by Lynsey G
Ex-porn actress Aurora Snow wrote in an article for The Daily Beast in the wake of the horrific Christy Mack incident that, “Yes, most of us in the adult industry have experienced the stereotypical porno dude who becomes the ‘manager.’ He books your work, drives you to set, wheels your suitcase in, helps you collect your check and, of course, spends it. Along with all this comes a certain possessiveness; these manager-boyfriends begin referring to you as their property, and a sense of ownership is created.”
I don’t mean to imply that all adult industry managers are ticking time bombs of horrific viciousness just waiting to go off, of course. Far from it—most performers who work closely with their boyfriend/managers never experience anything remotely akin to what Christy Mack did, thank goodness. But, at conventions, I try to give men with neck tattoos a wide berth.
A good chunk of the guys who position themselves as amateur agents or managers for inexperienced women have an ulterior motive besides skimming from their clients’ profits and controlling their bodies: They want to perform, themselves. Because it’s so difficult for men to break into straight porn, many aspiring guys will hitch their carriage to women who could do well, then talk those women into requesting to work with them on camera. If it goes well, they may be able to stick around as woodsmen. Many a fixture in the porn industry got his start this way, which is to say that not all men who attach themselves to female talent are necessarily scummy. But still, ulterior motives are ulterior motives. (Perhaps incidentally, War Machine appeared in twelve adult films during the course of his relationship with Christy Mack.)
Rounding out the population of the porn expo Creepazoid Zone, I must be careful not to forget the industry groupies. This is a motley crowd comprised of miscellaneous hangers-on: party promoters, low-level rappers and rockers who want to up their “cool” cred, models from other industries sizing up their chances as porn stars, drug dealers, pro-and anti-porn activists, and, of course, journalists.
Like me and the WHACK! crew.
I’d be negligent not to count myself as one of the spongers. After all, here I am, an outsider with stars in her eyes, showing up at industry events with a microphone in hand and trying to get Internet famous. It’s been pointed out to me by at least one prominent porn star that I’m basically standing on the bare backs of adult actors to make a living, and I can’t deny there’s truth in that. But I will defend myself by mentioning that I’ve never made anything close to a “living” on writing and reporting on pornography—I have always worked full-time at other jobs, occasionally eking extra cash out of my porn reporting career, but more often using the money I made at my full-time gigs to support my porn-reporting habit.
But that’s not the point. I won’t deny that I’m too afraid to take off my own clothes on camera, yet I’m happy to stick a camera in the face of someone who does and ask them about their life. I’ve always told myself that the work I do seeks to humanize the people of the porn industry, normalize the work they do, and give them some positive PR in a world that enjoys scorning them. But I also want to get into the after-parties. And so did my cohorts at WHACK!
The groupie mentality of the WHACK! pack was displayed for all the world to see at the 2010 AVN Awards, the culmination of the previous year in porn. WHACK! had been unable to get press passes to the event itself, or even to officially cover the red carpet extravaganza preceding it, so we all trucked over to the Palms, where the awards ceremony was then held, and found a spot on the wrong side of the velvet ropes. We were surrounded by rabid fans, drunk frat boys who’d wandered over from the strip, cameras of every shape and size. But, sadly, we were not surrounded by other reporters, because the legitimate ones had mostly gotten onto the red carpet itself, where rock stars and porn luminaries conducted video interviews with the porn glitterati as they swept up the carpet in their gorgeous duds. We got a few quick poses from some of our favorite stars: Jenna Haze and her then-boyfriend Jules Jordan, Joanna Angel and her crew of alt models, sweetie pie supreme Teagan Presley, a few of the new acquaintances we’d made over the weekend, and gonzo director Ivan in his finest hockey jersey, furry hat, and matching kicks. But for the most part we were overlooked like the insignificant hangers-on we really were.
That sucked. After the hubbub died down and the AVN Awards got under way, we wandered off toward the strip and decided to console ourselves with a few drinks at the Circus Circus Casino, the location of one of the most memorable passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, during which Doctor Gonzo and Raoul Duke take ether and attempt to board and then disembark the casino’s famous rotating Carousel Bar. Matthew, vegas, and I found the bar, which was surrounded by confusingly family-friendly carnival games, where kids with cotton candy puffs in hand squealed over their chances to win oversized stuffed animals. Freaked out by the unexpected family dynamic, we boarded the Carousel Bar without much trouble, and set about sipping watered-down drinks while a trapeze act took place far over our heads. It was delightfully weird, but as it turned out, the bar didn’t spin very fast, the drinks were too expensive, and we were all too exhausted to enjoy ourselves after our unsatisfying go at the AVN red carpet. We felt like the groupies we were as we sat at the disappointingly real bar, spinning slowly in a vestige of Vegas’s golden age.
The AEE convention and the AVN Awards are much like the Circus Circus, really: glittering homages to a bygone age. Every year, AVN week in Vegas gets smaller and more sparsely attended, as the industry reinvents itself in the Internet age—smaller, sleeker, more spread out, and less tied to the same old places it used to hang out at. In 2016, Tee Reel told me about the good old days: “I remember going to my first AVN Awards at the Sands and staying at the Bellagio, and companies having black cars and renting, not even rooms, but whole floors.”
It’s always sad to watch an institution of debauchery like AVN Week—and, similarly, old Vegas standards like the once wild Circus Circus—lose face and luster as times change. And yet nowhere is this fading more fitting than in the porn industry, where meteoric rises and falls of boners and careers and companies and trends are standard. Times change faster than any industry—pornography or casino gaming—can predict, and anyone who’s not fully prepared to cash in on the next big thing is bound to miss a winning shot. The Internet has altered the porn landscape more drastically than anyone could have predicted back in the nineties, when adult entertainment reached its apex and AVN week in Vegas reached maximum glamor.
Things change fast these days, and irrevocably. Case in point: Four months after our visit to the Carousel Bar at the Circus Circus, it was turned into a snack bar. In keeping with the family-friendly feel of the casino, the redubbed Horse-A-Round Snack Bar now serves gelato, popcorn, and lemonade rather than the whiskey the WHACK! staff downed that night, quiet and tired, until the bar closed around 11:00 p.m.
CHAPTER 12
The New Girl
BACK IN NEW YORK in early 2010, my life had taken on a surreal quality. For the book I was trying to ghostwrite, I was still attending swinger parties—sometimes alone and sometimes with Matthew or friends from the swinging community. I didn’t participate in the action beyond a few make-out sessions, but I watched a lot of live sex. It was an odd parallel to my porn reviewing career, which was continuing apace at the print magazine for which I watched a lot of hardcore gonzo porn, and at WHACK! for which I was tending more toward feature films and parodies.
It confused and disturbed me that, although I was frequently surrounded by sex and by prospective sex partners, my interest wasn’t piqued by much. It had, however, been quite piqued by a good friend, who we’ll call Jenn. She and her fiancé, who we’ll call Adam, had moved in downstairs from Matthew and me in Harlem, and now the four of us got together once a week or so for video games, movies, food, weed, and booze. Jenn and I had been growing closer, and when she and Adam showed interest in the swinger parties I was attending, Matthew and I decided to invite them to one. Things got intense at the party,
and I walked away from the encounter with the rather surprising understanding that I had a massive crush on Jenn.
As my understanding of non-monogamous relationships and my own sexuality deepened, I began to consider that my long-term relationship with Matthew might not be the only one I could maintain. So, after some very long conversations with Matthew, Jenn, and Adam, as well as some more fooling around, Jenn and I started formally dating. It was an interesting dynamic between the four of us. Matthew and Adam were in no way interested in each other, and Matthew wasn’t interested in Jenn, either. But he wasn’t opposed, he said, to my relationship with her. Soon, Jenn and I were going on dates and spending nights together.
And so, I became polyamorous. And I felt really good about it. I also felt good about really exploring my sexuality. Now that I was getting a look at the wide world of sex on film and at sex parties, I realized that gender wasn’t really an issue for me at all. If Jenn had been a man, or a transgender woman, or any other gender at all, I would have been magnetized just the same. When I interviewed Sophia St. James, a gorgeous, buxom queer porn star, she told me, “for me, being queer means that I’m an equal opportunity lover. I enjoy many different sexualities and many different genders … Queer can also, for me, mean that you’ve taken your sexual realm and identity outside of the societal, heteronormative views of what sex should be.” These ideas were directly in line with my evolving understanding of myself, and when I began dating Jenn seriously, it occurred to me that I wasn’t really bisexual—attracted to two specific genders as I’d considered myself for years. I am queer—attracted to whatever gender a person who interested me happens to be.
ON THE PORN-REPORTING front, I was trying to keep up with a seemingly endless roster of “new girls” in adult entertainment. Publicists had gotten wind of WHACK! and wanted their clients interviewed, but no matter how many Q&As we conducted, there was always a brand-new actor to talk to. That night at the Circus Circus kept popping up in my head. In just a few short years I’d seen several merry-go-rounds of adult talent whiz by, each new wave of up-and-comers ready to reinvent the carousel.
I doubt that any industry, except maybe food service, has a quicker turnover rate than porn. And I’d be willing to bet that porn has the most spectacularly meteoric career trajectory, with new talent rising through the ranks in the blink of an eye, spending a few months at the glamorous top, then opting out—often in a crash-and-burn fashion. When I started writing about the industry in 2007, the estimate for the average female porn performer’s career was an eighteen-month blitz. But by the time I attended the XBIZ industry conference in Los Angeles in early 2016, panelists were saying that most new female talent only lasted three or four months.
This incredible career brevity is due to a number of variables: Many young people use the sex industry as a way to make quick cash, moving on when their debt is satisfied, school finished, or purchase made. Others try it to sow their wild oats—they get some kicks, but never plan on staying. Plenty have their sights set on fame and fortune, but then realize that porn is more difficult than they’d imagined and abandon the idea.
And of course, some actors are quickly disillusioned by bad experiences with unscrupulous producers, agents, or costars. Performer Mickey Mod told me once, “It’s really a misconception that everyone in this industry is exploited. But it is true that sometimes people can get taken advantage of,” particularly when they are being pressured by “someone who may have a financial interest in their performance or their career path.” For many who experience manipulation or coercion of this kind, careers in porn don’t last long.
And it’s important to realize that, pop culture’s fascination with successful porn stars’ glamorous lives aside, it’s not easy to achieve success in smut. Performer Mandy Morbid told me once, “It’s hard to support yourself in porn unless you’re willing to take almost every job that comes along,” and not every job is worth a performer’s time. Careers are difficult to sustain, after the initial burst of work during which many female performers find money practically falling into their laps. New girls in porn are human commodities the likes of which simply do not exist in other industries. In an interview for WHACK!, performer Sheena Ryder told me, “They’re just letting girls get off the bus and putting them through [the industry] on like conveyor belts”—and those conveyor belts serve as the industry’s main artery to relevance. Both novelty and youth are hugely popular in terms of human arousal worldwide, and new girls usually possess both of these attributes; as a result, they are coveted by pornographers and consumers alike.
There’s a standardized trajectory for a new porn model to follow with regards to the sex acts she performs on camera, with pay rates escalating along with the level of “hardcore” acts she’s willing to engage in. This trajectory isn’t one-size-fits-all, and it’s falling out of fashion as the industry shrinks and new performers enter the biz already savvy about choosing their own career paths. But the step-ladder ascent of yesteryear was quite structured, as Tee Reel explained in a 2016 interview: “Ten years ago, there were dozens of solo companies, and anal companies, and interracial companies,” he said. “The list goes on and on and on. At that time, the attitude of agents, from a business perspective was, ‘I can bring a girl in in January and have her do solos or girl/girl work for an entire year.’”
(An important note: Although many of these girl/girl scenes are marketed as “lesbian” scenes, they are called “girl/girl” within the industry because female performers are expected to be “gay for pay.” A higher percentage of porn performers self-report as bisexual than in the rest of the population, so rarely do girl/girl scenes involve partners who are truly repulsed by vulvas, but these scenes are nevertheless not considered “gay.” Also worth noting: Scenes between clearly not-gay women in mainstream porn aren’t hard to find, and they are just as disappointing as you would expect.)
Tee Reel continued in his hypothetical porn star progression: “‘When she’s shot out with those [girl/girl] companies, the next year she can do boy/girl. And I can probably up the price and get more money out of a production company for her first boy/girl. So she’s shooting boy/girl for the next year. And then maybe I can stretch it out for another year for her first anal in year three. And then in year four, maybe I can stretch it out for interracial.’ It was a business decision.”
This master list of on-camera firsts, and the order in which they happened, is becoming outmoded. Now, there are only a fraction of the number of companies shooting any of the above types of content, so Tee Reel told me that a model entering the industry in January would be able to work with every girl/girl, boy/girl, anal, and interracial company by March—three months after she started. There’s not much of a point putting off boy/girl scenes for all of the two weeks it would take to work with every girl/girl company.
Moreover, the new millennium has brought with it a bit more candor around sex in America (linked arm-in-arm, of course, with easy access to its visual depictions vis-à-vis the Internet) than existed when a first-time anal scene was a game-changer for a new performer’s career. Fewer hang-ups around sexual taboos have liberated many porn actors from compunction about jumping into double-penetration scenes right out of the gate, if they want to try them.
No matter the placement of sexual landmarks in a performer’s career—whether she climbs the new-girl ladder rung by rung or plunges right into the deep end of the pool—the pay remains scalable: She will be paid more for a hardcore gangbang than a girl/girl spanking scene, no matter how many times she’s done either in her private life. But it’s important to point out that pay rates are by no means standard across the industry. Pay is governed by supply and demand, the depth of a producer’s pockets, the star power of the performer in question, and the difficulty of the shoot. Naturally, more established companies with bigger budgets can afford to pay more. But also naturally, that doesn’t mean that they will pay more. Smaller companies with more to prove might be willing to offer more
to get the model they want doing the scene they’re looking to capture.
But pay does average out across the industry, as agents and producers need to work together to meet their bottom lines. Sadly, rates have fallen precipitously as online piracy has devoured the fat around the middle of the industry. Mark Spiegler told The Hollywood Reporter that the average porn star had made around a hundred grand a year in 2002, but that by 2012 he estimated that average had been cut in half. Of course, his clients generally command higher rates and pull in more than the average performer. Spiegler Girls can earn two thousand dollars or more for their scenes, while rates for boy/girl scenes pay most female models between seven and fifteen hundred dollars.
Another detail worth noting when it comes to performer pay is that it’s very different for male talent. In a country where women in other industries make seventy-nine cents (or less, depending on race, age, and ability level) per male dollar for the same work, this discrepancy is worth pointing out with an extra-pointy finger. Guys in straight porn earn only about five hundred dollars per scene, on average, with newbies getting blowjobs making as little as fifty bucks and bigger names pulling in up to five thousand dollars for a scene. But those at the top tier may find themselves doing a limited amount of work, since most studios either can’t or won’t pay their rates.