To look at her childhood photos, 18-year-old Tressa seems like an average American girl.
Baby pictures depict her grinning and dark-haired. In one photo, her face is smeared with birthday cake frosting. She grew to become the captain of her high school cheerleading squad and developed a passion for photography. Cards and letters in her baby book gush with proclamations of love and pride from her parents.
But millions of Americans know Tressa not as the girl from small-town Texas, but as Stella May, a rising star with Hussie Models, a Florida-based porn production company.
Tressa (whose last name is protected) is one of the main actresses featured in “Hot Girls Wanted,” a documentary about the amateur pornography industry premiering at Sundance this month.
The name amateur pornography can be misleading — the films are professionally produced to look homemade.
“If she’s being paid, there’s nothing amateur about it,” said University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz.
Definite numbers about the industry are hard to come by, but directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus say thousands of girls sign onto amateur porn films each year — partially because of a young generation that’s used to living a public, online life.
“We’re dealing with a generation who are very used to putting themselves out there in social media, for example, and now they’re taking it to another level, and they are doing porn,” Gradus said.
Cash and cachet
As a 19-year-old college student, Mary Anne Franks was offered a job stripping for extra cash. Today, Franks is a University of Miami law professor and the Legislative and Tech Policy Director for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.
Franks refused, opting instead to become a tutor, but she said the financial burdens on many students have changed since she was in school, which is why some young women turn to amateur porn.
“I had the luxury of that option,” Franks said. “Many women don’t, and that’s a struggle for a lot of people contemplating work in the sex industry.”
Besides the fact that women stand to make around $800 per scene, Franks says there’s a social element that sets amateur porn apart in the minds of today’s youth.
“Cameras and filming has become part of breathing for the; it changes their sense of self, privacy, intimacy,” Franks said. “It’s a disengagement from sex generally, and it makes them think of sex as something you do for other people.”
For some, the comfort of being online, with few privacy boundaries, and the disengagement from seeing sex as a private, intimate act makes amateur porn not only an acceptable career choice but a logical next step.
“It’s perceived as a cool thing. It’s, ‘I hope people find out about it because I want thousands of Twitter followers,’” Franks said. “It used to be socially acceptable to go to Hollywood and make it. Now it’s, ‘No, I want to be a porn star and then maybe I’ll make it.’ There’s a social cachet to it now that wasn’t there before.”
That hunger for attention and online notoriety is deeply tied to low self-esteem issues, Franks said, which some research indicates might worsen with excessive social media use. Franks argues that growing up with social media might lead some women into amateur porn as a way to find validation.
“I don’t know a woman who doesn’t struggle with self-esteem. These days, it’s only a question of varying degrees, and one way to deal with that unhappiness is validation,” Franks said. “Many of them think, ‘I’m not going to have the kind of life where it’s going to matter if anyone finds out. I’m not going to have a career or be married, or I’m always going to be a nobody.’ There’s something wrong with that.”
Illusion of choice
To outsiders, the world of amateur pornography might seem like a self-made trap, Franks says. In other words, the girls who volunteer essentially get what they deserve.
But Franks found that nothing could be farther from the truth.
“Even within realms of consent, there’s an awful lot of coercion that goes on,” she said. “If this were happening to the employees of Wal-Mart, it would be a labor-law issue, a human dignity issue.”
While many girls who sign onto these films are legally adults, that doesn’t mean an 18-year-old has a firm grasp of all the consequences she could face after she signs a consent form, such as disease, abuse or unwanted pregnancy.
In order to keep working, girls who don’t develop a big enough online following in three months or so must consent to “niche work” in order to stay employed. As some of the women featured in the film learned, that means starring in videos where the line between consensual sex and being abused gets blurry.
One of the women, Rachel, agrees to $300 for an oral sex scene that turns out to be an abuse scene once she gets to the set. At just 18, she doesn’t think she can just walk away for her protection.
“I was terrified,” Rachel tells the documentary crew. “I didn’t know if I could tell him no. Then I understood, that’s how rape victims feel.”
These are exactly the kinds of situations U.S. labor laws need to address and prosecute, Franks said.
“We don’t let 18-year-olds legally drink. The NFL doesn’t let them turn pro because of potential health problems,” Franks said. “But there’s no one looking into an industry that will force an 18-year-old girl to decide whether or not to she should engage in group sex when she was told she’d be performing oral sex.”
Everyday porn
Low self-esteem, naivety and the lure of money aren’t the only reasons young women fall into the trap of amateur pornography, says Kinsey Institute sex and porn researcher Bryant Paul.
The real problem, he says, is that it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish between what’s porn and what’s not as the mass media becomes more and more sexualized.
“It’s a cyclical process. You have to ask yourself, as the sexualization of the media in general increases, what does porn have to do to keep up?” Paul said. “They feed each other.”
Paul says that’s why more and more porn (about 40 percent, according to the film) conflates sex and intimacy with violent and aggressive acts against women. When everything from music videos to movies to fast food commercials depict women in varying degrees of nudity and are available to watch infinitely online, hypersexualization becomes normal for America’s youth.
“Everything looks more like porn every day in one form or another,” Franks said.
That also seems to be that attitude many of the women in “Hot Girls” take. Jade, who at 25 is the oldest actress in the troupe, shrugs off videos she’s done where she was slapped around or forced to vomit because of what she calls “supply and demand.”
“What I do is an outlet for something that’s already there,” she says in the documentary. “I say, 'Whatever floats your boat.' If they’re watching someone like me do it, that means they’re not going out and doing it to an actual girl.”
The extremes of sexualization of mass media also means that sometimes people don’t notice how aggressive porn has become, Paul said.
“One of the things I have my students do is watch a porn video and have them write down every act of aggression they see,” Paul said. “It’s only when they do that that many of them notice what’s going on.”
With the media environment changing at break-neck speed, Paul says the proliferation of porn online and in everyday media changes everything about growing up in America.
“Sex education is now a lifelong journey. We have this idea that we need to protect kids, and we do, but it’s really a question of more speech, not less,” Paul said. “Letting them discover it on their own leaves them out there for a fall because what they don’t get when they get ‘the talk’ is what happens when the lights go down, the mechanics of how sex works. Most kids now get that from porn and that’s sad.”
Until something changes, countless young women who take the path to amateur porn, like Tressa, will continue to learn a hard lesson about their own self-worth.
“If it had a dollar sign in front of it, I said yes,” Tressa reflects in the film. “It’s really not that hard to take advantage of an 18-year-old when she’s in front of a camera.”
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com
Twitter: ChandraMJohnson