WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK, preparation for “Consent” went into overdrive. I got off the plane and headed directly to performer Brittany Andrews’s apartment for an interview, rolling my suitcase behind me. I was immediately thankful for Brittany’s talkative nature, since my brain was scrambled and possibly numb after so many interviews during my trip. An industry veteran of almost two decades, she had been flirting with retirement for years, moonlighting as a DJ, but she had stayed active enough to know exactly how she felt about modern porn. As a 2008 inductee into the AVN Hall of Fame, her status was so cemented that she was able to demand condoms in her scenes with no ill effects to her career, and she had been a staunch advocate of condoms in porn for years. She was likewise vocal about the deleterious effects of hardcore gonzo porn: “It’s a shame that you’ve got young men who think that this is how sex is supposed to be,” she fumed. “And you see young women thinking that … this is how women are to be treated in the bedroom—not like goddesses, but like dirty fucking whores that you slap around.” She threw her hands in the air in frustration.
After the interview, I went home to the Bronx to shower and change, then hopped the subway to Queens to j. vegas’s apartment to start editing the videos. His skill at video editing and our established working relationship made him the obvious choice for this process, and he and his new wife (they’d married in the summer of 2011 and there had been one hell of a party) had just welcomed a daughter. Our available time for working was limited to nights and weekends after we both finished work, and even further constrained by the baby’s sleep schedule, so we needed to use every precious moment to the best of our ability.
We had less than two months to edit over twenty-four hours of footage into four short films, each one coherent enough to hold together around a theme. I’d landed on four ideas that came up in almost every interview: the porn industry as people see it from inside and outside; how porn fits into society at large; the thorny issues of morality that come up around pornography; and the reality of porn in people’s lives. I’d also decided to drop in clips of explicit sex performed by the people I’d interviewed—I didn’t want the art show to end up too removed from the topic at hand. There are plenty of documentaries already out there featuring talking heads getting high-minded about pornography. I wanted the subject matter and the discussion to coexist.
I went to vegas’s small apartment every evening after work for the next two months, and most weekends, as well. We’d work from my arrival around six until ten or later, finding the right clips, cutting them, piecing them together until we’d formed the structures of films. Some, like the Madison Young interview, had to be heavily color-corrected and sound edited before they were usable. Two of my interview subjects had requested that their faces not be shown, so we overlaid much of their footage with porn—we preferred hardcore sex to a blank screen.
I still needed an interview with myself for the show to be complete. As the self-described occupant of the middle ground between porn and the public, I wasn’t approaching these films as a documentary filmmaker—not really. I’d been asked to curate a show from my own perspective, and though the work of making the videos clearly reflected it, other people’s words did not. I didn’t see a point in remaining objective, and I was honestly curious about how I would answer some of the probing questions I’d asked my subjects.
Through apexart, I was introduced to the former producer of a successful TV series about sex—a show so popular that many of my interview subjects had referenced it as a formative part of their sexual journeys. This woman, who I’ll call Sharon, had interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people over several decades. Although the series had come to an end, she still worked for the same cable network and had an office in the Grace Building next to Bryant Park, where she invited me for our interview.
I was all nerves walking into the offices of one of the biggest television companies in the world. After my brush with TV fame in LA, part of me still clung to the hope that interest in my story might be revived. Maybe Sharon would see something in me and pitch my ideas to her network. I let myself briefly envision calling up my old agent and smarmily telling her I’d gotten a better deal.
I’d provided Sharon with a list of standard questions I asked my subjects to get things started. But she didn’t use it. Instead, she subjected me to an interrogation about my motivations for being involved in pornography. She was trying to get to the deep, dirty truths beneath my smiling exterior. It was the type of interview I’d have liked to conduct with Max Hardcore. But I was not Max Hardcore, and try as she might, Sharon couldn’t expose my hidden well of dark secrets because my secrets were not very dark and they were already on the table.
It’s a sticking point I’ve come up against a number of times, but never as pointedly as in this interview: People assume that I have an agenda behind my work. That I really want to make porn myself or that I’m just in it to sleep with the porn stars. But for me, neither of these is a motivation. I have, almost unavoidably, considered doing porn to see what it’s like on that side of the camera and to discover if I’m brave enough to handle it. A reporter can’t really know her subject matter unless she immerses herself, right? But honestly, I’m not that brave, nor am I that dedicated a journalist. And, alas, I’m just not an exhibitionist. I might get a thrill from getting nude in front of a camera—and I have done so as a model—but having sex in front of people just isn’t something I’m interested in. It never has been.
And as far as sleeping with the porn stars? I won’t deny that the prospect is enticing, but I will deny that it has ever been my motivation for writing about the porn industry. If it were, the payoff would not begin to match the huge input of time, money, and energy that I have poured into my work. I’ve seen my share of starfuckers circling porn performers, and I’ve always wrinkled my nose at them, perhaps unjustly. There’s nothing wrong with lusting after one’s favorite porn star, since that’s the point of what they do, but coming up with sneaky ways to get private access to them so I can proposition them just isn’t my style.
Some people assume I’m acting out in response to some darkness in my psyche or my past, in the same way that they believe all porn stars were molested as children. I can admit that, yes, I am turned on by pornography—it’s designed to turn me on. And yes, I am coming from an extremely repressed background, which makes my interest in smut perhaps more pointed. And, yes, I was raped as a young adult, which likely provided some impetus to work through my own trauma by watching a lot of sex. But as far as an inner darkness leading me down this path? Not as far as I can tell. Then again, maybe I’m just not self-aware enough to see the darkness that lurks inside me.
Whatever the case, seekers of my hidden perversions aren’t going to get very far. I’m a pretty open book. I find porn interesting. As a subject of study, pornography is one of the least understood forms of entertainment from both a production and a consumption point of view. In my time writing about porn, the industry and how society views it have both changed measurably. But we still know far less about how smut impacts us as a society than we do about most things. Billions have been spent on the search for the perfect facial exfoliant, but we hardly talk about why we find facial cum shots so compelling. I find this discrepancy strange, so I’ve devoted myself to promoting porn as worthy, even important subject matter.
As I answered Sharon’s questions with the above sentiments, I sensed her frustration growing. I wondered if she was hoping I’d burst into tears as I recalled a buried childhood trauma. As she kept wearing me down, I grew frustrated, too. My only secret was that I was already worn down. I had little patience for her antics, and I could only offer what I had to give. After about thirty minutes of unsatisfying back and forth, we ended the interview. She shook my hand and brusquely informed me that they’d get the footage to apexart soon.
I got word a few days later that Sharon’s video was unusable. The minicassette on which the interview had been recorded, at her request, was a mess. Sharon had recorded my interview over something else, and the resulting video quality was low, with those little lines of static fuzz you might remember from VHS days. The audio was completely drowned beneath a low buzzing noise.
Sharon’s office apologized about the tape, of course, and offered to do another take, but I couldn’t find a time that worked for both of us. Truthfully, I didn’t want to be subjected to her interrogation again, and in our e-mail exchanges she grew more and more curt. She finally ended by telling me that she frankly didn’t understand why I wanted to have myself interviewed, because she couldn’t see how it would contribute to the films anyway. In other words: “You’re not interesting, so leave me alone.”
I’ve come up against similar dismissals a few times in my career, and I’ve only recently been able to take a deep breath and get over them. I’ll never know what it is about me that puts people off—particularly other women who work in journalistic roles in my porny world. But I’ve been introduced, sometimes wined and dined, chatted up, befriended, invited to parties, and otherwise made overtures to by women who do similar work, and in the majority of cases, my reception grows cold shortly thereafter.
I’ve come to believe, after many let-downs, that, like Sharon almost said, I’m just not that interesting. I’m not here to swap stories about porn star make-out sessions, or to brag about my publications, or to indulge in industry gossip. I’m interested in the larger picture … that middle ground. And, though it pains me to admit it, a lot of people find the middle ground dreadfully boring. Sharon was joining a long list of people who found me tedious because I didn’t have anything incendiary to say. She may have also found my dullness something of an intimidation: Was it possible that pornography didn’t need to be a den of sin and degradation, and that my interest in it could be, actually, benign?
I was pissed that she’d wasted my time, but I didn’t have enough of it left to fret. I instead asked a friend to interview me, and our chat was a great addition to the art show films, if you ask me. So, Sharon, if you’re reading this? Kiss it. I’m plenty interesting for my own needs.
I KEPT MAKING THE pilgrimage to Queens to sit beside vegas and direct his edits for the next two months. We forged from raw footage four films that explored human experiences with pornography. They weren’t achievements of great finesse, as most of the footage was grainy or blurry or blown-out, but they reached into the minds of their subjects and broached the difficult issue of pornography in our lives. I was proud of our work, particularly given our extremely limited time and resources.
Two days before the show opened, vegas and I watched our working cuts of the films and then set them to render while we downed celebratory beers. We’d had a delicious meal cooked by his wife, and I was set to be back in Penn Station around nine to meet an artist with whom I’d been planning a photo shoot for months. I’d taken the next day off work to run all the necessary errands and get myself prepared for the show, so this artist and I were planning a late-night photo shoot in an empty subway car, knowing I wouldn’t have to be up early the next morning. I thought some modeling would be a good way to let loose and work off some nerves.
But when vegas and I checked the renders, we were horrified to realize that something was very wrong. The sound was off in every single video, and some of the visuals glitched out, replacing the people on the screen with ugly bars of bright green. We frantically tried to fix them, playing with levels and layers and clips, but every render turned up the same. We finally discovered that one of the porn video files, from which we’d put at least one clip into every film, was corrupt. And now, so was every film. Because of the way we’d saved our progress, we had no versions of the films from before we’d added the infected clips remaining, so we couldn’t go back and rebuild. And we had about forty-three hours before the show opened.
I texted the artist, who was already waiting for me at Penn Station, to say I didn’t know when I would get there or if I could do the photo shoot. He assured me he would wait as long as he could, and vegas and I got back to trying to fix the films.
Somehow I kept myself from crying, possibly because I was so exhausted I didn’t have the capacity to produce tears. After much trial and error, we discovered that if we removed all the clips from the video at fault and took out every caption introducing every interview subject, we could mitigate the effects of the corrupt file. This meant that there would be no written indication of who all of these people flapping their jaws about pornography were. It was a disaster. But we didn’t have the time to put the captions back in, and the attempts we made only further screwed up the files. We’d have to do without. In a fortunate twist of fate, the show materials, website, and brochure already included labeled still shots of the interviewees, so those who were paying attention would be able to identify the speakers.
I resigned myself to subpar videos and left j. vegas to finish rendering the files. I took the last Long Island Railroad train from Queens into Manhattan to meet the artist, who had sat in TGI Fridays, bless him, until it closed—and saved me a margarita in a Styrofoam cup. We went back to my apartment, but instead of finding an empty subway to shoot in, I proposed we drink whiskey until we passed out.
And so we did.
This artist, who is perhaps predictably now my fiancé, called out of work the next day to help me run errands for the art show. Really, he stayed with me to keep me from having a complete breakdown. I’d rented a car to pick up the DVDs from Queens and cart them—along with my oversized trunk full of porn DVDs, which were to be displayed at the show—to the gallery in Manhattan. I was so on edge that traffic made me twitchy, and so worried about not getting the car back in time that I nearly hyperventilated, but he stayed by my side and fed me soothing words, kept me laughing. When it was all said and done, I took him out for sushi to say thanks.
We had been in contact for months, so he wasn’t a complete stranger, but still, the fact that this person I hardly knew would give up an entire day to keep me sane when I was at my anxious, overwrought worst stayed with me. That he never even got the photo shoot we had spent so long planning, and never complained about it, spoke even louder.
In the months that followed, he and I got closer, and I eventually realized that the bond we were forming was something that needed to be cemented. I broke up with Matthew shortly after the art show opened, not in order to date this artist I’d met, but because the artist made me realize that I could expect more fulfillment out of my romantic attachments. Matthew and I had been friends in high school, lovers in college, and we had pretty much been dating for ten years. The magic had long since been replaced with comfort, but the more I examined that comfort, the more I realized that it had been strained for some time. He had agreed with my relationship with Jenn more out of necessity than approval; he knew I wouldn’t let her go, and since he was pursuing a PhD and had very little time for romance, he’d been able to handle it. But tensions had run high, and he had occasionally shown his cards, which read that he didn’t like sharing me.
Meanwhile, Jenn’s life had been shifting dramatically. She had quit her job at a research lab early in 2012 to pursue her artistic dreams, and although I supported her decision and tried my best to keep up with the changes she was making, her life was increasingly devoted to late nights and a different lifestyle than my own. In the summer of 2012, we decided to amicably end our romance on the grounds that it couldn’t be sustained by seeing each other once a month for lunch.
I’m happy to report that I’ve maintained strong friendships with both Matthew and Jenn, who stuck with me through some truly incredible years, and who I continue to value as some of the best people in my life. And I’m now engaged to this incredible artist who swept me off my feet the day before my art show went up on March 21, 2012.
THE OPENING OF “CONSENT” was one of the biggest in the gallery’s history, with hundreds filing through the doors, photographers wandering the premises, and booze flowing. The videos weren’t beautiful, but they played well enough, and the viewing stations were packed. I was proud, and so relieved that I couldn’t stop smiling.
In the essay I’d written for the show’s pamphlet, I’d said, “‘Consent’ is my attempt to turn up the lights in the space I occupy by documenting and presenting what the world looks like from my point of view. I’ve brought together conversations with the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders,’ footage from the movies I’ve reviewed, images of my friends and colleagues in the industry, and my very own porn collection, sourced from my years of being given review material. I want to show you what my empty space is like, and invite everyone to join me in here.” And I was thrilled that all these people had taken me up on my offer. They stood around the gallery, taking in my films, discussing them, and letting themselves be seen in what was once my nearly private domain.
Friends from around the country came to see the show, and my older sister even flew in from Colorado to check it out. My parents endured me sending them a brochure, but declined to visit the city on the grounds that they would be more upset by it than proud.
WHEN THE SHOW CLOSED in May, life went back to what passed for normal. I kept showing up for work, blogging, and maintaining WHACK! But I could feel myself slowing down. The pace at which I’d been living for five years was catching up with me. I noticed an uptick in the activity of the rheumatoid arthritis I’ve had since I was a baby. I was frequently fatigued and achy, so I took a lot of pain relievers. And then my stomach started hurting. My doctor told me I was developing an ulcer, prescribed me some preventative medication, and upped my dose of injectable immunosuppressants so that I could take fewer pills.
I’d received a stipend for the art show, but it had quickly gone to medical bills and credit card debt. I found myself scraping by on my measly publishing salary with swiftly diminishing health to maintain other activities. My budding relationship with the artist gave me a fresh perspective, and I had to admit that I was simply doing too much. I couldn’t keep it up.
So, one evening in July, I invited j. vegas out for a drink, and we decided to let go of WHACK! Magazine. We’d nurtured our beloved project for almost four years, and it had blossomed, but we had never made a single, solitary dime on it. Instead we had poured thousands of our hard-earned dollars into it, and we’d had some wonderful times. But we both needed to move forward or we would drown. After a few bittersweet beers, we hugged and parted ways.
The next day we turned control of the magazine over to one of our writers, who lived in Europe and had shown extraordinary devotion to the WHACK! cause. He took care of it for a while, but then he abruptly moved to Brazil, got married, and let WHACK! slide. It still exists on the Internet, and is currently in the process of being repurposed into a photography website by a talented artist. Most of the old material was deleted when the site went to Tumblr under new management, but I had very luckily saved all of my WHACK! writings on my own website, where they can still be read if one digs through the archives.
I also quit my remaining print magazine jobs. The first magazine had stopped asking me for reviews when Charles—the guy whose butt plug I mistook for a paperweight—discovered that I was still working with vegas, whom he despised. I’d parted ways with the “barely legal” magazine after discovering that their photos came from unknown and likely illegal sources in Eastern Europe. And the other magazine, for which I’d continued writing set copy about boobs, was getting closer to bankruptcy every day. When I told my editor that I couldn’t turn in any more copy until I was paid for three months’ worth of work, he responded that he was personally filing suit for unpaid wages the next day.
Because I have never mastered the art of actually doing less, but I excel at telling myself that I will learn, I immediately began sending new (uncorrupted) edits of the films from “Consent” to film festivals and awards shows. A shortened edit of “Morality” was played in the summer of 2012 at the YANS & RETO festival in Manhattan, and a full edit at Cinekink the following spring, where I had been promoted from a press attendee to the red-carpet interviewer of filmmakers and performers.
I also sent a re-edited copy of “Society” to the Feminist Porn Awards. I had no expectations, given the amateur quality of the film, so I was both shocked and giddy to discover that it was on the list of nominees for the April 2013 show. That year was also the inaugural Feminist Porn Conference, to be held at the University of Toronto the weekend after the Awards. I resolved to scrounge up the funds to get to Toronto, where as a nominee I could rub elbows with an elite group of smart and sexy visionaries.
The Feminist Porn Awards had been moved from the church to a much larger venue, the Royal Cinema, in the year I’d been absent. With a gigantic crystal chandelier above and a crowd big enough to pack the theater, the experience felt more formal this time around. Compared to the ever-shrinking AVN expo and awards, the growth of the FPAs was striking: Feminist porn was getting big. The previous year, queer and feminist porn websites had swept through the nominations at the AVNs, and feminist porn panels had begun popping up at number of mainstream industry conventions. A cadre of queer and feminist pornographers had walked the red carpet in Vegas, their tattooed, pierced, plus-sized, unenhanced, trans, and proudly outré appearances drawing lots of attention. Articles and podcasts and questions about the feminist, queer, and indie genres were abounding online, and interest was expanding. And, subsequently, the Feminist Porn Awards were exploding.
The ceremony was interspersed, as before, with comedy, burlesque, and BDSM demonstrations that kept the crowd limber, and I kept drinking to calm my nerves. The Feminist Porn Awards didn’t have a set list of nominee categories; instead, you were alerted that you or your work had been nominated, and that was that. I didn’t know when my prospective award might pop up, or whom I was up against. After a few hours passed and I’d heard no mention of my name from the stage, I assumed I hadn’t won anything. So, when the Honourable Mentions category was announced, I was pleasantly tipsy, relaxed, and getting a little sleepy.
And then someone on the stage said my name. As a clip of Sinnamon Love—talking about how she’d never seen porn before she was in it—played on the big screen, I floated to my feet and onto the stage as if in a dream. I was drunker than I’d realized, and completely unprepared for this honor. I had no speech in mind, no inkling of what I was supposed to do up on a stage with a trophy (a Crystal Delights glass butt plug on a stand with a magnetic bunny tail attached, and a plaque with my name on the front) in my hand, before a crowd that suddenly appeared much larger than it had from the floor.
I don’t remember what I said. I was too overwhelmed. I’m pretty sure I thanked the interview subjects for allowing me the honor of recording them, and j. vegas for editing it, and probably said something awkward and drunken and silly, because that’s how I roll. Me. Winning an award. For my dinky little art film. In Canada. With the coolest people in the world.
WHEN I DISPLAYED MY Feminist Porn Award in my apartment in the Bronx, I felt like I’d reached a pinnacle. In my line of work, the possibility of topping myself seemed farfetched. Instead of setting new goals, I reflected on the path that had brought me to that moment onstage in Toronto. I’d begun on this path by stumbling into it and blithely deciding to keep on walking, but along the way I’d learned volumes about the industry, the world, and myself. I’d done more healing and exploring than I’d have managed otherwise, and arrived at a place where I felt more confident in myself, my sexuality, and my place in the world than I could have dreamed.
As I looked at the landscape of porn, I was delighted to note that things had changed since I’d begun watching it for pay. From a doomsday scenario of nose-diving profits, decimated distribution chains, subpar products, and crash-and-burn tactics on screen, I was noticing pinpoints of light breaking through the smoke: feminist pornographers, queer pornographers, indie pornographers, new technology, performers making themselves independently profitable, better testing protocols, and ingenuity at every level were starting to clear the rubble from the Internet’s blaze. Green shoots of ideological shifts and changing paradigms were poking up through the ashes as porn’s unrelenting drive to survive kept pushing onward.
Of course not everything was coming up roses: MindGeek continued to eat up smaller businesses and undermine those who refused to be swallowed. More allegations of serial assaults have popped up in the industry, most notably the previously-discussed allegations against director Tony T., who has been shooting for multiple companies—especially Brazzers, of the MindGeek family—for years. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation was rolling out seemingly unending legislative initiatives to force intrusive regulations on adult models’ bodies. More STI outbreaks popped up in Los Angeles—including one involving my old heartthrob, Mr. Marcus. The feminist porn community underwent upheavals as the landed gentry at the top of the pile began infighting over who was more politically correct, to such an extent that in 2016 the Feminist Porn Awards took a hiatus, reconsidered its goals, and morphed into the Toronto International Porn Festival in 2017.
And with the Trump administration’s conservative ideals now firmly in control of the White House—with none other than Reagan-era anti-porn zealot Ed Meese as part of the transition team—porn in America is facing uncertain times. Operation Choke Point, the Department of Justice’s 2012 initiative that aimed to cut off money to select industries online—notably including pornography—is still in effect. The Republican party named pornography a “public health crisis” in their 2016 platform, and shortly thereafter several states passed resolutions along the same lines. One of these states, Utah, may pass legislation allowing consumerss to sue porn producers for undefined “harm” inflicted by their products. And, after eight years of President Obama’s leadership during which there were no federal obscenity trials, Donald Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have vowed to take up the fight against smut once more. Which is especially ironic, considering Trump appeared in a 2000 softcore porno called Playboy Video Centerfold 2000.
When I spoke to Mike Stabile of Kink.com in 2017 about the political climate and what that meant for his industry, he said, “right now, given that [porn] scenes are largely distributed on the internet, it become a little more difficult to make a community standards argument … [But] there’s a lot that you can do to enforce compliance or to get a population to comply by going after a few select people. If you go after a clips producer who’s doing something like making pissing videos, that person doesn’t have a huge amount to defend themselves. They’re going to go under, they’re going to fold, and they’re going to settle, or they’re going to go to jail. And anybody else who’s doing that is probably going to stop doing it, even if it’s unfair. And billing companies and credit card companies are going to pull out of that. You’re going to lose your insurance. There’s a lot of things that can happen with setting examples with one or two well-placed cases.”
The future may be a bit murky at this point, but no matter what obstacles have set themselves up before pornography in America, I’ve come to appreciate the industry’s unyielding will to not just live, but to thrive. I’ve been inspired by the passion and commitment of the people who are determined to keep making it, unapologetically, proudly, and much to the benefit of the rest of us. Technologically, legally, and sexually, we are all in debt to the individuals who do the work most of us are too afraid of, in the face of taboo, ridicule, the religiously fanatical, the sexually repressed, and sometimes the law itself. Our First Amendment rights in the US have been reinforced at nearly every turn by the refusal of pornographers to be silenced. Our sexual knowledge and freedom has deepened as we’ve watched their exploits and taken their teachings into our own bedrooms. And none of us can even fathom what state our technology would be in had porn not led the charge in every imaginable way.
Today, pornography has become more than a punch line in civilian conversations. It is a subject of academic and scientific study, a cultural touchstone for media-conscious Americans, and a vanguard of social justice for marginalized groups. Pornographers are taking to the podiums of workshops and lecture halls, the covers of magazines, the screens of online publications, the pages of books, the centers of documentaries, and even the halls of lawmaking bodies to advocate for their very existence. And the world is, finally, listening. As Jiz Lee wrote in their essay in Coming Out Like a Porn Star, “Where media outlets and public opinion continue to portray a negative, one-sided depiction of porn and its participants, our stories reveal a more honest depiction … May our words be stepping-stones for increased sexual awareness and nuances to come.”
The public has taken a few steps into the void between “them” and “us,” and I’m watching with glee as it fills up with willing participants in a conversation about sex, work, and entertainment. Fans are more interactive than ever, with webcamming, custom videos, and sexting apps providing a direct line to porn actors who were once positioned on the opposite side of a vast canyon. The Internet is picking away at my home, the middle ground, as sex workers and porn makers interact with and educate the public about their work and their lives, cutting directly across the ever-lower walls that once separated the two sides of the divide.
It’s a bittersweet realization that, really, I’m no longer needed here. The people who do the real work—who hold the banners and ride into battle every day—are fully capable of telling their own stories, and it seems that at last there is a social landscape in which those stories are more valued than they’ve been before. I still gladly write about them and their work for several publications, and I doubt I’ll ever totally break the habit. I’ll always be interested in porn, but my relevance is fast diminishing in the face of the new guard.
And, you know, I think that’s wonderful.