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Casting calls in Pornoland

August 06, 2004

Thursday afternoon was a three hour long casting call at the porn company I work for. Casting calls are really interesting experiences, to put it mildly. Though I am involved in the actual interview process with people when (if) they show up, I am not involved with the placing of ads and arranging of appointments. This means that I basically don’t know who will be showing up or when - all I know is that they will probably be very young, skinny, bubbly women.

As soon as a girl comes in, I’m all about trying to make her feel comfortable and not nervous. Usually I reject the whole gender solidarity thing for various reasons, not the least of which being that I’m a huge brat, but I’m very keen on gender solidarity during these casting calls, because not only am I the only other girl there, but I’m the person who is closest in age to the potential talent. These conversations can be lots of fun as we get to know the girl, which boils down to three major questions: how comfortable is she with her body and her sexuality? is she crazy? is she interested in doing porn to get revenge or make someone jealous?

In the casting call yesterday, we got a really nice, cute girl with great tits (I know for sure they were nice because part of casting is getting the girl to take her clothes off). It was pretty easy to get her talking about herself and why she’s interested in doing porn. In my notes, fairly early in the interview, I wrote: “motivation to do porn is purely vindictive - bad boyfriend.” As we got her talking more, she confessed that she wants to do porn because she wants to “torture” her boyfriend. To me, this is a red flag. But the powers that be were very taken with her, so she may do a solo scene for us sometime soon.

Afterwards, I was thinking more about her and the other girls who came to the casting, all of whom were very young - in the 18-21 range. And the more I think about it, the more I think that the minimum age for porn performers should be 21 instead of 18, because seriously, what 18 year old girl is mature enough to deal with sex (much less porn) and has thoroughly learned to say no and stick to it. I am a major supporter of the idea that porn (and sex work more generally) can be a wonderful and liberating experience, but it can also be oppressive and fucked up. This discussion came up a few months ago on Carly Milne’ Pornblography, where Carly also says that 21 should be the minimum age. It’s certainly a dilemma - and its been pointed out to me that its perhaps unusual for someone sex positive and pro-porn to recommend an increase in minimum age for something sex related. But while I think its important for women of all ages to have access to, say, reproductive health care, I do think this is a different issue. A sticky one (har har), to be sure.

Posted by Dacia at August 6, 2004 09:15 PM