The legacy of Max Hardcore - Part 3
Continued from Part 2. Read it here: https://xhamster.com/posts/10312155
Classic Max scenes
So, is any of Max’s work worth seeing? Yes, some of it is quite satisfying porn to watch if one enjoys extreme porn with pissing, etc. And I do. The exciting thing about this sort of porn is always the "I cannot believe she is letting him do that to her" aspect. There is something deeply erotic about a woman consenting to an apparent violation. Of course, with Max, as we have already explored, the full extent of the consent can sometimes be questioned. But some did it willingly.
I haven’t seen a huge amount of Max's stuff because I don’t want to see some of it, there are better options available, and it’s not easy to find for free anyway. When the thumbnail for the scene consists of a woman with a metal device holding her mouth open and red lipstick smeared all over her face so that she looks like a clown in agony, I don’t need to see more. And little has been professionally upscaled since the original, cheap production so the quality is poor. But it’s important, classic porn that had a major influence on all porn that came after. It also showed that many (most?) of us like much more extreme porn than had previously been thought. Max and Layla liked to say their work was made for a minority. And Layla, bless her, may have been dumb enough to believe it. But Max was aiming for the mainstream. He knew that the we were all sickos and that it might just take longer for some to admit it than others. Or perhaps that, really, as I have argued elsewhere (see: https://xhamster.com/posts/10308870) Max knew that there is no such thing as perversion but that many are excited by things that they have been taught to disapprove of. The “forbidden” aspect of sex has always been of significant interest to many. So I hope Max’s work is being preserved somewhere because it’s a crucial historical record of sex fantasy at a moment in time and a watershed moment in the history of porn.
Here are some classic scenes I have seen and that are well worth seeking out. You may need to put any conscience you may have in a box and close the lid firmly whilst you watch these. But it turns out that my cock has almost no conscience at all.
* Any of the scenes with Chiquita Lopez. Max struck gold when he found this petite little Latina slut. She’s a real trooper and she’s one of the few actresses who didn’t seem to mind what Max did to her and came back for more. In fact, I gather she has nothing bad to say about him to this day. Perhaps she’s just a very forgiving person. I know of four scenes with Chiquita. All are good. All involve copious quantities of piss. The scenes where Chiquita pisses too are the best and, fortunately, that is most of them. She pisses like a small waterfall. I like this girl.
* Alexa (with Layla Rivera). Alexa is one of my all-time favourite porn actresses (see my full list at: https://xhamster.com/posts/10304254). She deserved far better than to be abused in this way but she still gave Max a spectacular performance. The wiser course for her, however, may have been to run naked and screaming into the street after the first few minutes. It’s one of her earliest scenes and this Canadian girl is a delicate flower. But Max shows her zero mercy. He shoves his cock down her throat. She bucks and kicks. Layla holds her down. Max pisses right down her throat. She gags and pukes. Her eyes are red with tears. He inserts his cock in her rectum. When it is all over and Max has come all over her teeth, she laughs through her tears.
* Kelsey Michaels (with Layla Rivera). This was the lovely Kelsey’s first ever porn scene. It is also the only anal scene she ever did in a lengthy and successful porn career. Later, Kelsey would express bitter resentment about the way she was treated by Max here. The scene is a replay of the Alexa scenario (or perhaps the other way around, I don’t know the dates of the scenes but the sets are very similar). Kelsey is dressed up in a pink bikini top and micro skirt with ridiculous white platform heels. Max sets to work on her in his usual way and Layla assists by fondling and kissing Kelsey. Then Layla pukes over Max’s cock. Kelsey also tries sucking Max but the taste of Layla’s vomit on it makes her gag repeatedly. Before long Kelsey is showered in Max’s piss and sobbing. It’s exaggerated certainly, Kelsey plays up to the role and delivers her lines: as Max makes to assault her arsehole she objects in her native Kentucky accent : “But I’m too little Mister!” Max, of course, thrusts his cock as deep inside her as it will go. How much of Kelsey’s apparent discomfort is acting and how much was real is for the viewer to decide. You can see it here:
https://pornez.net/video469837/max-hardcore-porn-pack-playboy_88-anal-pain-kelsey-layla-wmv/
The distorting lens of time
The immediate response of the modern viewer to the six scenes recommended above is that their content is now very familiar. Anyone who has seen much modern porn is not going to be shocked by it. This is the wrong way to view it. It needs to be seen in the context of the time when it was made, which will be difficult for anyone who did not live through the time. There are three key points of difference:
Firstly, perception of what was acceptable was different then and we all live by our expectations. Our expectations frame what sort of behaviour wounds us and that which just shrug off. At the time, even other veteran porn producers found Max’s work to be profoundly disturbing stuff. It was deliberately aimed, in Layla Rivera’s words, at “sickos and perverts”. Perhaps even those making it did not expect that mainstream porn consumers would be interested in it. If so, they were mistaken. But their assumption meant, of course, that those involved in making it, knew they were transgressing, they knew that the women involved were going to be upset by what was done to them, and they were probably excited by that. And those unsuspecting actresses who unwittingly stumbled into it for the first time almost certainly had no real idea of what was going to happen to them. And so many were genuinely victimised. Max says that he showed all of them Polaroids of previous scenes before filming and told them what he was going to do to them. And he says that means they consented to it. This reminds me of the consent form that your surgeon, already wearing scrubs, hands you to sign as you are already being wheeled toward the operating theatre. You neither fully understand what you are consenting to nor is refusal a real option available to you at that point. And Layla was there. Nothing really bad will happen whilst Layla is there. Right?
Secondly, as I have stated repeatedly, it is plain to me that Max hates women. I don’t think it’s acting. When Max calls a woman a “worthless cunt” whilst ejaculating into her mouth, which is spread open with an ugly metal device, it’s hard to believe that he can do it only because he is such a great actor that he can deliver the lines as written even in the throes of orgasm. Or that he apologised to her off-camera afterward.
I don’t get the impression that e.g. Bryan Gozzling of Hookup Hotshots or Mike Adriano of AllAnal.com hate women. I am less sure about the guys at facefucking.com though. I don’t think those guys liked women very much at all.
The difference between a Hookup Hotshots scene and a Max scene is marked. With few notable exceptions, it can be seen in the actresses eyes and heard in their voices. Some of the actresses at Hookup Hotshots take some punishment. It’s not necessarily what they would have chosen to do that day or their favourite thing to do. But one does not get the sense that they are afraid. Or that they realise they have made a terrible mistake. Or that they are just praying for it all to be over soon. But, unfortunately, those thoughts are written all over the faces of many of the actresses in Max’s scenes. The fact that he plays up to that, encourages them to lean into it, and gives them lines to deliver that reinforce that impression does not make all of it acting.
Thirdly, at that time, the porn world had not yet been introduced to Sasha Grey. Then, women who performed in porn had very low status in the entertainment world. But within the hierarchy of women in porn, stars like Jenna Jameson and Nikki Dial, who looked like soap opera actresses or swimsuit models, ruled. In the porn they made, those women were honey-fucked. It was the women at the bottom of the pecking order who were mistreated. Like Kelly Wells, who worked often with Max. And Max treated his actresses worse than almost anyone else. He degraded them deliberately. And he had the power to do so. In time, women in porn would take back that power. They would make their own seeming degradation a choice of their own, a weapon they would deploy at their own choosing. They would make their sluttiness their power. No man can degrade a woman by performing an act on her that she herself willingly encourages. And, in so doing, women in porn would take away much of the power of men in porn to force those men’s perception of them on to themselves. See my blog ‘The Legacy of Sasha Grey’ here: https://xhamster.com/posts/10306078
This is Nikki Dial. Christ, to think I once jerked off to this.
And here’s a typical day at the office for Kelly Wells in the post-Max world.
No hero
Max is no hero of mine. It is plain to me that he is a psychopath - angry, manipulative, and blind to the feelings of others. But it is also the nature of boundaries that reasonable people rarely press hard against them. It takes an unreasonable, hardheaded, unwise, and arrogant person to lay waste to boundaries that have held for many years and within which an entire industry was content to work and consistently profit. It needs an outlier to do it. Unreasonable people like that are rarely very nice. Almost by definition they are arseholes who are prepared to put others’ livelihoods at risk whilst they pursue their own agendas. And Max is a massive, gaping arsehole. But without Max (and John Stagliano) porn might still consist of statuesque, overly made-up women with hairspray in their tresses being gently fucked in soft lighting to a muzak soundtrack. I am glad, at least, that we have seen the back of that shit.
Classic Max scenes
So, is any of Max’s work worth seeing? Yes, some of it is quite satisfying porn to watch if one enjoys extreme porn with pissing, etc. And I do. The exciting thing about this sort of porn is always the "I cannot believe she is letting him do that to her" aspect. There is something deeply erotic about a woman consenting to an apparent violation. Of course, with Max, as we have already explored, the full extent of the consent can sometimes be questioned. But some did it willingly.
I haven’t seen a huge amount of Max's stuff because I don’t want to see some of it, there are better options available, and it’s not easy to find for free anyway. When the thumbnail for the scene consists of a woman with a metal device holding her mouth open and red lipstick smeared all over her face so that she looks like a clown in agony, I don’t need to see more. And little has been professionally upscaled since the original, cheap production so the quality is poor. But it’s important, classic porn that had a major influence on all porn that came after. It also showed that many (most?) of us like much more extreme porn than had previously been thought. Max and Layla liked to say their work was made for a minority. And Layla, bless her, may have been dumb enough to believe it. But Max was aiming for the mainstream. He knew that the we were all sickos and that it might just take longer for some to admit it than others. Or perhaps that, really, as I have argued elsewhere (see: https://xhamster.com/posts/10308870) Max knew that there is no such thing as perversion but that many are excited by things that they have been taught to disapprove of. The “forbidden” aspect of sex has always been of significant interest to many. So I hope Max’s work is being preserved somewhere because it’s a crucial historical record of sex fantasy at a moment in time and a watershed moment in the history of porn.
Here are some classic scenes I have seen and that are well worth seeking out. You may need to put any conscience you may have in a box and close the lid firmly whilst you watch these. But it turns out that my cock has almost no conscience at all.
* Any of the scenes with Chiquita Lopez. Max struck gold when he found this petite little Latina slut. She’s a real trooper and she’s one of the few actresses who didn’t seem to mind what Max did to her and came back for more. In fact, I gather she has nothing bad to say about him to this day. Perhaps she’s just a very forgiving person. I know of four scenes with Chiquita. All are good. All involve copious quantities of piss. The scenes where Chiquita pisses too are the best and, fortunately, that is most of them. She pisses like a small waterfall. I like this girl.
* Alexa (with Layla Rivera). Alexa is one of my all-time favourite porn actresses (see my full list at: https://xhamster.com/posts/10304254). She deserved far better than to be abused in this way but she still gave Max a spectacular performance. The wiser course for her, however, may have been to run naked and screaming into the street after the first few minutes. It’s one of her earliest scenes and this Canadian girl is a delicate flower. But Max shows her zero mercy. He shoves his cock down her throat. She bucks and kicks. Layla holds her down. Max pisses right down her throat. She gags and pukes. Her eyes are red with tears. He inserts his cock in her rectum. When it is all over and Max has come all over her teeth, she laughs through her tears.
* Kelsey Michaels (with Layla Rivera). This was the lovely Kelsey’s first ever porn scene. It is also the only anal scene she ever did in a lengthy and successful porn career. Later, Kelsey would express bitter resentment about the way she was treated by Max here. The scene is a replay of the Alexa scenario (or perhaps the other way around, I don’t know the dates of the scenes but the sets are very similar). Kelsey is dressed up in a pink bikini top and micro skirt with ridiculous white platform heels. Max sets to work on her in his usual way and Layla assists by fondling and kissing Kelsey. Then Layla pukes over Max’s cock. Kelsey also tries sucking Max but the taste of Layla’s vomit on it makes her gag repeatedly. Before long Kelsey is showered in Max’s piss and sobbing. It’s exaggerated certainly, Kelsey plays up to the role and delivers her lines: as Max makes to assault her arsehole she objects in her native Kentucky accent : “But I’m too little Mister!” Max, of course, thrusts his cock as deep inside her as it will go. How much of Kelsey’s apparent discomfort is acting and how much was real is for the viewer to decide. You can see it here:
https://pornez.net/video469837/max-hardcore-porn-pack-playboy_88-anal-pain-kelsey-layla-wmv/
The distorting lens of time
The immediate response of the modern viewer to the six scenes recommended above is that their content is now very familiar. Anyone who has seen much modern porn is not going to be shocked by it. This is the wrong way to view it. It needs to be seen in the context of the time when it was made, which will be difficult for anyone who did not live through the time. There are three key points of difference:
Firstly, perception of what was acceptable was different then and we all live by our expectations. Our expectations frame what sort of behaviour wounds us and that which just shrug off. At the time, even other veteran porn producers found Max’s work to be profoundly disturbing stuff. It was deliberately aimed, in Layla Rivera’s words, at “sickos and perverts”. Perhaps even those making it did not expect that mainstream porn consumers would be interested in it. If so, they were mistaken. But their assumption meant, of course, that those involved in making it, knew they were transgressing, they knew that the women involved were going to be upset by what was done to them, and they were probably excited by that. And those unsuspecting actresses who unwittingly stumbled into it for the first time almost certainly had no real idea of what was going to happen to them. And so many were genuinely victimised. Max says that he showed all of them Polaroids of previous scenes before filming and told them what he was going to do to them. And he says that means they consented to it. This reminds me of the consent form that your surgeon, already wearing scrubs, hands you to sign as you are already being wheeled toward the operating theatre. You neither fully understand what you are consenting to nor is refusal a real option available to you at that point. And Layla was there. Nothing really bad will happen whilst Layla is there. Right?
Secondly, as I have stated repeatedly, it is plain to me that Max hates women. I don’t think it’s acting. When Max calls a woman a “worthless cunt” whilst ejaculating into her mouth, which is spread open with an ugly metal device, it’s hard to believe that he can do it only because he is such a great actor that he can deliver the lines as written even in the throes of orgasm. Or that he apologised to her off-camera afterward.
I don’t get the impression that e.g. Bryan Gozzling of Hookup Hotshots or Mike Adriano of AllAnal.com hate women. I am less sure about the guys at facefucking.com though. I don’t think those guys liked women very much at all.
The difference between a Hookup Hotshots scene and a Max scene is marked. With few notable exceptions, it can be seen in the actresses eyes and heard in their voices. Some of the actresses at Hookup Hotshots take some punishment. It’s not necessarily what they would have chosen to do that day or their favourite thing to do. But one does not get the sense that they are afraid. Or that they realise they have made a terrible mistake. Or that they are just praying for it all to be over soon. But, unfortunately, those thoughts are written all over the faces of many of the actresses in Max’s scenes. The fact that he plays up to that, encourages them to lean into it, and gives them lines to deliver that reinforce that impression does not make all of it acting.
Thirdly, at that time, the porn world had not yet been introduced to Sasha Grey. Then, women who performed in porn had very low status in the entertainment world. But within the hierarchy of women in porn, stars like Jenna Jameson and Nikki Dial, who looked like soap opera actresses or swimsuit models, ruled. In the porn they made, those women were honey-fucked. It was the women at the bottom of the pecking order who were mistreated. Like Kelly Wells, who worked often with Max. And Max treated his actresses worse than almost anyone else. He degraded them deliberately. And he had the power to do so. In time, women in porn would take back that power. They would make their own seeming degradation a choice of their own, a weapon they would deploy at their own choosing. They would make their sluttiness their power. No man can degrade a woman by performing an act on her that she herself willingly encourages. And, in so doing, women in porn would take away much of the power of men in porn to force those men’s perception of them on to themselves. See my blog ‘The Legacy of Sasha Grey’ here: https://xhamster.com/posts/10306078
This is Nikki Dial. Christ, to think I once jerked off to this.
And here’s a typical day at the office for Kelly Wells in the post-Max world.
No hero
Max is no hero of mine. It is plain to me that he is a psychopath - angry, manipulative, and blind to the feelings of others. But it is also the nature of boundaries that reasonable people rarely press hard against them. It takes an unreasonable, hardheaded, unwise, and arrogant person to lay waste to boundaries that have held for many years and within which an entire industry was content to work and consistently profit. It needs an outlier to do it. Unreasonable people like that are rarely very nice. Almost by definition they are arseholes who are prepared to put others’ livelihoods at risk whilst they pursue their own agendas. And Max is a massive, gaping arsehole. But without Max (and John Stagliano) porn might still consist of statuesque, overly made-up women with hairspray in their tresses being gently fucked in soft lighting to a muzak soundtrack. I am glad, at least, that we have seen the back of that shit.
3 years ago
