"The Price of Pleasure" essentially has its intent kept under its belt from minute one. It's an attempt to completely demonize and stigmatize pornography and the porn industry by only exploring the more exploitative aspects and demonstrating the ill effects of such a craze in America where money is made off of sex. The imagery is striking and disturbing, the editing is tricky, and the movie essentially seeks to turn the porn star in to something of a low life, never really remarking on how most of the pornography stars are voluntarily exploiting themselves and making a living out of something they don't normally perform in life. Every business is exploitative, every business suffers casualties, and garners individuals who have been affected by it for better or for worse. The documentary never really explores that fundamental in America. Movie making, modeling, dancing, pageants, child pageants, this movie could have easily replaced most of its footage with crafty clips of the ill effects of the aforementioned industries and it would serve as a striking weapon against turning this industry in to something of a stain on American culture.

Including interviews with militant feminists and psychologists who tend to distort the truth, "The Price of Pleasure" really doesn't want to open up the floor for everyone and allow two sides of the discussion and issue. They instead just completely and wholly attack America for being so blatantly obsessed with sexuality, and never really seek to attack the roots of this obsession that can tend to involve our own sense of cynicism, curiosity, and absolute sexual awakening. They explain that the injection of porn in our world is a statement about our desensitizing but isn't it more a statement about our acceptance of sexual practices for entertainment, comedy, and or enlightenment? And hasn't the industry gone far from its seventies origins which involved drug use, abuse, and mob ties? The documentary even goes so far as to subtly allude that pornography is a gateway for child pornography exploiting horrific images of computer generated naked toddlers having sex with computer animated adults all the while preaching about exploitation.
 

They never explain the differences between legitimate pornography (which goes out of its way to indicate the performers are adults and insists on depicting them in such a manner), amateur pornography (which appeals often to sick fantasies of rape and torture), and child pornography a disgusting form of sexual violence that is unfortunately nothing like actual pornography. But "The Price of Pleasure" never takes the time out to set them apart and explain in detail that pornography is not a gateway to child pornography nor has it been proven to be. It's still a highly debated topic.

Sexual fantasies and pornographic entertainment is often for the adventurous and is never completely an indication of mental illness in its consumer. The normal animal loves sex, it craves it, but the entire documentary has the legitimacy and shock factor of a normal tabloid television show on syndicated television, and takes a real effort in interviewing porn consumers who come off as foolish and twisted, and make every effort to skew the scope of the pornographic entertainment industry without delving in to the more sociological aspects. If porn is racist and sexist, why not instead delve in to the reasoning for it instead of completely slurring the entire base of this industry? And isn't the glut of women wanting and willing to exploit themselves concern more our lust for fame than our lust for sex?

And more so what of the women in pornography who have taken the business and turned it in to an empire using it to build themselves up as respectable entrepreneurs like Danni Ashe? "The Price of Pleasure" is a shock a minute propaganda infomercial about the evils of porn and never quite uses its resources to perhaps explain how most consumers of porn can tend to just be average people without no delusions about sexism. Worst of all it pinpoints the horrors of porn on men and men only barely ever showing women who also take part in these functions and titles. Men hurting women, men objectifying women, but what about girl on girl? What about women hurting women? No. Men are evil, they love porn because it hurts women, and they'll start sleeping with little girls if they get bored enough. That sounds like a very unbiased documentary, doesn't it?