HOT GIRLS WANTED: TURNED ON. (2017) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

 HOT GIRLS WANTED: TURNED ON. (2017)

A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY SERIES.

PRODUCED BY JILL BAUER, RONNA GRADUS AND RASHIDA JONES.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I literally couldn't wait to sit down and write this review, even though I'm nearly a decade late to the party and the show has been on Netflix for several years.

This documentary series is a follow-up to the 2015 documentary film, Hot Girls Wanted, in which several young girls/women are interviewed about their lives as amateur porn actresses.

They all live in a grotty bungalow with twenty-three-year-old Riley Reynolds, a porn agent, in North Miami Beach. Yes, they go to casting calls and shoot amateur porn movies, but there's an awful lot of sitting around bored on their phones in Riley's house and overall the life isn't as glamorous as it sounds.

Riley, though not abusive, reminds me of nothing so much as a douche-baggy pimp, and his words (paraphrased by me as I remember them) live rent-free in my head: 'Every day a whole bunch of new girls turn eighteen and want to go into porn, so the well never runs dry.' Or words to that effect.

This documentary left me feeling really depressed for all the beautiful young women, some of whom are still children themselves- though over eighteen, it's all legal- who actively choose this lifestyle for themselves. 

Maybe they do it to escape abusive step-daddies or neglectful mothers, or because they're done with school and studying and they think porn might be a way for them to earn some 'easy money.' Well, it may be a lucrative profession, but I would never call it easy.

Anyway, onto Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, the sequel from 2017. It's made up of six stand-alone roughly hour-long episodes: Women on Top, Love Me Tinder, Owning It, Money Shot, Take Me Private and Don't Stop Filming. Today I want to talk to you about two of these, Owning It and Take Me Private...

Owning It is so sad, in the tragic meaning of the word. Bailey Rayne is a young female 'entrepreneur' in her twenties who acts as a recruiter for the porn industry. To my mind, she's no different from a brothel madam, but that's just my opinion.

She works in tandem with a rather sleazy-looking, middle-aged porn agent called John. Bailey picks up the girls, whom she finds online, and brings them to John's house, or at least it's a dwelling in which John houses his 'finds.' One such find is nineteen-year-old Bonnie Ginz...

Bonnie is truly gorgeous. Fresh-faced and sweet-natured, she's a knockout busty blonde who would turn heads in any setting. I think John and Bailey can scarcely believe their luck in nabbing her before anyone else does.

On one casting call, at which the girls are required to strip naked for the benefit of the agents who might or might not hire them to 'act' in their films, one agent likens the small-town girl to another tragic blonde, Anna Nicole Smith.

Anna Nicole was the American Playboy magazine centrefold and 1993 Playmate of the Year who married an eighty-six-year-old billionaire (J. Howard Marshall, not Hugh Hefner!) in 1994 and was dead of a drug overdose by age thirty-nine.

Anna Nicole definitely had father issues, having been brought up mostly by her mother after her daddy left them. Bonnie, our amateur porn actress wanna-be, speaks openly on camera about having watched porn with her stepfather before she was ten years old and losing her virginity at the age of twelve to a boy of seventeen.

That implies, to me certainly, a lost little girl who's going to equate sex with love and she's going to spend the rest of her troubled life looking for it.

The fact that Bonnie has already been hurt or even abused by men is obvious by the way that she's decided that, initially anyway, she's only going to do 'solo' porn work (masturbation, etc.) or girl-on-girl.

Later on in the programme, she's decided she'll do the boy-girl work after all, but the trouble with that is that you can get 'ripped.' And I don't mean you'll have a muscular abdominal area with a rippling six-pack...

We see Bailey, the 'recruiter,' making sad noises to camera about how poor Bonnie is getting heavily into drugs and possibly actual prostitution as well, as she's meeting up with some guy, supposedly for 'lunch,' and this guy is willing to pay five hundred dollars for the privilege. You'd have to be pretty naive not to work out that he's gonna want more for his money than just the pleasure of her delightful company...

I couldn't help it. I looked Bonnie up online to see how she finished up. Dead of a drug overdose by 2025, by which time she still wasn't even thirty. Also known as Kylie Page or Kylie Pylant, the 'adult film star' had acted in over two hundred films, and her family launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover funeral expenses...

This is just the most criminal waste of a young life you'll ever see. A beautiful, healthy, intelligent, friendly young woman dead of an overdose by thirty, after being used and abused by men her whole life because of her pleasing physical appearance.

So, that was the sad-tragic element. Now for the sad-cringey episode. Take Me Private introduces us to the world of 'camming' and 'camgirls.' For those who may not know, a camgirl is a girl/woman with a webcam set up in her home or a space rented for this purpose.

Viewers- mostly men- can pay to collect 'tokens,' and then use their tokens to have the camgirl carry out various requests. These can include: taking her top off, flashing her boobs, butt or panties, jumping up and down topless, doing star-jumps or squats, spanking herself, touching her own boobs or even her genitals, i.e., masturbation.

Viewers share their camgirl with all the other site users, all identified only by their usernames. If a camgirl asks you to 'take her private,' it means she wants you to pay extra to go into a private chatroom with her, and then you can see each other and converse together and whatever you request her to do, as long as you're paying for it, will be for your eyes only. The host website would take a certain amount of all/any earnings.

Alice Frost (at the time the documentary was released: 2017), a bubbly blonde, is an American camgirl. Her main selling point is big tits. She could be anywhere between twenty-five and maybe thirty-five. She cams about fourteen hours a day, every day. She's a hairdresser by trade but it looks like she makes most of her money by camming.

Tom, username Approximate, is Alice's biggest fan. Tom, heavy-set, is a self-confessed nerd from Melbourne, Australia. He could also be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five in age. He has never had a girlfriend and his only friends are fellow nerds. They meet up to play games and discuss nerdish things, which I'm not dissing, by the way. I also enjoy certain nerdish things.

Alice is very nice to Tom because Tom pays her large sums of money to 'go private' with her. Alice admits that nearly everything in her flat, including a load of sexy underwear and swimwear, was bought by money Tom has donated to her as a frequent viewer of her camgirling service.

Tom thinks that he and Alice are having a 'relationship.' In fairness, Alice does nothing to discourage this feeling of his. She herself tells us that Tom's a truly wonderful guy and she really, really, really likes him, even though she has a husband who seems to live off her earnings.

Tom knows about the existence of this husband. The two men often exchange cheery greetings while Alice is online with Tom and hubby is on his phone on the couch, with his bare feet up on the cluttered coffee table. Nice, huh?

Alice laughs a lot, especially when she's in the private chatroom with Tom, as if she's desperately trying to convince herself and us that she's having such a lot of fun and everything in the garden is absolutely rosy.

The laughing gets a bit frantic at times. Does Alice really get as much as she'd have us believe out of her 'relationship' with a paying customer from across the world, even if she has been 'seeing' him for four years...?

Unfortunately, the more Alice laughs and compliments and gushes, the more poor Tom thinks their 'relationship' is real and Alice likes him as much as he clearly likes her.

I'm not implying that Alice is bad and Tom is being taken advantage of. They are both nice people, and Tom is old enough to realise that Alice is being so nice to him because he's her biggest tipper. But the 'relationship' ends up hurting them both.

In the documentary, Alice is going to Melbourne to visit Tom, who acts like he's expecting a real-live girlfriend to come stay with him. He's also clearly expecting their intimate 'relationship' to be consummated when she lands.

We see scenes of Alice excitedly packing all the bikinis and underwear she's bought with Tom's money, and she's doing it 'live' on the webcam for Tom's benefit. It's kind of no wonder Tom thinks she's going to sleep with him when she gets to Melbourne. Why else would she be bringing all these sexy knickers and bras, etcetera...?

Alice does not enjoy her sojourn in Melbourne. She stays in a motel rather than at Tom's house, saying at first that it's just till she recovers from the long flight. The sex that Tom is hoping for and was maybe counting on doesn't happen, because Alice, even though she's seen him as his real self online numerous times, clearly doesn't fancy him or find him attractive in any way, shape or form.

Tom is mortified. He's devastated. Alice, to give her her due, is upset because she knows he's upset and disappointed. To get out of the 'relationship,' she tells Tom he deserves 'real' love and she's prepared to set him 'free' so that he can achieve just that.

To quote The Simpsons, you can actually pinpoint the exact moment his heart rips in two. He pretends to agree with her and he even tells his friends that he's going to look for a 'real' girlfriend now, but you can tell he's destroyed. He's just been dumped by his camgirl, after all, even though he's probably paid her thousands of dollars over the years.

This is all just so messed-up. What must it be like now, nine years later, when we're all online so much more and porn is literally all over the Internet, so freely, in fact, that even kids can find it...? Are people eschewing real relationships in favour of online ones?

Porn dehumanises us, whether we choose to believe it or not. There's a whole generation of young men growing up today who think porn is real and the stuff they see in it is what real women are supposed to do for them in their sexual relationships. This is bad for women and men.

Though it's a few years old at this stage, I respectfully suggest you watch Hot Girls Wanted and Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, just in case you were ever tempted to think that the porn industry was as glamorous on the inside as it may appear on the outside. And, if you've managed to make it all the way to the end of this admittedly long piece, thank you for your time.