Somewhere in the midst of my rabid consumption of all these available stories, I began to wonder: Surely everything couldn’t possibly be so dramatic? Surely not everyone commits suicide (Savannah), dates Hollywood bad boys (Ginger Lynn Allen), is in an abusive personal relationship (Linda Lovelace), gets busted by the feds (Philip D. Harvey), or is linked to one of the most gruesome massacres in Hollywood history (John C. Holmes and 1981’s Wonderland murders)? Surely, out of all the people working in this industry, there had to be some “normal” folks living “normal” lives, right? Where was all the information about them? Where were all the other stories?
It was as if the real meat of the industry was being hidden or kept secret. It was as if the people involved were concentrated into some sort of porn bubble that enabled them to live, work, and contribute to wider society while simultaneously isolating them from it. I was absolutely captivated by this mysterious dynamic, compelled by what appeared to be an almost schizophrenic desire to both consume and reject porn in US culture. And I was totally part of this at-odds juxtaposition—simultaneously horrified by what seemed to be happening and fascinated by what I instinctively felt had to be more complex. I was eager to explore the processes that had contributed to this bubble, but this industry and whatever phenomena were responsible for shaping it were far too big for a master’s program.
I was gonna have to get a PhD. So I got to work on that.
I finished up my master’s degree at CSUN in 2003 and eventually moved on to the doctoral program in sociology at UT in 2004. I hit the ground running as soon as school started that fall and began exploring anti-porn activism in the US during a history seminar my very first semester. I also started learning a lot more about research methods, which caused me to notice something seriously suspect: The vast majority of the “porn is mostly awful” literature I had been swallowing whole while at CSUN was rather methodologically unsound.2
Discussions of “violent” or “misogynist” content engaged only small, unsubstantiated, and cherry-picked selections of fairly dated material. There were no sampling frames (itemized lists of those surveyed or studied and/or of every case possibly surveyed or studied) to be had, and nothing was even remotely close to representative. Many of the sweeping conclusions and arguments made in opposition of porn read more along the lines of “This is bad because I don’t like it!” rather than “I have demonstrated through A, B, and C that XXX is. . . .” And perhaps most egregiously, no one ever seemed to talk to anyone who actually worked in this industry; or, if they did, it was always to the same handful of players who’d had bad experiences. I had done ethnography3 work in restaurants to complete my MA, and I had spoken to a bunch of waitresses and servers in the process. Talking to people who were actually doing what it was that one was studying made sense to me, and those porn-free assessments of porn were starting to look a little suspicious on the basis of methods alone.
Then I read Lynn Chancer’s Reconcilable Differences. (It was on the required reading list for a course on gender and sexuality I was taking in 2005. Ironically, this course was being taught by the same professor/advisor who would later demand to know why I wanted to watch people fucking.) In this book, Chancer takes on many divisive topics—things that people generally feel one way or the other about: beauty, “victim” versus “survivor,” prostitution, and porn. Chancer’s main point on every topic and in the book as a whole is that nothing—absolutely nothing—is all good or all bad. Instead, according to Chancer, most things are both good and bad. Reconcilable Differences is a brilliant call to arms away from either/or scholarship in lieu of both/and considerations.
I was completely in agreement with this both/and concept; as were, it seemed, all fifteen or so of my classmates. But when we got to discussing the porn chapter in class, one young woman became absolutely outraged. She asserted, with passion and conviction, that both/and considerations were not applicable in this case. Porn was, in fact, objectively bad. It harmed women and men in myriad ways, and it corrupted people’s humanity. When pressed on her stance though, she couldn’t explain why. She had never spoken to anyone who had ever worked in the adult entertainment industry, and she could see the methodological and epistemological problems embedded in the all-or-nothing “truth” she was touting. But none of this mattered. This person, who had to be at least a little bit rational and bright by virtue of her place as a student at the university, couldn’t separate what she felt and thought (which was real and valid and her right) from the possibility that others might see things differently, that there may be other experiences and versions of reality operating somewhere out in the ether.
I had never actually seen this sort of thing in person before. I had never seen a person come totally unglued over porn in this way, especially not someone in a graduate-level classroom. It was amazing. Porn was capable of making people lose their common sense, analytic skills, and composure. It could scramble the smartest, most educated of brains. And that was it for me. I was hooked—porn for life. But I had absolutely no idea what specifically about porn for life I wanted to explore. All of it! was what I was thinking, but that definitely wouldn’t fly within the strictures of graduate school. It was around this time that I started having all those meetings with my advisor, and you already know how that went. . . .
After that fateful spring day and that fateful spring meeting, things really changed for me. It was subtle at first. My advisor wouldn’t respond to my e-mails, and it became impossible to connect with her during her office hours. A gnawing feeling began to grow in my stomach, but I convinced myself she was just dealing with end-of-the-semester obligations. But when I didn’t get funding for the summer, not panicking became a little bit more difficult. There weren’t a lot of positions available during that particular term, and it only made sense that they’d go to students who were farther along in the program, right? I was pretty far along, but I didn’t get funded. And I still couldn’t get a response from my advisor.
The other shoe dropped pretty hard soon after. I found out that I, a second-year student who had made good progress and was one year away from taking comprehensive exams (so I was really more like a third-year student), didn’t have funding for the fall either.4 That’s when I realized the severity of what had happened at that meeting in the spring. And, to add insult to injury, the sociology department didn’t tell me about any of this until just before the semester began—far too late for me to find another position in a different division of the university (not that those were easy to come by either, mind you).
The stress of this—thousands of dollars’ worth of out-of-state tuition due now, a full load of graduate-level classes looming, no job, and no health insurance—was almost too much. After twenty-four hours of panicking, crying, and vowing revenge, I did the only thing I could. I formulated Plan B. I took out an emergency loan (the university was happy to sign me over to a large national bank), I got a job serving cocktails in a raucous downtown bar, and I barged my way onto the adjunct faculty of the local community college. I already had a couple years’ worth of college-level teaching experience in California, which luckily was enough to get me a course assignment at a satellite campus thirty miles north. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
I scraped together a semblance of financial stability relatively quickly, but there was one other thing: UT allegedly had this strange noncompete clause stating that if you had “other funding” (read: worked at a bar and taught a community college class that paid a sum total of about $2,000 over the course of four months—four whopping $500 installments), it would lower your chances of getting tuition support from them. Why would they pay you when someone else was? But I needed to get funding from the university. I needed the insurance and (at least) the fee reduction. But mostly, I needed the myriad intangible things that came from being let back into the fold with all my peers.
So I kept my jobs a secret, especially the teaching one. Then the rumors began: Chauntelle wants to study porn, so she mus
t have some connection to porn. Chauntelle lost her funding because of porn, so she must be doing porn . . . or at least stripping? When a kind and concerned professor I had worked with during my first year told me about these rumors over lunch one day, more to see if I was okay than anything else, I was caught between laughing myself silly and a rage so acute it burned a hole through my soul. Really? That’s all I could do, strip or fuck? Working in either one of those occupations takes craft and skill. Neither is shameful or a laughing matter. But the fact that these “shameful” occupations were all I could do in the eyes of my scholarly peers. . . . Well, that bothered me. It was a difficult time.
Oddly enough, this unfortunate series of circumstances fueled my passion for porn like Santa Ana winds on a Southern California wildfire—intensely. What possibly could be happening in Porn Valley that warranted all of this nonsense? Better, what did people imagine was happening? I was going to find out. And I would not be beaten.
At this point, I came up with two primary objectives. First, to research porn and the adult industry. I needed to get to a point where I had enough information to articulate, clearly and succinctly, what I suspected was worthy of scholarly consideration. I also figured that I needed to learn more basics about the industry so I wouldn’t sound like a total poseur when I finally got the opportunity to speak to someone who was directly involved. Second, I had to find a new advisor. This was imperative because, as I said before, your advisor basically shapes and controls your entire graduate school experience. But finding one was not going to be an easy task. I had already been tagged as belonging to my first advisor, and no one was signing up for her sloppy seconds.
It took about a year and some serious networking, but I eventually found a new person to work with—a wonderful and supportive yet endlessly challenging, giving, and passionate woman who singlehandedly grew my brain in ways that I still cannot begin to fully appreciate or articulate. My work and my life are better because of her, the absolute embodiment of a true mentor and friend. So in that respect, it all worked out.
Approximating how the adult industry worked from distant Texas, however, took a bit more doing. I spent about one year on background research—late nights bogged down with dial-up Internet, reading, referencing, and cross-referencing industry trade publications, blogs, and retail websites, along with the occasional mainstream news article. I was trying to build a remote picture from the ground up, and it was very slow going. Eventually, I came up with something sociology-worthy to look at: the expansion of women’s rights in the absence of a social movement.5 Now I just had to figure out a way in.
I knew the San Fernando Valley was an obvious choice for my project, but it had become clear to me that the bubble around the adult industry was thick and tight. Just getting casual access would be a difficult task, and here I was attempting to do a rigorous scholarly study within the confines of university-sanctioned research protocols. Since I still had no connection to the industry, I began working on making contacts. Using information and insights from my background research, I identified four people I thought might develop into useful points of entrée. Each person had worked in the industry for more than twenty years and was directly connected to either a porn production company or a service-provision business with industry-only clientele. After all sorts of snail mail and e-mail outreach, all four agreed to speak with me; and, eventually, three agreed to meet with me in person. So I scheduled a “business trip” back home, one that happened to coincide with spring break.
I recall the first of these meetings vividly. It was my first-ever face-to-face interaction with “porn people.” I was meeting with a company’s CEO and production executive armed only with my little bit of background research and wrestling with every negative feminist and culturally informed stereotype imaginable. I was a nervous wreck. When I arrived at their main office, which was located in the most innocuous-looking commercial building ever, I paused in my car for a long moment. I might have been hyperventilating. What might be going on inside this building? What was I about to do? Was I about to be morally corrupted? Kidnapped? Coerced into something “deviant”? Would these “pornographers” be able to see how nervous (and, truthfully, how frightened) I was? How I actually knew absolutely nothing about their industry or their lives? Moreover, was I about to offend working people with my head-in-the-clouds academic desire to “study” them? After what felt like an eternity of self-reflection, I entered the building . . .
. . . where I was greeted by a cheerful pretty secretary and offered a seat in a perfectly bland reception area. I felt disoriented and a little dizzy. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the lobby at my dentist’s office. After a few moments of waiting, I was led behind some closed doors to a corporate meeting room decorated with giant posters of glamorous ladies in lingerie and a massive case housing a large number of gold and Lucite statuettes. There I met a sharp, intense man in his early forties and a smiling friendly woman, also in her early forties. We sat around one end of a giant table and started talking. Our subsequent hour-long conversation, I feel, marked the actual beginning of my learning about the realities of adult production. Everything I had done so far was nothing compared to what I learned in that one face-to-face exchange. Needless to say, my other meetings were less stressful.
I followed up these springtime consultations a couple months later by doing what every college student does—I went home for the summer. I spent six weeks in LA developing additional contacts and strengthening rapport with people in the adult business. By the time I headed back to Texas for the fall, I had networked with all sorts of women and men at various industry trade and social events and had developed many strong connections. I was always forthcoming and fully disclosed my identity as a graduate student/researcher to anyone I had more than a passing conversation with. I still had comprehensive exams to take and a dissertation proposal to write, but I finally felt like things were starting to come together.
Sometimes, ideas that look great and make sense on paper don’t quite follow the script when you try to apply them in the real world. This is pretty much exactly what happened with my field research. At the time of my dissertation proposal defense, I planned to explore my research questions (about women’s rights expansion in the absence of a social movement) with a mixed-methodological approach combining comparative historical-informed sociology, in-depth interviews, and adult film content analysis. I was going to conduct the interviews over the course of eight weeks, which meant that I got to go home for another summer.
I went back to LA and immediately set up my first interview with one of my strongest contacts in the industry, a very well-known content producer. After some preliminary chitchat that blossomed into a great talk about the ins and outs of the company, I was presented with an unheard-of opportunity: I was offered an unpaid summer “internship” in their public relations department. I was to assist this company’s PR representative with mailings, media archival updating, and other similar projects for approximately twenty hours per week. In exchange for my work, I would be able to observe the inner workings of the company, interact with other employees on a daily basis, and attend any events, shows, and so on that occurred during my time there. After some consideration (which really amounted to me feeling spastically anxious and excited) and a couple long talks with my advisor (who told me to calm down and focus), I went for it.
During those weeks, I worked in an actual porn production office. I mailed things, photocopied things, carried things, answered phones, stacked cartons and crates, drove people places, ran around, and did pretty much every other flunky job you can imagine. The best was the week I was tasked with spray-painting promotional boxes for a reissued classic film—two hundred boot-size boxes outside in an alley during the dead of San Fernando Valley summer heat, to be exact. It was the opposite of glamorous and not at all sexy, but it was fun to do something other than type and teach. I also got to attend a fan show and a couple of industry trade
events (business-only things), and I got to go onto sets. Yes, sets—where porn was being made and sex was being had. I talked to everyone I could, conducted informal interviews whenever possible, soaked up every bit of information possible, and took endless notes. As before, I told everyone I was an intern and a researcher. Some people were intrigued, but most couldn’t have cared less. This “data-gathering” period informed a major portion of my dissertation and helped me build a foundation for my future endeavors—exploring the adult industry’s sociocultural significance.
A lot happened to me and around me and (sometimes) because of me, both during my days as a porn intern and during the years it took me to earn my PhD. Ironically though, one of the most significant things to happen was actually something that didn’t—I never got my funding back. I had to piece together survival money very suddenly in 2005, and those first panicked steps really shaped the rest of my time in graduate school. While most of my peers were holed up in offices down the hallway from one another, rubbing elbows with faculty, networking at symposia, eating free lunches and drinking free cocktails, and getting “writing grants”6 from any number of benevolent programs (within the university and beyond), I was busy holding down anywhere from two to four part- and full-time jobs. There was not a lot of time for hobnobbing, which had an extremely negative impact on the integrated, network-based dimensions of my academic career.
During the years I was in graduate school, I worked as a college professor in three different university systems and in several higher education coordination positions. I also worked at about one hundred other odd jobs, which included, but were not limited to, serving drinks at a bar, under-the-table restaurant and catering work, working as an online sociology instructor, ghostwriting and editing (something I still do to this day), door-to-door data collection for the United States Census, mentoring and tutoring “advanced” students at one university and “ordinary” students at another, reading and evaluating others’ funding and grant proposals, and data coding for others’ research projects. And I did all this while taking classes, passing comprehensive exams, developing a research project, doing fieldwork, gathering data, and writing a dissertation. I was tired a lot, but somehow, in spite of what often felt like impossible (and impossibly unfair) circumstances, I ended up finishing my degree, paying my bills, and having a much more interesting time than I imagine most people do.
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