A porn site tricked and degraded women – and that was exactly its point

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/10/pornography-misogyny-women

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GirlsDoPorn defrauded unsuspecting women, a court found. But a successful $13m lawsuit won’t fix a culture of contempt

In the ads, the women were clothed. Appearing on innocuous sites like Craigslist, they advertised modeling opportunities that paid about $5,000. There was no indication that nudity or sex would be involved. One ad asked for “beautiful, college-type pretty girls” for photo and video shoots. When women responded, they were directed to websites that showed no evidence of porn. They were asked for contact information and photographs on pages that showed more pictures of clothed women. One woman flew to San Diego to pursue what she thought was the modeling opportunity. When she arrived, she found herself in a hotel room with two men, who told her she would be shooting a pornographic video.

This was the tactic used by the producers of GirlsDoPorn, according to a California superior court judge’s finding in a lawsuit brought by 22 women: they entrapped and defrauded women into making pornography. Alone in the hotel rooms with strange men, the women were asked to sign contracts written in dense legalese, but they were discouraged from reading them. They were told that the contracts stated that the images would never be put online and never distributed in the United States; they were told that no one would find out their real identities. This was a lie. In fact, the videos were posted on the GirlsDoPorn subscription sites as well as on free sites like Pornhub.com. Their identities were easily findable; many of the women faced humiliation and ostracism in their communities. They say that when they sued the producers, the men made sure that the videos were sent to people they knew, in a retaliation tactic reminiscent of revenge porn. The legal complaint says that the men’s actions cost the women educational and professional opportunities. Some of the women became suicidal.

According to the proposed statement of decision, which will become final if there are no objections within 15 days, the 22 plaintiffs will be awarded a total of $13m and will each receive compensation ranging from $300,000 to $550,000. But the damage done in reputational harm, emotional distress and lost opportunities is probably permanent. The women have also been awarded legal control over their own images, but in the end this will probably be a futile formality: the defendants have been ordered to take the photos and videos down from the websites that they control, but by now the women’s likenesses have spread all over the internet. Trying to remove the pictures and videos from the places where they are publicly accessible would be like trying to un-crack an egg.

The defendants in the lawsuit are also facing criminal charges related to the fraudulent and coercive tactics of GirlsDoPorn. Michael J Pratt, the chief executive, Andre Garcia, a performer, and Matthew Wolfe, a videographer, have each been charged with three counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Pratt has fled the country and is considered a fugitive.

The heinousness of GirlsDoPorn’s actions and the sensational nature of the legal case risk feeding unhelpful popular myths about sex trafficking. The allegations against GirlsDoPorn, in which women are coerced into commercial sex work by strangers, reflect a relatively rare phenomenon. The sad truth is that most women who are forced into the sex trade are forced not by strangers preying upon women online or in public, but by debt, by inhumane immigration policies or by the treachery of men they know and trust.

Rather, the story of GirlsDoPorn might tell us less about the nature of sex trafficking and more about a particular genre of heterosexuality that is undergirded by misogynist contempt. After all, GirlsDoPorn’s efforts to deceive and entrap women into doing pornography were part of its sales pitch to viewers. Their style of “amateur” porn is built around the convention of having fresh-faced, unseasoned and usually very young female performers paired with much older and more experienced male ones. The power imbalance is meant to be erotic, but so is the supposed gap between these women’s innocence and potential and the abasement that they’re subjected to in the videos. The women are supposed to look nervous, afraid. Their supposed degradation is the eros.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of feminist intellectuals, led by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, led campaigns against pornography, and they argued from a Marxian position that porn was a method of commodification that hurt women as a class. They wrote, among other things, that the nature of commerce was incompatible with a free and liberated sexuality, and that in commodifying sex, pornography degraded women by rendering sexuality something to be bought and sold. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but I don’t think pornography is unique in this regard: sex is rendered similarly transactional in all parts of our commercial culture, including those that tend to be much less controversial, such as when sexuality is used to sell blue jeans, car insurance or toothpaste.

Rather, I think the feminist problem with pornography of the likes of GirlsDoPorn might lie not so much in its commercial form as in its contemptuous content, a content whose spirit is reflected in the exploitative means by which it is produced.

The GirlsDoPorn site was a specific brand of pornography that markets itself as having models who are not professional sex workers, who would not ordinarily “do porn”. This is in fact the essence of its sales pitch: that its performers are not professionals with fair compensation and safe working conditions, but scared, naive, manipulated people in a situation they would not have chosen for themselves. In that sense, the defendants were doing exactly what they told their viewers they were doing: tricking and humiliating women for men’s titillation.

Second-wave feminists who opposed pornography wrote that the industry commodified sex, and they were right, but the commodification of sex is something that is arguably done any time sex is used to sell any product. What I think is unsettling about pornography like GDP is that it is not merely commodifying or “selling” sex. It aims additionally to sell women’s humiliation and fear. It is this fear, more than the sex per se, that the GDP audience was paying to see.

One wonders if men who are so erotically invested in women’s humiliation and pain of the GDP type don’t see how they’re missing out on a better, freer kind of sex. A sexuality that is so focused on degrading women forecloses many more erotic possibilities than it enables.

For their part, the makers of the GirlsDoPorn site still have the opportunity to go on producing this sad and blinkered kind of porn, if they want to. Only now, they’re not allowed to coerce women into doing it. The judge has ordered that in the future, their ads must prominently and clearly state that they are seeking models for pornography, to be distributed on the internet.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist