by Lynsey G
I could hardly have been further off target. The truth was that Internet porn as I knew it was just your standard, ho-hum American porn of the day, which had been illegally reproduced and put up for free on the Internet. Because people just like me were watching pirated material so damn much, the porn industry was losing millions. In fact, money was evaporating so fast that porn producers had entered into a terrified frenzy in which they filmed as much cheap content as possible and put it out into the market as fast as they could in order to make a few bucks before the pirates got around to stealing it.
Thus, in the mid-2000s, a genre of porn called “gonzo” rose to prominence. The majority of gonzo produced in those days spent very little time, money, or effort on production value, and required no scripting, costuming, plot, or really anything else. It was what Wicked Pictures director Brad Armstrong called “the make-it-for-as-cheap-as-you-can, throw-it-out-there, sell-it-for-as-little-as-you-can stuff” in an interview with me a few years later. (Certainly not all gonzo porn fit this mold—some studios did, and still do, produce gonzo porn with high production value and beautiful cinematography, but there are several boatloads more of the cheapo stuff in existence.) The genre’s “in the action” filming style, often using Point of View (POV) camera angles without dialogue, scripting, or setup, embraced an “erasure of the so-called fourth wall where there is no pretense of separation between the performers and the viewers,” according to Shira Tarrant. It was named after Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous immersive style of journalism, and though in many cases it may have been a miscarriage of a literary legacy, the name stuck.
In keeping with its breakneck speed and pared-down production style, gonzo porn often prioritized shock value in the hopes of baiting consumers into paying for something they hadn’t seen before. One company would offer a brand-new performer’s first-ever blowjob, but then another would up the ante by offering that performer’s first-ever blowbang (think gangbang, but with oral sex only). A third company would then enter the fray, showing a first-time model’s debut blowbang, but then another company would release an even-newer newbie deep-throating the biggest cock in the biz while taking the second-biggest anally. This of course would give rise to a different company releasing video of another newbie drinking semen out of a shoe, which would lead to a different company grilling up a multiple-man semen omelet and feeding it to the woman who’d just been gangbanged. (I’m not making that one up. And there’s actually a word for semen-feeding content, which is perhaps unsurprisingly Japanese: gokkun. Not to be confused with bukkake—also Japanese—in which multiple men ejaculate on one person. But bukkake, in turn, is not to be confused with a simple gangbang, during which men may ejaculate on someone’s face, but they may do so elsewhere, and in which no semen consumption is required.)
You get the gist. The name of the game was to shock in order to sell as much as possible, at as little cost as possible—whatever it took to make a quick buck, even if that meant grossing out ninety percent of the audience.
Let me be clear. I’m talking about more than hair-pulling and getting the occasional spurt of semen in someone’s eye. I’m talking about rigorous double, triple penetrations. Fishhooking and smacking and choking, retching and swearing and spitting. Close-ups of holes gaping so wide a viewer could question what they were looking at. Acts that may have been exciting and even intensely pleasurable for the actors, but which might have just as easily been painful, dangerous, or traumatizing, if conditions were wrong. Sitting at home watching, I had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty made me squirm.
Let me also state that most of these sex acts were not considered specialties or fetishes. They were just run-of-the-mill samples of the adult entertainment being filmed primarily in California at the time. Most of them were scenes that had been filmed randomly, then grouped together according to a theme and packaged under a somewhat upsetting name like Throat Yogurt. (Yes. That’s a real title. So is Sperm Receptacles.)
The gonzo period was when edgy became normal in adult film. The now-standard deep-throat, gagging blowjob scene became mainstream in the mid-2000s; anal sex became a matter of course rather than an exotic side dish; behavior that some might find degrading and borderline violent was normalized in porn. Sure, this kind of hardcore fare had been made for decades, largely in low-budget fringe films, but the gonzo era pushed it as far into the mainstream as possible. And now it was being produced and marketed aggressively to an audience that had such a glut of choices that the weirder the content, the more intriguing it seemed, and the more likely it became that anyone would spend money on it.
Danny Wylde, a now-retired porn star, artist, author, and big fan of horror and grindhouse entertainment, made an excellent point in our 2011 interview: “A great deal of contemporary audiences get off on degradation,” he said. “It’s in our films, television, and magazines all the time.” I suppose there is something to that—gonzo porn may be another arm of our already-existing tendencies toward degeneracy. But I’ve never overly enjoyed the horror genre, and there may be an element of this kind of media that passed right over my earnest little head.
In 2007, it shocked and concerned me, and I really hoped that the DVD reviewing gig would buoy me above the dregs I’d been floating around in online.
CHAPTER 3
East Coast ASSault
AS I POPPED EAST COAST ASSault into the shared DVD player in the living room in my apartment in Harlem, I envisioned myself in a few months’ time, wearing a beret and black turtleneck with a cigarette holder (never mind that I’ve never been a smoker) and a glass of wine in hand, telling my rapt friends about my first film reviewing experience. “This film asked some important questions about what butt stuff really means,” I’d drawl, receiving impressed nods in response.
But East Coast ASSault did not open my eyes to a new existential contemplation of filmed sex acts. It did, however, deepen my understanding of the reality of the porn industry, and inspire in me a line of questioning that to this day has not ended.
The conceit of the film was that a tired, oversexed porn actor (also the film’s director and producer) was trying to get away from his grueling schedule in Los Angeles by vacationing on the drearier side of the country, but everywhere he went, some voracious acquaintance (or several) would seduce him (and sometimes his friend, too). And so, on video, he fucked his way through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Montreal, and maybe Toronto. Or Providence? I don’t remember. Anyway, it was a solid five-hour marathon that contained the same kind of hardcore, frill-free, pared-down boning I’d been watching on the Internet for years, but with slightly better production quality than I’d been accustomed to online.
I remember being confused—this was not what I’d thought I was signing up for. But then again, some of my ethical qualms were allayed. I knew where it came from, for instance—there were credits all over the place, a notice of where the legal records were being kept, and professional editing to indicate that somebody gave a damn about the product. I knew that everyone in the film had been paid for their work, that the women involved had consented to do what they were doing and had signed papers to that effect.
And, for all my dismay over the bursting of my Internet porn bubble, East Coast ASSault didn’t exactly disappoint me.
In fact, the scene filmed in New York was exceptionally arousing. It was a threesome shot in a hotel room, and the two women involved were extremely, vocally, voraciously enthusiastic. I don’t just mean that they seemed to enjoy themselves; I mean that they loved it. They were smiling and laughing and squealing and clearly getting off, again and again. For sex-shamed little me, it was hugely erotic to see women so into the sex they were having, and I didn’t feel bad about enjoying myself as I watched their pleasure. True, there was a lot of slapping and spitting that I didn’t find erotic, per se, but it was made sexy by the sheer enjoyment of the participants. Their excitement obliterated my queasiness.
But, as I soldiered on through hours two, three
, and four of the double-disc set, my qualms came roaring back. There was a scene filmed in Montreal in which the woman seemed uninterested at best, deeply intoxicated at worst. Whatever the case may have been, she did not look aroused or even really there for most of the forty-five-minute scene. I wanted to skip it, but I had to review the entire film, so I stuck it out, wincing the whole way through as I was blearily reminded of one of the worst moments of my own life—being sexually assaulted while I wasn’t fully conscious. Her placid face and lethargic movements felt deeply wrong, and I wondered if the fact that she had signed the same papers and been paid the same as the other women in the film made her clearly uninspired performance, strictly speaking, okay.
In a way, the big questions I’d hoped to find buried in the artistic subtext of the film were here, writ large and less than artsy: Why had this model signed up to do the scene if she didn’t really want to? Was she just there for the money? Did she hate what she was doing? Was she being exploited? Was the act of watching her exploitative in itself? Or was she exploiting my willingness to watch her, no matter what state she was in? How did this work?
I’d gone into this first review strong in my belief that the women I would be watching were as empowered as anybody else and that I would be supporting them in their choice of profession by viewing their work. But the Montreal scene made me question that resolve and the principles upon which it had been based. If their profession involved them having sex that upset me personally, would I stand by their decision to pursue it? And more than that, should I?
Now that the imaginary veil between “real” and “Internet” porn had been ripped down, I had to grapple with issues I’d been sweeping under the rug of my latent, lazy feminism. The gross Internet porn I’d been watching for years had largely flown under my radar. For the reasons I’ve already mentioned, I tried to avoid thinking about it, outside of a few post-orgasm moments of contemplation. My participation in this kind of ambiguity should have indicted me to my own conscience, but I told myself that I didn’t know the truth of any of it, so I had no right to judge.
I had considered myself a feminist ever since the question arose sometime in high school, but I had never really examined what that meant to me. I attended a tiny rural public high school that offered neither AP classes nor any philosophy outside of what was necessary to get through literature courses, and then went on to college at a Catholic university that I liked because the buildings looked like castles, not because I was Catholic. (I wasn’t.) Sex was just as taboo at my undergrad institution as it had always been for me, and though I thought often, long, and hard (hah!) about the topic, I had received zero formal education on the intersection of sex and feminism. I eagerly participated in the scant few feminist and sex-positive activities available to me there, from a few hotly protested productions of The Vagina Monologues to The Rocky Horror Show, but they didn’t exactly round up to a strong background in feminist theory.
I knew nothing of the feminist porn activists of the eighties and nineties: Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley (all of whom I would go on to meet). But I was familiar with the anti-porn feminists who had started the feminist “sex wars” that raged through the late seventies and early eighties: Andrea Dworkin, Catharine McKinnon, and their ilk, for whom female empowerment could not possibly be tied up with sex work. Those rabid activists whose “men-are-pigs-and-women-are-victims” theories (as summed up by Nina Hartley in a 2011 interview) had gained enough traction internationally to have become the most recognizable face of modern feminism in the nineties. I knew of them, and I knew that I vehemently disagreed with them.
Even with my copious intake of borderline-scary gonzo smut on the Internet, I recognized that one couldn’t reduce the vast landscape of pornography into the “evil” category. It felt small-minded and reductive to try to pigeonhole the thousands of people who made it, or the hundreds of thousands of films they’d made, into any one box. Surely not all pornography is wholly empowering to women, and some of it absolutely can feed into an attitude of misogyny and the larger patriarchy that mindset serves. But is all porn, then, by definition, bad for women? Certainly not. The logic doesn’t follow well enough, in my mind, to even bother pursuing. And so, for the most part, I hadn’t.
It is an interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen in other places, however. In conversations with anti-porn activists at industry conventions and protesting outside film festivals, with consumers in their homes, and even with some pornographers, I have heard all manner of generalizations made about “porn” as if it is one monolithic entity, usually with a single clear aim in mind—be it to destroy American morality, or to drive humanity to Onanistic damnation, or whatever other doom these crusaders have read in the tea leaves. It’s never been clear to me how one industry could be so single-minded; in my experience, pornography is a massive and varied organism that some refuse to even call an “industry.” Tim von Swine, a long-standing male performer and director, for instance, told me once, “I don’t like saying ‘industry’ because porno’s not an industry. When you have an industry, there are protocols and standards that you adhere to and regulate … There’s not that regulation in porn. It’s a bunch of free enterprises. A bunch of pirate ships.”
Pornography in America is spread out, decentralized, and fiercely individualistic. Basically, even if there are slimy, evil, rape-y pornographers out there seeking to exert control over women in heinous ways—and don’t get me wrong, there certainly are—they don’t speak for all pornographers everywhere. For every one of the outright skeezy porn makers I’ve met, there is at least one beautiful human being who sees porn as a way to express the beauty of sex through art.
But when I started writing for porn magazines, I hadn’t thought much about any of this. My solitary contemplations of sex-positive feminism had left me with a few basic stances: I believed that women should be afforded the same rights and opportunities as men, and that they should be free to make their own decisions about their lives and their bodies. Ostensibly, this led me to support the women who made porn or did any other form of work that involved them using their bodies at their discretion. Like legendary performer Nina Hartley told Rolling Stone in 2016, “If I have the right to choose birth control, to choose abortion, then I have the right to choose to fuck for a living.” End of story.
Now I had to start thinking about who the people I supposedly supported actually were, who they’d been all along, and what we were all participating in.
For instance, I had never entered into contemplations of capitalism and feminism, but porn brought me around to them quickly. Like many others of my generation who had been familiar with the porn superstars of the nineties and early 2000s—Jenna Jameson, Asia Carrera, Ron Jeremy—I went into my new job in adult entertainment thinking that performers were making oodles of money from their work, which made their choices easy to understand. It wasn’t until some time into reviewing that I realized that the good old days in which production companies contracted porn performers and then dumped money, time, and energy into their careers to produce “stars” were nearing an end. Most of the industry talent was comprised of independent contractors hired for one-off gigs, for which they were typically paid at the completion of a scene and then sent on their way. Porn stars did not (and still do not) earn royalties on their work. No matter how much money a scene makes for a producer, non-contracted performers earn a flat fee. (Performers who are under exclusive contract with one production company earn a salary that’s usually more generous, but they don’t pull in extra money on royalties.) In other words, porn was not the lucrative career that many of us had always thought.
For those entering the industry without a game plan or the means to take their careers by the horns, many would-be porn “stars” end up disillusioned by the relatively low profit margins versus the amount of hard physical labor the job requires, and summarily drop out of the race. Given that these short-lived, not-very-profitable stints come along with a side helpin
g of Internet infamy and the scorn of millions who look down on sex workers, I began to wonder what motivated performers to do this kind of work. Especially when the current ambiance in the field was over-the-top pseudo-violence that looked painful at times and gross at others.
It’s important to note that from a more enlightened (or possibly world-weary) vantage point, now I can recognize much of the gonzo frenzy of the mid-aughts as an unbridled take on freedom of sexual expression. For reasons that are unique to every individual, lots of people enjoy hardcore porn of this kind, as well as sex that looks like it. As French performer Katsuni put it to me a few years later, “There are many taboos in the USA, and this is also why porn is so extreme … Porn is a reflection of society. People are extreme because they are frustrated and need to express their compulsions. Porn has a real function of catharsis.” Certainly, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the War on Terror at a fever pitch and the tensions running high in America, more of us may have felt a pull toward the porn equivalent of action movies, and I am loath to blame them for dealing with stress by watching or making smut instead of getting into fistfights.
Exhibitionism is not my personal kink, but it is a legitimate and common one that motivates many porn actors. I acknowledge and respect that. When I was twenty-four, what I couldn’t respect, because I couldn’t fathom it at the time, was why anyone would choose to do these things on camera. An actress allowing her mouth to be held open so that two men could ejaculate inside it, for instance: Obviously there’s a certain shock value to an act like that, and in the gonzo-heavy climate of that period, it fit right in. But could I really be a feminist and not only watch this type of sexual behavior—but profit on it?
I had good reason to hesitate, but I also had good reason to jump right in—namely that I hadn’t yet landed a job and my meager two months’ worth of rent money was disappearing fast. I had no safety net to fall back on. I was interviewing for full-time jobs, but even if I landed one and started working immediately, I’d barely have my first paycheck in hand by the time my savings ran out. I needed some kind of cushion, and thus feminism met capitalism in the form pornography yet again.