Cover image: Porn Valley Media
Trigger warning: The following post contains quotes that many may find to be disturbing, graphic, and/or triggering. We have edited inappropriate language while still preserving the meaning of the quotes. Reader discretion is advised.
To consumers, pornography appears a fantasy world of pleasure and thrills. It is cleverly marketed as an endless stream of more sex, better sex, and hotter sex. As an estimated $97 billion a year global industry, pornography is one of the most popular forms on entertainment across every major media platform. Last year, the internet’s top free porn site received over 28.5 billion visits, and in 2016, streamed 4.3 billion hours of pornography to its users. Virtual reality porn is now making waves as the next frontier of “adult entertainment” and porn producers are consistently pushing the envelope for new and shocking material.
The ultimate porn producer’s goal: your money, views, and time
Think about this—the one and only focus of the porn industry is to make money. It’s not actually to “spice up” your sex life, give you a healthy understanding of sex and consent, or help you respect women or men.
Behind the novel sex acts and explicit titles are teams of people responsible for fueling the money-making machine. Porn producers have every incentive to create the most extreme product available in order to compete in a flooded market and thus make money.
Related: 10 Popular Ex-Porn Stars Share The Raw Reality Behind Their Most Popular Scenes
In our years of educating on the harmful effects of pornography using science, research, and personal accounts, we have come across many people who have been directly involved in the porn industry. Furthermore, those who study and perform research on the industry often uncover shocking truths about the dark and sketchy ideas, attitudes, and motivations that drive porn into new territory.
For more info on this, watch episode three of our three-part documentary series called, Brain, Heart, World. You might be surprised what you learn about the industry:
An industry of violence
In the book Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated Video, Dr. Robert J. Stoller, one of the world’s leading experts on human sexual behavior, joins with I. S. Levine, a professional writer with long experience in X-rated video making, to examine the ideas and psychological makeup of the participants in porn. In the book, the authors interview porn producer Bill Marigold who tells them:
“I’d like to show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women. I firmly believe that we serve a purpose by showing that. The most violent we can get is the **** in the face. Men get off behind that, because they get even with the women they can’t have. We try to inundate the world with **** in the face.”
Bill Marigold, quoted in Robert J. Stoller and I. S. Levine, Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated Video (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) p. 22.
Robert Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. In it, he interviews Paul Hesky, the CEO of a porn production company, who says:
“Essentially it comes from every man who is unhappily married, and he looks at his wife who just nagged at him about this or that or what not and he says, ‘I’d like to **** you in the ***.’ He’s angry at her, right? And he can’t, so he would rather watch some girl taking it **** and fantasize at that point he’s doing whatever girl happened to be mean to him that particular day, and that is the attraction, because when people watch anal, nobody wants to watch a girl enjoying anal.”
Paul Hesky, quoted in Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2001) p. 58.
The above quotes are just two of many that reflect the very sexist and sexually aggressive attitude that the porn industry promotes and cashes in on daily. The porn industry does not make money from showing people having sex, it profits from showing extreme and shocking sex acts that depicts human beings as less-than-human sex objects. An LA Times article titled Internet porn is an experiment in dehumanization puts it perfectly: “Women are no more than a set of orifices intended for the use and abuse of men, and men are nothing more than anonymous phalluses demanding to be serviced.”
Related Video: Greg’s Story—Most Successful Male Porn Star Of All Time Speaks Out On Porn
Other Disturbing Quotes
There are countless other quotes by porn producers speaking frankly on their line of work. Here are just a few more:
“People just want it harder, harder, and harder, because like Ron said, What are you gonna do next?”
– Jerome Tanner, “AVN Directors Roundtable,” Adult Video News, January 2003
“Sometimes we do a **** line, where the girl’s giving ****, and she’s gagging so much she vomits. … It’s repugnant. It is, Yes. We’ve got tons of stuff they technically could arrest us for. And when this happened, I put on our website—I made a big speech: ‘I welcome the LAPD to come on down.’ I said, ‘Come and get me,’ I said, ‘Because we won’t go down without a fight. We will fight this. Regardless of the cost, we will fight it. We will take it to the airwaves.'”
– Rob Black, PBS Frontline, PBS.org
Related: 5 Real Stories Of Porn Performers Who Were Trafficked Into The Industry
“People want more. They want to know how many **** you can shove up an ***… It’s like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless. The guys make the difference. You need a good guy, who’s been around and can give a good scene, **** ’em hard. I did my homework. These guys are intense.”
– Mitchell Spinelli, Adult Video News, September 2004
Why this matters
The porn industry wants you to believe that they simply provide a service to society. They want you to believe that their performers enjoy what they are doing, and that they are cared for, well-paid, and safe. They want you to believe that they have good intentions.
They don’t.
Quotes like those found above make one thing abundantly clear: the porn industry only cares about itself. It cares about its budget, not about its performers or consumers. It cares about the health of the industry, not the health of customers. It cares about incomes, rather than the outcomes of consistently consuming pornography.
The porn industry doesn’t care about people more than they care about their product. Is this an industry we should be idolizing and normalizing in society?
