It didn't take long for Lizzy to establish herself as a woman who went where no woman, and most men, would dare to go. The covers of the films that she has produced are difficult to even look at, covered as they are with hardcore snapshots of sex and blood. There's "Cannibalism," a horror-porno in which various internal organs are consumed after an orgiastic release. There's the "Sexually Intrusive Dysfunctional Family" series, which features such props as a decapitated pig's head. "Cocktails" features a grinning girl with a filth-smeared face and a bowl underneath her chin. ("Forced Entry," fortunately, has no cover art.)

Sex in Borden's films is almost always violent. Urine, excrement, blood and spit are prominent. Many films feature witches, Satan, robots, aliens and assorted otherworldly creatures. No orifice goes unviolated, and the more revolting the means, the better.

In fact, Borden says, she often revolts herself, but in a good kind of way. "It's disgusting but I like to watch it because it's shocking," she explains, and says that she sadistically eggs on her actresses to see how far they'll go. She's inspired by the likes of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, she says; she also compares her more nasty videos, like "Cocktails" -- in which, it seems, the sex is almost ancillary to the shock-horror-revulsion -- to shows like "Jackass," in which star Johnny Knoxville will don a face mask and go "swimming" in a porta-potty, or "Survivor," where contestants eat bugs and drink blood.

"Those reality shows, where people eat bugs and shit: That's disgusting! How can you watch it? But I watch it. It's the same with what we do: People are shocked by it, but they watch it."

And apparently enough people watch to make Borden's business profitable: "Cocktails" and "Fossil Fuckers," the films of which Borden says she is most proud, have sold so well that she has done sequels for all of them. "Forced Entry," her magnum opus, has sold 20,000 copies through mail order alone. This is the most disturbing aspect of her films: The fact that viewers watch these movies as a way of getting off. What kind of person masturbates to the sight of girls being slapped, drinking their own vomit or being raped?

This is the only question that gives Borden pause. "That's the one thing that we deal with every day," she says, and quickly meets the eyes of Veronica Caine, whom she has hauled into our interview in order to assure me that the actress wasn't really beaten and murdered in "Forced Entry." There is a momentary silence.

But Borden quickly brushes off this concern by insisting that, really, those creeps who get turned on by the violence in her films are actually being taught a lesson. She argues that many of her films are moral tales, based on "real" stories you might read in the news, in which the bad guy or girl gets caught in the end. A bad alcoholic mother runs over her babysitter and her son, and ends up slashing her wrists (after having sex with assorted strangers first); the rapist in "Forced Entry" is murdered by a vigilante mob; a woman with a cheating husband leaves him in the end.

"If you watch it and don't fast-forward it, and if you think about it, you'll see there's a moral to it!" Borden argues. "Most of this is awareness. I try to show what could happen to you. Do this [violent act] and you are going to get fucked up." Instead of believing, as some do, that linking sex and violence encourages rape, she points out that people get turned on by violence against women in movies like "Halloween" or "The Accused" all the time -- the only difference being that they don't actually see the sex.

Caine, a freckle-faced 32-year-old who is as calm as Borden is hyperactive, chimes in. She was shunned for performing in "Forced Entry," Caine says, and she admits there are moral concerns about the film. But, she adds, "There's nothing wrong with what I'm doing. The one thing that people want to pick out that makes it wrong is the fact that there is hardcore sex in it. Everything else is completely acceptable on a daily basis. I simply performed something that involved sex with a completely mainstream kind of entertainment. And porn is mainstream to me."

I can vaguely understand the argument that Eminem's "Kim," in which we hear a woman being raped and murdered, is no more socially acceptable than "Forced Entry," in which we see it. Except "Forced Entry," of course, is also a porno flick intended to sexually arouse us. Perhaps the juxtaposition that shocks me has simply been normalized in the porn industry, in which sex can be as banal an act as eating cornflakes -- even when it is embellished with a beating.

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