by Lynsey G
So I decided to let the fates decide whether I had a future in the porn industry and got to work on my first review. If Charles and j. vegas decreed that I had what it took to review smut, then I would figure out how to make my feminism square with what I reviewed. I tried to work within the parameters of the magazine’s existing review model: a wry tone, a bold dedication to alliteration and puns, and as much shameless double entendre as I could manage.
Reading over my East Coast ASSault review now, I can see that I had not exactly mastered the technique. But I sent it and some set copy describing photos from a previous magazine, along with my résumé, to Charles and vegas.
“Nice work. You’re hired!” Charles wrote in an e-mail four days later. He offered me seventy-five dollars per review to start and asked me to come to the office soon to pick up a bunch of DVDs. And just like that, I was a part of the porn industry.
LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING about making money as a writer in the twenty-first century. What with the fancy binding, colorful cover, and nice paper stock of the volume you’re reading now, you might not realize that money for writers these days is, basically, not actually a thing. It does not exist. Of course there are a lucky few who survive as authors, big-name novelists and biographers and thinkers, and some celebrities who have a thriving side business in print. There are journalists who write and pitch and get bylines in The New York Times and its ilk, who eke out solid earnings for their reporterly merit. But for the vast majority of us who write, making a living on our words is a dream very much akin to the fantasy of a Little Leaguer who wants to play in the World Series. The best we are likely to achieve is an editorial position on the high school paper, then a few publications in our undergraduate lit mag, followed by an online publication or two for no pay. Some of us will keep it up and pitch our way into positions as staff writers for websites with real payrolls, but most will eventually succumb to a salaried desk job where we can copyedit the office’s monthly newsletter.
To earn a real living as a writer is nigh unthinkable. And, while I knew that a few reviews a month at seventy-five dollars each wouldn’t exactly pay for a loft in SoHo, that kind of scratch for a lousy five-hundred-word review of a movie I could fast-forward through was the stuff of my wildest writerly dreams. I could not, and did not, turn it down.
I went to the magazine’s offices again, where I smiled a lot and was sent on my way with a FedEx shipping box packed to nearly bursting with porn. I had been promised payment for each review I completed, and I was now, officially, a Paid Writer. I walked across town to Penn Station, where my boyfriend, who we’ll call Matthew, held down a job as a shipping coordinator at a big store in the area. I demanded he break for lunch so we could celebrate my new gig as the Coolest Person He Knew, and dragged him to the nearest sushi restaurant and ordered a bottle of sake with our meal.
After a few maki rolls and two bottles of sake had been ordered and dispatched, my cell phone rang. It was an employment agency back across town, to which I had apparently submitted a résumé for a position as an art gallery receptionist. My memory called up a fuzzy association with a Craigslist ad, so I agreed to drop by the agency later that afternoon. I was in flip-flops and a tank top, but the woman on the phone assured me that it would not be a problem.
I was gleeful. A box of porn, a job offer, and another interview, all in one day! But when I hung up, Matthew had one eyebrow raised.
“What?” I demanded. He kept quiet, and I took stock of my situation for the first time since I’d left the magazine office. I was toasted.
“You really ready for an interview right now?” Matthew asked.
“You shut your face. I already got one job today! I’m on a roll.” I laughed, because I was holding a piece of eel and avocado roll. The irony!
He shook his head but didn’t argue. I might be too shnookered for an interview, but that walk back across town in the heat would sober me right up. And hey, I already had one very cool job, so if I blew this interview it wouldn’t hurt too much.
Matthew and I ran a few errands together—post office, key copying, and some shopping—before I started the cross-town trek again. Halfway to the interview, I decided to grab a cup of iced coffee to help me sober up. I stayed in Starbucks for a little while, nursing my coffee and waiting for my head to clear, before skipping over to the agency’s building. It was one of those über-modern lobbies with a gigantic front desk guarding an elevator bank that seemed to be made entirely of glass and shiny metal surfaces. I signed in, got directions, and proceeded to open an alarmed door into an emergency stairwell. The coffee had, apparently, not sobered me up.
But, after passing my typing and computer skill tests with flying colors, I wowed my interviewer, tipsy or not. By the time I left, I had gained numerous phone numbers within the agency, promises of calls back, and certainty that I was both charming and employable, particularly when I’d been day-drinking.
I was strutting toward the subway, my head spinning with alcohol, coffee, and confidence, when I realized, suddenly, that my hands were empty. I was supposed to be holding a rather large box filled with pornography that was worth at least a hundred dollars, and which was my only promise of a paycheck in the near future.
I stopped dead. Had I left the FedEx box propped against Tanya’s desk at the agency? And if I had, should I go back for it? Clearly not. But if I didn’t, there went my job at the magazine. The only one I had actually gotten so far. Would it be worth it to destroy my newly sparkling reputation at the employment agency in order to keep my job at the jizz rag? After what I’d seen so far, did I even want to keep it?
I heard thunder rumbling as I turned back toward the agency, but then I distinctly recalled walking into Tanya’s cubicle and sitting down, empty-handed. Relief washed over me, but then my panic resurged. If I hadn’t brought it into the agency, then where was it? I attempted a mental rewind of my afternoon: Everything between the restaurant and leaving the agency was fuzzy, but now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure I hadn’t had the box when I got to Starbucks, either. Or walking across town to get there.
I must have left it at the restaurant. How embarrassing. Well, it was the only sushi restaurant near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden; they’d probably seen a lot worse than an abandoned box of porn. I started walking across town once again. What a day.
By the time I got to Broadway, it was raining. I was slipping around in my flip-flops and little pieces of grit were digging into the undersides of my feet. As I waited for a light to change just north of Herald Square, I experienced a clear memory of getting up from my table at the restaurant and picking up the box of porn. I was certain that I’d walked out of the restaurant with it in my hand.
Thunder clapped overhead, and for the first time in hours I remembered that I’d also gone to the post office. The James Farley United States Federal Post Office, the giant stone historic landmark taking up two city blocks at 32nd Street and 8th Avenue.
Shit.
This was only six years after the 9/11 attacks, and paranoia was still running high. Police and soldiers dotted public places, particularly federal buildings, and unattended packages of any kind were often marked as terrorist threats.
As I attempted to run in my soggy flip-flops through crowds of businesspeople with their umbrellas raised, I blearily recalled approaching one of the automated postage machines and setting my box-o-perversion on top of the unit. I could vaguely remember a sign near the exit warning that unattended packages were subject to inspection by NYPD or federal forces. Shit, shit, shit.
My brain conjured images of the postage machine surrounded by police in riot gear, leaning back against the straining leashes of their leaping, slobbering canines. One of the men would step forward—after doing whatever they do to check boxes for bombs—and look inside, pulling out filthy DVD after filthy DVD, then smutty magazine after smutty magazine, before getting to the photocopies of tax paperwork I’d filled out at the office. In slow motion, he’d sca
n it, then address the crowd: “Is there a Lynsey of 147th Street here?” The crowd would part as everyone turned to me, standing pale, sodden, and finally sober near the door.
I stopped on 33rd Street, just north of the post office. I was right next to an entrance to the 8th Avenue subway line that would take me straight home. Maybe I’d get the gallery job and not need the porn gig, anyway. Maybe I should turn tail. Maybe this was the hand of fate, making its decision known.
But at last I knew: Deep down, I really wanted that porn gig. It was possibly the coolest thing I’d ever do.
I walked, very slowly, up the stairs to the post office, taking one of the less-used side entrances to be inconspicuous. There was no obvious police activity inside. No dogs. No flashing lights or tear gas.
There it was! I broke into a jog, right past an armed police officer who paid me no mind. There was a woman using the postage machine atop which my box of smut was perched. She saw me coming, and as I rushed up to the machine and grabbed my prize, she turned to stare.
I grinned, hugging it to my heart. “I can’t believe it’s still here!” I told her breathlessly.
“Congratulations,” she said. Her smile was genuine, if bemused. I smiled back, and I would have skipped the whole way to the subway if my flip-flops weren’t so wet.
A stack of porno DVDs I’d received for review as of early 2012
(PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
CHAPTER 4
The Early Days
A WEEK LATER, I LANDED the gallery job. So I took my place as the receptionist at an elite art gallery in midtown Manhattan that catered to the artistic tastes of millionaires. I manned the phones, greeted customers, provided informative materials on exhibits, and turned prospective buyers over to salespeople. And in down time between duties, I wrote porn reviews.
I elected to take a “nom de porn,” as j. vegas called it, from one of my favorite cult films—an easy decision that I didn’t spend much time on, which at that point more or less reflected my involvement with the porn industry as a whole. It didn’t require much brainpower, aside from that pesky feminism issue, with which I continued to wrestle.
I tried to play it cool, though, for the sake of my poker face at the gallery and in order to keep making the money that came rolling in. I wrote about the films as if their contents came as no surprise. As if they served only to turn me on, or better yet, to make me laugh. The magazine’s line was to take everything with many grains of salt, so I cracked jokes as much as I could, and endeavored to keep in the forefront of my mind the fact that every person involved in these situations was a consenting adult. It was a challenge for me, but it paid well enough to make it worthwhile.
My editor, j. vegas, on the other hand, seemed to have been born for his job. He had a half dozen pen names, and he got a sort of childlike glee out of coming up with colorful new terminology for sex acts and the people who practiced them. And he was good at it. If there were some kind of award system for excellence in witty porn journalism, I’m sure he’d have gone home with the trophy for “Most Inventive Use of ‘Jerk-Off’ in an Alliterative Sentence,” and several others. He saw the porn industry as the pinnacle of humanity’s capacity for dark, self-deprecating humor, and his role was to point out and capitalize on the ridiculousness of it all.
But even with his enthusiasm and the magazine’s more general laissez-faire attitude toward most things pornographic, there were still rules in place to remind me that this business wasn’t all fun and filthy games. For instance, we could not use the word “kid” or “child” anywhere for fear of setting off child-porn alarms. And I was prohibited from mentioning female ejaculation, even if it happened in a movie I reviewed.
I was told that any mention of squirting was prohibited because in some places where the magazine was distributed, this could be considered urination, which could in turn be considered obscenity, and which could lead to any number of negative consequences for the magazine and the makers of the film in question. I assumed at the time that the places vaguely referred to in this prohibition must be some backwaters where women were not allowed to vote, but it later became clear that the backwater in question was, incredibly, the UK. The epicenter of the “civilized” world is, apparently, not enlightened enough to admit that women squirting in ecstasy is not, in fact, the same as women peeing.
Female ejaculation, or “squirting” (considered two different phenomena in scientific circles but synonymous in porn) has been recognized as a pre-orgasmic or orgasmic occurrence for centuries the world over, basically up until the Victorian period when preexisting notions of women having anything like sex drives or real arousal seems to have been squashed. In moments of great sexual excitement, fluid gushes forth from two small ducts to the sides of the urethra in many women and other people with vulvas. These ducts are attached to the Skene’s gland—a very recently discovered gland that is thought to be linked to the G-spot on the anterior wall of the vagina—which becomes engorged during arousal. The fluid they expel is sometimes copious enough in volume to be mistaken for urination. (Note: The amount of liquid expelled is limited, however; many squirting videos in porn are faked—those streams shooting all the way across rooms are usually the result of douching during a cut in the action, then expelling the liquid during filming. If you look very closely, you can usually see that it’s coming out of the vagina, not the urethra, which means it’s not really squirting.) Though the liquid is usually clear, with very little odor or taste (hey, sometimes somebody’s face is down there when it happens!), it’s more similar to urine than any other bodily fluid, and until very recently, the scientific community refused to consider that it could be anything else. But thousands, nay millions, of people with firsthand experience attest that squirting is not peeing. Numbers are hard to come by, but most studies attest that somewhere between ten and forty percent of people with vulvas are able to squirt, with some folks I’ve spoken to in the porn industry claiming that the ability is universal.
Nevertheless, the scientific community has remained skeptical of the notion that anything that looks like pee could be anything else—actual female experiences be damned. And so, in the UK in particular, squirting was considered close enough to urination to rule it out from any and all film reviews I wrote. Oddly, it wasn’t until 2014 that female ejaculation was officially banned in adult films in the UK, along with spanking that leaves visible marks, facesitting, and the use of restraints, to much protestation and rebellion from British pornographers. Nobody can put their finger on why, exactly, these and a number of other benign and extremely widespread acts were deemed obscene by the Brits, but even if they could, they’d have to be careful not to finger too hard, lest somebody squirt on camera.
But the biggest and hardest (teehee!) rule at the magazine was that if I didn’t have anything positive to say about a film, I could choose not to review it, but I could not choose to give it a bad review. The relationship the magazine had established with certain production companies did not allow for less-than-glowing words about those companies’ work. If I wanted to make my hundred bucks (my rate per review had increased after a few months), I had to come up with ways to gloss over the things I didn’t like.
So I settled into a sort of benevolent numbness in my viewing habits, in order to facilitate benign reviews. After the initial excitement about the novelty of it all had faded, I spent a lot of time holding down the fast-forward button. I would press play every so often, of course, to take note of the soundtrack, dirty talk, and so on, but if I’d watched every film at normal speed I would have had very little time left over to spend all the money my reviews were earning me. And I would have been bored absolutely to tears. I’d often review five films in a month, each of which stretched on for four to six long hours of hardcore fucking. Who could possibly be interested enough to watch all of that? And who would pay the forty or fifty dollars that these jumbo packs of porn were retailing for? No matter how gleaming a review I wrote for Anal Creampies #7, I ju
st couldn’t imagine who was buying all this smut.
The answer came to me in a roundabout way through the business of working for a dirty magazine.
About a month into my reviewing career, the editorial director told me he could give my name to an editor at another magazine. One that wasn’t about to go bankrupt.
Oh. Nobody was buying all that smut.
It began clicking into place that the industry that supported these magazines—the same one responsible for Elastic Assholes—wasn’t just hyperventilating over the threat of Internet piracy. It was failing.
THE PORN INDUSTRY BASICALLY went through a turbulent adolescence in the seventies, blossomed into young adulthood in the eighties, and settled into a corpulent, self-satisfied routine in the nineties. It kept on top of new technology, but it got a bit round in the middle, secure in its status as the “recession-proof” industry. Production companies fattened themselves on easy profits and let their business models languish, unaware that they would be harshly yanked from their stupor early in the new millennium. When the Internet exploded onto the capitalist playing field, pornography was naturally the first to exploit its promise, but it was also one of the first to fall.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, as most industries were trying to figure out how to make this new technology work for them, pornography jumped into the fray feet-first, as it always had before. In their book about modern sexual desire, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Dr. Ogi Ogas and Dr. Sai Gaddam state that there were fewer than ninety adult magazines published in America when the Web went online in 1991, but by 1997 there were nine hundred pornographic websites. The adult industry took to the new technology like fish to water, establishing new models for payment and distribution that everyone else followed. Streaming video, membership websites, credit card verification systems, encryption coding, and nearly every advancement in file sharing and video display were pioneered by porn, then taken up by the rest of the world.