Dirty Movies

Movies: Pleasure

Oh, pornography. We love to hate it. We hate to love it. We love to judge it (while secretly watching it).

Maybe the weirdest thing about porn is how the hatred and fear of it brings natural enemies, like feminists and conservatives, together to become strange bedfellows.

I'm not going to get into a huge history lesson here, but back in the 1980s, there was a thing known as the feminist sex wars (which would be a great title for a porn, incidentally) where a bunch of feminists believed that pornography (and BDSM, and sometimes even consensual heterosexual sex) was inherently violent against women and degrading to women. Some of these feminists even teamed up with folks who worked for Mr. Ronald Reagan himself to fight against pornography and attempt to regulate it or even ban it. The 1980s were dumb, y'all. I should know because I was born in the 80s. 

Personally, I identify as a "pro-sex feminist", which means I believe that consenting adults should be able to have whatever kind of sex they want as long as it does not harm others. I also think adults have the right to NOT have sex--at all, or certain kinds of sex. Not everybody likes sex or wants it and that's ok too. 

So, I am pro-pornography (IF you want to watch it). I am in favor of people paying for porn. I am in favor of more women, BIPOC, and queer people making porn. I am in favor of there being more options for different tastes. This means that while there are certain types of porn I find ridiculous, gross, and even offensive, I still believe in the right for it to be ethically made and I still believe in the right for people to watch it. 

The tricky thing is, just like many industries, the porn industry has bad people and good people. The movie Pleasure, which is about a newcomer's journey through the LA porn scene, is about how there are good and bad people in porn and how there are good and bad business practices in porn. 

I will say that overall the film is a bit anti-porn, which makes sense given that the director apparently used to be an anti-porn activist and I guess now has sort of come around to the "let's push out bad porn with good porn" side of the table. But the movie shows more of the negatives aspects of the industry--everything from on-set rape (we'll get to that in a minute) to creepy old men controlling everything to in-fighting among adult starlets. 

Pleasure follows Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel, one of the few actors in the movie who is not actually in porn), a 19 year old from Sweden who comes to LA to be the next biggest porn star. The film starts with her first-ever shoot, which involves Bella acting with an average looking guy in his 40s. If y'all want to see actual penis in a "mainstream" movie, Pleasure has you covered! Though there isn't any penetration shown in the movie, there are dicks, tits, bush, and butts aplenty! 

Bella makes friends with her housemates, who are also up-and-comers, especially Joy (Revika Anne Reustle), who helps her learn the ropes. Both Joy and Bella dream of being "Spiegler Girls"--starlets who work with real life agent Mark Spiegler (playing himself in the movie). Spiegler girls are enormously popular, but basically have to work their literal assess off and can't really have limits. 

There are two scenes in the movie that really capture the dichotomy of porn. In the first scene, Bella does a BDSM scene with a female director (Aiden Starr) and tatted up actor (Small Hands, who is by all accounts a super nice guy IRL and super cute, too) where they ask about her limits, offer her breaks and water, make sure she is comfortable, etc. The shoot is portrayed as very positive and Bella has real orgasms during it.

This is followed up by one of the worst scenes of sexual assault I've ever seen in a movie. Bella asks her agent to get her more "rough" shoots, and she ends up doing a scene with a male director and two actors who don't go over limits, don't pay attention to her bodily clues, and pressure her into continuing the shoot when she is clearly terrified and wants to stop. They even tell her "if you leave now, you won't be paid. You'll have done all this for free." This is rape! Even if she consented on paper, this is fucking assault. It's *incredibly* difficult to watch and I would only recommend this movie with massive trigger warnings. 

Bella fires her agent and decides to work independently. In her quest to become the next biggest thing in porn, she agrees to do a double-anal interracial scene for free. (I really hope my mom isn't reading this!!). She specifically requests Bear (Chris Cock), an actor she met early on, to be one of her scene partners since she trusts him. Sure enough, he helps her breathe and get through what I can only assume was a pretty painful scene. Earlier in the film, Bear tells Bella that interracial is the most taboo thing in porn. Bella says "that sounds kind of...racist" and Bear replies "that's because it is racist". I kind of wish there had been more exploration of why interracial sex is still considered such a taboo in porn because I find that to be very interesting especially since there is a high demand for it in the United States...especially the Southern United States. Pleasure doesn't really editorialize on these things (both the rape and relationship between racism and interracial porn)--it just show things, or brings things up, and then moves on. 

The gambit pays off and Mark Spiegler agrees to let Bella become one of his girls. The only problem is that being in the in-crowd sucks. Bella leaves her old friends behind and has to hang out with people she doesn't like. Worse, she begins acting aggressively during some of her shoots, mimicking the behavior she's been on the receiving end of. She has a realization at the end of the film and gets out of a limo taking her to a party, and that's where the movie ends. 

So, what to make of this film? First of all, I liked it. I thought it was shot beautifully and the acting was very natural, very slice of life. I liked that Ninja Thyberg cast real porn actors, directors, and agents in the film. I also like that the film didn't lionize the porn industry because, let's be real, at the end of the day it's an industry dedicated to making money and there are going to be more than a few shitty people in it who exploit others, especially young women, for personal and financial gain. I'm a pro-sex feminist but people who refuse to hear any criticism of porn are naive at best and willfully ignorant at worst. I'm pretty sure most people *in* the industry have complaints about it. 

I also think the film could have been a touch more even-handed and nuanced. Maybe there's no room for nuance in an industry that brought us such films as "MILF Squirters Vol. 7", or maybe by portraying the porn industry "warts and all", Thyberg felt that she *was* being even-handed. 

I'm giving this movie a high grade because it's a very good movie and I enjoyed the hell out of it (I didn't "enjoy" the rape scene, but I appreciated how raw it got...it didn't try to pretend that rape on set is no big deal). But I'm also going to leave you all with a YouTube playlist of a series called "Ask a Pornstar", where pornstars are asked a variety of questions from "do you believe in aliens" to "how to give a good blowjob" to "did you go to college" and I really recommend watching some of the videos--especially the ones that aren't about sex. I watched a ton of these during the early stages of the pandemic and I have to say--it really humanized a lot of these actors for me. They're just people, like you and me. Most of them are incredibly smart and funny and are probably people I'd like to be friends with. Let's demystify an industry that many of us, er, use on a regular basis and let's have a little more respect for the people in it. 

Grade: A-