The Dark or Inappropriate Humor Thread

The Casting Couch (c. 1924), a classic title in the stag film genre,[12] was an early depiction of the casting couch as a pornographic trope that later became mundane as it grew in popularity.[13] In the ten-minute film, a casting director tells a young actress to wear a swimsuit during an audition, spies on her in a voyeuristic manner while she undresses in a different room, and enters the room to solicit sex from her. The actress initially rebuffs his advances with disgust, but returns to the director after taking advice from a book titled How to Become a Movie Star. She performs fellatio and vaginal intercourse in exchange for a role in his film; the latter takes place on a couch. The Casting Couch concludes with an intertitle that states, "the only way to become a star is to get under a good director and work your way up".[12] Zimmer credited the film with popularizing the term casting couch.[11]

Pornography websites used the casting couch scenario, beginning with Backroom Casting Couch in 2007.[14] From 2009 to 2020, the pornographic company GirlsDoPorn produced hundreds of videos of casting couch pornography mostly featuring women aged 18–22 who had not otherwise appeared in pornography.[15][16][17][18] The depicted women were manipulated, coerced, lied to, given marijuana or other drugs or physically forced to have sex, according to the accounts of victims and material from a lawsuit against the company.[19][16][18][20] Six people involved in the website were charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in November 2019.[18] Official videos from the company were viewed over a billion times, including a paid subscription service on its website, and an estimated 680 million views on the tube site Pornhub, where the official channel was among the site's top 20 most viewed. Pirated copies of the videos were also viewed hundreds of millions of times.[16][21][22] According to a lawsuit, the videos could still be found on mainstream pornography websites up to at least December 2020.[23] In 2020, twenty-two women were awarded a cumulative $12.75 million in damages as a result of a lawsuit which alleged that women who filmed for the website were lied to throughout the process.[15][16][17][24]

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The Dark or Inappropriate Humor Thread