Joanne Guest FAQ   >   Appendix 4

 

Appendix 4 - Wot, no hardcore?

 


 

 

Please bear in mind that I AM NOT A LAWYER.

 


 

What is hardcore?

There is no universally accepted meaning of the word hardcore - a lot of authorities confuse it with obscene - but I'll start with (what I have been led to believe is) the American definition:

"A work that contains scenes explicitly depicting one or more of the following: [A] Penetration, either oral or genital; [B] Cumshots; or [C] 'getting off' (sometimes referred to as 'heavy petting')."

Some US states (particularly those that permit hardcore to be sold, albeit with severe restrictions) do have a legal definition of what constitutes "hardcore" but I do not know whether their definitions agree totally with the above definition, or even with each other.

In the UK, there is no actual definition of "hardcore" as such, although people will usually have strong views about what the term means (this often gets voiced as "if it's illegal, it must be hardcore"). UK obscenity laws are fairly harsh: one of the restrictions is on explicit depiction of the erect male member, which would catch a few of Jo's "more racy" photosets (see below) that would be allowed in other countries such as Australia or the USA. I understand the regulations in Japan are even stricter.

 


 

All right then, what counts as "obscene"?

In the USA, the definition is based on a US Supreme Court decision [Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973)], which augmented an earlier Supreme Court ruling [Roth v. United_States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)]. The appropriate passage reads:

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be:
  1. whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
  2. whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
  3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

If you've got a lot of time to spare you might want to read the full text of the Supreme Court decision, which can be found here.

The UK definition appears in the Obscene Publications Act of 1959:

For the purposes of this Act an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.

As with all matters legal, things are never simple. UK case law has resulted in certain extra rules-of-thumb being applied (e.g. "the erect male member is not allowed"), while in the USA the effect of state laws have to be taken into account. In other words, something that's legal in New York might be illegal in Minnesota (to take two states more or less at random). However, many states do permit "not-quite-hardcore" shots.

So, the situation is that pretty much anything (I am not kidding) could be regarded as "obscene": the issue hinges on whether a prosecutor might feel they have sufficient chance of securing a conviction. Given the uncertainties, many magazines choose the path of least resistance and avoid publishing any controversial stuff.

 

So what's the legal situation with Jo's m/f sets as they stand?

If you are in a country where hardcore is legal (e.g. Sweden), then there's obviously no problem.

If hardcore is illegal in your country (or state), then Jo's m/f sets might be legal, they might not. For example:

Australia: Legal. They are classed as "Category 1 Restricted", i.e. for sale to adults aged 18 and over.
Japan: Illegal, but some heavily-censored versions have been published.
UK: Legal. You won't find them in ordinary shops, but licensed sex shops will be allowed to carry them.
USA: Legal under Federal law, but check your local state law.

I must stress again that I AM NOT A LAWYER. If you require legal advice on this (or any other) matter, you should seek out a licensed legal professional familiar with the laws of your locality.

 


 

Just how good (or bad) do Jo's "racy" sets get?

During the early part of her career (i.e. up to 1993/1994) Jo appeared in a number of photoshoots in which she was in extremely close proximity (ahem!) to the male model. However, no new photoshoots of this sort have appeared in print since 1996.

Some people, on seeing those pictures, respond in one of two ways:

  1. "That's hardcore!"
    Well, as explained above, they might well be classed obscene in certain jurisdictions, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're actually hardcore, does it?
     
  2. "There MUST be more pictures in the series!"
    This one crops up time and again. People assume that the 'racy' pictures must have come from a hardcore shoot, so they claim there should be some hardcore pictures from these shoots.

    There are several problems with that assumption. For a start, no-one seems to have a halfway reasonable explanation of why the "missing" pictures are still missing: if a photographer did have any such shots you would have expected him to cash-in on Jo's subsequent fame by now. It's been ten years, guys!

    Also, the question displays a certain amount of naivety as regards how photoshoots are actually carried out. Some magazines (e.g. Penthouse, at least before 1997) specialised in "not-quite-hardcore" pictures: the photographer commissioned to do the shoot would be well aware of the magazine's preferences and wouldn't want to waste his time taking hardcore pictures only to have them rejected by the magazine. From the models' point of view, they weren't being paid to do hardcore so the photographer wouldn't be getting any hardcore.

    Given these contraints, the photographer would of course be using his skill and judgement to suggest that more was going on "just out of view", but do bear in mind that the most likely reason you don't see something happening is because it didn't actually happen at all.

 

What about the pip0572 series? That's gotta be hardcore!!

Ah... <cough>... THAT picture. No more than a "handling error" in my opinion. Compare picture 11 in the series (the one that people are presumably referring to) with picture 31 (which I think was the pose being aimed for).

Yes, the picture is clearly borderline and I can well understand why people might consider it to be hardcore. However, the fact remains that it was originally excluded when pictures from the shoot were published (by Club magazine) back in 1993, and in all these years it's the only such picture to have surfaced. Seems to be an out-take rather than a hardcore shoot to me.

The extra pictures were published on the (now-defunct) "Pretty In Pink" paysite. Jo's name was given as "Daria" and the picture filenames all began with "pip0572" (e.g. pip0572_0031.jpg).

 


 

But what about those adverts for hardcore videos?

I've heard of two distinct series of adverts:

  1. The 1998 "German" advert
    To the best of my knowledge, this advert only appeared once: it didn't mention Jo by name, but there was a picture of Jo in the advert. The text was along the lines of "Back in the early 1990s, a struggling young British model appeared in a German hardcore film. Nowadays she's much better known in the UK..."
    Nobody seems to have received a copy of this video, which leads me to suppose it was a "take the money and run" scam.
     
  2. The 1999 "UK" advert
    In the latter part of 1999 (and on into early 2000) a series of adverts appeared in UK publications promising a hardcore video: this time the adverts did mention Jo by name. Two points need to be made: firstly, the postal address kept changing from advert to advert, and secondly the adverts were strangely quiet about the existence of a BBFC certificate (which is a legal requirement for videos sold in the UK) [1].
    Feedback would suggest that you aren't necessarily going to get what you expect: one respondent claimed he got "lots of still shots (and some of them not very good) copied onto video tape". It is also worth noting that nobody has bothered to post any clips from this video to the newsgroup (if there was any real hardcore you would have expected someone to have taken the trouble...)
     

There are of course some softcore videos featuring Jo. See the Merchandise section for details.

 

[1] Another correspondent has suggested the video may have been trying to exploit a presumed loophole in the regulations: videos that did not feature movement (i.e. consisting solely of still pictures) were thought to be exempt from BBFC classification. The historians among you will appreciate the parallel with the Windmill Theatre in the 1940s and 1950s.

 


 

"I heard this rumour about..."

Talk is cheap, and some rumours crop up again and again. I'll mention three of them:

  1. "The magazine chose not to publish the h/c pics"
    This is based on the observation that a magazine clearly isn't going to publish every picture a photographer takes in a shoot. The thing is, these missing shots are most likely to be "more of the same" (i.e. similar poses to the pictures that were published). To quote a real example: in November 1998, the Penthouse website published some extra pictures from their 1994 "Circus" set featuring Jo - the new pictures were, if anything, more tame than the pictures that were originally published. The significance of this example is that Penthouse started publishing hardcore pictures (of other people) in 1997 - if there had been any hardcore pictures held back from Jo's "Circus" shoot in 1994, Penthouse would almost certainly have published them in 1998.
     
  2. "The photographer didn't submit the h/c shots to the magazine"
    This is usually couched in terms of a draconian model release contract, in which the model supposedly has a right to vet each and every picture taken during the session. If that really is the case, the photographer could only have retained any hardcore pictures for his own private enjoyment since he would not be legally entitled to publish them. In other words, these pictures would fall into the same category as other "private" pictures, and we are unlikely to ever see them.
     
  3. "I've seen (a previously-unknown series)"
    Someone may claim to have seen a "new" hardcore series (one rumour mentioned a series of pictures supposedly taken at a well-known London hotel) but, despite having been "seen" by one heckuva lot of people, the pictures themselves are curiously unavailable for posting on the Net, and hard facts about the shoot always seem more difficult to find than the Yeti.
     

 


 

There COULD be some hardcore stuff, couldn't there?

In an infinite universe, anything is possible. Here are a few scenarios:

  1. An undiscovered magazine shoot
    Looking increasingly unlikely as time goes on, but it is still possible that a hardcore set may have appeared in some magazine, somewhere. You do have to ask why it has managed to avoid detection for so long: there are a lot of people looking. Also, you would have thought the publisher might have been tempted to reprint the pictures by now...
     
  2. An unpublished magazine shoot
    It is also possible that a hardcore set may have been photographed with a view to publication, but for some reason never actually published. In this case, one has to wonder why the photographer (or the publisher, if it got that far) would have chosen not to cash-in on Jo's subsequent fame [2]. Do bear in mind that she's a model and her time at the top is, perforce, limited: any photographer trying to hang on to photos in the hope that "they might be worth more next year" runs the risk that she'll disappear from public view, leaving him with a pile of worthless snaps.
     
  3. Private pictures, not intended for commercial release
    Yes, people have been known to take pictures that are solely for private enjoyment, and pictures of this sort do sometimes escape into the public domain (e.g. the Pamela Anderson / Tommy Lee hardcore video that, so the story goes, was stolen from their home). But it only happens on rare occasions [3] so don't hold your breath.
     

 

[2] In the specific case of Jo the waters have been further muddied by a succession of UK magazines claiming to have "hardcore" pics which turned out to be the same old pictures we've seen dozens of times before. Any new "hardcore" set would be more difficult to sell, so reducing the value of any such pictures.

[3] I know of only three other cases in the past 12 years: Tonya Harding (the ice skater) in 1994, Mimi MacPherson (sister of Elle MacPherson) in 1998, and Katie Price (UK glamour model "Jordan") in 2003. Yes, it's that rare an occurrence.

 


 

"But there's big money to be made doing hardcore!"

Actually, the money's a whole lot poorer than you might suppose.

According to the rec.arts.movies.erotica FAQ, many hardcore performers make more money as "exotic dancers" than they get from hardcore movies. In the early 1990s (i.e. the point at which "hardcore" offers would first have been made to Jo), freelance performers in hardcore movies made between $300 and $1000 per movie. Top stars earned up to $10,000 per movie, but there were (and still are) very few people in that category.

Also, bear in mind the stigma associated with hardcore work: once a model has done hardcore she'll have extreme difficulty getting any mainstream work thereafter. So, in order to make $100,000 per year, a hardcore performer would have to appear in at least 10 movies and might have to appear in over 100 movies. It's theoretically possible, but it's not particularly likely, is it?

To sum up: Yes, it's a living. But it's not that well-paid, and it's a decidedly career-limiting decision to do hardcore. Is it any wonder that Jo decided not to?

 


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