The High Price of Free Porn
The High Price of Free Porn
Since porn is freely available online, videos have become more extreme and conditions for performers have deteriorated
De Volkskrant, 1 February 2019
By Colin Van Heezik
original article in Dutch :
Two boys walk through the streets of Budapest. They ask a young
woman if she wants to come with them, for 200 euros. She accepts the offer,
comes to their hotel room and has sex with both. They film their
adventure with their smartphone and put their homemade porn movie on
Pornhub, where the video is watched millions of times.
Amateur porn? Yes, but not really.
In 2005 YouTube came, in the following years free porn sites like
Pornhub and YouPorn arose. Since those years the genre ‘amateur porn’ has grown
considerably. Most of the time these are videos made by the
porn industry. With actors and cameramen, make-up, microphones and
lamps. But with lower budgets than the ‘classic’ porn movie,
and an intentionally less sophisticated look.
The amateur look reinforces the sense of authenticity and closeness: as if
you were that neighbor who suddenly has sex with that naughty
girl next door. ‘The amateur label is primarily a style’, writes the
French research journalist Robin D’Angelo in his book Judy, Lola,
Sofia et moi (2018). ‘Few camera angles, bad lighting, poor
camera work. It responds to fantasies of voyeurism and
exhibitionism.’
As a porn consumer, D’Angelo was curious about the world “on the other
side of the screen ‘. During a year the journalist explored the segment
that produces amateur porn : an environment of
Redbull, cigarettes, muscles and tattoos. He walked with
producer Stéphane, who runs his business from his meager apartment.
Eventually he pushed through to the top of the amateur segment: the
company Jacquie & Michel, with a turnover of 15 million euros per year.
Until then he only knew the porn world from films like Boogie
Nights (1997) by Paul Thomas Anderson. And contact was not yet
so easy. ‘The porn world shuns the light,’ he writes.
D’Angelo did everything to infiltrate : he wrote
enthusiastic articles in Playboy, attended shabby erotic fairs, worked
as a camera assistant on a porn set, played the part of a deceived husband in
a porn movie. He developed friendly relations with producers and three
starting porn actresses in their early 20s : Judy, Lola and Sofia. He wrote down
their stories in his book, which appeared last October.
D’Angelo starts the book with his first experience on a porn set.
There he witnesses how an actress faints during a
fistfuck.
“O shit, should we call an ambulance?” Asks the journalist.
The porn producer, also actor: ‘No man, are you crazy ? No worries man. This is normal during a fist. The orgasm is so intense that the girl
just faints.’
Moments later, he witnesses a facefuck, something he liked to watch back home on his screen, but not in reality. Now that he sees how roughly
the actors treat the actress, he feels disgusted. In the end
she has sex with four men, in all the openings of her body. The agreed number was two, not four.
« Nice huh?” the producer says afterwards. « You see, we have good vibes here. »
Another significant dialogue is the one between a producer and an actress who
tells him that she was injured during a fistfuck.
“I have a 6 centimeter wound in my vagina. And I can not do
anal scenes either, because the wound is on the side of my anus. ”
“That means you can suck,” says Pascal.
‘Yes, that would be possible.’
“Okay, I’ll arrange a bukkake for you!”
A bukkake is a gangbang in which about ten men ejaculate onto the face of a woman. At the end of his book D’Angelo goes undercover as an ‘actor’ during such a bukkake, with a
balaclava on his head, but he walks out sick.
‘I came to see porn very differently,’ says D’Angelo on
Skype from his office in Paris, ‘because the production
often is not ethical, to put it mildly. Producers who do not give their actresses
a copy of their contract and do not tell exactly what is going to happen. And then
during the shoot they hit the actress hard on her breasts, for example. Afterwards she can only ask for more money, instead of calling the police or exposing them on social media. When #MeToo happened, the porn world has been completely out of range, because we do not care about that sector. Which is amazing since most people watch porn: more than 80 percent of men and about 60
percent of the women. ‘
The industry was not entirely enthusiastic about D’Angelo’s book.
‘The chatter of three whores, with which he destroys the reputation of the whole sector’,
a porn producer reacted furiously. “Whores? The fact that you use that word, says enough’ wrote a fan of D’Angelo’s.
“Of course you find more exploitation and abuse at the bottom of the sector,” says D’Angelo, “but in the end the whole porn world is full of machismo. This is also apparent from other research, such as that of sociologist and porn scientist Mathieu Trachman. The porn world is not female-friendly. The pleasure of the man is central and men have the power. Exploitation and abuse of women are always one step away.”
Opinions differ on the scale of abuse, exploitation and harassment in the porn world and the way we have to talk about it. Some consider stories about violence and abuse as exceptions that perpetuate an annoying prejudice about sex work, others emphasize that it happens on a much larger scale than we think. But has the problem worsened since the growth of the amateur segment? And if intimidation and violence are so common in this sector, how is it possible that the porn industry has remained outside the field of #MeToo?
Big changes
The fact that the porn world has changed considerably in the last ten years is also reflected in three other journalistic productions. One of them is the much talked about documentary Hot Girls Wanted from 2015. In it, Rashida Jones explores the amateur porn world just like D’Angelo, but in the US. The documentary follows a number of hot girls who saw their first porn movie at a young age, mostly because their father had not shut down his computer properly. Some of them were already a webcam girl as a minor and eagerly awaited their 18th birthday: the moment you can legally enter the X industry. They go to Los Angeles or Miami to become a porn star, but that adventure usually does not last longer than a month or six: according to the professionals in Hot Girls Wanted, the expiration date of a porn actress. Then she is exchanged for a younger, fresher one.
We meet Riley Reynolds, a beginner, ambitious porn agent in Miami, who helps girls with their first job. They live with him in the house: a large apartment that is reminiscent of a student house. He sees the girls coming and going, according to a predictable script. It is an inexhaustible source, he says: “Every day a new girl turns 18.”
The makers of Hot Girls Wanted note that ‘teen’ is the most popular search term in the internet age.
And they find that there are no laws to guide things in the right direction, except that a girl must be 18; in the digital age no new regulation has come, while the internet has radically changed the porn world. According to the documentary makers, this also has to do with the popularity of extreme porn, which nowadays can be enjoyed in the dark corners of the internet. These are the niches where girls often end up if they want to continue after the 6 months expiry date.
D’Angelo also sees this connection with the internet. ‘Since the explosion of ‘tubes’ (YouPorn, xHamster, Xvideo), the online platforms that offer millions of videos for free,’ he writes, ‘the working conditions of actresses have deteriorated’.
More violence
Because with the rise of the free platforms, a decent revenue model has disappeared and the conditions for people in the porn industry have deteriorated. This leads to more violence and abuse, the French filmmaker and former porn star Ovidie thinks. “What you see now in the porn industry is that large IT companies control everything, while they have no connection with the worker at the end of the chain,” she said in an interview for Canal +. She calls this ‘ultraliberalism, the uberization of porn’.
Ovidie made the documentary Pornocracy: The New Sex Multinationals in 2017. “To attract the surfer on the internet and to persuade him to use his credit card, porn bosses produce increasingly hardened content,” she said in an interview about her film with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. Ovidie refers to the affair surrounding the American actress Nikki Benz, who wrote in April last year on Twitter that she had been raped, beaten and kicked on a set for the Brazzers site. Benz also related this to the hardening of the content: ‘I guess rape videos are now huh’, she tweeted.
According to Ovidie, Benz is no exception. ‘Other actresses then acknowledged that they had experienced the same thing, without ever having dared to talk about it. And thousands of others are forced to play twice as hard scenes for twice as little money. Ten years ago, actresses were able to demand a condom and refuse certain actions, now they are forced to do one shoot after another in terrible conditions. For an actress, it has become normal to be kicked off, stretched, beaten or strangled.’
That may seem a bit exaggerated. But the effects of the Internet on the industry are huge, according to The Butterfly Effect (2018) by the British research journalist Jon Ronson, one of the most talked-about podcasts of 2018. In seven parts Ronson investigates the effects of free platforms such as Pornhub, which, in imitation of YouTube, arose in the years 2006-2010. He exposes the enormous inequalities that characterize the sector: the contrast between the tech people who become rich so easily and the people working in the sector that are under increasing pressure.
Ronson starts his podcast with an anecdote. It was in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. He saw a porn actress in a tight light blue dress. “She seemed so otherworldly, like a great mad peacock.” And he saw the receptionist’s gaze. “It was a look of total contempt. Apparently most people are only at ease with porn people on their screen, but not in real life. ‘
Ronson wants to get to know those ‘porn people’. In San Fernando Valley, the Hollywood of porn, he visits productions such as Bad Babysitters: Volume Two. There he meets a porn actress who describes himself as a ‘starving artist’, because she has so little work, and a frustrated porn director who has experienced the good old days before the Pornhub revolution. ‘I am here to shoot a film’, he says, ‘which will be released on DVD in two weeks’ time. And the same day he is online for free on Pornhub. It’s pretty frustrating.’
Ronson sees that since the arrival of tubes, the industry has to work harder for less money, because those who earn porn are no longer the makers, but the people who exploit the porn tubs. And actually it is mainly one company, Mindgeek, formerly Manwin, founded by one man: Fabian Thylmann, a German businessman, originally a ‘computer nerd’. Ten years ago he was smart enough to buy a large number of porn sites in a short time, such as Pornhub.com, Redtube.com, Playboy.tv and YouPorn.com. He borrowed $ 360 million for that – apparently the banks did see something in his plan. Ronson mentions the irony of this fact, mentioning the case of a porn actress who could not even get a small loan because of the bad reputation of her profession.
In The Butterfly Effect Ronson speaks extensively with Thylmann, who recognizes that the industry has deteriorated. ‘Many companies earn less money, indeed. But I do not know exactly how many producers went bankrupt. “And the main development, Ronson asks, is that the transfer of money from the San Fernando Valley to tech company Mindgeek in Montreal? “That’s right,” says Thylmann.
Ronson sees an industry that is fully driven by search terms. What produces the most clicks is what is made. He also discovers that actresses between the ages of 25 and 30 are often unemployed. Why? Because they fall outside the search terms ‘teen’ and ‘milf’ (‘mother I’d like to fuck’). Because ‘just attractive’, a porn director tells Ronson, is not a search term. It is one of the most absurd butterfly effects from the podcast.
Coherent image
So there are four recent explorations of the porn world: Hot Girls Wanted (2015), Pornocracy (2017), Judy, Lola, Sofia et moi (2018) and The Butterfly Effect (2018). The image that emerges from these documentaries and publications is quite coherent. The rise of the free platforms since the late 2000s has greatly influenced the industry: cheaper and more extreme videos are being made, in which the conditions for actresses have deteriorated.
How do people from the industry view this development?
‘The porn world of today is almost unrecognizable to me’, says Dutch ex-porn star Bobbi Eden. ‘In my time in Los Angeles, from 2002 to 2009, film productions had budgets of which they would now be jealous. And that also applies to the gages of the performers. The DVD was booming and there was hardly any mention of the illegal content sharing. In general, everyone was treated with respect. It was the time of Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick, ‘beautiful’ porn was made. What I see today is often focused on five to ten minute work. Because of the success story of Mindgeek, a lot of bush robbers are appearing who also want to get rich with internet porn. With today’s technology, anyone with a decent smartphone and a few dollars can call themselves a porn maker. With all its consequences. A quality mark for these types of companies would be desirable. ‘
‘Ronson shows how radically the industry has changed in the last twelve years,’ says Swedish director of alternative porn Erika Lust. ‘Tech nerds determine what is made: clickbait. It does not bother them at all to squeeze people in boxes: teenagers, milfs, grannies, big buts, big breasts, Asians, Latinas. The makers are no longer filmmakers, but videomakers. They just shoot a clip of sex. Consumers get bored and want to see more and more extreme things, like triple anal.’
Eden agrees that Thylmann is a hated figure in the porn world. “I understand that most porn makers hate Fabian Thylmann. My husband calls him ‘the Napster of porn’, after the online music service. Illegally or not, just like Napster, it was a smart move. Mindgeek is now not only owner of all those big tube sites, but also of the suppliers of all those sites. Brazzers, Digital Playground, Playboy, you name them. All from Mindgeek. All other parties, who used to earn a lot, suddenly have to get by with much less. The first thing they save on are the performers. ‘
Erika Lust agrees with that. But, she adds, that does not mean that women in the porn world are more likely to be assaulted, raped or exploited than elsewhere. ‘I see that mainly as a persistent prejudice about the porn world. We work with strict rules, such as mandatory consent statements and biweekly tests for venereal diseases. The industry is cleaner than you think. What D’Angelo describes is the bottom of the industry. That’s how it always goes: when journalists write about the porn world, they only show the bad apples. ‘
Stigma on the profession
Porn actress Liz Rainbow (24) has one experience with abuse on the set, but sees that as an exception. She lives in Barcelona, where she grew up, but works throughout Europe – including the European porn capitals Prague and Budapest. ‘I’ve experienced something like this with Pierre Woodman, a French producer who works in Budapest. He was also an actor in that video and pissed over me during a scene. We had not agreed that. Afterwards I complained about this and asked for more money. He promised me then, but ultimately did not give it. And no, I did not accuse him on social media. But I have to say: in six years this is the only time something like that happened to me, while I did about a thousand shoots. Otherwise, everything always went smoothly. I love this work. And you come across assholes everywhere, in every sector.’
Are Rainbow and Lust right and is abuse in the porn world no more common than elsewhere? That is somewhat more complicated, according to the American journalist Tierney Finster. She wrote the article Why It’s So Hard to Bring the #MeToo Movement to Porn last October. The porn industry has great difficulty to openly talk about sexual violence, says the journalist. She talks about this with porn actress Tasha Reign, who said last year that she was assaulted on a set by a cameraman. Nobody wanted to believe her. According to Reign, women in her position always hear the same thing: then you should not have chosen this profession. “You’re a whore. That is all you are. You have no voice.’
We look down on porn people, says Clarissa Smith, professor of Sexual Cultures at the University of Sunderland and editor of the magazine Porn Studies. ‘There is still a huge stigma on porn performers. They are seen as people who have no special talents and who probably suffer from some kind of mental disorder, otherwise they would not have chosen this profession. People who have surrendered their right to sexual consent at the door of the porn studio, and who are unreliable in their statements. As a result, the #MeToo moment in porn is very difficult.’
Bobbi Eden recognizes this: ‘The exploitation of women is something that we should never look away from in any business. But the practice is unfortunately different, especially in porn. Who is going to believe a girl who has sex for money on camera? And such a statement usually means the end of your career in pornography. ‘
At the beginning of January, Ronson’s latest podcast was released: The Last Days of August. In it he investigates the suicide of the 23-year-old porn star August Ames, which was initially associated with online bullying. Ames had been attacked hard on Twitter because she had refused to work with a cross-overperformer, a man who also did gay pornography. During his research Ronson discovered something that probably had more influence than the hateful tweets: a scene in which a Russian actor treated Ames unusually rough, while the men on set did not intervene. She was pulled by her hair, thrown against a table, choked with her stockings. Ronson’s reconstruction shows that Ames was upset, but did not want to make a fuss. Why she did not want this, Ronson makes clear in the seven episodes of The Last Days of August, an analysis of the porn world that fits surprisingly well with Robin D’Angelo’s book.
Code of conduct
It can help if a woman speaks out. On December 30, American porn actress Lily Adams reported on Twitter that she had been anally raped by a well-known porn director, Alan Eigen, also known as Still by Alan. It was a # MeToo moment for the porn world. Adams tweeted: “I’m not going to sit back and watch as these men continue to violate other girls, as they did with me.” She was supported by an ex-girlfriend of the perpetrator. The Canadian producer Gamma Films initially did nothing. When Adams also expressed her indignation about this on Twitter, the company came into action. By now the director, who was nominated for the AVN Awards (the ‘Oscars of porn’) in 2017 and 2018, has been suspended.
Gamma Films has also decided to draw up a code of conduct, the company announced on 11 January. ‘As a company, we care a lot about the safety and well-being of our industry and everyone who works in it’, said Karl Bernard in a statement. The code of conduct means that nobody is allowed to use a dominant position within the company to enforce sexual services. Actors are also asked to draw up a ‘no-list’ of acts and scripts in which they do not feel comfortable.
A code of conduct, #MeToo for porn? Erika Lust is in favor of a quality label for porn: « Then you can see how the porn is made, who is behind it, an “about “page where you can check whether something is ok and made in a female-friendly way. We already do that with the food industry. You see that people are also willing to pay more for free-range eggs. We must become responsible ourselves. Just like with clothes and food, we have to ask for other, better porn and look where our porn comes from. It’s about us, that’s what I always say: it’s quite easy to blame the porn industry. A problem that now plays is also the shame: if people do not even assume that they watch porn, although the majority of them do, then how do you want to have a public debate about abuses in the porn world?’
“Porn is apparently so filthy,” Ovidie told Les Inrockuptibles, “that politics does not want to touch it, not even to regulate it.” D’Angelo also sees that problem. He believes that there should be legal rules to protect actresses. ‘But the only thing that interests politics is restricting access to pornography for minors. While the majority of people watch porn, the sector remains an underworld. Not just the amateur porn, but the entire sector. With my book I try to break through that hypocrisy: we do not care about porn at all, in fact, except to watch it seven minutes a day.’
colin van heezik 