Hot Girls Wanted
***1/2
The first pornography was produced 10,000 years ago, when a man drew a crude picture of the woman he liked on the inside of a cave for his pleasure. The caveman hoped that the rest of the village didn’t walk in on him while he was enjoying the picture.
In 2000, I walked into a newsstand on Main St. to buy a porno mag. I hoped that no one I knew saw me doing it and I was pretty sure the clerk was chuckling at my expense.
For humanity’s first ten millennia, the technology and relative scarcity of pornography hardly evolved. The internet changed everything.
Now, of course, porn is everywhere you are. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, you could be looking at a dirty video on your smartphone somewhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute from now.
…Welcome back.
In a world of infinite choice, most people don’t want to watch actual porn stars. Most viewers simply want to see the girl next door.
The surprisingly even-handed documentary “Hot Girls Wanted” introduces us to a handful of these girls next door who have chosen to make their living having sex on camera.
They seem like average teenage girls. They all have pretty much the same story: they recently graduated from high school, answered a Craigslist ad, and easily landed an endless string of lucrative (an average of $800 each) porn gigs.
The film doesn’t sugar coat it. The money really is good. Especially compared to the alternatives.
One of the girls makes an eloquent defense of her life decision. She observes that her options were to go to a college she isn’t interested in and go into crippling loan debt, get $8.50 an hour job at Arby’s and continue to live in her mom’s house, or do porn.
The glamorous first step in a teenager’s adult entertainment career is to take a free flight to sunny Miami, move into her manager’s fun party house, and enjoy a new life of freedom and possibility.
Wait a second; is “Hot Girls Wanted” endorsing the porn life? Not exactly.
The documentary claims that very few girls who work in the adult film industry last more than six months. That’s because the gigs are more degrading than they were expecting.
One of the girls does a short film about a middle aged friend of the family deflowering her against her will. Another girl does a vile video where the camera man insults her and then the male protagonist intentionally gags her to the point where she vomits. It’s actually worse than that but the gory details are unpublishable. Before too long, the joys of money and freedom are outweighed by the degradation and indignity.
In a conversation with her mom and boyfriend, one of the girls comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that she can’t think of anything that distinguishes her from a prostitute.
It kind of makes you wonder why walking the street is forbidden everywhere but getting paid to have sex on camera is perfectly legal. Unfortunately, the reason is clear: prostitutes tempt married men and break up couples. The prostitution laws exist to protect respectable families, not troubled women. Porn only hurts the girls so society doesn’t consider it a serious problem.
Again, “Hot Girls Wanted” doesn’t go too far in its condemnation. None of the young women becomes addicted to drugs, suicidal, pregnant, or diseased.
But they all learn an ugly lesson about the way the world works. Our culture values 18-year-old girls for pretty much three things: their sex appeal, their food serving abilities, and their willingness to take care of children.
Using their sex appeal is definitely the best paying option of the three. And that will continue to be the case in our brave new world of internet pornography.