Hot Girls Wanted, the newish documentary produced by actress
Rashida Jones, is making headlines and earning some rave reviews—as well as
getting panned by people in the adult industry and advocates for sex
workers—for its depiction of one tiny sliver of the wide world of porn, a
fly-by-night talent agency called Hussie Models, which operates out of a scuzzy
little house in Florida. The movie centers around a handful of young women at
the Hussie house at a particular time, but purports to be a window into
“professional amateur” pornography as a whole, strongly hinting that it’s an
industry that ruins many guileless young women who only wanted to be famous.
The idea that young women are being lured into the Big City
only to have their virtue wrecked is a very old story, going back to the 19th
century social purity movement and the Christian reformers who set up weekly
soapboxes outside houses of prostitution. In Hot Girls Wanted, the general
notion that porn irreparably or at least very seriously taints women is paired,
a little shakily, with shots of writhing pop stars like Miley Cyrus. Its goal
is somehow clear and vague simultaneously: Hot Girls Wanted is aiming to convey
something about our sexually-saturated, erotically schizophrenic culture—but
that something never resolves to anything much at all.
If amateur porn was, in fact, lying in wait within the
recesses of the Internet to snatch very young women away from loving homes to
plunge them deep into highly visible sexual slavery en masse, Hot Girls Wanted
would highlight a trend of sexual corruption that no civil society should put
up with. But the film’s obsession with sex kneecaps a much more important
discussion on young women and labor: a discussion that in one way is specific
to a small and unregulated corner of the porn industry in Florida, but speaks
more generally to the way cultural shame contributes directly to exploitation.
READ MORE BELOW
In Hot Girls Wanted, Porn Isn't 'Ruining' Women. Exploitative Labor Is.
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