I want to make a documentary about documentary filmmakers and their desire to always focus on the bad part of the porn industry. With the exception of Inside Deep Throat and the Pornucopia series that was on HBO back in the mid-2000s, there’s often a Puritan conservative slant against the industry.
Money Shot: The PornHub Story seems like it would be a focus on how the website went on to become popular and feature stories of performers and what they do. And it seems like it’s going to be this way at the start. We meet several performers who dispel the myths of people who were sexually abused as children and drug-addicted. That might have been the case back in the 1970s and 1980s when the Mafia had more control over it, but this is the 21st Century.
However, it quickly switches gears to focusing on a 2020 case involving the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, a conservative faith-based organization that has been around since the early 1960s. And most of the interviews are from Dani Pinter, lead counsel, who talks in a smug tone as she tiptoes around saying she’s doing God’s work. The same can be said for Michael Bowe, a lawyer represent a few dozen clients, who are suing PornHub for using “illegal content” for profit. Bowe just seems to cocky but he’s a lawyer.
It glosses over so many topics. I wanted to actually hear more about how Nicholas Krisof, a writer for the New York Times, uncovered how there was videos on the website that may have featured women who were raped and/or underaged. Surprisingly for a Netflix documentary, this is short, at just an hour and a half. Considering the streaming service will have multiple one-hour long episodes focusing on true-crime cases that offer the same information you can read on Wikipedia, it’s a letdown.
Granted, PornHub and its parent company MindGeek, should’ve done more to go after this problem from the start. Because filmmaker Suzanne Hillinger can only talk to former employees, you have to take a lot of what is said with a grain of salt. At one point, Noelle Perdue, who worked there said that she’s not sure she can legally talk about something before looking at someone off camera. It feels like this documentary was rushed rather than Hillinger taking her time to get the right interviewees.
People who are quick to trash the porn industry out of fear it will exploit children aren’t willing to show how all industries exploit children it seems. There are currently moves by many state legislatures to do away with child labor laws. Also, Hillinger never addresses the fact that the porn industry may just be the only industry in America that benefits women the most. Women are paid more and even direct porn scenes. This is only hinted at toward the end as we see a scene being set up.
But if you’re for some naughty scenes, you’ll be out of luck. The porn’s all blurry and we only see a few snippets that look about the same as those porn memes you see on social media. Inside Deep Throat was rated NC-17 and released by Universal Pictures and contained a scene of Linda Lovelace going down on Harry Reams. Pornucopia was on HBO when it was owned by Time Warner and it showed scenes of men having sex. Real Sex also had a man being pegged.
What Money Shot does do is show how NCOSE and other organizations actually did more harm than good as lawmakers quick to act made it harder on content creators to make money and easier for the actual people doing sex trafficking and child exploitation to hide itself. With creators and performers not able to make money on PornHub, they went to OnlyFans where some make their most money. Again, there’s another missed opportunity here to ponder why someone will pay $50 for a porn actress to comment on their genitalia.
What Hillinger doesn’t show is that we live in a society obsessed with nudity, sex and pornography, but it’s not the content creators and performers, but those on the other side who have been raging this war for decades. The more we continue to wag our finger at people and tell them they can’t do it, the more they’re going to fight back and search for ways to get around it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 