When I was a teenager, and perhaps when you were, too, shows that would come on premium cable networks like HBO late at night — particularly Cathouse — were interesting, erm, initiators into “illicit” content: deeply unsexy and porn-adjacent, with the excuse of being “educational”! On TV! But still the closest thing to real sex you were going to see! These shows aired late at night, alongside actual soft-core pornographic programming, and they felt designed to be consumed privately.
Over a decade later, cultural conversations about sex and sex work have, at least in certain circles, become a lot more open, and America’s puritanical relationship with sexuality has been waning (or rising in reaction, depending on where you go) with the unavoidable fact that sex pervades the Internet, from hookup apps to highly accessible pornography to erotic fanfiction written by people with pen names like Snowqueen’s Icedragon that’ll go onto become #1 bestselling fiction.
Netflix has an upcoming docu-series that examines these notions and that apparently won’t be relegated to 1 a.m. bouts of teenage curiosity, because a.) this appears to be an actual documentary probing relevant questions, and b.) it’s 2017, and these questions can be “probed” out in the open. Produced by Rashida Jones, Jill Bauer, and Ronna Gradus, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, which released its first trailer today, focuses on the rapidly shifting tactics for making and consuming pornography and digitally mediated intimacy, and both the social advances and pertinent ethical quandaries these changes bring about.
The series is based on the 2015 documentary Hot Girls Wanted, directed by Bauer and Gradus (and co-produced by Jones). That film premiered at Sundance in 2015, and has been out on Netflix for quite a while. It centeres on young women in the porn industry; in the Hollywood Reporter,Leslie Felperin wrote, “The filmmakers strive to give a fair hearing to those within the porn world who unapologetically defend the profession,” but that “the film clearly questions just how much the barely legal participants are in control.” Felperin called it “carefully constructed” and a “rigorous, timely study.”
The series, which will be released on April 21, focuses on six different stories, each representing a different realm of contemporary, virtualized sex and intimacy. From a young woman employed by an amateur porn agency, to users of dating/hookup apps, to a 19-year-old who was arrested for charges that she live-streamed her friend’s rape, to a cam girl who equates her work to psychiatry, the series looks to ponder the revolutions and regressions, pleasures and horrors, utopian and dystopian elements of the virtualization of intimacy.
Watch the trailer:
Here’s the poster:
