Check It Out and then Act: Hot Girls Wanted

by Sunsara Taylor | June 3, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

If you are one of the millions and millions of people, especially men, who regularly watch porn, I strongly recommend you click on something else today: the new documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, which was released to Netflix on May 21, produced by Rashida Jones, and directed by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus. Of course, it’s much better if you don’t watch porn—but either way I strongly recommend this film.

In less than an hour and a half, you will be introduced to just a few of the real human beings whose lives are turned upside down and hollowed out by the porn industry. You will meet young women who start out bright and full of life, excitement, and ambition. They are fed up with the stultifying life of their hometowns and are looking for adventure. They’ve been sold the idea that being wanted as a sex object is “empowering” and want to cash in on their youth and inexperience. And, for a short while, they are able to hold together the collective delusion that, packed into a generic five-bedroom house in Miami owned by their “talent-agent”/pimp, they are calling the shots and living the lives they’ve always wanted.

There is a reason, however, that most young women who enter pornography don’t stay for more than a month or maybe three. Many don’t make it past their first shoot.

One young woman is hired for a series called, Virgin Manipulations. She plays an unwilling virgin who is preyed upon by a trusted older friend of the family. “Here’s the key point,” a voice tells her from off screen as she is about to shoot the scene, “You’re never like fully engaged into it.” Another young woman is filmed in a series called, Latina Abuse. A man spits in her face, chokes and slaps her, and aggressively forces his penis and huge dildos down her throat with the aim of making her vomit. The camera zooms in to capture the trauma and tears pouring from her eyes and you can hear her gagging violently. When she finally pukes, she is forced to lick it up out of a dog food bowl, all the while bearing unending and grotesque racist and woman-hating insults.

Typically, once their innocence and naïveté has been extinguished, they are no longer cast as virgins and can only keep working if they go along with ever more extreme brutality and humiliation.

The film treads lightly in these scenes, showing enough to force the viewer to confront the actual content of this porn, but never using these scenes to “titillate” the viewer. When the film shows nudity and degrading sex acts, you experience them from the point of view of the young woman who is acting them out. As the days and weeks go on, the trauma and degradation of it all begins to bubble up through their own words, in their eyes, and in the pall that falls over their collective living space and banter.

A statistic appears on the screen, “In 2014 abuse porn websites averaged over 60 million combined hits per month. More hits than nfl.com, nba.com, hotwire.com, cbs.com, fortune.com, disney.com, and nbcnews.com.” Another informs us that “teen” is the most commonly searched word in all of Internet porn.

A question that the film never asks, but that viewers really should, is: WHY is there such a market for this kind of predatory abuse and degradation of women? What kind of society is this where millions and millions of men are daily visiting websites to watch women be abused, violated, insulted, spit on, choked, tortured, and humiliated through sex and in other ways? And what does the mainstreaming of this kind of abuse do to further normalize this hatred against women, to socialize men and even very young boys to see women as objects to be used and abused for sexual pleasure? Is this the only way the world can be, and is it a world that anyone should want to live in?

It is very important that this film humanizes and makes audible the voices of the young women who are preyed upon by the porn industry. But it is also important to pull the lens back even further—to examine not only these women’s lives and choices, but even more fundamentally what gives rise to a world where these are the choices available to women in the first place.

Bob Avakian, the leader who has developed a whole new synthesis of communist revolution, which includes the most radical and thorough-going approach to the full liberation of women, has emphasized:

First, people don’t make choices in a vacuum. They do it in the context of the social relations they’re enmeshed in and the options they have within those relations—which are not of their own choosing. They confront those relations, they don’t choose them.

Two, if people feel for whatever reasons that they want to choose to harm themselves and others, we’re going to struggle with them—but we’re not going to blame them. We’re going to show them the source of all this in the system, and call on them to struggle against that system, and transform themselves in the process. Just because a youth “chooses” to sell drugs, or a woman “chooses” to commodify herself sexually, doesn’t mean that they chose to have those choices. And there is no other way besides fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution that all this will change for the better. Blaming the masses for bad choices just reinforces the conditions that they are oppressed by.

In sum, people do make choices—but they make them enmeshed and confined within social relations that are not of their choosing. We have to bring into being different social relations and conditions so that masses of people can act differently and relate differently to each other. Fundamentally, that takes a revolution which is aiming for communism.

Getting into all of what it means to make a revolution aiming for communism, and why that is the only real and lasting way to liberate women, goes beyond the scope of this article. But there is work you can—and should—get into. I recommend starting with Break ALL the Chains! Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution and A Declaration: For Women’s Liberation and the Emancipation of all Humanity

The point is, it is completely unacceptable that thousands of teenage girls and young women are degraded and abused by the porn industry every single year. It is unacceptable that this is just a fraction of the violence and humiliation, the torture and sexual brutality that is inflicted on millions of women and very young girls every single year world-wide in the sex “industry.” It is also entirely unnecessary.

By bringing viewers face to face with just a tiny—but extremely powerful—fraction of this unnecessary oppression, Hot Girls Wanted, makes an important contribution. Take the time to check it out. If you are someone who watches porn, now is the time to stop. And for everyone who wants to see an end to this disgusting and damaging culture of rape and pornography, of woman-hating and sexualized degradation, now is the time to rise up and fight! Get involved today with the movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.

 

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