by Lynsey G
A giant kerfuffle eventually broke out between a big-name star we’ll call Bee Hanson and j. vegas, who had made a series of pointedly nasty cartoons about her after she’d flaked out on a number of scheduled interviews with us. Bee had slandered vegas all over social media, and things had gotten ugly. But after much grousing about satire and freedom of the press, vegas finally backed down and took the cartoons off the website.
Personally, I felt awful about the Bee Hanson situation. I didn’t apologize personally for the cartoons, since I hadn’t made them, but I did branch out on my own.
A friend alerted me to an essay contest for a year-long column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in 2009. The online arm of Dave Eggars’s publishing company was looking for personal columns on any topic. McSweeney’s had a tone I liked—a dry sense of self-deprecating humor that felt right to me. A bit of self-flagellation could go a long way for my conscience, and also provide a significantly larger audience than the few hundred people who were starting to look up WHACK! on the regular.
So I pitched a column about my weird life as a feminist and a porn journalist to McSweeney’s in 2009, considering it a practice run for pitching the idea to other, more attainable, publications. But my column was accepted. I got a small cash prize, but the real reward came in the form of tens of thousands of readers that “The Conflicted Existence of the Female Porn Writer” eventually attracted.
Interviewing the legendary feminist performer Nina Hartley at the New York Sex Bloggers calendar release party in 2010
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)
CHAPTER 7
The Conflicted Existence
of the Female Porn Writer
WITH THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY of my professional life bearing down upon me, I had to face the most daunting task of my personal life: telling my parents what I’d been up to since I’d moved back to New York. I knew that their response would be shock and likely horror, but I was proud of my accomplishment. McSweeney’s was, and still is, a big freaking deal. I hoped that when they read the column, it might be a source of non-confrontational information on my career. Explaining to them the finer points of my thinking about orgy scenes might be difficult over the phone, but the deep (pun sort-of intended) thoughts I had to offer on the subject were intelligent, forward-thinking, usually feminist, and sometimes even poignant. They were worth reading. At least I thought so, and now someone at McSweeney’s agreed with me.
It would be a relief to come clean, anyway. It had become increasingly difficult to answer questions about my career at family functions. My sisters and cousins were accomplishing things: getting promotions and research grants, graduating with honors, traveling abroad. Meanwhile, I looked like the typical family “creative” type—a receptionist with little to show for her work—to those who didn’t know I’d actually been writing quite a lot. It was time for me to unburden myself, and now that my name would be plastered on the front page of a renowned literary outlet on the Web, even my tech un-savvy family would likely hear about what I’d been up to, one way or another.
And so, one night, I called my parents. I pep-talked myself into hoping that the years between my childhood and this phone call might have mellowed their perspectives on the immorality of sex, or at least given them some perspective. But I doubted it.
I barreled through my rehearsed monologue in a breathless jumble of words that I don’t recall clearly; the adrenaline overwhelmed my memory. I know that I couched it all in lemons-into-lemonade terms: “I’ve been doing this job you’ll find very icky, but I’m getting paid and leveraging it into something that will be great for my writing career! Hooray!” When I stopped talking, they both stayed silent for a long, long time, while I pictured them on the other end of the line, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
My father eventually spoke up. “So, this McSweeney’s … Is that also an adult publication?”
“No!” I warbled, breaking into a panicky grin. “Not at all! McSweeney’s is a prestigious publisher of literature. Real writers publish with them all the time! It’s a very big deal for me!”
Another silence. I could picture him working his jaw, trying to find words. “Well,” he intoned carefully, “I’m glad to hear that you’re making the best of the situation.”
I felt my smile falter.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said, and hung up. To date, that is the only conversation I’ve had with my father on the subject of the adult entertainment industry and my involvement with it.
I think that trauma-processing mechanisms in my brain must have been set off during the conversation I had with my mother after Dad hung up, because I can’t remember any details. I was impressed that she handled it as well as she did, which was likely the result of our shared Northeastern Protestant upbringing, in which emotional reactions are sanctioned only in the direst of situations. I walked away with a glimmer of hope that perhaps, someday in the future, my mother and I could have a conversation about sex that didn’t involve shaming tactics, long silences, or suppressed tears.
In the years since, I have attempted to start that dialogue. As I’ve moved through reviewing porn films, writing set copy for naughty pictures, interviewing porn stars, interviewing consumers, making documentary films, moderating panel discussions, reviewing books, publicizing adult industry events, blogging about all these things, and now writing this book, I’ve tried to bring up my work without forcing details upon her. But her engagement with the subject matter has been grudging at best. She told me once that she’d read a few things I’d written online, and was unable to sleep for days afterward.
In the spirit of good daughterhood, I asked my editor at McSweeney’s to remove my last name from the column. I would henceforth publish my explorations of pornographic matters as Lynsey G. or Miss Lagsalot so that my parents could claim that the sex-crazed deviant on the Internet just happened to spell her first name the same way as their daughter. Isn’t that so strange, what are the chances!
For quite a while, I kept the Lynsey G. identity separate from my Miss Lagsalot pseudonym, which was in turn distinct from the other pseudonym I utilized at the print magazines. To be honest, I was becoming increasingly embarrassed by the stuff I was writing for the old-school jizz rags; although I was doing my best to be witty and quietly feminist, there’s only so much you can do with five hundred words about the surprising perkiness of a pair of E cups or the orgasmic expressions in Anal Acrobats. And, because much of my work involved searching for sexiness in films or images that didn’t exactly inspire me, I needed a place to speak more freely and more seriously as Lynsey G. I felt a certain weight lift when I assumed the alliterative, bad-joke-making mien of Miss Lagsalot, and a different burden disappear when I sat down as Lynsey G. to relieve my mind of my conflicted thoughts as a porn writer. And I had lots of them.
From where I spent my days at my oversized desk in midtown, I couldn’t see anyone trying to bridge the gap between pornographers and porn consumers. There was writing about porn out there: magazines like the ones I wrote for, which glorified yet often degraded porn stars in pursuit of the consumer dollar; industry trade publications, which ran press releases about directors’ vanity projects; online review sites that pandered to whichever companies provided their review fodder; and a smattering of scholarly articles tackling snooze-worthy subjects like the significance of eye contact during gangbangs vis-à-vis some philosopher or another’s writings. But none of it felt accessible to someone like me, or to the people I was interested in: consumers of pornography who might want to think more deeply about what they were watching. I knew they had to be out there in the thousands, but nobody had found a platform from which to speak to them.
In her 2016 book The Pornography Industry, Shira Tarrant wrote, “Its ubiquitous presence in so many aspects of our lives means that pornography is a rich source for studying the ways in which ideas about gender, race, class, beauty, and sex are constructed, conveyed, and maintained.” In 2009, I felt exactly the same way. I’d been attempting
to cultivate a space for this discussion at WHACK! in my op-eds, where I reported on matters like STI screening in the adult industry and legislative attempts at enforcing the use of barrier protection on set. But although I had complete creative freedom at WHACK! I also found myself facing a largely empty room. Our audience was heavily skewed toward the industry itself. As it turned out, convincing consumers to spend more than a few seconds on a website that talks about pornography but doesn’t actually show pornography was not so easy to pull off. Consumers weren’t looking for a place to find out what their favorite porn star thought about Star Trek; times were tough for Americans during the Great Recession, and most were more interested in seeing what that porn star thought about ejaculate on her face.
And thus the paradoxical middle ground I hoped my McSweeney’s column could begin to inhabit: the space between the industry itself and the public’s consumption of the products it sold. Between making porn and masturbating to it. The chasm that few people spend time lingering in after they’ve gotten what they wanted.
I considered this expanse confusing, fascinating, and scary all at once, and I was standing squarely within it, as neither a creator of porn nor a typical consumer of it. I knew more than your average bear about what was happening on both sides of the fence, and I felt that this was an important place for someone to stand in—someone who wanted to talk about it.
I was mostly alone in this space not only in my writing life, but also socially. The crowd I ran with was a mix of young professionals, artists, and graduate students—a fertile field in which to reap some interesting perspectives on porn, I had hoped, yet I found myself standing in a selfmade echo chamber when I brought up the subject. People would seem charmed to find out that I wrote about porn, but also standoffish. Shira Tarrant summed up the experience of being “the porn girl” at the party in a 2016 interview with The Atlantic: “I’ve had this experience so many times, where people, colleagues or what have you, aren’t even listening to what I’m saying about the industry or the politics or the financial aspects of what’s going on. They’re just thinking about whether or not I’m watching porn.” I know exactly how she felt.
Nobody knew what to make of me in social situations. I liked to think it was because I was doing something new and different—challenging people to have real conversations with me about their thoughts on smut—but more likely it was simple discomfort. For my generation (those not quite young enough to be considered millennials, but too young to be Generation X), porn is a type of entertainment usually viewed privately and in the dark; it has never been something one talks about at a party with a stranger, much less a bright-eyed female stranger who’s earnestly inquiring about what websites you frequent and why.
I discovered that most of my acquaintances had never spoken to anyone on these topics, and—more to the point—they didn’t want to. The one answer I often could eke out of a conversation before the person I was talking to squirmed away to get another drink (and then forgot to come back) further solidified my belief in this empty space of silence between the adult film industry and its consumers: Almost none of the people I spoke to had ever paid for pornography. Not even once. When I asked them if they had, I’d often get a series of confused blinks in response, as if the concept had never crossed their minds. And it probably hadn’t. As Tim von Swine once pointed out to me, “Ten years ago, someone who was fourteen is now twenty-four … If you’ve been jerking off since you were fourteen to free porno, you expect it to be free.”
In a capitalist culture where dollars are stand-ins for voicing approval, this lack of communication between a customer base and the industry attempting to cater to its desires was, quite literally, hurting everyone in 2009. Porn was getting weirder by the day, and the few who would speak openly about their habits often said that they didn’t like the violent and misogynist stuff they saw online. But none of them were willing to pitch in the dollars to support the kind of porn they liked. From what I was hearing, most of them didn’t even bother looking very hard to find things that didn’t make them feel so icky. They kind of just watched whatever they found easily and for free, then complained about it. I tried to lure them out into the middle area with me by encouraging them to look harder, giving them the names of a few companies to support, and engaging them in meaningful conversation, but my attempts were largely fruitless.
I also exhorted people to talk to pornographers via their many available social media channels. Most porn actors and directors are very active on social media, and they want to know what you want to see so that they can make it. In an interview, when I asked groundbreaking trans superstar Buck Angel how consumers can help pornographers, he said, “They should speak up and be vocal about what they want to watch. I get lots of specific requests, which I love. And I always try to accommodate them whenever possible.” Buck was far from an outlier in that respect; especially in the trying days of the late 2000s, when pornographers were fearing that their industry would be dead in a year, if consumers expressed a serious interest in seeing something, it was very likely that someone would make it in hopes of turning a profit. As more porn stars were building their own websites and filming content for themselves, the space between fans and producers was shrinking, and turnaround time disappearing. Porn made on spec was no longer a thing of the past, and finding someone to make it was getting easier. (Hint: It’s even easier now. A lot of performers make custom videos or do cam shows where you can make requests! Get on it!)
This all seemed obvious to me, but I began to realize that other people my age didn’t always see porn as an industry made of human beings with whom interaction was possible. It was viewed as more akin to Hollywood, which makes what it feels like based on some metric that none of us are privy to. But porn is more like an open book, willing to be rewritten by its fans, and leaving the space between the industry and the rest of us empty was dragging everyone down.
So I tried to start the conversations I wasn’t having at parties in my column at McSweeney’s. I wrote about the dangers I saw in leaving this space empty—the inherent inequality in the drastic separation between “them” and “us.” In a culture that already mistrusts and mistreats what Danny Wylde once called the “very visible, but somewhat ostracized minority” of sex workers, a chasm between those who do and those who don’t is a fertile breeding ground for prejudice and dangerous lapses in understanding. “A bridge is what we need,” I wrote in my McSweeney’s column, which gave me the opportunity to invite more people to consider crossing the rickety one we currently had.
I had been learning, and now I was ready to open that learning up to asking big questions, hypothesize their answers, and make some room for a discussion about them. Although there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of feedback—no comments section, and not much going on just yet on Facebook, which was only a few years old—it felt good to shout those ideas of mine into space. And I was onto something. By the midpoint of my yearlong column, my editor told me that more people were reading my column than anything else on the site.
CHAPTER 8
In the Flesh
THE BEAUTIFUL THING ABOUt this middle ground into which I’d stepped between porn industry and porn consumer was the freedom it afforded me to walk back and forth between the two sides. At least, hypothetically. But two years into my work as a porn journalist, I had never actually met any of the people I spent my time watching, talking to, or thinking and writing about. Although I was imploring my McSweeney’s readers to close the gap between themselves and their porn heroes, I myself had yet to step outside my comfort zone.
It wasn’t until late September of 2009, almost a year after I’d done my first porn star interview, that I took the real-life plunge into industry waters. The WHACK! team had secured press passes to the Exxxotica Adult Entertainment Expo in Edison, New Jersey, booked a hotel room, and prepped ourselves mentally for what would be my first adult industry event.
Exxxotica, now a mainstay of the porn calendar year with se
veral events held annually in a variety of locations, was just a wee bairn of a convention at the time. It had started in 2006 and was still getting its legs under it in 2009, trying out venues from Miami Beach to Los Angeles to Edison. My inaugural expo was a decidedly porn-centric affair, but in latter years it has opened up to sex toys, webcammers, lingerie, kink, exotic dance venues, head shops and other 420-friendly vendors, and—peculiarly—novelty car shows. It draws crowds numbering into the tens of thousands to the suburban New Jersey expo center every fall and is an excellent source of revenue for the porn personalities who rent booth space.
The expo circuit was a latecomer to the adult industry, but it proved a vital one in the twenty-first-century financial climate. True, the Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) in Las Vegas had been a fixture for years as a gathering place and sister event to the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards—also known as the “Oscars of Porn.” But that was only one convention, available only to vendors and fans able to make it to Sin City, and though it still attracted crowds in 2009, the recession had put a dent in its numbers. So the advent of multi-location expos like Exxxotica proved a godsend for American pornographers, who could now more conveniently bring themselves and their wares to consumers all over the country.
In a way, the bring-the-smut-to-the-masses approach speaks to my “middle space” theory. The past decade has seen adult industry denizens making more frequent public appearances at conventions, strip clubs, public speaking venues, and even college classrooms, bringing them face-to-face with members of the public who may otherwise have never dreamed of shaking hands with their favorite adult star. But, when that star more or less comes to them, there’s no harm in leaving the comfort of one’s own side of the us/them divide and saying hi. Meanwhile, an endless parade of social media platforms has transformed the public’s ability to get to know porn personalities from afar. In the age of free porn for all, providing the public with digital access to the lives and times of porn stars has proven invaluable to the industry. Without tethering themselves to their fan bases in ways that solidify both loyalty and cash flow, many pornographers may have seen their careers crash and burn.