FOR THE NEXT YEAR, I kept myself busy with my day job while I came up with increasingly creative descriptions for copulation and delivered glowing praise of oversized breasts I’d never laid eyes on. I had also begun research to ghostwrite a book about swingers in New York City for a couple in that lifestyle, so I was attending swing parties to observe their carousing on weekends. In short, I was drenched in sex twenty-four-seven, even while watching blue bloods peruse sculptures worth more than my apartment. Whether watching it on video or in person, imagining it for set copy, or remembering what I’d seen that weekend at a party, sex was my main occupation for most of 2008 and into 2009.
After the requisite New York City bedbug infestation hit our cramped Harlem apartment, Matthew and I moved into a small flat in the south Bronx. My former editor, j. vegas, was surviving on unemployment in Washington Heights and sending me regular updates on his web series. As expected, he hadn’t been offered his old job back when the magazine started up again; I felt slimy for earning extra money when vegas didn’t have that option, but he seemed content to write in peace in his uptown digs.
The idea behind the script, which he was calling pornocracy (which is, incidentally, now the title of a documentary by erotic filmmaker Ovidie, about the porn conglomerate MindGeek’s effects on the world), followed the exploits of a smarmy, happy-go-lucky writer with a penchant for sleaze and satire, along with his best friend—a more earnest young woman who played the straight man. (Any of this sounding familiar?) They both worked at WHACK! Magazine, an odd-world version of the publication we’d written for. It was all fairly straightforward satire, with a manageably sized cast and what felt like a not-too-ambitious series of shooting locations. He asked for my help with casting and filming, and I, having no experience with that kind of thing, agreed.
It became quickly apparent that we did not have the resources to make the series happen. Between the two of us, we had about zero dollars to feed into it and few options to find any more. He enlisted the help of a friend to oversee casting and crew on the condition that she would play the role of the best friend. We cobbled together the rest of the cast and crew on the promise of “exposure” but without pay. But costuming, props, sets, lights, editing, post-production … all of these were beyond the reach of our bootstrap budget. And remember, this was before Kick-starter campaigns were de rigueur in the making of indie films.
Over discounted Bloody Marys at a bar near vegas’s apartment where we held semi-regular “meetings,” Matthew, vegas, and I tried to brainstorm funding options in the early summer of 2009. After a few hours, we’d come up with more empty glasses than ideas, but slowly, a concept took shape in my mind: Why not raise awareness about the web series by creating an online version of the magazine that the characters worked for? Make it feel real until it is real. We could write in an overblown parody fashion, using pornocracy’s characters’ names as pseudonyms. Do fake interviews with the imaginary porn stars in the make-believe films they watched. If we played our cards right, we could leverage the site into some notoriety for the web series and eventually turn the project into money.
After another round of Bloody Marys, we set about purchasing www.whackmagazine.com and setting up a free Blogspot platform. (It was 2009; don’t judge!) We took on the names of the show’s characters and invented a few other pseudonyms to flesh out the magazine’s “staff.” I invented the moniker “Miss Lagsalot” off the cuff: My initials spell “LAG,” and “Sir Lagsalot” jumped to mind. “Sir” seemed a bit confusing, though, given the fact that I was born female and present that way, so I tacked the “Miss” on instead, and off I went into the land of satirical porn journalism. Little did I know how much that “Miss Lagsalot” designation would come to mean, or how tenaciously it would cling to me.
We settled early on j. vegas applying his skill at Photoshop to original porno-litical cartoons, a monthly horoscopes column tailored specifically toward porn stars and fans, and op-eds on all things porn and sex. These carried us for a while, and I was thrilled to be writing op-ed pieces. I had free range to tackle issues I thought were important, champion causes, and eviscerate problems I saw in porn. My feminist colors began to show in a rosy rainbow hue; one month out of the gate, I’d already written impassioned articles on the female ejaculation controversy, the necessity of accessible healthcare for porn actors, and the importance of legalizing more forms of sex work.
Despite my enthusiasm for anonymity, however, it soon became clear that these real-world segments made no sense next to profiles of fictional porn stars and films. In the current piracy-happy online climate, in which most people weren’t thinking about porn stars’ careers, the difference between a real porn model and a fictional one might sail right over our readers’ heads. And how exactly did we intend to find still shots from imaginary pornos to run with our reviews, anyway? Besides, j. vegas pointed out, he had a lot of contacts in the real porn world. We may as well get some real films to review, and see if we couldn’t rustle up a few interviews with real, live porn stars. If we leveraged their fan bases, we’d have a much larger audience to beg for funding for pornocracy when the time was right. The real world of smut, he argued, was crazy enough to meet our weirdest needs. Why invent anything?
I was skeptical about our chances of convincing real pornographers to work with us. The idea felt far more “legit” than our little blog could ever be. But we wrote a few e-mails to a few porn companies and PR outfits, and soon enough I was receiving screeners of DVDs, addressed to “Miss Lagsalot,” at my home address.
This was my first exposure to the fact that the porn industry does not set a particularly high bar for entry. This might sound self-evident, but having grown up on a farm in the countryside, any real industry had always felt unattainable to me. But one important quality that has long allowed the porn industry to maintain its “recession-proof” status is its openness to newcomers. It makes sense: In a business in which technological advancement is a constant and fresh faces are lifeblood, a lax attitude toward who gets to participate is vital. Retention of high-level performers is all well and good, but a high turnover rate that keeps the carousel of novelty spinning is just as useful, if not more so.
This applies to journalists, but it is far easier to see in performers. The human sexual brain is highly motivated by novelty, as our collective obsession with porn and the longstanding prevalence of extramarital affairs in monogamous cultures will attest. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are suckers for variety in our sex lives, and pornographers have learned to capitalize on our insatiable appetites for new faces by providing them—along with other body parts.
The phenomenon of “the new girl” is a well-worn trope familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with the porn industry. When a new female performer appears on the straight porn scene, she (or, in the gay industry, he, and in the queer industry, any number of pronouns) is likely to find work very easily. Depending upon her appearance, demeanor, and the set of skills she’s willing to put to use on camera, there will almost certainly be a filmmaker looking for just her type. There is no proficiency test, no background check, and very few hoops to jump through, aside from an industry-approved STI test, proof of age and identity, and a smile. It’s relatively rare for a new actor to have spent a lot of time researching or preparing to enter the business, though in a recent interview, Nina Hartley told me that this has been changing after the Great Recession: “More women come to porn with real-world experience [or] college degrees, so the level of professionalism has risen,” she said. Still, many of my acquaintances in the biz decided to try it on a whim, or just to make some quick money, then decided they liked it and stayed.
April Flores, a performer whose presence has played a large part in the rapid evolution and popularity of plus-size porn, told me that for her first scene, “I wore a wig to hide my identity because I really thought that it was just this one-time thing, having sex on film. I did it because I was curious.” But she loved the experience and, over a decade later, she’s still performing.
Many who have spent a significant amount of time in the industry advocate for a more formal set of requirements for newcomers—mentorship, a how-the-industry-works curriculum, and so on. And the Adult Performers Advocacy Committee (APAC) in Los Angeles is now providing these things for its members. But the truth is that pornography is so spread out, so decentralized, and so relatively open to outsiders that it’s impossible to regulate who gets involved and what level of education they receive about the industry. Particularly now that almost anyone with a cell phone could, technically, make a porno, it’s impossible to require everyone to fill out standardized forms or complete a certification course. And many pornographers wouldn’t have it any other way—new faces are money. As such, there’s not a lot of time or interest in showing someone the ropes before they take the plunge, and their naivety can serve the industry well, as their series of on-camera “firsts” brings in viewers whose appetite for novelty translates into cash.
I may not have been interested in putting myself in front of the camera, but as an open-minded young woman looking to dip a toe in the shallow end, I was welcomed with open arms in the hopes that I could contribute, even as a journalist, to the industry as a whole.
It was only a few months after starting WHACK! that I lined up my first-ever porn star interview with Mr. Marcus, a performer whose name and image were attached to a clothing line and a few sex toys—one of which was, incidentally, the go-to vibrator I kept in my drawer. When I’d purchased it, I hadn’t known who Mr. Marcus was, but by the time I scheduled a phone call with him in September 2009, I had reviewed plenty of his scenes, become intimately familiar with the toy he’d branded, and would have been able to identify him by his penis alone. Yet the idea of calling him petrified me. I had no idea what I was doing.
But, just like the industry at large, he was fine with giving me a chance. When I called the number he’d sent me, I told him that I’d never done this before. Clearly accustomed to hearing these words from young women, he laughed and set me at ease with a mellifluous cadence that soothed me into a fantastic conversation that lasted for almost an hour. He was kind, gracious, and intelligent. He didn’t think my questions were silly, instead treating my naivety as an opportunity to educate me and my readers. “We can affect a lot of people,” he told me of porn stars. “And you know, there’s something to that, there’s a power to that. To sexually inspire people … across the planet.”
And suddenly, I was a real jizz journalist. I transcribed my interview with Mr. Marcus, breathlessly attached several photographs of his warm, handsome face—and plenty of the rest of his well-muscled body—and published my first porn interview. And then WHACK! Magazine was on the porn industry’s map in a real way.
• • •
ONE THING I DIDN’T REALLY understand at the time is that the porn industry can use all the good publicity it can get. For decades it’s been the scourge of American entertainment; porn is routinely blamed for an astonishingly wide variety of social ills. If you can think of a “bad” thing that exists in the world, especially if it’s tied to a vice that Americans don’t like admitting to, there’s a good chance that pornographers have at some point been implicated in it. As professor Mireille Miller-Young put it in her foreword to Coming Out Like a Porn Star, “Porn is perceived as the cause of our modern cultural decline, the trafficker of thousands of innocent women and girls, and the purveyor of rampant and misogynist prurience that is infecting the minds of our youth.”
The mainstream media is most concerned with porn when it can be paired with other inflammatory words in headlines—violence of any kind, drugs, and pretty much anything involving children. (Although “child porn” and the actual porn industry have literally zero mutual ties, the word “porn” is used when describing both legal adult entertainment and a horrific crime perpetrated against the most vulnerable people in our society. It’s awful that the legal porn industry is so readily lumped in with such horrendous crime, given that pornographers follow very strict rules on age verification to a T or face dire consequences.)
In a WHACK! interview in 2010, actress Kristina Rose noted, “Anytime the adult industry is mentioned in mainstream media it’s always some awful story. No one ever talks about when a girl or company does major charity work. America only wants to hear horror stories.” And she was right. If a former porn star robs a convenience store and shoots someone in the process, it’s likely the national news will be all over the story, and you can bet the word “porn star” will be included, even if the person has been out of the industry for years. Meanwhile, if a former bank teller does the same thing, a local paper might deign it worthy of a police blotter mention.
So when we started WHACK! Magazine as an independent entity, with no money on the table, no ties to anyone in particular, no distribution deals in the works, and no reason to share porn news with the world except for the hope of one day funding our web series, the porn industry was happy to oblige. We weren’t lauded as heroes by any stretch, but we were certainly welcomed.
The same can be said for most aspects of the porn industry, both to its credit and its detriment. For all the flak it takes for giving porn consumers a distorted view of what human bodies and sex look like, the porn industry itself might be one of the most welcoming in the world. While it’s true that many in the porn industry have augmented their appearances with surgery and Botox, it’s increasingly true that there is room for all manner of natural beauty, too. Although many of us picture a bleached-blond, spray-tanned, long-legged, double-D Amazon when we’re asked to envision a porn star, this is an outdated stereotype. In fact, a 2013 study of ten thousand female porn stars in America found that the “average” porn star was a five-foot-five brunette with B cups, with the stage name Nikki Lee. Not so “exotic,” when it comes down to it.
And despite its reputation for sexism, racism, and homophobia—much of which isn’t misplaced—there’s still, arguably, more diversity in porn than in most entertainment. The work force comes from nearly every imaginable background, race, socioeconomic status, level of education, and personal credo. People of multiple sizes, shapes, and levels of physical ability can find companies with an interest in shooting them, and those who work behind the camera rarely object to diversity on set. No high school diploma? Generally not a drawback. Have tiny breasts, a giant butt, and a PhD? Fabulous! Come one, come all. Just come.
A lot of people I’ve talked to believe that those who go into pornography do so for a reason. They’ve failed at everything they’ve ever done, for instance, or were abused as children, or are trying to get revenge on parents or exes. A friend I interviewed in 2012 about her thoughts on porn asked, “Why would that woman put herself in that position? Something happened along the way that made that woman decide to do that. Something happened. Someone wasn’t good to her at some point.” We’ve all heard this line of thinking: People who make porn for a living are damaged.
The story goes that nobody in their right mind could decide to fuck on camera (or film people fucking, or edit the footage, or whatever). If you look at the comments section of nearly any online article about porn (and wade through the glut of abusive language that I guarantee lives there), I bet you’ll find at least one comment claiming that female porn stars were sexually abused as children, that these people don’t respect themselves, that they need to be “rescued,” that they are all addicted to drugs. These are the tired battle cries of sex-negative second-wave feminism and also—tellingly—of paternalism, seeking to paint women in porn as hapless victims of the patriarchy, refusing to consider that they could have decided to go into the business for their own perfectly valid reasons, much less find satisfaction in their work.
And I can tell you that it is a big load of hooey. A big, steaming pile of crap.
While it’s certainly true that some people in adult entertainment do drugs, I wouldn’t say that there are more of them per square mile than in other populations. While a 2012 study by James D. Griffith of Shippensburg University showed that porn performers tend to have tried more types of recreational drugs than people in the rest of the population, their rates of use and addiction were not statistically higher.
Furthermore, although it is true that some porn stars are in fact “damaged”—as are many, many of us in the rest of the population—it’s just as true that many of them are not. There will always be people who gravitate toward the relatively “easy” money and the notoriety of porn due to some mental or emotional instability. But if you’ll take a moment to reflect on the people you work with now, and your friends in other industries, I’d wager that you’ll come upon more than a few who would qualify as damaged or unstable who would never dream of making smut. Pornography may put some of these traits on display more visibly than other lines of work would, but porn stars are frequently asked about their pasts and their emotional states in a much more direct way than, say, accountants. Yet that isn’t any reason to think that there aren’t thousands of CPAs with histories of abuse, bullying, and other horrors. We just don’t hear about them because their industry isn’t constantly under fire for what the outside world calls immorality.
I agree with director and performer Nica Noelle, who told me, “There are men and women from all walks of life performing in adult films by choice; not out of ‘desperation’ or because they lack the skill set to do anything else. The notion that every performer is a drug addict, a sex addict, a victim, or just a confused and exploited person, is patently false.”
What baffles me further about the allegations that porn is a home for tragic pasts is that this line of thinking is usually deployed to delegitimize the choices that porn stars make. If so-and-so was molested as a child, the logic goes, then her decision to do porn is somehow made invalid. Through some mystical set of circumstances, her history has made her incapable of using her brain. But I just don’t understand how a shitty past makes one less capable of being human. Let’s be honest: Lots of people have shitty pasts. If someone had a horribly abusive father, then left home to work as a waiter in another town, do we assume they’re making bad decisions because of their past? Nope. Same goes for most career choices. So why is that that people who do sex work for a living are “broken” while anybody else with a similar history is not?
Kristina Rose gave a magnanimous reading of the situation in our interview: “I think generalizing a group of people as damaged just because we have sex on camera is just dumb,” she told me, but then continued, “I think people are afraid of things they can’t understand and labeling us as damaged makes it easier for the person labeling us to understand how we can do what we do.” I suppose she’s right, that it’s a way of understanding people whose choices baffle us, but the infantilization inherent in the concept bothers me to no end.
There are, absolutely, plenty of examples of people who have made the opposite statement, telling stories of horrible working conditions, coercion, drugs, and worse on set. There’s no need for me to pretend mishaps and bad situations don’t happen in the adult entertainment industry. But after years of interviewing porn stars about their experiences, I have to tell you that the horror stories aren’t more prevalent than the tales of success and satisfaction. And scientific inquiry says I’m right about that. The aforementioned Shippensburg University study set out to test the “damaged goods hypothesis, [which] posits that female performers in the adult entertainment industry have higher rates of childhood sexual abuse, psychological problems, and drug use compared to the typical woman.” Researchers compared a group of 177 American female porn actresses with the same number of “civilians” (as those in porn refer to the rest of the world) matched in age, ethnicity, and marital status. The study found no differences between the two groups in the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse or mental health disorders. It did find that porn actresses had significantly higher self-esteem, better body image, more social support, and a higher level of spirituality than the control group. The study’s abstract concludes with a simple statement: “These findings did not provide support for the damaged goods hypothesis.”
Arguments have been made that the sample was too small for these findings to be significant, and that the self-reporting aspect of the study may have skewed the results. But I’m skeptical of skeptics, especially with regards to both groups of women having the same rates of childhood sexual abuse. Although statistics in this arena are slippery because sexual abuse is so rarely reported, according to the National Sex Offender Public Website, one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before the age of eighteen. Given that a full twenty-five percent of American women aren’t currently working in the sex industry, I think it’s safe to assume that most industries are home to many victims of abuse, and porn is just one of them.
The point being that there are plenty of people in the porn industry, and around it (like myself) that simply enjoy it. Their reasons for being involved with sex on video run the gamut: I’ve spoken with pornographers who considered and researched porn from afar before diving in (jessica drake), went into nude modeling after injury left them unable to do other work (Cadence St. John), made the transition from fetish modeling (Nikki Darling) or mainstream modeling (Nina Mercedez), started an art gallery with profits from porn (Madison Young), started porn as a form of activism (Sophia St. James), and dozens more. There is no one-size-fits-all “reason” why people do porn.
Performer Misti Dawn told me, “Nobody has sex on camera without being wired a little off”—but I think that the wiring is really only a matter of sex drive. With few exceptions, my adult entertainer interviewees have reported that they love their jobs because they love sex, and always have. In a 2012 interview, model and PR wiz Kelly Shibari backed up my take on the situation. “We’re actually real women who just have a really high sex drive,” she said. And a high sex drive, most doctors will tell you, is nothing to be worried about unless it’s causing you significant difficulty in the rest of your life. But how could it cause problems if you’re making a legal, profitable, satisfying career out of it?
That high libido unites many in the porn industry, as well as, I thought back in 2008, a sense of humor. At least, I’d been led to believe as much because of the way delicate matters were handled at the print magazine—which is to say, not delicately at all. WHACK! had assumed a similar outlook on all things porn: This is fun. This is ridiculous. Let’s make fun of it.
I was more heavy-handed with my interviews, reviews, and op-eds than vegas or Matthew, but when it came to researching the month’s astro logical information and applying it to the denizens of the porn world, I let myself have some fun. I’d predict that, based on the alignment of Saturn and Mercury, a herpes outbreak was headed your way, or that before your anal shoot on the fourth, it would be best not to have those beets for dinner, and so on.
Matthew tended toward high-minded philosophical rants in his op-eds and reviews, which would degenerate to hyperbolic statements that were intended to pinion the sex-terrified masses and often the performers themselves. They were frequently spot-on, but I’d venture to say that they went right over the heads of most readers in a manner that could be described as “inflammatory.”
And j. vegas took things further with his porno-litical cartoons, in which he ragged mercilessly on still photos from porn shoots. He’d doctor the photos according to his whim and insert thought or speech bubbles over the actors’ heads, delivering satire that was raunchy, irreverent, and often downright offensive. When some industry people got upset with us, vegas was astonished. It was satire, he said. Didn’t anybody understand that? Didn’t they get that, as a publication that supported and publicized the porn industry, we were on their side?
While it’s arguable that many Americans actually don’t understand the line between satire and outright meanness, it’s also arguable that some of those cartoons had a toe on both sides of that line. For as long as I’ve known him, vegas’s sense of humor has gone straight for the jugular, and I couldn’t blame people for being offended by it. If I’d found myself parodied in one of his cartoons, I’d have been upset, but I was still surprised when others got pissed off. I had been going along my merry way thinking that everyone who made porn saw it as the same kind of dark, humorous commentary on the human condition that vegas took it to be, since he had ushered me into this industry with his biting wit and dark sensibility.
But if I was being honest with myself, which I decided to try now that the industry that had welcomed me was calling for my colleague’s head, I’d always been a tad suspicious of this devious humor. As someone who grew up with the idea that sex was pretty much the most evil act a human being could engage in, I took porn quite seriously. I tended toward showing the human side of the industry, trying to understand it rather than make jokes about it.
But I’d let myself assume that I was a loner in that respect. Of course, I hadn’t met anyone in the industry aside from vegas and his former bosses (the second magazine gig had come along solely through e-mails), so this was really an excuse for going along with the cartoons that landed us in hot water. Even as I was beginning to do respectful, insightful interviews with porn stars, I’d let myself be cajoled into supporting nasty caricatures lambasting the self-same people whose words I’d clung to over the phone, in which we used photographs they’d given permission for someone else to take, divested them of their context and thus of the performers’ consent, and mocked them. Of course they were pissed off.
A giant kerfuffle eventually broke out between a big-name star we’ll call Bee Hanson and j. vegas, who had made a series of pointedly nasty cartoons about her after she’d flaked out on a number of scheduled interviews with us. Bee had slandered vegas all over social media, and things had gotten ugly. But after much grousing about satire and freedom of the press, vegas finally backed down and took the cartoons off the website.
Personally, I felt awful about the Bee Hanson situation. I didn’t apologize personally for the cartoons, since I hadn’t made them, but I did branch out on my own.
A friend alerted me to an essay contest for a year-long column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in 2009. The online arm of Dave Eggars’s publishing company was looking for personal columns on any topic. McSweeney’s had a tone I liked—a dry sense of self-deprecating humor that felt right to me. A bit of self-flagellation could go a long way for my conscience, and also provide a significantly larger audience than the few hundred people who were starting to look up WHACK! on the regular.
So I pitched a column about my weird life as a feminist and a porn journalist to McSweeney’s in 2009, considering it a practice run for pitching the idea to other, more attainable, publications. But my column was accepted. I got a small cash prize, but the real reward came in the form of tens of thousands of readers that “The Conflicted Existence of the Female Porn Writer” eventually attracted.
Interviewing the legendary feminist performer Nina Hartley at the New York Sex Bloggers calendar release party in 2010
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)