Graphic Sexual Horror, a documentary made by Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon, shows the rise and fall of Insex, Brent Scott’s BDSM pornography company. Scott, more commonly known as “pd,” did not simply own and run the company—he also occupied the role of sadist/dominant in his films and live feeds. When the horrific nature of his pornography eventually caught the eye of the FBI, he was effectively forced to shut down his website due to federal obscenity laws.
While the documentary is pro-Scott (particularly when it comes to his right to “free speech”), it isn’t completely one-sided: Bell and Lorentzon document the abuse of models at Insex, and include stories that speak to Scott’s lack of regard for the models’ lives and safety. At the same time, Bell has claimed in interviews that many of the problems at Insex weren’t unique to pornography or even to Scott’s interpretation of BDSM porn:
In the movie, we tried to illustrate the moment when a model has to make an active choice – Do I want this money so much that I’m willing to put up with that? You see, we ALL have to make that choice in our jobs. Sometimes we need the money. But for many of us, we simply want more money. This is where we begin to see what I call the “secret actor” in our documentary (and in our lives). Money. It blurs the line of consent. […]
PD was also being driven by “the secret actor” in our film. The pressure of the audience and the money was higher for him than anyone else. He became a demanding boss like many bosses, yet when he breaks a limit on camera with a young, naked, vulnerable-looking model, it looks really bad to many viewers. In truth, he’s pushing the limits of the situation because he’s conscious of the pressure of all those viewers and their money. It doesn’t make it right, but if you put it into a day-to-day context, it’s pretty normal. […]
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In an interview included on the disc, co-director Barbara Bell discusses Brent’s behavior and, while acknowledging it was wrong, notes that sexual harassment isn’t exactly confined to the sex industry. One of the more interesting aspects of the documentary is that it raises the question of whether or not the “exploitation” and moral ambiguity we see in this film is that much different from the kind of exploitation of workers and pressure to violate one’s ethics that occurs every day in regular, non-porn industries. Is what happened at Insex really worse than what happens routinely at companies like Hewlett-Packard or IBM?
(source.)
Before you begin to think this sounds sensible, you should know that Bell is referring to multiple instances of Scott routinely violating, manipulating, and coercing the women who performed in Insex shoots. “When he breaks a limit on camera,” Bell is specifically talking about the time he hit a model across the face—even though she had established the action as a hard limit before she started the live feed. And he doesn’t just hit her, either. In the documentary, Scott is documented antagonizing her as she cries. He tells her this will be good lesson on the persistence of a question, and acts angry about her asserting that face hitting is one of her limits. Instead of stopping the scene or heeding her insistence that what happened was not OK, he tells her to stop lecturing him. Although she’s obviously upset, he continues to be insensitive, telling her to either continue the shoot or shut up. “It’s not about you, it’s not about me, it’s about what we’re doing here,” he says. “Do you understand that this is a show?” he keeps asking, and Scott tells her that she must know the difference between a show and real life. “It wasn’t personal,” he says. At the end, he says he will let her have this victory if she continues. Keep in mind that this is happening live.
This isn’t a one time thing for Scott, either. Graphic Sexual Horror shows again and again that models were treated horribly. Earlier in the documentary, around the 29 minute mark, Scott tests one of the model’s hard limits during a live stream. She tries to get him to back off by first quietly mentioning it’s a hard limit, and he says “I can’t hear you. Speak louder.” She says no a few times and he mentions that she has a safeword – that she needs to use it. He stops after she uses the Insex safeword “ah ah ah,” and he sighs after she tells him very loudly and firmly that this is a hard limit. He mocks her, asking if “Ms. Hardlimit” would like to continue. The torture scene is juxtaposed with soundbytes from an interview with the actress, where she says that it’s difficult to use a safeword during a live stream when you know others are watching. To put it simply, there’s pressure not to wimp out. In another torture scene with a different model, titled Hydrophobia, Scott submerges a woman – who is in a cage – into a deep pool of water. After she comes up the first time, she tries to catch her breath. As she utters “uh uh,” which sounds very similar to the Insex safeword, he lowers her again. And keeps lowering her, before she can even catch her breath. During the follow-up interview, she says the experience was scary, a “nightmare” even.
Another model mentions that they were discouraged to use their safewords. She talks about the second live feed she performed in as an example. She had notified Scott that she had never done anal before; without asking her, he roughly penetrated her anus with a very large object. This is juxtaposed with the scene in question, where the model’s mouth is covered by tape. She mentions that she feels like she was raped. She also says it wasn’t really rape when she could’ve used her safeword, but that she would’ve possibly lost the livefeed job and not be invited back. She concludes she wanted to come back for the money, not for the challenge or experience.
The same model mentions that she eventually left Insex because Scott stopped offering returning models work if they wouldn’t “play” with him off camera. The documentary explores this development at Insex, interviewing both Scott and some of the models he kept at his compound for 24/7 BDSM.
For Bell, these examples are simply “sexual harassment” or economic decisions—mundane, common to most work environments, and unfortunate. She simultaneously maintains that money “blurs the lines of consent” when it comes to sex in Insex pornography, even though I doubt she would see so much “nuance” in another work environment where a woman had to risk losing a job/money if she did not perform sex acts she found degrading or painful.
What I find distressing about Bell’s views is that she’s not the only one who thinks the informative message of Graphic Sexual Horror is that consent is “complicated.” The founder of sexgenderbody, Arvan Reese, reviewed the film after watching it during a sex positive film series. His “insights” echo Bell’s, and it’s not unlikely that he plagiarized things she said after the screening (she was attending for a Q&A). I say this because he specifically reiterates Bell’s assertion that sexual harassment is a problem, period, and there’s nothing different about it when it take place in the porn industry. He writes:
Now, if sexual harassment happens between the shift manager at a convenience store and one of the clerks, it’s just sexual harassment and it means nothing about the convenience store business. I happen to think the same reasoning applies here. It might be a temptation to just lay into the whole torture porn or porn business because of sexual harassment, but that is a mistake in my view. It allows the sexual harasser to shift the conversation away from the harassment. Harassment is harassment and the industry is unimportant.
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He also plays out the argument that consent is complicated, claiming that “… if they were being tortured and didn’t need the money or could get the same money elsewhere – then it is pretty much a freely given consent. If the girls did not feel that they could get that money in any other way, then I question whether the consent is in some way coerced.” In GSH, many of the models remark that there is no way for them to make comparable amounts of money doing anything else. One model, the one that lived at Scott’s compound, was addicted to drugs. Cyd Black, a former Insex employee who went on to work for Kink.com, shares a story about his ex-girlfriend. She didn’t like BDSM at all, but was addicted to drugs and needed money. Instead of being a stand up guy, he encouraged her to be an Insex model, knowing she’d accept even extreme abuse if she was getting paid. These examples, along with the many times Scott violated women’s boundaries during shoots or live feeds, are clearly situations where women were not freely consenting. When you apply even very basic feminist understandings of consent, the documentary leaves little room for Reese’s “if” statements.
Clarisse Thorn, a woman who’s built her career on talking about BDSM from a feminist perspective, recently mentioned Graphic Sexual Horror on Role/Reboot, writing that it’s one of her “favorite films in the world.” She goes on to say that “there are harrowing moments in the film that made me feel terrible for some performers. The film does a matchless job of highlighting the problems and complexities of sexual consent, once money gets involved. But Graphic Sexual Horror is also the source of my favorite positive porn anecdote” (source). She doesn’t mention the company specifically or any of the abuses documented in GSH, choosing instead to relate an anecdote of a former Insex performer who also lived with Scott on his BDSM compound. Thorn describes the anecdote:
… she got in touch with the porn site’s founder, and asked if she could come in for a shoot. He agreed, she came in, and afterwards he wrote her a check. She was like, “Wait, why are you writing me a check?” … and that was when she learned that the S&M-on-camera performance she had given was considered work. This porn site, which harmed some sex workers and showed some of the most extreme porn on the Internet, gave this woman an incredible route to explore her own sexuality.
I find it disheartening—and frankly disgusting—that Thorn glosses over Scott, an abusive pornographer, and his actions in order to relate her “favorite positive porn anecdote.” While I assume she doesn’t actually believe that one woman’s sexual liberation is more important than not abusing women, Thorn’s last line does suggest that the exploration of sexuality is of more concern than documented cases of rape and sexual coercion in pornography. And like Reese and Bell, she believes that sexual consent has “complexities,” particularly when money is involved, even though there are very explicit examples of coerced “consent” and economic exploitation in the documentary.
Sadly, if you look at other responses to Graphic Sexual Horror, whether from professional media outlets or no-name bloggers, they say similar (and sometimes worse) things. They’re especially keen on pointing out the “victimization” of Insex by the FBI*. But it’s not a good sign that figures in the sex positive movement look at this documentary as enlightening, especially when it comes to matters of consent.
*I don’t agree with using anti-terrorism laws to take down pornography sites. There should be very strict laws in place to help out actresses/models who are abused in pornography and to punish pornographers/porn companies that abuse these women. But I haven’t come across any criticism that meaningfully acknowledges how people like Max Hardcore and Brent Scott got away with raping women through “freedom of speech” laws and the porn industry.
The Unsexy Feminist 