Oprano Adult Industry Forums - HBO’s documentary “Thinking XXX” takes an unconventional look at the porn industry.

As a teenager, I once looked for female role models by plugging “amazing women” into an Internet search engine. The results produced hundreds of pornography sites. Google seemed to be telling me that the only amazing women were sexualized ones. Like generations of feminists, I find it difficult to balance the issues of pornography and censorship. Is pornography a positive example of free speech, a negative example of anti-feminism or—more problematically—both?

The debate between pro- and anti-porn feminists has long been a nasty brawl between women who’d otherwise agree on a wide range of feminist issues. Lawyer and activist Catharine MacKinnon favors gender equality over freedom of expression and supported laws banning porn. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin linked pornography to violence against women. Then there are pro-porn media and culture critic Laura Kipnis, and, of course, the feminist-that-other-feminists-love-to-hate, public intellectual extraordinaire Camille Paglia. Both Kipnis and Paglia view pornography as a form of art that deserves serious cultural analysis. These critics have dictated the terms of the pornography fight: The genre is seen as either fetishization of sexual abuse or a tool of sexual liberation.

Sometimes forgotten in this heated debate are the pornography performers themselves. “Thinking XXX,” a nuanced HBO documentary, seeks to add their voices to the fray. The film follows photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders as he assembles a portrait collection of 30 porn stars. In one portrait the actors are clothed; in a second, they are naked (a nod to Goya’s paintings The Clothed and Unclothed Maja).

Public intellectuals, from Gore Vidal to John Waters, offer commentary, as do a number of other artists, filmmakers, and authors. The commentators provide colorful explanations of pornography’s role in our culture. Vidal, for example, attributes America’s boob craze to a national infantilization of adults, and controversial performance artist Karen Finley says pornography stems from a longing for the maternal breast.

The porn stars featured in “Thinking XXX” have their own theories. The actresses alternately debase and venerate their profession. While Nina Hartley traces her entry into the business to her reading of Our Bodies, Ourselves and other popular feminist books from the 1970s, Tera Patrick makes the weighty confession that a woman must relinquish her soul in order to work in the pornography industry. Actor Sean Michaels echoes the arguments of many female porn stars—their profession is a form of liberation and empowerment.

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