Page 41 - AVN August 2025

The hilltop house, up a steep hill off a well-traveled street in Woodland, Hills, Calif.,
has an otherworldly quality: it doesn’t have the vibe of a place where people live, but
not an empty location-shoot-only house either. There are several unplugged pinball
machines against one wall, with computer-printed instructions. Walls are high and
white, with generic art. A half-finished swimming pool is visible through floor-to-ceiling
windows. The kitchen is stainless steel and black granite, with the central island filled
with snacks and water bottles. People drift in and out, conversing in small groups.
The Adult Time production, Hard Stop, is about a sex-addiction clinic and the women
there for a one-week group-therapy treatment, telling the stories of their addictions and
learning from and supporting each other. Bree Mills is directing from her own 45-page
script, with the logline: “A self-destructive woman enters a week-long sex addiction
rehab, resisting every attempt to break through her denial. But as the raw confessions
of the other women strip away her defenses, she’s forced to confront the darkest truth
about herself—or risk never escaping the cycle.” The group-therapy participants are
played by Sarah Arabic, Anna Claire Clouds, Reagan Foxx, Kenna James and Little
Puck, and the pressure is off: The movie has wrapped principal photography and
today’s shoot agenda is a reunion round-table discussion and ancillary material.
“It’s very topical, and I find it fascinating,” Mills, who is also chief creative officer
for Adult Time, says. “I’ve known people who’ve struggled with addiction, and seeing
not just the impact on them, but the impact on everyone around them. I wanted to
explore it, obviously in the context of our industry: looking at sex and love addiction
and framing it that way as opposed to another type of addiction. When I knew I was
going to do a story about sex addiction, I knew I wanted a female protagonist, and
I wanted her to be a middle-aged woman. I started researching the most common
reasons women go into SLAA [Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, a real group, not a
fictional construct for the movie] and I found that the most common reasons correlate
to some of the most common fantasies. Like with Kenna James’s character, leading
a very sexually repressed life and acting out by putting herself in high-risk situations
with strangers and pushing herself to her absolute physical limit as the polar opposite
of the repression she’s feeling. With Anna Claire Clouds’s character, basically public
exposure issues and compulsive masturbation issues: The constant need for validation
and attention from others.
“As an industry, we always grapple with the duality of the entertainment we create: it
is fantasy, but it does feed into a lot of narratives that echo throughout your life and can
be quite dysfunctional, and disruptive, and destructive. As women, the formation of our
own sexual identities is so shaped by others, and there’s not a lot of resource for one
to find confidence in their own sexuality, especially as a woman. One of the beautiful
things about our [adult industry] community is finding that confidence through being
a sex worker, being in the sex industry. I’m always interested in duality in things: isn’t it
interesting that some of the top male-gaze porn fantasies are also what land women in
SLAA?
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