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The Illusion of Love
http://www.nationalpost.com/most-popular/story.html?id=2073591 In
an exclusive book excerpt, author Chris Hedges explores the physical and
psychological damage that the pornography industry wreaks on the women who pass
through it. Chris
Hedges, National Post The
Pink Cross booth has a table of anti-porn tracts and is set up in the far corner
of the Sands Expo convention centre in In
a convention exalting the pornography industry, Lubben's table is not overrun
with visitors, most of whom are male and middle-aged with cameras around their
necks. The few men who make it to the far corner of the convention centre look
curiously at its pink banner and walk past. The expo is filled with more
alluring fare. There are numerous booths for porn producers and distributors,
many with women in tiny skirts and bras who, often clinging to stripper poles,
gyrate and bend over and spread their legs for groups of men. They simulate
masturbation and flash their breasts for crowds of onlookers. Huge banners hang
from the ceiling promoting new releases such as Slutty and Sluttier 6. A
local escort service, VegasGirls, has a booth about 100 feet from Pink Cross.
There is a homemade wooden wheel with a flipper that looks like a middle-school
shop project on its table. Those who spin the wheel can get various discounts or
even a free visit by a "stripper" to their hotel room. Small, glossy
cards are fanned out on the table, showing women in evocative poses and not much
clothing, all with a first name, the agency's phone number and the phrase
"actual photo" emblazoned on the side of the card. "You
want to take a picture of my boobs, then you have to take my card," a woman
in front of the booth tells a camera-wielding, middle-aged man. "If
I call this number, is it you who will come?" he asks. "Here,
baby," she says, giving him the card. "I will come." Many
of the booths at the Sands Expo feature well-known porn stars. There are long
lines of men waiting for a signed photo and the chance to have a picture with
stars from the Wicked Pictures studio, including Kaylani Lei, Kirsten Price and
Jessica Drake. The men usually wrap their arms around the women for the photo,
always taken by a friend or someone in line. As they hug the women's waists, the
women sometimes playfully grab the man's crotch or lick their lips. Huge plasma
screens placed in
the booths run nonstop porn, often featuring the stars having anal sex with
multiple partners or giving blow jobs. The sheer volume of porn blasted
throughout the convention floor by the sea of giant screens becomes, very
quickly, numbing. The
porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the
films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what
amounts to a personality. The
one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy
men, especially if that desire involves the women's physical and emotional
degradation. The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is
shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn,
which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The
acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The
manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting,
oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are
unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no
wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of
sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the
thump of a pulse, taste, breath -- or tenderness. Those in the films are
puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid
of authentic human beauty and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote
sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes
masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and
love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else's expense. "I
was addicted to porn for two years," says Scott Smith, 29, from "I
started out once a day, usually at night, when my roommate wasn't there,"
Smith says. "You try and hide it. Then I started watching it several times
a day. I would only watch it long enough to masturbate. I never got why they
make these long features since I would always turn it off when I was done." Smith
says the images crippled his ability to be intimate. He could not distinguish
between the fantasy of porn and the reality of relationships. "Porn messes
with the way you think of women," he says. "You want the women you are
with to be like the women in porn. I was scared to get involved in a
relationship. I did not know how extensive the damage was. I did not want to
hurt anyone. I kept away from women." Patrice
Roldan, 26, with black hair and a loose-fitting purple and black potato sack
dress, is standing next to the Pink Cross table. Roldan, whose screen name was
Nadia Styles, made her last porn film in November 2008. She starred in nearly
200 films. She is 5-foot-5, 110 pounds and wears a black scarf around her neck,
black knitted stockings with knee-high black socks, and flat, black shoes. Her
outfit seems calculated to be exactly what a porn star should never wear in
public. She looks like a schoolteacher. Roldan,
like many of the women who drift into the porn and prostitution industry, had a
difficult and troubled childhood, including a physically abusive mother. Her
mother threw her out of her home when she was 17, and she spent time in homeless
shelters. She answered an ad in LA Weekly that offered women $1,000 as models.
This is a common doorway into the porn industry. She started appearing in
Internet porn. She had a boyfriend when she began filming and tells me she
"felt guilty" about hiding her porn sessions from him, but the money
was good. Her boyfriend eventually found out, and their relationship descended
into one increasingly characterized by verbal and physical abuse. She drifted
from the Internet into films. She was 19 when she made her first film. "Doing
a movie shoot was a different experience," she says as we sit in two
folding chairs across from the Pink Cross booth. "I made my first film with
New Sensations [adult video studio]. I got makeup. There was a set and cameramen
all around. I thought it was glamorous to have my makeup done, to have pictures
taken of me. That was a regular boy-girl shoot. At that point, I was just trying
to survive." She
had been promised $1,000 for her first film. She was handed $600 when the scene
was done. She also contracted gonorrhea. Porn stars are tested for HIV and
sexually transmitted diseases once a month, but "people do so many scenes
between tests that a month is a long time." She began, once she had treated
her gonorrhea, to do films three or four times a month. She would have several
more bouts with gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during her
career. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The demands on her began to
escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became
"extremely rough. They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll. "The
next day my whole body would ache," she recalls. "It happened a lot,
the aching. It used to be that only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace,
would once do things like anal. Now it is expected." She
became a staple in "gonzo" porn films. Gonzo movies are usually filmed
in a house or hotel room. They are porn verite. The performers often acknowledge
the camera and speak to it. Gonzo films push the boundaries of porn and often
include a lot of violence, physical abuse and a huge number of partners in
succession. According to the magazine Adult Video News, "Gonzo, non-feature
fare is the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it's less expensive to
produce than plot-oriented features, but just as importantly, is the fare of
choice for the solo stroking consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get
off on the good stuff, then, if they really wanna catch some acting, plot and
dialog, pop in the latest Netflix disc." Roldan
would endure numerous penetrations by various men in a shoot, most of them
"super-rough." As she talks of her career in porn, her eyes take on a
dead, faraway look. Her breathing becomes more rapid. She slips into a flat,
numbing monotone. The symptoms are ones I know well from interviewing victims of
atrocities in war who battle posttraumatic stress disorder. "What
you are describing is trauma," I say. "Yes,"
she answers quietly. Shelley
Lubben, who also worked as a porn actress, agrees. "You
have to do what they want on the sets," she says. "There's too much
competition. They can always find other girls. Girls bring in their friends and
get kickbacks. They feel like stars. They get attention. It's all about the
spotlight. It's all about me. They have notoriety. They don't realize the
degradation. Besides, this is a whole generation raised on porn. They're jaded
and don't even ask if it is wrong. They fall into it. They get into drugs to
numb themselves. They get their asses ripped. Their uterus hemorrhages. They get
HPV and herpes, and they turn themselves off emotionally and die. They check out
mentally. They get PTSD like "Porn
is like any other addiction," Lubben says. "First, you are curious.
Then you need harder and harder drugs to get off. You need gang bangs and
bestiality and child porn. Porn gets grosser and grosser. We never did
ass-to-mouth when I was in the industry. Now you get an award for it. And
meanwhile the addicts make their wives feel like they can't live up to the
illusion of the porn star. The addict asks, 'Why can't she give blow jobs like a
porn star?' He wants what isn't real. Porn destroys intimacy. I can always tell
if a man is a porn addict. They're shut down. They can't look me in the eyes.
They can't be intimate." "When
legal and social mores first changed and porn went mainstream in the 1970s,
there was a standard sexual script, which included oral and vaginal sex, with
anal sex relatively rare, ending with the 'money' or 'come' shot, where the man
ejaculated onto the body of the woman," Robert Jensen, the author of
Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, tells me over breakfast one
Saturday morning at my home in Princeton. "But once there were thousands of
porn films on the market, the porn industry had to expand that script to expand
profits. It had to find new emotional thrills. It could have explored intimacy,
love, the connection between two people, but this was not what appealed to the
largely male audience. Instead, the industry focused on greater male control and
cruelty. This started in the 1980s, with anal sex as a way for men to dominate
women. It has descended to multiple penetrations, double anals, gagging and
other forms of physical and psychological degradation. "What
does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?" Jensen
asks. "What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and
glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason porn is so
difficult for so many people to discuss is not that it is about sex -- our
culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes
something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with images
of women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not
people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty
are played out. And many men -- maybe a majority of men--like it." The
cruelty takes a toll on the bodies, as well as the emotions, of porn actresses.
Many suffer severe repeated vaginal and anal tears that require surgery. The
male stars are encouraged to be rough and hostile. Some, she says, "hated
women. They would spit in my face. I was devastated the first time that
happened, but I thought it was good they were rough because of my abusive
relationships. I thought roughness in porn was OK. I would say, 'Treat me like a
little slut,' or 'I'm your bitch,' or 'F**k me like a whore.' I would say the
most degrading things I could say about myself because I thought this was what
it meant to be sexy and what people wanted to hear, or at least the people who
buy the films. You are just a slut to those who watch. You are nothing. They
want to see that we know that." She
would shoot scenes with men who disgusted her, whose sweat and smell "made
me cringe." And when the lights went off and the cameras stopped, she would
stumble off the set in pain, her face often covered with semen. "Sometimes
they would hand you a paper towel to wipe your face off," she says,
"and sometimes they would say, 'Don't touch us. You're gross.' I remember
the first time I had come all over my face. I was so pissed off, but I took it.
I pretended to like everything they did. I took pride in being a good gonzo
girl. My fame came from this." By
the second year of shooting, with an income of $100,000, she had turned to
drugs, including painkillers and muscle relaxants. "The
lifestyle of a porn star is to spend your money as soon as you make it on weed,
alcohol, coke, ecstasy and Vicodin," Roldan says. "I wanted to be the
good gonzo girl they wanted me to be. I took this so I would not feel anything.
By the next year, instead of only Vicodin I began to drink vodka, a whole
bottle. Every girl I knew used alcohol. We were drinking so we did not feel the
pain." -
From
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris
Hedges. Copyright by Chris Hedges. Published with arrangement by Random House
Canada.
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