LOS ANGELES – After watching the Rashida Jones-produced 2015 documentary Hot Girls Wanted, I thought I had a good read on Jones and her take on porn.
Like a lot of others who have looked at porn from a liberal feminist perspective, Jones’s documentary concluded the porn industry represented wholesale exploitation, a point she made by selecting one of those low-rent “talent agencies” most people within the industry had never even heard of and dissecting it into its many problematic, amateurish parts.
Even though I found myself agreeing with some of what Jones said about porn, sex and the peculiar place of both in American culture, the documentary caused me to temporarily lose all interest in Jones’s perspective, in large part because I figured I’d heard and seen it all before.
There’s nothing particularly challenging or unusual about taking a controversial topic (any controversial topic) and presenting a one-sided take on the subject. In some ways, this is a succinct description of the career of another documentarian, Michael Moore.
Whether the subject is gun control or health care, if you scratch beneath the surface of Moore’s work, what you quickly find is a tendency to abandon facts that tend to argue against the filmmaker’s thesis, in favor of sensational emotional content elevating (in many cases, admittedly compelling) individual anecdotes that reinforce the thesis.
In effect, after watching Hot Girls Wanted, I thought I had Jones pegged, at least in the context of her take on porn. She is to the porn debate what Moore is to the gun control debate, I thought: a vocal proponent of a certain point of view, masquerading as a centrist documentarian who just wants to “start a conversation.”
In reading some of Jones’ more recent statements about porn, given in the context of promoting the new Netflix series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, I now realize I was wrong about her. Jones is not anti-porn, per se, she’s just one of many women out there who would like to see porn changed for the better — or changed for what she perceives to be the better, at any rate.
Among the things Jones said that caught my eye was her professing interest in “female-directed porn reflecting female-led desires.”
“There’s a difference between sexuality and sexualization,” Jones said, leaving little mystery as to which she thinks “typical” porn represents, versus the kind of porn for which she’s advocating.
If this sounds a lot like quotes you’ve read from a number of current female porn directors and producers, from Candida Royale and Angie Rowntree to Erika Lust and Courtney Trouble, it’s because it is a lot like the things those women have been saying, in some cases for decades.
While I didn’t think too highly of the original Hot Girls Wanted documentary, I’m greatly encouraged by Jones’s more recent statements and by the prospect of someone who has achieved a great deal of success in mainstream entertainment showing an openness to pornography, albeit to a very specific form.
While I doubt Jones ever will produce or direct porn of her own, it wouldn’t surprise me if she were to weigh in on specific productions that represent her vision of “ethical porn,” particularly when the auteur(s) behind the titles are women. This possibility may not sound too significant in the abstract, but when you consider where we stand in the public conversation about porn these days, with state after state issuing proclamations declaring porn to be a public health crisis, an “endorsement” of any type of porn by a mainstream celebrity is a good thing.
If Jones ever were to dip a toe more directly into the world of sexually-explicit media, say by directing or bankrolling an erotic film, this would be even more encouraging, of course. Regardless of how negative my reaction to the first documentary released under the Hot Girls Wanted banner, everything else I’ve seen from Jones reveals an undeniable level of talent, intelligence, humor and perceptiveness, all of which are welcome elements in a porn director, writer and/or producer, as well.
I also like to believe, perhaps naively, Jones has a mind open enough to recognize “good porn” made by men, too, if she were to run across such. In other words, while it appears feminist porn is the gateway by which Jones has at least partially embraced porn as an expressive form, as she becomes more familiar with the industry, she might come to see some value in genres and angles to which she’s currently hostile.
It’s also possible, of course, the new Netflix series will be the last we hear from Jones on porn, ethical, feminist or otherwise.
I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, because whether I agree with her in part, in full or not at all, at least Jones approaches the subject with a degree of intelligence and nuance. This may not sound like a lot to hang my hat on, but it’s certainly more than I can say for this guy.
