Having grown up in Taiwan, I did not see my first porn film until I was thirty years old, when I came to the U.S. as a graduate student in Boston in 1990.

Contrary to many women being pushed to watch porn by their boyfriends, I had a shy partner who never had the courage to rent a porn video. The few times that I reached for the top shelf at the Video Smith in Brookline to grab a porn video, I had to endure the torturous journey – ignoring other men peering at me out of the corner of their eyes while I was cruising through this off limits section, holding the extra large video box with vivid pictures for everyone to see while I stood in a long check-out line, and then waiting for the clerk to slowly take the video out of its box and put it in a black box which everyone knew was for porn anyway. Although this journey made me descend from a respectable to a fallen woman, there was something thrilling and daring because I was against the constraints set by both Chinese and American patriarchy that disapproved of women's consumption of porn. I figured, if not being allowed to watch porn was part of the sexual repression, then rebelling against it must be liberating and even feminist. read more >>

Co-writer and Associate Producer: Robert Wosnitzer
www.miguelpicker.com

When I began working on The Price of Pleasure over 4 years ago, I expected, more than anything, to learn the process of filmmaking. That the film’s topic was to be pornography was, at the time, of a secondary consideration. I had what can be considered conventional liberal beliefs about pornography and the contemporary pornography industry – pornography was free speech; pornography represented a liberatory sexuality, intervening in the repressive moral codes of religion, conservatism, and infantilizing protectionism; that pornography was a “free” choice, made by both consumers and performers who made their living by engaging in sex onscreen; and I had also assumed that the majority of the pornography out there looked very much the like the pornography I had experienced as an adolescent, or saw at bachelor parties during my career in investment banking – mostly “conventional” sexual practices, with a nominal degree of mutuality.

I will not attempt to say that these assumptions were simply false, but they certainly weren’t true, either. During and after the process of making this film, I realized the complexity that marks the relationships between pornography, sexuality, gender roles and identity, fantasy, and pleasure. I also discovered a politics that the analysis of pornography enabled. That is, the complex patterns of social and sexual expressions are inexorably linked to our economic system in a mutually constructing dance. It is this complexity that, I believe, is precisely how this film moves beyond the binary rhetorics of the so-called “porn wars” of the 80’s and 90’s, while also giving us a way to understand – and challenge – the politics of representation, and its tendency to focus on aesthetics. read more >>