AVN: Max Hardcore Raided by FBI

There are good reasons Hardcore is among the most hated men in the industry. He's rumored to have put several actresses in the hospital, and most starlets refuse to work with him; porn queen Nici Sterling calls him a "psychopath." "Apparently they think I play a little rough," he says of the European sex stars who dodge him in Maxed Out 2. Watching the video, it's not hard to imagine why. After finishing Sabine's aforementioned anal scenes, he grabs her hair and begins to plow her face, covering her in spit, cum, and makeup smear--what Max calls "giving a facial." "The only way you're able to get the saliva out is to take your cock and choke the girl," he once told Adult Video News. Mere dirty-sex aesthetics, you might say, except that by now it's obvious the actress is not at all "into it"--her eyes look dead, her mind perhaps in the far-off place you're supposed to go in moments like these. When it's over, the camera lingers above her, leering triumphantly. Fake lashes barely cling on, and her eyes well up with tears as the subtitles read: "Oh my God! Like on the phone all you said was you wanted to cuddle." Then: "This is one fucked-out stupid cunt! Go Max!!"

Misogynistic theater like this should surprise no one; it is porn, after all. But in a medium that regularly traffics in taboos, the director crosses a subtle but important line: Max invites the viewer to share his pleasure in hurting and humiliating not a character, but a real woman. Here and elsewhere, he reduces porn to the rape propaganda anti-porn feminists have long claimed it to be. The Sabine sequence feels like a snuff film--that mythical bogy of anti-porn crusaders. And because this isn't obscure stuff--one of his tapes is always hovering in the top-20 adult video charts--Max might just be the miscreant that zealots need in the new age of Boogie Nights, when most people couldn't care less about squelching smut. This stroke-sadist's popularity represents a seismic shift in American porn, though no cultural eruption occurs without considerable historic foreplay.

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But why do consumers want Max Hardcore? That's the disturbing question, one made more interesting by the widespread backlash against him among porn fans. "We're not killing girls," Max told Adult Video News. "We're not hurting them more than minor discomfort. What's the big deal? When you get a girl and give her a good working over, you take her to the extreme of pain and pleasure, and that's exciting." Maybe so, but in most of his videos, the emphasis is clearly on pain and humiliation. (As in most other porn, the women never come.) It's as if Hardcore had carefully pored over Andrea Dworkin's 1979 tome, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and made himself over into a shining example of everything wrong in porn--he's the "sexualization of insult" personified.