Note: This post has been moved from Latest Picks.
Porn Star Pick: Rachael Madori
Netflix of course managed to deliver pretty much exactly what was expected with its Hot Girls Wanted pro-am porn shockumentary, but, for sure, not all took it as meekly and etiolated as it hoped to portray.
“Hot Girls Wanted”: a review by Rachael Madori (avn.com).
“Controversial new documentary Hot Girls Wanted, concerning the recruitment of young women into the so-called ‘’pro-am porn’ world, has struck a mighty nerve among members of the adult industry community, several of whom have voiced their opinions on it through mainstream outlets—including Casey Calvert for Refinery29.com, Aurora Snow for The Daily Beast, Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals for Uproxx.com and AVN’s own Mark Kernes.”
Pro-am, a contraction of professional-amateur, specifically in this case professionally produced, lower budget porn content shot with new or “amateur” performers porn scene capitalising on infatuation with fame and fortune from attention.
Who’s afraid of Hot Girls? Society it seems…
And not quite so polite with it. Former porn veteran Aurora Snow suggests the Rashida Jones-produced documentary—acquired by Netflix after premièring at the Sundance Film Festival and likely as concerned with its own streaming ratings as much else—attempted to expose the horrors of the amateur porn industry, but too bad it gets a lot wrong in the process:
“Hot Girls Wanted” is pornsploitation: the porn industry fights back (thedailybeast.com).
“The doc illustrates a seedier side of porn from a narrow perspective. It’s focus is on the pro-am (paid amateur) genre of a Florida-based porno recruiter, and while that in itself is fascinating, it’s the text blurbs added in post-production that pretend to shed light on the adult industry as a whole, and miserably fail to do so.”
Post-production text blurbs seemingly suggesting in an after-thought sort of fashion that the adult industry has moved to Florida due to L.A.’s condom mandate when in fact Bang Bros bus has been rollin’ on through the sunshine state’s most populous city paying “amateurs” to step on in for its version of gonzo reality since just after the start of the millennium.
“While some of the elements in Hot Girls Wanted ring true, the film fails to portray adult entertainment as the professional business it is, capturing only a sliver of a multifaceted industry still largely based in California…”
A professional and multi-billion dollar industry—the US porn industry is thought to be worth more than $13 billion (£8.2 billion) a year.
“The so-called model houses on display [in the documentary] really do exist—and in Los Angeles as well as Florida. Girls fly in on tickets purchased by their new agent (who also happens to own or rent the model house), bond with the other girls over their inexperience, and agree to do things they may or may not want to do for the money.”
Indeed making it sound like an XXX version of the Big Brother—or rather sister— house. But the key point she is making is that they do agree to do things they may or may not want to do for money and porn fame. For sure, should they be working in a factory or supermarket instead few would turn up to sweep broom under machine or stack top shelves out of a pure love of doing so either.
Some may claim it ludicrous to talk about it that way, comparing working in the sex industry with more mundane work, but perhaps that is the point: for those working as supply for an industry for which there is much demand, it is often just as mundane, but with the contempt aimed as much at them personally as the job. Aurora though and the agents she knows are keen to stress that some, indeed many performers do enjoys the work they have chosen.
“Hot Girls Wanted makes no effort to provide a balanced look at the adult industry. To showcase an industry with its fair share of happy employees working together to improve its weakest links wouldn’t be as effective. A woman seeking to join the adult entertainment industry has options; she doesn’t have to go with the first ad she sees online offering a free plane ticket. With a little bit of research, she can chose to be a part of a legal, tested, regulated industry with licensed agents who treat her like a valued client and not just another piece of meat.”
Even if in the titles those houses may aim to portray them in exactly that role—fantasy street meat picked up and made to do humiliating things for money—and, specifically in the case of some of the “abuse” sites, no, we are not talking about blowjobs or anal sex as humiliating here, we are taking about using the same intimidating slut/pig/ugly/stupid invariably misogynistic and frequently racist language used to describe the performers while they perform more commonly used to debase and degrade on Twitter et al.—which is pretty much the raison d’être of that—it does have to be said—particularly Miami-based genre, seemingly that women make men do things and that they in turn can be made to do anything for money.
Is that art imitating life or visa versa? Does fantasy for which there is obvious a huge demand have to act as role model or should we be acting as one for our fantasies? Regardless, the idea that woman may be earning for doing things with their bodies usually simultaneously earns a conflicted retort that they shouldn’t and should give it freely to their audience for… love?
That particularly frustrates Chauntelle Tibbals, PhD, a sociologist specialising in the workings of adult entertainment, as she shared with Uproxx.
“Hot Girls Wanted” shames and further stigmatizes the porn workers it depicts (uproxx.com).
“Hot Girls Wanted, like so many narratives before it and likely like gazillions to come, implies that porn is responsible for many wider social ills—from the commodified hyper-sexualization of young women to the ‘risky’ and/or ‘degrading’ sex behaviors plaguing humanity today. It’s porn’s fault. Porn did it!”
And, for sure, porn assuredly will again while there is still demand for it and those anti-porn protestors will suckle from Hot Girls Wanted and its likes teat to fullfil theirs.
“Porn, like every other human-social entity, is both an artifact and a component of wider society. It’s a complex product of what we, as a collective group of humans, are. As such, what does the reflection of humanity we see in the cultural mirror of porn say about us? That query is generally too uncomfortable to engage, so instead we gobble up narratives like Hot Girls Wanted—ones that give porn all the power and paint us as passive victims.”
Which accounts for those tabloid tales of internet-induced porn addiction—which, apparently affects women as much as men now (theguardian.com, 2011)—where, like some jizz and fem ejac. squirting ghost in the machine, porn makes you look when you would really rather not and it can’t be possible at all you could just be—albeit perhaps to a rather distracting degree—really, really enjoying it.
“Hot Girls Wanted could’ve explored the similarities between porn and other industries—industries that rely on body work and every type of media. Industries that are very competitive, where few people ‘make it,’ and stigmatized occupations, as well as jobs wherein the vast majority of workers have very short shelf lives, etc. But why would you watch a film about porn and construction workers, porn and professional fighters, porn and musicians, or porn and lawyers when you can gawk at *exploited teens* instead? This, incidentally, makes Hot Girls Wanted at least kinda guilty of precisely the thing it’s criticizing.”
With the reality that porn is a multi-billion dollar industry that is never going to go away, does that itself not suggest we should perhaps stop sweeping it under the “bad” carpet and try and address the real problems with it better? For sure, sweep any other industry under the same rug and watch what working conditions become like for them too.
Obviously, I like porn…
Obviously, I like porn, and in particular I like Latina porn, with latina’s being a big percentage of performers in these Miami-based houses features, but, I’ll make no bones about it, I invariably skip those with abuse/humiliation in the title while noting the stars for follow up in other productions, not purely because it’s an ethical issue, I just really, really don’t enjoy them, as that genre in particular and pro-am in general is not really my thing.
But then again, nor is any of the inescapable in vogue bondage or Fifty Shades of, or indeed any of those polemic horror films mixing it up with Freud’s Thanatos and Eros which are surely not exploitative since losing their B-movie status or intended to excite at all because plot simply dictates the nudity and acts of carnal are synchronous and necessary with acts of serial-killing sadism; I’m pretty capable of brushing on past towards what I am into, which may not be somebody else’s fantasy thing, so, not particularly in need of being judgemental of people’s kinks if they have any in particular, as long as its legal, I try to live and let live—well, up to a point. For sure, it may be cliché but opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one and is surely welcome to do with it what they need to do or not.
I don’t take well to slut shaming for real, nor in fantasy, but whereas I’ll unhesitatingly fight the real I’m well practiced in use of the stop or off button if a feature turns in a direction I don’t enjoy. It may provoke a caricature but I’m intrinsically weary of crusaders and do-gooders and very aware that I can be as much a hypocrite as those to the left or to the right. So perhaps the last word should be with someone inside the box, or rather the house.
“But AVN wanted to know what those at the very center of the HGW debate thought about it—namely, adult’s current crop of ‘fresh’ starlets, … all no older than 21 and in the industry no longer than about a year, for their reactions to the movie,… one of those was Rachael Madori….”
Who, new to the industry and gone through the house featured in the documentary must surely just as exemplify those of whoem it speaks.
“Not only does this movie depict the girls as naive and poor decision makers, they're also made out to be powerless. When the subject of a single site called ‘Facial Abuse’ is presented, it seems as if the girls are forced to agree to shoot that content—which is not the actual case. I feel as if the movie is trying to send the message that the violent themed porn shoots are not professional and consensual, which is extremely inaccurate.”
And that makes…
Starting in the adult industry last year with mofos.com Rachel Midori, aka Rachael Rae, already has a host of performer credits with, among others, Evil Angel, New Sensations, Digital Sin, Devils Film, Mofos and recently Wicked Comix’s Axel Braun directed Barbarella XXX porn parody alongside Asa Akira.
With a proclivity for facial, anal and lez scenes, and recently relocated from Brooklyn to L.A., the 5 feet, 6 inch tattooed and mohawked alt porn hellion’s demeanour has proved fiesty and deft agent provocateur to those needing to slut shame.
Reserving any shaming herself to the audio kind for Iggy Azalea in her own tweets but, I guess that’s just the way of things and… hell, who am I to say when, after all, my caricaturing stuffed monkey has thrown a hoop too (Gallery). :)
And that makes Rachel Midori this week’s porn star pick.
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