Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [41]
“My whole reason for being in the industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t much care for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up,” Bill Margold, a performer and producer of porn, has said. “I strongly believe this, and the industry hates me for saying it. . . . So we come on a woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually: We’re getting even for their lost dreams. I believe this. I’ve heard audiences cheer me when I do something foul onscreen. When I’ve strangled a person or sodomized a person or brutalized a person, the audience is cheering my action, and then when I’ve fulfilled my warped desire, the audience applauds.”6
A performer known as Max Hardcore, currently in prison in Florida on obscenity charges, pioneered many of the forms of physical abuse now widely embraced by the industry. He was the first to perform anal fisting and “face-fucking.” He placed lighted medical specu lums in the vagina and anus. He urinated on women, often directly into their mouths. He slapped women around, tied them up, thrust their heads into toilets and flushed, pulled their hair, threw them onto the floor, and called them bitch, whore, cunt, and slut.
The women in porn plead to be abused. They call themselves whores and sluts. They are beaten and penetrated by groups of men. Their faces are covered with semen from dozens of masturbating men, their anuses penetrated repeatedly by lines of partners, and they are raped. The women portrayed in the films exist to fulfill the desires of men in the most degrading and painful way possible. Nearly all porn dialogue includes lines from women such as I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.
I find a man named Barry who refuses to give his last name sitting at a table selling bulk packages of 100 DVDs filmed by his company, Pain and Orgasm. He does business using the names Torture Portal, Masters of Pain, and Bacchus Studios. He admits his torture porn is outlawed in many states, and I find out later that he has been charged by a federal grand jury in Billings, Montana, with distributing obscene DVDs through the mail. The specific films named in the indictment are Torture of Porn Star Girl, Pregnant and Willing, and Defiant Crista Submits. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on each of the three counts charged in the indictment.
Barry is fifty-eight and is wearing a gold Star of David around his neck. He has graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. He has been making movies since 1998. Not surprisingly, he feels the government is too intrusive in the business. He has a Web site where subscribers can see his bondage and torture films for $24.95 a month, along, he said, with “one live show.”
“There are more restrictions, more government involvement where there shouldn’t be,” he says. “People should be able to watch whatever they want to watch as long as it is between consenting adults and there are no kids or animals. Stay out of our bedrooms.”
He has little time for traditional porn and tells me, “I couldn’t tell you anything about porn. I don’t shoot porn. I don’t watch it. It’s boring. I shoot bondage. Tie ’em up and fuck ’em and maybe I will watch.
“I am not really involved in the industry,” he goes on. “All I know is that large segments around the world like to watch young girls being tortured.”
Barrett Blade, whose real name is Russell Alex Heil, is a porn actor who directs and is often filmed in porn movies with his wife, Kirsten Price. He started acting in porn films a decade ago when, he says, a girlfriend who shot porn brought him to the set.
“When I came into the business, gonzo