Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [43]
“I find real guys and they get to fuck a porn star like Kenci,” he says, turning to a young woman beside him in cutoff shorts, a bra, and a baseball hat.
Powers says he tried to film a scene the night before with a fan that “went really bad.” “It was hours of heartache, but he got a free sandwich out of it,” he says. “It is tough once the camera comes on.” He is perturbed because three fans who had previously agreed to be filmed with Kenci this afternoon had not appeared. He says he “makes stupid content for stupid people,” that porn is a prime example of the “stupidifi cation of America.” “This is a YouTube world,” he continues. “It is a Jackass world. Everyone has short attention spans. You need a catchy trailer. You catch their attention, they buy the film and jerk off.
“There was a day when porn stars were veiled actresses,” he says. “They took the job seriously. They were twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Now they are nineteen. They are hookers. They don’t care. They are a throwaway commodity in a throwaway world.” He turns and looks with disdain at Kenci and says to me, “She doesn’t know what a book is, I bet.” He asks me if I want to be filmed having sex with Kenci. I decline with a quick “No, thank you.” He explains he doesn’t have anyone else. He has a house nearby to film, a camera crew, a porn actress, and no fan. At no point is Kenci consulted.
Sharon Mitchell, an ex-porn star, is the founder of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation. She tests and treats actors in the porn industry. She runs her clinic out of Los Angeles.
“The type of performances that they are doing, basically they walk on the set and it is wall-to-wall sex, and the type of sexual encounters they are having are extremely high-risk, much, much higher-risk than when I was involved,” Mitchell said in a 2007 interview with National Public Radio. “When I was involved, I had the choice to use a condom, the choice to do whatever sex acts I preferred. Today, anyone pretty much with a handful of Viagra and a High-8 camera: ‘Hey, I want to be a porn director and producer.’ And they can literally go about this and sell these things on the Internet. So they recruit very young people, and my concern is, ‘Are you ready to do this?’
“When I founded the Adult [Industry] Medical Healthcare Foundation in 1998, there was actually an actor who was knowingly and willfully infecting women with HIV,” Mitchell said, “and finally I caught up with him and realized that he was going to county health clinics and getting anonymous testing. And he would put someone else’s name on this test. And not everyone was testing, and the tests were not centrally located back then. Denial is the backbone of pornography when it comes to health care.”
“I am a clinician that serves a world that I know very, very well because I come from it,” Mitchell told NPR’s Scott Simon. “And I know the pressures that these talent members go through not to use the condoms. They are offered more money. They are told, ‘Look, these films will not sell if there are condoms on it.’”
“Not to get graphic, but you would think that in these days of computer enhancements and special effects, it would be no more necessary to endanger a performer that way than it would be to require Tom Cruise to jump off a twelve-story building,” Simon said.
“Absolutely,” Mitchell answered, “but they are not looked at as performers. They are looked at as commodities. They are looked at as body parts that are going to be edited into a product that’s going to make money. And this