by Taylor Marsh
For the endorphin rush alone, sex is sublime. It offers a complete physical escape.
At least I haven’t found anything that feels as great, even when I have a headache.
Why do you think porn is big bucks? It’s not just about looking at naked girls. It’s about the payoff at the end. That feeling. That’s what the guy is after, and when it’s a do-it-yourself adventure it’s easy. The majority of men also want a deep relationship, connection and love, just as much as a woman. They’re a lot more fragile when they’re in love, too, which is why when a woman cheats she often pays a bigger price. Once a man is vulnerable he will give you everything, often risking anything to see you happy. Cheat on him and he may never forgive.
Men are also more willing to take risks and venture outside their relationship for sex than women, which almost always has absolutely nothing to do with their partner.
A great example of the compartmentalization some people are capable of is represented through a Mad Men episode that aired in April 2013 titled “The Collaborators.” Written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, it revolves around Don Draper who, as played by Jon Hamm, is one of the best characters ever created that allows women inside the mind of an insatiable philanderer.
Sitting in bed with one another one morning, Sylvia, played by Linda Cardellini, asks Don, “You don’t mind sitting across the table from your wife and my husband?”
Don Draper responds, “I don’t think about it…”
“I suppose that has nothing to do with this,” Sylvia replies.
“This didn’t happen. Just in here,” he says pointing to his head, meaning that for the two of them it can only be real in their minds.
The next night Don and Sylvia get in a heated discussion about their affair at dinner, their spouses unable to attend. She’s upset, but he’s not sure why. “Is that what’s bothering you, that everything worked out perfectly?” Sylvia keeps jabbering. Then, after taking a sip of his cocktail, he levels a deadly gaze at her, saying, “Now I understand. You want to feel shitty right up until the point where I take your dress off, because I’m going to do that. You want to skip dinner? Fine, but don’t pretend.”
She then confronts him, wondering if their spouses had come to dinner, “Would it be someone else’s dress?” Don’s confused: “What are you talking about?”
“Weren’t you the one who told me you were drifting apart? Isn’t that what this was about?”
Don glares at her. “I want you. I want you all the time. And if you’ve suddenly decided you want something more than that, well then that’s news, isn’t it?”
Sylvia sits there, stunned at his brutal candor. She’s been called a hypocrite by this hunk of a man, and all she can do is bow her head in response. When she looks up again they lock eyes and you can feel the heat through the screen. It’s molten.
Underneath the dialogue, the dramatic Italian aria “Casta Diva” (Norma) plays, while on screen, the scenes are cut in such a way as to alternate between moments of Don and Sylvia first coming through a door, then back again to the table where they’re shown arguing, then back again, as they carnally devour one another. Don takes off Sylvia’s dress and they fall onto a bed, ravaging each other as if they’d not had sex in weeks.
When Sylvia apologizes for being jealous, Don stops her. “This is just us here tonight,” he reminds her. She replies, “We have to be careful. We can’t fall in love…”
That’s it, the heart of infidelity — physical lust and longing that are separate from love. Having the ability to live in the eye of passion, blocking all else out, not allowing the complications of feelings and emotions to enter the arena of desire. Nothing exists but two human animals fucking and finding their way to explosion.
At the end of the episode, Don Draper returns home, with “Just a Gigolo” playing in the background, the lyrics emphasizing the cyclical futility of his thirst: “Just a gigolo, everywhere I go. People know the part I’m playing…. Selling each romance, every night some heart betraying.” Don can’t go into his apartment, but instead slumps in the hallway on the floor, ruined.
Carnality can catch you up in its vortex, where you can find yourself doing things you never dreamed of before. Sexual acts of unbounded moral lethality or unlimited imagination can take you over a pleasure cliff you never knew existed, and over which you feel you have no control. The abandon is instantly sublime, and you can’t, you won’t, deny yourself. When an affair is moored in the physical alone, no earthly responsibilities attached, the escape works like a narcotic; it becomes an obsession. It’s equally deadly. It can be confused with love, because of the sustenance sex supplies to parts of ourselves that are wounded.
It inevitably turns to pure torment. Infidelity isn’t romance, though the excitement often masquerades for it. Romance is ultimately about safety that allows you both to be vulnerable. Cheating is dangerous, especially if one of you has more to lose than the other. It rarely has a happy ending, because the carnage unleashed when it’s discovered can extinguish whatever brought the two people together in the first place. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are an exception, not the rule.
There are also things some men won’t ask their partners to do. They can be afraid of judgment or rejection, or they may be just embarrassed or shy. That’s when pornography temporarily soothes the beast. A man might want extreme sex-play or “kinky fuckery,” but doesn’t want to admit it.
The more sexually liberated the woman, the better off a man is.
There’s a reason why romance novels and soap operas have ruled for decades, and why Fifty Shades of Grey blasted onto the book scene and took off. Fifty Shades should finally obliterate the notion that women aren’t visual, because the entire three-volume trilogy takes place in each reader’s head. The movie that’s on its way will expand the visuals, which will likely do a much bigger on-demand and home-video business than in theaters. Erotica is a very private thing, and the notion it’s just for men is suggested by the ignorant. Women also like to keep their erotic secrets tucked away where others won’t mock or tarnish their fantasies with judgment.
Women have always been titillated by erotica. We just like it different than men do, though even that depends on the woman. However, it helps to have connection between the characters, real ties of emotion, along with the lust, with the woman equally in charge, even when she submits. When love is tangled with lust, it’s a blockbuster.
One thing in my job description at DHD was that I had to write erotic stories to go along with a set of pictures of a couple together every week. It was creative torture for me. That I did my damndest to deliver I can only tell you, but the resulting product was always a disaster. When I used the phrase “fluttering action of a feather,” the emails I received were brutal, though nothing was as bad as when the girl fell asleep and had a dream fantasy. Epic rejection ensued, with men emailing me that it was the most juvenile porn they’d ever read. E.L. James I am not. When the stories were dropped, the only people more relieved than myself were the men.
One thing about DHD is that you had to quickly distinguish between office talk and a hostile work environment. It takes a certain type of individual to stare at female genitalia day in and day out, which made me glad I was on the management side. Okaying the images was the boss’ job. The conversations in the office went like this:
“Look at those tits!”
“Are they natural?”
“Natural? She’s a size triple-H, for God’s sake.”
“How big is triple-H?”
“A lot bigger than you.”
“Does she have the biggest tits?”
“They have cat-fights about that all the time.”
“How do they run?”
“Run, hell. How do they sleep at night?”
The creative team smoothed out stretch marks on the girlie photos, which were evident when the women had boob jobs. They removed corns from foot-fetish photos, smoothed out tummy wrinkles, and performed amazing feats of magi
c with butt shots. That included removing very nasty hemorrhoids, making bend-me-over backdoor close-ups look presentable, if there is such a thing.
When it was time to hire a model coordinator, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it myself, we ran a blind ad in Variety and Hollywood Reporter for a “talent coordinator,” with no one knowing it was the soft-core megasite DHD. The response totaled literally ten pounds of résumés. We actually weighed them. They included résumés from people who’d worked at Disney, as well as with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. One applicant had managed the talent for Barnum & Bailey Circus. That was all I needed to know. Managing circus talent was the perfect requirement for corralling the crew of misfit models, strippers, and XXX-rated porn actresses that crossed DHD’s doorstep.
The stress at DHD when I was there, at a time when Ashe’s business was realigning, was intense. Every day we worked to satisfy subscribers, get new images uploaded, and create the e-zines CyberBeauties, NaughtyNewbies, Nippleodeon and NetFetish, all to feed the insatiable voyeurs who paid our salaries and made DHD a multi-million-dollar company out of the gate. This was the original twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week web enterprise that made the news industry pale in comparison. We worked like dogs, and I made sure we blew steam off when the cork was about to blow. The trick is not to quiet creative spirit, but to harness and focus it. We had a tight team, with Ashe on the outside as boss, something she had a difficult time accepting.
About as outlandish as it got was when the performance-enhancing substance GHB was overnighted to the corporate headquarters for the private use of a big-breasted star stripper and headliner who was flying in for a highly publicized, upcoming charity event. I hadn’t even been there a month when this blew into an epic row. When answers to my questions became a babbling stream of incoherence, because she never imagined anyone would challenge her, “Star Stripper” became the second girl I sacked in the first month. Evidently, there had been lots of partying on a previous Las Vegas trip that made her believe no one would care if she was loaded on stage. That was before I landed in the middle of this diva-drenched scene, knowing very well what the combination of GHB, drinking and a striptease in front of a packed crowd could bring.
This charity event also included limousine rides that could be purchased by the guys, with strippers going along for the ride, insert your fantasy here. At the cost of seventy-five dollars per ride, champagne would flow and plenty of carousing could be crammed in, so more money could be made for the charity, and the strippers. Who knew where that would lead? The answer led to the event being canceled.
Whatever boob job means to you, if you’ve never seen a big-breasted, top stripper, you’ve not seen anything, though I have no idea what’s the norm today. The girls ranged from a normal 34B to an unbelievable 125ZZZ. One gal had a 55EE bust line after a reduction. The biggest strippers back then made anywhere up to five thousand dollars a week and more than a hundred grand per year, and earned every penny, though keeping that going was not easy for many. Whatever glamour might be attached, it dulls quickly, when you watch how the sex industry grinds these girls down.
After one event where DHD’s model representative had won a kissing contest with a popular stripper, he arrived back at my office with the prize he’d won wrapped in an old Tiffany box, complete with a large satin bow. It contained a latex replica of porn star and model Nikki Tyler’s vagina, complete with synthetic blonde pubic hair, and he was giving it to me! My beauty queen mind was regularly blown.
It’s this dismemberment part of porn that incites critics and anyone else who can’t imagine having sex with a body part of a woman without anything else tied to it. It’s not even a blowup doll, the complete “girl.” Masturbation is something we all share in common, but the body part thing, well… Many girls love their Rabbit dildos, but that doesn’t seem like the same thing. It’s different from a plastic vagina replica of your favorite stripper for a man to stick his penis into. The plastic vagina is meant to represent Nikki Tyler, a specific person, which is a lot different than a sex toy.
Body part fetishes are big in the sex industry and it starts with huge boobs. There’s a big downside for the girls. It wasn’t uncommon during the thirteen months I watched this industry to hear of girls having a breast collapse, due to a faulty implant, though given the extraordinary sizes, we’re not talking about your next door neighbor’s boob job. When you’re a triple-E, a quadruple-F, not to mention a multiple-Z, things can pop, with the ensuing mess nothing to laugh about. More than one girl told me she was saving up to repair her boob collapse, while the oozing material remained in her body. One supersized stripper had to get five thousand dollars together to pay for one of her implants that had started leaking, with the other one in danger of doing the same. It wasn’t the doctors; it was the size of the tits, which were as big as shoe boxes on the very largest strippers I saw.
When I got a chance to interview any of the girls, I always attempted to do it without their “managers,” often known as their boyfriends, present. But that rarely happened. Male control over some of the girls obviously remained, especially the XXX actresses, even as others broke free of the male dominance of the industry. Stronger women in the adult industry, including strippers, became web pioneers by taking power back from the men who put pornography on the map and did so by cutting out the women who made the industry possible.
One popular stripper had appeared with Howard Stern, Geraldo Rivera and Jerry Springer, and was a featured dancer who reportedly performed in front of more than a hundred thousand men per year. Julie was a seemingly smart young woman, unable to see the signs of what was coming when she’d gotten mixed up with a bad boy, even if everyone else could. When she finally decided it was time to dump him, she got scared of what he might do. She’d discussed how she was going to get away with her friends and family, and everyone who heard about her troubles at DHD pleaded with her to be careful. Julie just kept saying she had it under control, but that she couldn’t leave everything she had behind. She kept trying and almost made it out. Almost, but not before he threw her into a wall, badly injuring her kneecap and taking her out of exotic dancing and modeling for quite a while. When she showed up at DHD with a broken leg it was heartbreaking, but not surprising. When a woman is in an abusive relationship, the moment she attempts to leave is the most dangerous. Who can ever forget Nicole Brown Simpson?
More than one stripper had custody troubles, with judges often saying her exotic dancing meant she couldn’t be a good mother. Strapped for cash, strippers, also moms, would augment their breasts further to become bigger draws, but it wasn’t a great image for the courts. The cycle was dizzying to watch. As Nikita Cash talked about in Sexy Baby, it’s not easy getting out. At least Cash’s dream of having a family panned out. Pictures of her and her husband with their son Rocco on The Daily Beast website and other outlets indicate a better ending than most.
Female porn stars have gruesome adult-film war stories, but that’s an industry I know little about, even if their tales are often seen on the web. On The Daily Beast, which was once Tina Brown’s baby, I was flipping through stories one day to see what was making headlines, and I came upon, “Blood, Sweat and Sex: My Hard Life in Porn,” with the porn actress writing: “My first on-set injury happened with a rapacious male performer who held little regard for my body and slammed into me like a rag doll. It was the first time I’d been torn; the director suggested we use extra lube and keep going.”
Feminists, conservatives and most women rail against pornography and legal sex workers, which is understandable, there being many sad stories and bad endings to use against these choices. I’ve only seen it up close through one soft-core website when it first started, which is nothing compared to what’s available today. I’m not immune to the impact of what porn and the sex industry do to objectify women, because that’s the nature of pornography. Much of it offers little eroticism, no Fifty Shades of Grey, because it’s all based on extinguishing hunger
quickly. Nothing else matters.
Pornography today amounts to mindless surfing to get hot and get off. It’s a way to enjoy other women without cheating, at least as far as the man is concerned. I’ve interviewed enough women over the years to know many feel differently. Many women judge men looking at pictures of naked women, as well as watching viral video smut or DVDs, as something dirty and wrong, including thinking it’s cheating. I honestly don’t know what to say to you if you’re one of these women. Fantasy isn’t cheating. Virtual voyeurism isn’t either.
Men like to look at naked women. This isn’t news. Some have fetishes, from feet to toes to big and beautiful, to anything you can name. It doesn’t mean anything, as far as I can tell, except that it’s an outlet, a release valve, a quick and easy way to get off that doesn’t require much energy.
Are the women exploited? It’s their choice how they make their money, with their ages verified, and children kept out, both of which matter to every legit purveyor in the industry.
Are there porn addicts? Absolutely, just like there are addicts for any number of other vices. I’ve been there when a man preferred porn over me, and it hurts. It also can destroy a relationship, but that’s not the norm, as far as I’ve been able to learn. A man can watch porn, get turned on, then turn around and make you the receiver of his lust. This is particularly true in long-term relationships, but also when a man hits a low testosterone point in his life.
I’m not sure policing your partner’s visual eye candy is a good idea, mainly because it’s just not going to work. What do you care if he loves you and you’re the one he’s sleeping with? Because it’s icky to you? We all deserve some privacy, as long as it’s recreational, singularly experienced and not obsessive. A woman’s ego and pornography can be a combustible mix.