‘Over 18’ points to the problems behind the pleasures of porn

The ability of young people to watch porn has a pair of Canadian filmmakers investigating porn addiction in their latest documentary, Over18.

Over18: A Documentary About Porn was publicly screened for an Edmonton audience at the neighbourHouse (6811 92a Avenue) last week. Jared and Michelle Brock, the married couple who co-directed and co-produced Over18, wanted to make a film addressing pornography addiction among children and teens. Although the film isn’t available through video sharing sites, and currently can only be viewed during the couple’s designated tour stops in Canada, their stop in Edmonton was the 50th time they’ve screened the documentary for an audience. The film features interviews with researchers, porn stars, ex-porn stars, porn directors, and recovering porn addicts.

The audience convened in the reception area of the venue, where we enjoyed homemade baking and caffeinated beverages before the screening. While waiting around, one elderly gentleman told me he didn’t have a cell phone or a computer at home, and asked how easy it was to access pornographic content — I resisted the urge to show him my Reddit search history.

Over18 addresses how clicking further down the rabbit hole of internet porn can form into an unhealthy addiction with potentially violent consequences. The idea being that images which create arousal one day simply cannot the next, so the porn viewer seeks more graphic images, and when those images fail to arouse, even more graphic content is sought for.

“This is not your grandfather’s porn, this isn’t breasts in a magazine. This is hard core violent sex and it’s going offline,” said co-director Jared Brock after the screening. “Kids are asking their girlfriends, their boyfriends for porn sex.”

One male adult, interviewed in Over18, said he couldn’t become physically aroused with a sexual partner without watching porn first. The parents of 13-year-old Joseph said their son began physically assaulting his younger sister because of the violent sexual content he’d looked at every day since he was nine. However, Bill Margold, a retired male porn performer, director, and staunch defender of the industry, said in Over18, “no one has ever died from an overdose of pornography.”

During the audience Q&A which preceded the film, Jared said he was physically sick after the Bill Margold interview for Over18. Jared also claims some of Margold’s interview had content which was too disturbing to include in a documentary on porn.

Over18 isn’t the first documentary Jared and Michelle Brock have directed and produced together. Enslaved and Exploited (2009) was their first documentary about sex trafficking in Canada. It was viewed over 30,000 times and helped train over 200 border patrol officers, says Jared. Red Light Green Light (2013) was the couple’s second film, which explored the issues of legalized prostitution and sex trafficking.

Jared and Michelle are on tour with Over18 almost every night until December 14, when Parliament will vote on motion M-47. The motion wants an examination into “the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material on children, women and men.”

The Brock’s are also petitioning to have legislation passed for meaningful age verification before a user can access pornographic content online. “‘Are you over 18? Click yes or no’ is clearly not enough, even the porn stars have told us,” says Jared. “Our focus is to protect kids.”