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The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships. Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker, directors. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 20 1 1 . 56 min. $250.00.
This film begins with several college students talking about their earliest experiences looking at adult videos and magazines. The brief interviews are intercut with pictures of their childhoods. The Price of Pleasure starts with the insinuation of the innocence and purity of childhood and the promising future that awaits and pornography as an early polluter of youthful virtue. Although not an overt statement of the filmmakers' opinions, these early interviews reveal the underlying case being made: The adult entertainment industry is a monolithic enterprise with harmful and destructive effects.
The broad questions explored in this documentary concern the construction of gender, desire, and relationships. Also, how did the porn industry become part of the cultural and economic mainstream? The filmmakers' exploration of these questions centers on two commonly addressed themes in most documentaries regarding adult entertainment: profit and the exploitation of women.
The adult film industry produces 13,000 videos and over 900 million rentals every year, generating between $10 billion and $14 billion annually, according to the filmmakers. The filmmakers establish porn's mainstream presence by discussing how CBS, Time Warner, and News Corporation earn over $ 1 billion a year through their distribution of these videos and the production and licensing of programs such as The Girls Next Door on E! Entertainment and The Cathouse on HBO. The increasing political and legal clout of the adult entertainment industry is explored through the 1981 creation of the Free Speech Coalition. The coalition is best known for the 2002 Supreme Court decision Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. According to the filmmakers, this increased presence of pom in mainstream media and the creation of the Free Speech Coalition have facilitated the omnipresence of porn. Ultimately, the filmmakers argue that adult content has saturated the public realm to such a degree that there is...