"Porn is no longer about sex, it's about making it as shocking as possible," says Petra, who escaped from filming an extreme scene
Petra, what made you decide to try porn in the first place?
Money, that's all it was. I've never watched porn or had any interest in it, so the desire for excitement or something new wasn't there at all. Unfortunately, I was in a pretty difficult situation in my life and a friend, now ex, offered me this opportunity. He surprised me quite a bit by doing this, he had never told me he had anything to do with porn before, and suddenly I found out that he had been making videos on private platforms occasionally for two years.
Anyway, after some thought, I accepted the offer. He promised me it would be a private shoot for an anonymous payer, so no big agency or anything like that, where the video would reach millions of people.
You say you've never watched porn before or even cared about it. Did that change the moment you got this offer?
Not really, I didn't see any reason. I thought that the industry wasn't really going anywhere and it was just different forms of normal or hardcore sex. So he told me it would be something harder with three men, but I never thought it would go to the state that porn is in today. The most I imagined was that the men would take turns, enjoy themselves and be done with it. But I was sadly mistaken.
I was promised tens of thousands for a half hour shoot that was supposed to be over in two days. I was so excited and stressed at the same time that I didn't care about any of the videos I was viewing on the internet. Plus, I was working a pretty time-consuming job at the time, so coming home late at night to watch porn and see what was trending didn't appeal to me at all.
Did you really think it was weird that you could get good money for half an hour shooting a simple scene?
Like I said, my experience with these films has been and is minimal, I don't know what these people are getting paid for. Plus the friend told me that such good money is a combination of many things. For one thing, it's supposedly going to be a bit rougher sex, but my appearance also plays a role, it's going to be with three men, etc. He just managed to explain it in a way that I had no reason to think about it. I just wanted to wait those few hours and get it over with.
So how was the beginning of the shoot? What were you told?
Basically, you could say that everyone lied to me. When I got there, my friend was waiting for me, the three guys and the one woman who was going to shoot it all. I found that sympathetic because I thought if she was running the whole thing, nothing terrible could happen.
And the script was pretty simple. I was to play a woman who cheated on her boyfriend. During an argument, two friends visit him and together they punish me severely. But as I said, I imagined the punishment to be sexual. I didn't think it was anything perverted at all. There was just one weird moment when one of them came up to me and told me that I was extremely beautiful, and so he was looking forward to getting his hands on me. But by then it was on to the shower, makeup, dressing and stress. I immediately let it go.
You didn't even know what you were getting into during prep?
The director did my makeup, she gave me the dress, but I didn't find out anything from her either. She just told me it was basically a regular scene. Then her phone rang and she was talking to someone the whole time she was doing my makeup, so even if I wanted to, I couldn't talk to her.
So when we get to the actual filming, how long did it take for the thing you ran off for to come up?
About five minutes, and it was pretty extreme. The first few minutes were about the fight with my boyfriend and his friends coming over. He told them what had happened and they said I deserved a proper punishment. He replied that they could do whatever they wanted with me, and that was the moment when everything changed. They walked up to me, one of them spat at me and the other started tearing my clothes and underwear off. I was quite shocked by the sudden aggression, but I had no reason to interrupt everything.
What was worse was that one of them then took me under the neck, lifted me up and threw me on the seat with him. The other one immediately pinned my head to the sofa with his foot and started swearing at me quite profanely. It was all just pure aggression... I've never experienced or seen anything like it and it just froze me.
Is that when you ran away?
It was brutal, but I didn't know what to do. It took me a few seconds to fight back and scream that I didn't want this. But it was no use. One of them started choking me again, slapping me and calling me some pretty harsh names. Then finally came the moment when I realized that this was definitely not going to be a classic sex scene and that it was only going to get worse. I ran screaming for my clothes and ran out of the apartment, still half naked.
What happened next?
My friend caught up with me on the stairs and was very unpleasant to me. He said if I hadn't gone crazy to run away at the beginning of the shoot, that the clients were waiting for their order and it had to be ready today...
After a few days of getting over the shock, I finally looked up the company's videos. Too bad I didn't know her name before, because I would have turned down the shoot before anyone offered it to me. What I experienced was really only a fraction. I don't know how much detail I can give, but I don't really want to. I don't understand at all to whom such abject humiliation is worth any money.
Have you addressed this experience with anyone? Police, family, friends?
There's no point in bothering the police, all the porn sites are full of such videos, I've found. It's a trend people have obviously been into for years. And it's obviously getting worse. I looked further and found that the boundaries of what constitutes porn are constantly shifting. Porn today is no longer about sex at all, it's about making it as shocking as possible. I've even come across sites where digital effects are already being used. Anyway, the most popular and watched practices have nothing to do with sex at all. The aim is pure and brutal humiliation of women by many drastic methods. Even though it's overwhelmingly filmed, people can't quite explain it.
As for family and friends, I only told my best friend to actually warn her in a way. Otherwise, there's no reason for me to tell anyone in the family. Basically, nothing even happened, no video exists. And warning them about extreme porn probably doesn't make much sense either.
Is there anything you'd say to women who are thinking about doing porn?
To be honest, I don't really have anything against it. But I'm talking about the classic kind where it's really just about sex. The moment there's disgusting play with excrement, extreme violence, humiliation and brutality in any way, I don't consider that porn and I don't think it should be on video. And I would like to warn all the girls about that. At the very least, don't support projects like this in any way.
If they want to do porn for a living, there are much safer options today than agencies and shady companies that don't even tell you what's going to happen at the beginning. Unfortunately, the problem is that as the excitement bar keeps rising, it becomes harder and harder to get anyone interested. But that's a debate to have with the experts.
