From: steveb@meaddata.com (Steve Brooke)
Subject: Re: "Gang Bang" series
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 17:52:26 GMT
Distribution: na

In article <H.lQpq36a7cps@harvee.billerica.ma.us>, scm@harvee.billerica.ma.us (S. Mudgett aka little gator) writes:
|> >
|> ...  but i did "read somewhere", possibly in the boston globe, about
|> a woman renting a porn video every night becuase she was in it and didn't
|> want anyone seeing it.  regardless of whatever other options she had, she may
|>  not have known she had them.

Here's the Boston Globe article published without permission.  The article is
dated May 17, 1992.

              Home-video sex sells; unwilling stars cry foul
                       By Judith Gaines, Globe Staff

   Every weekend, a New Hampshire woman rents what she says is her own
rape.

   After discovering that a film recording the event had become publicly
available at a local video store - one of a new genre of amateur adult
videotapes that have become popular in the last few years - she decided her only
option was to keep renting the film. That way, she reasoned, maybe no one else
will see it.

   She is one of many women who are experiencing firsthand an unexpected
outgrowth of the recent home video revolution: Husbands, boyfriends and
relatives are filming their wives, girlfriends and others engaged in sexual
activities, and then marketing the films commercially. For all who agree to the
sex, not all agree to the filming, and even fewer to the marketing.

   The homemade videos - facilitated by the development of inexpensive,
portable camcorders and other easy-to-use film-making equipment - are legal and
have become "one of the fastest-growing parts of the pornography industry," said
Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Boston's Wheelock
College who has studied pornography extensively.

   What separates this new genre from standard pornographic fare is that these
films are made by novices, usually without scripts, in their own homes. After
the raw footage has been shot, it typically is sold for prices ranging from 
$250 to $2,000 to any of about 100 US companies that provide minor editing,
packaging and distribution services.

   Advocates claim the films are harmless depictions of couples exploring their
sexual fantasies. But others say they indicate a growing acceptance, and
promotion, of violence toward women.

   "You don't have to use an actress. You don't have to sign any contracts or
negotiate salaries. You just grab the nearest woman, do whatever you want, and
somebody will pay to watch it. It's domestic violence with the camera added, and
it's becoming much more prevalent and lucrative," said Rhea Becker, who heads
the Cambridge-based Women's Alliance Against Pornography.

   The films are marketed in product lines such as "Mr. Peepers Amateur Home
 Videos, " "Neighborhood Watch," "Student Fetish  Videos"  and "Real Deal
Swingers," and sold or rented through adult bookstores, swap clubs and ads in
 video  and swinger magazines. The amateurishness and nonfictional qualities of
the production are lauded as selling points.

   "These are real folks just having fun in front of the camera, for everyone to
see," reads the jacket of a tape by Amateur Home  Videos  of California. "Is
that the girl next door? How about that guy? Didn't you just see him at the
supermarket? It's possible . . . as these are PURELY AMATEUR  videos. "

   "One of our correspondents sent in this tape that features . . . the thrill
of seeing a lady bound outdoors," says the cover of a film produced by Home Maid
 Videos,  also of California. "Perhaps after viewing you will be tempted to
contribute your own version. . . . Each new position is bound to excite you and
inspire you and yours."

   But to some of the women who find themselves stars in these films, the real
story is far from fun or inspirational.

   Pat Haas, now 45, was a keypunch operator in Brookline in the late 1980s when
she began dating a new man. She thought she loved him, but before long he
began "using mind games, manipulating me to be his sex slave," she said last
week.

   She said he began coercing her to have sex with other men and women while he
watched.  She said he beat her repeatedly, still professing his love. When she
protested, she said, he threatened to harm her or her young son.

   In April 1988, the physical abuse became what Haas called nothing short of
"torture." He forced her to pierce her nipples to wear a total of five gold
rings as a sign of her devotion, Haas said. A few months later, he decided to
record his control of her on videotape, she said.

   It was "a very strange night in December 1988," Haas recalled. Her boyfriend
gave her a ring for Christmas. Then, after brandishing a gun to show he meant
business, "he beat me with a whip handle for making noise during sex. When I was
all quiet and timid, he brought out the  video  camera," she said.

   "He set it on a coffee table a few feet away, on automatic, so he could get
close-ups of me servicing him orally," she continued. "I never consented, I just
gave in."

   She said the hourlong film shows him "pulling my hair, abusing me, telling me
again and again that I'm not doing it properly and to start over."

   Her boyfriend promised the  video  would never leave her house, Haas said.
But after she learned friends had seen the movie, she came to suspect her
boyfriend had made it available commercially. She also discovered he had made
films previously with other women, amassing a large self-made porno library.

   Now Haas says she wonders of the  video:  "How many copies are out there? How
many stores is it in? It's really tough."

   The details of Haas' story may be extreme, but the basic facts have become
all too common in the last few years, agree those who work in rape crisis
centers, in battered women's shelters, in YWCAs and with other women's groups
around New England.

   No statistics record how many adult amateur films are on the market today.
But in the last three years, from 2.5 million to 3 million camcorders have been
sold annually in the United States, said Jim Barry of New York City, editor of
 Video  Magazine.

   Now nearly 13 million homes have camcorders, 80 percent of all US households
have  video  cassette recorders, and there are about 25,000  video  specialty
stores in the country, Barry said. Women Against Pornography, a New York-based
group, estimates that 75 percent of these stores sell or rent pornographic
tapes.

   In 1991, adult  videos  accounted for 11.5 percent of all  video  sales and
rentals, grossing about $ 385 million a year, said Mark Kearns, managing editor
of Adult  Video  News, published in Los Angeles. He said that his staff screens
about 75 new adult  videos  every month, about a third of them produced by
amateurs.

   Lori Flanagan, 35, of Massachusetts, says she is "haunted" by the fear that
several pornographic tapes made of her, without her consent, will show up at her
local  video  store and ruin her future as a high school art teacher.

   Flanagan, who did not want her hometown identified, was an "A" student on the
president's honor roll at the Massachusetts university from which she graduated.
But she also came from a dysfunctional family and had been subjected to sexual
abuse by a family member, she said.

   When she met a man in 1986 who "paid attention to me, gave me crumbs of
affection, I ate it up," she said last week.

   But he began acting bizarrely, demanding that they watch films from his huge
pornography collection while having sex, telling her she was not normal if she
did not like this. And he started "waiting in the dark for me to come home and
then jumping out at me," she said.

   "At first, after that happened, we'd just make love. Then he started tying me
to the kitchen table," naked and blindfolded in the dark, Flanagan said. "He'd
leave me there and say when he came back, I wouldn't know who would be touching
me."

   One night in 1989, another man was also waiting for her. When the sex began,
a man with a camera jumped out, film rolling.

   When she protested, she said her lover hit her. Then "he said we wouldn't
have to watch strangers anymore; we could watch ourselves. I should act like I
was enjoying it, like those girls in the porno films."

   "I was so afraid of losing him," Flanagan continued. "He was the sun and I
revolved around him. I wanted the outside world to see that I had him - a
him." She later added, "The constant battering had broken down my resistance."

   She kept trying to get the tapes, "until one day he exploded and started
putting cigarettes out on my legs. After that, I stopped asking about the
tapes," she said.

   Legal experts say the indecent assault and battery that women like Haas and
Flanagan say they endured could be a prosecutable, criminal offense. When
filming occurs without a person's consent, civil penalties can also be imposed
for fraud and invasion of privacy.

   But women who have been abused in this way are often too ashamed to seek
public redress, consent can be obtained under duress, and, in any case, no state
or federal law prohibits marketing pornographic films of adults, even films
showing the commission of crimes, experts in abuse say.

   "It's one more common way in which many women are being exploited - and,
sadly, often by their partners," said Rep. Barbara Hildt (D-Essex), who is
sponsoring legislation here that would give women the right to sue the creators
and purveyors of pornography, if they can prove it has done them harm.

   In fact, some evidence suggests that the desire to produce films for the
amateur market is stimulating criminal behavior.

   This is how police view the case of Mark Lucius of North Walpole, N.H., who
was arrested in August on charges of felonious aggravated sexual assault in what
authorities say was an unsuccessful attempt to make an amateur porno videotape.

   Lucius had conspired with another man to lure some neighborhood girls into
the woods, rape them at gunpoint while a camera filmed the crime, and then
sell the tape, according to Detective Sgt. Mike Miles of the State Police in
Keene, N.H.

   But his alleged accomplice "got cold feet and contacted police," who arrested
Lucius before the rapes could occur, Miles said. A trial is pending.

   In about a dozen interviews around New England, proprietors of stores selling
adult  videos  said the amateurs account for 20 to 60 percent of their total
videotape sales and rentals. Some said the possibility that the women have been
filmed without their consent, or through coercion, merely adds to the appeal.

   "When someone says there was a hidden camera or something like that, it's a
big seller," said John, who owns Adult Video Books and Novelties in Boston
and asked that his last name not be used.

   But he and others stressed other reasons for the popularity of the amateur
films. "People get tired of seeing the same girls in the same old sequences,"
John said.

   The amateur films are also less predictable, said Mitch, 25, an engineer from
central New Hampshire, who asked that his last name not be used. He said he had
"worked behind the camera on about a dozen amateur  videos"  and participated
on-screen in three or four more, but always with the women's consent.

   "There are lots of bloopers, like when a person falls off the bed, or a cat
comes running into the room," he said.

   For the film stars, it's "an ego-booster. . . . It says other people still
find me sexy," he added.

   But Pat Haas and Lori Flanagan got a different message from their
experiences.  Haas attempted suicide not long after the filming.  Flanagan's
abuse necessitated surgery, and she still has debilitating flashbacks.

   "Those films are going to hurt me for the rest of my life," said Flanagan.
"Sometimes I think, if I cry, I'll never stop. There's oceans inside of me."

   But Flanagan said she feels stronger as she finds the nerve to speak out
about what happened and realizes "this isn't an isolated case. There are so many
of these abusers out there."


|> -- 
|> -- little gator aka s. mudgett     email: scm@harvee.billerica.ma.us
|> -- friend of a gator is a friend of mine

-- 
Steve Brooke  		      "Revolution Calling!"          Mead Data Central
BIS Conversion Engineering        -Queensryche   	     P.O. Box 933
uunet!meaddata!steveb                                        Dayton, Ohio 45401
steveb@meaddata.com		   Go Cubbies!               (513)865-7691

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban