Jens Hoffmann – The Porn Diaries

Do you keep in contact with any of the people featured in the documentary?

JH: As much as possible. I mean it is like it is. You start a new project and all of the sudden it is kind of hard to keep in touch permanently. I personally have personal contact to Sasha (Grey), who I keep meeting or talking to on a personal level.

We did have contact with everybody involved, after the movie was finished, and everybody was ok with it. Nobody felt mistreated or shown in a wrong way, and this is how it should be. The people trust you, and you should pay this respect back. I am very happy that we managed it like this, which is always hard, when you enter somebody’s private space on this level.

Sasha Grey was only 18 when she was featured on the documentary. How do you feel about people that young being involved in porn?

JH: If you do not go to University, I guess 18 is about the age you start your professional career. At the end it all comes down to the individual’s personality and if it fits to the profession chosen. I am not saying that porn is a normal career, but also it is not a devils thing. It is a flat statement and would need a lot of discussion, but when I see how many people get depressed on their jobs in insurance or maybe become amoral gangsters in banking – how ready were they when they started their careers? You are able to go to war and shoot people by the time you are aged 18. In our days, kids do have sex before marriage. Of course, it is a different thing to have sex on camera, but this has nothing to do with real sex. This is a performance, a circus act, a fantasy. There are some people who do have an exhibitionist fetish and do get turned on by a camera.

Anyway, we asked the same question and that is why we included two 18 year old girls who just started out in their porn careers. Sasha has obviously proved, that she was ready for it and that she had a strategy for her life, in which porn is an important part. But for sure, she is not the typical 18 year old. Her life-experience and her awareness, knowledge and intelligence are way above average.

Mia – the other 18 year old in the movie rather represents the average. Not that she got hurt or abused by the industry, but not all her dreams came as easy as she first thought and some might never come true. But at the end it is not a question of physical age, it is much more the question of personality, mental stability and intelligence.

Of course I am speaking about the world of porn as we know it from the USA and Western Europe. The more east you go, the more different the whole scene gets. I am talking about the relation to sex-business, prostitution and human trade. This separation gets thinner and disappears in places east of our homes, and then this is whole different story which we would discuss…

How would you say porn has changed in the recent years? Is there a trend for more extreme stuff now?

JH: The first big change in porn was the introduction of video, when it became affordable and technically possible for small crews and amateurs to make movies, and for people to watch them at home on their TV in privacy. Another step in all this was the digital technology, with Mini-DV cams, Internet, etc. Now a full beginner could grab a camera and make a POV-movie, even edit it on his laptop and distribute it through the net. The consumer can access it without leaving his house. So it becomes more intimate and your ‘worse’ fantasies can be fulfilled without getting a bad look from a person behind a counter.

I mean – nothing is produced which is not sold. The consumer leads the production in terms if content. No freak stuff is produced without the request. Since it is much easier to produce stuff, more specialties are available, and this is the extreme stuff, you can find now and has not been there before.

Besides that, I guess there are a lot of national trends. Americans love the deep throat gagging stuff, ass to mouth stuff. Germans I guess, are more straight to the ass and pussy, and they do love the very dirty talking. In France, more pubic hair is seen, and so on…

I am not so sure about the Brits. I guess they are still quite new in the game and do not have such a big porn-tradition, since it has been kept under the counter.