Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  In a way, this evolution makes sense. With fans more focused than ever on interactivity with porn stars, being accustomed as they are to being able to tweet to them directly, follow them on Twitter and Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram, to meet them face-to-face at public appearances, it’s only natural that some fans want to engage with them more, shall we say, personally. Interactivity is the new face of porn, and it doesn’t get much more interactive than a date. Apparently, those dates and their thousands-an-hour payments were more important to the likes of Alyssa Lane and others who managed the escorting careers of porn models than those models showing up at a red-carpet party for WHACK!

  Hard at work just before the opening of “Consent” at apexart in March 2012

  (PHOTO COURTESY OF APEXART)

  At the live taping of Ultimate Surrender in late 2011 … everybody won!

  (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  CHAPTER 20

  Porn, Art, and Obscenity

  AS 2011 DREW TO A CLOSE, I began conducting interviews for my art show, which I’d decided to name “Consent.” I felt it was important to emphasize that, when we get involved with pornography, our participation is a consented-to agreement—a relationship between pornographers and consumers. I hoped that in some small way, the videos I would create might bring porn insiders and outsiders together and remind visitors of our shared humanity, and our shared sexuality.

  I started the filmmaking process by purchasing a cheap video camera on the gallery’s dime and setting out to interview people in New York. I tracked down a few near-strangers I’d met at parties and through mutual friends—those who I had been introduced to as “the porn girl” and stuck around to talk to me. I also recorded conversations with a number of close friends, detailing what porn meant to them. I included a few professional friends, as well: Cindy Gallop, of course; a former adult scriptwriter named Dan; one of the writers for WHACK! whose perspective had always intrigued me; some poetry acquaintances; a fellow porn critic; and three adult performers who lived in the city—industry veterans Sinnamon Love and Brittany Andrews, as well as the then-novice Natasha Starr. There were others I’d have loved to get on camera, some for very personal reasons. But I decided to limit my list to people I had never slept with (with one exception, but I’ll never tell who that was), for fear of losing my focus on the art show in pursuit of my own libidinous curiosity.

  But my libidinous curiosity, it turned out, may have been my greatest strength in these interviews. I started every interview with the same, quite personal, prompt: “Tell me about your first experience with pornography.” The answers were stunning. Not because the stories themselves were riveting (though some were) but because first times are formative experiences, particularly first experiences with smut. One of my subjects described the experience as “a feeling of shock … Something powerful was happening in my brain.” Everyone remembers their first encounter with porn, because it can color your outlook on sex for the rest of your life, depending on how much that first experience teaches you. But nobody had ever asked most of my subjects about this indelible first experience. Once they got started, the floodgates burst wide open.

  Although I’d already spent years writing about the diversity of sexual desires in the world, the interviews I collected for “Consent” really began to drive home just how correct I had been. Particularly with regard to first encounters with pornography, people’s responses and takeaways were wildly divergent. Most of us, upon our first encounter with this new, scary yet exciting source of pleasure and guilt, had nowhere to go with our newfound discovery. Friends might be alerted, but the adults in our lives who might have provided context for porn were rarely told about our illicit peeks into the things we tried not to imagine them doing behind closed doors. One interviewee said that she began watching clips of anal porn in her early teens. “I was really aroused by it, but I was embarrassed that I was aroused by it,” she revealed. “I would have been destroyed if my parents figured out that I was doing that.” And so she just internalized it and let it color her experience of sex for years. When she found out a high school boyfriend watched a lot of porn, she said, “I started observing it more deeply … This is the really kinky shit to do. This is the way to be special.”

  For some subjects, porn provided not just a template for sex, but a deeply conflicting outlet, as well. One woman told me, for instance, that she had never been able to orgasm while watching porn unless something violent was happening in the scene, and that guilt plagued her. She had tried to quit watching it, she told me, but she also had difficulty reaching orgasm with a partner; porn was her most reliable tool for climax. “I think that the porn that I watch is harmful to me,” she said. A victim of childhood sexual molestation, she had a conflicted relationship with pornography in which she both relived and took control of the trauma in her past by watching smut that mirrored her own experiences and feelings of anger.

  Her story, upsetting though it was, reflected a trend. For many of my interview subjects, porn was a source of great shame. But, as one of few things in modern culture that is usually kept private, their relationship with porn was safe from prying eyes and was thus, in a weird way, freeing. In a porn viewing session, viewers could let go of the walls they construct around their formative traumas, their darkest desires, their fear of discovery. In many ways this sounds healthy; wouldn’t we all love to let go of our baggage, even for a short time? But the taboo around pornography, and often the types of porn that these people consumed, made their relationships with the medium fraught.

  For others, the taboo around porn was its draw, and this fascinated the hell out of me. Personally, I’ve always been intrigued by the forbidden, but not so much in order to revel in it as to break down the socially constructed walls that make things forbidden in the first place. But some of my subjects enjoyed pornography, as consumers or creators, because of those walls. For them, porn felt like a playground where they could drop all expectations. Porn was a gleeful opportunity to indulge in the things they knew they weren’t supposed to like. For performers and producers, the act of making a taboo form of entertainment liberated them from the rules of a Puritan society, and they used their freedom to push every limit to near the breaking point—as a point of pride, as a form of art or activism, or just for the fun of getting away with it.

  Others saw porn as just an interesting but atypical diversion—something they’d tried but never found compelling enough to make a habit of. These interviews were short, but I was amazed by them. I suppose, had I grown up in an environment in which sex were not the most forbidden topic, perhaps I’d never have been so drawn to pornography. Most of those lacking interest in porn came from open and accepting backgrounds, in which shame didn’t enter heavily into the dialogue about sex. I envied them in a way, but then I also cherished the dark and forbidden rush I felt when I watched porn, even after years of doing so professionally. I’m not sure if I would trade places with them if I could.

  A shared theme among interview subjects was that very few had ever purchased pornography. Those who had actually shelled out legal tender for smut tended to be older and had made most of their purchases before free porn became readily available—via magazines, videos, or visits to porn theaters. Of the younger interviewees, a few more fiscally responsible souls had subscriptions to one or more membership sites, but most did not. Several blinked at me, uncomprehending, when I asked them about paying for porn. One said, “I guess it just doesn’t seem worth it. I can find enough for free that it doesn’t matter.”

  What was most frustrating was that many of these subjects also complained about not being able to find porn that they liked. Some complained about production quality, others about content on tube sites, but they were united on the fact that finding good porn was difficult. I intimated to them that if they did a bit of research and spent a bit of money, they’d be able to find something more edifying, and to ensure that more of it got made. The responses I got were mostly polite, a
few incredulous.

  “I tried to pay for pornography for the first time,” said one disgruntled guy I spoke to, “and I found that the movie was unavailable for digital download, and they wanted me to pay twenty bucks to get a DVD shipped to me. And at that point, I was like, ‘Fuck you. I’ve tried to do a transaction, and you’re being a dick about it.’” He gave up and had never again attempted to pay for porn.

  Eccentricity was not unexpected in these interviews, but eccentric trends were a fascinating surprise: Several cisgender men informed me that they saved their favorite porn, but not in the way you might expect. They didn’t download entire videos, but rather still shots or short clips that they handpicked from their favorite moments of a porno. As they were watching, they’d hoard these moments to a cache on their computers. It was a time-honored ritual that they indulged in as they neared climax, amassing gigabytes of the most orgasm-inducing moments of their masturbatory forays. But when I asked them why they did it, they had no reason at the ready. They didn’t even go back to their smutty cache to enjoy what they’d saved. Their sometimes-massive stockpiles of pornography just sat on their hard drives, never to be enjoyed again.

  This phenomenon confounded and sort of obsessed me—and to date, it still does. Were these men saving their favorite moments because they felt a need to gain a more personal connection the people on the screen? Did the act of clicking “save” cement the glorious moment of release in their subconscious? I’ll probably never know, but I wonder how many people out there engage in this little quirk.

  The one thing that banded everyone together, from performers to critics to tube site frequenters, was that they loved talking about porn once I got them started. Some of the interviews went on for over an hour, and I loved conducting them. My overwrought schedule was exhausting, but I was so excited to be talking to people about the issues that had obsessed me for years that I hardly noticed.

  IN OCTOBER, I FLEW TO the Bay Area. My primary goal was visiting a friend in Oakland, but I’d also arranged to meet with a personal hero of mine, Madison Young, as she was setting up an art show for her queer, feminist art collective, Femina Potens. Madison had begun her porn career as a mainstream porn star and rose through the industry’s ranks in LA before branching out into more indie and feminist projects. She prided herself for bringing feminism to mainstream porn by visibly enjoying the hell out of her scenes, refusing to fake orgasms, and supporting her art space in San Francisco with the earnings from her anal scenes in LA. At Femina Potens, she had cultivated a community of like-minded queers, feminists, and progressives under the banner of art and revolution, and had then begun to direct and perform in queer, feminist performance art that often ventured into pornographic territory. When I met her, she was also running TheWomansPOV.com, and she had just given birth to her first child.

  We met at a gallery space in the Mission District and plopped down on the floor, the white walls reflecting the midday sun and the space echoing with music blasting from a radio down the block. My friend Leigh, with whom I was staying, filmed our interview, which turned into a rambling conversation about our childhoods, philosophies, desires, and fears. And porn and art and feminism. And bondage and kink and fetishes.

  Madison showed me the bruises covering her ass after a recent caning session and brimmed with joy while she told me about the experience. She caressed her still-full-from-pregnancy body as she talked about her love of rope, the ecstasy she found in relinquishing control, the joy she felt during rough sex. She referred to the mainstream porn she used to make as “fast food porn” and spoke of the deeper, more nourishing fare she and others in San Francisco were making. She spoke of art and porn as one and the same, both parts of an evolving mystery, and as the interview wore on into its second hour, I felt her excitement about these topics seep into me.

  A day or two later, Leigh and I ventured back into the Mission to visit the Armory—the home of Kink.com and the epicenter of American kink pornography. I had scored two press passes to a live taping of Ultimate Surrender, a sex-wrestling event in which competitors grappled while performing sex acts on one other for points. When the bout was over, the winner got to fuck the loser. All in front of a cheering crowd of onlookers, and, of course, the cameras, which streamed live to paying customers around the world.

  Leigh and I were nervous. Both feminists, but with different degrees of comfort with pornography and live sex, we weren’t sure what was in store at Ultimate Surrender. I was worried that I had dragged my sweet artist friend to a horror show of demeaning activity. We sat in a holding room near the building’s main entrance with other audience members, taking in the architecture of the massive structure. Built nearly a century earlier to resemble a medieval castle, the Armory had served as an armory and arsenal—and occasionally a prize-fighting arena—until 1976. It was purchased in 2007 by what is now the largest kinky porn company in the world. (The Armory’s reign as kinky porn’s stronghold came to an end in 2017, when Kink.com decided to move production off premises in favor of renting the aging building out for events and office space. The company still owns the Armory and is continuing to produce porn in several cities around the US.)

  It’s an interesting melding of entertainment, sex wrestling. In many interviews I’ve done, porn performers have told me that they enjoy doing extreme porn not because it feels good so much as because they wanted to prove that they could. Toughness is sometimes worn like a badge of honor. When Katsuni told me in 2010 that, in porn, “The key of success is a balance between will, strength, pleasure, and intelligence,” there was a reason she put “will” and “strength” at the front of the list.

  In pornography, going big is a way to get noticed, too. Houston, a self-described “porn superstar,” set a world record by having sex with 612 men in one day at the filming of The Houston 500 in 1999. When I asked her about her motivations for going so over the top, she told me simply: “I was making history, becoming an even bigger star, dominating the porn world … I wanted to be the biggest porn star in the world and that’s what I did.” Her feat required physical stamina and true grit that I’ll never be able to approach.

  Toughness can also be a mark of dedication to making great entertainment. Kaylani Lei, a tiny but powerful performer, said to me during an interview, “I can be my little four-foot-eleven self and take a mean, big cock in a scene. Granted, I’ll be sitting on ice later that night or walking funny the next day, but hey at least we got a great scene!” Women like Kaylani feel that sometimes gritting one’s teeth to get through a scene that pushes their limits can provide a reward in the form of an excellent product.

  For others, extreme porn functions as a physical paring down of the self into something more free and honest. Oriana Small—formerly known as Ashley Blue, the queen of extreme porn in the mid-2000s—told me that, “With people there watching, it felt like a wrestling match. Like I was strong.” For those who enjoy using their bodies athletically, porn is an excellent fit. Or wrestling. And most amateur wrestling doesn’t pay as well as porn-wrestling, so, hey, why not?

  But then again, why?

  When they let us into the arena, Leigh and I took advantage of our press passes to nab front-row seats, setting up the camera we’d brought and reading our pamphlets while wishing we had known in advance that the event was BYOB. We were about to witness a featherweight tag-team event, our informational pamphlets told us—the first of its kind. We’d signed paperwork to confirm that we realized our faces might be live-streamed to the world, as well as waivers cementing our understanding and comfort with what was about to take place. The emcee explained the rules: Points were awarded for sex acts performed on a member of the opposing team. Basically, the goal was to pin or otherwise immobilize the opponent, then disrobe, lick, tickle, kiss, fondle, face-sit, smother, or finger her for points. The first team to amass a winning number of points got to choose an appropriate sexual punishment for the losers.

  Leigh and I settled in with trepidation, bemoanin
g our sobriety, as the games began.

  What followed was, to put it simply, way more fun than we expected. The wrestlers genuinely enjoyed themselves, with screaming orgasms forcing a pause in the action several times during taping. When Team Blue eked out a victory over Team Yellow, the winners brought in two of Kink.com’s best wrestlers, Isis and Donna, to help deliver a twelve-minute, hardcore, strap-on gangbang that included all manner of depravity and ended with several squirting orgasms from Team Yellow as the crowd roared its approval.

  In the end, I’m pretty sure everybody won.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, I upped my commitment to interviewing. I recorded primarily in people’s homes to help set them at ease. This meant I was running all over New York City, usually after work on weeknights, and occasionally doing several interviews back to back without time for dinner—all while juggling my already overloaded schedule. I was, in a nutshell, a complete wreck.

  One night just before Thanksgiving, I left work to attend happy hour with one of the gallery’s staff members. She took a good look at me and told me I needed to slow down. I agreed, then went out to conduct two interviews in a row. Over the course of the evening I had about three drinks but no food. I left my last interview at around 11:00 p.m. and boarded the subway back to the Bronx, so exhausted that I was afraid to sit down for fear of falling asleep and missing my stop. I leaned against the doors of the 5 train and put on my headphones, keeping my brain active with a podcast … until suddenly I woke up.