MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION | www.MEDIAED.org
This transcript may be reproduced for educational, non-profit uses only.
© 2008
The Price of Pleasure
Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships
Transcript (edited by Carl Mickelsen)
INTRODUCTION
. . . . .
NARRATOR: With its ease, affordability and anonymity, the internet has contributed to a skyrocketing production and consumption of pornography. There are an estimated 420 million pages of pornography online, and each year, 13,000 porn videos are released and over 900 million videos rented. How do these pornographic messages help shape our gender and sexual identities, and our relationships? How did this industry, once considered seedy, become part of the cultural and economic mainstream?
DIANE SAWYER: Tonight we are going to take you into the parallel universe of pornography in America today. It's now an estimated 10 billion dollar business, which is bigger than the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball combined. More than all the tickets spent at movie theaters. Some of the most respected corporations in America are making millions from it, while saying nothing publicly at all.
NARRATOR: With estimated annual revenues of 10-14 billion dollars, the pornography
industry has developed close ties with telecommunication and media corporations. Time Warner, CBS and Newscorp collectively earn one billion dollars annually from pornography, either by directly distributing pornography through video on demand, or by producing and licensing pornrelated content, and cross-promoting it through their various media holdings. Pornography production, once considered exploitative, is now depicted as a fun and normal business.
TV PROGRAM: I'm a single dad with a son that I absolutely adore. And I work with my mom and my cousin in the family business. Just one more thing. My business is entertaining adults.
NARRATOR: While the pornography industry has been amassing tremendous wealth, and is increasingly accepted by the establishment as legitimate business, it has also gained political and legal power.
TV PROGRAM: I am a proud member of the board of directors. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the mother of all defense teams standing in front of you. We are proud and fortunate to have you on our side.
NARRATOR: In 1991, the pornography industry founded The Free Speech Coalition, a
lobbying group that builds relationships with lawmakers and state officials, while tracking legislation throughout the 50 states. Bill Lyon, the former executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, was a lobbyist for the defense industry. In 2003, 60 Minutes reporter Steve Croft interviewed him about his role.
STEVE CROFT: What kind of reaction do you get when you go up to legislators all over the country and tell them you're the lobbyist for the adult entertainment business?
BILL LYONS: Initially, I think there's a degree of shock, but when you explain to them the size and the scope of the business, they realize, as all politicians do, that it's votes and money that we're talking about.
. . . . .
JOEY (from “Friends”): Is this porn?
NARRATOR: In mainstream media, watching pornography is no longer depicted as dirty or shameful. It is just normal male behavior, and even a bonding experience.
CHANDLER (from “Friends”): Joey just pressed something on the remote, and it just came on.
MOVIE MONTAGE: (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) Hey man, got a big box of porn for you. Can I come in? (Superbad) You're the weird one, man. Don't make me feel weird because I like porn. You're the weird one for not liking porn. I'm normal as shit.
GAIL DINES: If you’re going to tell the story of how especially the mainstream media
legitimizes pornography, then you have to put Howard Stern front and center of this.
ENTERTAINMENT NEWS: It was a wild bash fit for the king of all media. Everybody's
talking about Howard's end, from Penthouse pets to a former President.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: I hope he does well. I expect he will.
. . . . .
NARRATOR: Popular music videos are increasingly using porn performers as central
characters or background dancers. Gregory Dark is a director of extreme pornographic movies. One of his best-known movies, “Let me tell ya ‘Bout Black Chicks,” portrays black women being raped by white, male Ku Klux Klan members. Dark has since gone on to direct feature films and music videos for pop singers, including Linkin Park, Mandy Moore, Britney Spears and Xzibit.
DAMONE RICHARDSON: Pornography in hip-hop has been with us for some time now.
Artists like Too Short who portrays the pimp image. Ice-T certainly with a song called “GirlsLet’s Get Butt Naked and Fuck Tonight.”
NARRATOR: Hip-Hop artist Snoop Dogg has also directed hardcore pornographic videos.
DIARY OF A PIMP: (Singing) I never had no pussy like this. Never had my dick sucked like this before.
ELI: You'd have to be living under a pretty big rock to not be able to have access to erotic images.
GABRIELLE: It was just thrown at me from the time that I was twelve or thirteen that you’re obligated to have sex…that’s kind of how you exist as a social being, as a woman.
STEPHANIE: And if you're bothered by it, there's nowhere left for you to go really.
PORN STARS: MYTHS AND REALITIES
ARIEL LEVY: You see us idealizing and sort of holding up porn stars often as these idols, like Jenna Jameson being on the bestseller list as well as just being this very recognizable female celebrity.
NARRATOR: Jenna Jameson, a central figure in legitimizing the pornography industry, has made being a porn performer appear to be a glamorous career choice. She founded Club Jenna, which later was sold to Playboy for 17 million dollars. In her video game, players engage in virtual sex with her. Jameson also promotes sex dolls that bear her likeness, and sex toys modeled from her own body parts. Jameson has become a cultural icon.
. . . . .
ROBERT JENSEN: One of the most important lessons we can learn from pornography is about the process of commodification within capitalism. Critics have long observed that in capitalism, everything is commodified; everything is turned into something that can be bought and sold.
PORN MONTAGE: You know where the beach is? You want a ride? I'll give you $100 each to go with us. It will be the best time of our lives. Excuse me, ma'am. I'll give you $100. Come with us. Come on.
ROBERT JENSEN: Pornography takes the most intimate, the most private spaces of our lives, our sexual experiences, our connections to other human beings at that most basic level, and sells them to us.
ANNIE CRUZ: For blowjobs, regular blowjobs, I get three hundred for those. For a girl on girl scene, that’s usually six hundred. Me and one guy, that’s nine hundred. Me and one guy anal, that’s a thousand. Me and two guys, whether or not it be anal or regular, is eleven hundred. Double penetration, which is one in vagina, one in the butt, that’s twelve hundred, and gangbangs usually range - I start at thirteen hundred for three guys and then add a hundred for each additional guy. And double anal, fifteen hundred, and double anal would be two in the butt.
SARAH KATHERINE LEWIS: As a woman who does not have a college education and has no work experience, I could basically choose from working food service, retail, any low-skill, low-wage work, or the sex industry.
. . . . .
NOEL: This is their choice to be doing this; it’s what they want to do; they’re getting paid for it.
JULIE: It’s your choice to make these. It’s your choice to watch these. It’s your choice to be in these. It’s all about choice.
SARAH KATHERINE LEWIS: When your best choice is taking off your clothes and sticking toys in your cunt for money, I think there’s a real problem with the labor system.
JUST A FANTASY?
. . . . .
GAIL DINES: I think we often make the mistake of thinking that pornography is just an image of people having sex. What pornography is, it’s a worldview. It is an ideology. It is a way of understanding relationships.
ERNEST GREENE: Men are the majority of consumers of pornography. That has changed to a degree in recent years, but it remains fundamentally true that seventy percent of the audience is straight men watching it alone.
DR. RICHARD WOLFF: Pornography meets a real need that people have to somehow break out of their sexual loneliness, their sexual isolation, their failure to connect sexually with somebody. And as with every other basic human need that gets inappropriately dealt with, it becomes an opportunity for private enterprise to come in. And that's what private enterprises do. They make money off of human needs and wants and desires. And in the process, of course, they being to shape those needs and desires.
. . . . .
GAIL DINES: The pornographers want you to think that you can see pornography; you can watch as much as you want, and just as you then zip up your pants, you can zip up your brain and put it away. It doesn’t work like that; it leaks, and it leaks into the everyday world of your life.
PAMELA PAUL: I interviewed over 100 people it was about 80% male. The vast majority of the people I interviewed were men who considered themselves casual users. People tend to think that pornography is something that enhances your sex life. But the men that I talked to, even men who were big fans of pornography and happy consumers of it, found that pornography had begun to dictate the way that they thought about sex, that they found themselves unable to achieve orgasm during regular intercourse with their partners, that often they had to replicate scenes or moves from pornography.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I like aggressive sex. Like really forceful, like stroking, like
spanking, and hair-pulling, and yelling and screaming, and like a regular hard core film, I guess. That's where I learned what regular sex was from, anyways. So that's why I have sex the way I do.
PAMELA PAUL: A lot of men said that while they were having sex with their partners,
pornography would infiltrate into their consciousness often unbidden and unwanted. Other men said that they found they were unable to achieve orgasm unless they thought about those images. So even when they were with their wife and they used to be able to kind of be in the moment an focus on her and whatever might else come into their head, that they found themselves needing to conjure up scenes and images from porn movies or things they’d seen online in order to maintain their level of excitement.
. . . . .
CARRIE (from “Sex and the City”): Miranda was pleased to discover that Ethan was as passionate between the sheets as he was on the subject of non-narrative film. But just as they were getting down to business, Miranda realized they were not alone.
MIRANDA (from “Sex and the City”): What’s that for?
ETHAN (from “Sex and the City”): Just something to get us in the mood. I think it’s kind of sexy, don’t you?
PAMELA PAUL: Women would say to me, I was wondering why we weren’t having sex
anymore, or I was wondering why suddenly he was obsessed with ejaculating on my breasts. He had never been into that. And then I found that he’s looking at porn and porn is all about the money shot and that’s what he’s been looking at online.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He had a work desk in our home, and there was a big dictionary and I took it down. Pornographic pictures spilled out, and they were small to medium size, very, very carefully cut out with, like, an exacto knife. I pictured him sitting there, deciding which woman gets the cut; which one is worth saving. I began to think I’m really, really have a lot of sexual problems because I can’t do this, and I’m not devoting myself to this; I’m not able to wear these clothes; I don’t have the body that can wear these clothes. And yet, he had—there’s all this proof in my home all the time that there’s thousands of women who do do that, who can do it, but it’s not me. The feeling during sex was that any woman could fulfill the job I’m fulfilling. He just needs to plug in a physical entity so that he can play the fantasy out on her.
EMPOWERED BY PORN?
LISA: It’s really hypocritical for women to take porn out of a man’s life, to expect that just because of marriage or just because of a serious commitment. You know, they’d do a lot better if they just accept it, roll with it and have fun with it.
NARRATOR: The pressure to be hypersexual is increasingly present in women's daily lives. Advice programs, talk shows and books instruct average women to spice up their sex lives with pornography. Private fitness instructors and health clubs teach women striptease and pole dance routines.
E! ENTERTAINMENT: Former Pussycat Doll Carmen Electra turned her titillating talents into a technique for staying superstar skinny and made a workout video that’s our best and naughtiest way to get twisted. Cardio striptease - bend your bods around this people.
CARMEN ELEKTRA: 5, 6, 7, Smack.
ARIEL LEVY: What’s interesting about porn or strippers or any other kind of sex work is, you know, it’s women whose job it is to impersonate lust or to fake arousal. The idea that you are going to get more in touch with your own authentic, personal, innate sexuality by imitating a woman who’s job it is to imitate sexuality. I mean, you’re getting pretty far removed from the real thing.
GIRLS GONE WILD: Ultimate Rush takes you where the action is with more sex, more
excitement, and more hot young girls than ever before.
GIRLS: Girls Gone Wild!
ARIEL LEVY: I went on Spring Break with “Girls Gone Wild.” These guys walk around the beach, walk around town. Young women, just start streaming up and being like “I gotta be on Girls Gone Wild. I gotta get a hat.” And they just start flashing and stripping and the rest of it.
JOE FRANCIS: How did you, as a college student, afford to stay in such a nice place?
FEMALE STUDENT: I saved up.
JOE FRANCIS: How many people are staying here? Is it just you?
FEMALE STUDENT: Three. Well, it’s me and two other girls.
JOE FRANCIS: Quick little flash. Just psh psh. (She flashes her breasts) You have puffy nipples?
ARIEL LEVY: There was this one 19-year-old girl who had stripped for them at the back of a bar, and she’s simulated masturbation for the cameras. I said, well what’s in it for you? Why did you do this? And she looked at me with just total, totally baffled and she said, ‘the only way I could see someone not doing this is if they were considering a career in politics.’ And that was an idea that I heard a lot from a lot of young women down there. It was just like, obviously you would do this. Obviously this was, just you know, this is what women do! This is what hot women do.
DAMONE RICHARDSON: At a lot of the hip-hop events where I’m spinning hip-hop music, it still surprises me to this day when a woman will come to me and request 2 Live Crew’s “We Want Some Pussy.” You would literally, actually see, women on the dance floor, dancing to it, singing the chorus, hey we want some pussy. To me, it would almost be like white supremacist hip-hop saying, you know, “those drug using niggers in the city,” you know, but I would dance to it because the music is catchy. It’s really, I don’t understand why more women don’t take offense to this kind of stuff.
TYRA BANKS SHOW PROMO: There is a new use for the student body. Dorm porn. Made by students, this craze is taking over colleges everywhere. She’s a college student and a porn star at the same time. An all new Tyra starts now.
NARRATOR: College students have also begun to produce their own pornographic magazines. Many of the producers and models are female students from schools such as Harvard and the University of Chicago. While most of them claim to express a liberated sexuality, some make no attempt to hide their profit motives.
HOWARD STERN: There is a magazine on the stands called Boink. It’s put out by a BU
student named Alicia. She is a college student who started her own porno magazine. Gives you ideas, you know.
ALICIA OLEYOURRYK: And in the beginning when they heard about the magazine, and it was getting some press, everyone was looking for justification – Oh, there’s going to be some articles about STDs, there’s going to be articles about contraception, right? And you know, yes, there’s going to be those articles, but it’s here for entertainment, it’s here to masturbate to, it’s here to titillate, it’s supposed to arouse you. And there is nothing wrong with that!
HOWARD STERN: I would like to see you in your red panties. That’s quite a little ass on you.
ALICIA OLEYOURRK: Thank you.
ROBIN: I think you are marketing to the wrong audience.
HOWARD STERN: I think you should market to older guys.
ALICIA OLEYOURRK: We have been approached by two different television stations. And they both wanted to make some sort of reality series. We recently signed a book deal for six figures with Time Warner to put out a bigger version of the book.
ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD: I think when people don't feel like they could actually
challenge sexism and fundamentally change the terms on which we're evaluated, then the reaction is, it's like if you can't, if you can't beat sexism, at least you can join it. If women are gonna be viewed just as sex objects, well at least I'm gonna assert myself about how I'm viewed as a sex object, you know. I'm gonna assert that I'm sexy, or that I'm, you know, and try to be a part of that process so at least it's not just something that's happening to me, but I have some measure of control over what's going on my life. But I think it's actually a huge mistake because I feel like in a fundamental way, it's just giving up on the idea that we could change the terms of how women are thought to be.
. . . . .
HARDER AND HARDER…
. . . . .
NARRATOR: A team of scholars from New York University, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Rhode Island examined the content of popular pornographic videos.
DR. ANA BRIDGES: Defenders of pornography often state that critics hold up the worst-case examples, most degrading, most violent pornography and talk about why this is harmful. But in fact, pornography is very diverse. Our research team was interested in what people are actually viewing. So we randomly selected videos from a list of best renting videos and that way we were not responsible for choosing which videos to content analyze. Rather, the viewers are choosing which videos to watch, and we are sampling from their choice.
NARRATOR: The research team examined 304 scenes from the most popular videos released in 2005. They found that 89.8% of the scenes included either verbal or physical aggression. 48% contained verbal aggression, mostly name-calling and insults, while 82.2% contained physical aggression. 94.4% of the aggressive acts were targeted at women.
MALE PERFORMER: You want some fucking food. I’ll give you some fucking food.
NARRATOR: And the female performers frequently expressed enjoyment in response to the aggressive behavior.
FEMALE PERFORMER: This feels so good!
MICHELLE CHANG, M.A.: I was a research assistant and a coder. This involved watching the films very closely and quantitatively counting different sex acts, and acts of aggression and violence.
NARRATOR: The research team reported that spanking and gagging were the most frequently depicted acts of aggression.
. . . . .
GAIL DINES: There are limits to what you can show, how you can show it, because there’s just limits to what the human body can endure. So what the pornographers have to do is always think of new and different things as a way to keep the audience going.
. . . . .
ROBERT JENSEN: All of these acts are, at their base, about male domination and female submission. Men’s ability to do whatever they want to do to women and women accepting it, and even further in pornography, not only women accepting it, but women seeing it as part of their nature.
VANESSA KEEGAN: It’s the dirtier the better, you know, the more cocks in the scene the better, so it's just really taking kind of an extreme turn lately.
JOHN STAGLIANO: God, have you been watching these movies lately? There’s a lot of hard stuff: S & M sex, S & M fetish of all kinds. That’s where people are going with it.
JOE GALLANT: I hate to say, but I think the future of American porn is violence.
NARRATOR: The United Nations defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” What makes a torture-like treatment entertaining? What makes an image of suffering sexually arousing?
GAIL DINES: Pornography takes violence against women, and it sexualizes it. And when you sexualize violence against women, you render the violence invisible.
DR. RICHARD WOLFF: Pornography, with all of its destructive effects, is a sign or a
reflection of the failure to question an economic system that rewards enterprises for profit maximizing, endlessly market expanding.
PORN AWARDS HOST: Hello. How are you everybody? Twenty-five years ago, the first porn awards were held in a dark room in a Vegas-shit hotel. And here we are twenty-five years later in the nicest hotel in Vegas, and we’re here to say ‘fucking boo,’ that’s right sir. There’s nothing wrong with an orgasm. It’s a natural body function, like a sneeze or taking a shit. At the end, you clean it up with a tissue and move on.
DR. RICHARD WOLFF: They will explore every kind of sexual perversion, dysfunction,
misery, sadness, desperation to produce anything for which there's a market. And if there isn't a market, they'll go to work to create such a market. As long as we don't question the pornography industry, you're allowing the producer to create the need that he can profitably meet.
TV CLIP (from “Pornucopia”): In 2003, there were 900 million rentals. Unless there are 900 lunatics renting a million tapes each, it’s quite a bit of consumers out there renting the material.
ROBERT JENSEN: The fact that more than ten billion dollars a year is spent on pornography makes it very clear that pornography does not express a deviant sexuality. It, in fact, expresses a very conventional sexuality, and that means the road takes us not just to the valley in California where this material is produced. It takes us into our own lives and into our own bedroom.