Smackdown Time for Max Hardcore: Jury Finds Paul Little Guilty on 10 Counts of Criminal Obscenity
Jun 6th, 2008 by admin
WARNING — GRAPHIC — MAY TRIGGER
Of pornographer Paul Little’s (”Max Hardcore’s) penchant for making films, for example, depicting ”actresses” who hold themselves out to be 12 years old vomiting after being orally raped, followed by the rapist urinating on them, or being forced to drink urine and vomit, Hardcore’s attorney, Jeffrey Douglas, argued:
[The offensiveness of the videos] is the politically incorrect depiction and relationship with women. That is the actual evidence of serious political value.
In other words, Little/Hardcore (or anyone) is entitled to publicly state that women deserve to be treated as they are treated in the films that he makes. His depictions of brutality, violence and hatred of women are his “free speech”. When Hardcore tells an “actress” on film, “You look better with puke on your face,” after having apparently raped her until she vomited, he is making a political statement about women that ought to be protected and defended under the law.
A seven-woman, five-man jury didn’t buy it. Yesterday they convicted Little and Maxworld Entertainment of five counts each of distributing obscene materials over the Internet and through the mail. Each count carries a possible maximum penalty of five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Asked to decide whether Little should lose his home as well as his domain names, jurors decided he could keep his home but not the domain names.
News reports describe Little’s attorneys as “shaken,” speaking expansively and with all seriousness about this terrible blow to the First Amendment. They had attempted to characterize “Max Hardcore” as a Homer Simpson-like figure, a caricature or cartoon, the acts depicted as consensual and not “real.”
Little apparently cried after being sentenced, bawling, “At least they didn’t take the house.”
Well, buddy, they should have. I’m having difficulty feeling your pain. It’s men like you who are ultimately responsible for incidents like this and this. The harm you have done to women is incalculable and unconscionable.
Now watch the pro-porn crowd defend this guy with a straight face, just like they defend the making of “virtual” child porn (even though everybody knows there is almost zero “virtual” child porn, it is all real). I’m still waiting for someone to answer the Apostate’s excellent question from the thread on child porn. She noted that companies that make blow-up dolls (masturbatory aids for men) stop short at making children dolls. Why’s that? I think it’s because they know it’s dangerous to do so, despite their endless, fatuous arguments about the harmlessness of fantasies and whatever isn’t “real.” Of course, the women in Little’s films are real, just as what is being done to those women on film is also real.
Thanks to Donna Hughes DIGNITY listserv for the heads up.
I glad the jury didn’t fall the freedom of speech argument. This man puts so much hate into the world.
The women in his videos have no freedom of speech as tey are being degraded and tortured. He does not care about the mental effect his “fun” will have on those women.
I hope he get a long sentence.
well, I say let him keep the house–put him in it, chain him to a chair…
BURN THAT BABY DOWN…
but then, ah, thats the Maoist in me creeping up isn’t it,
but that house of his,
bought and paid for by the rapes/tortures of HOW MANY YOUNG GIRLS?
As for the ones who cry boo hoo over him…easy,
throw them in a room with this monster for about two days…
would cure that shit real quick.
They support his type of filth because its not them that the violence is directed to, they think by being open minded that they are some how insulated from that hate of women,
what to expect from Stupidity, seriously,
anyhow,
I too am glad the jury didn’t fall for the stupid free speech argument, and I hope they not only throw his sorry ass to rot in prison,
but that they throw him in with some really large men…
[I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling civilized today]
So Little cried did he when he was read the verdict. Poor man but at least he wasn’t subjected to horrific sexual violence, unlike the women he has routinely raped and sexually abused all in the name of so-called ‘free speech.’ Unfortunately there will without doubt be calls for this verdict to be overturned because it violates ‘free speech,’ or claims Little was a victim of feminist oppression. The porn industry will not allow this verdict to go unchallenged because their profits are far more important than the supposedly ‘trivial issue’ of women’s rights not to be raped and sexually abused by men in the name of male entertainment.
But at least one pornographer has had his huge misogynstic ego dented and that to me is good news but I just hope it is not an isolated case given that pornography is mainstream and of course does not have any casual connection to men’s increasingly more violent acts being committed against women and children.
Ah just to make it crystal clear - pornography whilst not directly causing men and boys to commit violence against women it does normalise existing misogynstic beliefs concerning women. It also reinforces existing beliefs that women but not men are responsible for acts of male violence against women and children.
If you read further into this case, you will discover that the only reason that he convicted on as many counts as he did, or really on any at all, is because a bloc of jurors browbeat and harassed the rest into voting guilty. There are reports of both male and female jurors coming up to Mr. Little after the trial and apologizing for their vote.
I do not mention this to defend Mr. Little. I point this out as one of the many reasons why this case will definitely go to appeal.
Whatevs, John L. Robinson. The jury voted the way the jury voted.
So all the Max Hardcore supporters are attempting to comment here. No.
You know, like Laurelin, who commented earlier and whose posts were lost when my blog moved to a different server, I’ve always been against an obscenity law approach to pornography. I’ve consistently opposed censorship in favor of laws which allow those harmed by specific works of pornography to sue those who have created or trafficked in those specific works.
But you know what? My position has not helped women. All that happens is, idiots and haters like Max Hardcore destroy the lives of girls and women. At this point, I’m just really glad this sorry and pathetic excuse for a human being got a tiny bit of what he has coming to him. I’m sick of woman hating. I want justice for women.
Hmm, and I wouldn’t mind betting that if the jury had decided the way the pornsick apologists had wished, those jurors would be described as ‘twelve good men [sic] and true’, holding the torch for freedom of speech! First amendment! Abdication of responsibility towards anyone but oneself! etc. There would be no accusations of ‘browbeating’ then…
Perhaps (shock, horror!) one ‘bloc’ of the jury actually managed to convince the other part of the validity of their arguments. Y’know, with, like, free speech and debate and stuff? All that stuff porn apologists claim they love so much (except when it doesn’t go their way)?
I fail to see how anyone can read the desriptions of Hardcore’s movies, of a woman fucked until she pukes, and then claim ‘free speech’ and ‘consent’, as if that undid all the mental and physical harm done to the women in the film, and to women generally, when an atmosphere of woman-hating is bolstered by this abuse. This man should not be protected. This man should be in gaol.
Women are worth so much more than this, deserve so much more, and I for one am sick of the endless self-serving rationalisations from those men who regard their pathetic thrills as overriding the rights of women to be treated as human beings.
John, dear, that’s what juries do. They have to have a unanimous vote, so when they disagree, they do something called “deliberating” until they can reach a verdict, in which - although it may be surprising - jurors argue for the side which they support. I hope we’ve cleared up that little confusion for you.
Probably some of the jurors were affected, emotionally, by seeing him break down. I can only be glad that they were also affected by seeing the women that he raped until they puke. I’m not generally an obscenity-law fan (since it gives all power to the government to decide what will be prosecuted, which doesn’t necessarily have to do with what hurts women) but if it gets Max Hardcore into prison it has done something wonderful for the world.
Don’t know if anyone will read this, but here goes. I am in no way, shape or form a Max Hardcore supporter, he’s obviously a sociopath and an abuser, and I really don’t understand how anyone can consider his movies erotic at all. He makes sex into an ugly, disgusting thing at the expense of these women but…don’t they agree to do this stuff? What causes them to let such men do things like this to them? I’d be out of there so fast the first time a man slapped or gagged me intentionally during sex. I’ve watched a few of his scenes and just was horrified at how like rape Hardcore’s depiction of sex is and just wondering why she doesn’t get the hell out of there. Is the money really that good? Anyway, not to start a fight, but aren’t these women also responsible for the violence and misogyny that violent porn fosters when they lie there and take this kind of abuse? Aren’t they in cahoots with their abusers? I just can’t make sense of this because it makes me so angry yet I just can’t get over the willingness to do this kind of thing for money. Well, hope someone responds.
Lola , I can understand why you are angry, and it appears that the women being raped are allowing the violence.
As a woman who was in the sex trade, and on the receiving end of sadistic and degrading sex, I do not believe it that simple.
Max Hardcore is very violent man, so I really doubt if the women or girls have any real choice. I am sure they threatened with more violence if they do not “perform”.
I was prostituted, and one way of dealing with extreme violence that I was on the receiving end of, was to distached the mind from the body. This can means that you become like a robot in order to survive.
I also think many women and girls in the sex trade have come from a lifetime of sexual violence. This will destroy their self-esteem, and often can means they have been brainwash to believe that they must be just a sex object.
As a sex object, they made to believe that their pain and degradation is of no important.
Many women and girls in the sex trade have live with male violence and hate for so long, that being forced to do sadistic and degrading sex is like committing suicide.
But most important, the people to blame are the men that choose to produce or participate in degrading and sadistic sex on women and girls.
Not the women and girls who are mentally, physically and sexually damaged by the sex trade.
Lola, I think there are some women who are in cahoots with Max Hardcore, but in general, those women aren’t the women in the filth he produces. Instead, they are women who would agree with Hardcore that women can consent to being violently sexually assaulted in his films and that if they are over 21, it’s all good. Some of those women identify as feminists. They do great damage to all women.
Women enter into degradation like this because they believe it is what they deserve, because they think the attentions of men, even men’s degrading and violent attention, means they have value, because they desperately need money because they are poor, addicted or marginalized in any number of ways, because they have been so consistently raped and violated, sometimes over their whole lives, that it’s all they know, because they think in aligning with men and agreeing with men that women deserve to be sexually assaulted and battered, they are somehow not a victim.
Andrea Dworkin wrote:
“I spent a lot of years on the street living hand to mouth, these New York Streets and other streets in other hard cities. I can hide my prostituting because I went to college and no one ever looks for a woman’s real life anyway. I thought I was a real tough-ass and I was: tough-calloused; tough-numb; tough-desperate; tough-scared; tough-hungry; tough-beaten-by-men-often; tough-done-it-every-which-way-including-up…
“”I know about the lives of women in pornography because I lived pornography…
“Societies are organized so that men have the power they need to use women the way that they want to. …”
“Male dominance means that …society creates a pool of prostitutes by any means necessary so that men have what men need to stay on top, to feel big, literally, metaphorically, in every way…What prostitution does in a society of male dominance is that it establishes a social bottom beneath which there is no bottom. It is the bottom. Prostituted women are all on the bottom. And all men are above it. They may not be above it much but even men who are prostituted are above the bottom that is set by prostituted women and girls. Every man in this society benefits from the fact that women are prostituted whether or not every man uses a woman in prostitution. …prostitution comes from male dominance, not from female nature. It is a political reality that exists because one group of people has and maintains power over another group of people. …We need to look at the role of men in romanticizing prostitution, in making its cost to women culturally invisible, in using the power of this society, the economic power, the cultural power, the social power, to create silence…among those who have been hurt, the silence of the women who have been used.
“We need to look at the role of men in creating a hatred of women, in creating prejudice against women, in using the culture to support, promote, advocate, celebrate aggression against women. We need to look at the role of men in creating a political idea of freedom that only they can actually have. What is freedom? Two thousand years of discourse and somehow it manages to leave us out. It is an amazingly self serving monologue that they have going here. We need to look at the role of men in creating political systems that subordinate women…We need to know the ways in which all those men use prostitutes and in doing so destroy the human dignity of women.
“The cure…is political. It means taking power away from men….They have too much of it. They do not use it right. They are bullies. They do not have a right to what they have, and that means it has to be taken away from them.
“…any vestige of sex hierarchy, any, will mean that some women somewhere are being prostituted…because every hierarchy needs a bottom and prostitution is the bottom of male dominance. So when you accommodate, when you compromise, when you turn a blind eye, you are collaborating. Yes, I know that your life is at stake but yes you are collaborating, both things are true, in the destruction of another woman’s life. ”
I think, again, that the women in cahoots are the women who are turning a blind eye or defending what happens to women in Hardcore’s films as a “choice” for women. I think that the women in Hardcore’s films are victims of rape and sexual assault, and no woman can meaningfully “choose” or consent to either.
I am writing to say thanks so much for quoting Andrea Dworkin. Each time I see her words, it gives strength and reminds that I am going in the right direction.
I remember the terrible “toughness” I lived with when I prostituted. The living as tough because all emotions are dead. The acting tough as men raped and tortured me. Being tough is one way to save your life when death is very welcoming.
I was very moved by Andrea Dworkin saying -
“no-one ever looks for a woman’s real life”
For most exited prostituted women will hide in their new life, and try to ignore the truama in their body and mind.
I went to university. I use that I was middle-class to hide. But I mostly hide from myself by blanking out prostitution from my memory. It was too hard to see.
I had to collapse to remember, I had to break the tough wall hiding my real self from me.
To me my forgetting show the true nature of prostitution. I forgot because the sexual violence and degradation that men put me through could not be remembered till I was mentally strong enough to cope.
Many women who were sadistically abused in the sex trade have blanked out what happened, even when it has happened many times and for many years.
I blanked out about ten years. That said a lot about the violence I lived through.
I agree with Andrea Dworkin that men need prostituted women and girls so they can proclaim their power. They need a group at the bottom of the bottom, so they can justify sexual, mental and physical violence to all women.
Prostituted women are treated with utter contempt so that man can keep the status quo.
I agree with Tasha here, seriously. I think “Max Hardcore” needs to suffer tremendously, to die a slow and painful death. And even THAT would not make up for the disgusting violence he’s committed against women and girls, and videotaped it to share with his rapist consumers.
I remember watching Gail Dines’s presentation at Wheelock College on pornography, and she talked for a bit about Max Hardcore. He’s absolutely beyond despicable. While I think this disgusting piece of crap should be tortured, I am happy that at least he got a little slap in the face for the repulsive stuff he produces.
And the First Amendment should NEVER override the rights of marginalized groups (women, men of color, etc.) to be respected and treated as human beings. There’s something called the Fourteenth Amendment, ya know…
This guy is an embarassment to the United States of America.
He is a disgusting criminal of the lowest kind. The fact that he has not been imprisoned many years ago is a disgrace to the state and federal law enforcement.
Those that offer him any sympathy are in the same league.
His films are a disgusting legacy of the corruption of the US legal system.
So it appears that it is okay in the femi-nazi handbook to call for torture and death of a man but not to defend anyone from such attacks.
I guess I’ll just go start a blog calling for the torture and death of women I disagree with. I am sure you’ll all be okay with that, yes?
And again, in the interests of educating those who read my blog, I have approved one of several comments “Micheal,” spelled wrong, has attempted to make here.
A clue for you, “Micheal”: Paul Little/Max Hardcore is a white male supremacist of the most dangerous and odious kind. He makes his living creating and selling misogynist rape porn so disgusting a court has sent him to prison. Little is not oppressed, not a member of any minority group, not marginalized. He sits at the top of the hierarchy under male heterosupremacy. Given his crimes against women and humanity, for that matter, the spouting off that women are doing in this thread is understandable. What this guy does HURTS ALL WOMEN.
Take your whining and sniveling over Hardcore/Little getting (some of) what’s coming to him elsewhere. The guy is a menace to all decent people and so are you, because in your mind this guy is a persecuted victim! Here on my blog I will not play down is up and up is down and hardcore haters are oppressed because women on my blog rage freely about the way they hate women. You’ll have to take your delusions elsewhere. I approved your shortest comment, again, in the interests of educating those reading who might benefit from this type of education.
While I find Max Hardcore’s material reprehensible and disgusting it simply isn’t rape. Rape is non-consensual…all of the actresses in these movies have consented to what is going on. That doesn’t make it right, or non-exploitive, or fair or even human…but it does make it not rape.
What IS interesting to me about the phenomenon of Max Hardcore is that he is a micro-cosm of what happens to natural male sexual aggression when it is given absolute free-reign. From the beginning this guy’s stuff was rough. It was about power and submission. But it was still sexual. Now it doesn’t even resemble sex. Over the years it became less and less about sex as the brain and dick became numb to the old forms of power and in order to get a fix he had to resort to more and more bizzare and fucked-up ways to get his rocks off. A bit like a junkie who just needs a stronger and stronger dose. There is plenty of shit out there that is much, MUCH more degrading (including fem-dom stuff) but it does not have the same narrative arc that Max Hardcore’s career does. This is the real lesson about Max Hardcore: Pornography, fundamentally, begins to warp the sexual part of the mind until what constitutes pleasure and arousal becomes a squalid charade, a sick immitation, of what it began as. Whether the fetish is power, submission, feet, big, small, young, old, black, white…whatever. Every consumption of pornography with that fetish in it removes the sexual act further and further from it’s actual genesis as the simple and fundamentally good thing it began as: two people naked together making babies.
I have lived in a country where pornography was illegal. State censorship was a fact of life. I remember when the video for Salt N’ Pepa’s song Push It came out and it played once before being banned. The same thing hapened to George Michaels “I want your sex”, it’s amusing to think of all that now. When I was a teenager, outside of trips to this country, the closest thing I could find to porn was foreign fashion magazines.
This was not necessarily a bad thing. If people want to live in a country without these things then I suppose there is something to be said for it. I was walking down the street the other day and saw a giant Victoria Secret billboard and thought how completely midboggling that must be to someone who moves here from…say, a country like Saudi Arabia, where an image like that is essentially pornography.
The problem with censorship is the slippery slope. You can still be for censorship but the slippery slope must be acknowledged. To pretend it doesnt exist is ridiculous. If Max Hardcore’s pornography transgressed community morals then surely all pornography could be accused of doing the same thing. If speech that expresses values we find odious is illegal than surely someone who publishes a periodical claiming that certain races are subhuman, or has a radio program claiming that all muslims should be exterminated should also be in breach of the law. Many people might be fine with this…I for one would not be and I dont think the benefits of these sorts of censorship outweigh the negatives of the slippery slope.
I am a black man but I would firmly stand behind the rights of the Klan to say whatever they want. If the Klan hired black men to film videos of them being whipped and fake-lynched, I would be disgusted but I don’t think it should be illegal. Of course, I recognize that many people feel differently.
I don’t know if his films should be considered illegal or if his actions are “criminal,” as i am not a lawyer. But as an American and a human being I do know that he is a sick pervert and probably has distorted sex and the view of many towards women in his films, which in themselves probably appeal to fans of pedoplilia, rape and sexual degradation. Teens and young people may embrace and attempt to recreate this. Mle dominance, female submission and degradation translates-Rape. This guy has done tons of bad and literally no good. I can only wonder what has become of these vulnerable, lost and probably abused young girls he took advantage of. As far as a prison sentence for Mr. Little, right or wrong as it may be, the old saying….”You do Dirt, You get Dirt.”
Everyone reading this thread should please read numbers 10, 11 and 12.
My two cents:
When I was 21 I was volunteering at a street kids health center in Bucharest. The kids ranged in age from 7-18. The children were were about 85 percent boys, and some were prostitutes. Girls were about 15 percent of the homeless child population I worked with. They were all “crazy”, and the older the girl the more apparently “crazy”. When I say “crazy” when I describe the girls I knew, what I mean is extremely, deeply abused human beings, so that it seemed like they were completely somewhere else in their head all the time, like in a haze. They did not seem present. Basically trauma victims, all the time.
I understood then that there is only a certain amount of times a person can be raped without going insane. (Probably, maybe, for your own sanity.) What Dworkin writes above, about girl and women prostitutes being on the lowest rung of the patriarchal model we live (and somehow breathe) in–she is right. The girls I knew were to a last absent seeming, “mad”/”crazy”, even the loud or more tough-seeming ones. Prostituted females are treated as less than nothing, so they have to negate themselves to survive as Dworkin and Rebecca write above.
When you consider that about 70 percent of prostitutes worldwide began as 12 year olds, it isn’t hard to put two and two together and understand just where people like Max Hardcore find their actresses. The women in these films can be in these films because they have lived it already and know the part. When you look at the sheer number of rapes occuring right now this second, to women and girls all over the world, for some the first time, for some the 100th or thousandth, and for some by a john, and others by a family member — it is easy to see where you can find all these women who will do this “for the money”. It goes far beyond selling out or anything remotely like it.
When you say something isn’t rape if someone is paid, I don’t know. I’m sure there are people who would take money for getting murdered if they could come back–if this was an actual “job”. Who would want to? Only those who have been horrifically and criminally broken. This doesn’t even factor in the large number of prostitutes who risk being murdered by pimps if they try to leave.
Taken from :
http://www.avn.com/law/articles/32647.html
Max Hardcore Sentenced to 46 Months in Minimum Security Prison
By: Mark Kernes
Posted: 10/03/2008
TAMPA - Director Paul Little, aka Max Hardcore, was sentenced today to 46 months in a minimum security prison on charges of distributing obscene videos through the mail and the Internet.
Little was fined $7,500 and his company Max World Entertainment was fined $75,000. The director was charged with 10 counts in all, plus another 10 counts for his company.
Judge Susan G. Bucklew gave Little the minimum fines allowable by law. The recommended range for the fines was between $1.2 and $2.4 million.
Little has been advised to make no statements to the press.
I am in no way a supporter of Max Hardcore and what he does is just as repulsive to me as it is to many of bloggers, however I am reading comments where the general trend seems to be to blame men and society for individuals actions.
I am a black male and from low income background and this is also something I see so many people use as an excuse or validation for theer actions. Fact of the matter is these women signed contracts the MAJORITY of women who appear on his websites are not novices to the industry, in other words they know what they are getting into. When people believe they have the right to be the voice of EVERYONE just because of the experiences in their own lives that becomes ignorant and somehow condesending. I mean we all want the world to be how WE want it but reality is IT IS NOT. People have the right to do what they want as long as it doesnt harm others. And that includes harming themselves in the name of entertainment. Athletes break bones every day, Firemen and policemen die on the job porn actresses know the dangers of the business. What about personal choice and intrest?, I am sure “some” of the women who acted in his movies have been abused, but hey abuse happens to men too. I am sure some of these women have been coherced but at least they have CHOICES. I am starting to rant now but what I am trying to say is this I am an educated man who has managed to make a reasonable amount of money in an unfair world where there is obviously good and bad. Through this what I have learnt is that MOST times especially in the west where we live and the freedome that offers adults are responsible for the actions they perform and many many people will do the worst things for money and fame. We are not talking about people in 3rd World living under a dictatorship or communist regime here. These woman can say “hey I dont want the $1000″ and WALK OUT.
To say that women who perform in porn movies are all victims of abuse or brainwashed weaklings in a mans world is offensive to women. Its 2008 people some escorts charge $2000/hr for the pleasure of their company. What of the women who are paid to dominate men, to spit, deficate and insult men? What of the women who enter porn because they want superstardom and recognition and think it is the best way to achieve this? I am reading many intelligent posts but also many bitter posts, stop blaming men for all the wrongs in the world and society and start realising that women have a great deal of power some just choose to give it away because thats how they get their rocks off.
Also we need to stop judging others on our own value system, what one may find disgusting someone else may enjoy. I mean I have been there before trying to tell someone how they are living their life is wrong but its their own choice.For the women who were prostitutes reality is its fine to say men abused you and used you but the fact is you took money for that act. For someone like me who came from the lowest of the low and saw the worst of the worst and lived among roaches and rats to hear someone say today in America as an adult, I had no choice I see that as a cop out. We all have choice like Al Pacino said in the devils advocate “Free Will” (I am not refering to women abused as children)
Is Max a terrible human being who makes sick disgusting movies? Yes.
Is he an abuser YES BUT THEY LET HIM AND TAKE MONEY WILLING FOR IT. This is reflected in his light sentance.
Is he a rapist? No.
There are as many girls willing to enter porn everyday as there are girls who want to be the next Nicole Kidman or Drew Barrymore and most of them werent victims of abuse.
Hi, there, Self Made. You know, you really aren’t self made right? You came from the body of a woman, your mother. Your mother, and likely, your female relatives, cared for you, nurtured you, protected you, went to bat for you, raised you for many years, saw to it that you were fed, clothed and educated. As a man, your success, compared to women’s success, came at great cost to all of the women who directly served you, and the rest of womankind, which has always in millions of ways, served all mankind, including you, and including as objects used to satisfy male sexual appetites and male sexual dominance of the type Max Hardcore has made a fortune turning into hard cold cash.
I’d like radical feminists/womanists here to refrain for now from responding to Self Made.
Self Made, I direct you to three male privilege checklists. You are glaringly unaware of your own entitlement and privilege, compared with women, you are also glaringly aware of what women’s reality is in this world, and there is no discussion to be had between you and I or any of us here until you read and begin to consider all of these many privileges:
Male Privilege Checklist
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
Black Male Privilege Checklist
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2008/08/12/the-black-male-privileges-checklist/
Unpacking the Male Privilege Jockstrap
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/10/unpacking-male-privilege-jockstrap-by.html
Consider your own privilege, Sir. Then kindly rethink what you’ve written up there, an apologetic for male sexual and physical and emotional abuse of women.
Heart
I thought about responding earlier, when Mr. Africa wrote, but really, what’s the point? If you can’t see what’s wrong with porn (not from some point of “obscenity”, right-wing standpoint” but as abuse to the women in it as well as to all women who must live in a society with it) than there is something wrong with YOU.
Period.
Interesting how there do seem to be more posts by men on this feminist, *women’s space* blog when there are porn-related posts than on almost any other topic.
“Interesting how there do seem to be more posts by men on this feminist, *women’s space* blog when there are porn-related posts than on almost any other topic.”
Yeah, Laur. It’s as if they come out of the woodwork to defend Their Precious. They know that it’s wrong but just so long as no one speaks up and says so, they can keep porning without explanation or consequence.
Paul Little is a rapist and this has been documented, not just on his own films but also in a documentary filmed a few years ago which followed a woman’s journey as she travelled from the UK to the US with hopes of building a career in pornography.
Many of the issues that radical feminists raise with regard to pornography were clearly evident throughout this piece, from the woman’s vulnerabilty to manipulation by an exploitative agent to abuse and degradation and rape. At one point we see the crew stop filming and walking away because of what they are witnessing but they feel unable to intervene.
The director of the documentary (which was called ‘Hardcore’) was present at a panel discussion after a screening of his film and expressed the distress experienced by himself and others in the crew. He was very clear about the woman being completely unprepared for what she was getting into, about witnessing the process of the woman eventually being broken down in various ways until she ‘consented’ to being involved in various acts and in various different films, which she had originally stated that she would not participate in. He also expressed guilt and regret about inaction and feeling partly complicit in her abuse.
No, i don’t support the approach of using obscenity laws, but lets not pretend that Max Hardcore is anything but a serial rapist, misogynist and all round arsehole. I must also confess to hoping that his tears were real, his distress genuine and that sometime in the future women harmed by him will be supported to, and feel able to, take legal action against him.
faith2, what was the name of the documentary, if you don’t mind my asking? it sounds like vital info that has been erased by the pro-porners!
The documentary faith2 refers to was simply called “Hardcore”, as she also points out. Directed by Stephen Walker for Channel 4 (UK). Here´s a link to a pretty good article about the documentary:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/features/her-first-orgy-i-couldnt-face-it-680502.html
Saw the documentary a few years ago, and it´s a mystery to me why this man didn´t end up in jail back then; the film should be more than enough evidence to land the guy in jail. Not for obscenity, but for rape
Maybe the argument is at a draw, but my two cents:
Free Max Hardcore:
http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2008/10/free_max_hardco.php
I obviously fall on the side of this that accepts that people in Paul Little’s movies are consenting adults. I also fall on the side that doesn’t believe that representational expression should be held legally responsible for the actions it may inspire. That’s hardly the same as saying these situations are “all good.” Which is why I advocate criticism, union organizing in porn, and criminal prosecution of violence.
None of which has anything to do with obscenity law. When you sign on with the outcome of this case, you’re endorsing the idea that limiting expression is good for people. That was the argument of the Bush justice department prosecutors here, along with the one that “community standards” in Tampa (or wherever) can apply to videos originating anywhere else in the U.S. as long as they’re made available for over the internet and through the U.S. mail.
Dworkin’s writing is as important as ever, but I think what she’s most right about belongs to the realm of the unprovable, like David Thomson’s arguments about how film has altered the way we look at love and marriage. Her work is too brilliant to be reduced to a collapsing legal argument–it’s like bringing in Fast Food Nation to bolster the Twinkie defense.
Putting hate into the world can be speech. Max Hardcore videos are speech. But let’s say they aren’t. Let’s say instead that they’re something more like violence or an illegal narcotic. In that case, why haven’t the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in this case been charged with the crime of showing hours of these videos to a jury?
If a prosecutor shot a juror with a gun to demonstrate how a murder took place, he’d be arrested and charged with murder. If she handed out cocaine to a jury and urged jurors to sniff, she’d be thrown out or worse. By allowing Max Hardcore videos to be shown in court, as evidence of themselves (and not of, say, a criminal act being depicted), the judge demonstrated that they are speech. They communicate, demonstrate, and illustrate. Nothing in the mechanics of offering, showing, and viewing the video in that courtroom was any different than when somebody in Florida pops a Max Hardcore DVD onto the player at home. (And notice how none of this applies to child pornography, about which no subjective argument would ever be offered in court.)
I’m saddened by a lot of the discussion above, and the tendency it reflects, and not just because increased porn freedom has in many ways improved the culture and made it less sexist. That’s another longg argument, and, again, not one to bring up in the same breath as “obscenity.” (I’d take it up with Katha Pollitt, who cited home-pole-dancing and legal setbacks for equal pay in the same sentence earlier this year.)
To me, it’s as if a small but surprisingly influential faction of the anti-war crowd had siphoned human energy into opposing pro-war films, then gloated when a pro-war director got sentenced to years in prison for making one. To me it’s worse than wrongheaded or beside the point: It’s vocally siding with the forces of repression that encourage violence in the first place.
I’m “coming out of the woodwork” because free speech needs all the defenders it can get, including those who find Max Hardcore repulsive.
Hello, Peter. I don’t think the discussion or debate is at a draw. I think what happened to Max Hardcore at least moves in the direction of justice, and I do not find arguments otherwise remotely persuasive.
I’ll respond to your comment tomorrow, though others reading should feel free.
I am speechless that the major defence of this hardcore porn is that the “actresses” always fall back that they must of consented.
I always forget that women and girls that work in the sex trade are not viewed as fully human, so all their actions are placed in free choice.
Many of these “actresses” in hardcore porn have been moved from other parts of the sex trade, where they have been trained to “accept” violent and degrading mental, physical and sexual abuses. Part of this training involves looking happy. They are trained to speak that they “love” their work.
So what the hell is meant by “consent”.
Porn is the filming of the common violence to prostituted women and girls.
As an ex-prostitute, I know porn and performing as a prostitute are interchangeable.
Many johns pay to “copy” porn on the bodies of prostituted women.
I for instinct was in the era of “Hustler” and “Deep Throat”. My body has massive scars from men acting out that violence on me.
Most johns like to deny their hate by clinging hold that the prostitute seemed happy, so hell she must of consented.
Many johns or managers used prostituted women and girls to make porn, and make even more profit out of the goods.
I personally would put Max Hardcore in that catergory.
I am against Max Hardcore because he is raping and mentally abusing women. If “free speech” gives permission to this real violence, gives permission for women to be treated like they are sub-human, then I think free speech is just the speech of the sex trade.
There may be no “evidence” that many of the “actresses” have been abused before and or come from other parts of the sex trade.
This evidence is missing because many of these women are too intimidated by the degradation and violence to speak. Many who exited the sex trade want to cut out that part of their lives.
I speak of my experiences, but it makes me full of sickness, and I still have the terror.
I have learn to hate the word “consent”.
From what place of safety are these women speaking of their consent, choice, and happiness?
I am seperated from my wife who deep down I treasure. But I have placed my own sexually pleasure, no matter how wrong and sick, ahead of my love for her. I take full responsibility for my sin, but Paul Little has his role in my marriage breaking up that our Maker will hold him accountable for. Little has contributed to my choosing to distort what I know to be good and right in women and sex more than any other porn producer. I was relieved beyond words that he finally got a taste what he deserves. For myself and my wife but even more so for the women he so selfishly and indifferently has degraded. And for his leading of women being devalued by the porn industry.