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About a year ago, eFukt, America’s preeminent shock-video website, brought up an interesting philosophical question: what does it mean to jerk off to a pornstar who killed herself? Is it immoral? What if she just died of a drug overdose? As a sign of respect, should we all stop stroking? Or is it the other way around? Should we honor her sacrifice with ribbon after ribbon of our baby batter? Perhaps we should inseminate a living woman while watching the deceased so that the latter might be reborn. Maybe these questions wouldn’t matter if suicide and overdoses were uncommon among pornstars, but that shit happens all the time. The video “Cumming on Dead Girls” tops five minutes. Its title card simultaneously entices and warns: “the digital ghost cumpilation/dead girls with fake names: frozen in time: getting cummed on forever.” What follows is several dozen chicks taking money shots to the face, chest, and feet with script at the bottom of the screen listing their “name,” age, and cause of death. Granted, some died of natural causes, such as cancer. All the same, the conclusion is obvious: a lot of these girls are lethally unhappy. Given how much porn can mess up your life, fuck up your family, and ruin future career prospects, it’s impossible not to blame the industry, at least in part, for that unhappiness.
And yet, all those videos of them fucking and sucking aren’t going anywhere, ever. Plenty of them were hot (Loni Evans), some worked with well-known studios (Natasha Blu), not a few were mildly famous (August Ames). So it’s not that failing to be a porn star made them unhappy, it’s either that being a porn star made them unhappy, or at least, did not make them happy. Are we all culpable for sending them to that dark place? Or are we as innocent as fans of Nirvana? I wasn’t sure, so I phoned a friend. He said something boring about capitalism, so I hung up.
The answer with rapists in porn is much easier. Take Ron Jeremy. The guy has been indicted on dozens of sexual assault charges (including against minors) going back to the 90’s. It seems certain he’s guilty of something. Solution? Stop watching him fuck women…which isn’t exactly a big loss, now is it? James Deen, meanwhile, was accused of some shit, but no charges were ever pressed, much less indictments handed down. Solution? None, because solutions require problems. Should websites take down Ron Jeremy content? Yes, on aesthetic grounds.
But what about all these dead girls? Simone de Beauvoir famously asked, “Must We Burn de Sade?” Well, now that Olivia Lua said goodbye with a “mix of prescription drugs, recreational substances and alcohol in rehab at age 23,” must we burn “Horny Young Sluts” and Me And “Mommy’s Messy Mouth 2?” Or would that be unfair to the other performers in those titles? On most tube sites, if you search for really dark shit (e.g. rape, forced), you get a little scolding message instead of a dozen thumbnails. What should come up when you search “Olivia Lua and Mick Blue?” How about this: here’s a video of Mick Blue fucking her. Now you can just click it and watch; it’s a pretty good scene. Are you going to jerk off? Do you want this unhappy dead girl to make you cum? Does that add another level of enticing taboo for you?
Maybe that’s fucked up, but the other extreme is worse. What if, as a society, we became so embarrassed that these girls ended up being sacrifices to our country’s favorite drug, we—out of “respect,” of course—completely purged them? We could pass a law that banned hosting or selling their videos and make the penalties for doing so as harsh as the laws about hard candy. To honor the dead and comfort their families, all their porn would disappear. It’d be like it never happened. Then one day, you could be cruising on your favorite site and innocently search “Natasha Blu ATM” and immediately see “Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material.” You’d feel weird for just a second, but then you’d move on, happy to know you’re safe from busting a nut over a dead girl. We wouldn’t have to think about it at all, because hey, who the fuck wants to think about all this?
So anyway, did you watch the Mick Blue video?
Richard Power is the author of Letters from a Heartbroken Pervert, available from Terror House Press.