A Hostile Work Environment: The Porn Sections of Movie Gallery Video Stores


Needless to say, we disagree with the American Family Association on a number of issues, in particular their anti-gay agenda. Nevertheless, they have collected some valuable testimony from Movie Gallery employees about conditions there:

Employee Testimonial

The following is an actual letter from a Movie Gallery employee to AFA Special Projects Director Randy Sharp. It, perhaps, is the best evidence yet of the need for Movie Gallery to get out of the porn business.

…My employment of several years with Movie Gallery has been most enjoyable with few exceptions. Working in a management position has allowed me to mature and grow as a young female employee… One of the exceptions to me enjoying my employment is the back room adult entertainment. The stores that have these, that I have worked in open me and the other workers up to a variety of negative, vulgar, embarrassing remarks and come-ons from customers. The stores without the back rooms are so pleasant because we do not have to endure this kind of harassment…

When men, and sometimes women, rent the adult videos, they more often than not, have remarks to the check-out person as they leave the store. It is not unusual for them to say things like, “Come home with me and be my b****,” “We’ll enjoy this movie together,” or “It will be a blast!” I have been told that the women in the movies are referred to as the man’s b****. It is automatically assumed that we are willing participants in the sexual content of the videos. One of my ugliest encounters was a local businessman who came in every Saturday night without fail. He would spend several hours choosing a video or two from the back room. While he searched, it would not be unusual to see him masturbating through his clothes. This was so embarrassing to the employees. When he would check out, he would search me out to be his checker. He would begin the same come-on week after week with, “Honey, come with me and I will give you an evening that you will never forget. You’ll make more money with me tonight than you will working here. I will make it worth your time. This movie will take us to places we’ve never been. How about it?” What an insult! He solicited me just like I was a prostitute…

We have adults that come in and rent the movies for the minors that wait at the door for them. I feel so guilty when this happens. I feel like I rented filth to kids…

Sincerely,

(name withheld)

Former Movie Gallery Managers Expose Corporate Greed, Sexual Harassment

Editor’s note: The following letters were submitted by former managers and employees of Movie Gallery stores.

February 2005 – Manager Trainee misled by Movie Gallery – “They treat their employees terribly.”

I was a manager at a Movie Gallery store in (town withheld) for 4 months…

There was at least 3 times more porn than mainstream titles, more than there was room for to be put out…

The type of low life [clientele] this brought into the store was disgusting! I’m originally from the LA area and I’m not naive to that fact that porno exists, but this was shocking!…  When the rentals came back, they were usually late if they came back at all. Then I would get into huge arguments w/ people about why they can’t rent anymore porn till they pay their late fees for the last porn. The conditions they were in upon return was disgusting too, I felt like I needed tongs and sanitary wipes after checking them in…

I never in my life had been so verbally abused, names that I couldn’t help be shocked by and found myself not keeping with the “customers always right” policies. Retaliating back verbally in my own self defense…

The amount of porn varies from store to store, depending on [its] demographics. In the sleazier neighborhoods they take full advantage of it, it might as well just be an adult porn store…

March 2004 – Movie Gallery proud of porn profits

…I thought I would let you know that they actually charge more than $6.00 dollars for the rental of a pornographic movie now…

The company only pays between $1.00-5.00 dollars for these movies and make a four or five hundred percent off each rental…

District manager thrilled by “smut-man’s” business

…We, as store managers, had goals for the day for sales. If no one came in and rented this porn, then there was no way that we would make our goal. But my district manager, (name withheld), acted excited when a last minute “smut man” came in to purchase three or four movies…

In addition, I was not required to ask for identification when I thought there was a person underage renting a tape. Although I could ask, it was frowned upon because I was driving away business…

Adultery, drunkeness, harrassment part of corporate meetings

…I am a former employee of Movie Gallery, a District Manager to be more precise…

I have had the opportunity to see just how Movie Gallery really feels about families and family values. I have been on company trips where, until a couple of years age, spouses were not allowed to attend. And now, about 98% of those who have husbands and wives still do not bring their spouse. I believe this is because they do [not] want it to upset their fun for the week.

During these trips, [there] is drinking, adultery, and sexual harassment running rampant. I know in my heart that a lot of what goes on stems from the pornography the company deals in. They feel nothing is wrong with that, so nothing is wrong with other things they do…


See also:

Improv Resource Center: True Porn Clerk Stories (explicit language)
…The “Little White Chicks, Big Black Monster Dicks” (note intriguing combination of race and fetish) series has some of the most offensive cover art I’ve ever seen, not because of the sexual content but because it’s incredibly racist. The little white chicks look at you demurely over their shoulders while surrounded by scowling African-American men. The men are repeatedly referred to as “monsters” (“monster dicks” itself doesn’t bother me because it merely implies that said dicks are monstrously large, but referring to men themselves as monsters is another story) and their faces are actually mounted on cartoon animal bodies. There’s no way in hell you could put that cover on, say, a book and not get your store burnt down…

Sometimes people get animalistic about the tapes. For the real addicts (I’m convinced that porn is like alcohol: some people can stop at just one every now and then, some people just binge on weekends, and some people get genuinely, horribly addicted) the reptilian brain kicks in. They hit the magic portion of the tape and they’re done. They pop out the tape and slam in another one, and the next day the stack comes back, unrewound and covered in goo.

Repeat offenders get a note on their file that says “LUBE WARNING”. Management policy is that for $6.50 an hour, clerks should not have to deal with the bodily fluids of others. The first time we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time we hand him the tape, the Windex, and the paper towels and tell him to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter…

The Anime section is the one that really makes me cringe. It’s upstairs in the general releases since it’s all, you know, cartoons, and some of it is charming fare like My Neighbor Totoro. But a lot of it is incredibly hardcore stuff – way worse than we’ll allow in the real-people porn downstairs. My position on porn is that I’m fine with whatever floats your boat, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Manga throws b
oth of those rules out the window. Sure, all the boxes claim that all the characters are at least 18, but a lot of them are clearly drawn to look about 12. And there’s a lot of raping. Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either – we’re talking about triple-penetration rape by demons…

The most common fetish, if you can call something so common a fetish, is for borderline jailbait. This is true of both straight and gay porn. The gay series to watch are Eighteen Today, Just 18 and Gay and First Time Tryers. The straight series are Bring ‘Em Young, Barely Legal, and, horrifyingly, Faces with Braces

 A lot of fetishizing has to do with unwitting or unwilling participants, and that runs pretty hard up against my “whatever floats your boat” policy…

I get sort of conflicted about throwing kids and teenagers out of the porn section. I really don’t want them down there, not because I think sex is dirty or bad, but because I don’t want them to think that that’s what sex is about. The stuff on our boxes is sex in the basest, sometimes most brutal terms – naked women spreading their relevant orifices and making that Porn Face. Unless you’re talking about the Max Hardcore series, which involves women with “SLUT” and “WHORE” written across their foreheads in lipstick…

I always want to debrief them. “Hey, guys, it’s cool that you’re curious, but this isn’t the way to find out. Porn is fine, but it’s not real sex. Real sex is great, and even good girls love it, but it has to be a two-way street…”

It gets pretty full at 9am on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t know if people are just getting up or if they stayed up or what. I just know they’ve been waiting for porn until they almost can’t stand it…

It took a long time for me to even admit to myself that porn can be degrading. I’m a sex-positive, first amendment feminist. I’ve been through the progressive arguments: lesbians enjoy it too, the woman giving the blow job is in control of the sex act, and what if they come for your porn first. I got them, I believed them, I was willing to defend to my death (or at least to my jailing) the right to produce porn, assuming all the actors truly consent. (No, I would never watch Deep Throat. Last time I checked, porn produced at gunpoint is rape on film.)

As is so often the case, I had those lofty ideals before I really had any experience with porn other than as an abstract concept. Working with porn on a regular basis, while it has expanded my whatever-floats-your-boat tolerance, has led me to conclude that yes, sometimes porn is degrading. Indeed, sometimes it’s meant to be degrading. That’s the whole point.

Take, for example, the Guttermouth series… There are short fake cast bios of all the girls, in the same happy tone of theater bios before the actors grow up and get hip and cynical. One of them is called a dumb slut, another a worthless cunt…

I don’t understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time…

Rocco’s Animal Trainer series, I’m told, traditionally ends with Rocco fucking a woman up the ass while he shoves her head into a toilet and flushes…

I caught another jerker in the porn section today. It’s amazing – I’m already jaded about it…

…porn, or at least the porn we’re carrying, is very big on taking cameras up and in and through anywhere they can go… I think part of it is that porn, which doesn’t have much in the way of scripting or acting chops to move it along, has to rely on other ways to convey intensity: bigger, harder, faster, freakier… I think heavy porn renters must get jaded to watching plain old sex – how could they not? – and that’s what leads to the bizarre for its own sake: obesity porn, little person porn, old person porn, bondage porn, foot porn. Double penetration. Cartoonishly huge sex toys. Sticking a camera up someone’s urethra…

Some porn is degrading. Hell, a lot of it is degrading very much on purpose. It’s hard to look at the box for Young, Dumb and Full of Cum and think they had anything else in mind…

While we do have lesbian porn, we don’t really have porn that’s aimed at lesbians… It’s just the feel of the thing – a general “Hey, fellas! Getta load of this!” vibe… We don’t get much repeat lesbian business…

It doesn’t look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They’re always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don’t seem to be getting touched much. They’re just getting poled by some guy who’s apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee.

So we don’t get many women downstairs…

Like Mr. Buddy, [Mr. Hazy has] spent literally thousands of dollars in rentals. He’s like clockwork – in, six hardcore porn videos and then back again within a day or at most two.

…Mr. Hazy is definitely not pirating. As I mentioned, Wednesday and Friday are New Porn Days and he has to hit them because he has seen all of our other straight videos. I’ll type that again: He has seen all of our straight videos. Try though we do to rotate the stock, we just can’t keep up.

That, my friends, is why I feel comfortable using the phrase “porn addiction”.

Mr. Hazy isn’t the only one that’s finished off the store. There are several customers that have seen everything we carry, or at least everything that floats their particular boats. That’s why I loathe New Porn Days. We don’t get the new stock out until at least 4 or 5 o’ clock at the earliest – sometimes we don’t even receive the shipment until then – but people start calling at about 10 in the morning and the frequency of the calls and intensity of the whining only increase as the day goes on…

They want to see and touch and rent the new tapes, and they want them NOW…

No more warnings. From now on whackers will be referred directly to the police…

The shift when the sanitizer ran out reduced David and me to jittery wrecks. So many matinee specials came in that day… Eugh…

I am no longer a porn clerk…

Writing this journal has taught me many things.

The first is that people who hold a given point of view too passionately tend not to be careful readers. I’ve had rabidly anti-porn people (mostly women) tear into me because I didn’t say that all porn ever is inherently evil and I’ve had ferociously pro-porn people (mostly men) send me frothingly outraged e-mails because I didn’t say that all porn ever is healthy, free and wonderful…

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment
I got to the point where I couldn’t put up with it any more. And being one of the only two women on the job, and being rather new at it and not knowing that I had any alternatives, I got pissed off one day and ripped all the pictures off the wall. Well, it turned out to be a real unpopular move to do. I came back in at lunch time and half the pictures were back up again. They pulled them out of boxes and stuck them on the wall and proceeded to call me names, and just basically call me names or otherwise ignore me…

…I have encountered pretty much hostility in the last six years being the only woman on the job doing men’s work. On that particular job, I was a legal threat because I had replaced one of the other men who was causing trouble, who was one of the good old boys. And I think they were doubly angry at me on that job and they wanted to get rid of me.

Testimony in Ma
ssachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment in Carpentry

Working as a woman in a non-traditional job (union carpentry) I have encountered many covert and overt aggressions. Pornography on a job site is one of the more blatant ways a woman is told that “this is a male domain;” “Go Away.”

Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.
A number of instances have occurred at M.I.T. in labs where pornographic pictures are displayed, and there are only one or two women in the lab. When the women complain about it, instead of taking the pornography down, the response has often been defensiveness, anger and more pornography has been put up… Another example is the computer pornography where the students are trying to write their papers in computer networks and they’ll have pornography right next to them being shown on the screen, and again making it difficult for them to do their work…

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Living Environment at M.I.T.
I was one of the few women who spoke out and attempted to explain to men and women why pornography hurt me. Rumors spread quickly throughout the dorm about me, and people I once considered friends gave me nasty looks. While visiting a friend, I was verbally harassed by three men.