Category: Uncategorized

Adrian Horton

In an explicit and uncompromising new drama, a Swedish woman tries to work her way to the top of LA’s patriarchal porn industry.

Swedish film-maker Ninja Thyberg certainly did not take the easy route with her first feature. Pleasure, which arrives in US theaters this weekend, takes on a subject rife for denigration or moralism: ambitious 19-year-old Bella Cherry, played by Swedish newcomer Sofia Kappel, trying to break into the American porn industry in the late 2010s. Based on years of research in the Hollywood-adjacent world of Los Angeles adult film, Thyberg’s debut portrays female friendship, pragmatic striving and power dynamics in an industry as liable for abuse – and professionalism – as any other. Pleasure often lingers on the quotidian aspects of the business – contracts, pre-shoot douches, set lighting, gossip with co-workers. The unrated film, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance festival, opens on Bella’s bare crotch, as she contorts herself in the shower to shave her vulva before her first shoot.

Another act of ambition: this is Kappel’s first-ever acting role. The 24-year-old first met Thyberg through a mutual friend, who recommended her based on an early character description for Bella. “My initial thought was: absolutely not,” Kappel told the Guardian. But she was looking for challenging, uncomfortable experiences – there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of nudity in Pleasure, though lack of clothing is so perfunctory as to become unremarkable – and was sold on Thyberg’s vision of a film about porn as a professional business and microcosm of society. “I think the porn industry as a subject is very interesting since it’s very present in our lives but we don’t talk about it. We act like it doesn’t exist,” she said.

And yet it is nearly ubiquitous; various international studies have put porn consumption rates at 50% to 99% percent among men, and 30% to 86% among women, according to the American Psychological Association. Porn, as Pleasure implicitly argues, is less a seedy corner of society than a mirror. “Everything that would be present in our society will also be shown in the porn industry,” said Kappel of the film. “We are a racist society, and the porn industry is also racist. We’re a sexist society, and the porn industry is also sexist. We live in a patriarchy, and the porn industry is also that.”

Pleasure is a nearly decade-long journey for Thyberg, a former anti-porn activist who developed the feature from her 2013 short film of the same name. The short took a much more critical view of the industry, based on research conducted via the internet. For the feature, Thyberg knew she needed first-hand experience – “I wanted to challenge people’s prejudices, so I felt I had to this properly and get to know [adult film performers] and then build a story, not decide beforehand what the story would be,” she said. So Thyberg traveled to Los Angeles and, starting in 2014, spent five years researching for the film – getting to know adult film performers, befriending producers, observing sets, networking through Mark Spiegler, one of the industry’s top agents, who plays himself in the film (as do numerous real-life performers).

The research checked many of her existing biases. Thyberg said she arrived in LA nervous to talk to female performers, and with somewhat of a “victim perspective” – “I thought that they were taking part in this very patriarchal system and playing along with these super stereotypical gender roles because they don’t have the theoretical perspective that I have,” she explained. “I was on a high horse … I had a very good intention, but I was coming from a [patronizing point of view].

“I started to understand how it’s the complete opposite,” she added. “They know so much more about patriarchy than I do, and they are super aware of everything.” The realization changed Thyberg’s understanding of feminism and her approach to the film. “I became so aware of how we look down on women, and how much that is part of reproducing a male gaze,” she said.

Kappel described the months spent researching her character as a similar evolution. “When I got to the US, I had a lot of prejudice toward the sex industry and especially toward women in the sex industry,” she said. Shadowing adult film sets and building relationships with performers changed her mind. “I realized that it was so obvious that it was work,” she said. “It’s turned boring very, very quickly.

“What I realized very quickly was that the question ‘Why?’ is so problematic,” she said. “Because I would never ask someone who works at a supermarket or a pharmacy, ‘Why would you work there?’ But as soon as there’s sex involved or especially toward women, when they’re using their bodies – they’re objectifying themselves rather than giving that power to men – you want to ask why. Why would you do that?

“I think a better question to ask would be: what do you get out of it?” she added. That question elicits highly individualized answers. People work in the sex industry to pay medical bills, to make extra money, for artistic expression, or for fun. Not that the industry is perfect. Adult performers have reported widespread mental health concerns, and are particularly susceptible to dismissal – many will conflate performing sex acts on cameras as asking to be hurt. “They don’t feel like they can speak up, because they’re not going to be believed,” said Thyberg.

Pleasure is, ultimately, a film about work, one that suffuses a business often described in stark terms with grey areas and fine lines – between empowerment and exploitation, erotic and obscene, ambition and corruption. Bella – blonde, blasé, an expert at the dissociative pout – befriends the other women living in a house owned by their mutual agent. She competes with other girls, tries to build an online following, eyes the “Spiegler girls” (porn’s A-listers) with envy and takes on increasingly risky, hardcore material in a bid to shoot up the industry ladder. She participates in a fetishized “interracial” porn (“it sounds racist because it is racist,” a black colleague tells her.) A BDSM shoot directed by a woman, in which Bella is rope-bound and whipped, evinces the industry’s best practices: safe words, check-ins, clear boundaries and expectations.

It’s a sharp contrast to the most harrowing scene of the movie, exemplifying the industry’s worst potential. In the scene, Bella arrives to a bare set – her, two male actors, one male director. The director notes the material will be “rough” – slapping, choking, spitting – but there is no rehearsal, warm-up, or discussion of safe words, check-ins or boundaries. The director just begins shooting. When Bella shuts down, he pressures her to continue (“Feels good to say yes, right?”) Thyberg’s camera effectively mimics Bella’s blurred perception, splintered by trauma – sounds fading in and out, a shoe, a face, the wall, the camera, a snippet of memory. On the drive home, she pulls over and vomits.

It’s a difficult scene to watch and, paired with the compassionate, professional BDSM shoot, one of the film’s most evocative sequences of the industry’s ethical spectrum. In reality, the scene was tightly rehearsed and padded with numerous safety guardrails. Kappel chose to do stunts, and practiced months prior with Bill Bailey, the lead male actor. A close friend from Sweden was on hand during the shoot, as was co-star Revika Anne Reustle. Both had the authority to call cut if she made eye contact with them. There were established boundaries – no feet near her face – and plenty of snacks during frequent breaks. “The situation was very safe and very therapeutic for me, because even though I had to get in a headspace that was hard and uncomfortable for me to get in, I got to do it in a very safe space,” she said.

Ultimately, Pleasure morphed into a story about “being a woman in a male-dominated world”, said Thyberg, as told through one woman’s navigation of one insular, frequently stigmatized industry. The film, and particularly a muted ending open for interpretation, avoids moralizing against porn at large. “You can’t quit patriarchy – you can only handle it and deal with it,” Thyberg said. “The things that [Bella’s] going through that are bad in the film don’t have anything to do with having sex on camera. It has to do with inequality, with power abuse, with structures that exist in any industry.”

Andrew Anthony
Sun 22 Apr 2018 03.00 EDT

Originally published by The Guardian.

Not all sex addicts are sexual predators – many are just struggling to contain their destructive urges. Andrew Anthony meets addicts and therapists to hear how they cope with this secretive pandemic.

Of the many alleged victims of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, perhaps the most overlooked and least sympathised with are so-called sex addicts. They may not have directly suffered at his hands, but in their own way they have felt a harsh blowback from his actions.

When the damning testimonies of sexual abuse began to pile up, Weinstein denied allegations of non-consensual sex but did admit to a problem and is believed to have sought sanctuary – and treatment – at the Meadows, an upmarket sex addiction rehabilitation centre in Arizona.

It runs a men-only programme entitled, a little ironically in Weinstein’s case, Gentle Path, which lasts 45 days. Participants are assessed as to their position on the sex-addiction spectrum, according to a programme designed by Dr Patrick Carnes, the leading expert in the field who first popularised the term “sex addiction”. Level 1 is overuse of porn or masturbation and visiting prostitutes; Level 2 is victimisation, exhibitionism, voyeurism and harassment; Level 3 is rape, incest, child sex abuse. Carnes believes most people with addiction problems are a Level 1 or 2.

The residents of the centre undergo group, individual and family therapies. In a “nurturing community”, they also engage in meditation, exercise programmes, spiritual practices and lectures. By all accounts, the food and accommodation leave little to be desired.

The aim is for residents to “gain the courage to face difficult issues, including grief and loss; heal from emotional trauma; and become accountable for their own feelings, behaviours and recovery”. The actor Kevin Spacey, another accused of predatory sexual behaviour, is also said to have attended the Meadows.

To many observers, Weinstein’s sex-addiction treatment appeared like the last refuge of the Hollywood scoundrel, a handy excuse when all else had failed: “It’s not my fault. It’s my damaged psyche!” Even the term sex addiction seems a little too convenient: a vice masquerading as a pathology, an excuse dressed up as an illness. It’s not a condition that is recognised by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM], the bible of the American Psychiatric Association. There are no physical symptoms of withdrawal, as there are with, for example, alcohol and drug addiction.

However, therapists in the field speak of a growing sexual addiction “pandemic” that a mixture of shame and misunderstanding has kept hidden. Paula Hall runs the Laurel Centre, a specialist organisation in Leamington Spa dedicated to sexual-addiction therapy. She believes the publicity surrounding recent high-profile scandals has been detrimental to an understanding of what she believes is a very real and growing problem.

“There is a percentage of people who are sexually addicted and offend,” she tells me in her London office. “It absolutely in no way excuses the offending, and is a completely separate issue. So if Harvey Weinstein is a sex addict I hope he will get the help he needs. And if he is guilty of what he’s been accused of, I hope he gets locked up as well. They’re not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, it has again cast doubt on the whole sex addiction label and left ordinary guys finding it harder to reach out. As one client said to me: ‘I’m worried that even being here, people will assume that I’m predatory.’”

Hall insists the debate about whether or not sex addiction is a clinically accepted condition misses the point. “Look,” she says, “bereavement is not in the DSM, but no therapist says: ‘Sorry, bad luck. I can’t see you.’”

The clients who come to her seeking help are, Hall says, often in a state of great distress and not infrequently suicidal. They want to stop doing what they’re doing: be it watching porn, visiting prostitutes, or using the internet to organise fleeting sexual encounters. But they can’t, in much the same way that the compulsive gambler can’t stop gambling, even though it’s destroying his life.

When things were at their worst, Rob Joy would hold his head in tears of frustration and smash another mobile phone, while his wife lay asleep in blissful ignorance upstairs in bed. The 39-year-old owner of a decorating company would destroy his phones to stop himself from viewing pornography and texting, or “sexting”, women in provocative or inappropriate ways.

As compulsive sexual behaviours go, Joy’s were a long way from the most extreme. On Carnes’s scale, he would classify as Level 1. But it was enough to lead to a crisis that saw him lose his job, his friends and, effectively, his home. What made the situation particularly difficult was that his job was that of an Evangelical Christian pastor in a respectable Northamptonshire market town.

A short, good-looking man who buzzes with words and energy, he felt overwhelmed by the work which, aside from the financial responsibilities, included advising married couples on the issue of adultery. He and his wife had a two-year-old child and one-month-old baby, and Joy had taken to unwinding with a couple of drinks in the evening which, he admits, lowered his inhibitions. Then he would stay up looking at porn and seeking digital flirtations.

“I wanted the conversation to go to the point of sexualised conversation,” he recalls at his base in Luton. “Masturbation and then finished.” That was the line beyond which he didn’t want to cross, out of respect for his wife, although on a couple of occasions he did transgress and he was mortified with shame and guilt.

One day three years ago, he tried to steer a text conversation with a woman from his congregation in a similar direction, but she reported him to church leaders who conducted an investigation. They looked at Joy’s computer and found porn sites and incriminating emails. His world fell apart. Within days he was dismissed, ostracised by his community and had to move away from the village. The family spent months sleeping on his in-laws’ sitting room floor. In the aftermath, Joy felt humiliated, depressed, and full of remorse. It was at that low point that he decided to seek treatment for sex addiction.

The vast majority of sex addicts who seek help are male, though many studies, including Paula Hall’s own, have shown that 30% are female. So why are they not seeking help? “There’s a lot more shame for women,” says Hall. “We accept a man being a bit of a player, a bit of a lad. But a woman’s going to get a lot more societal shunning.”

One therapist in Bristol, Gary McFarlane, a member of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, who treats people throughout the UK and around the world via video link, told me that, broadly, he found that while men were more likely to be sex addicts, women were more often love addicts.

Hall, however, does not recognise the distinction. “All addictions are basically symptoms of something else,” she says. “For many people it’s a symptom of a lack of self-worth, a way of seeking validation and affection, of feeling wanted and feeling needed. That is equally true for male clients.”

When she first started working in the field, most men sought treatment after being found out by a partner. The therapy was part of an ultimatum. But, increasingly, her clients are coming of their own accord because they can no longer function with their dependency – some have spent “tens and tens of thousands” on their sexual habits. There are times, however, when the dependency still wins out. “One guy stopped coming,” she says with a broad smile, “because he said he couldn’t afford both me and ‘the girls’.”

In nearly all cases she sees, the entry point, the gateway drug as it were, is pornography. Like the other therapists I spoke to, Hall believes there has been a generational shift in behaviour as a result of the digital ubiquity of porn.

“The problem is hidden from the person themselves. You can’t drink alcohol or take drugs for five hours and not feel it the next day, or people around you not notice. You can watch porn for eight hours every single day and no one is going to know. There are no side effects.”

Yet Hall is not interested in pathologising watching pornography, or indeed any other sexual behaviour involving consenting adults. “Ultimately the type of the behaviour is not what defines an addiction, just as if you’re an alcoholic it doesn’t make any difference if you drink whisky or gin. It’s the dependency and inability to stop that defines the problem.”

Owen Redahan, a sex addiction counsellor who has a practice in London’s Canary Wharf, agrees. “I get clients coming in who say they must be addicted to sex and you go through it and they aren’t.”

Some people have high sex drives, which should not be confused with sex addiction. “Most of the people I work with,” says Hall, “have long ago forgotten what their sex drive is.”

She compares the situation to the chronically obese person who can’t stop eating. They don’t experience hunger and in a similar way the sex addict doesn’t feel sexual desire. What they are in search of is the dopamine hit from a risky or inappropriate sexualised encounter, the self-soothing buzz that will momentarily block out the underlying feelings of self-loathing and anguish. But those feelings soon return and the sufferer seeks respite in the next sexual encounter.

That is the cycle the writer Erica Garza describes in her memoir Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction. It’s a compelling read about sexual compulsion. “I started watching mild porn,” she tells me, “but to get that feeling of shame I had to watch harder and harder porn. I had to go to extremes. I had to find something that I thought was shameful and disgusting and that leaked out into the rest of my life.”

Pretty soon Garza was picking men up in bars and having unprotected sex with them, which left her with an emptiness she vainly tried to fill with more reckless sexual behaviour. What’s unusual about her case is the pattern of her recovery. As she tells it in her book, she met a man she fell in love with and sex became a medium for expressing love rather than anaesthetising pain. In her new “healthy” relationship, she avoided pornography and put a premium on monogamy, because that felt the safest way to live her life.

No one can be certain, but by some assessments the relapse rate for sex addiction seems to be quite high, partly, perhaps, because of the ease and proliferation of casual or commercialised sex, and pornography.

“After a while,” says Garza, the monogamy and no pornography strictures “felt inauthentic, as if I was cutting off a part of my sexuality. That didn’t feel right.” Now she and her husband have boundaries in place, though she seems to suggest that they’re quite permissive – at least by the standards of most recovering sex addicts.

And this is where sex, as a form of addiction, is a problematic concept. The alcoholic, the drug addict, the compulsive gambler all know that recovery involves total and, ideally, permanent abstinence. But what of the sex addict? Celibacy is not much of an answer. So what is?

“Identifying what is positive sexually to that person,” says Hall. “When, after a sexual encounter, you feel worse about yourself, that’s not a good sign. So the exercise we do is write down what is definitely OK and what is definitely not OK, and they’re allowed a temporary space, which is ‘iffy’.”

“Pornography almost certainly is not OK ever [for the sex addict], but it can be OK – and this is the critical understanding of sex addiction – if it is coming from the place of libido, from sexual desire, as opposed to dopamine arousal. Masturbation is the classic one. When is it OK? When is not OK? Not in Sainsbury’s.”

For Rob Joy, the road back from sex addiction has been long and difficult. Earlier in his life he underwent a dramatic change when he became a Christian. For 10 years before that, from the age of 16 to 26, he’d been a drug addict, and for most of that time a crack addict. Yet when he took to religion, he was able to stop overnight. He got married to a fellow believer, and told his story of overcoming drug addiction, criminality and gang life to rapt audiences around the country. But not even his love of God could stop his sexual compulsions.

Like many addicts, Joy traces the source of his problem to childhood trauma – in his case being introduced to pornography as a four year old by older children on his estate. His father, he says, also had a lecherous attitude to sex and, in fact, died in a brothel while having sex with a prostitute.

“You don’t want to become a victim,” Joy says, “but sex addicts are victims, too. You see people being named and shamed at the moment, and their behaviour is absolutely wrong and it needs correcting, or punishment, but the way we are shaming people is causing so much more damage to them, because most of them probably have similar stories to me. Their brains have been set like wet concrete at an early age.”

Joy, who also describes himself as “an author and itinerant Evangelist”, undertook treatment with Gary McFarlane, and that made him come to terms with the nature of his problem. He now has a security app on his phone and his laptop that alerts his wife to any ill-advised communications. Recently, he sent a message to her that ended with a loving “XXX”, which triggered an alarm owing to its pornographic connotation.

“I genuinely do not want to watch porn,” he says. “I do not want to dishonour my wife or degrade the women on the internet. I weep over it. I walk into shops with my 12-year-old son and magazines are at eye level. And I say, sorry that’s wrong. You can go two or three weeks and one day you just go, I need it. And the risks you’ll take in being caught are ridiculous.”

Luckily his wife, Lydia, has been extremely supportive and understanding.

“Obviously I was very hurt,” she says. “I went through different phases. At first I felt sympathy, because I saw how people were looking at him with total disgust. But there were also times when I just felt anger, mostly at the situation, but that came out as being more distant from him.”

Lydia never lost her belief in his strength of character but, watching his efforts, she also regained her trust. Having gone through the experience, she has contributed to a book he has written about his addiction.

“I want to help people and the partners who feel that they can’t forgive or understand it,” she says.

Sex addiction may not have made it into the psychiatric manuals, but it does seem to have entered plenty of people’s lives. In many respects it’s a modern phenomenon, born of increased opportunities, the anonymous and hyper-sexualised online world, and the forlorn urge to find transient respite from the all-too-common internal voices of angst and self-doubt.

Yet, like some fiendishly adapted parasite, it’s made its home in humanity’s oldest and most vital urge. And this means that, whether or not clinicians agree that it exists, it’s unlikely to go away.

Originally publised by The Economist

IN THE 17th century Yoshiwara, in north-eastern Tokyo (then known as Edo), was one of a number of red-light districts. Both female and male prostitutes walked the streets, offering a full range of services. Four hundred years later Yoshiwara remains a centre of the sex trade, but customers’ desires are becoming less explicit. Scores of “soaplands” such as “Female Emperor” offer men a scrub by a lingerie-clad woman, for around ¥10,000 yen ($94).

Yoshiwara’s transformation reflects broader changes in Japan’s sex industry. Reliable data are difficult to come by, but softer services seem to be gaining popularity at the expense of harder ones such as vaginal sex (which is illegal but widely available) or oral sex (which is legal). The sex trade in Japan has long been about not only intercourse, but also the yearning for intimacy and romance, says Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist, and these are the services that are growing.

There are, for example, more kyabakura, places where men go to be served drinks and fawned over by women, and “image clubs”, where men act out fantasies (minus the climax, at least in theory) in mock doctor’s surgeries or train carriages. Onakura shops allow men to masturbate, while female employees watch. The pornography industry is in rude health, too.

Elderly, not abstinent
The shift to less carnal services started after the second world war, when the prudish American occupiers urged the Japanese authorities, against their better judgment, to outlaw payment for vaginal sex in 1958. More recently, however, demographic and economic factors have accelerated the change. Some 28% of the population is over 65, the highest proportion in the world. The old stay healthy for longer, but are after “softer, less explicit services”, says Katsuhito Matsushima of Yano Research Institute in Tokyo.
Elderly, not abstinent

A recent edition of Shukan Post, a weekly magazine, described how some elderly men visit soaplands “just to talk to the babes”. The owner of a “delivery-health” business, which dispatches girls to homes and hotels in Hiroshima, says that older people have replaced those in their 20s as his main customers. Rather than having intercourse, he says, they simply want to spend time in the company of young women.

Akira Ikoma, the editor of My Journey, a sex magazine, says that today his publication is aimed mainly at men in their 50s and 60s. The photos are demure: no genitalia and not many breasts. An elderly man with a walking stick shuffling around an outlet of M’s Pop Life, a chain of adult stores, can find much aimed at him. One example is “silver porn”, starring the likes of Maori Tezuka; she retired last year, at 80, after a nine-year career.

At the same time, the sex industry is adjusting to cater to young Japanese who are also less interested in carnal pleasures. Once it was common for young men to lose their virginity to prostitutes in Yoshiwara, something known as fudeoroshi, meaning writing with a new brush. Now virgins often remain so indefinitely. A recent survey found that 42% of unmarried men and 44% of unmarried women had never had sex by the age of 35 (over 50% of Japanese men and over 60% of Japanese women are married by the time they are 30-34). Many young people see sex as mendokusai, or tiresome, says Mr Yamada. Services for the young are often about “doing it by themselves—quasi-sex”, Mr Matsushima says. Services that make masturbation more enjoyable are booming, such as websites that offer chats with naked girls or video parlours where men can watch adult DVDs in a private booth.

Some see all this as a sign of the decreasing confidence of Japanese men. Local media talk of “herbivores” who are fearful of independent women. Maid cafés, where women in frilly aprons blow on customers’ food before spooning it into their mouths, are packed with men (and tourists). In soineya stores, or cuddle cafés, clients pay to lie next to a girl. If they pay extra they get a pat or the woman stares directly into their eyes. Sociologists reckon the lack of confidence may also account for another trend in the sex industry: the fetishism of young girls. Some businesses, for example, give men the chance to walk or lie with someone dressed as a schoolgirl, which is legal as long as the sex workers involved are not actually of school age.

Economics may be playing a part in the sex industry’s evolution, too. Gone are the bubble years when there was lots of cash to throw around. Sex is expensive, says the owner of the delivery-health service, whereas a visit to a maid café can cost as little as ¥1,000. Yet the decline in the conventional sex industry does not mean a decline in the overall business of adult entertainment. A study by Yano Research Institute found that sex-related facilities and services grew by 2.1% in 2014, and sales in sex shops by just under 1%, despite Japan’s ageing and shrinking population. Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, says Japan is its fourth-largest source of traffic.

Mr Ikoma, the editor, attributes this in part to the business being more culturally accepted in Japan than elsewhere. Many companies still see fit to entertain clients in the equivalent of strip clubs, while pornographic magazines are sold in most convenience stores. And whether or not Japanese men are losing their taste for penetrative sex, they are not short of creative alternatives.

Who would have thought it? Turns out it’s women, more than men, who get bored with sex first in long term relationships.

Read more at The Atlantic here.

Some lucky guy attended the JAV Expo 2017 and shares his experience of the event.

Read more here!

In this interview from 2013, Yumi Kazama tells how she entered the AV industry and how she grew into the role she’s still commonly playing in movies.

Read more here!

Yumi Kazama can be seen in BBAN-075: Love Between Mature Women: Yumi Kazama & Rena Fukiishi

An interview in two parts with Shimiken and Taku Yoshimura, famous male Japanese Porn Actors, by Find Your Love in Japan. Find out how they entered the adult industry, their achievements, and what it takes to make it as a male actor… and it’s not what you may think.

Taku Yoshimura appears in SSNI-053: The Volleyball Player

Part 1

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7iEQA7jhgM

Mikako Abe provides some insight into how she entered the AV industry, her motivations, character and her routines. Thanks to Find Your Love in Japan for this interview.

Mikako Abe appears in HNDS-038: 5th Year Anniversary Creampie Island.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRvjwaM1HPE