I had been racing my bike to campus, wearing flip-flops and no helmet in the rain, because I was on my way to meet my advisor for what seemed like the five hundredth time in the past few weeks. We were going to talk about my research interests and dissertation project ideas. Again. These meetings were getting increasingly tense and—as we batted ideas back and forth—unproductive. So I was already feeling pretty winded and dreadful as I dashed up several flights of stairs to her office.
And it began. “Who cares?” she asked, referring to my proposed topic.
“Everyone!” I said. “Everyone cares about this.”
To which she shot me a pointed, incredulous look over the top of her glasses. Not five minutes in, and I was already starting to annoy her. I was wasting her time. I tried again.
“So little is known about this industry, but it makes all this money . . . Surely there’s something going on.”
She hit me with the same look of incredulity, now faintly peppered with disgust, as she walked over to her wall of books and pulled a few titles of the shelves. Their premises were, essentially, porn hurts, porn harms, and porn is a heterosexist tool for destroying women and strengthening patriarchy through capitalism. As she slid them toward me, her message was clear: “This is what we know. This is what goes on.”
I tried again.
“This industry is legal, it has a history in our society and a place in our culture, but so little is known about it, and it makes all this money. People are watching this stuff. There has to be something going on.”
I was repeating myself, and unfortunately I wasn’t making much sense. I had been nervous on arrival, and I now was starting to really get flustered. I didn’t understand what she was looking for, which was simply a clear statement of a research question or puzzle. But even if I’d had that, what I didn’t grasp at the time was that I was up against an impossibility. My advisor had already come to a conclusion about what was going on in porn, and there was no book on her shelves or in the university library or anywhere else that I could use to suggest otherwise.
“‘Stuff’?” She wrinkled her nose, shook her head, and turned away from the table where we were seated across from one another. I was dismissed. The meeting was over.
I tried one more time.
“This industry has been around for decades. People claim to hate it, but they consume it like mad. So many people talk about it, but I’ve been looking into it and no one ever talks to the people actually involved. We don’t know anything about them, really. No one goes to where they work or sees what’s actually happening in their lives. Nothing can be as completely bad as all those books say. Stuff doesn’t work that way. Lots of people, millions even, watch porn, and lots of people work on making it. Doesn’t that make it even kind of significant. . . ?”
I trailed off as she oh-so-slowly turned back around. “Why do you care, Chauntelle?”
This took me by surprise. “Huh?” I replied, as inarticulate as could be.
“Why do you care? Why are you interested in this ‘stuff’? This ‘workplace’?” Her voice was raised slightly, more agitated now than annoyed. I could see the wheels turning in her head as an idea about exactly why I cared began to take shape. She squinted at me just slightly, and I started to feel extremely self-conscious of my blonde pigtails, my Southern California casual clothes, my pierced nose, and my glittery black fingernails. Her office door was open behind me, and other students were waiting in the hall.
“What do you mean?” I asked, frantically searching for a smartsounding way to say that I was fascinated by this thing that everyone seemed to consume but no one was willing to acknowledge, that I loved the fact that this was an industry filled with rule-breakers, and that I was absolutely electrified by the possibility of exploring something new. I was going to speak to the porn industry, both because it was made up of people who deserved to have their voices heard . . . and because no one else had the guts to.
But I had thrown down the final straw with my last “What do you mean?” She snapped. She came halfway out of her chair, palms flat on the table. “What do I mean? Why do you want to watch people fucking, Chauntelle?” she shouted.
Seriously. She shouted.
I have no memory of the remainder of that meeting, no recollection of our final words that day. I have no memory of actually leaving her office, my books and belongings stacked in my arms as I shuffled outside, back into the misty air. I made my way to the bike rack, where I had unceremoniously tossed my ride not thirty minutes earlier. My friend Jordan, who was a student in the same cohort as me, was there, carefully locking up her own bike. She was so much better at this whole living-in-a-place-with-weather thing. She had on rubber-soled shoes and a snazzy helmet.
“Heeeey,” she greeted me in her characteristic way. Then quickly: “Are you ok? What’s wrong?”
“Dude,” I said, all school pretense abandoned, my California-speak completely unchecked. “I think something really bad just happened. . . .”
1
How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get into (Studying) Porn?
I’VE HEARD PEOPLE ASK PERFORMERS A VERSION OF THAT QUEStion countless times: “How did a nice girl like you get into porn?” It sounds like a reasonable thing to ask, complimenting one’s niceness and asking after someone’s life-so-far story. People’s responses are as varied as the performers themselves; however, this question and any number of subsequent responses (if one can get them) are often a little sticky. You see, the rationale behind that initial question is generally not as “I want to learn about you!” as one might think. In fact, more often than not, it’s really just a glossy cover for something more along the lines of: “You’re too good to be doing this [insert unsavory adjective here] thing, so please tell me what awful series of occurrences cornered you such that you had no other choice.” There’s usually a good measure of “Your choices make me uncomfortable” thrown in there, too.
As I worked my way inside the adult entertainment industry, I began to realize that these types of questions and the viewpoints behind them were born largely out of misinformation. I also realized rather quickly that these misinformed viewpoints applied to me, too. I was not immune to their application, nor am I impervious to their effects today. I am a sociologist and a scholar. I earned my PhD from one of the top research universities in the United States. When I began exploring the adult industry, I did not have one single contact in the business. I had never engaged in a sex work occupation, nor had any of my friends or associates. (At least, not to my knowledge.)
In the beginning, all I knew was that it seemed like many people had opinions about porn. Some unabashedly loved it. They followed industry politics and personalities and spent money on products and whatnot. Others enjoyed the industry privately, and often secretly, while simultaneously feeling somewhat ashamed. And then there were the folks who opposed porn at all costs, with unparalleled passion and conviction. For some reason, regardless of the specifics, porn inspired very strong emotions in lots of people. Though it was just a gut feeling, I knew there was something bigger going on from the day I started looking at the industry. I had no idea what it was at the time.
And that’s really it, the entire overview of my initial interest in adult entertainment. All of it. The end. But I still got the question, “Why is a nice girl like you studying porn?” I still get it to this day. So here are the ins and outs of how and why.
My life course leading up to today, or even to that meeting I was talking about earlier, was long and winding but no more so than anyone else’s. I’m pretty regular, advantaged even—an able-bodied, decently smart, white person living in the United States. Thinking about it, minus the woman part and minus my decidedly “unclassy” habitus,1 I’d actually say I’m more advantaged than regular. And though I know it’s trendy these days to focus on everyone’s unique snowflake qualities, I’m only rare in one way really: I was raised in Los Angeles. Not in the city proper but throughout the entire sprawl that is the g
reater LA metropolitan, suburban, and outlying areas. So were both my parents.
They’re a crafty duo, those two—and important to this story. Outliers and outsiders themselves, my mom and dad employed all kinds of tricky tactics to make sure my brothers and I grew up to be outliers and outsiders as well. Everything about my upbringing was rowdy, and my parents seemed to take great delight in cultivating rowdiness in us kids. They found the last place in LA County close enough to the city to travel to work but still technically in the middle of nowhere to raise us: Acton, California, a small town near the glorious Antelope Valley Desert of Extreme Nothingness. And out in the middle of nowhere, my family and I did everything from riding motorcycles and horses and firing guns to “camping” in storage sheds and building forts out of bales of hay. It was fun.
My parents had interesting notions about social propriety and child rearing. We arrived to every convivial activity and extended family function twenty minutes early, circled the block fifty times before walking in right on time, and always left before everyone else. As kids, my brothers and I were all given a decently rigorous set of rules, standards, and expectations to abide by, and no deviations were tolerated. When we misbehaved, punishments were clever and effective. For example, one time, after we had snuck out in the middle of the night and gone swimming in a neighbor’s irrigation tank, my parents dropped us off at a local community church for a couple of hours. Apparently, there was no greater punishment than having to interact with an organized group of people who seemed to be the opposite of outsiders.
By the time I was an early adolescent, the whole “stand alone” (or at least “stand with your family and buddies outside the big group”) thing was definitely working. From who my friends were to the cultural and social things I found alluring, my need to be off the beaten path was almost compulsive. And, partly because I was such a little instigator, so was my desire to remind everyone who remained on the path that outsiders were people, too.
But I also had my eye on getting out of the desert and into college. Consequently, I—the little rebel—did all sorts of oxymoronic-seeming things. I held several offices in high school leadership, the only kid with purple hair. I was also the only purple-haired member of the track team and the only kid in every AP and honors class with a collection of fairly aggressive concert T-shirts. And because I was still just a bratty teen, I did all sorts of obnoxious things, too, like being the only kid who blatantly ditched those same AP and honors classes on an excessively regular basis. Or rallying relentlessly to have “my” music, which actually belonged to a lot of other kids in school too, played during pep rallies. (It was only fair that everyone’s tastes were reflected, right?) When I lost that battle, I sneakily did it anyway.
As I made my way into college at UCLA, my outright brattiness mellowed while my need to push boundaries and champion folks with relatively marginalized voices matured and refined. For example, I was a reporter for the Daily Bruin in the late nineties. I had to beat out several other student writers to get a spot on the roster, and it was fun to get to go to different events on campus, things that my scrubby self never would’ve been welcome at otherwise. In those days, I had a good friend who was really into women’s rights and feminist politics. I knew nothing about that stuff, but I became intrigued and started going to Women’s Resource Center (WRC)–sponsored events with her. And after attending a few of these gut-wrenching occasions where students discussed various forms of social marginalization, physical abuse, and the like, something dawned on me. These were important moments in campus culture, and there was no one from the Daily Bruin there! I mean, I was there, but I was there as an attendee, not a reporter.
When I went to my editor with this news, I was mortified to learn that no reporter was ever assigned to WRC events because, I was told, no one was interested in all that feminist stuff. So I started covering it. And because it was still the late nineties and gender and sexuality were lumped together in a relatively uncritical way, I started covering the LGB (there was no T or Q in the acronym then, at least not at UCLA) events, too. In those days, I didn’t really understand most of the politics or issues, I just knew that certain groups on campus—outliers and outsiders—were not being included in the student news voice. It was like these members of the community didn’t even exist, which gave me all the reason I needed to jump in and do whatever I could to change that. Plus, let’s be honest: I also thought it might piss some people off.
After I completed my over-amped undergraduate education at UCLA in 2000, I found myself not knowing how not to be in school. I was a whopping twenty-two years old and in the middle of a pretty significant identity crisis, so I decided to enroll in a terminal master’s program at Cal State Northridge (CSUN). A master’s degree in sociology? Sure, why not? I had to bide my time while I worked on finding myself.
As it happens, CSUN was (and still is) located right smack in the middle of Porn Valley, a slightly snarky nickname for the San Fernando Valley, which is yet another piece of the giant Los Angeles city-sprawl. A little background is in order.
People have been creating various forms of sexually explicit content in the US since the early 1900s; however, because “smut” was both vaguely defined and pretty unlawful back then, any production of this type of material was fairly clandestine. Then, in the 1950s, some key court cases made things a little less illegal by providing a clearer working definition of obscenity. Ever so slowly, individuals interested in creating sexually explicit content came out of the woodwork. As the years passed, an informal collection of somewhat interconnected folks began creating elaborate short film projects that featured depictions of some form of hardcore sex. By the 1970s, people were creating full-length films that focused on sex-specific narratives.
For various reasons, members of the nascent porn industry moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and Los Angeles during the 1970s. Over time, content production in the San Francisco Bay Area became more of a part-time artistic and political endeavor (at least, for many of the performers), while businesses in LA began to resemble a conventional industry. By the 1980s, LA’s San Fernando Valley had become porn’s absolute epicenter. And today, though the industry is constantly changing and though there’s plenty of adult content production that occurs in the Bay Area, across the US, and around the world, Porn Valley is still the center of the smut universe.
I recall being dimly aware of the Valley’s reputation as the other Hollywood when I started at CSUN, but that reputation held no real relevance for me as I directed my energies toward graduate work. I had a lot of classes to take; and, because I had taken so much hard science at UCLA (I was a double major: physiological sciences and sociology), I decided I would go for what was really interesting to me—gender and sex stuff, with some additional focus on the social phenomena of work and organizing thrown in for good measure.
As I began to delve into more nuanced areas of sociology and—gasp!—feminist scholarship, I realized pretty quickly that sex work, particularly sex work in porn production, had a contentious history in academic, feminist, and activist worlds. I learned about the polarizing “porn wars,” which generally broke down to either porn is wholly awful or porn is just mostly awful, with the exception of some niche exploratory genres. I found myself getting pretty wrapped up in the whole “porn is bad (at least mostly)” thing.
But while all this was happening through books and in classes, there were other things happening in real life, too. Over the course of many long hours and late nights working, studying, and socializing, the mysterious adult industry began to reveal itself in subtle ways. Sometimes it was in the form of billboards advertising various events at local strip clubs; other times, ads in the LA XPress, which I had begun flipping through regularly when I was still an undergrad. Sometimes it was in the form of coworkers—guys, of course—losing it in the restaurant where I worked because some big-deal performer was dining in their section. And sometimes it was in the form of rather . . . umm . . . noticeab
le people standing in line at the local Starbucks. They had to be porn people, right? Why else would they be dressed like that at 11 a.m.?
I’m naturally nosy and have always been an unabashed people-watcher, two sociologist’s skills in the raw, so, of course, I became intrigued. Who were these people working in this mostly, supposedly morally reprehensible (at least according to my schoolbooks) industry, degrading women and warping people’s ideas about sex while drinking lattes near my school? Such were the stereotypes informing my thinking at the time. I found it odd that no one else around me seemed to notice or care. The apparently harmonious, albeit often unacknowledged, existence between “regular people” and “porn people” fascinated me, particularly given the adult industry’s fairly negative reputation. I became even more interested and began to do a little investigating.
I learned that at the time in the United States it was only legal to produce porn in the state of California (now it’s only legal in California and New Hampshire) and that most of the world’s porn was made by a large cluster of companies operating mere miles from CSUN. What’s more, many adult personalities and performers had written autobiographical accounts of their experiences in the business. People cared enough to write books about this stuff!
I became obsessed with the stories of former adult performers Linda Lovelace and Jerry Butler, as well as with the legendary tragedies and horrors associated with Savannah, Traci Lords, and John C. Holmes. There were some impressive legal battles, too—for example, that of Philip D. Harvey, the co-founder of Adam & Eve, a mail-order company specializing in sex-related products and rooted in public health that has been prosecuted multiple times by the US federal and various state governments—and some instances of porn performers poking their heads up into the mainstream à la Ginger Lynn Allen.
Exposure Page 2