Pornography conference blasted as 'meat market' by protesters | Culture | The Guardian

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Dozens of feminists have staged a protest in central London to protest against the "meat market" of the pornography industry, as adult entertainment executives attended an international trade summit in Bloomsbury. Dressed as butchers in aprons smeared with fake blood, the activists waved pretend meat cleavers and chanted anthems outside the Radisson hotel in Bloomsbury. "You're not welcome in our city," they sang. "Pornographers go home!" The three-day XBIZ EU conference, which opened for the first time in London on Friday, is billed as an "international digital media conference" for the adult entertainment industry. Speakers include Michael Klein, president of Hustler, the pornographic magazine and website, and Berth Milton, chairman and chief executive of Private Media Group, a producer and distributor of pornography. Its website says it is "designed to deliver cutting-edge educational seminars, engaging technology workshops, special guest keynote presentations and high-energy business-networking and deal-making opportunities". But to the men and women protesting, the conference's slick image conceals a disturbing reality of misogyny in 21st-century pornography. Julia Long of the London Feminist Network said: "This summit is being presented as a lavish, respectable corporate event, when in fact it is a brazen opportunity for the porn industry to plan new ways of profiting from the exploitation of women." Watching the protest, Claire Wigington, head of marketing of Television X, said this argument was "simplified". "It's easy to say 'porn degrades women' but the women in the industry know what they're doing," she said. In recent years the multi-billion dollar industry has become a focus for the feminist movement as fears grow over the impact its pervasive influence is having on society at large. Activists claim that viewing pornography can lead to greater acceptance of rape myths and attitudes supporting violence against women. Gail Dines, academic and author of Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, said it was "central" to the fight for equality. "You cannot have a massive industry built on the sexual torture and dehumanisation and debasement of women. If you want any gender equality in a society you cannot have this industry steam-rollering into men's psyches, sexuality and identity," she said, adding that there was an "immeasurable" difference between the X-rated industry of decades ago and the kind of "body-punishing, hardcore" material available now, which she says has become the "major seller" in the industry today. Not all feminists agree, however. Catherine Stephens, an activist for the International Union of Sex Workers, said opposing pornography as a whole did not make sense as there were so many different kinds. "This porn summit represents pimps in suits … meeting to plot how to push the boundaries of porn even further to increase their profits," said Anna van Heeswijk, campaigns co-ordinator of the activist group Object which organised the protest along with UK Feminista and other groups. "It is their aim to make the sexual violence of porn appear normal and acceptable. It is our aim to stop them. Our message is clear: 'Women are human, stop treating us like objects.'"

Sooooooooo... Yah. It's precisely this sort of loud, illogical, killjoy puritans who make it so that no one dares admit to being a feminist for fear of being laughed out of town.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

Sooooooooo... Yah. It's precisely this sort of loud, illogical, killjoy puritans who make it so that no one dares admit to being a feminist for fear of being laughed out of town.

That might be true. After all, that's how slave mentality works.

It doesn't even begin to make sense:

"We're going to liberate you and give you equality."
"Oh, how's that then?"
"By preventing you from working in your chosen profession, telling you what you can do with your body and obliging you to conform to our vision of what's good for you."
"Hmm. Well that's really very kind of you, but I think I'm liberated enough for the time being."

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Now, now, Z....

It's well known that ALL women in the porn industry are desperate women stolen from their third world happy villages and then forced and raped into filming these horrors.

But, no fear, the feminists on their white chargers are coming to their rescue in their shiny armour...

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The Hardcore truth about women in porn

UK Feminista is to rescreen the 2001 documentary Hardcore that offers a horrifying glimpse into the abuse of women in porn – in a bid to combat the argument that it's just 'people having sex'


Julie Bindel
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 July 2011 21.01 BST


An old controversy has arisen over pornography; not the usual ruck about whether it is harmful to women, but a debate over the viewing of women being abused during the making of it.

This Monday UK Feminista is screening the documentary Hardcore, which offers a horrifying glimpse into the industry.

First screened on Channel 4 in 2001, it follows Felicity, a 25-year-old single mother living in the UK, who is desperate to make money to improve her daughter's opportunities. She is invited by a porn agent to meet movers and shakers in the so-called US 'adult industry'. The audience watches as she goes from a bright, sparky, pretty woman to a cynical and emotionally exhausted shell.

Her agent introduces her to performer Max Hardcore, notorious for abusing and humiliating women during filming. Aware of his reputation for choking women during oral sex – and that he often asks his co-stars to wear little girls' clothes – Felicity did not want to meet him, let alone work with him, yet she is pressured by her agent until she agrees.

When Hardcore chokes her she breaks down in tears, but he insists on her continuing, calling her a "fucking loser" and she is almost persuaded to continue until the documentary crew steps in for fear of being complicit in her rape.

Feminist group Scottish Women against Pornography says it should never be screened, saying it is a "filmed rape of Felicity" which will be "endlessly re-enacted long after she is gone". But in the early 1980s, Women Against Violence Against Women compiled a "slide show" of pornographic images, and activists, including myself, gave presentations to anti-pornography women's groups. The images ranged from Playboy centrefolds to a Hustler image of a woman being fed headfirst into a meat grinder, and a cartoon of a learning disabled child being penetrated by a penis in one of her ears with the semen shooting out of the other.

Undoubtedly, a number of those at the meetings were upset but the knowledge gleaned was an essential tool with which to fight the liberals when they argue that porn is "just pictures of people having sex". Other human rights campaigners rely on disturbing imagery to add strength to their arguments: footage of animals being caged and tortured; images of men being lynched in the American south by the Ku Klux Klan; pictures of mass graves in conflict zones.

UK Feminista acknowledges the film makes difficult viewing, but says it depicts the true face of the oft-glamorised porn industry. And importantly Felicity, who left the porn industry after the documentary, did consent to the film being shown.

We need to know the truth about the porn industry to be able to effectively campaign against it. Hardcore tells the truth. Watch it.

The Hardcore truth about women in porn | Culture | The Guardian

So you've got one anecote (which sounds, frankly, like it was set up to prove a point) about someone who gave it a go and then found out that she couldn't hack it.

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Originally Posted by contracycle

Undoubtedly, a number of those at the meetings were upset but the knowledge gleaned was an essential tool with which to fight the liberals when they argue that porn is "just pictures of people having sex". Other human rights campaigners rely on disturbing imagery to add strength to their arguments: footage of animals being caged and tortured; images of men being lynched in the American south by the Ku Klux Klan; pictures of mass graves in conflict zones.

"Upset"? Sounds like an excuse to satisfy your baser instincts to me. I mean, at the end of the day, they're just pictures. Some of them aren't even photos. If you don't like them, no one's forcing you to look at them.

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A bit biased in their selection of actresses and directors, are they? One anecdote doesn't count as data...

FROM WIKI

Writer Susannah Breslin, reviewing Hardcore's work, has commented: "In Max Hardcore movies – Pure Max, Hardcore Schoolgirls, Max! Don't Fuck Up My Mommy! – women are verbally and physically degraded in an unprecedented myriad of ways." The treatment by Hardcore of his female co-stars has been described by several critics as occasionally abusive. The tone of Hardcore's work has been considered misogynistic. His films and alleged work methods have reportedly made him relatively unpopular in the porn industry.

In 2007, Little and his company, Max World Entertainment, Inc., were indicted by the United States Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section with five counts of transporting obscene matter by use of an interactive computer service and five counts of mailing obscene matter, relating to five movies showing fisting, urination and vomiting. Little was subsequently found guilty on all charges, and sentenced to 46 months in prison. On appeal, the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta, Georgia upheld the conviction, but remanded his sentence. Little began serving his sentence on January 29, 2009.

The jury ordered the internet domain www.maxhardcore.com to be forfeited but declined to forfeit Little's house in Altadena, California.

Little was originally held at Federal Correctional Institution, La Tuna in Anthony, Texas, a low security correctional facility for men. He was transferred to the management of the Community Corrections Management, Long Beach facility on January 21, 2011 in preparation for his release, and served the final five months of his sentence under house arrest. He is Federal Bureau of Prisons number 44902-112 and was released on July 19, 2011.

Bam-ta-dish...

What about being serious and investing the working practices of more established industrial players such as Vivid Entertainment, Hustler, Playboy, Wicked Pictures, Red Light District, Erostream, Private Media Group, Woodman Entertainment, Trimax, SG-Video, GGG, VideoRama, Zip Production, Hot Rod Productions, JoyBear Pictures, Blue Juice TV, Rude Britannia, Fresh SX, Harmony, Marc Dorcel...

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Originally Posted by Zichao

So you've got one anecote (which sounds, frankly, like it was set up to prove a point) about someone who gave it a go and then found out that she couldn't hack it.

Classic victim blaming. SHE is at fault, she just wasn't tough enough. Which is exactly the same fucking emotional blackmail that was used on her right there on the set. Why should she even have to be tough, if this is just a job like any other? If it's nothing to be worried out? Youre neatly ignoring the bit where the FILM CREW intervened becuase they felt that were becoming accessories to rape.

Plus, you're kinda right about this being a setup, becuase the whole thing was originally intended to be pretty lighthearted.

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Hardcore wasn't intended to be a return to the underbelly of human experience. Walker's backers wanted something relatively light and his own attitude to the porn industry wasn't weighed down by moral disapproval. "I've bought a porn film and I've watched porn films before * it would be absurd to say I hadn't... Interestingly enough, since making the film I've watched no pornography at all. But I had, and if I'm going to be totally honest, I was really curious to know what it was like to be on a porn set." He soon found out. "The fact was that I hated it. I found it depressing and numbing and totally unerotic. I was prepared to find that I found it extremely erotic and quite interesting. But the truth is that having been on about 26 porn sets, it felt like being in the bottom of a lavatory bowl after a while." The metaphor isn't entirely surprising, given the first job that Felicity secures * a session of still photographs which required her to straddle a bucket and pee for the camera * or the almost obsessional emphasis on anal sex among her potential employers. What might notionally have been an intriguing spectacle quickly became a depressing obligation: "I can remember that we were supposed to be filming an orgy, an orgy which Felicity was participating in and it was going to be her first anal sex scene, so it was supposed to be an element in the telling of the story... and I just couldn't face it. It was on day seven and I turned to my recordist and my assistant producer and said, 'Let's go somewhere.' So we played truant. We went off and found an Italian restaurant and sat there with a bottle of wine and I felt bad that I wasn't filming an orgy!" Having become friendly with Felicity and filmed her talking to her daughter in England, Walker was already feeling the pinch of his opposed instincts as a documentary maker and a human being. When I put it to him that every bad thing that happened to her made his documentary better, he concedes the point ruefully. "It's true, in an awful, sick, terrible way. It's a documentary maker's dream. But there's a cost to that dream, there really is." It can't have helped that he often found himself using identical equipment to the pornographers, and was once mistaken for a crew member by a porn director, who asked him to secure the sort of close-up that he was at some pains to avoid. The cost is clearest in Hardcore's most intense sequence, which record Felicity's unwilling encounter with Max Hardcore, a notoriously extreme porn star. After reluctantly agreeing to film with him (and ignoring Walker's insistence, audible on the soundtrack, that she doesn't have to), Felicity breaks off in tears, having been deliberately choked during an oral sex sequence. Walker found himself filming Hardcore's attempt to persuade her to resume filming. "It's really easy, in retrospect, to look at something like that and say, 'Oh, you should just get in there and clobber the guy.' It's actually not as easy as that. A number of conflicting things are happening at that point: at a very basic level you're getting an amazing story on film * let's be honest about that, you are. At another level, you want to record just what really happens behind the scenes. You know that it's absolutely the kernel of your story and it's criminal not to film it. At the professional level, you're also in a house which is in the middle of nowhere, there are almost certainly guns around the place and there's this guy who I think is actually psychopathic and you're scared..." Eventually, when his assistant producer Tessa Gogol pointed out that they were effectively about to film a rape, Walker stepped in, persuading Felicity not to continue and escorting her from the house. "I double-locked all the doors to the hotel room and put the rushes underneath my bed, and about three o'clock in the morning I rang my wife and * this sounds terribly silly * I completely broke down, I was in floods of tears. I kept saying to my wife, 'I don't know whether I did the right thing...' Thank God I did it in the end * but I'm not at all sure that it was not too late." Only a few days later, Felicity agreed to take part in another extreme scene. Walker walked out after three minutes, by which time one performer was bleeding. It was at this session that the director * who refused to have his face filmed * boasted to Walker that he had offcuts from his films that made "Belsen look like a picnic".

'Her first orgy? I couldn't face it' - Features, Films - The Independent

Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

A bit biased in their selection of actresses and directors, are they? One anecdote doesn't count as data...

They didn't choose who she was referred to by her agent. The documentary just followed her experiences. And while the encounter with Max Hardcore may be the most significant, it's hardly the case that the rest of the stuff they saw makes for a good argument for it all being just a bit of fun on film.

Even Walker, who was not actually the person being coerced and badgered was aware of the implicit dangers involved in the situation they was in. As I've asked before, how can we even be sure that once on set the performers only do what they agreed to do?

So I'll agree that this just one particularly nasty case, and I ceretainly hope that it's not like that all the way through the industry. But the argument that only prurient anti-sex killjoys have any concerns is bogus.

Lastly:

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His films and alleged work methods have reportedly made him relatively unpopular in the porn industry.

So what? That's only the porn industry. It's a good indication that his practices were unusually rough but at the same time it confirms that there is an express market for men who want to watch women being seriously abused. And that it's better for them if those women are dressed up as little girls too. This is the deliberate serving of misogynistic fantasies.