Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges Page B

whore.’ I would say the most degrading things I could say about myself because I thought this was what it meant to be sexy and what people wanted to hear, or at least the people who buy the films. You are just a slut to those who watch. You are nothing. They want to see that we know that.”
    She would shoot scenes with men who disgusted her, whose sweat and smell “made me cringe.” And when the lights went off and the cameras stopped, she would stumble off the set in pain, her face often covered with semen. “Sometimes they would hand you a paper towel to wipe your face off,” she says, “and sometimes they would say, ‘Don’t touch us. You’re gross.’ I remember the first time I had come all over my face. I was so pissed off, but I took it. I pretended to like everything they did. I took pride in being a good gonzo girl. My fame came from this.”
    By the second year of shooting, with an income of $100,000, she had turned to drugs, including painkillers and muscle relaxants.
    â€œThe lifestyle of a porn star is to spend your money as soon as you make it on weed, alcohol, coke, ecstasy, and Vicodin,” Roldan says. “I wanted to be the good gonzo girl they wanted me to be. I took this so I would not feel anything. By the next year, instead of only Vicodin I began to drink vodka, a whole bottle. Every girl I knew used alcohol. We were drinking so we did not feel the pain, physically and emotionally. I remember driving home thinking, ‘I could be stopped for DWI.’”
    Roldan usually socialized with other porn stars, whom she and everyone in the industry call “girls.” They often spent their days drinking. “Most are very lonely,” she says. She longed for a relationship, “but it felt weird to have a boyfriend.”
    Adult video companies such as JM Productions and Extreme Associates, which includes graphic rape scenes in its array of physical abuse of women, make no attempt to hide the pain and acute discomfort endured by the women. The pain and discomfort are the major
draws of the productions. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat-fucking” videos such as the Gag Factor series, in which women have penises pushed all the way down their throats until they gag or vomit. On the Gag Factor Web site, the producers promise “The best throat-fucking ever lensed.” It offers still shots of women being “face-fucked.” One typical description of a film begins with the standard brief summary, as if the women were criminals with a rap sheet: “Degraded On: 10/8/08. Name: Ashley Blue . . . Age: twenty-five. Status: Happy? Home Town: Thousand Oaks, CA.” It shows a picture of a woman with black hair lying on her back with her eyes closed. Her face is covered with semen and a penis is buried in her throat.
    â€œHere’s Your Retirement Party,” the description of the film reads. “As many of you will remember, for quite a long time superwhore Ashley Blue was the official JM contract whore. But like the sole of an old shoe, porn whores eventually wear out and have to be thrown away. So, our way of throwing a retirement party for Ashley was to have her head get pistonfucked one last time. Enjoy!” 2
    Las Vegas, a city built on illusions, lends itself to the celebration of porn. It is the corrupt, wilfully degenerate heart of America. It is, in Marc Cooper’s memorable phrase, The Last Honest Place in America. Las Vegas strips away the thin moral pretension and hypocrisy of consumer society to reveal its essence. The commodification of human beings, the heart of the consumer society, is garishly celebrated in Las Vegas. Here there is no past, no history, no sense of continuity, and no real community. The mammoth resorts and casinos glittering in the desert are monuments to greed and vice, even as the rest of the country crumbles under the onslaught of physical decay, shuttered stores and