There are the rough and explicit images that many people dream of… And there is reality: even harsher filming conditions that could just as easily take place in a pavilion in the north, or in a corner of the woods, a gloomy hangar, or the living room of one Apartment in a beautiful Parisian district. Welcome to the world of Pro-Am porn, a half-professional, half-amateur porn dominated by the company Jacquie & Michel, which brought in no less than 25 million euros in sales in 2017.
In this environment, journalist Robin D'Angelo spent eighteen months infiltrating small and large producers, actresses and actors, alternately playing extras or cameramen. An immersion that he talks about Judy, Lola, Sofia and me* (ed. Goutte d'Or). He describes an opaque world in which labor contracts and consent are the last concerns of producers in the search for maximum profitability.
Why did you want to investigate and infiltrate the “Pro-Am” porn scene?
I was driven by a contradiction: I am both a casual porn consumer mainstream, where women are dominated by men while being a staunch feminist. I wanted to explore this contradiction and question what it represented.
And I wanted to be interested in these women that we see in these videos, in the filming conditions in which they make these films. In my book I quote this sentence by Virginie Despentes from her essay King Kong theory, who writes that porn is made from human flesh, the flesh of actresses, and that the moral question this raises is how the women who appear in these films are treated. Because we can read hard porn books, have fantasies that can be violent, everything just happens in our heads. But porn is physically embodied by these women, it is very real. And when you see them in pro-am scenes, which can be trashy and violent, with two, three or 30 men, it raises a number of questions.
Is “Pro-Am” porn really that amateur? Or does it refer more to a genre, a specific image?
The line between professional and amateur is fluid. The amateur has become a style, an image, a certain visual. Producers play both sides, as do actors and actresses who can both star in “amateur” productions and travel to Eastern countries to film in major productions.
We say “amateur,” but this content gets a phenomenal number of views, makes a lot of money, and is often produced by professional producers. But little is known about what lies behind the scenes. We talk a lot about Jacquie & Michel as a fun little company. But we've come a long way from the little mess of the beginning, of libertines filming themselves for fun. That's just marketing, because today it is a machine with twenty employees that recorded a turnover of 25 million euros in 2017. Plus, Jacquie doesn't even exist, just to perpetuate the idea that it's a little couple thing.
They describe a “pro-am” environment where racist stereotypes are rife…
Porn is a magnifying mirror of society, it simply eroticizes racist clichés, which here, like any other, represent a commercial niche. A niche that has a name: interracial sex, both racist and sexist, featuring white women with black men, playing on the stereotype of black man bestiality, because that is exactly what the viewer is looking for . Without complexes, one of the producers I met restricts black actors to scum roles while at the same time being antifa. Afterwards I met others who claim to be right-wing extremists, who are anti-immigrant and who support the theses of Alain Soral and Dieudonné.
Nor is it a feminist environment in which producers, often professionals, worry about labor rights and actresses' consent…
Absolutely, but again there is a magnifying glass effect on a society in which women are objectified for their sexuality. A producer I met, Pro-Soral, believes that feminism kills seduction and that it is no longer possible to approach a woman. A vision that is reflected in his productions in which he films and engages in trashy practices, often without warning to the actress.
The concept of consent is very specific in porn. The sexual coercion of women is in a way part of the deal, the producers don't see the problem, and the girls integrate it by telling themselves that they are unable to say no to sodomy, for example, for fear of to no longer be called upon to do so for future filming. In my opinion, this explains why porn actresses have not embraced the #MeToo phenomenon.
As for labor laws, those don't exist in pro-am porn. A big producer told me one day, “I never give the girl the image rights deal unless she asks for it.” » This means that many actresses have no documentation of their filming. And I'm not even talking about an employment contract! The producers pay them in cash and say it's up to the girls to start their own business, but considering what they make, they take the money and that's it.
What stands out when reading your work is that the young actresses you met all have damaged lives and are in great financial and psychological vulnerability.
It is true that they have had difficult lives, most of them experienced traumatic events in their childhood, suffered sexual violence and come from precarious backgrounds. Living a privileged life, it's hard to understand why these women decide to do porn and film violent scenes. But we must understand that these women refuse to be seen as victims. For them, porn is a way to make quick money, build a career, be socially recognized, have fans and meet people. We may not understand them, but we can't blame them for trying to exist through porn. Some were sexually abused by a parent in childhood and then think it's okay to have sex without desire if it gives them something positive, social status or money. For them, this is normal, even if this behavior is essentially the result of a suffering linked to a traumatic memory, which the psychiatrist Muriel Salmona calls “traumatic dissociation”.
Furthermore, if many actors film “for pleasure”, it is not desire that drives actresses at all… And actors and actresses are not considered in the same way, neither in the industry nor in society.
Men who do porn say they do it to “empty their balls” and that they get pleasure from it. While for an actress pleasure is the least of her concerns, she suffers from constraints in her sexuality, degrading practices and physical pain. As I said before, a woman does porn for money or status, but she also pays the price. Women are certainly paid more than men in porn, but where a man is considered a big name in his neighborhood, the girl doing porn is treated like nothing, insulted and harassed. In addition, they have significantly shorter careers than men. Once they manage to find a place for themselves, the guys can stay in the industry for fifteen years. After filming fellatio, sodomy and gangbang scenes, the women can be ignored by producers overnight six months after their porn debut because there is always a need for new faces, “fresh meat.”
You played a cheating husband in a film and worked as a cameraman on film sets. What was the most difficult part of this immersion for you?
It was one of the last shoots I attended and was supposed to take part in. It was a bukkake in which dozens of hooded men had to cum in the face of a woman who looked completely emaciated. And then I say to myself: “That’s not possible, I have to go.”
Has this book changed your personal relationship with porn?
It's still too early, I don't have the perspective to be able to analyze it. But I return to my initial objection: we know that it is not an ethical environment, that the filming conditions are not terrible, but the sources of fantasies and pleasure are difficult to control even in the face of reason.
On the other hand, I think there is a collective consideration to be made here, a regulation that needs to be implemented through legislation. This is not about banning porn or burying your head in the sand just because access to it is theoretically forbidden for minors. All of this is hypocritical and simply allows politicians to avoid dealing with the issue. The result is that these environments become ghettos, lawless zones. It doesn't seem inappropriate to me to think about legal status for sex workers and regulating filming conditions so that they are healthier and more ethical.
* Judy, Lola, Sofia and meGoutte d'Or editions, in bookstores from October 18th, 17 euros.