Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  A helpful factor in this solo activity was that, as my young adulthood had progressed, so had the Internet. And with the Internet, as we all know, came a deluge of smut that has yet to recede. By the time I asked Samantha to pass along my contact information to a porno mag editor in 2007, I was an old pro at online smut. But, despite my fluency in porn, my relationship with it mirrored those of many people I’ve spoken to since: Although it was a recurring motif in my life—a standard part of my weekly (okay, maybe daily) routine—I managed not to think about it very often, if at all. One of the greatest advantages, and also drawbacks, of free online porn (the kind I was watching) is that it can be accessed quickly and easily, with neither forethought nor afterthought. At the drop of one’s pants, it can be cued up and enjoyed. When the viewer is sated, it can be closed and the browser history purged in a matter of seconds. Et voilà! We can walk out the door with a clear mind, a spring in our step, and virtually no mental or emotional connection to what we just watched remaining in our minds.

  That’s pretty much how I related to porn as a young adult. My repressed upbringing, and my trauma from being assaulted, stood the test of time just as steadfastly as did my high sex drive, and though I frequently told myself I would give up the porn to appease my guilt, I wound up alone in my room with a laptop and a vibrator more often than I wanted to admit. So I didn’t admit it, even to myself. I allowed Internet porn to comfort me when I was lonely, bored, or depressed, but I didn’t give it the time of day in my normal waking thoughts.

  But the catch was that most of what I was finding online kind of freaked me out. As an overworked and underpaid administrative assistant just out of college, I couldn’t imagine being able to afford a porn site subscription, so I was left with the free stuff—for the most part, short clips of badly pixelated boning. Like, really hardcore boning. One of the signatures of the “gonzo” style of shooting that dominated the industry at the time was low production value (at least for many studios), so much of what I was seeing looked like it could have been filmed in some weirdo’s basement in a suburb in Ohio. For all I knew from the pirated clips I streamed, the actors could have been unpaid or non-consenting—the latter of these being a big issue for me, given my personal experiences.

  The ambiguity of the circumstances under which these clips were filmed compounded the guilt I already experienced every time I engaged in sexual activity. I wasn’t sure whether the things I was seeing were normal, but my upbringing told me that they could not possibly be okay. I’d been raised to feel bad for being interested in “normal” sex between two people behind closed doors, so gangbangs and dirty talk and bondage couldn’t be healthy. Could they? The question plagued me, but I was young and broke. I didn’t have many options for taking in higher-quality entertainment. And it bears mentioning that I have always nurtured a deep and abiding attraction to the forbidden. So I watched porn a few times a week, at least. Online. For free. And I felt terrible about it.

  I was just like thousands, probably millions, of other Americans. We almost all watch porn for free online, but we try not to think about it because we’re remorseful, and because we don’t really understand what we’re seeing. But no matter whether we regret our decisions or not, we keep going back to it. After all—really—how could we not watch porn? It’s everywhere.

  While the statistics on Internet porn vary wildly from source to source and remain unreliable due to a paucity of serious research on the subject, estimates range from four to nearly thirty percent of the Internet currently being devoted to pornographic content. Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five percent of Internet searches are for porn, and popular porn tube site Pornhub reported twenty-three billion visits in 2016. That’s billion with a B. In other words, given our ever-increasing dependence upon the Web and the still-evolving prevalence of technology in our daily routines, ignoring the siren song of free porn is becoming more difficult all the time.

  ALTHOUGH OUR ACCESS TO pornography has exploded in the new millennium, there’s no use in taking an alarmist approach about it or wallowing in guilt over our prurient tendencies. Porn, after all, has always been available. And I do mean always. Ever since we became Homo sapiens, and arguably even before, we’ve been into pornographic depictions of naked people doing sexy stuff. Some of the earliest artwork known to have been produced by human hands are the small carvings of voluptuous and luridly detailed female figures called “Venus figurines,” which date back as far as the Aurignacian period some thirty-five thousand years ago. Ancient cave paintings the world over (from China’s Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs to England’s Creswell Crags) depict sexual content ranging from stylized genitals to bisexual, bestial orgies. According to Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry, “The Turin Erotic Papyrus was an ancient scroll painted during Egypt’s Ramesside period (1292–1075 BCE), two-thirds of which includes explicit depictions of sexual acts.”

  Erotic artwork and inscriptions were so rampant in pre-volcano Pompeii that modern archeologists restricted access to large portions of the preserved city until quite recently, fearing an adverse reaction to the amatory murals. When researchers from Oxford deciphered a gigantic collection of two-thousand-year-old papyrus from a garbage dump in Egypt, they found themselves reading copies of a wildly popular book of erotica—the Fifty Shades of Grey of Alexandria. The Moche people of what is now Peru were painting scenes of anal sex on their pottery in the first centuries AD. Temples in India from the tenth century sport graphically-carved orgies. Japanese wood-block prints in the shunga style depicted explicit sexual liaisons from the thirteenth century on. In the fifteenth century, no sooner had the printing press concluded its Bible-printing duties than it got to work on porn. In 1749, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (commonly known as Fanny Hill) caused a sensation in England and throughout Europe, and the book was first banned then collected by smut-hungry noblemen, with the debauched writings of the Marquis de Sade only a few decades away.

  It hardly needs to be said that photography’s invention in the early 1840s was nearly immediately put to dirty use—some historians consider pornographic photos of prostitutes and dancers called “French cards” major contributors to the explosive popularity of the new medium. (Despite the popularity of these nudie pics, however, the term “pornography” wasn’t coined until 1857 in the UK, and didn’t come into common use in America until the late nineteenth century. So while we might call the Venus figurines pornographic, they wouldn’t have been considered so by their makers.)

  The first porn films were produced in the mid-1890s, more or less simultaneously with the advent of the moving picture. The earliest known surviving explicitly pornographic film, À L’Écu d’Or ou la Bonne Auberge, dates from 1908, and though that may sound quaint to us today, it’s worth noting that these films were not much tamer than what we’re used to. The filming techniques may have been less sophisticated, but Ye Olde Pornographers were into some kinky shit. The oldest surviving American porno flick, A Free Ride, for instance, features a raunchy al fresco threesome that’s spurred by two women getting excited by watching a man urinate. Water sports, anyone?

  “Stag films,” as they came to be called, were men’s club institutions, presented by their producers for small groups of men at Elks lodges, bachelor parties, brothels, and the like, well into the twentieth century. The 1960s saw an increase in legalized hardcore porn from Europe in magazines and on 8mm film, which was often looped and played in adult bookstores’ popular peep-show booths. American filmmakers soon followed suit, giving rise to a budding porn industry on this side of the pond. As the decades wore on and the Supreme Court passed down a number of rulings that more closely pinpointed the definition of prosecutable obscenity, full-scale adult theaters began to pop up, and big-budget, full-length feature films showing explicit sex were played on the silver screen. The “porno chic” films of the 1970s, like Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), saw pornography emerging as
big business, often bankrolled by organized crime.

  When the Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California ruling made the definition of obscenity reliant upon local “community standards,” the Golden Age of Porn was curtailed, but the advent of home video was not far behind. Porn workers continued doing business with lower budgets and less refined technology, skulking around without explicit legal protection. By the release of Reagan-backed Meese Commission’s report on pornography in 1986, many Americans were investing in home viewing systems to consume their sexy films in private, and the market expanded accordingly.

  Since the establishment of an explicitly legal and wildly profitable industry in California in the late eighties, our voracious appetites for smut haven’t let up. The nineties witnessed a proliferation in the medium, with hundreds of independent companies springing up in the San Fernando Valley. And, with the emergence of the Internet, pornographic websites were some of the first to make money from selling products online—a move that revolutionized the way consumers shop … and masturbate.

  It’s been argued that porn—or at least our never-ending desire for it—is one of the major forces, if not the primary driving force, behind almost every major technological advancement in our species’ history, and I tend to believe the hype. HD video was popularized by the porn industry just as much as by IMAX films. Virtual reality tech was adopted by pornographers long before mainstream producers took it on. Text messaging may never have become the go-to short-form communication of the new millennium if photos and videos had not been thrown into the mix, enabling “sexting.” Virtually every media-sharing platform and app must grapple with the masses’ wont to use it for sending, receiving, or watching sexy media. And, as far as anyone can tell, the cycle will continue for as long as we keep inventing things.

  In short, we love our porn. We have always loved it. As of 2016, CNN reported that between fifty and ninety-nine percent of American men, and thirty to eighty-six percent of American women, consume pornography. Yet, especially in America where our repression breeds obsession, we are ashamed of our proclivities. We keep porn carefully contained behind our locked bedroom doors, except for those few times a month, a week, or a day when we take it out to play before slamming the door shut again, leaving our shameful partner untended to do what it will in the dark. And, like many things that exist in the dark, it scares us to imagine seeing it in the glaring light of day.

  I had been downplaying my own relationship with pornography for years when, in the late summer of 2007, I was offered a chance to take a good, long look at the monster lurking in my closet. I reflected on the few years I’d spent out of college and noted that I had written nothing worth a damn since I’d earned my BA. I had to face the fact that, at this point in my life, I didn’t really have anything to write about. And here was porn itself—my greatest source of shame and satisfaction—knocking from the other side of the bedroom door, offering me a chance to face my lifelong struggle against the horny nature with which I’d been born.

  A photo of me taken during my pre-porn journalism days, feeling carefree in the New York City subway system

  (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  CHAPTER 2

  Getting In

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THAT rooftop party, I made my first visit to the offices of a publishing company that put out several “jizz rags,” as Samantha’s friend, the editor in chief who went by the pen name j. vegas, had called them on the phone. They were looking for a DVD reviewer, and I wanted the job.

  After a confusing series of events that left me trapped in a fire stairwell due to construction in the lobby of a nondescript office building in midtown Manhattan, I was greeted at the emergency exit by one of the tallest, skinniest white guys I’d ever seen. He was fresh faced and wearing thick black plastic-rimmed glasses, a punk T-shirt beneath a plaid button-up, cuffed and torn blue jeans, and a pair of black Converse All Stars. He stuck out a heavily tattooed arm for a handshake. “Hi, I’m vegas. I take it you’re Lynsey?”

  “Yes!” I wheezed, winded from climbing the emergency staircase.

  “Great!” he said, grinning. “Follow me, if you please!” After a few twists and turns through a maze of perfectly normal hallways hung with large prints of magazine covers featuring all manner of tits and ass, we arrived at a modestly sized office with windows looking out onto the sweltering city. A large desk was piled high with glossy magazines, photos, and notebook paper filled with illegible scribbling in red pen. A small plaque on his desk featured his name over the words “Editor in Chief.” I was impressed; he didn’t look much older than I was, and here he was with his own office, a fancy job title, and a plaque. Maybe this porn stuff was a bandwagon worth jumping on.

  I don’t remember much about our initial conversation. My nerves were in such a state that I skated through it with only part of my brain dedicated to the task. I recall that he showed me a few copies of the magazine, making it clear that this was a hardcore magazine—no FHM-style tasteful nudes here. With glee reminiscent of a child repeating all the bad words he’s overheard his parents using, j. vegas informed me that this magazine was about filthy sex, gaping holes, and close-ups of penetration. It was placed on high shelves behind all the other magazines, and it came wrapped in plastic.

  I was unfazed by this litany at the time, but I realize now that he was trying to warn me. My bright eyes and smiling optimism were red flags, I’m sure, that I had no clue what I was getting into. But I didn’t take his speech as the caution sign it was—I instead looked into his friendly eyes and noticed how happy he seemed, and I unconsciously decided that this couldn’t be as “bad” as my sex-phobic upbringing would have me believe.

  After he’d vetted me well enough for his liking, the two of us headed over to his boss’s office. When we entered Charles’s office, the graying editorial director had a set of photographs in hand and was examining them closely with one of those tiny magnifying glasses that you hold right up to the paper. I’d never seen anyone actually use one before, so I considered this impressive. He was looking, very closely, at anatomy-textbook-grade close-ups of anal penetration.

  As we waited for Charles’s attention, I noticed a small sculpture atop a stack of papers on his desk. I’d never seen anything like the shapely, shiny piece of contemporary art, which had some sort of disk balanced on top of it. It was large—the bulbous part must have had a diameter of three or four inches at least. Driven by curiosity, I reached out and touched the disk, which promptly fell off and revealed the “sculpture” to have been a blank CD balanced atop a massive black butt plug.

  I can’t imagine that I hadn’t been blushing before committing this faux pas—I’ve been blessed with that type of redheaded complexion that flushes if I so much as meet someone’s eyes—but I’m sure I was at high crimson when that butt plug revealed itself to me.

  At any rate, I left the magazine offices that afternoon with copies of several magazines to study, and one double-disc DVD set called East Coast ASSault. Charles wanted a sample DVD review and some set copy within a few days, which he’d review before deciding whether or not to hire me.

  I went home, had some lunch, and popped in the first of the two DVDs. My roommates were at school, my boyfriend was at work, the sun was shining, and I had my first-ever freelance writing assignment for a print publication. I was so ready for this.

  IT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT, in mid-2007, I had landed in a strange situation. Moving in with my boyfriend, I had assumed, would rid me of my desire to watch porn. I’d be getting laid so much, I assumed, that my desires would be satisfied and I’d be able to forget all about my shameful secret.

  But, perhaps unsurprisingly to those with more life experience, I’d been disappointed in myself when I discovered that, despite the lots of sex that I was indeed having, I still wanted to watch porn. And I did. I told myself it was because I was oversexed and unemployed, and after I’d gotten a job and acclimated myself to having regular access to a willing partner, everyt
hing would calm down. But I was watching a lot of Internet porn, reliably getting off to it when I couldn’t always do so with my partner, and I didn’t approve of the trend.

  So when porn reviewing came to me, I saw it as a way out of my nasty habit. Sure, I’d be developing a new habit to replace it, but it would be sanctioned by the income it would bring, and it would provide me, I assumed, with better porn than the stuff I’d been finding online. In that quaint way that children often arrive at imaginative but wildly inaccurate conclusions about matters for which they have no guidance, I had gotten it into my head that, because I considered much of it distasteful, my usual Internet fare was not real, professionally made porn. I thought it must be the work of bottom-feeding amateurs, and that “real” porn made by professionals didn’t end up on the Internet. “Real” porn would be fancier, I imagined, and look prettier than my Internet porn. Because they would be higher-end fare, I thought, the movies I got for review wouldn’t make me feel so bad for watching them.