Image credit to Netflix/HotGirlsWanted. 4-minute read.
Trigger warning:
FTND Note: Hot Girls Wanted contains mature subject matter and nudity. We most definitely recommend viewer discretion, especially for those who may be easily triggered by the material. The latter part of the film also shows edited clips that are very graphic and extremely disturbing.
In our day and age where technology, the internet, and social media are so widely used, anybody can quickly become a porn star. The often glamorized appeal of porn offers thousands of young “amateur” aspiring porn stars dreams of money and fame. But as brought to light in the Rashida Jones produced documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, the reality of the porn industry is as dark as it is exploitative.
This documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Now, it’s available for exclusive streaming on Netflix.
The film opens up by showing clips of all the oversexualized material in popular media, showing just how prevalent “porn culture” is in our society. We then see the story begin for several 18-20 year olds who all answered a craigslist ad to be flown out to Miami for a chance to make money and be on camera. One 19-year-old is a former high school cheer captain from Texas, another is a small town girl from Illinois with the only goal of getting out of her hometown. They all get into amateur porn by connecting with a porn agent on Craigslist, who fills his five bedroom house in Miami (where porn laws are much more loose than California) by posting these ads seeking “models”.
“Every day, a new girl turns 18, and every day, a new girl wants to do porn,” the agent says in the film. “I will never run out.”
The doc goes to show how the amateur porn business is a never-ending revolving door of girls who want to make money and then are chewed up and spit out within a short amount of time. At one point in the film, another agent/manager talks about the extremely short “shelf life” of these young girls.
“Worst case scenario? One to three months,” he says when asked about how long the girls will stick around. “Alright scenario? Three to six. Best case scenario? If she doesn’t catch onto the game? A year, tops.”
The doc takes a serious turn when it shows how these young girls inevitably end up doing more hardcore, fetish-oriented shoots, in order to continue to work and pay the bills. (FTND Note: We must mention again that this film contains sexual subject matter and nudity. Specifically, this later point in the film shows edited clips that are very graphic and extremely disturbing.)
One of the most eye-opening parts of the film is when one of the 18-year-old girls is being directed on the set of a video titled Virgin Manipulations, in which she is told by the director to act like she’s not interested as she is taken advantage of by an older, much bigger man who is acting “like an uncle.”
The same girl later tells a story of how she showed up for a shoot one day, only to find that the gig was just one man at his house with a camera set up.
“I was scared. I was terrified,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I could tell him no.”
In the end, the former cheer captain opens up to her boyfriend and mother and decides to stop doing amateur porn after four months in the industry. In that short amount of time, she develops a painful cyst from having too much sex and estimates that she earned about $25,000, but after travel fees, makeup, lingerie, STD testing, and agent fees, she only left with $2,000 in her bank account.
At one point in the film, one of the 18-year-old girls comes home after having had full unprotected sex with two male porn stars in the same day after which she explains she was given $100 by the producers to go get a “morning-after” pill to prevent her from getting pregnant.
“The Plan B pill only costs like forty bucks, which means I get $60 extra dollars, so why not? Plan B always works, I guess,” she says, “I don’t know.”
Hot Girls Wanted is an up-close and personal look at how exploitative the porn industry is. The lives of thousands of young girls across the world are torn apart after being misled into selling their bodies, and so much more, just to make money.
