A friend of mine suggested I watch the documentary "Hot Girls Wanted" while we were talking about those gross porn ads that pop up like chat boxes in our browsers. So I watched it. And I cried multiple times while watching it. After finishing the documentary, and digging up some research myself, here are some facts about the porn industry that I found interesting:
"Recent research shows that nearly 40% of online pornography depicts violence against women."
Sites like "18 & Abused" depict videos of forced sex and hardcore sex that involves degrading women and often physically and verbally abusing women. In the documentary, a 24-year-old Latina woman who stars in an abuse video says, "The combination of the hitting, the vomiting, and the degrading...that's what gets me. But at least I'm an actress and they aren't doing this to real girls." But the thing is, they're still doing it to her, whether this is acting or not. And also...
Porn can correlate with violent attitudes against women.
It's true, correlation is not causation. However, some studies have found that porn can be a casual factor in sexual violence "in the way that it can: (1) predispose some males to desire rape or intensify this desire; (2) undermine some males' internal inhibitions against acting out rape desires; (3) undermine some males' social inhibitions against acting out rape desires; and (4) undermine some potential victims' abilities to avoid or resist rape."
There is a lack of safety in the porn environment.
In the movie, one girl says of being surprised about being forced into oral sex, "I think I know how rape victims might feel...they feel bad about themselves. Then the whole thing comes in, like, did I really want money that bad?" Furthermore, this lack of safety goes as far as affecting the health of the actresses. In one scene, when a girl's mom finds out about her life as a porn actress, she asks if they do anything to prevent pregnancy and STDs. The actress replies that they get tested every few weeks and that they don't use condoms, but the men "do pull out." In an article I read on an ex-porn star's confessions about the industry, she claims that "Dr. Sharon Mitchell confirms the STD prevalence in an interview with Court TV, in which she states: '66% of porn performers have Herpes, 12-28% have sexually transmitted diseases and 7% have HIV.'”
Whether we want to admit it or not, porn is normalizing unhealthy behaviors.
Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, says "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy." With the violent porn in circulation, it's hard to believe that men and women are aroused by such demeaning displays of sexuality: ejaculating on women's faces, verbal abuse, forced group sex, forced oral, anal, or any kind of forced or abusive sex in general should not be sexual. I'm not arguing that men are going to watch porn and then go out and abuse women, but porn rather gives people the okay to treat women the way we see them treated in these videos. Because in porn, nothing that happens is too degrading, too painful, or too humiliating for a woman. Furthermore, since 2004, the search for "teen sex" has increased by over 60%. This normalization takes away the taboo of having sex with children as we are exposed to extremely young looking (infantile) women having sex with older men, even though all porn actresses are 18 or older. One of the directors creating a scene about a teenager and her older family friend says to the actress, "here's the key thing: you're never like fully engaged in it. This is kind of weird." The actress later comments that she hated this scene, and that nothing about porn is actually enjoyable for her, but rather, it's just work. This normalization of being made to feel uncomfortable in sex is disturbing. What is this teaching us about sexuality?
Overall, porn is correlated with issues in real-life intimate relationships and marriage. Statistically, most porn actors and actresses will contract an STD at some point in their careers, many of which are incurable. And the degradation of women becomes more and more common in the porn industry, even fetishized. In the documentary, an actress comments, "In the amateur porn world, you're just processed like meat...they don't care who you are."
The documentary "Hot Girls Wanted" premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and is available on Netflix.
