Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [45]
“The more society loses touch with reality, especially in relationships, the more people do not know how it is supposed to be, how to react with other people, the more they turn to porn,” she says. “People look at this fantasy and believe it should be their reality. They retreat further and further into their illusion because porn can never be real. It does not work in real life. Porn is a sickness.”
Jersey Jaxin, as she was known in the industry, walked away from porn. “Guys punching you in the face. You have semen. . . . Twenty or thirty guys all over your face, in your eyes,” she remembers. “You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It’s never-ending. You are viewed as an object, not as a human with a spirit. People don’t care. People do drugs because they can’t deal with the way they’re being treated.” She estimates that the number of women who use drugs before they film are “75 percent and rising. Have to numb themselves. . . . There are specific doctors in this industry, if you go in for a common cold, they’ll give you Vicodin, Viagra, anything you want, because all they care about is money. You are a number. You’re bruised. You have black eyes. You’re ripped. You’re torn. You have your insides coming out of you. It’s not pretty and foofoo on set. You get hurt.
“The main thing going around now is crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin,” Meza says. “You have to numb yourself to go on set. The more you work, the more you have to numb yourself. The more you become addicted, the more your personal life is nothing but drugs. . . . Your whole life becomes nothing but porn. I was a drinker. I drank a lot. Vodka was my drug. Vodka was my numbing toy. Before sets, after sets, and if it was a set where people didn’t care, they’d have it there waiting.”
“You may see a forty-five-minute set that took us thirteen hours. . . . We’re ripped, we’re tired, we’re sore, we’re bleeding, we’re cut up, we have dried semen all over our faces from numerous guys, and we can’t wash it off because they want to take pictures. You have this stuff all over you, and they’re telling you, ‘Hold it!’” Meza says.
“You can say anything you want [e.g., ‘Stop’], and they don’t listen,” she says. “There’s the ultimate thing where you squeeze their leg to ease up, and most of them don’t care. They have another scene to go to. It’s all about the money. They’ve forgotten who they are, and they don’t care who they’re hurting.
“You have no soul in the porn industry,” she adds.10
Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about necrophilia. Mingled with the booths set up by distribution and production companies, Las Vegas escort services, and a vast array of sex toy displays. There are booths that sell life-size, anatomically correct silicone dolls.
At the Lovable Dolls display booth, three large picture windows are set in walls of faux brick. There is a replica of an iron streetlamp outside the windows. The first window has two life-size silicone dolls. One wears knee-high, black latex boots with stiletto heels. She is reclining on a small frame covered in red velvet. Her fingers gently touch the hand of another doll in a black, curly wig and wearing a bandeau top. In the other two windows are more dolls, one with pointed pixie ears and what Bronwen Keller, a sales respresentative, calls “a deliberate fantasy face.”
“They have removable heads,” she tells me. “There’s a whole array of heads. The head cap pops off. You can reach in and disconnect the head and put a new one on. You can move the eyes. You do that from the inside so you don’t damage the eyelashes.”
We stand and peer through the glass at the pixie doll, surrounded by huge plastic flowers, as if she is emerging from a tropical garden. She has a pierced naval.
“We ship them in lingerie, like a chemise,” she tells me. “They are fully made up. They have their nails done, and they have