other points that this film forgets to mention. I’m sorry, but if the filmmaker states that this is going to be “a holistic understanding of pornography as it debunks common myths about the genre”, perhaps they shouldn’t bring up pedophilia in the first 10 minutes of the film or end the movie with a 21 second close up of a woman’s face after people ejaculated on her. Showing gut-punching images like that does not reflect a “holistic understanding”, it shows that it has a clear scare tactic agenda. As an educator, I almost dropped the 250.00 it would cost to buy it because of the description of it being “unbiased.” Thank goodness I didn’t. There is no way I could show this film as a way to accurately portray porn and it angers me to think other individuals might be using it that way.
In hindsight, presenting the positive side of pornography was at a disadvantage because we went AFTER the TPoP, at which 40 % of the audience left immediately after the film ended. We were able to gather some discussion though for over an hour! The articles that were posted did NOT reflect that part of the evening. There were some very intellectual statements made by students, my particular favorite was after a discussion of “woman friendly porn” which was stated a few times. A woman raised her hand and pointed that she had had enjoyed watching the previous images (the “rough” images) and when people make statements like “woman friendly” it implies that woman can’t enjoy intense scenes ORr if they do, their must be something wrong with them. She let us how wrong she felt that to be. Brilliant.
If educators are looking to educate individuals, I would suggest that they purchase this resource; (created by Planned Parenthood of Western Washington)
Pornography: Discussing Sexually Explicit Images http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ppgnw/pornography-discussing-sexually-explicit-images-23207.htm,
Read “America’s War on Sex” by Marty Klein, http://www.americaswaronsex.com/
Or check out sex positive resources like Charlie Glickman, who just published a lovely piece on “using” porn. http://www.charlieglickman.com/2010/03/why-do-we-call-it-using-porn/,
Thank you for posting your thoughts.
Megan Andelloux