Ephebophilia

“Okay here’s a good one I heard. Would you rather eat a piece of chocolate that tastes like shit, or a piece of shit that tastes like chocolate?”

It was January, and my best friend/porn agent Spiegler and I were driving to Vegas for the most important week in our industry: the annual AVN convention and awards show. Toni had already been there for a week shooting, which worked out, because the four-hour ride was something I looked forward to doing with Spiegler every year.

“Will eating the shit mess up my stomach?”

It was a valid question. I thought about it. “No. In this scenario, eating the shit comes with no medical consequences.” “That’s easy, I’d eat the shit.”

“Euw!” I excitedly screamed. It was the answer I had been hoping for. I loved debating with Spiegler—his opinion was one I respected above almost anyone’s, and it was thrilling when it opposed my own. “But you would know it’s shit!”

As we went back and forth on whose choice was more valid, my phone started to ring.

Incoming Call from Steve Orenstein

“Hang on, let me get this,” I said as Spiegler turned the music down. I had been ignoring most calls for the day, but this was the owner of Wicked Pictures, my boss. “Hey! We’re still a couple of hours away.”

“Do you know the drama surrounding you right now?”

I quickly tried to think of anything I had done wrong recently. Was I rude to anyone on the set? No. Had I tweeted any rape jokes? No. Did I gossip about the wrong people, with the wrong people? Possibly. “No I don’t think so... Is everything okay?”

Steve sighed. “I’ve been with AVN’s lawyers all day. Apparently you said something on your podcast that they’re not happy with. They’re talking about not only canceling your keynote speech, but not having you in the show this year altogether.”

I had been chosen as the keynote speaker for this year’s show, and it was something I had spent months preparing. It was an honor rarely given to a performer, and I had been (not so) humbly bragging about it to anyone who would listen.

“Was it a rape joke...?” I asked into the phone, looking at Spiegler. He was rolling his eyes. Something I said on the podcast? It could have been anything. “I mean, I say a lot of things on there but it’s all meant to be taken...”

“Do you know who Sarah Locks is?”

“Sarah Locks?” At the sound of her name, Spiegler’s eyebrows raised. “I know of her. She’s an insane person, she’s always accusing me of being a pedo...” Shit. I knew where this was going. Sarah Locks was a bitter retiree of the industry, who now had a blog and harassed porn stars on social media. She was a known psycho, and no one took her seriously. I had her blocked on all of my accounts. “Fuck. Did she call me a pedophile?”

“Not exactly. She put together a six-minute clip of you saying it’s okay for a grown woman to have sex with a fifteen-year-old boy. I just watched the video. Now, I don’t know if it’s taken out of context, but...”

“That’s ridiculous! I mean, come on, isn’t that every boy’s fanta...”

“I’m gonna stop you right there. Don’t say it. I don’t wanna hear it. The reason this is such a big deal is that Sarah Locks is now accusing AVN of supporting child pornography.”

“What? How did it even go there?”

“All I know is, this Sarah person sounds unstable, but AVN is not pleased.”

“Well whatever I said, it was probably taken out of context. I don’t know what episode that is, but I’ve talked about that a few times. I mean...I don’t want to say go back to listen to the entire episode in its full context, because I probably said some other horrible shit that they’ll like even less.” I closed my eyes. I knew the podcast would bring me trouble one of these days.

“So what should I do?” I asked Steve. “We’re about two hours away still.”

“I’m gonna send you the video now. Call me when you’re checked in, and you can come up to the Wicked suite to talk. AVN is probably gonna wanna meet with you.”

I hung up and told Spiegler the story. “Sarah Locks? Do they know that bitch is crazy?”

“I don’t know if they know. But the damage has been done.” I looked out the window and saw that in the midst of this nonsense, we had missed our chance to point out the Zzyx sign. “I don’t even fuck guys under thirty,” I pouted.

The rest of the ride was less enthusiastic. I watched the video Steve sent me, and it was exactly what he had said—a clip of me defending grown women who slept with teenaged boys. I wanted to message Steve to let him know what I was talking about wasn’t even pedophilia, it was ephebophilia! There was a huge difference, but as Spiegler so kindly reminded me, “This ain’t the fuckin’ time for that argument.”

When we got to the hotel, Toni was already checked into our room.”You’re not gonna believe what’s fucking going on,” I told him.

“What? Already?”

As I told him the situation, I got ready to meet with Steve. “And you know what sucks? This probably means I won’t win any awards this year either.”

I was always thinking of the important issues.

“Don’t worry Ashka, everything will be okay,” Toni smiled. “And just so you know, if I were a fifteen-year-old, and a thirty-year-old woman seduced me, it would have been the best thing ever.” He paused for a moment before coming to hug me. “Plus, you already have the best award: me.”

I could always count on Toni to be on my side.

The (very subjective) truth was, what teenaged boy wouldn’t think it was the best thing ever? Not that I’d personally be interested in fucking one, nor did I know any women who would, but would being seduced by an older woman really be damaging to a fifteen-year-old kid’s psyche? I couldn’t honestly say I think it would. I did know where AVN was coming from. I knew that, as the industry’s possibly most well-known company, they could not support my viewpoint.

I walked across the casino from my room to the penthouse suite Wicked used every year and remembered how much I hated Vegas casinos. Everything was so far apart, and it was guaranteed wherever I was going would be in the farthest tower from the one I was in. Add to this that, starting tomorrow, I’d be in heels. “Stop,” I told myself. “One problem at a time.”

Truthfully, it seemed that something crazy happened at every AVN. There was the year I hosted the awards show, and Toni and I got into a huge fight that ended with my face on the ground. My second AVN ever, I almost didn’t make the awards show because I had accidentally kissed a guy in front of my then-boyfriend. There was last year, when every girl at the Wicked table was crying for different reasons before the show even started. Then there was that year I got into a fight with Keiran, Brazzers’ main contract guy, and they banned me from shooting for them for an entire year. It was the first and only time I had ever fought with someone in the business; it was ironic that it was with Keiran, because he’s one of the people I get along with the most in porn. Whenever I had gossip, he was the first one I called after Spiegler.

We were hosting a party together for Brazzers, and unaware I had signed a contract stating that was to be the only party I hosted that weekend (because really, who reads all that fine print?), I booked two other hosting gigs at two other clubs. Ultimately, I was able to keep all three jobs, but Keiran wasn’t happy about it. He kept threatening me that if I didn’t drop the other two clubs, I’d never shoot for Brazzers again, which enraged me, because who the fuck was he to tell me that? (It ended up that he was totally someone who could tell me that.) It was my fault completely, and I can say that now that it’s been four years. At the time, though, I didn’t feel that way, and we fought the entire time leading up to the party, on the phone before we got to Vegas, at the convention while we were signing, in the limo ride over to the club, and even on the red carpet taking photos. I look at those photos now and laugh—I went in denim shorts and flat boots, as if I were retaliating against Keiran, when in reality, I just made myself look like an idiot, going to a club dressed like I was heading to a day at Six Flags.

Spiegler had his own share of AVN stories, maybe more than anyone in the business. First of all, a good twenty percent of the girls are under twenty-one—which is the minimum age to do basically anything fun in Vegas. Keeping these girls from getting kicked out of the casino was a task on its own. A few years ago, he bailed two of our girls out of jail for two unrelated events; one girl beat her boyfriend up, another had somehow, in a fit of rage, attacked and destroyed a slot machine. At every AVN, at least one girl got dropped from the Spiegler Agency. A fun game was always predicting who it would be, unless, of course, you ended up as the one getting dropped.

It took me a while to figure it out, but I now know why otherwise-lovely girls turn into raging cunts at AVN. It’s no phenomenon; there is a perfectly reasonable combination of explanations:

1) We are fucking starving. The convention starts on a Wednesday and goes through Saturday. Saturday night is the awards show, so all week while we are signing and meeting fans, we are starving so that we can fit into our skintight dresses for the awards.

2) We are fucking exhausted. Typically, a girl’s AVN schedule consists of getting into makeup at 7:00 a.m., signing for eight hours straight, rushing back to the room to get touched up, and then going to host a party until 4:00 a.m. Repeat for four days.

3) We are bombarded every time we leave our hotel rooms. I love attention probably more than anyone I know, but AVN is overwhelming even for me. Because the convention and awards show are all at the same casino, everyone—performers, producers, and fans alike—stay in the same building. This is both convenient and irritating; unless you stay in your tiny room, there is zero privacy.

4) Our feet hurt and no one cares. Standing in heels for twenty hours a day is painful, and it’s in these uncomfortable moments that I remember how sexist the world is.

5) We are fucking nervous as fuck. As much as we like to pretend the awards show doesn’t matter to us, it does. It fucking does.

Truly a recipe for disaster.

The convention would not start until tomorrow, but already people I recognized as porn fans were wandering around the casino floor. I put the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and walked quickly, looking down at the floor, appropriately playing the role of woman-accused-of-pedophilia-advocacy. I wondered how I would feel if the genders were reversed. Thinking of a grown man sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl felt, immediately, different and gross. Yet, I had been that girl. Did it damage me? I honestly didn’t think so—it was well after I had been fucking boys my own age, and I was emotionally ready. In fact, I’d always felt that there were two kinds of fifteen-year-old girls: ones mature enough to be fucking, and ones who weren’t. It would make sense to have some kind of EQ test to be passed along with the drivers permit exam, but I wouldn’t be the one suggesting it. Who would I even take such an issue to? Was there some kind of international council of sex? Or would this be a DMV thing?

These were the kind of thoughts I kept in once I was in the Wicked suite. I apologized to Steve for once again being a problem, and we met with AVN, and their lawyers, and their PR team.

Out of respect for AVN, out of appreciation for them allowing me to remain the keynote speaker, out of fear of never winning an award from them again, I won’t repeat the dialogue that went on in that suite.

I will say that I repeated the line “I am not a pedophile” at least four times, and that in the end, we came to the agreement that I in fact, was not, and that in the future, I would consider that my words had more weight than I knew.

And I didn’t win any awards that year.