Chris Hedges on Pornography, discussing Empire of Illusion on BookTV

[seabeyond]

25. how can you say porn is degrading to women

"I was addicted to porn for two years," says Scott Smith, 29, from Cleveland, Tenn., who is at the Pink Cross booth. He first watched Internet porn as a college student. "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."

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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.

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"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 Vietnam vets. They don't know who they are. They live a life of shopping and drugs. They don't buy real estate. They party, and in the end they have nothing to show for it except, like me, genital herpes and fake boobs." "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."

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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."