Unpacking the Mixed Messages of Hot Girls Wanted (2015)

We’re back, baby - and we’re going back to our documentary-based roots. Whereas our documentary reviews are often either a critique of the subject matter or the documentary itself, this one has a fun mix of both. Let’s jump right into it.

Hot Girls Wanted, huh?

You bet they are.

This Netflix documentary, famously produced by Rashida Jones, tries to shed light on the sordid world of amateur pornography by following the brief careers of five different women: Stella May, Ava Taylor, Ava Kelley, Lucy Tyler, and Brooklyn Daniels. These women, ranging from ages 18 to 25, wind up working for the same “agency” - a generous term for Hussie Models LLC run by one Riley Reynolds. The “agency” is actually just a 5-bedroom house where all the talent lives with Riley, who books them jobs and takes a percentage of their earnings.

What the documentary tries to focus on is the less-than-honest aspects of amateur pornography - the manipulation involved with recruiting talent, the coercion of the talent to abandon their boundaries, the potentially-dangerous lack of regulation of the industry, etc. And while it makes a fair and important argument about how generally seedy and exploitative the amateur porn industry is, it tends to focus on the wrong things in the process.

What Does it Focus On?

Well, for one: it paints the women involved in a pretty uncompassionate light. Rather than focusing on which systemic issues forced these women into pursuing pornography, it narrativizes their lives and careers as “falls from grace.” That any woman would consider sex work as a valid form of employment is treated with a vague disdain and condescension. In fact, the documentary doesn’t even entertain the notion that pornography is a proper career.

While Olivia and I both agree that any industry that lies to teenagers to exploit them is inarguably awful, we also felt that the documentary painted adult film performance as an action in a broad stroke of disdain. The women featured in the film were humanized simply through their own unique characters, but the documentary seemed strangely uninterested in their personalities beyond the fact that they’re porn stars (except one, but we’ll get to that).

Also, their message is undercut by the documentary’s strange fixation on eliciting an emotional response from the audience. Rather than let their content speak for itself, the editors resort to blatantly manipulative music choices and editing techniques. For instance, they feature a montage of photographs for each woman - their high school photos side-by-side with screen caps of their porn videos. It’s a needlessly manipulative visual meant to illustrate how their youth was stolen from them. In another section about a porn site called “Latina Abuse,” they show censored, slowed-down footage from particularly graphic forced-blowjob videos with thriller-esque, tense music - intentionally making it look more like a horror movie than pornography.

And I get it. “Woman sucks a d*ck so hard that she vomits and eats her own vomit” is a pretty wild thing to hear as a vanilla audience. And it’s clear that the woman who performed in this video, Ava Kelley, felt emotionally unprepared and therefore scarred by some of the things she had done in BDSM porn. But this is a problem with the industry - not fetish porn. Rather than focus on the industry’s intentional lack of education and safety precautions for its talent, the documentary demonizes fetish pornography as the source of the abuse itself. In a perfect world, every porn star would act in videos they felt comfortable with. But the industry is designed to coerce women into bending their own boundaries for money and continued exposure - with little to no regulation.

So What Happens to the Women?

Predictably, the documentary pays much less attention to the women who seem generally okay with their situation. Lucy Tyler in particular has a fascinating profile: clear baggage with sex making her relationship to pornography complicated, but genuinely seems to enjoy the aspect of putting on a persona and pretending to be someone else for a while. She takes active pleasure in creating her porn character and interacting with her audience in-character. There could have been a genuinely stimulating conversation about her feelings about porn vs. her feelings about the amateur industry, or even about how her character perpetuates the fetishization of young girls. But no. The documentary all but ignores her in favor of the women who show clear and decisive resentment of their work.

Ava Kelley, the 25 year-old who performed in “Latina Abuse,” was given a few moments and presented a similarly complex relationship to pornography and sex work. She had valid complaints about amateur porn and the way talent can be treated, but she also seemed to be content with the work itself when she was working within her boundaries. In fact, Ava Kelley continues to work as a Cam Girl to this day. But the documentary doesn’t focus on much more than her traumatic experience in “Latina Abuse,” leaving the rest ambiguous.

Instead of unpacking these complexities, the documentary focuses hard on the other three girls: Brooklyn Daniels, Ava Taylor, and Stella May in ascending order of importance in the film.

Brooklyn Daniels, 19 years old, symbolizes the type who is already uncomfortable with the work when they arrive. She is visibly insecure with rock-bottom self-confidence - so much so that she calls a verbally abusive photo shoot “a really fun experience.” She describes her first job as “kind of gross.” It’s a clear cut matter of her simply not enjoying the work.

Ava Taylor, 18 years old, has a pretty solid and clear-cut arc from being thrilled to be a porn star and enchanted with the glamorous lifestyle to resenting the industry and her experiences there. She becomes quickly dismissive of her job and more and more reluctant to work. She even has an experience where the lack of accountability in the amateur world leads her to give up her own autonomy for a shoot. When it was over, she says she understood what rape victims feel like. That is a genuinely terrifying thing to experience, and she is the perfect picture of a girl who didn’t know what she was getting herself into. But again, her problems don’t stem from the act of performing in pornography - after all, she said at the beginning that she genuinely enjoyed the shoots! Her problems stemmed from the complete lack of safety and respect she was afforded while she worked.

And finally, the de facto protagonist of this documentary, Stella May. This 19-year old is the first woman we see in the documentary, and she is the only one whose family gets involved as the story progresses. It follows her more closely than the other four women, and this is where the film’s agenda is clearest. It focuses far too long on Stella May’s past, waxing poetic about the opportunities she threw away when she ran away to do porn. It follows her as her family responds to her new career, and all but endorses their manipulation and verbal abuse when they confront her. And it paints her ultimate “decision” (read: forced decision) to leave porn as a victory for feminine freedom when, in fact, she had relinquished her autonomy to her family and boyfriend. Hooray.

I’m not trying to say that there isn’t anything wrong with a 19 year-old being lied to and coerced into acting in porn - there is! The system is deeply broken and women who do porn for a living should actively want to do porn for a living. But rather than focus on the manipulation Stella May suffers, it treats any pornography as inherently exploitative and abusive when it simply isn’t. Professional pornography is notorious for its strict regulations when it comes to the talent’s health and safety. Professional porn stars are hired through legitimate agencies and management and never have to do work with which they’re not comfortable. The people are treated like… people. And many professional porn stars spend years in the industry! To paint the seedy amateur world as the standard of pornography production is simply dishonest.

So Stella May is coerced into bending her boundaries, develops a Bartholin cyst on her vagina, and has a generally rough time of it. But when she is confronted by her mother and boyfriend, very little concern is expressed for her wellbeing. Instead, these people focus solely on their own discomfort with Stella May’s job and act like she’s done something to hurt them. Never once do her loved ones offer to help her learn pornographic best practices for her health and safety. No one asks if she wants help standing up for her rights as a performer. No one offers and tangible support for her physical or mental health. They simply passive aggressively demean her decisions and berate her until she caves and quits.

The documentary, capturing every moment of this, makes no move to condemn the family’s actions. Rather, Stella May’s departure is treated like a victory - hooray! She gets to work as a manager of a restaurant and live with her awful boyfriend! Old-fashioned values for the win!

This whole portion of the film is ridiculously frustrating, because the documentary patently ignores a major factor of porn stars’ wellbeing in the industry - the derision of their loved ones. This could have served to start a conversation about the stigma of pornography and sex work, but the film was far more interested in spinning Stella May’s story into a morality tale. Highly disappointing.

So Where Do We Land?

I certainly don’t want it to sound like I’m endorsing the amateur porn industry. It’s exploitative and often abusive, treating its talent as expendable objects rather than valued laborers. I think every one of the women featured in this documentary faced some sort of trauma at the hands of the amateur porn industry (as evidenced by the fact that none of them stayed after the documentary aired). Do I think that sex is horribly commodified in our society? Absolutely, capitalism is a cancer. Do I think that children are exposed to a level of sexual content and unrealistic sexual standards that ultimately hurts them? Of course, both because of their youth and their parents’ reluctance to teach them properly. Do I think that the potential emotional and chemical repercussions of sex are often ignored both by abstinence-only advocates and sexual liberation advocates? Definitely.

Ultimately, this means I agree with the core message of this film. We both do. But the strangely archaic methods the documentary uses to convey that message almost entirely discredits it. I know amateur porn is exploitative - everyone does. But rather than villainizing porn as an entity and painting the situation as a simple, black-and-white matter of “well if women don’t want to be exploited then they shouldn’t do porn,” we could be having fruitful conversations about the systemic reasons why women are able to be exploited this way. It’s disappointing to see a film with such lofty ideals stoop so far into stereotypes and caricatures to manipulate its audience.