The actor, writer and producer talks about her new Netflix show Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On and how our attitudes towards watching porn are shifting

While the critical groundswell of praise towards Netflix has been largely focused on their ever-increasing library of scripted series, the streaming giant has also been quietly assembling an impressively varied list of documentaries. What Happened Miss Simone?, The Square, Mitt, Virunga and last year’s Oscar-nominated 13th have all exemplified a commitment to diversity of both voice and content, challenging the snobbish preconceptions some originally had about what content we could expect from such a service.

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Back in 2015, Netflix picked up feature-length documentary Hot Girls Wanted after an acclaimed Sundance debut, its unvarnished tale of young women working in pornography making a strong impression. Now, they’ve reunited with the film’s directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, as well as producer Rashida Jones for Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, a series exploring different intersections of sex, dating and technology.

Jones, now taking on a more central role than before, has spent her career adding more and more skills to her résumé. She’s starred in films from I Love You Man to The Social Network, taken on comedic TV roles in Parks & Recreation and Angie Tribeca, written screenplays for Celeste & Jesse Forever, an episode of Black Mirror and the upcoming Toy Story 4, created a comic book series and even provided backing vocals for a set of Maroon 5 tracks. Choosing to collaborate again with film-makers Bauer and Gradus and add yet another project to her workflow was something of a no-brainer for Jones.

“The reason I wanted to work with them is because they have such a balanced approach to the way they treat their subjects and also, the kind of attitude that does disarm people,” she tells me in a New York hotel room, sitting next to the two women she’s heaping praise on. Deservedly, I might add. The series, like the film, is filled with remarkably candid interviews with women who might have easily closed up if they had encountered just a hint of condescension. “I think we have always gotten access to certain stories that if we were men, I don’t think we could have,” Gradus adds.

Often documentaries about the sex industry can come off as cautionary after-school specials, a pervasive sense of slut-shaming preventing the discovery of any real insight. But it’s refreshingly absent here with no coyness or judgment muddying the waters and it’s a frank tone that mirrors how a younger generation deals with sex and nudity in a way that the three women involved had to get used to.

“We had to fill in some gaps, sorry, everything sounds porny,” Jones says, laughing before reminiscing about her youth. “We’d go sneak and get a Playboy and all sit around it and look at pictures and you had to use your imagination to think of the other parts of the sex-having experience. Even with VHS, it was never hardcore.” She goes on to discuss a study they carried out, along with the series, which showed that 80% of teens now happen upon porn accidentally.

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There’s a concern expressed that the increased access to porn, coupled with a lack of sexual education in schools, will turn the average teen’s idea of what sex should be like into something that doesn’t resemble reality. It’s something that’s affected the sex lives of the women I’m speaking to, with some of the men they’ve met exhibiting porn-like behavior in bed. Gradus talks about “the spitting”, Bauer references “hair-pulling” while Jones even included her example in the script for Celeste and Jesse Forever.

“I went on a date with a guy and it ended with him jerking off and me just sort of two feet away watching him,” she says. “I can’t for sure attribute that to porn but it does feel like he’s watched enough porn to think that anything goes and you can do that on a first date without even asking if I’m interested in watching that. I felt like I was an accessory to a sex crime.”

The show also explores the effect that the internet has had on dating. It’s far from a new trend but with around 40 million Americans looking for love, or lust, digitally, it’s more influential than ever. But there’s no smug, reductive “online dating is bad” messaging here, with Gradus herself having found love on OKCupid (“It took a long time, it really did”) and Bauer admitting that she’s dabbled. The episode in question does explore the effect that one’s high school self has on later dating practices – the lead subject is a man about town who is still getting over being less appealing to the opposite sex as a teen.

“I do think that everybody as an adult does this thing where they act out their teenage self, their victories that they wish they had when they were younger,” Jones says. “Hopefully, you kind of even out and pick somebody who’s right for you.” When I ask her if it’s something she notices in herself, she laughs. “That’s like a weekend,” she says. “We have to go somewhere and break that down. There’s so much there.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ronna Gradus, Rashida Jones and Jill Bauer. Photograph: Lipson/BFA/REX/Shutterstock

But the women found that this wasn’t a type that necessarily translated into the world of porn. The majority of the women they spoke to were “cheerleader types” at school. “Most of them were very comfortable with sex and loved having sex so they just thought that porn was the natural next step,” Gradus says. “They had all seen porn very young and porn was very normalized to them so it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

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Jones adds: “It’s a different archetype and that’s part of what’s happening now. It’s not this dark taboo thing. It’s mainstream but we’re still not talking about it. People are watching it, people are being influenced by it, people are making career choices based on it, people are making sex choices based on it but there’s no national conversation on it.”

The only national conversation right now about porn seems to be how to get rid of it. Since Donald Trump (star of softcore film Playboy Video Centerfold 2000) became president, surrounding himself with superficially puritanical Republicans, there have been small steps towards the beginning of a “war on pornography”. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has a history of enforcing obscenity laws while Trump has already signed an executive order that suggests a new committee to “examine the harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture”.

It’s a step that worries the women I’m speaking with. “Shutting it down will not work because statistically the highest consumption rates of porn are in the most conservative states,” Gradus says. Jones agrees: “It will drive everything down which will make the conditions worse for the performers.”

It feels like a regression, especially given that the field has expanded in recent years to include more female film-makers, including Erika Lust, whose work is explored within the series. Her films are tailored towards women and showcasing a female view of sex. Having a woman behind the camera is something that’s also important for Jones, who is currently part of a Calvin Klein campaign directed by Sofia Coppola.

“I didn’t ever expect to do an underwear commercial at 41 but the reason I did it was that I knew that she would make me feel comfortable and beautiful and like myself, and I didn’t have to worry about some sort of other version of me being pushed on me,” she says. “I’ve had that, I’m an actress, I’ve had to do dozens and dozens and dozens of photo shoots with guys trying to make me someone I wasn’t. They’ve tried to make me look sexy when I didn’t feel sexy.”

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The porn industry remains one filled with contradictions. While women are gaining more visibility behind the camera and higher pay in front of it (men are often referred to as just “floating dicks”), there’s still a depressingly staid view of race. The image of a hyper-sexualized, well-endowed black male tarnishing a petite white woman is still a common theme in porn. In one episode, they focus on a shoot replaying this exact stereotype and the women spoke on how such scenes are treated so differently within the industry.

“If people have this sexual fantasy then you cannot touch it,” Jones says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s racist or sexist or degrading because it’s fantasy but the truth is, it’s reflected in the financials around the business. Girls who do IR (interracial) porn, they get a different rate for that and it changes their relationship within the business. It’s classed as an event. Why is it an event? It’s an event in the way that anal is an event and DP (double penetration), too.” Bauer adds: “IR is not just an event, it’s a career-changing event for a young woman.”

While there are improvements for women within the industry, there are still questionable subgenres that revolve around forceful and violent sex and in covering this, Gradus has seen a certain reaction from some men. “I think they want to look at it very simplistically,” she says. “If a woman signed up to do porn and she wants to do porn then back off, don’t judge her which is not what we’re doing.”



The motivation behind the series is not to stop porn but to shine a light on the industry, the good and the bad. But regardless of the content, a negative reaction from many hardcore fans awaits.

“I don’t know if men know what they’re reacting to,” Jones says. “I think there’s some fair criticisms of the show and the movie but I think there’s a certain aggressive thing as if we’re pulling up to somebody at the McDonald’s drive-through when they’re wasted at two o’clock in the morning and being like ‘by the way that’s not real beef and that cow was abused and those fries have been sitting there for 10 years’ and they’re like like ‘fuck you, all I want to do is eat that burger and you just fucked it up for everybody’. It’s not for everybody, some people don’t want their porn ruined.”

Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On is now available on Netflix worldwide