Serious about smut

The Price of Pleasure is a superficial exploration
of our society’s love affair with porn

by MALCOLM FRASER

Porn is really popular; a lot of porn degrades women; in the current era, there’s a trend among some young women toward a pro-porn stance. If any of these facts are new to you, you’ve probably been living in a rural religious community for years, and would be the ideal spectator for The Price of Pleasure, a new documentary by Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun which earnestly attempts to place the massive popularity of porn, and the implications it has for our culture, in an objective context.

The filmmakers set the scene by contrasting the anti-porn dogma of leftist academics with the decidedly more libertarian views of porn producers, performers and consumers. This starts off pretty much as you would expect, with the anti-porn spokespeople coming across as articulate and informed, but a little self-righteous, and the porn proponents displaying varying levels of intelligence but sharing a fundamental laissez-faire nihilism.

Things get a bit more interesting when Picker and Sun introduce the sex-positive feminism angle; while the female porn advocates aren’t entirely convincing on the harmlessness of their products, they at least introduce a degree of moral complexity which the doc is otherwise lacking.

The trouble is that while it may show both sides of the argument, The Price of Pleasure doesn’t allow for much grey area in between the pro- and anti-porn extremes. Climaxing (excuse the pun) with a montage of particularly nasty and violent porn images, the film comes out on the anti-porn side (which truthfully, Picker and Sun never conceal very convincingly throughout), but without going very deep into why these kinds of images are so popular, or what kind of solution to the issue might be proposed in a healthier society.

Christine Fugate’s The Girl Next Door, the doc on porn star Stacey Valentine, addressed the same concerns in a way that was at once more subtle and more direct. With its academic tone and broad but superficial scope, Picker and Sun’s hour-long doc would be best suited for stimulating a debate among a student audience, who might not yet have had a chance to reflect on the subtext of smut; for a mature viewer (in the true sense), the ideas here are nothing new.

THE PRICE OF PLEASURE OPENS AT
CINÉMA DU PARC ON FRIDAY, SEPT. 5

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