Production Issues
When I got over my initial post-Anglican revulsion I found enough material for four hours. Having seen a bunch of it I was also concerned about what we could show on TV of all of this. It’s pretty awful, and incredibly varied. I tracked down, but couldn’t get honourable access to extreme hard-core porn production sites in Odessa, Lagos, Groningen, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong and Most. A Czech go-between told me that some Bulgarians who ran a brothel-motel would do anything to a girl on camera for the right price. Whoa. The best S and M trade show in the world is in Bavaria but they had a strict no-cameras policy. And third, there was a Big Question about the damage done to the youngest consumers of porn ever (literally millions of kids worldwide through their wireless devices) and Internet porn addicts. So I went back to the CBC with these issues. But they only wanted one hour; assured me that they would air the content; and weren’t interested in victims.
“The internet porn industry has this in common with the Church or Communism or Curling. It’s out there, pursued with passion by a certain constituency, active 24/7, somewhere around the world, but we Choose To Ignore It.”
Robin Benger, Director
When it came to the screening of the first cut for the CBC, it was clear that they couldn’t show more than half of the original material we had shot. And the victims, that I had gone ahead and shot anyway, were suddenly considered a bigger focus and were moved to the beginning of the film. So now the doc looks a bit like we are wringing our hands at something you don’t actually see in the film. But as the CBC pointed out, it’s pretty clear what cannot be seen exists anyway, and we all worked it out. Getting content like this through the eye of the needle of primetime, family hours viewing is going to be a communal effort, and, in the end, it was a good process. It’s easy to slag the CBC, but I respect both their internal dynamic and their mandate to respect the audience. Who wants to have answer all those emails and letters?
While I was editing this doc I was reading Phillip Norman’s (definitive, yet again) biography of John Lennon, A Life. When the Beatles went to Germany, they didn’t want their families to know they were headed for the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s notorious sex district. He quotes some of the rantings and ravings in the mainstream press about the moral decay and sexual licentiousness in evidence there. In August 1960, for heavens sake. And still today the arbiters in the mainstream view porn in a similar way.
As far as children are concerned. I asked my fourteen-year-old son if he had seen porn. He winced in embarrassment. “Of course, Dad.”
“When?”
“Oh at Palmerston (his elementary school)…I guess I was about 11.”
“How?”
“On my buddy’s computer.”
We talked a bit about it and at one point he said, “Dad. It didn’t really interest me that much. And I can tell the difference between good and bad, y’know.” Of course, I thought. That’s it. Teach-your-children-well.
In the end, thanks to editor Greg Hopen and the team here at Cogent/Benger, and at Doc Zone, we were able to bring you Porndemic. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know whether porn’s really damaging to a mentally healthy population. In fact i ended up being much better informed and mostly unconcerned about pornography. When in doubt, choose freedom. I do believe it can, in a few cases cause problems. It can drown a mind that is susceptible in a very particular way, something to do, I believe, with childhood trauma, and maybe bad parenting. I’m happy and relieved to be done with it.
The internet porn industry has this in common with the Church or Communism or Curling. It’s out there, pursued with passion by a certain constituency, active 24/7, somewhere around the world, but we Choose To Ignore It. Apart from damaging kids, my view now is, In the case of porn: Let Rutting Dogs Lie.