TORONTO – from www.catholicregister.org – Everything about the porn industry is fake, former Playboy TV producer Donny Pauling [pictured right] told an audience of about 175 students at York University on Sept. 27 at a lecture organized by its Catholic chaplaincy team.
Partnering with Matt Fradd [pictured left], founder of the Porn Effect, a web site dedicated to fighting pornography, the two exposed painful secrets surrounding Pauling’s old business.
“I’m sorry if you think porn’s not a big deal,” Pauling said. “I think it is a big deal.”
Pauling started shooting porn at age 24, a job he discovered to be a quick, easy way to make money. He would recruit women at shopping malls, convince them to be his models and send the pictures to various Internet sites.
“Soon, you’re doing stuff you never meant to do,” he said.
Eventually, he was working for Playboy, for whom he recruited women across the United States for 18 years.
Later, Pauling encountered xxxchurch.com, the Christian group that turned him around. Refusing to judge and insisting that Christ loves everyone, including porn stars, the group attends porn conventions and hands out Bibles and spreads love.
Angry at his Christian upbringing, which he thought was “hypocritical,” Pauling at first expressed rage at the organization. However, in September 2006, after receiving many e-mails from the site and starting to pray occasionally, Pauling finally quit the porn industry and surrendered to God.
Pauling told the audience he felt peace in the face of a highly reduced salary and threats of foreclosure because he “wasn’t destroying lives any more.”
Despite the high pay and travel opportunities he had, Pauling insists there is truly no glamour in the porn industry. He talked about the guilt deep inside from the fantasy world he portrayed to potential models and the use of sex in a way God did not mean it to be used.
“They’re all daddy’s little girl,” he said. “No one wants to do that in their right mind.”
Pauling mentioned that despite a promise to himself to “keep it professional” and “not mess around with anybody,” he gave into temptation and cheated on his wife. Most poignantly, Pauling talked about how his wife — a woman he truly loved not just for her physical beauty, but her inner self — left him as a result of his work.
“I sold out my wife and kid for half-a-million dollars a year.”
Pauling was honest about the effects of pornography on models, which he downplayed years ago when he was recruiting them. He talked about the reconstructive surgery that some must undergo and said underage girls are used illegally in certain cases. He was not hesitant to declare that human trafficking, usually considered a Third World problem, is a problem within his old business.
He read a letter to his audience from an ex-model whose job opportunities and relationships outside the industry were in jeopardy.
“If (porn sites) pulled down the content of every person who regrets what they did, there’d be nothing left to sell,” Pauling said.
Much of the problem, Pauling says, is demand; pornography would not be successful if people did not want it. Pop culture has glorified pornography with porn stars as celebrities and shows with sexual themes.
“We’re raised in a society that tells us it’s all okay.”
Today, Pauling and Fradd speak publicly against the porn industry because they believe people need to be educated. People need to know the effects it has on those in front of and behind the camera, as well as their family and friends.
“Fifteen years ago, it took time, money and effort to get porn,” said Fradd. “Now it takes time, money and effort to avoid it.”