Exposure

by Chauntelle Tibbals

  There are five scenes in Natural, all fairly straightforward and all epitomizing Elegant Angel’s unique, starkly beautiful aesthetic. And all, allegedly, “natural.”

  I struggle with this attribution—natural. It’s extremely widespread, but what does it mean? In the contemporary porn lexicon “natural” is simply code for “no boob jobs,” but I just can’t get over the fact that the lack of boob jobs is the only natural thing about the women performers in this film. From the settings, the lighting, and the oil and water being misted or poured over various body parts, to the fact that most of the women performers have tattoos, all of them have beautiful hair and makeup, and one has had fairly significant cosmetic dental work, everything is contrived. These things are all well and good, but they’re not natural.

  And why does natural just mean no boob jobs? Why stop there? Why not rule out altered noses or lips, artificial nails, or tattoos? It really makes very little sense. For example, no one would ever call the currently untattooed Kagney Linn Karter (who is featured in Natural’s bonus scene) natural, but her implants probably took less time to complete than Hayden Winters’ elaborate ink (Hayden is featured in the actual film), and Kagney wears no more or less makeup than any of her contemporaries. Neither Kagney nor Hayden is unaltered; and when you really think about it, no one is. So I struggle with referring to anything in the modern world as natural, especially in film projects and even more so in porn.

  Less invasive but equally confounding are trends associated with pubic topiary, or the manicuring of bush.

  Our world is filled with fads. What’s hot one day will soon be not and will likely cycle back around again. It’s a sociocultural thing that happens with music, food, fashion, politics . . . and pubic hair. Pubic hair has been styled for various reasons for hundreds of years, and we’ve gone through many looks. From the wearing of merkins (pubic wigs that were historically used following shaving to combat lice and are now used for fun and as costuming in performance art) to the voluminous seventies’ bush, these hair-down-there styles are just as faddish as anything else.

  In contemporary porn, although hairy has long been (and continues to be) a significant niche, the vast majority of performers tend to be relatively hairless. (Well, at least they are when they’re on camera.) Trends range from all to mostly bare in the most visible content, and even the women and films touting bush present very specifically manicured configurations.

  Though it’s impossible to determine if performers dictate the styles that show up in content or if consumers demand specific looks, to which performers and producers respond (I think it’s both and more), these pubic hair patterns provide a wealth of fodder for debates about the wider social implications of such manicuring in general.

  At one end of the spectrum, there’s an increasingly vocal contingent that feels a woman’s pubic hair is hers to style and/or remove as she sees fit. At the other are those who maintain certain forms of pubic topiary are unnatural and have substantial negative social implications. And in between are folks who hold just about every other opinion about every other configuration of pubes imaginable.

  Lately though, some people have been talking about the bush in a new way. Supposedly, it’s back! And in some respects, based on my observations, it is. But not like you’d think. The mainstream adult industry’s current love affair with hair does not involve seventies-era nostalgia or any semblance of natural. Actually, it’s just another trending coif.

  Consider Elegant Angel’s series Bush. It consists of well-done titles that showcase the latest craze in pubic topiary—long on top and bare on the sides and around back. This look always makes me think of nineties-era Beverly Hills, 90210 and its character David Silver. He sported the same look, just on his head—long on top and shaved on the sides and around back. What we’re seeing now is simply a David Silver for the mons veneris. This configuration satisfies many needs in contemporary porn, namely, getting a good penetration shot, while still attempting to embody an air of unwaxed, unshaven realness. But just as Hayden Winters’ “natural” tattoos ring false, these bits of David Silver–styled bush feel more like marketing than authenticity.

  Films like these do not mean the bush is back. Instead, they’re simply evidence of an emerging style. Will this configuration become the landing strip of today? Will the rest of the world soon be blaming porn for the long-on-top, shaved-on-the-sides-and-around-back look? And most importantly, what cutesy name will bikini waxers and estheticians come up with for this request? Perhaps the David Silver!

  I kid. But seriously—whether we’re talking about boobs or bush or braces or sex or music or food (or anything else), consistency and authenticity in contemporary media is a tricky subject full of pitfalls. I sometimes wish that, rather than trying to convince themselves something is real or fake, people would simply experience the creation, whatever it is.

  But maybe that’s just me.

  6

  Average Joes and the Monster Cock

  I ONCE RAN INTO THE LEGENDARY AND LAUDED ADULT performer Rod Johnson in the lobby of Sexytime Products. Sexytime is a leading manufacturer of adult novelties—porno speak for sex toys. I was super excited to see Rod, as we are buddies in real life and it had been a while, so we spent a few minutes chatting before it even occurred to me to ask him what the heck he was doing there.

  It seems that Rod was there that day to pick up his penis, two of them actually. Apparently, Sexytime had recently molded and manufactured a sex toy version of Rod’s cock, and the company was in the process of distributing it across the land! As he and I were standing there talking, someone from the warehouse brought out two fancy boxes, units of product ready to go. Rod continued to chat, never missing a beat, but I was distracted. I immediately grabbed the closest box, eager to get a better look. I had seen plenty of his work, but I’d never actually studied the goods up close before. How did his penis stack up?

  The packaging was impressive, the size of a large shoebox, with a clear plastic window on the front. One could easily peer in, gazing upon the impressive prize suspended inside its packaging shell. The box’s remaining sides were glossy and colorful, covered with smoldering, seductive images of Rod’s bad-boy face. And there was list of the unit’s advantages and features. These included being modeled after Rod’s real-life cock, as well as boasting that the contents constituted a realistic, seven-inch (“actual size”), insertable, waterproof, harness compatible, phthalate-free novelty. Each unit came complete with a hand-painted pink tip and “true-to-life saggy balls.”

  True-to-life saggy balls.

  “Why do you need two . . . er, three . . . of these?” I asked.

  His response was not nearly as titillating as I would have liked. Apparently, Rod was traveling over the next week with his girlfriend, Phoenix Lee. Phoenix had several feature dance bookings and radio show appearances lined up, and one program director had set up a contest for listeners. Winners would receive one of Phoenix’s sex toys, a molded and manufactured replica of her external genitalia. The station had asked Rod to bring his toy in as a gag prize for the losers. Rod took this request with a grain of salt, but the whole thing seemed rather unkind to me.

  We parted ways soon after, and, honestly, I didn’t think much more about it. It’s not so uncommon for performers of Rod’s caliber to have their own novelty dildo dong thing, and I’ve long since given up trying to figure out why anyone would want two penises instead of one . . . or none . . . or three . . . or otherwise.

  I found myself thinking about Rod’s rod sometime later though, after a PR announcement of epically ordinary proportions found its way into my inbox. Apparently Topco Sales, another leading adult novelty manufacturer, had just launched its Average Joe line of realistic dongs. Relative to Rod’s toy, these novelty items were rendered in more “average” sizes, because, as their marketing materials suggested, “not everyone wants to play with a porn-sized cock.”

  The Average Joe line consisted of six different dongs. Each A
verage Joe was realistic, waterproof, phthalate free, and harness compatible, just like Rod’s replica. But unlike Rod’s toy, none of the Average Joes were claiming to reflect an actual person. Instead, each Average Joe had an invented name and some sort of fantasy identity attached to it. Victor the Construction Worker, Darnell the Fitness Instructor, and three other Joes each measured in at an impressively average six inches, while one guy, Andy the Mechanic, was an extra-usual 5.5 inches.

  What I found especially interesting about these Average Joes was that, in spite of their complete and total fakeness, each was allegedly bringing a different sort of “realness” to the table. Supposedly, they were more representative of an average person’s reality than Rod’s porn-size cock. But that didn’t make sense to me. Rod was real, as was his penis. How could an Average Joe be more real than Rod? I found it interesting that the contrived realness of the Average Joes was being presented as somehow better or more authentic than an exact replication of Rod’s rod.

  Then I started thinking about Rod himself. For him, maybe those Average Joes didn’t even register. Perhaps he didn’t even think about the fact that if they were truly “average” then he was outside the norm (above the curve or otherwise). And for Rod, because those boxes containing molds of his own cock were actual embodiments of what he had and who he was, maybe he never once considered that the Average Joes (who were pure fiction) were being marketed as more “real” than he—an actual real human—was. But I thought about all of this. And what about other penis-wielding sorts? What might they think about Rod and all those Average Joes? Because if the mystique of women porn performers’ bodily proportions, including overall physique, breast size, apparent genitalia, and more, can induce insecurities in ladies (as is so often claimed), what might all seven inches of Rod’s rod do to others with variably sized rods themselves? It was interesting to consider the novelty dildo and the balance between porn star penises, Average Joes, and the ever-elusive Monster Cock.

  There are a wide range of dongs available in the adult novelty world. Rod’s toy and the Average Joes are nowhere near the only ones, as a quick search of “dildo sex toys” at any conventional sex toy website reveals. For example, at some point, I searched through the well-known, well-developed, and (according to Alexa.com) well-trafficked AdamEve.com. At the time, I found everything from the 5.5-inch-long, 1-inch-thick, pretty pink Femme Rubber Dildo to the 11-inch-long, 2-inch-thick Double Bullet Jumbo Dildo. There was also the 8.5-inch-long Carmen’s Fun Cock: EXTRA LARGE (1.5 inches thick, FYI) and the 15-inch-long, 2-inch-thick King Dong Dildo—the “biggest dildo ever!” Now granted, the King Dong Dildo is cross-marketed as a joke gift, a for-fun novelty if you will. But you only have to look a little further into more advanced corners of the sex toy world to find the WildFire Extra-Large SensaFirm Black-Balled Cock (11 inches long, 3 inches thick)—a toy made for actual use that comes with a safety disclaimer.

  The real-world approximate average erect length for a human penis is five to six inches. But in the world of novelty cocks, real-world average falls on the small end of the spectrum—the pretty pink beginner end. And leading porn performers aren’t really packin’ that much more. Yes, Rod is longer than average, but he is nowhere near 11 inches. This implies that, relative to the sex toy world, average (and Average Joe) penises and porn-size cocks are actually small. Anything progressively larger is for a more advanced user.

  People often talk about the disconnects between women and sex in porn and real women and real sex in real life, highlighting the presumably negative effects these disconnects have on the wider social world. I find this type of rhetoric to be somewhat shortsighted and tedious, if for no other reason than the people in porn are themselves completely real, as is the sex that they’re having. And you can’t generalize about the impact a series of images or fantasy presentations are going to have on people. What may stir fear or revulsion in one person may be the hottest thing ever to the next; what may make one person insecure may be inspiring to another.

  But I do wonder about the impact sex toy marketing might have on men. Not that I think it has any single uniform consequence, but clearly fantasy is different from reality when it comes to penis prosthetics. If one is concerned with the effects of adult imagery on women, why not also worry about the effects a girl-girl scene featuring a Foot Long Double Dildo (1.5 inches thick) may have on an actual average Joe named Andy, mechanic or otherwise?

  7

  On Set

  THE FIRST TIME I WAS ON A PORN SET—DURING ACTUAL shooting, I mean—it was a big deal, but not because anything outlandish or unexpected happened. It was a big deal because I had never experienced such a thing before. I was nervous, I was sweating, and I was afraid I would make the performers uncomfortable or knock something over. Plus, let’s be honest here—I’d seen all those black-light scenes in crime shows, and I was worried about . . . dried substances.

  My first time on set was also a big deal because, while I was relatively keyed up, everyone else seemed absolutely absorbed with (or totally bored by) their jobs. The fact that doing said jobs involved recording two people having sex didn’t seem to matter much at all.

  I was flabbergasted.

  But after about ten minutes or so of a director working with some naked guy who took instructions and made adjustments to his cock’s position near an equally naked woman who was on all fours at the foot of some prop futon, I started to calm down. Outside of the attention it took to get the job done, no one cared. No one was weirded out, except me, and there was nothing going on besides work. I was eventually able to refocus my attention on the labor of the situation.

  But then the performers changed positions, and I had to start the work-normalization process all over again. Such was the required learning curve, I guess.

  Since then, I’ve been on numerous sets, while numerous types of sex were being filmed for various types of porn. It’s become far less stressful. One time, on one set, I actually dozed off.

  I had been invited to the set of American Dad XXX—a satirical take on Fox’s animated American Dad! sitcom. Parodies were so hot around 2010 that anything was fair game. Even cartoons. There’s a Simpsons porn parody and one of South Park—no joke.

  Getting an invite to the American Dad XXX set wasn’t really a big deal. I received such invitations regularly, but not because I was special or anything. Though these events were never open to the public, industry reporters, bloggers, and folks who were trying to show the adult industry and adult content production in a more complex light often were invited. The hope was for media coverage, which was all part of building some pre-release buzz.

  This is what the invitation said:

  Exquisite Films and Paradox Pictures invite media to attend the set of American Dad XXX on [Date X]. This real-life rendition of the popular animated series features a star-studded cast. . . . [Date X] will mark the first day of production on American Dad XXX and [will] include sex scenes, dialogue scenes, glamour photos, and box cover photos. . . .

  Decisions, decisions. Though I had never once watched an episode of American Dad!, I hadn’t been on set in a while. I had to be in the Valley that day anyway, and a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen for some time had to be there, too. We’d be able to catch up over lunch afterward, so I decided to pop in.

  I got to the set just after 11 a.m. Everything was set up inside one of about six or so storefronts making up an innocuous, commercial/ industrial building in the middle of a nondescript mixed-use block—residential on one side of the street, commercial on the other. There was nothing about the location’s exterior that suggested porn was being shot inside.

  And truthfully, when you first entered the building, you wouldn’t have known it either. Two nice ladies greeted me, and a representative from the company’s PR management team introduced me to other media and visitors in attendance. While waiting in the little break/ snack/lounging room, I got the pleasant surprise of meeting and chatting with Kim Airs, the proprietrix of
Grand Opening, a “sexuality boutique” (her description). In addition to running Grand Opening, Kim is a sex toy consultant who reviews adult novelties, lectures on college campuses, and offers advice to doctors and patients dealing with sex-related problems caused by medical issues. I had known about Kim for a while and was super excited to meet her in person.

  We engaged in some gushing mutual love of each other’s work and eventually moseyed onto the actual set. There were four rooms built out in a larger warehouse, each designed to look something like American Dad!—a conventional home, except really brightly colored. Kim and I continued our chat while photographers snapped away at sex bomb Angelina Valentine and, eventually, Evan Stone. They were booked to work together in the first scene of the day. We found some folding chairs and pulled up a seat.

  And then it was hurry up and wait as everyone seemed to get ready for, well, I’m not sure what. A couple of informal interviews were going on around the room, Angelina and Evan were practicing their lines, production assistants were scampering around doing all sorts of preparation-looking things. Kim got some texts that she had to attend to and stepped outside. I started to get a little sleepy, so I ate a banana and drank some water.

  A photographer had started shooting Angelina, who was in the most awkward-looking position: one leg up and across a dining room table, looking over the opposite shoulder, while balanced on the tallest platform shoe ever. She made it seem effortless. Evan was now off to the side, joking with some reporter, and I could hear him laughing. It was kinda warm in there, and my head was starting to nod to one side. The lights were strangely bright. Then it got hot . . . then dim.

  And then suddenly everything was very bright and glamorous and incredible. Glitter started to fall from the ceiling, covering the floor with a light dusting of silver sparkle. Pink neon ran along every line and corner in the room—I was in a sparkly pink spider web. Evan walked up to me. Inexplicably, he was wearing an orange and pink ringmaster’s costume and carrying an ornate platter. I was eyeing the trio of baby goats walking alongside him (where did they come from?) when he leaned over and offered me some pizza and a glass of champagne. Wait! Where was I? Where was Kim? Did I just doze off in my chair?