The Jeff Booth Show

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Show Transcripts

March 15th, 2009

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Sunday, March 15th, 2008- The Jeff Booth Show (radio.eroticuniveristy.com)

Jeff Booth responds to criticisms of his show from anti-porn crusader Michelle Maren. Jeff also spends time on the set of Will Ryder’s Not Married with Children XXX  and talks with cast members.

This is the Jeff Booth Show for March 15th, 2009, brought to you by the Center for Sexual Expression and Education, and Erotic University. I’m Jeff Booth. On the show we do criticize and sometimes mock those who take anti-sex stances. It is easy to forget that there are real human beings at the other end of our mockery. And sometimes they respond to us. As is the case with Michelle Maren.

She is an anti-porn advocate and former porn performer, and she took exception to our comments about her. She wrote “Since you are a believer in freedom of speech, I trust you will make my response public.” On my show, I am a believer in free speech, but only for me. Everyone else gets edited. But still, out of a sense of fairness, we are airing Michele Maren’s comments- although I doubt she will care much for my responses to them in our Booth v. Maren segment.

Onto lighter fair- we spent the day on the set of Will Ryder’s Not Married With Children XXX. I like Will Ryder as a director- he is one of the rare few who gets the comedy porn thing. He won best director at the XBiz awards this year, beating out Joone, the director of the big porn pic Pirates. And I am not just kissing his ass because I get to hang out on his sets where they have free donuts. I didn’t even eat the donuts. I just have some respect for his work. SO in our Married segment, we’ll take you behind the scenes of this porn parody of one of the funniest shows on television ever.

Just click on the segment you want to listen to, and thanks for clicking in.

News

We have very little time for our sex in politics news segment this week, so let’s get right to it…

With reenlistment so low the army has had to let in convicted felons to keep their numbers up, they are still kicking out gays. Eleven in January alone. They even kick out those with mission critical skills, to replace them with people convicted of manslaughter, rape, kidnapping and ironically, making terrorist threats. Which is nothing compared to the threat of a man who might be willing to suck another man’s cock. That apparently, would blow the entire mission.

Women who refuse to carry her rapists child are the worst kind of scum, as is any doctor willing to give her an abortion. At least according to the Vatican. They supported the wholesale excommunication of the woman and her doctors in Brazil. Well, not exactly a woman. She was only nine years old- carrying twins after being raped. But to be fair- look at it from their point of view. They heard it was a father who got her pregnant and just naturally assumed it was one of their own and not her actual father.

An African American politician who is black, Republican, not homophobic, and progressive on abortion? A Republican gutsy enough to say ““I think that there’s a whole lot that goes into the makeup of an individual that, uh, you just can’t simply say, oh, like, ‘Tomorrow morning I’m gonna stop being gay. Tomorrow morning I’m gonna stop being black.’ Who is this guy? Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee. In the same GQ interview, he also calls abortion a personal choice. Republicans are in an uproar, and he has started to back off those positions, but ultimately he has to wait for Rush to call to tell him what he actually thinks.

Rob Black, Lizzy Borden and their company, Extreme Associates, pleaded guilty before a federal judge to one count each of conspiracy to distribute obscene materials. Sentencing is scheduled for July 1. They were the sacrificial lambs of the adult industry, dumb enough to march up to the chopping block and start biting the executioner.

In a sign that the new Justice Department won’t be quite so sexually aroused by the idea of prosecuting adult entertainment, David Ogden was confirmed this week as Deputy Attorney General. Conservatives opposed him because he has represented defendants in adult entertainment cases. And I am guessing because he also believes in a defendant’s right to counsel and in the First Amendment. 

On the Set

Married with Children

So I walk into the studio where they are filming the new Married with Children sex parody- Not Married with Children XXX, and I almost bump into a guy leaving. Director Will Ryder says to me “Do you know who that was- David Faustino!” Faustino played Bud on the original series, and he hung out on the set that day, seeing his namesake do what his character Bud could have only dreamed of doing. Ron Jeremy was hanging around, for reasons that I could not determine other than that he wished he was in this movie. And after he left- one of the crew said- Gee, We should have gotten Ron Jeremy to play Buck, the dog. Which is about the only thing I’d want to see Ron playing in this movie.

Eric Swiss played Al and he really nailed the voice and the hangdog facial expressions. I was impressed. Bud was played by Dane Cross, Kelly by the appropriately slutty Kagney Linn Karter, and Peg was played by Brittany O’Connell.

Brittany, you say? I thought she left the business. Well, she did, but she’s back, and this is her return debut. Brittany has been in the business since 1992, and retired in 2006. I fondly remember her from a number of films where she often played a scorching temptress bad girl, including a couple of the Sodomania films. She is officially back, and we had a chat with her outside the studio, which was situated near the busiest municipal airport in the world. That buzzing sound is not a vibrator- its planes buzzing us overhead.

Booth v. Maren

Michelle Maren, since you took the time to write in, I am going to share your comments and respond to them. You call me Mr. Booth, but the only person who calls me that is Melvin Clear, and he is one of the made up characters on this show. SO you can call me Jeff. And I hope you don’t mind my calling you Michelle.

You complain about the segment on this show where we commented on an interview you had done. This is what you wrote me: “I spoke about my experiences in the sex industry during the interview I did last year. They were just that--my experiences. I don’t understand how you can refute that. I don’t remember ever meeting you. You were not there. I was.”

Kind of a snippy way to start Michelle, but I was not refuting your experiences. Nor do I refute the notion that some women have bad experiences in the adult industry. They do.  I was refuting your conclusions based on your experiences.  You concluded from your experiences that “It is a fantasy that the women performing porn actually enjoy it. No one does”. That is what I was refuting. Because you were, to my knowledge, a performer on only six porn sets over the course of a single year almost thirty years ago.

My point was that your experiences then, your personal experiences, are simply not relevant to the world of porn today. I know about the 80’s porn world only from the people I have talked with, and my impression is that it was a very different world back then. A lot has changed in thirty years. I do know about the world of porn today. More than you. I have friends in the industry, I know a lot of performers, I have been on far more porn sets than you have, and I even had sex on camera myself. And yes, for money. And no, I wasn’t the one paying.

Here is how I can refute your blanket statement about none of the women enjoying performing in porn. Because I know my wife pretty well. We have been together for a long time. And a few years ago when she did scenes on camera and did a centerfold and did a magazine cover, she enjoyed it. She didn’t do it for the money. She did it for fun, and part of the fun was getting paid for it. We took a really nice vacation with that money.

When we did a threesome scene on camera,  it was not all that different from what we do in our regular lives as swingers. It was fun. We enjoyed it. You can’t say otherwise. You were not there. We were. And even if you had been there, I doubt you would have enjoyed it- cause I think you did and still do have some real issues to work through. You should not have been doing porn. I agree that it was the very wrong career choice for you.

Next you write “While I was a porn actress for only just over a year, I did waste eight years of my life working in the sex industry in general. I was a go-go dancer between the ages of 18 and 24 and a professional escort (a.k.a. prostitute) for eight years. I also was a men’s magazine model, recorded phone sex messages, wrote articles for porn mags and was the figurehead of one. In addition, during those years, I met literally hundreds of women in the sex industry who shared their own personal experiences with me.”

Well, Michelle, I have known a few prostitutes, and I think it is a very tough business. It can mess with your head and your relationships. Seems like it was a really bad choice for you. That does not mean I feel competent to tell women or men that they should not be able to do that. Its just that there are pitfalls and things to watch out for and I wish it was decriminalized and that there could better support systems.

You say you wasted eight years of your life in the adult industry. Clearly, it was not for you. But I am assuming you got paid. Lots of us do things we might have preferred not to do to get a paycheck. It is not wasting our lives. It is just making a buck. A necessary evil. And believe me, there are much worse jobs than phone sex , modeling or writing magazine articles. Much worse. And they have nothing to do with sex.

When you say you talked to hundreds of women, I am assuming you are saying this to infer they all hated what they were doing, and by inference that no women should do porn. Let me introduce you to a little something in the world of psychology called confirmation bias. We filter out what we don’t want to hear, and hear only what confirms what we already believe. I imagine that any woman who told you she enjoyed the business, you were certain she were either lying or deceiving herself. And even being told the opposite, in your mind, it winds up confirming what you already believe.   

You write about the endless tragedy that women in the industry face- suicides over-doses, murders and AIDS-related deaths. That is only meaningful if it is statistically different from other similar populations. I have never ever seen statistics that show that porn stars are at a higher risk of murder. I have never even seen that they are at a higher risk for AIDS than other sexually active women in similar circumstances. There have been very few AIDS cases traced to on-set activities. They have happened, they are tragic, but they are also relatively rare.  You sent me to the RAME.net dead porn stars list saying I would find it enlightening. I looked at it.

Yes, many gay performers have died of AIDS. Not surprising- AIDS hit the gay community hard- porn star or not. But it is not necessarily related to their work since gay movies have used condoms for a long time. In that long sad list, there was only one woman’s name. Lisa de Leeuw. And according to writer David Jennings, despite rumors of her death from AIDS in 1993, she was just long retired from the industry and alive and well. I was able to find no credible evidence that she died of AIDS. Were there suicides? Sure. But it is not statistically significant compared to say, mainstream actresses. There was nothing in that list that even remotely supports your point. An awful lot of women flow through the industry, so you would statistically expect a few deaths, even tragic ones, from a list that covers a fairly long period of time. But to link it all to the porn industry? That list doesn’t even come close to making your case.

Then you respond to my skepticism at your claims about underage performers. I can certainly speak for today- there is no upside and great risk in using an underage performer these days. There would be no reason for anyone to do this. As to your claims about the 80’s you wrote “While working in porn films, I did meet an underage girl who was on set with her mother. She appeared in more than one of the films I was in and performed sex scenes with both women and men.” That is quite a charge, and something that would have been very, very illegal at the time. I am surprised no one on the shoot, including you, went to the police. You should have. According to the Adult Internet Database, you were in only six movies, with sex scenes in just three. We can compare the cast lists, which show seven actresses in at least two of the movies: Kelly Nichols, Cassandra Leigh, Athena Star, Laurie Smith, Nicole Bernard, Annette Heinz, and Spring Taylor. You are accusing one of these women of working underage with her mother helping her. That is a crime.  Distribution of an adult film featuring a minor is illegal, no matter how long ago it was made, and many of these films are still available. So who was it? You say you know and you were there- it’s criminal not to tell us who.

You write “Certain things never change. What humiliates a woman doesn’t change. What degrades all of womankind doesn’t change. My story is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago.” I disagree with you here on all counts. Your assumption is that having sex on camera is degrading and humiliating. That is a minority opinion. It is not reflected in reality. Yes, there are directors, especially on the gonzo side, who do things I consider humiliating to their talent. And I think that is bad for the industry. And I do not like it. Yet I have talked to some of the women who have been in those scenes and they found it fun. It was play acting. Still, I think scenes of actual degradation or humiliation are not good for the industry, even though the actresses were just acting. With the convictions of Max Hardcore and Rob Black, there is going to be a whole lot less of that crap.

In the BDSM community, that is a whole different discussion. People are really into it as a form of role play in their real lives, and while I may not completely understand it on a visceral level,  I do understand it is a choice and something people enjoy- including my wife- even if those are the kinds of things we do not do with each other.

The vast majority of porn does not feature humiliation or degradation, though, unless you redefine sex on camera as degrading. Its just people having sex.  And I have never seen anyone intentionally humiliated or coerced into doing something they did not want to do on the many sets I have been on. Sure, I’m sure it happens. But I can tell you from experience it does not happen all the time as you seem to infer. And directors who are abusive quickly get bad names and have a harder time finding talent. Or, like Rob Black and Max Hardcore, wind up in jail.

Michelle, you do not speak for all women. You claim you don’t have an anti-sex agenda, but you do. Come on- you say you are celibate because you respect sex? No, you are celibate because you have issues you really should be working through with a therapist. Which I think is a good thing. We can all use a little therapy, since so many of us, porn stars or not, have come from abusive families. I’ll agree there is an epidemic of that. 

You write: “Another fact: whenever a woman sells herself, she sells a little piece of her soul.” Michelle, you and I have a fundamental disagreement over how you determine what is a fact. You can find primitive people who believe every time your photo is taken it robs a little bit of your soul. No matter how much they believe that, you can’t call it a fact. And talk about selling a piece of your soul- I really need to introduce you to the mainstream movie and music industries. Talk about abusive environments. 

You end by asking if I would want my daughter in the adult industry. I don’t have a daughter, so I can not honestly answer that question. You talk about respecting women. I do. I respect them enough to let them make decisions about their own sexuality. For themselves. I don’t make generalized comments and expect them to apply to everyone. I respect the tremendous diversity in women. And for some, working in the adult industry is the last thing in the world they should do. For others, it can be a fun adventure and a good source of income. But I respect women enough to let them decide that for themselves, and unlike you, I don’t try to speak for all of them.