Op-Ed: Jousting With the Insane on AOL Build

NEW YORK CITY—It's been just about a month since the documentary Hot Girls Wanted hit Netflix, and plenty of adult industry members have weighed in on the film—and for the most part, they haven't exactly been complimentary. That's understandable: The film deals with a small group of first-time adult actresses who've been drawn to south Florida by Craigslist ads and put in a "model house" and booked for work in pro-am porn, apparently without any real idea of what they're getting into nor what to expect once they arrive on the set. It concentrates on the girls' experiences both in south Florida and, in a couple of cases, dealing with parents and a boyfriend who don't exactly know what the girl is doing as an amateur porntress—and when they find out, they're none too happy about it. My own connection to the movie began with a pair of articles I wrote at the beginning of the year, based largely on the press the film and its makers—Miami Herald reporters Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, and producer Rashida Jones—were getting following its showing at the Sundance Film Festival. Those articles can be found here and here, and since most of the reviewers, not to mention many of the soundbites from the directors and producers themselves, suggested that the adult industry as a whole was essentially just sucking up these young women and spitting them out, while in the meantime subjecting them to unwanted sexual violence, it was pretty clear that Bauer and Gradus weren't doing the industry any favors in releasing this minimally researched hit-job. And then came the phone call. "Is this Mr. Kernes?" said the voice on the other end of the line. "Wow, I didn't expect to actually get you on the phone!" The call was from Jill Bauer, who'd read my pieces on AVN.com and wanted to invite me to take part in a panel she and her co-filmmakers were putting together for AOL Build, a speaker series created by internet giant AOL which, according to the Huffington Post (which AOL owns), is "about sharing perspective, opinions, ideas and expertise from the outside in and inside out." The panel was to take place in New York City, and since Bauer and Gradus were willing to pay my airfare, I was inclined to accept, with two provisos: 1) I wanted to actually see the film beforehand, and 2) I wanted to know who else would be on the panel. Bauer said the first would be no problem; she'd send me a link to an online version of it. As to the second, she said she was still inviting other panelists, and when the selection was complete, she'd forward me the list. When I told some friends about the invitation, I couldn't help but speculate regarding who they'd be approaching for the anti-porn viewpoint. One choice seemed inevitable: Gail Dines, the Wheelock College professor who's written several books and articles bashing the adult industry and porn in general, not to mention sponsoring the annual conference Stop Porn Culture. I also suspected, since this would take place in NYC, that they might try for Prof. Chyng Sun, the Columbia University professor who'd made the excrable documentary The Price of Pleasure, for which she tricked several adult industry members into giving interviews at an AEE one year, then edited the comments into near-unrecognizability. The third possibility: Sun's co-creator, Prof. Robert Jensen of the University of Texas, another anti-porn zealot who'd authored Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, and who'd co-written, with Gail Dines and Ann Russo, Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality. Turns out I wasn't far off: They did invite both Dines and Jensen, though when Jensen's plane was diverted due to bad weather, forcing him to cancel, Dines found a last-minute substitute: Kourtney Mitchell, a board member of Veterans for Peace, and one of her acolytes. I finally did get to see the film, and while it wasn't as bad as some reviewers had made it out to be, it was still very troubling, in part because neither Bauer nor Gradus had sought to fact-check the piece with anyone knowledgeable about the industry. Also, while the footage they used and the interviews they conducted were reasonable and not too judgmental, the title cards between the scenes (many of which simply contained statistics on the popularity of some internet sites' more faux-violent offerings) and the background music painted a much bleaker picture of amateur porn in south Florida than even the footage itself suggested. Plus, many have taken the film as a comment on the entire adult movie/internet industry—an expansion which the directors have fervently denied intending. The panel was scheduled for May 22 at 4 p.m., and it would be recorded before an audience that included at least some members who were actually paid to attend—I'd earlier tweeted that fact, and at AOL's request, Bauer asked me to remove the tweet, which I did. But the "fun" started a bit earlier, in the studio's "green room," where I was reading Lenny Bruce's autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and Dines and Mitchell were hunched over a computer, apparently looking at porn. "Look at that," Mitchell said, pointing to the laptop screen. "Boy, you don't even need to know anything about photography to take pictures like that." (Take that! Dr. X and Scott Preston and IndustryByRick, among others!) Soon, we were led out to the stage where the panel would take place, and I found that besides Dines, Mitchell and the moviemakers, we would also hear from Nadine Strossen, who presided over the American Civil Liberties Union for 18 years and had written a book (which I'd always meant to read), Defending Pornography—and also Rachel Bernard, one of the actresses who appeared in Hot Girls Wanted, and who is credited in about 30 XXX movies and web scenes under the name "Ava Taylor." The panel's moderator was also its most famous personage, Rashida Jones, a mainstream actress most known for her roles on The Office and Parks & Recreation—and to a lesser extent for being the daughter of musician Quincy Jones (who doesn't get chills listening to his theme music for the TV show Ironside?) and Peggy Lipton, late of The Mod Squad. "We are here to talk about porn, which can be a very divisive topic," Jones began, stating the obvious. The panel then introduced themselves, with Dines getting her digs in early by saying that she is "founding president of the NGO Culture Reframed, and basically, we define pornography as the public health crisis of the digital age, and I've been fighting against the porn industry for at least 25 years." That was one of the few things out of her mouth that wasn't an outright lie. Mitchell stated that he was "a military veteran; I'm National Guard Infantry and I'm a peace activist, and I'm here to represent the position of young men who are resisting the porn industry and trying to find a healthy masculinity away from violent pornography." Somehow, he forgot to mention that, at least as of March 3, he had been AWOL from the Guard for some period of time. "I believe censoring pornography will do more harm than good," Strossen stated in her opening, "specifically to women's safety, women's dignity and women's rights, and I thought this film was a very fair treatment of the issue." (Well, to be fair, Strossen knows little about the actual workings of the adult industry—plus, she referred to me as a "fellow lawyer," which I'm not.) Bernard was the last to go, saying, "I was in porn for approximately six to eight months of my life and in this setting now, I view it as something that built me up but also brought me down, so I'm here to just tell you my side of the story because I think I have a good one." Sadly, her story didn't include the fact that she was still doing adult movies up to at least March of 2015, and that she is currently listed on one of the major online escort sites. It was apparently Jones's role to ask the penetrating questions the AOL audience wanted to know the answers to, so her first one was, "What does the average porn consumer not know?"—and of course, Dines was ready with a response. "I would say the average porn consumer doesn't understand what goes into making—it's like, 'Don't look at the sausage because you'll never eat it,'" she said, in her clipped British accent. "The average porn consumer does not understand that porn in its production is violence against women, that the women last for about three months and are often then thrown out because their bodies simply cannot tolerate the violence. What they don't know is that most women are in there because they've got few choices and would rather be anywhere else but on that porn set, and that pornography is really prostitution with the camera going and we need to think of it as a form of sexual exploitation." Readers should feel free to list in how many ways everything Dines said was complete horseshit—and Strossen was quick to take her to task. "I think many people, hearing that, Gail, and who have read your books, would be shocked by the film's characters, real people like Rachel speaking about how empowering they find it, how liberating, how exciting, how thrilling," Strossen said. "Yes, there are down sides; there are down sides to every job including mine as a law professor, but I was really positively impressed by, among other things, the young women saying how respected they felt and protected, more so even than in the real world." That's a fairly charitable way of looking at the film, but it's probably worth noting at this point that after meeting Bauer and Gradus, I came away with the impression that they didn't intend Hot Girls Wanted to be anti-porn, and that the inclusion of all the scare statistics and downbeat music were, in a way, their attempt to "balance" the positive opinions of porn generally voiced by their on-screen subjects. And speaking of on-screen subjects... "Every job does have points to where it's maybe uncomfortable, but when you go to a job, you're not technically showing every single part of your body or someone isn't technically using every single thing that you have and then tossing it away like it was never, ever anything important," Bernard claimed. "So if I went to work and I hated my boss, I could be like 'I hate my boss' and walk home and whatever, but in the fact that I am out there, I'm completely open, every part of my body, soul, mind is having to be in that position, it's a little more than uncomfortable." Dines, of course, jumped on Bernard's negativity. "And I think it's interesting what you said about what you saw as its empowerment," Dines responded, "and when we speak to women in the industry, they sound like that, but when they come out and have some perspective from what happened, and they can begin to—it's not work. You have a level of vulnerability. You are young, you've got all these older predators around you who know exactly how to push your buttons in order to do that, so I think it's interesting telling that story." But could both perspectives be right, Jones asked. "Absolutely," agreed Strossen, "and that's one of the reasons I thought the film was really fair, because it showed a range of perspectives, it showed different individuals including Rachel going through an evolution in their attitudes, and it clearly from the beginning was a voluntary choice: A voluntary choice to get in, a voluntary choice to stay in, a voluntary choice to leave." I managed to make the point that the film covered only a small segment of the adult industry, and dealt with only five actresses and one unlicensed agent—a point with which Gradus actually later agreed, though Dines interrupted to opine that agents were in fact "licensed pimps"—and that the California branch of the industry differed considerably from what was depicted in the film. I also took issue with the film's concentration on violent porn, which is only a small part of the XXX material available. "The reason that we sort of went down a dark path is not that we set out to say 'Let's talk about the violence, let's go looking for it.' It would crop up, like right in our faces," Gradus claimed, and Dines was only too happy to back her up. "Let me say that the studies show that—and when you look at peer-reviewed studies, what you find is that in the top rented/watched movies, 90 percent of scenes have violence against women in them, and these are academic peer-reviewed studies," she lied. "So what you're [Kernes] saying is completely not borne out by the research but by the porn industry." "You know, when the girls come in the house, you can see the story arc," Bauer added. "The film sort of—they're very, very excited; they have freedom for the first time; money, they're making money, and in terms of, you know, what Gail was talking about, the sort of more violent porn, a lot of the girls quite honestly—and Rachel can speak to this—don't actually know what they're getting into. I would say pretty much every girl we interviewed who did professional amateur porn ended up in a situation she did not know about beforehand." First of all, it's obvious that neither Bauer nor Gradus had done enough research to understand that "pro-am" doesn't mean "professional amateur"; it means, in the vast majority of such instances, that an amateur girl is paired with a professional male actor for the scene. But beyond that, having apparently only had contact with Riley Reynolds, they also had no understanding of what agenst do to prepare women first entering the adult industry regarding what to expect on a movie set and what rights and duties they have there. That's an important point, because Bernard spent several minutes lamenting the fact that she was, she said, almost never told what would be happening during the scenes she was booked on, and that as much as she said that she was uncomfortable with some of what she was asked to do, she apparently had never been told that she could simply call her agent and have him speak to the director about the problem, or that she could simply leave the set altogether. Next, it was Mitchell's turn, and he wanted to respond to Jones' initial question. "What do people not know about the porn industry?" Mitchell repeated. "Well, something that they don't know is that young boys start watching pornography at the age of 10 or 11 years old, so it doesn't matter whether what they're seeing is violent or not. If it's violent, then we already know that's bad for a 10- or 11-year-old boy to watch. If it's not violent, what we're seeing is that they're getting their sexual template from an industry that preys on young boys, that draws them in with images and pictures and media, where they do not have the psychological maturity to know what they're watching. I started watching porn at 11 years old, so you know, then I went on to join the National Guard as an infantry soldier, so what happens to young boys along this development, when they see this media—and the levels of violence are astonishing in pornography these days, so when young boys see this kind of media, what kind of message are they getting that tells them how to be a man and how to be masculine in society? I think that's the question you need to ask." He also later claimed that the "violent porn" those 10- and 11-year-olds are watching "definitely resembles the war movies, that's for certain." Jones then wanted to know from Strossen and myself, "as protectors of porn, and porn as part of freedom of speech," how we would protect actresses from the "violence and racial slurs" that are part of some XXX material? "If somebody is actually harmed or exploited in the production process, including through lying or harassment or coercion—it doesn't even have to be physical violence—it is already illegal under criminal and civil laws," Strossen pointed out. "That's why the concept of meaningful consent is so important, and everybody would advocate education and information and protection for those who are working in the industry. But when you're talking about alleged harm to people who are watching something, in terms of having a bad impact on your mind, fortunately, the Supreme Court has consistently said, in a free society, we as free individuals are autonomous. I'm sure Gail has watched more pornography than I have by far. I don't think it's had an impact on her. Her ideas, maybe, but not on her conduct." Of course, Dines couldn't let that go by. "The Supreme Court are not social scientists, okay? And when you want to look at harm, you don't go to the Supreme Court; you go to the literature, and what you do is, you look at the 40 years of empirical studies by sociologists, by psychologists, by media experts," she lied. "There is no discussion anymore in the academic world: Pornography shapes the way men think about women, it changes the way they think about rape, it changes the way they think about their own masculinity, it encourages violence against women, it causes erectile dysfunction, it causes  a whole array of things, and we all know that. The porn industry, by the way, they're liars; that's their job. They're a predatory industry; their job is to give you their PR. When you go to the actual peer-reviewed journals, without question, we know that what Kourtney was saying, and the harm that it does to boys as they're developing their sexual identity and their sexual template has been known for over 40 years, and that was before the violence of the online porn. That was Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler. Can you imagine now what it's doing, when most porn is violent, when you go into YouPorn or YouTube?" But though Strossen and I both called Dines out on her lies, sadly, AOL Build's audience generally doesn't have the information to know who's telling the truth and who's lying—and that's the real shame of situations like this. But Dines was on a roll. "Let me tell you what we do know," she said. "The porn industry is targeting those boys because the earlier they get them, the more likely they are to become habitual users, so all of what you're saying is PR for the industry, which is your job as a porn person; I get that. But my job as an academic is to point out what the research says." Mitchell, however, thought his own (alleged) experiences backed up Dines's point. "What I think is not really talked about here is, what kind of pornography are young men actually watching?" he asked rhetorically. "Do you think young men are watching porn that is, you know, all consensual and it's loving and 'oh, look, he's stroking her'? That is not the kind of pornography that young boys are watching. As a matter of fact, I'm 29 years old. Way back when I was 11, I was watching violent pornography, so what I'm telling you is that the industry is targeting young boys. This is the porn that young men are actually watching." That's, of course, horseshit, but how was the audience to know that—especially when Mitchell himself, in talking recently about his childhood, managed never to mention this "violent porn problem" he allegedly had—and when even Gradus seemed to support Mitchell's claim? "I was also going to say that what led us into this film was the fact that we were frequenting a lot of porn sites to make our first film [Sexy Baby] and we had a lot of questions, and one of the big ones was, what is this hateful, mean-spirited streak that we are seeing in the most basic of mainstream porn?" How can one respond to that except to ask, What the hell kind of "mainstream porn" are you watching? It's certainly not the porn that's being made in the San Fernando Valley every day of the week! But Jones wanted to return the discussion to her film, and asked Bernard,  "How much freedom did you think you actually had to walk away if you were uncomfortable?" However, Bernard didn't answer the question, preferring to bash her own "licensed and bonded agent," claiming that he'd signed her to a contract she couldn't get out of, and that "he's the one that's putting [his clients] into escorting and the one that's putting them into bachelor parties where really you're just showing up and having sex with all these guys at a bachelor party," adding, "So whether they're licensed and bonded or not licensed or bonded doesn't change how they act." Dines called on Bernard to name the agent, but she refused, instead naming only the agency itself. Strossen chimed in to note that trying to get out of bad contracts isn't limited to porn performing, but is a problem in many industries, saying, "The solution is not only individual contracts that are fairly negotiated and respected but also collective bargaining agreements where the power of the group—" "The porn industry is not going into collective—" Dines interrupted. "I mean, what kind of a world do you live in, Nadine? These are young women—I live in the world that Rachel's talking about and [I understand] exactly what happened to you. I've met women after women who went into this industry, thought they were going through consent, they're young, you don't know—you're up against basically predators who use you and know how to manipulate you." The discussion then turned to whether 18-year-old women should even be allowed to act in porn, and I pointed out that we allow 18-year-old men to join the military, go overseas and kill people—and that, of course, set Mitchell off, claiming that when he was in basic training, his drill sergeant used the same terms to insult and belittle him that he'd already heard in violent porn clips, and that that's how women are manipulated in porn into doing things they'd never expected or wanted to do—except, of course, as I pointed out, a porn actress can walk away from the scene at any point, which is not something an enlisted soldier can do unless he wants to be court martialed. Anyway, the panel pretty much deteriorated from there, with Dines calling me a liar, claiming that porn is "paid rape," and that "It is a predatory industry, it is bankrupt to its core and it should be gotten rid of and wiped off the face of this earth," while Mitchell claimed that in my lofty position at AVN, I'm a "facilitator of violent porn." All in all, it was one hell of an experience, and the more masochistic among you can see it all at this link—and more information about, and critique of, the panel can be found here. As for myself, I enjoyed the sparring, and just might take one of my colleagues up on her suggestion that I ought to go on more speaking engagements to discuss the adult industry. See you in the funny papers! Pictured on panel, l-r: Mark Kernes, Nadine Strossen, Rachel Bernard, Rashida Jones, Jill Bauer, Ronna Gradus, Gail Dines, Kourtney Mitchell.