So contrary to everyone’s expectations and fears, when I went in search of a gift, I wasn’t looking for a box of cock-tail straws or bulk pricing on fifteen Clone-A-Willy kits. Really, why poke the bear? It was Cindy’s special girls’ day, and I didn’t think she would appreciate such nonsense. What I was looking for was something a little fun and sexy but also classy—some subtle raunch à la Agent Provocateur meets Trashy Lingerie. Or maybe something stimulating in a therapeutic, organic kind of way. I thought this order, albeit tall, would be a bit of a no-brainer at my neighborhood sex shop. As I said, it was right in the middle of a very prominent, well-trafficked shopping area amid decently high-end stores.
But the more I thought about it, the more I started pondering a gift certificate. Because I wasn’t actually going to pick out a toy for her. We’re close, but not that close! And besides, shopping for something sexy for the bedroom might be a fun adventure for her and her soon-to-be-spouse. I envisioned a personalized gift basket comprised of a chic embossed certificate surrounded by some sexy soy candles, sensation-based lubes, and pheromone-infused massage oils, maybe with an elegant feather tickler as garnish—a beautiful collection of free-form erotic adventure!
But it was not to be. I knew that as soon as I stepped through the shop’s door.
Putting it kindly, the store was definitely on the seedier end of the sex toy store spectrum. Less kindly, the entire place was a disaster. It was dirty and disorganized. The walls were jam-packed with product, but the store still felt empty because of the underutilized floor space in the middle. And in a particularly genius move, higher-end products were adjacent to harder toys. Imagine the Lelo products right next to the Fuck Me Silly Mega Masturbators. (Look ’em up!) And the DVD selection—the one in the basement and lit by buzzing neon lights? Creepy and depressing!
Now, I’m no marketing feng shui display expert. I know little to nothing about harmonizing the human shopping experience with its environment. I also don’t know anything about running a brick-and-mortar store of any kind; aside from a summer stint organizing the Girls and Shoes departments at Target when I was eighteen, I’ve never worked at anything even remotely retail. But I’m a pretty experienced consumer, I’m fairly well versed in sex-related products, and as I’ve said, I’ve been inside many sex shops.
And I was shocked by this store! Specifically, I was shocked by how uncomfortable I felt inside it. Especially given its surroundings. I couldn’t imagine a setup that would be less conducive to enticing the shoppers milling about on the streets outside. I couldn’t imagine a person popping in for some lube after a fancy lunch and some retail therapy. Well, actually I could imagine it. I just couldn’t imagine it happening at this store. And I couldn’t imagine my friend having an enjoyable experience with her partner in this place. The Hustler store perhaps, but not here.
Maybe I was wrong. My neighborhood sex shop was in business, so obviously everyone was not as put off, but the entire experience both depressed and floored me. I wanted to support adult novelty retail and my local economy, but this place had nothing to offer me, not even for the stripper dildo lollipop party we weren’t having.
This entire sequence of events illustrated a wealth of lessons, both about the challenges one might face when attempting to “go local” by patronizing smaller, independent businesses and about the disconnects that can occur between an old-school business and an emerging clientele. In the end, Cindy got a typical gift card from a typical chain store, one that specialized in kitchen gadgets and home goods. That’s what was inside that perfect mid-size box wrapped in silver matte paper and topped with a voluminous bow. And I got a lesson in DIY gift baskets and online shopping—namely, start early, or you’ll be out of luck. Bummer.
20
Coming Out Porno
FOR A LONG TIME, I LIVED A DOUBLE LIFE.
For years, I worked quietly as a graduate student and professor. This, in and of itself, was difficult. Teaching four courses at a pair of very different schools—one elite liberal arts university and one community college—often made me feel a bit unhinged. The students’ needs and each institution’s expectations couldn’t have been more different. At one school, I had parents confronting me about the B their third-year student earned in my upper-level Identities course (no joke); at the other, I had a young single mother in hysterics when her babysitter flaked at the end of the semester. To this day, the only time I’ve ever done child-care work was while one of my students was completing her final exam. Top that with the tedium required to complete a dissertation, and you get a pretty clear picture of me in my early thirties.
But the difficulties I experienced while balancing what were essentially two (maybe three) full-time jobs were just the tip of the iceberg. The weighty remainder of my double life existed just beneath the surface. Because even though I had completed the fieldwork portion of my dissertation by 2008 and technically needed nothing more, I was still very much involved with the adult industry.
Given my roots in feminist scholarship and social justice, I felt compelled to give back to the community that had contributed so significantly to my work. So, as I pecked away at my dissertation and dealt with various student meltdowns and successes, I also continued helping out at conventions and the like, contributing wherever I felt ethically comfortable. And as more and more time passed, I started to see additional holes in the public’s understanding of porn. I witnessed blatant, outlandish bias in the mainstream media, and I cringed as other academics made endless off-base and problematic statements about the adult business and the humans (currently or formerly) involved therein. And it came from all sides, at any given moment.
For example, I was out with a group of people for a close friend’s birthday. Patrick had a large and diverse collection of associates from a variety of backgrounds, including one rather unsavory woman in “feminist media studies” (her words). I had never met her, but she was very curious about me.
“So, Pat tells me you do some interesting stuff,” she fished. “Like, with porno?”
“Kind of,” I said, already apprehensive about where this was going. “I study social movements in the absence of on-the-ground organizing and activism. The adult entertainment industry is the case I’m looking at.”
She took a second to process, then dived right in: “So, you’ve gone to all those shows in Vegas and stuff, right?” I nodded, and she continued, now louder, addressing the rest of the group: “God, we should all go and watch the porn people and laugh at them!”
“Laugh at ‘them’?” I asked. “Do you mean laugh at the people working, or do you mean laugh at the people who go to the show? Or everyone? We could laugh at all ‘those’ people. Maybe that would be fun?” I suggested, laying the sarcasm on thick.
“God, yes!” she squealed. “What a bunch of freaks!”
“Freaks” worthy only of mockery—this was the unfiltered response from a person who described her work as “feminist media studies.” I politely excused myself.
By the time I graduated, PhD in hand despite all odds, I was ready to rip my hair out. I had been maintaining my public composure about porn for years by that point, but I just couldn’t do it any longer. As I’ve mentioned, academic publishing takes a long time, and I wanted to find a way to get information out into the world more quickly and in a more accessible way. So even though I was absolutely terrified to do so, I started a blog upon completion of my degree. PVVOnline.com is “critical commentary on adult production”—interviews, film and content reviews, and my perspective on porn as a sociologically significant dimension of our wider culture. It was my coming out as a sociologist and as someone who was interested in the adult entertainment industry.
Around that same time, I also began working on more in-the-trenches, community-oriented research and scholarship. In the fall of 2010, mere months after I had collected my degree, I conducted a series of focus groups and interviews with adult performers working in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
A lot of political things had been going on in porn, developments related to health, law, and free speech.
One major issue had to do with workplace safety on set, or what’s come to be known as the condom debate: Should performers be required to wear condoms during vaginal and anal penetrative sex scenes? Though there’s more to this conversation, there were two distinct sides to the argument. On one hand, you had the adult industry raising free-speech concerns, bodily autonomy issues, and their STI-infection-mitigation-via-standardized-testing protocol. On the other hand, you had safer-sex rhetoric, the big business of sexual health, and the fact that people often misappropriate adult content for sex education. In the middle of all this were the performers, the folks who were actually impacted on every level. I was curious as to what performers actually thought about the issues, so I designed a study and set about asking them.
Prior to this cycle of data gathering, I had only been a fly on the wall—an ethnographer, an observer, a voyeur. And though I’d certainly done my fair share of informal, conversational interviews, this was the first time I had ever sat down, on purpose, with currently working (and in some cases, really prominent) adult performers in order to ask them structured, point-blank questions. Structured, point-blank, loaded questions. So in order to be effective and respectful, I had to learn to speak Porn Star Porno. (Yes, it’s a dialect.)
Like any subculture or group, porn performers have their own way of saying certain things. Porn Star Porno involves a vernacular drenched in bodily fluids and sexual acrobatics and consists of all sorts of things that those outside the industry don’t really understand, much less say in polite conversation. So even though I was perfectly comfortable saying “vagina” to a room full of twentysomethings taking a Gender and Sexualities course, saying “pussy” in lieu of “vagina” to a small group of slightly fussy porn performers made me sweat, just a little. So did saying “cock,” “blowbang,” “cum fart,”1 and any number of other things.
But I got it done.
These interviews ended up giving rise to a really great study that I published in Stanford Law and Policy Review.2 More important, this allowed me to take another step into the adult community. I could feel people relax a bit more around me because my words and my writing conveyed that I was both interested in and familiar with their work.
As I continued traveling down the academic yellow brick road, moving on to a Visiting Scholar position at USC, I also kept one foot in the world of porn. My insights on PVV developed, as did my understanding of the adult industry, and I continued publishing rigorous scholarly research. But I could feel myself shifting. Though my teaching work as a professor and my research work as a scholar were desperately needed in academia, I could feel it making a greater impact in the everyday world. What once seemed so compelling—scholarship and a university life—gave way to what was truly necessary: social justice for the adult community. I began taking active steps toward these ends. Not surprisingly, a number of representatives from the world of academia had some mixed feelings.
For example, in 2012, I began doing something innovative at AEE. Every year, AEE holds educational seminars alongside their fan days and business activities. The topics of these seminars can range from legal issues shaping the adult business to technology trends and retail strategies. And for the 2012 show, I had the honor of organizing and moderating a panel on women working in porn.
I took the planning and organizing of my panel very seriously, and I wanted it to incorporate two things. First, I wanted a good balance of occupations, not an over-representation of any one dimension. This panel was supposed to be about women working in the industry, and though I knew I couldn’t get at every aspect (I was limited to five speakers), I wanted to capture as full a picture as possible. Second, I wanted to have industry leaders involved. Because though everyone at every level certainly has a great deal to contribute, I imagined that people attending this panel wanted to learn something. I figured that the best place to learn was from people who had done it—and had done it well.
So after some shuffling and scheduling and pulling personal favors, my “It’s (not) a Man’s World: Women Leaders in the Adult Production and Novelty Industry” AEE panel included an incredible fierce five: a woman who was a high-profile performer turned writer and director; a woman executive with a background in marketing and sales who ran production at a major studio; a woman who worked as a sales representative and retail educator for a leading novelty company; the CEO of a leading web-based, tech-centered adult content producer; and an industry reporter who also ran her own boutique public relations firm catering to adult novelty clients. It was amazing. The room was packed. I was on adrenaline fire, and people seemed to love the panel.
There was just one hiccup.
At some point, a woman toward the back of the room raised her hand. After waiting her turn, she asked a statement-question along these lines: “This panel is very nice, but it doesn’t really reflect the diversity of the industry, does it?” My heart sank. Because in one painfully obvious respect, she was completely correct. Everyone on the panel was white (and blonde), and the lack of racial diversity was exactly what she was getting at. I knew it, and I had been agonizing over this since the moment I began assembling the panel. Luckily, I’d already thought long and hard about race, diversity, and representation within the context of the event, so I was able to respond with something along the lines of: “Well, if you only focus on physical appearance and the social construction of race to define diversity, then you’re completely correct.”
I continued, “There are only white people on this panel, and the industry is definitely made up of way more than just white folks. However, I was focusing on occupational diversity when I developed and organized this event. And though there’s no way to represent every possible job on a five-person panel, and though I certainly don’t know, nor could I ask for a favor from, every woman who works in a specific job—because taking the time out from a business event to sit on this panel is definitely a favor these women are doing for me and for all of us—in terms of women’s jobs in adult, this panel is as diverse as possible.”
And then the conversation moved on.
It was a perfectly reasonable question, one I had already considered at length. Truth be told, I think about race, class, and gender in everything I do. I had also pondered the same issue in terms of religious and spiritual beliefs and sexual orientation. And though I hadn’t asked the panelists about their prayer practices or whom they liked having sex with, I was pretty sure they weren’t diverse in those respects either. Throughout the planning process, I had to make decisions based on my two primary goals for the panel, within the context of my resource pool (which relied on my reputation and drew from the personal contacts I had cultivated up to that point). I could have had more women of color on the panel; but replacing a panelist with token diversity at the expense of occupational variety and industry experience, which is what would have happened given my network at the time, would have been a disservice to the entire event. And even though no one else seemed to notice this little blip (with the exception of the questioner herself, who actually apologized to me after the panel had concluded), I agonized over it to the point of doing a little poking around on the Internet.
Thanks to peoples’ endless desire to over-share on public digital forums, I discovered that the woman who had asked the question about racial diversity was actually “asking for a friend.” One of her associates, a women’s studies professor at a large state university, who was also present at the panel, had made some comment about the panel’s lack of diversity at the very beginning of the event.
From the perspective of average people living daily lives, querying diversity on racial grounds is more than fair. In fact, I would argue that we as a culture have been programmed to see nothing but race when we think about diversity in general. Further, I would offer that, had I known every single woman who worked in the adult industry such that I could implore them to
speak on a panel and I still ended up with a table full of white ladies . . . well that would have indicated significant issues related to race and occupational diversity for sure.
But that’s not what happened.
For another academic, especially one trained in women’s studies and presumably social justice and feminist scholarship to make such an uninformed and uncritical statement, all while watching from the audience and contributing nothing, well, at first I was floored. And mad. Actually, I was furious. But then it made me realize—this was simply one star in the night sky. It was just one of many instances where academics refuse to “see” the adult industry, which indicates an almost canonized refusal to acknowledge the multidimensional quality of human beings and human society as a whole.
My AEE panel in 2012 crystallized something I’d actually known since my early days at CSUN. The conventional path was not for me. The conventional graduate school experience hadn’t been mine, and it was clear that a conventional academic career wouldn’t be mine either. I was going to have to figure out a new way to be the change I wanted to see in the world, a new way to make the world safer and more inclusive for folks who weren’t “normal”—from all those pornographers to so many others just like them. Myself included.
So that’s what I’m doing now.
Afterword
NO STORY EVER REALLY ENDS, BUT WHEN ONE REACHES the cutoff point for any big project, it’s only natural to sit back and consider everything collectively, as a whole. And when one reflects on the stories in this book, some questions emerge: What does it all mean? What are the takeaways? What are my “conclusions”?
By now, some of the memories shaping these stories are fifteen years old. Some of them are even older. But they all still inform me. They still shape me, and they will always be a part of who I am—and I really like who I am. On a personal level, that’s what all this means to me, today. In addition to the personal though, and in addition to the generally obvious (for example, Don’t be an asshole or Dr. Chauntelle thinks certain porn movies named here are really good), there are many broad lessons we can cull from these tales of socio-porno exploration.
Exposure Page 14