by Lynsey G
But let’s get back to the new girl, and what happens once she ceases to be a new girl. Once all interested companies have filmed what they wanted and she’s checked off all of the boxes on her to-do list of sex acts, she will find that work slows down. She’s got fewer “firsts” to offer producers, she’s worked with most of the people she wanted to, she’s figured out whom and what she enjoys on camera, but now there’s another brand-spanking-new crop of fresh faces arriving in the Valley, ready to climb the ladder she just traversed.
Kelly Shibari summed it up neatly for me in an interview: “In the beginning, when you get in, you’re the new girl, and so you’re friendly with everybody, and you go to all the events, and you go to all the night clubs, and you go to all the signings. That whole first year, everything’s amazing. It’s perfect. Then the second year happens, when you don’t get as much work … By the third year, a lot of girls have either decided if they’re going to stick it out or if they’re just done.”
When a new face is no longer new enough to ensure constant work, it’s time to make a decision: Take a stab at a career by building one’s brand and really going for it? Or bow out, take whatever money is in the bank, and get a different job? Many pick one of these options, but there is also a contingent of models working in porn today who have chosen a mix of the two. They’ve found that porn can pay some of the bills, but often not all of them. Some performers have other jobs to supplement their income, or see porn itself as the supplement.
FIVE DAYS AFTER MY twenty-seventh birthday, on which I had been able to enjoy some of the sexual excess that my polyamorous, swinger-party attending, porn-reviewing lifestyle might suggest, I received an e-mail from someone named Lindsay who worked in development for a television production company in Los Angeles. She had become a fan of my column at McSweeney’s, she said, and was interested in setting up a meeting. Five days later, I left a night class early (growing tired of being a receptionist, I was pursuing a certificate in publishing) and hid out in an adjunct professor’s office while I took the scariest, most exciting phone call of my life. I told myself to be calm, take the call, and try not to pee my pants.
Unfortunately, I really had to pee when the phone rang. I didn’t know where the bathroom in that part of the building was, and I didn’t want to miss the call or be forced to answer the phone in mid-stream, so I had to hold it. Have you ever had to urinate so badly that your brain can no longer process information? Combine that sensation with an elevated breathing rate, quickened pulse, dilated pupils, and overexcited shivers, and then pair all of that physical inundation with the scattered brain of someone who’s been anticipating a possibly life-changing phone call for days.
All things considered, it makes sense that I barely remember the phone call. It was me on one end, with the President of Television for the company, the woman who had initially contacted me, and someone else whose title now escapes me conferenced in. All three of them were friendly but to the point: They were extremely interested in turning “The Conflicted Existence of the Female Porn Writer” into a television pilot based on my life. They wanted to fly me to LA to meet their team, and, seeing as I didn’t have proper representation for an offer as serious as this, they wanted to introduce me to agents while I was visiting, so that they could get to work on a contract immediately.
I said yes. To everything.
Then I got off the phone and found a bathroom.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I arrived in LA. I’d been to northern California before, but never LA. I’d never seen the rows of tall, spindly Pacific palm trees lining the boulevards or experienced the balmy March weather or been able to see the Hollywood sign from a luxurious—paid for—hotel room. I felt like I was in the kind of dream that’s so fantastic it’s dogged by the certainty that at any moment one might wake up, bereft.
For three days I was the center of a whirlwind of cab rides, coffee, and meetings with television developers and producers, literary and television agents, lawyers, other writers. I was complimented more times in the span of seventy-two hours than I had been in the five years previous, and I got the not-unpleasant impression that rainbows were being beamed up my ass. The agents I met with were fast-talking and driven: They wanted me to be the next Carrie Bradshaw, writing whimsical columns in much more expensive apartments wearing much more expensive shoes than I currently did. I got the taste of magenta glitter in my mouth.
As really nothing more than a literary dork with a more interesting part-time job than most, I was bewildered. I saw my TV doppelgänger as a blundering, sarcastic type who wore old funky sweaters, watched sci-fi, and shopped at the discount store on her block, but these people were envisioning a club girl in stilettos who shopped at stores whose names I didn’t know how to pronounce. I wasn’t opposed, necessarily, to a marriage of the two, particularly if it meant that I got a TV doppelgänger, but neither did I want to be treated like something I was not.
The thing about LA, I discovered, was that it moves just as fast as New York, but the people are more concerned with fluffing each other’s egos than talking business. After only a few short days, I had a head the size of a Volkswagen. I had an entertainment lawyer. I had the private numbers of some of the hottest agents in town. Everyone had wanted a piece of the shiny new penny—I think one of the agents actually called me that during our meeting. If I could keep up this momentum, I told myself, I could be rich. (Or at least richer than my receptionist-and-writer life had thus far made me.) And if a TV show were made based on my life, I could be famous.
It was so easy.
In my New Yorker’s heart of hearts, though, I knew that it was too easy. I could hope for all these dreams to come true based on the strength of the columns I had written for McSweeney’s, but I’d better not count on any of it. None of the people I talked to in LA admitted to having read my reviews or seen any of my interviews. I had no experience handling people who made million-dollar deals; I worked for those people as a receptionist. I knew how to be subservient to their whims, but I had no idea how to have my own whims, much less enforce them. The only people I knew who had any kind of experience with this particular breed of madness were porn stars.
I imagined myself navigating LA via the porn industry instead of Hollywood as a new girl. I’d been told by agents and producers alike that I was attractive—now I imagined being told that by people who were paying me for it. Even now, squarely in my mid-thirties and having spent a solid decade writing about feminist thought, action, and community, it’s impossible for me to overstate the impact of being told that I’m pretty. For whatever reason—societal or biological or something else—there are very few women I know who will ever get tired of physical compliments. And I’m in no way exempt from this phenomenon. A few Hollywood types commenting on my attractiveness was enough to have me envisioning myself living a bicoastal lifestyle with large, sunny apartments in New York and LA. I couldn’t fathom how I’d be feeling if those people were instead complimenting me on the way my ass looked in boy shorts or how enticing they found my smile. In the porn industry, I realized, I’d have followed the same trajectory as any other model until that new-penny sheen wore off. As far as I could see from my first interactions with Hollywood, show business was show business—compliments, coffee, and the whiff of easy money—no matter which LA industry you were working in.
The agents also told me that they were excited by my connections in porn. They wanted to know if actual pornographers would be interested in doing television appearances. Would porn stars talk to me for the book I was clearly going to write—a memoir, perhaps, with a glittery magenta cover? Not wanting to show all my cards, I told the agents that I could likely pull some strings and get porn stars on my TV show and in my book. I tried to make it sound as if this would be an insider’s job that only I could pull off. They looked pleased and jotted notes.
But inside I was appalled. Some part of me had been holding out hope that the divide I’d perceived between the “us” of the mainstr
eam world and the “them” of the porn community wasn’t as wide or as deep as I feared. Surely, I’d let myself think, in Los Angeles, where the Hollywood elite live and work and shop and eat right next to porn workers, there’s more overlap than I’d seen. Less division. More acceptance.
But at the talent agencies and the production company, the chasm between the industries yawned wider than it did from my far-flung perch in New York, where the sheer density of human beings forces divides to narrow. The porn industry exists in literally the same city as Hollywood. There is porn being filmed all over Los Angeles all the time, especially in 2010. There was no actual geographical divide between the daily lives of most Angelenos and their porn-making brethren. The divide existed only in the human mind, but the Hollywood folks believed it was real.
What made this divide even more curious was the fact that in 2010, the perpetual itch of both industries to cross the gap was at a particularly feverish pitch. The height of the celebrity sex tape phenomenon coincided almost perfectly with the peak of the porn industry’s analogous crossover madness. And the intermingling of mainstream and adult entertainment is sometimes even more literal than “leaked” sex tapes. Reality TV shows are no stranger to porn stars, and neither are many major networks’ online series. Late-night cable TV has long shared cast lists with adult films. I had heard lots of whispers about A-listers crossing the divide to spend their Hollywood cash with porn stars at clubs and private parties. In fact, in an interview with WHACK! Magazine, rock star Dave Navarro told me in no uncertain terms that he’d been intimate with a few porn stars. And yet, in the same city in which he lives, I’d watched agents’ eyes light up at the prospect of getting a real, live porn star on their contact lists. It was bizarre.
At that same time, maybe unbeknownst to the agents and producers I met with, mainstream entertainment and other industries were already opening up significantly to crossover talent coming from the porn industry. Nikki Benz, who I interviewed for WHACK! in 2011, was that year’s Penthouse Pet of the Year—the first porn star to earn the distinction—and, when I spoke to her, she had just signed a contract for her third year on the show Cubed on Fox Sports Network. She told me that she didn’t see her crossover work as an outlier: “I feel that porn, and the whole adult industry, is a part of pop culture right now,” she said. “It’s very popular, and it’s not taboo anymore.”
When I met with agents in LA in March of 2010, porn star Sasha Grey had just starred in acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience. Although critics weren’t sure what to make of her performance, the porn industry was beside itself with excitement at seeing one of its own making such a splash in the mainstream. Grey was one of the youngest, brightest, and most bankable actors in the adult film industry, having forgone the standard “new girl” ascent up the ladder of sex acts by performing in a gangbang in her first-ever sex scene at age eighteen. She then astonished fans with her intelligence in interviews, continued to turn in scenes with blazing sexual intensity, and won the coveted AVN “Performer of the Year” award in 2008 as the youngest woman ever to receive the accolade. A few months after my trip to LA, still high on her Girlfriend Experience success, she started an ongoing role on the successful TV series Entourage and summarily retired from porn about a year later. Since then, she has continued to work in mainstream entertainment as a successful—if no as longer wildly hyped—actor, voice actor, artist, musician, and author.
Grey’s crossover success was notable for many reasons, including the relatively high profile she earned on the other side of the porn/mainstream divide. Many who attempt to make the same leap find themselves strapped to far-less-notable vehicles, like B horror movies, badly-edited memoirs, and music videos. Jenna Jameson, perhaps the most famous crossover star of all, arguably never crossed much of a divide, at least as far as her industry affiliation was concerned. She became world famous entirely on the merits of her porn career. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially because she paved a path for others to follow. As adult director Ivan said in an interview, “Some porn people become novelties that are thrown into mainstream world just for being a ‘porn star.’”
But Sasha Grey broke that mold by being regarded by many as not a porn star who could act, but as an actor who had done porn. While she may not have landed blanket approval from the big guns in Hollywood, she was perhaps the first porn star to be taken moderately seriously by the other film industry in LA. But she was not the last.
James Deen actually started in porn earlier than Sasha Grey, but as a man working in the straight industry, his star was not as quick to rise. There is no “new guy” phenomenon analogous to the “new girl” trajectory in straight porn. Men are the workhorses, expected to be experienced from the get-go, with little added stigma attached to the sex acts they film (unless they’re perceived as “too gay”—but we’ll talk about that later). Deen got started in 2004 and worked steadily in the industry for years before he gained widespread attention. He had, in fact, appeared in an issue of the first magazine I wrote for back in 2008. There was no fanfare over the set of double-penetration photographs he posed for, and though I’m sure he crossed my radar in some of the films I reviewed, he didn’t interest me until he won his first “Male Performer of the Year” AVN award in 2009.
Around that time, a peculiar thing had begun to happen: Women watching porn started to take note of his average physique, his guy-next-door charm, and his chemistry with his costars. They started to talk about him. To tell their friends. To create fan pages. I noted the stir he was creating and sought him out for an interview in mid-2010, looking to cash in on his budding reputation as the thinking woman’s male porn star. We exchanged e-mails, and the responses he gave were friendly, sort of funny, but not clever or interesting. When I asked him how he’d gotten so successful, he just said, “I’m the luckiest boy alive.”
Despite his retiring nature, women all over the world started to seek out his work. And, significantly, they started paying for it. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Porn producers will do what makes them money. When they started to realize that not only was the cute, personable Deen a reliable performer, but also a guarantee of financial success, a singular phenomenon began to occur: He got really famous. Not just male-porn-star, Ron-Jeremy famous. I mean legit famous. I mean costarring-with-Lindsay-freaking-Lohan-in-The-Canyons-written-by-Bret-Easton-Ellis, mainstream, Hollywood famous.
And it was all because women liked him.
The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated. Not only was Deen breaking down barriers between pornography and mainstream entertainment, he was doing it on the good graces of women who enjoyed depictions of enthusiastic consent in their porn. There was no icky ambiguity—even in the kink and hardcore scenes he was known for—about whether his costars were enjoying what they were doing. He told me in our interview, “When it comes to sex I think it is all about communication and connection.” This line of thinking made feminist porn consumers feel safe watching him perform and, more importantly, paying for the privilege.
I also watched his rise to fame with curiosity because, as early as 2011, I had begun to hear vague and unpleasant rumors about him. Nobody said exactly why, but there were some in the industry who gave him a wide berth. Those who knew him well clammed up when his name was mentioned. There were a few terse utterances of “I don’t want to talk about James Deen” and “that guy gives me the creeps” and even, once, “he has dead eyes.” A friend of mine, who had become close with numerous performers, including Deen’s then-girlfriend and industry legend Joanna Angel, mentioned several times how horrendous their breakup in 2011 was, but didn’t elaborate.
On the merits of these foggy rumors, I avoided Deen. While I sensed a dark story beneath the golden-boy reputation, I wanted just as much as anyone else to believe that he was as good as he seemed, which, it turns out, he was not.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 2015, porn star, writer, and performance artis
t Stoya wrote two tweets that broke the Internet: “James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safe word. I just can’t nod and smile when people bring him up anymore.”
Porn’s biggest “power couple” in 2013 and 2014, Stoya and Deen had broken up quietly and gone their separate ways, occasionally working together for their own fledgling production companies after their break. So, more than a year after their split, the social media bomb went off unexpectedly and set off an avalanche. Joanna Angel sided with Stoya almost immediately, then went on to tell the story of her six-year relationship with him as one of perpetual abuse, both physical and emotional. And the flood gates burst.
Those vague rumors I’d been catching whiffs of for years came spilling out in horrific detail as twelve other women in and around the adult industry came forward with their own harrowing accounts of sexual misconduct, abuse, and assault at the hands of Deen. The stories ranged from off-set assault to on-camera brutality to flat-out rape. His dark reputation, it seemed, was a not-very-well-kept secret in the industry. But he was a powerful man with a sterling image in the outside world. He was profitable, reliable, and wildly popular. And so the women he assaulted kept mostly quiet, sometimes appealing to directors and studio heads for recourse, sometimes simply trying to forget about it.
But in the aftermath of these horrendous accusations and blossoming sickness in the pits of stomachs both in the adult industry and without, something just as amazing as Deen’s initial rise to fame happened. Instead of a too-familiar Bill Cosby scenario, in which the motivations of the women alleging abuse were questioned and discredited, pornographers quickly (though by no means unanimously) sided with Deen’s alleged victims. Companies and performers canceled shoots and contracts with him. The press interviewed the women speaking out against him and published their words, rather than twisting them into unreliable-sounding bits of copy. Discussions of consent in pornography ricocheted around the Internet, and many in the industry vowed to rethink their policies around consent on-and off-set.