Price of Pleasure

This documentary “The Price of Pleasure” by filmmakers Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker focuses on the violence towards women and their bodies in the sexual entertainment industry. Pornography has become one of the most visible and profitable divisions of cultural industries, having a significant presence in our mainstream media and pop culture. This documentary discloses the violence and abuse towards women and their bodies during sexual encounters in pornography. Chyng and Miguel illustrate the relationship between the violence displayed and the powerful effect those images have on the behavior of the audience. The filmmakers argue that the maltreatment of women in this industry causes audiences to blur the line between the fantasy world of pornography and the real world. The misperception that women are hypersexual objects with open availability, who also enjoy being dominated and abused, is one result the pornographic treatment of women has on spectators. Adult films and images containing sexual violence, set an example for the audience of how women should be respected and treated. This documentary also shows the different opinions and critiques of producers, critics and performers in the adult film industry. An anonymous interviewee shared that he likes “aggressive sex, where its really forceful” because he learned how to have “regular sex” through pornography at a young age. This interviewee made pornography his template for his sexual encounters instead of viewing it as a fantasy. In the documentary he later explains how pornography shaped his expectations of how women should act during sex, how a women’s body should appear and how it should be treated. Although everyone has different opinions of what “normal” or “regular sex” is, this interviewee’s idea of “regular sex” is completely based off of a fictional situation and widely considered “untraditional”. These violent images not only mold his sexual expectations, but also his expectations for the women’s body. Another commentator in this documentary says that because the women being filmed “look like they’re enjoying themselves” and are “moaning and screaming”, they have the desire to be punished, abused and dominated by men. This viewer is taking the performance of these women and relating it to women outside of these films. By removing the dominance, violence and aggression from the fantasy world of pornography and applying it to women in the real world, these viewers are dismissing the humanity of women, their sexuality, their desires and their pleasures.

http://vimeo.com/15667122