Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  It’s certainly no revelation that easy is, well, easier than intimate. But it’s less obvious that our penchant for what’s easy over what’s meaningful could be reflected in our porn viewing habits, or that those habits might extend into our personal sex lives. And it’s certainly far beyond my singular ability to prove that this might be the case. But a staggering amount of anecdotal evidence amassed by myself and others points to a developing trend in which young people who have been watching hardcore pornography from an early age take that hardcore pornography to heart.

  There’s nothing wrong, per se, with trying out a move you learned from porn in the bedroom. But when the totality of one’s sexual experience is downloaded directly from porn, there may be reason to pause. “Porn operates as default sex ed,” sex-tech disruptor Cindy Gallop told me in an interview several years after I began writing about porn, “in the complete absence of a counterpoint of an open, healthy discussion of parents feeling able to teach their kids about sex as opposed to feeling utterly embarrassed about it, in the absence of schools and colleges operating an open, honest sex ed curriculum.”

  The scarcity of reliable sex education available to young people in America makes online pornography an easy substitute; as of the time I’m writing this, only twenty-three states mandate sex education at all, and only thirteen require it to be medically accurate. Most sex ed in this country focuses on the male external anatomy and discusses erections and ejaculation, but girls are taught about menstruation and pregnancy risks instead of their anatomies or orgasmic potential.

  School isn’t educating the youth about sex, and it seems that neither are parents. The Pornography Industry author Shira Tarrant writes, “Between 1998 and 2005, there was a tenfold increase in the number of porn videos produced (13,000 vs. 1,300). Yet a survey of teenagers conducted by Psychology magazine found that during this same time period, seventy-five percent of parents never talked with their children about pornography.”

  There is a vacuum being created, and it’s not difficult to see why many young people turn to the mountains of smut on the Internet to find out about sex. For instance, if I’d had access to videos on my parents’ home computer when I was in middle school, my crippling anxiety about the mechanics of the pelvic thrust would have been put to rest, likely along with any other questions I had about what the human body is capable of in the bedroom. And these days, there aren’t many ways to get information as trustworthy as what we can see people doing on Pornhub. As Mike Stabile, a spokesperson for Kink.com and the director of communications for the Free Speech Coalition, said in an interview with Mark Hay, “Sexuality has always operated in tandem with pornography. Pornography tends to crystallize desires that you might not have articulated.” And for those whose desires haven’t even fully formed yet, it can be a system of guidance that easily jumps off the rails.

  Even porn stars I’ve spoken to learned about sex from the industry they would one day enter, and the lessons they learned were often of a particular nature. At AVN in 2010, performer Andy San Dimas told me, “I started watching porn in high school because I wanted to suck dick better. So I studied how to give a really nasty blowjob, like really intense and gross.”

  There’s no reason that a nasty, intense, and gross blowjob is any better or worse than a polite, discreet blowjob, of course. And I don’t mean to cast aspersions on anyone who genuinely prefers athletic sex over candles, R&B, and rose petals. Or anyone who enjoys athletic sex along with said romantic accompaniment. It’s of dire importance, I believe, that nobody with an interest in or relationship with the adult industry (which is to say, everyone) judges the sex lives or fantasies of others, whether onscreen or off. We’re all in this mess together, and nobody’s preferences are better than anybody else’s. Fantasies are personal, private, and innocuous—unless they are acted out on an unwilling partner. But when fantasies are derived from pornography, a few things can get lost in translation—things that can cause problems.

  As many porn actors have told me, and as many sex-positive thinkers have echoed, fantasy is not the same as reality, and porn is only a fantasy acted out for the gratification of the masses. Porn sex is not real sex, though there’s real danger in conflating the two. As now-retired performer Kelly Shibari told me in a 2012 interview, “It’s sex because there’s actually penetration, and a guy ejaculates at the end. Besides that, it is so not sex. Sex, to me, in real life involves a lot of tenderness that you really don’t see a lot of in porn … a lot of close tenderness that you can’t get a camera inside.”

  The camera’s presence on a porn set doesn’t just change the level of intimacy between partners, it physically alters the way that sex is choreographed. On most sets, performers must “open up” to the camera with plenty of room for light and a camera lens in between bodies. This results in sex that not only looks very different from what many of us find physically pleasurable, but also sex that is difficult to perform. Porn actors are professionals in their field and are often capable of feats of strength and endurance that the rest of us could never match. These superhuman acts are performed in controlled environments under the watchful eyes of directors and camera crews who are ready to call “Cut!” at a moment’s notice if things go wrong. And things do go wrong—ask any porn model about mishaps on set, and you’ll get an earful. (I once wrote a whole article about what happens when performers fart on camera, and what didn’t make it into the finished product were the tales of, shall we say, more than farts that almost everyone I interviewed told me about.)

  But we don’t see these faux pas in the edited cuts that make their way onto the Internet, or the mountains of preparation that performers go through to avoid those slip-ups. Feminist pornographer and performance artist Madison Young said something once that really stuck with me: “You’re not going to see, necessarily, the enema in the bathroom, or the five enemas that you did in the bathroom before being anally fisted.” (The mental image is striking, no?)

  Nor do viewers witness the cuts between positions, the reapplication of lube, or the ten minutes it often takes between the sometimes very long cut and the male performer reaching orgasm. Danny Wylde told me once that, “In most porn you see a facial. I think it’s just a matter of convenience, almost. It’s like, we get her to that point, then we cut, now the guy gets ready to ejaculate, however he does that, then he comes over and does his thing … I don’t think most consumers have any idea how bizarre that whole process is.”

  What I’m trying to say is that we, as consumers, are not privy to the realities of the fantasy sex we may be trying to reenact at home. What we see is a heavily edited, hand-picked series of video pieces that leads us to believe that this superhuman sex is easy, natural, and satisfying. And we can take that message to heart.

  Compounding the blurry line between porn fantasy and honest-to-goodness reality is the fact that, while Hollywood can revert to stunt people, smoke, mirrors, and CGI for action sequences, pornography uses flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens honest-to-god banging. (Or blowbanging, or gangbanging, as the case may be.) In porn, it’s not really real sex happening naturally for its own sake, but it is showing really real human beings engaged in real sex acts. Retired performer Oriana Small told me in an interview that on her hardcore sets, “I cried a bunch of times. There was a time when I would cry in every scene, because I would get so overwhelmed and it was so emotional. It was so real.”

  This realness complicates the impulse to give porn a pass for its status as fantasy. Particularly when the fantasy in question is hardcore gonzo porn that depicts gagging, asphyxiation, slapping, spitting, and the like as standard, sans disclaimer that, while many people may engage in these activities for their own pleasure, they are not everyone’s cup of tea and are best attempted by those with a lot of experience.

  As the months went by without a noticeable change in my online habits, I caught myself thinking more about the people in the clips I was watching. I’d been able to pull the wool over my own eyes before, my ig
norance of the industry giving me a lame but still convincing excuse to divest myself of responsibility. But my months of reviewing had given me a peek into where all this fantasy material I was bootlegging came from, and I couldn’t quash my conscience so easily anymore.

  But I was in a unique position from which this train of thought was almost unavoidable. For the tens of millions who visit Pornhub every day, it’s very easy to avoid thinking about the people who make pornography or the differences between real-world sex and porn sex. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the “mainstreaming” of porn, but I believe that the actual effect of porn on most lives is nearly as silent a topic as it’s ever been. Be honest. When’s the last time that you had a real conversation with a friend about the porn you watch? Maybe you’ve talked from time to time about your thoughts on pornography as a medium, or about a porn star whose name was in the news (usually accompanied by some illegal activity, A-list celebrity whose name is being dragged through the mud, or another negative spin). But can you remember a time you talked to anyone about your personal preferences or how your consumption of pornography has affected your sex life? When’s the last time you leveled with someone about your feelings on adult entertainment? The real shit. The juicy stuff.

  If you’re like most of us, your answer was probably “never.”

  Which is all a way to explain why, when the first magazine was purchased by a new parent company and reopened, I was happy to accept my reviewing job back in May of 2008. I’d spent a lot of time and energy grappling with the ways in which I didn’t like my relationship with online, pirated pornography. I had a lot of questions I still wanted to ask. They were messy, and many of them implicated me for my past, as well as the not-entirely-healthy way I’d been processing my personal trauma by watching emotionless, context-less clips for the sake of purely physical gratification. But it was starting to seem that facing those questions head-on might be better for my peace of mind than continuing to look for answers in a vacuum.

  Holding a printout of an early WHACK! Magazine prototype, probably in 2009

  (PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)

  CHAPTER 6

  WHACK! Magazine

  FOR THE NEXT YEAR, I kept myself busy with my day job while I came up with increasingly creative descriptions for copulation and delivered glowing praise of oversized breasts I’d never laid eyes on. I had also begun research to ghostwrite a book about swingers in New York City for a couple in that lifestyle, so I was attending swing parties to observe their carousing on weekends. In short, I was drenched in sex twenty-four-seven, even while watching blue bloods peruse sculptures worth more than my apartment. Whether watching it on video or in person, imagining it for set copy, or remembering what I’d seen that weekend at a party, sex was my main occupation for most of 2008 and into 2009.

  After the requisite New York City bedbug infestation hit our cramped Harlem apartment, Matthew and I moved into a small flat in the south Bronx. My former editor, j. vegas, was surviving on unemployment in Washington Heights and sending me regular updates on his web series. As expected, he hadn’t been offered his old job back when the magazine started up again; I felt slimy for earning extra money when vegas didn’t have that option, but he seemed content to write in peace in his uptown digs.

  The idea behind the script, which he was calling pornocracy (which is, incidentally, now the title of a documentary by erotic filmmaker Ovidie, about the porn conglomerate MindGeek’s effects on the world), followed the exploits of a smarmy, happy-go-lucky writer with a penchant for sleaze and satire, along with his best friend—a more earnest young woman who played the straight man. (Any of this sounding familiar?) They both worked at WHACK! Magazine, an odd-world version of the publication we’d written for. It was all fairly straightforward satire, with a manageably sized cast and what felt like a not-too-ambitious series of shooting locations. He asked for my help with casting and filming, and I, having no experience with that kind of thing, agreed.

  It became quickly apparent that we did not have the resources to make the series happen. Between the two of us, we had about zero dollars to feed into it and few options to find any more. He enlisted the help of a friend to oversee casting and crew on the condition that she would play the role of the best friend. We cobbled together the rest of the cast and crew on the promise of “exposure” but without pay. But costuming, props, sets, lights, editing, post-production … all of these were beyond the reach of our bootstrap budget. And remember, this was before Kick-starter campaigns were de rigueur in the making of indie films.

  Over discounted Bloody Marys at a bar near vegas’s apartment where we held semi-regular “meetings,” Matthew, vegas, and I tried to brainstorm funding options in the early summer of 2009. After a few hours, we’d come up with more empty glasses than ideas, but slowly, a concept took shape in my mind: Why not raise awareness about the web series by creating an online version of the magazine that the characters worked for? Make it feel real until it is real. We could write in an overblown parody fashion, using pornocracy’s characters’ names as pseudonyms. Do fake interviews with the imaginary porn stars in the make-believe films they watched. If we played our cards right, we could leverage the site into some notoriety for the web series and eventually turn the project into money.

  After another round of Bloody Marys, we set about purchasing www.whackmagazine.com and setting up a free Blogspot platform. (It was 2009; don’t judge!) We took on the names of the show’s characters and invented a few other pseudonyms to flesh out the magazine’s “staff.” I invented the moniker “Miss Lagsalot” off the cuff: My initials spell “LAG,” and “Sir Lagsalot” jumped to mind. “Sir” seemed a bit confusing, though, given the fact that I was born female and present that way, so I tacked the “Miss” on instead, and off I went into the land of satirical porn journalism. Little did I know how much that “Miss Lagsalot” designation would come to mean, or how tenaciously it would cling to me.

  We settled early on j. vegas applying his skill at Photoshop to original porno-litical cartoons, a monthly horoscopes column tailored specifically toward porn stars and fans, and op-eds on all things porn and sex. These carried us for a while, and I was thrilled to be writing op-ed pieces. I had free range to tackle issues I thought were important, champion causes, and eviscerate problems I saw in porn. My feminist colors began to show in a rosy rainbow hue; one month out of the gate, I’d already written impassioned articles on the female ejaculation controversy, the necessity of accessible healthcare for porn actors, and the importance of legalizing more forms of sex work.

  Despite my enthusiasm for anonymity, however, it soon became clear that these real-world segments made no sense next to profiles of fictional porn stars and films. In the current piracy-happy online climate, in which most people weren’t thinking about porn stars’ careers, the difference between a real porn model and a fictional one might sail right over our readers’ heads. And how exactly did we intend to find still shots from imaginary pornos to run with our reviews, anyway? Besides, j. vegas pointed out, he had a lot of contacts in the real porn world. We may as well get some real films to review, and see if we couldn’t rustle up a few interviews with real, live porn stars. If we leveraged their fan bases, we’d have a much larger audience to beg for funding for pornocracy when the time was right. The real world of smut, he argued, was crazy enough to meet our weirdest needs. Why invent anything?

  I was skeptical about our chances of convincing real pornographers to work with us. The idea felt far more “legit” than our little blog could ever be. But we wrote a few e-mails to a few porn companies and PR outfits, and soon enough I was receiving screeners of DVDs, addressed to “Miss Lagsalot,” at my home address.

  This was my first exposure to the fact that the porn industry does not set a particularly high bar for entry. This might sound self-evident, but having grown up on a farm in the countryside, any real industry had always felt unattainable to me. But one important quality that has long a
llowed the porn industry to maintain its “recession-proof” status is its openness to newcomers. It makes sense: In a business in which technological advancement is a constant and fresh faces are lifeblood, a lax attitude toward who gets to participate is vital. Retention of high-level performers is all well and good, but a high turnover rate that keeps the carousel of novelty spinning is just as useful, if not more so.

  This applies to journalists, but it is far easier to see in performers. The human sexual brain is highly motivated by novelty, as our collective obsession with porn and the longstanding prevalence of extramarital affairs in monogamous cultures will attest. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are suckers for variety in our sex lives, and pornographers have learned to capitalize on our insatiable appetites for new faces by providing them—along with other body parts.

  The phenomenon of “the new girl” is a well-worn trope familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with the porn industry. When a new female performer appears on the straight porn scene, she (or, in the gay industry, he, and in the queer industry, any number of pronouns) is likely to find work very easily. Depending upon her appearance, demeanor, and the set of skills she’s willing to put to use on camera, there will almost certainly be a filmmaker looking for just her type. There is no proficiency test, no background check, and very few hoops to jump through, aside from an industry-approved STI test, proof of age and identity, and a smile. It’s relatively rare for a new actor to have spent a lot of time researching or preparing to enter the business, though in a recent interview, Nina Hartley told me that this has been changing after the Great Recession: “More women come to porn with real-world experience [or] college degrees, so the level of professionalism has risen,” she said. Still, many of my acquaintances in the biz decided to try it on a whim, or just to make some quick money, then decided they liked it and stayed.