Chauntelle Tibbals

This review originally appeared on my blog at www.gimmethatbook.com.

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.



… (altro)

In Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment, Chauntelle Tibbals exposes readers to her PhD research on the San Fernando Valley adult entertainment industry. Double standards, a lot of mystery, a thin line between real and fake characterize pornographers, content, distribution and the people working in this legal industry. Whether you're in favor or against it, adult entertainment is a hugely influential cultural component in the U.S., and therefore interesting from a sociological point of view as well.
Tibbals met many industry professionals, watched a lot of content for both professional reasons as well as voluntary work as competition judge, worked as PR official in one of the companies, visited trade shows, and watched in film sets. The author shares what she saw, though not providing her full thesis here. Neither is the book itself adult entertainment. You'll be surprised about the many unexpected industry insights, stigmatized workers in their powerful moments as well embarrassing scenes. It's a fly-on-the-wall account of a multi-year research, including scientific analysis.
No one is a neutral observer, and Tibbals does affirm that her exploration is as subjective as any other's. She's positive about the industry, sees little or no real dangers. There's no mentioning of addictions, almost nothing on STD. Both producers and consumers have their dreams and desires. In the end, the porn industry is a business like any other, according to Dr. Tibbals. Exposure is well-written, free from scientific jargon and leaves room for a personal choice regarding the actual consumption of the industry's products and services.… (altro)

Free review copy. A defense of porn whose Panglossian account is unpersuasive, even if working in porn isn’t doom either. She hasn’t encountered abuse, and “there is no authority more correct than your own informed perspective,” which makes it hard to evaluate her book against others that tell stories that are far more unpleasant. Tibbals’ resentment of other academics seems both justified—she reports a lot of disdain, and she has a right to be angry at mistreatment based on her choice of topic—and unhelpful (I don’t know too many sociology grad students who really get a lot of “networking at symposia, eating free lunches and drinking free cocktails). She doesn’t like a fellow academic’s observation that a panel she organized on porn only featured white people, even though the white women she invited were diverse in other ways, and calls that criticism “uninformed and uncritical,” which doesn’t seem accurate.

She also defends porn with false equivalences (The Fast and the Furious plainly doesn’t impact how people drive—how we know this is unclear—and thus porn can’t be thought to have an impact on real-life sex) that don’t address the ways in which Americans get sex education, in particular, from media. In fact, later on she says that when it comes to sex, we wrongly conflate porn with reality in ways we don’t with horror films—so we get “consumers using adult content as a sexual teaching tool [and] people gauging their selfworth against the images they see in the newest adult scenarios.” I also lost a lot of respect at the point when she indicated that Traci Lords (who made a number of films while several years underage), though she wasn’t exactly to blame for her situation (throwaway kid, addicted to drugs, etc.), wasn’t exactly not to blame either. While I take her point that someone tricked into sex with an underage performer also has reason to feel bad, that doesn’t mean “Traci’s story stopped being about her a long time ago,” or that the people whose businesses were ruined as a result of having to destroy Lords’ films have more grievances than she does. “[W]here is the book about them?” she wonders, having sort of written it, albeit not that well. If she doesn’t like “a system that allowed a teenager to take everything,” does she mean that the films should have been left out there? Should the government have paid the producers for destroying child porn, and how would that work with an I-didn’t-know defense in general? Although she deploys her academic status to gain credibility—and that’s an understandable and acceptable move—the arguments here lack the rigor I’d expect in an academic work. I looked up one of her law review papers, on adult performers and safety/health regulations, and wasn’t more favorably inclined.… (altro)