NEW YORK, NY — Chyng Sun doesn’t believe her documentary film The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships has all the answers about American social dynamics, but she believes it makes a good starting point for discussion.“In many ways, I think pornography is a great lens,” Sun told the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women when she screened the film for the group earlier this month.
A professor of media studies at NYU’s School of Continuing Professional Studies, Sun said Americans spend billions of dollars on porn annually, and even more is downloaded for free from the Internet. One of the things she finds disconcerting about that is the way porn reinforces gender stereotypes. The overall impression in her documentary is that pornography — and by extension, American society at large — is overwhelmingly male-dominated, and women are little more than playthings to be used for men’s pleasure and expedience.
The Price of Pleasure examines the viewpoints of scholars, feminists, adult industry insiders and members of the public who attend the annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.
As part of the documentary’s process, Sun and a team of researchers analyzed scenes from the reportedly top-grossing adult films of 2005. To their dismay, they found 94-percent of the physical aggression depicted in the films was directed at women.
Of even more concern: The women were depicted as enjoying, sometimes even asking for, the pain or humiliation their characters endured — even though, according to porn stars interviewed on camera for the documentary, the performers frequently felt uncomfortable doing what their roles required.
Do men and women really interact that way, or are stereotypes so strongly ingrained in the social subconscious of America that they’re impossible to avoid? That was among the questions Sun began to ask.
University of Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen, who introduced the film and spoke again afterward, put the question another way: “If [porn is] just fantasy, why those fantasies?”
Although the debate has raged for decades about whether porn is “good” or “bad” for women, Sun said her agenda is not to castigate the industry or its product, but to uncover why the most popular pornographic images and tropes are the most popular. She said she hopes to advance the discussion about adult entertainment and its larger role as a reflection of society.
“I felt that we need to start with ground zero,” she told the commission. “We are taking on a billion-dollar industry. Let’s really look at pornography and have an open discussion.”
