Exposure

Thanks to author Chauntelle Tibbals and NetGalley for offering this advance review copy! EXPOSURE will be published July 7, 2015.

If you are looking for a salacious, tell-all expose on the world of porn–this isn’t it. What it IS: an intelligent and thought provoking view into the business of sexy movies. Tibbals supports this world yet doesn’t agree with it fully, a concept I found refreshing. It’s difficult to walk that fine line between “not my kind of stuff” and revulsion, and the author maintains her position as IN the world, not OF it. This position helps to create credibility and honesty.

Censoring attitudes almost prevented Tibbals from obtaining her degree; her advisor was hostile and passive aggressive, her peers wondered what was wrong with her. Why is a nice girl like you getting involved with such filth is the undertone of the first part, as Tibbals details her struggle to defend her choices. I found it repugnant in this enlightened day and age, that an advisor could hold such power over a student’s choice, a choice that was not hurting anyone.

Good thing that Tibbals marched to the beat of her own drum. Eventually she found her way and began her thesis in earnest. Substitute any other subject for porn, and what you have is how she went about gathering information. As the industry accepted her, not as a gawker, but as a true supporter seeking understanding through knowledge, Tibbals befriended the megastars and watched literally hundreds of films. (Did you know they have their own version of the Oscars for porn films? I didn’t either.)

As she gained respect by showing respect, Tibbals found herself in many situations: watching films shot from behind the scenes, hanging out with some of the actors, and sitting as a judge for the aforementioned films awards. She explains her “walking the line” mentality with an anecdote about a movie that was esthetically sound, but directed by an unsavory character. She struggled with trying to separate the fact that she loathed the director while appreciating the film for what it was: shot beautifully, with a plot that made sense and was actually engaging to watch. I was quite impressed by her self awareness and willingness to share the truth, even if she didn’t personally approve/like it.

You must go into this book with an open mind, similar to the author watching those movies. As the blurb notes, porn is “just another business” and this is an insider’s view. Sex is such a hot button topic in America, and it shouldn’t be. I applaud the author’s temerity and her vociferous support for this area of our society; the part of our culture everyone has an opinion about, yet hesitates to defend.

This societal dichotomy persists with a section on how these porn stars are alternately worshipped and reviled: when the girls make appearances at trade shows (much like authors or sports figures do) their “fans” will wait in line to see them, fawning over their beauty. Once they get their audience with Tammy Tawdry, however, they will call them “sluts” or ask if their daddy is proud of what they do. This is a perfect example of the double standard and pervasive misogyny that is a staple of our society. Women walk a fine line with their sexuality; the male stars are purported as heroes with staying power, and the girls are just an object to be used. Tibbals is dead on with this chapter.

Her writing style is easy to follow and often humorous. She makes no apology for who she is or how she got there; and I found that refreshing and empowering. Being a maverick is often lonely and frustrating, but usually has its rewards. I sincerely hope Tibbals is recouping hers now.

Recently, I began following Chauntelle Tibbals through her Twitter account and podcast. When I learned that she had a book coming out, I was interested in reading it, so I was happy to see it available through NetGalley.

As a sociologist, Dr. Tibbals communicates in a manner that is accessible for the layperson. While she sometimes dips into sociological jargon, it does not impede the overall message that she communicates throughout the book.

Dr. Tibbals is clearly well-versed in the adult entertainment industry, having studied it for over a decade. But that study has not just been limited to the academic. As part of her research, she has worked at adult conventions, conducted countless interviews with those in the industry (performers, directors, and producers alike), and defended the industry as a whole when those in the mainstream would rather berate and mock it.

There's a phrase that Dr. Tibbals uses in her book that I think is particularly important--"social justice for the adult community." This is probably the last thing that most people consider when they think of (or consume) porn. But it's also something that's highly necessary, especially in a shifting landscape where adult performers are likely not in a position to achieve the level of financial success and security that their predecessors were, prior to the ubiquitous use of tube sites and piracy.

That's a point that I would have liked Dr. Tibbals to highlight more in depth. She does mention that the industry is not as financially lucrative as it used to be, pre-Internet, but I would have liked a more thorough examination of just how deeply (and in the various ways) performers are negatively affected by piracy and what this means for the future of the adult industry.

In addition to its commentary on the state of adult entertainment in general, the book is part memoir. Dr. Tibbals shares the extensive work she did in college while earning her PhD and the numerous barriers she faced--many of them from her mentors in academia, who simply couldn't understand why a "nice girl" like her would want to study porn.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. It offers an interesting perspective of the porn business from someone who's closely associated with it, but not fully part of it (meaning she's not a performer, producer, or otherwise directly involved in content creation itself). The parts of the book that resonated the most with me are the human elements. Dr. Tibbals speaks without condescension or judgment when discussing the industry and the performers who comprise it.

When speaking about adult entertainment, much too often the analyses are on the extreme negative side. That is, the conventional notion that porn is a dark, dirty, seedy business that destroys lives. It's worth mentioning that Dr. Tibbals does acknowledge stories of infamous performers such as Linda Lovelace and Traci Lords. However, it's also worth mentioning that those experiences are probably not the norm. Additionally, it's also important to draw attention to the types of adult media that you might not hear about very often, such as feminist porn (no, that's really not an oxymoron) as well as porn for the target audience of women, often produced and/or directed by women.

Far too often, society treats the creation and consumption of porn as something to hide or feel shameful about. With her insight and candor, Dr. Tibbals reduces some of that social stigma and presents a different perspective: that in many ways, porn can actually be a healthy part of one's sexuality. Occasionally, it can even offer some social commentary. That acknowledgement, in the context of everyday life, is both noteworthy and empowering.

Chauntelle Tibbals is a sociologist whose studies focused on a "critical commentary on adult production", that is, a real study, conducted on the field, of adult entertainment. In this book Chauntelle tries to de-stigmatise the world of pornography and porn stars, to redime the industry and to show that it is so much more than a mean to exploit sex, gender and race. She interviews actors and producers, shows how (professional) pornography is just like any other kind of recorded movie because it also needs to be understood and not to be taken literally when re-acted in real life. She deals with issues such as feminism, race, sex, gender, tries to look at porn through the eyes of male pornstars (which are usually neglected due to their female counterparts), faces themes such as violence against women and exploitation of underage people.
The way she writes is strightforward and honest. She's a very intelligent person and a rather funny one. Chauntelle manages to cover any ambiguity her words could create, encourages the reader to understand that pornography shapes our culture on a daily basis and that we should think about it critically, not letting mere social contructs fool us.

Favourite quote (that covers the entirety of this review):

"Society is made up of a vast array of communities and experiences and though you don't have to like them all, all of them are significant pieces comprising the whole of humanity. As such, all of them are worthy of respectful consideration."

Geez, this was cute.

"Cute" may be a weird word to describe a book on porn, but whatever, it really is cute. Dr Chauntelle Tibbals is a sociology academic with a difference -- she earned her PhD studying porn. Or, rather, the cultural impact of porn. Nonetheless, she's spent her academic career stymied, notably by one particular university adviser who felt the need to shout at her, "Why do you want to watch people fuck, Chauntelle?"

That Tibbals is able to recount this and others of her humiliating/frustrating experiences with so much self-effacing humour is a large part of why this book works. Having so recently read another memoir where the author's personality seemed to be entirely absent, it was heartening to be able to get such a strong sense of Tibbals in Exposure. Her wit, her passion, her lovable weirdness, really jumps off the page.

Tibbals' personality is also important in grounding this book, which may prove difficult to categorize. It's easy to expect a doctor of sociology to have written a sociology book, but that's not what this is. It's also not the "exposé" on the porn industry that apparently some publishers wanted her to write. In fact, it reads more like a set of dinner party anecdotes -- all of which happen to relate to porn. (This does lend the book an air of "books that read like blog posts" -- part of a trend which is now so prevalent that I'm going to create a tag for it -- but it didn't affect my enjoyment.)

Smart, thoughtful and (yes) cute stuff. Recommended.

From the opening essay in Exposure, you will laugh (a lot) and you will cringe (occasionally). Which is appropriate. After all, this is a book about porn — that laugh- and cringe-inducing industry of id. It’s the shadow market force that accelerates tech innovation and the economy as surely as it does libidoes, and both mirrors and molds our culture in more ways than we realize.

Once relegated to shady theaters and sticky arcades, porn is now a billion-dollar business with crossover into the mainstream. Still, a stigma remains, and new hang-ups have emerged along with new media.

Chauntelle Tibbals, a sociologist specializing in gender, sex and media, is our guide through present-day Porn Valley in this collection of anecdotes, theories and observations from her decade-plus of researching the industry.

Tibbals is a prolific writer and commentator. In Exposure, she only skims the surface of her academic research, but you can find much of it online (and I highly recommend you do). Here, she gives us the broad strokes of the industry. Her essays raise more questions than they answer, and that’s the point. Pornography impacts us on many levels, and our relationship with it gets knotted up with our needs, values and feelings on gender, politics and social mores. Untangling these knots is beyond the scope of a single book.

Instead, Tibbals reveals the human side of adult entertainment that will reframe the way you think about the business — not in a judgemental way, but an intellectual one.

Tibbals traces her foray into porn scholarship to a provocative streak and a rejection of unscientific generalizations about adult entertainment. Sadly, she discovered this short-sightedness had infiltrated academia when her graduate advisor belittled her dissertation topic. However, this rebuke only further entrenched her scientific curiosity.

“Porn was capable of making people lose their common sense, analytic skills, and composure,” she writes. “It could scramble the smartest, most educated of brains. And that was it for me. I was hooked — porn for life.”

But it was more than the thrill of the maverick driving her interest. She was also fascinated with her own fear of pornography, which, once she delved deeper into the topic, she realized was actually a fear of “the socially constructed idea of it.”

Some of Tibbals’ finest work is when she’s exploring the meta-space between real and fantasy — real actors with fake personas having real sex presented as fantasy. What impact does this have on the performers? It’s complicated, of course, but the important thing is that Tibbals poses the question in a way that humanizes the participants.

Talk shows flock to porn-star tragedies and draw broad conclusions. Tibbals considers each performer as an individual being. One such star is Joanna Angel, a Rutgers graduate who runs her own production company and stars in its films. Tibbals found one of Angel’s more hardcore flicks to be both intense and empowering.

“It showed an educated woman business owner in control of exactly the kind of sex she wanted, all in order to make exactly the kind of creative product she wanted to sell.”

In her survey of the genre, Tibbals challenges her own assumptions of empowerment and exploitation. In spending time with performers and their fans at conventions, she confronts a complicated culture that she describes as “the strangest mix of human adoration and disgust.” There are earnest and endearing fans, but also stalkers, self-righteous assholes and seemingly well-intended folks who unconsciously break social norms (asking intimate questions or making lewd comments) simply because of the perceived intimacy they have with the performer.

And of course there are the insecure misogynists who simultaneously desire and degrade the women they adore, often in a flurry of bipolar comments (“I love you”/”You’re a whore”) on social media. As though porn actors didn’t have enough detractors on the outside, they also suffer the abuse of so-called fans who “slut-shame” them online.

And it’s not just anti-porn activists and misogynists who get in on the action. Media exploitation of the industry is as pernicious and predatory as it accuses Porn Valley of being.

Take as an example the recent documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which I enjoyed but which ultimately disappointed when it devolved into a patriarchal rescue narrative. The lead subject, Tressa, willingly and knowingly pursues a career in porn, but is infantilized by the documentarians. She starts dating a guy who is aware of what she does for a living, but then he whines about how her career is hurting him. He implores her to give up her job for him. Were you to replace “porn star” with any other occupation — say “ER surgeon” — the jealous, insecure boyfriend would be, at best, an unsympathetic character, if not an outright villain.

In Hot Girls Wanted, though, he is the white knight.

But don’t take my word for it. Tibbals happened to write a fantastic review for Uproxx, which explains the film’s failings far better than I could.

I have long been fascinated with this bizarro intersection of pornography, feminism and media, and Exposure did not disappoint. This book is proof of the importance of porn scholarship, and Tibbals’ is a welcome and needed voice in the field.

More popular than cat videos

Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment by Chauntelle Tibbals (Greenleaf Book Group, $18.95).

Chauntelle Tibbals has not had the typical career path for a Ph.D. sociologist, starting with her decidedly un-tenured approach to academia, but only advanced by her subject matter: Americans’ ambivalent relationship to the adult entertainment industry.

Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment is a sort-of memoir with footnotes that takes a decidedly chatty and generally reader-friendly tone to discuss misinformation about the most forbidden of topics: Porn. It’s a multi-billion-dollar, taxpaying industry—mostly based in California’s San Fernando Valley—that our culture insists on stigmatizing while still purchasing and consuming, and that ought to be an interesting question for sociologists, right?

But Tibbals not only describes her own field work (lengthy interviews and observations of adult entertainment industry workers, not personal employment), she also delves into the taboos that still exist about studying reality—even in the academy. A fascinating read, Exposure is—and ought to be—controversial, but what it really exposes is our own cultural hypocrisy.

A fascinating memoir of Dr. Tibbals' sociological examination of today's pornography. By taking a less scholarly approach, which, for the reader is far more entertaining, Tibbals' adventures are filled with funny anecdotes and personal histories. She takes on incredulous academics and field assignments with the same humor as her examples of pornography moves from traditionally elusive to mainstream acceptance.

I freaking loved this book. Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals is a sociologist studying porn. Instead of taking a sex negative approach to the porn community Dr. Tibbals seeks to go beyond the surface and get to the true heart of porn and the way it helps shape society. This book is a series of essays and my only fault is that I wanted more porn insight. There's a few gripes about Dr. Tibbals interaction with traditional academia that might turn a few off. Of course the topic of porn will turn more than a few off but this book is worth a read.

Subtitled: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment, and as one would expect from that, I came into this book thinking it would be a sociological study on the porn industry. It isn’t; I suppose one would read her doctorial dissertation for that, but once I adjusted that expectation, I found myself liking it more. What it turned out to be was a collection of stories about how she did her research, some of them hilarious, some gross, some both, all intriguing. If you look at the author’s photo, where she comes off as incredibly serious, you would not expect her to be in all these situations, but that belief is shattered by the stories of her childhood and college days, and of course her time on porn sets and award shows. If her goal was to prove that those who have sex on camera for a living are people too, mission accomplished.

I saw Exposure listed on NetGalley, and, being a guy, of course I was interested. A book about sex? Sweet! I'm all for learning about the porn industry. After all, sex sells, and yet it's such a taboo subject in our culture. Many people do it, and yet it's still frowned upon, talked in secret, and misinformation (or lack of information) is given to teenagers. So, Chauntelle Tibbals set out to explore the adult entertainment industry.

The book reads somewhat like a memoir, as Dr. Tibbals recalls what led her to investigate such a taboo topic and then goes on about her experiences, or, put fancily, "the sociocultural significance of adult entertainment as it relates to law, media, and gender." Although interesting, (and infrequently a little humorous) I felt that the book failed to do more than scratch the surface on some topics - more on that in a little bit. But for what this book actually is, I mostly enjoyed it.

There is no single topic about the adult industry that this book focuses on. It's a bit all over the place, beginning with how Dr. Tibbals got into this topic, to talking about the lives of some adults in the industry, then finishing off with some opinions.

The book did bring up some interesting things. One part I really got a kick out of because it's so true, is that people frown upon breast implants/any time of boob job. And yet we will correct our teeth with braces without giving it a second thought. A different body part, yes, but it's still being changed to our liking, just like some women will do with their breasts.

There's also some humorous parts, such as the author admitting to watching porn in an airport. Yes, reviewing porn is a job of hers, but still. Sheesh! I hope she at least had some headphones on.

Back to what I said earlier about scratching the surface. There's a lot of interesting topics that had so much potential but were instead quickly grazed over, such as piracy (tube sites). There was also the mentioning of the fact that nobody pays attention to the guy in porn. I felt that this topic could also have been explored in depth more. In comparison to the mentioning of tube sites/piracy this part was given a bit more of a writeup, recalling how a male porn star was unable to "finish", so, in addition to already being paid less than the co-starring female, he voluntarily took a pay deduction. Ouch.

Pornography is such a complex and broad subject that it's impossible to fit everything into a single book, but if we're just talking about the surface of things and intertwining personal narratives like this book does, I enjoyed it. I learnt a bit, such as that it's only legal to film porn for profit in California and New Hampshire.

Now let's hope my (quite religious) mother doesn't check my recent book reviews anytime soon, as she'd have a heart attack to know her oh-so-innocent son read a book about porn/sex. :-)

This book is a clear and interesting description of the world of porn movies, from a sociological and anthropological point of view. The author outlines in a very scientific, and even fun, way what are the main reasons that led her to do this research and allows us to have many different and interesting insights of a piece of the world that, even if it's very wide, is usually ignored.

Questo libro è una chiara e interessante descrizione del mondo del porno, in particolare dei film, da un punto di vista antropologico e sociologico. L'autrice delinea in modo scientifico, e anche divertente, quali sono le ragioni che l'hanno spinta a fare questa ricerca e ci permette di avere differenti e chiarificanti insight su una parte di mondo, che per quanto vasta, viene di solito sistematicamente ignorata.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND GREEN LEAF BOOK GROUP FOR THE PREVIEW!