IN EARLY OCTOBER OF 2007, I landed a gig at a second dirty magazine, for which I wrote the set copy for photographic spreads of ladies with large bosoms. You know, “This is Sally and she likes long walks on the beach, frozen daiquiris, and cradling big boners between her double F cups.” That kind of thing. I concocted five hundred words about each woman in the magazine, often according to some theme: big-titted tramps of the UK, for instance. The money was almost as good as what I got for reviews, and I didn’t have to fast-forward through hours of hardcore porn to get it. In fact, I rarely even saw the photos I was supposed to be writing about. I’d just make up a name and a story, let my imagination run, and allow the editors to pair my words with a model. Months later I’d get a copy of the magazine and stare in disbelief at “Maisey’s” smiling face and boobies, unbelieving—“How could they think that was Maisey? Maisey would never wear that bra and panty set!”
Thus set up with a second gig, I was prepared to take the financial hit when the first magazine went bankrupt at the end of 2007. It had been a short run, but it had come through for me when I needed it. I wasn’t, however, exactly heartbroken to give up reviewing titles like Breast Meat and Teens Like It Big #4. I’d already amassed an alarming repertoire of silly names for body parts, become aware of positions and activities I’d never have dreamed up on my own, and developed a knack for alliterating jokes about all of them. Words like “slut” and “cock-hungry holes” took up too much of my written vocabulary for my own comfort, but at the magazine I’d been writing for they fit right in.
The editorial director, Charles, assured me that if another publishing company bought out the magazine, I would be reviewing for him again as soon as possible. But j. vegas was made no such promises. He was given full unemployment benefits, however, and relegated to his apartment in Washington Heights not much worse for the wear. We’d developed a close friendship, partly aided by alcohol and marijuana, so he included me in his plans to write a satirical web series about working in the smut business—a lifelong dream, he told me, that had been realized more comically than he’d expected. As an aspiring filmmaker, he felt the experience had to be memorialized.
AS MONTHS PASSED, I surreptitiously praised the gigantic jugs that dominated Lizzy’s life and got Pauline kicked out of boarding school for distracting the Sapphic nuns, all while assisting with the sales of extremely expensive contemporary art. And I slid right back into my Internet porn habit. It was surreal: I now knew the names of the actors and their oeuvres, their preferences, even their dirty-talk styles. I appreciated them, at least more than I had before, as human beings. And yet I gravitated back to the free, pirated clips of their material, fully aware that I was stealing from them and contributing to the industry-wide collapse that had cost me my first paid writing gig.
As Lux Alptraum, a porn critic and journalist, summed it up for me, “It can be really, really difficult to negotiate ethics when orgasms are concerned … Sometimes your orgasm is not concerned with whether somebody got paid for that day.”
In a lot of ways, I was concerned about people getting paid, but like Lux said, my orgasms were not. I had a boyfriend who was ready to go at the drop of a hat. I had stacks of porn DVDs under the bed, which I could have watched anytime I wanted. Most of them were filmed in HD and featured behind-the-scenes footage, cum shot compilations, and lots of other goodies that the streaming video clips on free websites couldn’t match. Yet I kept reverting to the same crappy websites I’d frequented for years. I was still more assured of getting my orgasms there than anywhere else, and something about the surreptitious scrolling I was doing met a deep-set need in me that I couldn’t quite name.
I felt like an anomaly: aware of the harm my habit was doing, getting laid but nevertheless gravitating back to pirated porn, and being a woman, to boot. I’d heard the old platitude that women don’t like porn because they are not visual—that porn is for men. * Women, the thinking popularized by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s goes, are more complicated creatures than their male counterparts and require a more complex series of switches to be flipped in our brains before we can get aroused. The authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts write, “The male brain is designed to be more visually responsive to sexual stimuli than the female brain,” which they dub “the most sophisticated neural structure on earth.” And they back these claims up with investigative journalism, citing study after study claiming that, whereas men get a rise from looking at a pair of boobs, women don’t find much eroticism in those boobs unless they also know whom they belong to, why they’re being displayed, who else can see them, and whether the set dresser knows that that lamp on the bedside table isn’t plugged in.
The desire for context, this conventional wisdom tells us, is the reason that women gravitate toward romance novels and erotica, written works that provide them with all the background information they crave, while men enjoy the direct visual stimulation that porn provides. I can’t deny the allure of a good romance paperback—when I was in middle school, my friends and I passed one novel around, rereading it until the spine broke and the book split in half. And we were part of a much larger trend: According to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the romance novel industry pulled in $1.37 billion in 2008, and ninety percent of its readers were women. Since the advent of Fifty Shades of Grey, erotica readership has skyrocketed, making the so-called “porn for women” genre an even bigger seller.
But I still liked “porn for men” just as much, and probably more. And it wasn’t just me. Women are far from immune to the visual cues that erotic films provide. In a 2004 study conducted by Meredith Chivers of Queens University in Canada, women were hooked up to a plethysmograph—a device that tests the blood flow to the vaginal walls—and shown photos of a wide range of erotic and non-erotic photos. Afterward, they were asked about how aroused they had felt, and their answers were compared to the plethysmograph’s findings. The results were stunning: Physically, the women were aroused by literally all of the erotic images, regardless of their sexual orientation … or even their species (some photos showed apes going at it). But psychologically? Not so much. Most women only reported feeling turned on by the type of smut that tickled their particular fancies—heterosexual women said they responded most to heterosexual sex, and so on. None reported feeling any psychological response to the ape sex. But the proof was in the pussy, as they say. These women’s bodies did react to pornographic images of literally all kinds, whether their conscious minds picked up on it or not. It’s not much of a stretch to say, based on this research, that women are just as aroused by porn as anybody else—they may just not be aware, or willing to own up to it.
And there I was, with the bedroom door locked and my laptop fired up, to prove it. I didn’t seem to much care for context; I was turned on by just about any pairing of human genitals, whether it was straight, gay, or something else entirely, even if the images were supposedly made for men by men. I wanted hot, visual stimuli that would turn me on easily, without complications. There was something about being able to get off without noticing the credits, the lighting, the music, the company logo, that I appreciated. It was all painlessly simple. As director Ivan told me, “I think one of the reasons the Internet is so popular is you can find what you want, watch it, stroke it, and off you go.”
He was onto something. Particularly for women, the Internet has become a haven for the exploration of taboo fantasies. As the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts put it, “Women who previously felt too mortified to be seen in the back room of the local video rental store are finally empowered to explore their erotic interests in privacy and comfort” in the Internet age. The freedom of online porn viewing isn’t just exciting, it’s foundational: After years of experience talking to people about pornography, I know I’m not alone in my proclivity for easy orgasms—especially when it comes to people my age and younger—regardless of gender identity. There is something incredibly seductive about the quick and almost mechanical payoff of the disembodied clip or animated GIF showing just the best few moments of a porn scene. It is delightfully, and damningly, easy for even my (female) body to get aroused by the simple mechanics of sex without involving the difficult moral baggage of real human beings, their stories, or their motivations. Prevailing wisdom about women’s preference for context be damned: Online pornography’s devastatingly simple format and nonexistent price tag prove alluring enough to bring millions of women to the Internet seeking quick and easy orgasms.
With every passing year, women are viewing porn in greater numbers and getting more vocal about their habits. In the last quarter of 2015, Marie Claire reported that a whopping thirty percent of women they’d surveyed declared that they viewed porn at least once a week. And Pornhub reported in its 2016 year-end review that just over a quarter of its viewers, worldwide, were women. As discourse around the subject of pornography opens up, some of the stigma once attached to watching blue movies has been lifted, and more of us are poking our heads out of our shame dungeons to talk about our habits. More than that—whereas porn used to be a veritable desert for women who wanted an alternative to the standard made-by-men-for-men fare, the past decade has seen a huge spike in porn made for women, by women, as well as porn made for queer and nonbinary folks, with viewers in mind who aren’t necessarily straight, white men. These companies clearly give female viewers—and viewers of any other gender identity—a case of the ol’ warm fuzzies, as well as the wet and slipperies.
It’s not only out of self-interest that I implore you to believe that people aren’t depraved sex maniacs if they tend toward a simplified version of pornography, but I do find some relief in asserting I am normal. Free, fast, and easy can also be called “efficient,” and I’m a sucker for practicality. Yet, as 2008 began, I worried about the effects of masturbatory efficiency on myself, and on the rest of us. Was I—were we—sacrificing the experience of fantasy for the simple mechanics of sex?
It’s certainly no revelation that easy is, well, easier than intimate. But it’s less obvious that our penchant for what’s easy over what’s meaningful could be reflected in our porn viewing habits, or that those habits might extend into our personal sex lives. And it’s certainly far beyond my singular ability to prove that this might be the case. But a staggering amount of anecdotal evidence amassed by myself and others points to a developing trend in which young people who have been watching hardcore pornography from an early age take that hardcore pornography to heart.
There’s nothing wrong, per se, with trying out a move you learned from porn in the bedroom. But when the totality of one’s sexual experience is downloaded directly from porn, there may be reason to pause. “Porn operates as default sex ed,” sex-tech disruptor Cindy Gallop told me in an interview several years after I began writing about porn, “in the complete absence of a counterpoint of an open, healthy discussion of parents feeling able to teach their kids about sex as opposed to feeling utterly embarrassed about it, in the absence of schools and colleges operating an open, honest sex ed curriculum.”
The scarcity of reliable sex education available to young people in America makes online pornography an easy substitute; as of the time I’m writing this, only twenty-three states mandate sex education at all, and only thirteen require it to be medically accurate. Most sex ed in this country focuses on the male external anatomy and discusses erections and ejaculation, but girls are taught about menstruation and pregnancy risks instead of their anatomies or orgasmic potential.
School isn’t educating the youth about sex, and it seems that neither are parents. The Pornography Industry author Shira Tarrant writes, “Between 1998 and 2005, there was a tenfold increase in the number of porn videos produced (13,000 vs. 1,300). Yet a survey of teenagers conducted by Psychology magazine found that during this same time period, seventy-five percent of parents never talked with their children about pornography.”
There is a vacuum being created, and it’s not difficult to see why many young people turn to the mountains of smut on the Internet to find out about sex. For instance, if I’d had access to videos on my parents’ home computer when I was in middle school, my crippling anxiety about the mechanics of the pelvic thrust would have been put to rest, likely along with any other questions I had about what the human body is capable of in the bedroom. And these days, there aren’t many ways to get information as trustworthy as what we can see people doing on Pornhub. As Mike Stabile, a spokesperson for Kink.com and the director of communications for the Free Speech Coalition, said in an interview with Mark Hay, “Sexuality has always operated in tandem with pornography. Pornography tends to crystallize desires that you might not have articulated.” And for those whose desires haven’t even fully formed yet, it can be a system of guidance that easily jumps off the rails.
Even porn stars I’ve spoken to learned about sex from the industry they would one day enter, and the lessons they learned were often of a particular nature. At AVN in 2010, performer Andy San Dimas told me, “I started watching porn in high school because I wanted to suck dick better. So I studied how to give a really nasty blowjob, like really intense and gross.”
There’s no reason that a nasty, intense, and gross blowjob is any better or worse than a polite, discreet blowjob, of course. And I don’t mean to cast aspersions on anyone who genuinely prefers athletic sex over candles, R&B, and rose petals. Or anyone who enjoys athletic sex along with said romantic accompaniment. It’s of dire importance, I believe, that nobody with an interest in or relationship with the adult industry (which is to say, everyone) judges the sex lives or fantasies of others, whether onscreen or off. We’re all in this mess together, and nobody’s preferences are better than anybody else’s. Fantasies are personal, private, and innocuous—unless they are acted out on an unwilling partner. But when fantasies are derived from pornography, a few things can get lost in translation—things that can cause problems.
As many porn actors have told me, and as many sex-positive thinkers have echoed, fantasy is not the same as reality, and porn is only a fantasy acted out for the gratification of the masses. Porn sex is not real sex, though there’s real danger in conflating the two. As now-retired performer Kelly Shibari told me in a 2012 interview, “It’s sex because there’s actually penetration, and a guy ejaculates at the end. Besides that, it is so not sex. Sex, to me, in real life involves a lot of tenderness that you really don’t see a lot of in porn … a lot of close tenderness that you can’t get a camera inside.”
The camera’s presence on a porn set doesn’t just change the level of intimacy between partners, it physically alters the way that sex is choreographed. On most sets, performers must “open up” to the camera with plenty of room for light and a camera lens in between bodies. This results in sex that not only looks very different from what many of us find physically pleasurable, but also sex that is difficult to perform. Porn actors are professionals in their field and are often capable of feats of strength and endurance that the rest of us could never match. These superhuman acts are performed in controlled environments under the watchful eyes of directors and camera crews who are ready to call “Cut!” at a moment’s notice if things go wrong. And things do go wrong—ask any porn model about mishaps on set, and you’ll get an earful. (I once wrote a whole article about what happens when performers fart on camera, and what didn’t make it into the finished product were the tales of, shall we say, more than farts that almost everyone I interviewed told me about.)
But we don’t see these faux pas in the edited cuts that make their way onto the Internet, or the mountains of preparation that performers go through to avoid those slip-ups. Feminist pornographer and performance artist Madison Young said something once that really stuck with me: “You’re not going to see, necessarily, the enema in the bathroom, or the five enemas that you did in the bathroom before being anally fisted.” (The mental image is striking, no?)
Nor do viewers witness the cuts between positions, the reapplication of lube, or the ten minutes it often takes between the sometimes very long cut and the male performer reaching orgasm. Danny Wylde told me once that, “In most porn you see a facial. I think it’s just a matter of convenience, almost. It’s like, we get her to that point, then we cut, now the guy gets ready to ejaculate, however he does that, then he comes over and does his thing … I don’t think most consumers have any idea how bizarre that whole process is.”
What I’m trying to say is that we, as consumers, are not privy to the realities of the fantasy sex we may be trying to reenact at home. What we see is a heavily edited, hand-picked series of video pieces that leads us to believe that this superhuman sex is easy, natural, and satisfying. And we can take that message to heart.
Compounding the blurry line between porn fantasy and honest-to-goodness reality is the fact that, while Hollywood can revert to stunt people, smoke, mirrors, and CGI for action sequences, pornography uses flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens honest-to-god banging. (Or blowbanging, or gangbanging, as the case may be.) In porn, it’s not really real sex happening naturally for its own sake, but it is showing really real human beings engaged in real sex acts. Retired performer Oriana Small told me in an interview that on her hardcore sets, “I cried a bunch of times. There was a time when I would cry in every scene, because I would get so overwhelmed and it was so emotional. It was so real.”
This realness complicates the impulse to give porn a pass for its status as fantasy. Particularly when the fantasy in question is hardcore gonzo porn that depicts gagging, asphyxiation, slapping, spitting, and the like as standard, sans disclaimer that, while many people may engage in these activities for their own pleasure, they are not everyone’s cup of tea and are best attempted by those with a lot of experience.
As the months went by without a noticeable change in my online habits, I caught myself thinking more about the people in the clips I was watching. I’d been able to pull the wool over my own eyes before, my ignorance of the industry giving me a lame but still convincing excuse to divest myself of responsibility. But my months of reviewing had given me a peek into where all this fantasy material I was bootlegging came from, and I couldn’t quash my conscience so easily anymore.
But I was in a unique position from which this train of thought was almost unavoidable. For the tens of millions who visit Pornhub every day, it’s very easy to avoid thinking about the people who make pornography or the differences between real-world sex and porn sex. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the “mainstreaming” of porn, but I believe that the actual effect of porn on most lives is nearly as silent a topic as it’s ever been. Be honest. When’s the last time that you had a real conversation with a friend about the porn you watch? Maybe you’ve talked from time to time about your thoughts on pornography as a medium, or about a porn star whose name was in the news (usually accompanied by some illegal activity, A-list celebrity whose name is being dragged through the mud, or another negative spin). But can you remember a time you talked to anyone about your personal preferences or how your consumption of pornography has affected your sex life? When’s the last time you leveled with someone about your feelings on adult entertainment? The real shit. The juicy stuff.
If you’re like most of us, your answer was probably “never.”
Which is all a way to explain why, when the first magazine was purchased by a new parent company and reopened, I was happy to accept my reviewing job back in May of 2008. I’d spent a lot of time and energy grappling with the ways in which I didn’t like my relationship with online, pirated pornography. I had a lot of questions I still wanted to ask. They were messy, and many of them implicated me for my past, as well as the not-entirely-healthy way I’d been processing my personal trauma by watching emotionless, context-less clips for the sake of purely physical gratification. But it was starting to seem that facing those questions head-on might be better for my peace of mind than continuing to look for answers in a vacuum.
Holding a printout of an early WHACK! Magazine prototype, probably in 2009
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)