Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  Third-party payment processors like PayPal are particularly deep in debt to the porn industry; when opportunists realized the ease of making money on porn in the early days of the Internet, they jumped on the bandwagon and proceeded to make a mess of things by laundering money. There were affiliate click-through systems that collected money on falsely generated traffic, porn sites used as fronts for less-legal money-making strategies, and so on. Some sites would charge sky-high fees for website membership cancellations, which unsurprisingly took place quite frequently. Since no one had figured out yet that the name of a porn site showing up on someone’s credit card statement might cause blowback for people whose significant others looked askance at smut, membership cancellations were routine. And so were chargebacks—people denying outright that they had made a purchase from a porn site in the first place and demanding their money back. Due to rampant chargeback rates and fraud, credit card companies started to turn down online porn business—to this day, American Express will not work with the industry at all. Unable to process payments at reasonable rates with the remaining credit card companies, porn companies were bereft until third-party payment processing companies came to their rescue, taking on the risk that their clients’ businesses posed and charging through the nose for the privilege. In short, PayPal might not have come to be unless the adult industry had paved its way.

  In an ironic twist, the industry that birthed online payment solutions is now a victim of online finance’s scorn. Pornographers—and a variety of other businesspeople who deal in sex—are prohibited from using most major payment platforms online. Overall, the finance industry has, astoundingly, not yet gotten over the sting of the first few years of Internet craziness and is still convinced that porn, despite its almost ludicrous financial promise, must be lumped in with other “high-risk” companies—like loan consolidation and online gambling. Never mind that pornographers have gotten savvy to the idea that nobody wants their credit card statement to read “BigTitsXXX.com,” or that as society adapts, chargeback rates have gone down for porn purchases. Never mind that, as Cindy Gallop, founder of the real-world-sex porn alternative site MakeLoveNotPorn.tv told me in 2014, “The bank that welcomes ventures like ours, designed to change the world through sex, will make a fucking shedload of money” when sex-oriented companies inevitably flock to it. Most banks still flat-out refuse to do business with porn companies, citing outdated morality clauses or the Puritanical interests of their investors.

  Compounding the existing squeamishness of the finance industry regarding online porn money, in 2012 the Department of Justice launched Operation Choke Point, an initiative that encouraged banks to restrict service to businesses that pose a “reputational risk,” like pornography, online gambling, and payday loans, according to The Washington Post. Operation Choke Point was behind a 2013 rash of porn stars’ personal bank accounts being shut down and sex workers being refused service at financial institutions, for no given reason. The operation was exposed to public scorn, but to date there’s no evidence that it has been shut down, and it certainly didn’t encourage banks, or the credit card companies and payment processors that depend upon their largesse, to work with adult companies online.

  In sum, porn may have gotten a heady start on the Internet, but its kerfuffle with online finance was an early indication of how quickly cyberspace could turn. Though porn initially made huge financial gains online, hackers and pirates were not far behind. Whereas the jizz biz, as j. vegas liked to call it, had learned to think quickly to keep up with the pace of innovation, it had never before had to deal with anything quite as fast as the Web and its legions of faceless thieves.

  In the words of veteran performer Tim von Swine, “Technology has always been the midwife of destruction in porno.” Porn used to make its bread and butter selling things that had smut on them, like DVDs and VHS tapes and magazines, but with the advent of the Internet, pornography became available as information that was easily reproducible, easily distributable, and, when hackers caught up with it, entirely free to whomever wanted it.

  The porn industry, like others, reeled. Brad Armstrong—one of the most decorated directors in porn history—once told me that the Internet hurt porn from every angle. “People can even shoot movies on their two-hundred-dollar … phone and throw it up on the Internet,” he said. “If any business had to deal with that kind of saturation and overflow, there’s no way they’d be operating. Thankfully, everybody’s horny. That’s the only thing that keeps us going!” He was right; unlike many other industries, pornography didn’t have powerful protectors to buoy it in its time of need. Nobody cared enough about porn to publicly stand up for it. Armstrong told me he sometimes found himself wondering, “If we stopped tomorrow, there’s still so much of it out there, would anybody really care?”

  It appeared, at times, that they wouldn’t. And the industry stumbled. It got desperate. It started paying performers less, doing away with the bells and whistles as the ship began to sink. The sex scenes I was watching in the late 2000s were products of fear, anger, and desperation, acted out in the language of lust. The industry was thrashing out its own death throes, flailing and clutching at its throat, certain the end was nigh. And as ridiculous as it seems, given the direness of the situation, much of the industry was refusing to do much to help itself. Porn, having earned a reputation for paving the way forward with technology since the beginning of technology, was falling behind.

  Case in point: As recently as 2012, I was reviewing DVDs instead of video files for magazine reviews, waiting for them to arrive in the mail instead of downloading them. Meanwhile, a video file with no cover or packaging could have been e-mailed in hardly a fraction of the time and at literally zero cost. It was incredible. The adult industry may have invented the Internet as we know it in many ways, but in plenty of others, it likes to cling to the past. Director Ivan summarized the situation for me in an interview in 2010: “Many companies didn’t evolve with the times, and that’s why they are dying off. The smart guys behind the Internet porn boom capitalized on it. Years back, DVD people smirked at Web guys, saying stuff like, ‘Oh, it’s just Internet—quicker scenes with lower rates because it’s just Internet content.’ Whoa, did they get a dick slap of reality a few years later.”

  In other words, the old world order of the porn industry, which had come into being by way of innovation and rule-breaking, had calcified itself into an immovable leviathan that was all too easy to topple. The industry was in decline not because of one great failing, but because it was too bloated and proud to acknowledge that thousands of seemingly insignificant ruffians were picking away at it, bit by bit. Stealing a scene, reproducing it, sending it off elsewhere, and removing profits brick by brick.

  By the time the problem was recognized as a crisis, porn companies scrambled to counter the damage, but nobody knew how. There was no clear way forward, no new technology to save them or fresh business model waiting to take over. New video technologies like HD and 3D were adopted by high rollers, but for most in the industry, cheaper and quicker seemed the only way forward. Profits weren’t just dwindling, they were evaporating. Porn mags and companies were crumbling left and right, and the magazine I was writing for appeared to be the next to go.

  With the venerable, world-changing, and incredibly hot Cindy Gallop at the AVN Awards in Vegas, January 2011

  (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Backward Slide

  IN EARLY OCTOBER OF 2007, I landed a gig at a second dirty magazine, for which I wrote the set copy for photographic spreads of ladies with large bosoms. You know, “This is Sally and she likes long walks on the beach, frozen daiquiris, and cradling big boners between her double F cups.” That kind of thing. I concocted five hundred words about each woman in the magazine, often according to some theme: big-titted tramps of the UK, for instance. The money was almost as good as what I got for reviews, and I didn’t have to fast-forward through hours of hardcore porn to
get it. In fact, I rarely even saw the photos I was supposed to be writing about. I’d just make up a name and a story, let my imagination run, and allow the editors to pair my words with a model. Months later I’d get a copy of the magazine and stare in disbelief at “Maisey’s” smiling face and boobies, unbelieving—“How could they think that was Maisey? Maisey would never wear that bra and panty set!”

  Thus set up with a second gig, I was prepared to take the financial hit when the first magazine went bankrupt at the end of 2007. It had been a short run, but it had come through for me when I needed it. I wasn’t, however, exactly heartbroken to give up reviewing titles like Breast Meat and Teens Like It Big #4. I’d already amassed an alarming repertoire of silly names for body parts, become aware of positions and activities I’d never have dreamed up on my own, and developed a knack for alliterating jokes about all of them. Words like “slut” and “cock-hungry holes” took up too much of my written vocabulary for my own comfort, but at the magazine I’d been writing for they fit right in.

  The editorial director, Charles, assured me that if another publishing company bought out the magazine, I would be reviewing for him again as soon as possible. But j. vegas was made no such promises. He was given full unemployment benefits, however, and relegated to his apartment in Washington Heights not much worse for the wear. We’d developed a close friendship, partly aided by alcohol and marijuana, so he included me in his plans to write a satirical web series about working in the smut business—a lifelong dream, he told me, that had been realized more comically than he’d expected. As an aspiring filmmaker, he felt the experience had to be memorialized.

  AS MONTHS PASSED, I surreptitiously praised the gigantic jugs that dominated Lizzy’s life and got Pauline kicked out of boarding school for distracting the Sapphic nuns, all while assisting with the sales of extremely expensive contemporary art. And I slid right back into my Internet porn habit. It was surreal: I now knew the names of the actors and their oeuvres, their preferences, even their dirty-talk styles. I appreciated them, at least more than I had before, as human beings. And yet I gravitated back to the free, pirated clips of their material, fully aware that I was stealing from them and contributing to the industry-wide collapse that had cost me my first paid writing gig.

  As Lux Alptraum, a porn critic and journalist, summed it up for me, “It can be really, really difficult to negotiate ethics when orgasms are concerned … Sometimes your orgasm is not concerned with whether somebody got paid for that day.”

  In a lot of ways, I was concerned about people getting paid, but like Lux said, my orgasms were not. I had a boyfriend who was ready to go at the drop of a hat. I had stacks of porn DVDs under the bed, which I could have watched anytime I wanted. Most of them were filmed in HD and featured behind-the-scenes footage, cum shot compilations, and lots of other goodies that the streaming video clips on free websites couldn’t match. Yet I kept reverting to the same crappy websites I’d frequented for years. I was still more assured of getting my orgasms there than anywhere else, and something about the surreptitious scrolling I was doing met a deep-set need in me that I couldn’t quite name.

  I felt like an anomaly: aware of the harm my habit was doing, getting laid but nevertheless gravitating back to pirated porn, and being a woman, to boot. I’d heard the old platitude that women don’t like porn because they are not visual—that porn is for men. * Women, the thinking popularized by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s goes, are more complicated creatures than their male counterparts and require a more complex series of switches to be flipped in our brains before we can get aroused. The authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts write, “The male brain is designed to be more visually responsive to sexual stimuli than the female brain,” which they dub “the most sophisticated neural structure on earth.” And they back these claims up with investigative journalism, citing study after study claiming that, whereas men get a rise from looking at a pair of boobs, women don’t find much eroticism in those boobs unless they also know whom they belong to, why they’re being displayed, who else can see them, and whether the set dresser knows that that lamp on the bedside table isn’t plugged in.

  The desire for context, this conventional wisdom tells us, is the reason that women gravitate toward romance novels and erotica, written works that provide them with all the background information they crave, while men enjoy the direct visual stimulation that porn provides. I can’t deny the allure of a good romance paperback—when I was in middle school, my friends and I passed one novel around, rereading it until the spine broke and the book split in half. And we were part of a much larger trend: According to A Billion Wicked Thoughts, the romance novel industry pulled in $1.37 billion in 2008, and ninety percent of its readers were women. Since the advent of Fifty Shades of Grey, erotica readership has skyrocketed, making the so-called “porn for women” genre an even bigger seller.

  But I still liked “porn for men” just as much, and probably more. And it wasn’t just me. Women are far from immune to the visual cues that erotic films provide. In a 2004 study conducted by Meredith Chivers of Queens University in Canada, women were hooked up to a plethysmograph—a device that tests the blood flow to the vaginal walls—and shown photos of a wide range of erotic and non-erotic photos. Afterward, they were asked about how aroused they had felt, and their answers were compared to the plethysmograph’s findings. The results were stunning: Physically, the women were aroused by literally all of the erotic images, regardless of their sexual orientation … or even their species (some photos showed apes going at it). But psychologically? Not so much. Most women only reported feeling turned on by the type of smut that tickled their particular fancies—heterosexual women said they responded most to heterosexual sex, and so on. None reported feeling any psychological response to the ape sex. But the proof was in the pussy, as they say. These women’s bodies did react to pornographic images of literally all kinds, whether their conscious minds picked up on it or not. It’s not much of a stretch to say, based on this research, that women are just as aroused by porn as anybody else—they may just not be aware, or willing to own up to it.

  And there I was, with the bedroom door locked and my laptop fired up, to prove it. I didn’t seem to much care for context; I was turned on by just about any pairing of human genitals, whether it was straight, gay, or something else entirely, even if the images were supposedly made for men by men. I wanted hot, visual stimuli that would turn me on easily, without complications. There was something about being able to get off without noticing the credits, the lighting, the music, the company logo, that I appreciated. It was all painlessly simple. As director Ivan told me, “I think one of the reasons the Internet is so popular is you can find what you want, watch it, stroke it, and off you go.”

  He was onto something. Particularly for women, the Internet has become a haven for the exploration of taboo fantasies. As the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts put it, “Women who previously felt too mortified to be seen in the back room of the local video rental store are finally empowered to explore their erotic interests in privacy and comfort” in the Internet age. The freedom of online porn viewing isn’t just exciting, it’s foundational: After years of experience talking to people about pornography, I know I’m not alone in my proclivity for easy orgasms—especially when it comes to people my age and younger—regardless of gender identity. There is something incredibly seductive about the quick and almost mechanical payoff of the disembodied clip or animated GIF showing just the best few moments of a porn scene. It is delightfully, and damningly, easy for even my (female) body to get aroused by the simple mechanics of sex without involving the difficult moral baggage of real human beings, their stories, or their motivations. Prevailing wisdom about women’s preference for context be damned: Online pornography’s devastatingly simple format and nonexistent price tag prove alluring enough to bring millions of women to the Internet seeking quick and easy orgasms.

  With every passing year, women are viewing porn in greater
numbers and getting more vocal about their habits. In the last quarter of 2015, Marie Claire reported that a whopping thirty percent of women they’d surveyed declared that they viewed porn at least once a week. And Pornhub reported in its 2016 year-end review that just over a quarter of its viewers, worldwide, were women. As discourse around the subject of pornography opens up, some of the stigma once attached to watching blue movies has been lifted, and more of us are poking our heads out of our shame dungeons to talk about our habits. More than that—whereas porn used to be a veritable desert for women who wanted an alternative to the standard made-by-men-for-men fare, the past decade has seen a huge spike in porn made for women, by women, as well as porn made for queer and nonbinary folks, with viewers in mind who aren’t necessarily straight, white men. These companies clearly give female viewers—and viewers of any other gender identity—a case of the ol’ warm fuzzies, as well as the wet and slipperies.

  It’s not only out of self-interest that I implore you to believe that people aren’t depraved sex maniacs if they tend toward a simplified version of pornography, but I do find some relief in asserting I am normal. Free, fast, and easy can also be called “efficient,” and I’m a sucker for practicality. Yet, as 2008 began, I worried about the effects of masturbatory efficiency on myself, and on the rest of us. Was I—were we—sacrificing the experience of fantasy for the simple mechanics of sex?