A WEEK LATER, I LANDED the gallery job. So I took my place as the receptionist at an elite art gallery in midtown Manhattan that catered to the artistic tastes of millionaires. I manned the phones, greeted customers, provided informative materials on exhibits, and turned prospective buyers over to salespeople. And in down time between duties, I wrote porn reviews.
I elected to take a “nom de porn,” as j. vegas called it, from one of my favorite cult films—an easy decision that I didn’t spend much time on, which at that point more or less reflected my involvement with the porn industry as a whole. It didn’t require much brainpower, aside from that pesky feminism issue, with which I continued to wrestle.
I tried to play it cool, though, for the sake of my poker face at the gallery and in order to keep making the money that came rolling in. I wrote about the films as if their contents came as no surprise. As if they served only to turn me on, or better yet, to make me laugh. The magazine’s line was to take everything with many grains of salt, so I cracked jokes as much as I could, and endeavored to keep in the forefront of my mind the fact that every person involved in these situations was a consenting adult. It was a challenge for me, but it paid well enough to make it worthwhile.
My editor, j. vegas, on the other hand, seemed to have been born for his job. He had a half dozen pen names, and he got a sort of childlike glee out of coming up with colorful new terminology for sex acts and the people who practiced them. And he was good at it. If there were some kind of award system for excellence in witty porn journalism, I’m sure he’d have gone home with the trophy for “Most Inventive Use of ‘Jerk-Off’ in an Alliterative Sentence,” and several others. He saw the porn industry as the pinnacle of humanity’s capacity for dark, self-deprecating humor, and his role was to point out and capitalize on the ridiculousness of it all.
But even with his enthusiasm and the magazine’s more general laissez-faire attitude toward most things pornographic, there were still rules in place to remind me that this business wasn’t all fun and filthy games. For instance, we could not use the word “kid” or “child” anywhere for fear of setting off child-porn alarms. And I was prohibited from mentioning female ejaculation, even if it happened in a movie I reviewed.
I was told that any mention of squirting was prohibited because in some places where the magazine was distributed, this could be considered urination, which could in turn be considered obscenity, and which could lead to any number of negative consequences for the magazine and the makers of the film in question. I assumed at the time that the places vaguely referred to in this prohibition must be some backwaters where women were not allowed to vote, but it later became clear that the backwater in question was, incredibly, the UK. The epicenter of the “civilized” world is, apparently, not enlightened enough to admit that women squirting in ecstasy is not, in fact, the same as women peeing.
Female ejaculation, or “squirting” (considered two different phenomena in scientific circles but synonymous in porn) has been recognized as a pre-orgasmic or orgasmic occurrence for centuries the world over, basically up until the Victorian period when preexisting notions of women having anything like sex drives or real arousal seems to have been squashed. In moments of great sexual excitement, fluid gushes forth from two small ducts to the sides of the urethra in many women and other people with vulvas. These ducts are attached to the Skene’s gland—a very recently discovered gland that is thought to be linked to the G-spot on the anterior wall of the vagina—which becomes engorged during arousal. The fluid they expel is sometimes copious enough in volume to be mistaken for urination. (Note: The amount of liquid expelled is limited, however; many squirting videos in porn are faked—those streams shooting all the way across rooms are usually the result of douching during a cut in the action, then expelling the liquid during filming. If you look very closely, you can usually see that it’s coming out of the vagina, not the urethra, which means it’s not really squirting.) Though the liquid is usually clear, with very little odor or taste (hey, sometimes somebody’s face is down there when it happens!), it’s more similar to urine than any other bodily fluid, and until very recently, the scientific community refused to consider that it could be anything else. But thousands, nay millions, of people with firsthand experience attest that squirting is not peeing. Numbers are hard to come by, but most studies attest that somewhere between ten and forty percent of people with vulvas are able to squirt, with some folks I’ve spoken to in the porn industry claiming that the ability is universal.
Nevertheless, the scientific community has remained skeptical of the notion that anything that looks like pee could be anything else—actual female experiences be damned. And so, in the UK in particular, squirting was considered close enough to urination to rule it out from any and all film reviews I wrote. Oddly, it wasn’t until 2014 that female ejaculation was officially banned in adult films in the UK, along with spanking that leaves visible marks, facesitting, and the use of restraints, to much protestation and rebellion from British pornographers. Nobody can put their finger on why, exactly, these and a number of other benign and extremely widespread acts were deemed obscene by the Brits, but even if they could, they’d have to be careful not to finger too hard, lest somebody squirt on camera.
But the biggest and hardest (teehee!) rule at the magazine was that if I didn’t have anything positive to say about a film, I could choose not to review it, but I could not choose to give it a bad review. The relationship the magazine had established with certain production companies did not allow for less-than-glowing words about those companies’ work. If I wanted to make my hundred bucks (my rate per review had increased after a few months), I had to come up with ways to gloss over the things I didn’t like.
So I settled into a sort of benevolent numbness in my viewing habits, in order to facilitate benign reviews. After the initial excitement about the novelty of it all had faded, I spent a lot of time holding down the fast-forward button. I would press play every so often, of course, to take note of the soundtrack, dirty talk, and so on, but if I’d watched every film at normal speed I would have had very little time left over to spend all the money my reviews were earning me. And I would have been bored absolutely to tears. I’d often review five films in a month, each of which stretched on for four to six long hours of hardcore fucking. Who could possibly be interested enough to watch all of that? And who would pay the forty or fifty dollars that these jumbo packs of porn were retailing for? No matter how gleaming a review I wrote for Anal Creampies #7, I just couldn’t imagine who was buying all this smut.
The answer came to me in a roundabout way through the business of working for a dirty magazine.
About a month into my reviewing career, the editorial director told me he could give my name to an editor at another magazine. One that wasn’t about to go bankrupt.
Oh. Nobody was buying all that smut.
It began clicking into place that the industry that supported these magazines—the same one responsible for Elastic Assholes—wasn’t just hyperventilating over the threat of Internet piracy. It was failing.
THE PORN INDUSTRY BASICALLY went through a turbulent adolescence in the seventies, blossomed into young adulthood in the eighties, and settled into a corpulent, self-satisfied routine in the nineties. It kept on top of new technology, but it got a bit round in the middle, secure in its status as the “recession-proof” industry. Production companies fattened themselves on easy profits and let their business models languish, unaware that they would be harshly yanked from their stupor early in the new millennium. When the Internet exploded onto the capitalist playing field, pornography was naturally the first to exploit its promise, but it was also one of the first to fall.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, as most industries were trying to figure out how to make this new technology work for them, pornography jumped into the fray feet-first, as it always had before. In their book about modern sexual desire, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Dr. Ogi Ogas and Dr. Sai Gaddam state that there were fewer than ninety adult magazines published in America when the Web went online in 1991, but by 1997 there were nine hundred pornographic websites. The adult industry took to the new technology like fish to water, establishing new models for payment and distribution that everyone else followed. Streaming video, membership websites, credit card verification systems, encryption coding, and nearly every advancement in file sharing and video display were pioneered by porn, then taken up by the rest of the world.
Third-party payment processors like PayPal are particularly deep in debt to the porn industry; when opportunists realized the ease of making money on porn in the early days of the Internet, they jumped on the bandwagon and proceeded to make a mess of things by laundering money. There were affiliate click-through systems that collected money on falsely generated traffic, porn sites used as fronts for less-legal money-making strategies, and so on. Some sites would charge sky-high fees for website membership cancellations, which unsurprisingly took place quite frequently. Since no one had figured out yet that the name of a porn site showing up on someone’s credit card statement might cause blowback for people whose significant others looked askance at smut, membership cancellations were routine. And so were chargebacks—people denying outright that they had made a purchase from a porn site in the first place and demanding their money back. Due to rampant chargeback rates and fraud, credit card companies started to turn down online porn business—to this day, American Express will not work with the industry at all. Unable to process payments at reasonable rates with the remaining credit card companies, porn companies were bereft until third-party payment processing companies came to their rescue, taking on the risk that their clients’ businesses posed and charging through the nose for the privilege. In short, PayPal might not have come to be unless the adult industry had paved its way.
In an ironic twist, the industry that birthed online payment solutions is now a victim of online finance’s scorn. Pornographers—and a variety of other businesspeople who deal in sex—are prohibited from using most major payment platforms online. Overall, the finance industry has, astoundingly, not yet gotten over the sting of the first few years of Internet craziness and is still convinced that porn, despite its almost ludicrous financial promise, must be lumped in with other “high-risk” companies—like loan consolidation and online gambling. Never mind that pornographers have gotten savvy to the idea that nobody wants their credit card statement to read “BigTitsXXX.com,” or that as society adapts, chargeback rates have gone down for porn purchases. Never mind that, as Cindy Gallop, founder of the real-world-sex porn alternative site MakeLoveNotPorn.tv told me in 2014, “The bank that welcomes ventures like ours, designed to change the world through sex, will make a fucking shedload of money” when sex-oriented companies inevitably flock to it. Most banks still flat-out refuse to do business with porn companies, citing outdated morality clauses or the Puritanical interests of their investors.
Compounding the existing squeamishness of the finance industry regarding online porn money, in 2012 the Department of Justice launched Operation Choke Point, an initiative that encouraged banks to restrict service to businesses that pose a “reputational risk,” like pornography, online gambling, and payday loans, according to The Washington Post. Operation Choke Point was behind a 2013 rash of porn stars’ personal bank accounts being shut down and sex workers being refused service at financial institutions, for no given reason. The operation was exposed to public scorn, but to date there’s no evidence that it has been shut down, and it certainly didn’t encourage banks, or the credit card companies and payment processors that depend upon their largesse, to work with adult companies online.
In sum, porn may have gotten a heady start on the Internet, but its kerfuffle with online finance was an early indication of how quickly cyberspace could turn. Though porn initially made huge financial gains online, hackers and pirates were not far behind. Whereas the jizz biz, as j. vegas liked to call it, had learned to think quickly to keep up with the pace of innovation, it had never before had to deal with anything quite as fast as the Web and its legions of faceless thieves.
In the words of veteran performer Tim von Swine, “Technology has always been the midwife of destruction in porno.” Porn used to make its bread and butter selling things that had smut on them, like DVDs and VHS tapes and magazines, but with the advent of the Internet, pornography became available as information that was easily reproducible, easily distributable, and, when hackers caught up with it, entirely free to whomever wanted it.
The porn industry, like others, reeled. Brad Armstrong—one of the most decorated directors in porn history—once told me that the Internet hurt porn from every angle. “People can even shoot movies on their two-hundred-dollar … phone and throw it up on the Internet,” he said. “If any business had to deal with that kind of saturation and overflow, there’s no way they’d be operating. Thankfully, everybody’s horny. That’s the only thing that keeps us going!” He was right; unlike many other industries, pornography didn’t have powerful protectors to buoy it in its time of need. Nobody cared enough about porn to publicly stand up for it. Armstrong told me he sometimes found himself wondering, “If we stopped tomorrow, there’s still so much of it out there, would anybody really care?”
It appeared, at times, that they wouldn’t. And the industry stumbled. It got desperate. It started paying performers less, doing away with the bells and whistles as the ship began to sink. The sex scenes I was watching in the late 2000s were products of fear, anger, and desperation, acted out in the language of lust. The industry was thrashing out its own death throes, flailing and clutching at its throat, certain the end was nigh. And as ridiculous as it seems, given the direness of the situation, much of the industry was refusing to do much to help itself. Porn, having earned a reputation for paving the way forward with technology since the beginning of technology, was falling behind.
Case in point: As recently as 2012, I was reviewing DVDs instead of video files for magazine reviews, waiting for them to arrive in the mail instead of downloading them. Meanwhile, a video file with no cover or packaging could have been e-mailed in hardly a fraction of the time and at literally zero cost. It was incredible. The adult industry may have invented the Internet as we know it in many ways, but in plenty of others, it likes to cling to the past. Director Ivan summarized the situation for me in an interview in 2010: “Many companies didn’t evolve with the times, and that’s why they are dying off. The smart guys behind the Internet porn boom capitalized on it. Years back, DVD people smirked at Web guys, saying stuff like, ‘Oh, it’s just Internet—quicker scenes with lower rates because it’s just Internet content.’ Whoa, did they get a dick slap of reality a few years later.”
In other words, the old world order of the porn industry, which had come into being by way of innovation and rule-breaking, had calcified itself into an immovable leviathan that was all too easy to topple. The industry was in decline not because of one great failing, but because it was too bloated and proud to acknowledge that thousands of seemingly insignificant ruffians were picking away at it, bit by bit. Stealing a scene, reproducing it, sending it off elsewhere, and removing profits brick by brick.
By the time the problem was recognized as a crisis, porn companies scrambled to counter the damage, but nobody knew how. There was no clear way forward, no new technology to save them or fresh business model waiting to take over. New video technologies like HD and 3D were adopted by high rollers, but for most in the industry, cheaper and quicker seemed the only way forward. Profits weren’t just dwindling, they were evaporating. Porn mags and companies were crumbling left and right, and the magazine I was writing for appeared to be the next to go.
(PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)