Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  On the floor of the train.

  There was a man standing over me, saying, “Miss? Are you okay?”

  I was confused. I had no memory of losing consciousness, but I suppose that’s how passing out goes. The man, assisted by another who had joined him, helped me stand back up. “You should sit down,” they said.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” I answered, leaning back against the door and trying to make sense of what was happening. I was frightened, but mostly embarrassed. When I’d woken up, my face had been smooshed into the subway floor, and I wondered vaguely if I’d fallen in a really unattractive way. Had people seen my nose crunch up like a pig snout? I glanced out the door as we slowed down to stop at 96th Street. I was almost home …

  And then I woke up. On the floor. Again.

  This time the two men helped me to a seat. There were plenty of them available on the late-night train, and I felt silly for not having just taken one in the first place. Now a fuss was being made over my dumb mistake.

  I looked at the doors again. They were open, and we were still at 96th Street. I felt my heart rate quicken—how long had we been here? How long had I been passed out?

  Oh. Dear. God. Horrified, I realized that I was the “sick passenger” slowing down the train! The sick passenger that made hundreds, even thousands of people late to their destinations as other trains backed up behind mine, while I sat on my butt waiting for a medical crew to arrive and cart me off to a hospital! I was holding up every one of those people who just wanted to get home to their families and beds.

  I looked around. Everyone was watching me.

  I couldn’t be the sick customer. I refused to be that guy. Someone, sounding far away, told me, “We’ll call an ambulance.”

  And then the idea of a hospital visit confronted my reeling brain. A New York City emergency room is basically the last place any sane person wants to be. Hours in the waiting room, hospital staff who hate their lives and their patients, harried doctors, insufficient care. A whole night in the hospital, missing work the next day, maybe having to cancel interviews, all followed by an astronomical bill. I was lucky enough to have great health insurance through my new employer, but even that wouldn’t entirely cover a visit to the ER; I could be in debt for months or years.

  I stood up in a panic, yelling, “No! I’ll be fine. I’m just going to get off the train.” I patted my skirt down and stepped onto the platform. As one of the train crew came out to implore me to wait for medical attention, I shook my head. “No, thank you! I just need some air!”

  I got out of the station as fast as I could, bursting into the humid late-autumn night. I was embarrassed, terrified, and still confused. The cold air and moisture revived me enough that I could wander the Upper East Side for a few minutes, getting my breathing under control, before finding a cab, calling Matthew, and bursting into tears.

  I ARRANGED TO TAKE THE month of December completely off from WHACK! and this lightened my burden considerably, but I kept up my breakneck schedule of interviewing people in New York for apexart, working my full-time job, writing for dirty print magazines, and dating two people. In January I flew to Los Angeles to collect interviews from more porn performers. My month off from WHACK! had been moderately restful, and I had regained enough energy to be excited about renting a car and touring the city on my own. The interviews went swimmingly, and the majority of my subjects agreed on one thing: They loved sex, and they had found a legal industry in which that love was rewarded.

  April Flores, with whom I spoke in her living room, told me that although she’d never intended to make a career of it, she’d discovered in her first shoot that porn empowered her, and she’d decided to stick around for the self-love as much as for the paychecks. “I got tired of reading and hearing that porn degrades women, because I’ve never felt degraded in this field. I always say that I felt much more degraded as a receptionist than I did—ever—in porn,” she told me. Adult film had given her a more positive body image, too, as a plus-size woman. “Porn doesn’t give women bad body image. Life does,” she said. “We are assaulted, as women, with these images of what we should be to be happy. I don’t think it’s porn. It’s life.” At that point she had starred in several movies her husband, Carlos Batts, had filmed, and worked with a number of feminist, queer, and mainstream pornographers, all while spreading a message of body positivity for plus-size women who, like her, wanted to feel sexy in their skins.

  Nyomi Banxxx confided that she adored her job. Of course not every shoot was the best experience of her life, she granted, but despite her successes in other fields—modeling, beauty pageants, acting, vocal performance, mainstream filmmaking—porn was the only place she wanted to be after six years in the industry. “I love this industry. I love everything about it,” she told me. “It allows you to become an individual. It allows you to be able to brand yourself. It allows me to have learned myself sexually.”

  Kelly Shibari visited my hotel room to talk before she drove to Las Vegas to prepare for AVN. She tried porn on a whim and found it a safe place to experiment sexually with partners who knew what they were doing. She realized that porn was, as she put it, “a great way for me to get laid by people who are never going to call me afterwards!” Kelly has since gone on to be the first plus-size woman to appear in Penthouse, and a PR professional for the adult industry.

  Sinnamon Love, in our earlier interview in New York, had shared Kelly’s sentiments. On a porn set, she said, there were other professionals on hand to help if anything went wrong during a hardcore or kinky scene. “The opportunity porn presented,” she said, was “to explore certain types of fantasies on camera in an environment that was safe and consensual and that allowed me to feel protected. I felt like, ‘I can have sex with these guys, and there are people there that are watching what’s going on. It’s not going to get out of hand.’”

  One afternoon, I called Oriana Small to confirm our interview, and she instead invited me to the photo shoot she was doing that afternoon. I had recently finished reading her memoir, Girlvert, a retelling of her days as the reigning queen of gonzo porn, when she was the star of the JM Productions series Girlvert. In that series, she had gleefully tricked other women into brutal threesomes, tear-inducing punishment, and more, while playing the role of a bratty teenager with a sadistic streak. Her brand of porn had always upset me, but her book floored me. It’s difficult to describe, but it revealed to me some part of the human psyche that I’d witnessed, yet been unable to process before.

  After what I’d read and our correspondence earlier in the day, I expected to enter a porn set in the hotel I’d been summoned to. So when I walked into a tiny room strewn with vintage clothing and makeup, I was surprised to find Oriana, in a black-and-white checkered skirt suit with her lips painted to match, on her back with her legs splayed as another model, Audrey Bernal, stood over her in a latex French maid outfit with a chainsaw held aloft.

  The legendary kink photographer Eric Kroll was responsible for the mayhem, and after attempting to find a place for me to watch events unfold, he instead invited me to take part in the shoot. In short order, I was clad in a gold bodysuit, holding Oriana’s arms down while Audrey dribbled a homemade concoction of grape jelly, salsa, ketchup, and water over Ori’s vulva and thighs. She was attempting a blood-spatter effect, but ended up with a more menstrual-looking scene while Eric snapped photos of our ridiculousness.

  It was a surreal afternoon. We got lunch afterward and talked, but Oriana didn’t have time for an interview. I did, however, get some diverting photos e-mailed to me a few weeks later, and a Skype interview with Oriana that I used for the show.

  AFTER A FEW DAYS, I left LA and drove to Las Vegas. I’d figured that AVN would be a perfect time to collect interviews—with porn stars gathered like fish in the proverbial barrel—but discovered that I had grossly misinterpreted the situation. During AVN, everyone is running from shoot to signing to public appearance and back, booked to the gills. An hour-long, sit-d
own video interview in a quiet place was not an option for most.

  But I did manage an interview with Danny Wylde, a performer with whom I’d grown close to through some of my correspondence with Cindy Gallop and whose nihilistic perspective intrigued me in the same uncomprehending way as had Oriana’s. Danny worked occasionally in queer and feminist productions, but spent the majority of his time in Los Angeles, where his status as a bisexual man who had starred in gay, straight, and bi porn made him a rare figure. We had a great talk in his suite high above the Strip, talking about the need for an open dialogue around the pressures that porn places on male performers. “Just fairly recently, I almost failed a scene for the first time in the last couple years,” he told me. “I don’t think that ever gets easy. I think as a man, especially when it’s your job … from a self-esteem point, or just self-worth, even, it’s very emotionally draining to fail a porn scene.” Male porn actors’ rock-hard and fail-proof erections, he wanted to assure viewers, were not to be taken as easy, much less realistic. As a matter of fact, a few short years later, Danny was forced to quit performing when a mishap with performance-enhancing drugs brought him to the emergency room. He was told by doctors that if he continued to use these pharmaceuticals, he risked inuring himself so badly he would never be able to have an erection again. He quit the business and has gone on to work behind the scenes and as an author and subculture icon.

  I went back to my cheap (read: smelly) hotel and ordered cheap (read: terrible) room service that evening instead of lingering outside the awards show. I had considered getting tickets to the AVNs and trying to nab a date on my solo trip, but after a week of chasing porn stars around multiple cities, I was so tired I didn’t even want the (awful) wine that came with my dinner. And I had been disheartened by the state of the convention. It had been moved from the sprawling Sands to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, and I didn’t see the move as a positive one. The Adult Entertainment Expo and its attendant Adult Novelty Expo were big enough to take over every one of the smaller venue’s convention halls, with some booths spilling out into the hallways between them, making the show floor a bewildering maze of wall-to-wall people. I had wandered the aisles alone, looking for familiar faces and often getting lost.

  I collected a few video interviews for WHACK! as I wandered the floor, until I came upon the same pro-domme friend who had recently helped us with the disastrous party in New York during Exxxotica. As we chatted, I noticed a man in a large cowboy hat ambling by.

  When I turned to look, there was a pair of light, grayish-blue eyes piercing back into mine from a jovial face I recognized: Max Hardcore. The man anti-porn zealots point to when they’re screeching about exploitation, degradation, and coercion. The man who more or less invented the term “skull fuck”—an oral sex move in which the fellator is forced onto the fellatee’s cock by a hand on the back of the head, usually forcing the cock down the throat until tears and gagging are produced. The guy who made his models call him “Mister” in knee socks and pigtails, and, in some cases, syphoned his bodily waste into their various orifices—mouths included—on camera. The guy who had just been released from a thirty-month federal prison sentence for disseminating obscenity. That guy.

  He and his case had fascinated and repelled me for years. Obscenity trials in pornography are relatively rare, given that porn is not strictly illegal, but under the second Bush administration they had picked up significantly with the Department of Justice’s new Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, formed by Dubya himself. Bush was so focused on prosecuting pornographers for obscenity, in fact, that after he was sworn into office, adult entertainment lawyer Paul Cambria, together with porn industry leaders, developed a list of sex acts and themes that pornographers were encouraged to avoid in order to duck obscenity charges under the new administration. The Cambria List isn’t a set of rules so much as guidelines that include nearly everything we’re used to seeing in porn today—degrading dialogue, double blowjobs, facial cum shots—and has been criticized for discouraging normal, healthy acts that like male-to-male contact and interracial sex. However, the list also cautions against a few acts that have remained taboo, and which Max Hardcore enjoyed filming: shots with the appearance of pain or degradation and peeing indoors, to name a couple.

  In the Dubya years, several others had gone to court over their work, but Max Hardcore was a different animal. I’d become a little bit obsessed with him, and had interviewed several performers who had worked with him—Oriana Small among them—to find out what made him tick. I’d been told that he was a friendly, soft-spoken guy with kind eyes. But that sweet-tempered reputation just didn’t match up with his films. Make no mistake: I’m not just talking about hardcore sex. I’m talking about hiring very young women who are often new to the industry, putting their hair in pigtails, dressing them in clothes that make them look younger, requiring them to talk in baby voices, and asking them to pretend that they are twelve years old. I am talking about Max, who usually starred in his films, urinating on his costars, fisting them without apparent consent, inserting specula into their orifices, talking them into eating their own vomit. Max Hardcore was literally the monster in porn’s closet.

  But although his work horrified me, I wasn’t sure I could agree with him being locked in a federal penitentiary for making what he considered artistic expression, no matter whether I liked that expression or not. As performer and artist May Ling Su, who had worked with Max Hardcore by her own request, told me in an interview, “Max Hardcore may not have started out thinking he [was] going to make videos to challenge authority. I think he just made videos he wanted to make. It was the law that made a political statement out of him. What that means for us is up to us. Do we shrug our shoulders and say, ‘Serves him right for being so deviant. No one should do anything beyond the norm’? Or do we say, ‘This is wrong! No one should go to jail for consensual sexual expression, on camera or off’?”

  I suppose Max Hardcore represented, to me, the limits of artistic expression being pushed to their furthest extreme, and then peed on. But had those limits been broken? All his paperwork was in order, with I’s dotted and T’s crossed. His costars were duly paid for their performances, and none had ever pressed charges or testified against him. Some starred repeatedly in his films—clearly they were as excited by his shocking exploits as he was. May Ling Su told me that she enjoyed the experience and consented to everything that happened, which left me with little footing to feel disturbed by what had gone down, other than my own squeamishness. She told me, “Consent. That’s the line. It’s obscene when the participants are below the age of consent. It’s obscene when the participants are coerced or drugged against their consent. Obviously there are videos that depict non-consensual sex or underage sex, played by consenting adults, and those can be scary and sexy and it messes with your mind. But I want to know that it’s all in the realm of play, and that in real life it’s being carried out by responsible adults.”

  So, did Max Hardcore’s films merit an obscenity conviction, or merely a pass from those who were too weak in the stomach to handle them, like myself?

  Unable to get his case out of my head, I had written to him in prison in 2010. He responded with a five-page letter handwritten on lined notebook paper that he’d turned into stationery. “Max Hardcore,” it said at the top, “America’s Most Wanted Pornographer (TM).” There was a 3x5 photo of him behind bars in a trucker hat and tank top with an acoustic guitar in his hand and a toothy smile on his face. Clearly Photoshopped, it gave the impression of a simple, all-American guy wrongly imprisoned on a trumped-up charge.

  The letter complained, in high-minded language, about the failure of the justice system in persecuting an artist like himself. Despite his lawyer’s “inspired interpretation and logical explanation of the US Constitution,” he said, the 11th Circuit Court had denied his appeals, and he remained behind bars for “making religiously immoral motion pictures which were too tawdry from the poor people of Tampa to tolerate. It
should also be stated,” he went on, “that there were never any allegations of anyone who was compelled to perform in any of my movies. Also, no one in Tampa, Florida, where I was prosecuted, had protested my productions.” That much was true—he had been convicted not because people had objected to his films, but because the Bush-appointed task force had purchased several of his works online and had them mailed across state lines to Florida. These films were meant for distribution somewhere in Europe, where obscenity laws were more lax, and were not marketed for an American audience. How the feds were able to worm their way out of entrapment for that one, I don’t understand.

  His letter continued: “Equally unsettling is that a jury of my purported peers would be unable to understand the importance of free expression as a fundamental human right. They sentenced me to forty-six months in prison, along with a fine of nearly one hundred thousand dollars, simply because my movies had somehow violated their mysterious ‘community standards,’ which are nowhere written down. As a result of this outrageous travesty of objectivity and open-mindedness, I am being held against my will [in] very substandard conditions here at the decrepit La Tuna Federal Correctional Institute.”

  As dramatic as his wording may have been, I had to admit: Max Hardcore had a point.

  HERE’S THE THING ABOUT obscenity laws in America: To call them “vague” is to give them a lot of credit.

  Firstly, what qualifies as obscenity is material that does not merit protection by the First Amendment, and can thus be censored. However, there is no standard metric for what constitutes obscenity across the nation, leaving each federal district, state, and community therein free to decide what it finds un-protectable, and for the courts in that district to set their own precedents.

  If the material in question passes over state borders via the post, said material comes under federal jurisdiction and can be tried at the same level for obscenity, thanks to the Comstock Act of 1873. The vast majority of pornography is now, of course, distributed electronically, which has fluffed feathers on both the porn and law enforcement sides of the obscenity issue. There’s no real standard in place yet that specifically applies to online distribution—which is one happy reason why many sex acts have become normalized in the Internet age.