The Porn Oscars

Reading two new anti-porn books (link below) brought back the horror of attending the XBiz porn awards. Needless to say, the entire evening was a horror-story from start to finish.

The red carpet had been rolled out, the cameras bulbs were flashing. As the guests began arrive, the mood was one of preening self-congratulation. Within the darkened function room at the four-star hotel, the air was thick with aftershave, perfume and cries of ‘awesome!’

But for all its superficial glamour and professional boasting, this event could hardly have been more tacky. The annual XBiz Awards (this year renamed as the XMAs), which I attended as a journalist in Los Angeles, is regularly portrayed by its organisers as the ‘Oscars’ of the porn industry. And it has many of the trappings of the renowned Hollywood ceremony, including the long catalogue of nominations, the gushing acceptance speeches, the jokey host and the frequent movie clips.

There the similarity ends. Degrading, trashy and vulgar, the XBiz awards are not a celebration of any real creative achievement, but of the ruthless exploitation of women for financial gain. The sheen of respectability cannot disguise the reality that this is a sordid industry built on cruelty and abuse, no different to prostitution. The porn producers and distributors I saw strutting around are just pimps in bow ties. The entire event was a grotesque parody of a real awards ceremony.

As a feminist writer and anti-porn campaigner, I have for decades argued that the industry harms the women involved in its production; that it degrades all women by objectifying them onscreen; that the men - and boys - who consume it start to see women as the passive recipients of their desires.

And over the years I have seen porn become ever more acceptable and ‘mainstream’, a development accelerated by the technological changes that have made it accessible via smartphones, videogames and laptops – including by children.

One report showed 26% of UK males used Pornhub, compared to 4% of females. Pornhub.com counted over 50 million unique users from September to November 2023, with at least 50% below the legal age.

But I believe we are all, adults and children alike, damaged by pornography and its insidious impact on our culture.

So it was in the spirit of ‘know thy enemy’ that I flew to California, to see first-hand how the porn industry is now presenting itself.

At times, the awards seemed like a bizarre amalgam of a mafia convention, a lapdancing club, and a provincial conference for insurance sales staff. Apart from the top money men in black tie and their less wealthy colleagues in cheap suits, there were characters who looked just like extras from the gangster movie Goodfellas, complete with shades, pork pie hats and winkle-pickers.

Most of the female porn performers tottered about in the uniform of barely-there dresses and impossibly high heels. Silicon breasts, tattoos and glazed expressions completed the look. There was an embarrassing lack of dignity to proceedings. In response to the noisy demands of some cameramen, one woman on the red carpet lifted her skirt to reveal that she was wearing no underwear, giving a new definition to the term flash photography.

It is a myth that the porn industry is dying because of the deluge of free content on the internet. In fact, there is more money to be made than ever because there are so many new platforms on which to spread the degradation, thanks to the growth of technology.

But the obsession with profit means that the pornographers are incredibly mean, as reflected not just in the poor pay of performers but also in the penny-pinching ceremony. The XBiz Awards might call themselves the porn ‘Oscars’, but the organisers were so stingy that the tables in the room just had a few dips and bowls of peanuts, while a grossly over-priced cash bar operated throughout the evening.

It has become fashionable to downplay the darker side of this industry, and to pretend that modern pornography can be a liberating force for women. It is a view that has even been adopted by some who see themselves as feminists.

However the XBiz Awards expose the complete nonsense of such claims. This is a trade that is controlled by men and glories in vicious misogyny. Far from ‘empowering’ women, as its cheerleaders say, porn humiliates and dehumanises them.

That was all too literally true in the case of XBiz Awards’ sponsor, a company called Fleshlight which manufactures sex dolls based on the bodies of real porn stars. Such dolls are a perfect symbol of the entire nature of porn: crude physical gratification, which clearly mirrors the male porn consumer view of the industry’s women as subhuman.

I asked one young female performer if it was the money that motivated her. ‘We’re in it for the fun,’ she told me unconvincingly, as if spouting industry propaganda.

But a male porn actor was more honest, especially about the degrading sex scenes. ‘The women don’t enjoy it. They have to take a load of painkillers. Yes, they just do it for the money.’

The sense of debasement is also reflected in the context and titles of the films, which are often nothing more than the enactment of male fantasies about rape, or sexual acts between women. There is even a genre called ‘Gonzo Porn’, which makes no pretensions to any plot or character, but instead just features endless sequences of aggressive sex.

But none of the producers or directors seemed willing to acknowledge their role in this degradation of women. I spoke to one, who, with his heavily hooded eyes resembled someone out of The Godfather, and asked him about the association between pornography and cruelty.

‘Hey, none of the women get abused on my set. We don’t put their heads down the toilet. We don’t gag them. They have fun.’ That says it all. The absence of torture is meant to be a sign of progress.

What was striking was the absence of any shame among those that peddle and profit from porn. One older woman told me with pride that her own daughter was up for an award, having designed a sex toy.

I was also amazed to hear how ‘Max Hardcore’ (who died in 2023), a performer known as the ‘King of Gonzo’ because of his brutal lack of restraint, was actually regarded as a hero in the industry, for supposedly pushing back the boundaries of taste. In any other commercial field, this figure would be a pariah.

But the industry is riddled with such contradictions. Pornographers make their money out of abuse, yet they have hijacked the language of social justice and freedom. Just as in prostitution, there is a lot of talk about sex workers’ rights, while the awards even had a category for ‘Feminist Porn Release of the Year’.

I noticed, though, that in this world of twisted ethics, one of the demands of the sex workers’ rights lobby is that the requirement to wear condoms on set should be lifted because it allegedly infringed personal choice. In practice, this would mean that women’s health would be put even more at risk.

The pornographers also trumpet the expansion of a new genre celebrating older women, which are now apparently becoming big business. But this is nothing to do with combating age discrimination. It is just another way of extending the shelf life of the porn performers, whose physical and mental health may already have been badly damaged by their mid-twenties by the treatment they receive.

But perhaps the biggest paradox about the awards is that they were so dull. An industry that allegedly thrives on stimulation turned the ceremony into one long, dreary, anti-climactic performance. The host, by the name of James Deen, was woefully inarticulate and, in front of an increasingly bored audience, every one of his jokes fell flat. Just as unfunny were the desperate attempts at humour in the parodic film titles – such as ‘Game of Bones’ or ‘The Whore of Wall Street’. Nor did the thank-you speeches make any more impact, most of them sounding even less sincere than the Hollywood versions.

In all, 160 awards were dished out. The whole process was the ultimate expression of the edict from the Dodo in Alice In Wonderland that ‘all must have prizes’. So, alongside the predictable ‘best producer’ and ‘best picture’ categories, there were awards for ‘best girl-on-girl scene’, ‘most innovative sex toy of the year’, ‘best Gonzo release’ and ‘best BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sado-Masochism) scene’. It might be said that this incontinent distribution of prizes devalued the whole industry, but that would imply that there is anything worthwhile in pornography.

The self-serving approach also illustrates how hostile to outsiders the porn industry is. I think I was one of the only journalists present who was not actually connected to the trade. Unlike any normal business, this is a sector without morality, boundaries or independent scrutiny.

Max Hardcore

During the evening I chatted to one woman, who was perfectly friendly until her boyfriend interrupted us. ‘She’s my slave,’ he said, explaining that they were both into sado-masochism and he was her master. Without any guilt, he said that he would often put a collar on her and restrain her with a leash. If she was bad, he added, she had to sleep outside in a kennel. His tale could be a metaphor for the entire porn industry. This is a culture that normalises the systematic oppression of women.

Relieved to get out of the ceremony, I returned to my own hotel, where I had a long shower and a very large gin.

My review of the antiporn books is here