by Lynsey G
I looked at the beautiful, intelligent, successful woman sobbing in my arms, thousands of miles away from her home and her stupid jealous boyfriend. I felt certain that this boyfriend benefited from her career more than he realized; Jennie very likely provided him with a lifestyle he couldn’t begin to expect on his own. And the work she put in was exhausting. She was depleted. And she was under far, far too much pressure.
I wanted to punch her selfish boyfriend in the head. What kind of jerk signs up to be the significant other of a dazzling woman like Jennie Hart—a woman who is world famous for her fierceness and sexuality—and then gets petulant about the career that allows her star to shine so brightly? What kind of self-entitled prick would dare approach her, much less work himself into her life and her heart, only to decide that the career she has poured her heart, body, and soul into is too threatening? What an absolute turd.
As Jennie began to gather herself, Graham came down the jetway to tell her about the phone calls he’d been making to get her things back. They both thanked me for my support, and we went our separate ways.
That afternoon, as Jordan, vegas, and I were settling into our hostel, I got a text from Jennie, inviting us to the penthouse she was sharing with her best friend Joanne at a luxury hotel farther down the beach. The three of us basically tripped over each other’s feet on the way to hail a cab, and we spent the late afternoon enjoying beers and weed in a palatial suite overlooking Miami Beach with two of the world’s most successful porn stars. Jennie had arranged to get her things from Orlando; she would have her wardrobe later that night.
She invited us to a VIP party that evening, where we lounged around an outdoor courtyard filled with palm fronds and candles, watching a few brave souls swim in the pool despite the chilly night air. We were waited upon hand and foot as we schmoozed with the top talent in the adult industry, with Jennie periodically updating me on the mission to save her clothing. By the time we left, it had been recovered—in just one suitcase, which Graham proudly wheeled by us with a grin and a wave. I felt like WHACK! had accomplished something, after years of trying. Not success, exactly, but maybe acceptance. We had been admitted into the cool kids’ club. It may have just been that I was in the right time and the right place with the right star having a panic attack, but I preferred to think that our hard work and passion for porn had been integral, as well.
THE NEXT MORNING, WE arrived early at the convention hall to set up WHACK! Magazine’s first-ever booth at an industry convention. Moe, although he showed up hours late and only provided us with a third of the spending money he’d promised, had secured a large corner spot just inside the doors, directly across from the LA Direct talent agency booth, where some heavy-hitting performers would be signing throughout the weekend. We set up a signing table for our “booth babes” (Lexi Love, Angel Vain, and Trina Michaels), arranged all the swag we had brought with us—stickers, magnets, and other cheap-o goodies—and settled in for the long weekend.
At the party the previous night I had seen my first male porn star crush Keni Styles come in, and I’d commented to a few people about how attractive I found him. You might remember Keni from Chapter 14—the only actor of Asian heritage to make a big name for himself in the history of American pornography. I had struck up a sort of Twitter flirtation (or, at least, my version of a Twitter flirtation, which consisted of asking him for an interview repeatedly) and had been praising his performances in reviews. I enjoyed his chemistry with female performers, his charming smile, and his British accent almost as much as I enjoyed his physical attributes, which were more than enough to win me over in the first place.
I don’t remember how, but word of my crush got around, and he was brought over to the WHACK! booth by a friend and introduced to me. In typical confident-porn-guy style, he was relaxed but slightly goofy in an extremely appealing way, while I furiously blushed and kept asking him about an interview. I probably could have stuck the camera in his face right then, but I was too tongue-tied to get my shit together, so I told him I’d catch up with him another time. Then I studiously avoided him for the rest of the day. Smooth, I know.
On Saturday night, we accompanied Jennie and her entourage to the party she was hosting at the Fontainebleau hotel’s nightclub. Adorned in our discount-rack best, we walked into a massive nightclub with some of the biggest porn stars in the world, feeling very much like this should all be happening in slow motion, possibly with explosions happening behind us. We proceeded straight to the VIP section overlooking the dance floor, where we got blitzed on bottle service. Moe and Alexa joined us, making out in the corner the whole time, and vegas, Jordan, and I danced the night away.
When I woke up at the hostel on Sunday, my voice was gone. I’ve been prone to laryngitis my whole life, and my three solid days of drinking, shouting at strangers at the convention, moving between Miami’s late-spring humidity and arctic air conditioning, and Saturday night’s excesses had combined to leave me sotto voce for the duration of the expo. As I descended to the hostel’s bar/lobby, I realized I couldn’t remember much of the night before. I did, oddly, recall walking back to the hotel with vegas and Jordan, and demanding tacos from a street vendor at 3:00 a.m. But most of the party, after our dramatic entrance, was gone.
When I found vegas and Jordan, I tried to croak out a question about what the hell had happened. They laughed at my hangover. “What are you even doing here?” vegas demanded. “I can’t believe you didn’t go home with Keni!”
I shout-whispered, “Keni Styles?” He nodded. I was confused. “He wasn’t even at the party.”
He raised one eyebrow and whipped out his cell phone, pulled something up, and shoved it in my face. It was a photo of me, drink in hand and with a shocked look on my face, in the arms—like, literally being held several feet off the ground in the arms—of a hugely grinning Keni Styles.
I had no memory of this event.
“You two really hit it off last night,” vegas gloated. “You should have gone back to his hotel with him.”
To this day, I don’t remember what went down that night. After thinking very hard, I could vaguely recall Keni arriving and eventually dancing with me, but not that he’d picked me up. I wondered if our dancing had been sexy or silly. In my sensible way, I imagined I must have decided to leave the party rather than throwing myself at a porn star I’d just met. I didn’t want to make the rather gross assumption that his friendliness or career decisions left him open to my sexual advances. I’m sure I threw in the idea that, with two romantic partners back in New York, I shouldn’t indulge with a virtual stranger, lest they be upset.
But looking back, I wonder if I just cock-blocked myself. If he’d actually been interested. And whether my partners in New York would have been that upset if I’d gone for it and brought home an amazing story of coital bliss with my biggest crush in porn. After all, we were already in a polyamorous relationship—Jenn regularly had dalliances on the side and told me all about them. Matthew wasn’t so open, but he was remarkably laid back about my crazy lifestyle.
Sigh.
Lynsey G: missing out on the fun stuff, on purpose, since 1983.
CHAPTER 19
Losing It to the Tubes
WE GOT BACK TO NEW YORK on the 23rd of May, and on the 25th I had lunch with the management team of apexart, a gallery in Tribeca. It was a non-traditional space that did not sell works for profit, but rather invited thinkers to curate shows based around themes. The gallery’s director had been considering doing a show about pornography for years, and had read my McSweeney’s column. He was interested in my point of view and wanted to discuss the idea of me curating a show for the gallery.
I was ecstatic. Stepping into the middle space between the porn world and the not-porn populace had attracted curious looks at first, but now I was luring people out to stand there with me and make connections of their own. Here was my opportunity to invite people into the middle with me in a physical setting, in public! I’d now come full c
ircle, from providing customer service at a high-end gallery uptown to curating my own show downtown.
Setting to work on the art show was an exhilarating but challenging experience. How could I make my show inviting, but also pack a punch? Porn was nothing new to the art world, the director cautioned me. Presenting it in a way that invited discussion rather than blasé sensationalism was the challenge. But we didn’t want to move too far away from the shock angle, either—sex does sell, after all. I was cautioned not to be so professorial that the subject matter became uninteresting, but neither to revel too much in the salaciousness of the material. The trick was to find the middle ground, as always, to place myself firmly in the center, and from there to show what I saw. The validity of my perspective on pornography, really, doesn’t come from my closeness to it, but rather from the distance I have maintained from both the industry and consumers. How could I show the world the things I saw from my tenuous position between porn and public?
The answer came to me almost immediately when apexart first contacted me, but it took months of back and forth before I felt confident in it, since it didn’t involve me curating so much as creating an art show: I would interview people about their personal relationships with pornography. Performers, directors, producers, critics, consumers. The interviews would then be cut up and arranged into short documentary films, which would be shown at the gallery in the spring of 2012.
As I began to prepare for the show, I received an e-mail from my TV and book agents informing me that they were dumping me. The literary agent said that my columns, essays, and sample chapters just weren’t translating into a book-length work the way that she had hoped. The TV agent said that she didn’t see any future in working with me as a client for other projects, but that she would continue to service my TV deal, since her agency also represented the production company (a detail which no one had told me previously). Although the TV deal had been signed and my (meager) option money had been paid, the team was no closer to finding a co-writer for my pilot than they’d been on day one, and the idea was clearly beginning to go stale for all involved.
I wasn’t surprised. After my initial whirlwind of new-girl adulation and a few post-signing months of bliss, I’d been hearing less and less from the producers and agents who had lauded me as the next big thing in Hollywood. I was writing more than ever, for more places than ever, but my new stuff wasn’t getting as much of a response as the column at McSweeney’s had. It made sense: I had been a pervy outlier in the McSweeney’s world, as I now was in the Tribeca art world, but amidst the clamor of online publishing I wasn’t making much noise. I had tried pitching to larger publications, but had gotten no bites, so I continued to dedicate my energy to WHACK! rather than pursuing prominent bylines. My agents, with clearer understandings of writers’ career trajectories, had noticed what I was up to, and they dropped me.
I’m sure it’s bitter grapes that makes me wonder how much of their hesitation in more actively representing me came from a fear of judgment for being aligned with pornography. It felt as if it was okay for me to write about pornography in a literary magazine, with one eyebrow constantly raised. But when I got into the details of blowjob techniques in porn films for my less-exalted publications—look out! Nobody wanted to read about the implications of fellatio upon the cultural concept of gender relations. They wanted to read about the time I went home with Keni Styles after a party at a huge night club in Miami. But I didn’t have that story to tell.
At any rate, I didn’t have much time for reflecting on my bruised ego. I, too, had read the writing on the wall and had summarily started an internship at a major publishing company, which, within three weeks, turned into a full-time job for the company’s premiere genre paperback imprint. Mainstream publishing turned out to be an interesting place to find myself. After watching the adult entertainment industry battle death by technology for years, I was familiar with the symptoms I saw there: dropping profits, resistance to change, polarization, and conglomeration. Just as the porn industry had seen its formerly astronomical profit margin shrink as content was pirated, publishing had been in a free fall as bookstores closed, e-book sales skyrocketed, and other forms of media pushed books toward the bottom of the pile of consumer preference. And yet, in this climate of drastic technological shifts, publishers were still hesitant to make changes to catch up.
When I entered the publishing industry, e-books were an afterthought for my imprint, which still operated primarily in romances, murder mysteries, and thrillers—the exact genres that had been selling well as e-books. But nobody had time, in their panic over the changing publishing landscape, to devote to prioritizing e-books, even as brick-and-mortar sales opportunities continued to shrivel and digital publishing flourished.
Sound familiar?
In light of these changes, the publishing industry was shifting in opposite directions. On one end, independent publishers were popping up and taking advantage of technology that enabled them to reduce the time, cost, and overhead needed to publish books. Self-publishing was also booming, and mainstream publishers were buying fewer books to keep their bottom lines satisfied. This DIY mentality mirrored that of small, independent pornographers (many of them feminist and/or queer) who had taken the opportunities that cheaper, higher-quality tech offered.
Meanwhile, publishing behemoths serviced the other end of the spectrum, consolidating as sales continued to slow and the media shrieked over the death of print. About a year and a half after I started working in publishing, two of the biggest publishers in the world—Penguin and Random House—announced that they would merge, thus combining workforces and taking over an enormous share of the world’s publishing market in an effort to combat the threat of Amazon usurping the book-buying public, the means of distribution, and even the means of production. In a striking parallel, porn was witnessing the beginnings of its own, darker, slicker, conglomerate behemoth: a corporate machine that was growing every day, gorging itself on profits from the very piracy that was breaking down the rest of the industry.
THE ENTITY THAT IS NOW called MindGeek was started in 2003 in Montreal, where college friends Ouissam Youssef and Stephane Manos teamed up with a friend from the competitive Foosball circuit, Matt Keezer, to start some porn websites. When they did well, the group created Mansef, a holding company for their expanding enterprises, including a high-end pay site called Brazzers featuring content they contracted from producers in America. Brazzers specialized in big, often-augmented boobs—an aesthetic that had started to wane before Brazzers revived it—and high production values. I’d reviewed Brazzers films for both the print magazine and WHACK! and praised their quality, though I was never a fan of the plastic, blonde, tan-lined look they pushed.
The Brazzers family of companies expanded quickly, with JugFuckers, RacksAndBlacks, and more appearing in quick succession. A second network of sites popped up soon after, called Mofos, which specialized in less manufactured-looking performers—soon I was reviewing films from TeensLikeitBig, which had a more natural aesthetic and tended toward more extreme sex. (I preferred the Mofos content, generally.)
But even as Brazzers was growing in size and credibility in the porn industry, its cofounder Youssef was branching out in a different direction: tube sites. Internet porn piracy takes many forms, but by far the most popular tactic—and therefore the most draining on the industry—is tube sites. Taking their moniker from YouTube and modeling themselves after their namesake, porn tube sites allow users to upload pornographic content for free, and to watch it to their heart’s content, also for free. This means that anyone with an Internet connection can post amateur videos of themselves having sex (legal, so long as everyone involved consents), or scenes they’ve recorded from porn films (totally, completely, utterly illegal—and far more frequent than the former; “amateur” porn on tube sites is almost entirely comprised of professionals pretending not to be). Tube sites display whatever their users upload unless a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D
MCA) takedown request is filed by the copyright holder, in which case it will be taken down in due course. But pirates act fast, and there are so many of them that most porn companies that try to counter them fight losing battles with diminishing resources, given that people are now able to watch their movies for free instead.
So, when Youssef purchased the domain Pornhub.com in 2007 and added the tube site to the Brazzers family under the name “Interhub”—a separate company owned by the same people—he was getting into bed with porn’s biggest enemy while continuing to produce porn via Brazzers. Even as Mansef was paying porn crews, directors, producers, and performers to create new content for sale, that content was being pirated and uploaded to a growing family of free tube sites that Mansef also owned, and its advertising revenue was being funneled to Interhub. The Mansef/Interhub team had a simple strategy: Make money on traditional porn production and porn piracy, keep it quiet, and laugh all the way to the bank. As consumers flocked to the tube sites for their free and nearly limitless content, profits were dropping across the industry—except for over at Mansef, where business was still shockingly good. Rumors spread, and the Brazzers team—who had never been on a porn set but who were quickly becoming porn tycoons—were treated with suspicion.
In 2009, the Secret Service seized over $6 million from two Mansef bank accounts for suspicious activity. In short order, Mansef and Interhub’s assets were sold to Fabian Thylmann, a German programming wiz who, overnight, become a porn overlord. At the time of purchase, he already owned several porn sites (including Xtube), and when he acquired Mansef and Interhub’s operations, he renamed the conglomerate Manwin in 2010.