Times change, though, and content evolves. And occasionally, we do get different representations of womanhood and, interestingly, women’s interpersonal relationships. Consider, for example, Wicked Pictures’ Divorcees, a laugh-out-loud hilarious, wistful, and empowering exploration of women’s friendships, which is also porn. Written and directed by Stormy Daniels, this film—which is occasionally painfully on point in its real-life ludicrousness—is a thoughtful coming-of-age story about grown women. Here’s the synopsis from the box copy:
Now in their thirties, best friends Leanne (Stormy Daniels), Stacy (Julia Ann) and Carmen (Veronica Avluv) find themselves single and somewhat emotionally lost. After trying to heal through traditional methods, the trio decides a road trip is in order. Comedy—and Hot Sex—ensues as each tries drastically different approaches to get back in the saddle!
So three BFFs in their thirties are all single. They’re all also pretty quirky. Stacy is a little surly and 100 percent over sex, relationships, and guys in general; freshly cheated upon, Leanne is a bit more rageful and raw beneath her calm exterior; and Carmen is having a relationship with a fitness instructor (via her television) and her vibrator. She’s really a mess.
After some seriously funny and occasionally bittersweet sequences in which each lady tries various tactics to reclaim her mojo, they decide to go on a trip to LA, where everyone calls them ma’am. And they score some drugs! And Carmen stalks Ricardo (the fitness instructor) with a star map. And Leanne and Stacy meet DJ Deejay and his pal Clooney. Good-natured shenanigans ensue, and fun is had by all. Sounds cute, right? But there’s so much more.
Divorcees is good because it’s well done. The plot is simple but entertaining, the production value is high, and the sex is steamy. But Divorcees is also good because it explores many greater dimensions and themes, all of them relevant to real life. In other words, this film is good because it’s exceptional.
It’s worth noting that Carmen is not a divorcée—she’s a widow. Though this is only touched upon for a moment, it’s rare for adult films to reflect such a true-to-life experience. Divorcees looks at progressive ways of dealing with events and scenarios that can actually happen. As sad as it may be, relationships often end. People die, people cheat, and people grow in different directions. But what happens after? Seriously, what happens to “normal” people after their lives change? Divorcees explores the ridiculous and the mundane, all without some trite thirty-plus fountain-of-youth fantasy story line.
This film also shows women as friends. Now, maybe it’s just me, but over and over and over again you see media representations of women in competition, women backstabbing, and women just hating other women. But Divorcees doesn’t do that. Divorcees is about three ladies who may tease each other and who may all be very different, but they don’t hate each other. In fact, the primary motivation for the entire plot is care and concern for one another’s well-being. It was refreshing, both in terms of shattering stereotypes and (I’d like to think) showing a more nuanced version of reality.
Finally, Divorcees shows grown women as desirable and desiring, all while not being pigeonholed as cougars or MILFs. Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with cougars and MILFs, nor is there anything wrong with presenting young(er) ladies as desirable, but it was nice to see three beautiful mature women being showcased without all those extraneous tropes and stereotypes.
This movie was about friendships and loss and moving on. It was a coming-of-age story for an age bracket that’s often dismissed and rarely discussed, at least not without derision. It was about life moving forward and being a fun, silly, and unexpected adventure. It was women-centered and progressive. It made me think.
Our consideration of adult content is shaped by many things, including space and place, era, and cultural trends. Currently, we are led to look at young adulthood and youth as both desirable and problematic, a stage of life in which people are simultaneously autonomous and not, sexual and not. We have drawn a series of somewhat arbitrary lines around a collection of statuses common to this stage of life that end up shaping how we view the world. Thus, young girl content freaks me out, but also it pisses me off every time I see one of those wildly inaccurate descriptors I mentioned earlier. And I get all teary when I see something that shows women over the age of thirty as multifaceted and stimulating. Maybe this is because I’m well over thirty myself.
There’s room in the human experience for all of it, for desire at all ages (just as long as consent is involved and kids are not). And even though some of it may make us uncomfortable at various stages in our lives, we have to allow for sexual expression at all points. And we must also allow that expression to evolve.
Since I “met” her in 2012, I’ve seen Bonnie Rotten in many different scenes and roles. I’ve read her interviews, seen her speak to the press, and heard quite a few behind-the-scenes stories. And I’ve never since gotten that same “young” feeling from her. Years have passed, and her reputation remains flawless. (Killer businesswoman is now regularly included in her inventory of accolades.) In many ways, she’s stepping into shoes once filled by Stormy Daniels, who rode a similar rocket ship when she was similarly young. I look forward to seeing how Bonnie evolves. I will work to be mindful of my own evolutions throughout that process.
18
The Real Traci Elizabeth Lords
WE ALL HAVE OUR HOT-BUTTON ISSUES, THOSE THINGS people can push that end up pushing us right over the edge. And, as we know, one of my most sensitive buttons is related to the misnomer “child pornography.” Now, as I’ve said before, the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage persons happens. It happens all too often, and occasionally people even record and attempt to distribute it. In every instance, this type of abuse is horrifying and extremely problematic, but calling instances of recorded child sexual abuse “child pornography” is also problematic. It muddies the waters and conflates a wealth of issues, including the fact that the professional adult content production industry in the United States does not and has never knowingly produced content featuring an underage person. Unfortunately however, this does not mean that an underage person has never been featured in it.
Nora Kuzma was born on May 7, 1968. According to her autobiography, Underneath It All, she had a pretty difficult time growing up. Between her parents’ volatile relationship, which eventually ended in divorce, lots of moving around from the Midwest to Florida to Southern California, being sexually assaulted by a sixteen-year-old when she was ten, and her mom’s creepy, lecherous hippie boyfriend hanging around, Nora was already walking a perilous line by the time she reached junior high.
Stealing, smoking pot, drinking, and having sex with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend all amounted to Nora’s getting pregnant at age fifteen. And with the baby daddy refusing to get involved and her mother off somewhere, she turned to the only adult she knew for help—Roger, the aforementioned creepy hippie lecher. An abortion became just another event on the long list of things this young girl had to endure.
But Nora was a survivor, and, as she became increasingly self-reliant (that is, neglected and unsupervised), she began to realize that one thing you need to survive in this life is money. Nora needed a job, but she quickly found that there weren’t too many well-paying opportunities available for those in her age bracket. So with a borrowed birth certificate and a subsequently acquired legal California ID “proving” she was twenty-two-year-old Kristie Nussman, Nora found herself at an audition for “figure modeling” (legitimately, bikini, fitness, or nude modeling for things like art classes; illegitimately, a sneaky way to get doe-eyed young women to take their tops off) at Jim South’s World Modeling. Roger, ever helpful, gave her a ride to Porn Valley.
Just like that, in the blink of eye, Nora became Kristie, and Kristie started going by Traci Lords. And since she was still only fifteen, Roger became her chauffeur. Traci was wildly popular and photographed in countless pages of print porn. Eventually, though, her images saturated that media, and t
he work began to dry up. The only difference was that now Nora was even more desperate for cash.
You see, in order to psych herself up for all of that naked figure modeling, Nora had allegedly acquired a sizable coke habit, which she was topping off with a bit of a drinking problem. And though multiple industry insiders around her during these times report having never seen her use drugs on even one occasion, the need to manage her habit is what reportedly prompted her to make the jump from nude modeling to hardcore. The rest is history.
By the end of 1984, at the age of sixteen, Traci had morphed into one of the most recognized and sought-after women performers in the adult industry. Over the course of roughly the next year and a half, she would star in more than seventy adult films. And in only one of those films, Traci, I Love You, was she over eighteen.
Traci’s true identity and age were revealed in May 1986, just days after her eighteenth birthday. According to her autobiography, which she wrote under her eventually legally adopted name, Traci Elizabeth Lords, authorities had been aware of her case for three years—essentially, for the entire time she’d been working in adult entertainment. Industry insiders reported being shown during questioning photographic documentation (stakeout footage taken from afar) of Traci’s earliest work. Allegedly, law enforcement was gathering information for something having to do with the Meese Commission, watching underage Nora fuck and be fucked all the while.
Though authorities apparently were long aware of Traci’s deception, members of the industry reportedly were not. Upon learning her true age and identity, many people said they felt extremely guilty and foolish. How had they not put two and two together? A Polaroid photo serendipitously snapped by prolific industry photographer Suze Randall, showing Traci with her legal California-issued Kristie Nussman ID, was one of the only things that prevented the industry’s immediate and total shutdown in 1986.
And then there was all the content that had to be destroyed. Regardless of the industry’s misinformation about her age, countless units of Traci’s films had to be pulled from producers’ warehouses and destroyed. The loss of this stock and revenue alone was enough to put some companies out of business, and most immediately ceased any dealings in Traci’s products, which were literally child pornography.
Perhaps looking to minimize their years of data gathering, undercover investigators were able to find one person—Rubin “Ruby” Gottesman of X-Citement Video—who had learned of Traci’s true age and was still willing to sell her films. In 1987, Gottesman was convicted of knowingly trafficking sexual content featuring an underage person. His conviction was appealed on the grounds of vague and overbroad wording in the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977 (US Code, Title 18, Section 2251–2253); however, the original conviction was upheld by the United States v. X-Citement Video decision (513 US 64; 1994). With the exception of Gottesman, not one member of the adult industry was convicted of producing, possessing, or trafficking “child pornography” in light of the Kuzma/ Lords case—probably because they had all been scammed.
A similar scam happened again, years later, this time with Alexandra Quinn. Like Traci, Alexandra misrepresented her age with falsified legal identification, in this case, a Canadian passport. And like Traci’s films, Alexandra’s were destroyed immediately. But, unlike Traci, Alexandra eventually went back into the business when she was of age.
Although the Nora Kuzma/Traci Lords “child pornography” case was not used as evidence in the Meese Commission, her story and Linda Lovelace’s were invoked regularly in anti-pornography activism during the late 1980s. Both were used as “evidence” that women are systematically tortured and physically abused and children are sexually exploited through the course of porn production. But these instances actually exemplify why conservative and feminist work done in opposition of the industry during the 1980s failed to shut down or even limit porn production: Women were not being systematically abused by the industry, and the industry was not exploiting children.
Although unquestionably tragic, both Linda’s and Traci’s cases point to the wider social problems of partner and child abuse, child neglect, and interpersonal manipulation. These issues are not the “fault” of the adult industry, nor are they its sole responsibility to repair. Regardless though, just like Linda Lovelace, the name Traci Lords is still tossed around by anti-porn activists, scholars, and commentators—folks who generally don’t have a clear understanding of the facts.
Since her infamous adolescence, Traci Lords has done all right for herself. She has been in several mainstream movies, including John Waters’ Cry-Baby, Stephen Norrington’s Blade, and Kevin Smith’s ridiculous Zack and Miri Make a Porno. She’s done lots of TV, including multiple episodes of Melrose Place and Roseanne in the mid-nineties and nineteen episodes of Profiler soon after. She even released a techno-ish album called 1000 Fires in 1995, which I absolutely loved when I was in college.
Traci Lords has gone from being Two Timing Traci to a solid B-level actress doing a helluva lot more with her career in front of the camera than most people who desperately seek that sort of thing. She is incredibly beautiful, is a mom, and wrote a very compelling account of her life thus far.
Traci is also a survivor of reprehensible parenting and neglect. (Incidentally, why was Roger never sent to jail? That boggles my mind. And what about the California DMV? What about the role their negligence played in all of this?) I honestly cannot imagine the strength and tenacity it must have taken to move beyond the stigma she’s certainly felt to cultivate the life and livelihood she has. And because we as a culture are so hypocritical and judgmental, she likely still has to deal with her porn star past in some capacity every single day. Even now, thirty-odd years later.
And yet, I still feel rather ambivalent about her.
In my opinion, a child cannot be held accountable for decisions in the same way that an adult should, especially if there is a parent figure or a grown-up encouraging the exceptionally poor ones. At the same time, to assume that kids are too stupid or incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions in adolescence, even just a little . . . well, that’s just ridiculous.
I don’t necessarily think Traci “blames” the porn community for her stint in the industry. By her own account, she knew what she was doing, and she knew it was a less-than-good idea. (Or was it? Where would her career be today without the fuel of her infamy?) I wonder, though, if she blames herself. Was it her fault? Totally? Partially? Is fault even relevant at this point?
In my view, Traci’s story stopped being about her a long time ago, but I think the people whose lives she touched probably still think about her often. Because the saddest and most commonly overlooked part of this tale has to do with the industry insiders Traci impacted. Think about it: How would you feel if you were a performer who had essentially been tricked into having sex with an underage person? Or if you were a director who had filmed it? And what about the producers and distributors, the business people who suffered severe financial loss and, in many cases, devastation? Traci cost a lot of working people and small-business owners their livelihoods. And some of these folks are still there, working in porn and shaking their heads about a system that allowed a teenager to take everything.
I wonder, where is the book about them?
19
Stripper Dildo Lollipop Party
A GIRLFRIEND OF MINE GOT MARRIED RECENTLY, AND, leading up to the nuptials, my friends and I wanted to celebrate with every kind of festivity imaginable. Unfortunately though, due to various extenuating circumstances, a stripper dildo lollipop party wasn’t going to happen. Instead, we went all out for Cindy’s bridal shower, an extravagant weekend brunch at the fanciest of fancy LA-area hotels. It was an international, tri-generational event (four generations, actually, if you counted one of us having a three-month case of the babies), with attendees coming all the way from China and Germany.
Everyone was super dolled up, even me. I had taken great pains to b
ranch out from my everyday attire (yoga pants, Converse, and one of an endless array of ratty band t-shirts), arriving instead in a day dress and matching sun hat. This whole look was complemented with a lavender spring bag and a mid-size box wrapped in silver matte paper, topped with a voluminous bow. I looked like a duchess (and a stranger). Perfect.
But what was inside that box? All the ladies, but not the grand-mothers, were nervous. Because it was me, everyone suspected that I wouldn’t have been able to resist inserting a little raunch into Cindy’s very ladylike affair. So, what was inside that box?
Rewind to earlier in the week, when I had walked to my neighborhood sex shop. I’d never been inside before, but it was a seemingly subdued store located squarely in the middle of a relatively fancy touristy shopping boulevard. Now, I’ve been to a hefty handful of sex shops in my life, brick-and-mortar storefronts that run the gamut: from the larger-than-life Hustler Hollywood store on Sunset Boulevard to the quirkiest little retro place in St. Pete Beach, from high-end Dallas-area boutiques to highway-adjacent neon emporiums that are literally sticky. I’ve seen enough of them to guesstimate a store’s target market pretty accurately. Given the surroundings, I was hoping that my neighborhood sex shop would have something appropriately tasteful for the bride-to-be.
And what a bride-to-be she was. Cindy is an interesting mix of brassy bold and austere. She runs one-third of a successful multinational corporation and travels extensively in the name of her passions for food and yoga. Not surprisingly, she’s open to every new person and every new experience. But she can also be a little particular.
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