Netflix UK TV review: Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On
Review Overview
Ethics in pornography journalism
0Insights into sex and technology
5Sex positivity
7Rachel Bowles | On 24, May 2017
Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On is a six-part Netflix docu-series that aims to broaden the scope of the original feature-length doc of the same title, which focused on a small group of female amateur porn actors in Miami. The result is a frustratingly mixed bag. While addressing some concerns about the 2015 film by investigating a wider range of pornography, it also often repeats the original doc’s mistakes of lazy analysis, bizarrely conservative attitudes towards gender and, worst of all, exploitation of the very sex workers it claims to be on the side of.
Selling itself as a series investigating “personal stories reveal[ing] how the intersection of sex, technology and intimate relationships is rewiring us in fundamental ways”, Turned On turns in an impressive mission statement that the show ultimately fails to live up to. Beyond noting that the Internet is a powerfully pervasive medium that disseminates a variety of pornography and is used for sex/dating, there is scant little analysis of how screens and technology “rewire” us. Roughly half the show is worth watching – Eps 1, 3 and 4, although the individual viewer will have to decide for themselves if they’re happy to consume a show whose producers/directors, Rashida Jones, Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus showed a troubling lack of care towards sex workers and their safety by outing them without their consent on Netflix.
Episode 1, Women on Top, focuses on the female gaze within porn, something entirely elided by the original film. Jones, while promoting Turned On explained: “I’m getting pickier with my porn, like I am with food. I want to know how it was made, I want to know that everyone’s having a good time.” While the emphasis on ethical consumption is extremely pertinent and an important message of Turned On, the comestible metaphor is perhaps an unfortunate choice, given Hot Girls Wanted included an amateur porn star’s disillusionment at being treated “like a piece of meat”. It’s something that the female directors profiled in Women On Top work to avoid at all costs, treating good working environments for their female actors as paramount and working to please female viewers who are often ignored by the porn industry.
Mainstream porn director/photographer Holly Randal and indie erotica auteur Erika Lust are profiled in this episode, both showing serious commitment to the quality of their work and stressing the importance of women working behind the camera and on-set for the comfort of women on screen and the pleasure of women off-screen. Randall, the daughter of Suze Randall, the first female staff photographer at Playboy, was brought up in the world of erotic photography starting her career in the heyday of high gloss, paid-for porn, which she likened to playing with Barbies. “I don’t think anybody could have anticipated the internet. Nobody pays for porn anymore,” laments Randall, as she struggles to make money while remaining a detail-oriented, aesthetically interesting “pretty porn” director. She is being pressured by the industry to churn out uniform pornography with increasingly more aggressive, humiliating set pieces.
Lust, an indie erotic filmmaker based in Barcelona, shakes with anger as she describes this normalisation of what she calls “punishment fucking” in porn, which negates female pleasure and punishes women for being sexual. A title card claims that “nearly a third of all porn clips contain acts of aggression with women being the target 94 per cent of the time,” a shocking statistic, especially when considering the availability of pornography, particularly to children and teenagers, who use it in lieu of consent and pleasure-based (if any) sex education. Sweet yet troubled cam girl Bonnie Kinz admits to looking at pornography every day from the age of six. It’s no wonder that she falls into a tragic downward spiral of drug abuse to cope with her sex work, documented in Episode 3, Owning It, an illuminating and depressing look into the world of cam girls and the limits of feminism and sisterhood when money-making is the bottom line.
Episode 4, Money Shot, focuses on black male performers and explores the way in which porn’s obsession with sexual violence also normalises racism and fetishises black bodies through the popular category of “interracial” porn – Black men “destroying” white women, and the industry standard of an “interacial rate” in which white women are paid extra for scenes with Black men.
The unifying factor in these successful episodes is their approach – each looks at different facets of the state of pornography in 2017 and use the experiences of a range of voices to give us insight. Episodes 2, 5 and 6 are, in contrast, myopic case studies that masquerade as being emblematic of and insightful about complex problems of sex and technology, while actually delivering superficial, kneejerk conclusions. These episodes indulge the worst impulses of Hot Girls Wanted and Turned On, eschewing serious, interesting questions in order to reify sexist notions of porn, sex and dating.
Episode 5, Take Me Private, is a tedious account of the doomed affair between a married cam girl and her best client, with a rather reactionary verdict about the internet and screens preventing the forming of IRL relationships. Similarly boring and predictable, Episode 2, Love Me Tinder, does little to explore the effect that apps like Tinder have on modern dating and hook up culture, instead choosing to focus on the douchebag tendencies of a single male commitment-phobe using the app, blaming social media for his childish behaviour.
However the most disturbing scapegoating of social media is served up in the unforgivable Episode 6, Don’t Stop Filming, about 18 year old Marina Lonina who streamed the rape of her friend live on Periscope. It soon becomes clear that Lonina was not a suffering bystander, distancing herself from the horrific assault she was witnessing by filming, but instead, under the influence of alcohol, choosing to pursue social “likes” over helping her friend. The directors seem to have an obsession with stressing that the rape victim was an older minor, while also striving to depict Lonina as an innocent child – she is interviewed on her pink bed sheets, complete with teddies.
There is a very serious, urgent problem with out of date legislation failing to keep up with the way in which sexually active teenagers use technology and social media – young girls expressing their sexuality and finding themselves “sex offenders” because they have disseminated nude pictures of themselves, laws unable to deal with revenge porn sites, and the widespread coercion of teenagers into sending nudes. Don’t Stop Filming refuses to grapple with these issues, instead opting for an at best problematic 45-minute defence of Lonina’s actions.
Ultimately, Turned On is a bizarre series, more due to its scatter-brained logic than its subject matter, ranging from required viewing to near rape apology. Through its access to divergent realms of pornography and the interesting people that populate them, viewers may glean fascinating insights into society and the way in which we view and use porn. Beyond that, the forays into real life relationships and the effect of contemporary technology on us are often perfunctory, with little respect given to the viewer or the subject.
Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On is available on Netflix UK, as part of an £9.99 monthly subscription.