Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  One hundred years after the Comstock Act, in 1973, the Supreme Court instituted the three-pronged Miller Test. The Miller Test is our most current rubric for determining what is obscene, and it is at once frustratingly imprecise and beautifully nebulous. A work can be considered obscene only if it meets all three of the following conditions: (1) The average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, finds that the matter, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion); (2) the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, finds that the matter depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse), specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (3) whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

  The first two prongs of the test are held to local “community standards,” while the last is held to a broader standard of what a “reasonable person of the United States” would think, so as to avoid giving any “community” too much sway over a ruling. And the third prong provides some safety for pornography because, according to the Miller Test, most pornography with a storyline can’t be proven to have no literary or artistic value. Gonzo porn remains in murky territory—there is limited context for the sex and therefore more room to push community standards past the third prong. Max Hardcore’s work, as material that pushed well past what most communities would consider acceptable limits, straddled many of these blurry lines.

  Hardcore had been a target for obscenity prosecution for over a decade before he was convicted. His first trial, for child pornography, was called off when the Supreme Court ruled that adults portraying children in films were protected by the Constitution. In 2005, his offices were raided by the FBI and several computer servers were seized, but no charges were made because, ostensibly, nothing illegal was found. Finally, when his company, Max World Entertainment, Inc. was indicted by the Department of Justice Obscenity Section in 2007 on five counts of transporting obscene matter by use of an interactive computer service and five more counts of mailing obscene matter, Hardcore was found guilty on all charges and, in 2009, carted off to La Tuna, from where he wrote to me in 2010. He was released in July 2011, and he attended the AVN Expo in January 2012.

  WHEN I SAW HIM, I froze. I turned to my friend and whispered, “That’s Max Hardcore! What do we do?”

  “You should interview him,” she said simply.

  I screwed up my courage, turned on my heel, and walked right up to my nightmare. When I introduced myself he displayed a vague memory of my letter, and when I asked him to talk to me on camera for WHACK! he was happy to oblige. He offered to film it himself, as he was experienced with POV camera handling (shudder), but instead I handed it to my friend, and off we went.

  What followed was probably only about five minutes of chatter, some of which was lighthearted banter about what he planned to do now that he was out of prison (answer: make more films), and some of which went deeper into his motivations (answer: art and freedom of speech—which did not really constitute an answer, per se) and his feelings about having been sentenced (answer: outraged and shocked, naturally). I don’t recall many details, but I do remember looking at his incredibly white teeth as he grinned his way through the exchange, and his blue eyes wandering over my body when he offered to cast me in one of his films. He reminded me of a shark—always smiling, but cold.

  I walked away trembling. My friend handed me the camera and I mentally logged myself one point in the badass category. When I got back to the hotel room, however, I checked the footage: There were a few fumbling seconds showing my feet facing Max’s on the bright casino carpet, but then it cut off. Apparently my shaking hands had incorrectly pointed out the buttons, and the entire interview had been lost.

  In the years since then, Max Hardcore has fallen out of the public eye. He now has a Twitter account, from which he posts links to his old videos, but beyond that I’m not sure what he’s up to. I think I spent so much time trying to figure out what it was about him that so compelled and terrified me that I ended up learning more about myself, and about porn, in the process. It wasn’t Max himself that was so enthralling to me—it was what he represented.

  Max Hardcore made porn that married two things Americans love: violence (both physical and emotional) and sex, in a way that could be labeled as dark. He brought in an element of brutality that, to my mind, does not easily fit into the category of erotic entertainment. As a pacifist, I found Max’s work abhorrent because his definition of pornography was at odds with my idea about what porn could and should be. In my idealistic way, I’d been building a case for the ways in which porn could be empowering for those who make it and those who watch it. I’d gotten warm fuzzies during interviews when people said things like, “Sex is one of the most empowering things in the universe, and also one of the most beautiful. It should be celebrated and showcased” (Raven Alexis, in 2010), and I’d taken that sentiment to heart.

  I’d been cultivating this middle space, hoping that we could all get together there and shake hands. I still believe in the importance of that space, and as more people have stepped into it, I’ve seen the value it holds for many of us who have been victims of the negative attitudes our culture feeds us about sex.

  But not everybody wants that middle space. We don’t unanimously look forward to breaking down the barriers between “them” and “us,” and we don’t all think that pornography needs to be healthy. As I’ve said before, lots of people like porn because it is taboo. They enjoy the thrill they get from watching people do things they’re not supposed to. Furthermore, some people really, legitimately love to degrade and to be degraded. Many find a safe and legal vent for those impulses in pornography that reflects their darkest desires. Max Hardcore made some of that pornography. And that doesn’t make him the citizen of the month, perhaps, but it also doesn’t make him an outright monster.

  If there’s anything that the process of interviewing people about their experiences with sex and porn has taught me, it’s that no matter how open-minded, how expansive I want to be, I’ll never get it all. Everyone is different, and when it comes to sex, they are so very, very different. I will never be able to wrap my head around why Max Hardcore would film women drinking his urine out of one of their own body cavities. But Max Hardcore will probably never be able to understand what I find so compelling about watching a woman receive cunnilingus from a POV camera angle, either. I feel a little confident in saying that one might be objectively less upsetting than the other, but I’m not here to judge. I’m just here writing about it, and asking others to talk about it, too.

  HOLY MOLY, I WON A FEMINIST PORN AWARD!

  (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  CHAPTER 21

  Winner

  WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK, preparation for “Consent” went into overdrive. I got off the plane and headed directly to performer Brittany Andrews’s apartment for an interview, rolling my suitcase behind me. I was immediately thankful for Brittany’s talkative nature, since my brain was scrambled and possibly numb after so many interviews during my trip. An industry veteran of almost two decades, she had been flirting with retirement for years, moonlighting as a DJ, but she had stayed active enough to know exactly how she felt about modern porn. As a 2008 inductee into the AVN Hall of Fame, her status was so cemented that she was able to demand condoms in her scenes with no ill effects to her career, and she had been a staunch advocate of condoms in porn for years. She was likewise vocal about the deleterious effects of hardcore gonzo porn: “It’s a shame that you’ve got young men who think that this is how sex is supposed to be,” she fumed. “And you see young women thinking that … this is how women are to be treated in the bedroom—not l
ike goddesses, but like dirty fucking whores that you slap around.” She threw her hands in the air in frustration.

  After the interview, I went home to the Bronx to shower and change, then hopped the subway to Queens to j. vegas’s apartment to start editing the videos. His skill at video editing and our established working relationship made him the obvious choice for this process, and he and his new wife (they’d married in the summer of 2011 and there had been one hell of a party) had just welcomed a daughter. Our available time for working was limited to nights and weekends after we both finished work, and even further constrained by the baby’s sleep schedule, so we needed to use every precious moment to the best of our ability.

  We had less than two months to edit over twenty-four hours of footage into four short films, each one coherent enough to hold together around a theme. I’d landed on four ideas that came up in almost every interview: the porn industry as people see it from inside and outside; how porn fits into society at large; the thorny issues of morality that come up around pornography; and the reality of porn in people’s lives. I’d also decided to drop in clips of explicit sex performed by the people I’d interviewed—I didn’t want the art show to end up too removed from the topic at hand. There are plenty of documentaries already out there featuring talking heads getting high-minded about pornography. I wanted the subject matter and the discussion to coexist.

  I went to vegas’s small apartment every evening after work for the next two months, and most weekends, as well. We’d work from my arrival around six until ten or later, finding the right clips, cutting them, piecing them together until we’d formed the structures of films. Some, like the Madison Young interview, had to be heavily color-corrected and sound edited before they were usable. Two of my interview subjects had requested that their faces not be shown, so we overlaid much of their footage with porn—we preferred hardcore sex to a blank screen.

  I still needed an interview with myself for the show to be complete. As the self-described occupant of the middle ground between porn and the public, I wasn’t approaching these films as a documentary filmmaker—not really. I’d been asked to curate a show from my own perspective, and though the work of making the videos clearly reflected it, other people’s words did not. I didn’t see a point in remaining objective, and I was honestly curious about how I would answer some of the probing questions I’d asked my subjects.

  Through apexart, I was introduced to the former producer of a successful TV series about sex—a show so popular that many of my interview subjects had referenced it as a formative part of their sexual journeys. This woman, who I’ll call Sharon, had interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people over several decades. Although the series had come to an end, she still worked for the same cable network and had an office in the Grace Building next to Bryant Park, where she invited me for our interview.

  I was all nerves walking into the offices of one of the biggest television companies in the world. After my brush with TV fame in LA, part of me still clung to the hope that interest in my story might be revived. Maybe Sharon would see something in me and pitch my ideas to her network. I let myself briefly envision calling up my old agent and smarmily telling her I’d gotten a better deal.

  I’d provided Sharon with a list of standard questions I asked my subjects to get things started. But she didn’t use it. Instead, she subjected me to an interrogation about my motivations for being involved in pornography. She was trying to get to the deep, dirty truths beneath my smiling exterior. It was the type of interview I’d have liked to conduct with Max Hardcore. But I was not Max Hardcore, and try as she might, Sharon couldn’t expose my hidden well of dark secrets because my secrets were not very dark and they were already on the table.

  It’s a sticking point I’ve come up against a number of times, but never as pointedly as in this interview: People assume that I have an agenda behind my work. That I really want to make porn myself or that I’m just in it to sleep with the porn stars. But for me, neither of these is a motivation. I have, almost unavoidably, considered doing porn to see what it’s like on that side of the camera and to discover if I’m brave enough to handle it. A reporter can’t really know her subject matter unless she immerses herself, right? But honestly, I’m not that brave, nor am I that dedicated a journalist. And, alas, I’m just not an exhibitionist. I might get a thrill from getting nude in front of a camera—and I have done so as a model—but having sex in front of people just isn’t something I’m interested in. It never has been.

  And as far as sleeping with the porn stars? I won’t deny that the prospect is enticing, but I will deny that it has ever been my motivation for writing about the porn industry. If it were, the payoff would not begin to match the huge input of time, money, and energy that I have poured into my work. I’ve seen my share of starfuckers circling porn performers, and I’ve always wrinkled my nose at them, perhaps unjustly. There’s nothing wrong with lusting after one’s favorite porn star, since that’s the point of what they do, but coming up with sneaky ways to get private access to them so I can proposition them just isn’t my style.

  Some people assume I’m acting out in response to some darkness in my psyche or my past, in the same way that they believe all porn stars were molested as children. I can admit that, yes, I am turned on by pornography—it’s designed to turn me on. And yes, I am coming from an extremely repressed background, which makes my interest in smut perhaps more pointed. And, yes, I was raped as a young adult, which likely provided some impetus to work through my own trauma by watching a lot of sex. But as far as an inner darkness leading me down this path? Not as far as I can tell. Then again, maybe I’m just not self-aware enough to see the darkness that lurks inside me.

  Whatever the case, seekers of my hidden perversions aren’t going to get very far. I’m a pretty open book. I find porn interesting. As a subject of study, pornography is one of the least understood forms of entertainment from both a production and a consumption point of view. In my time writing about porn, the industry and how society views it have both changed measurably. But we still know far less about how smut impacts us as a society than we do about most things. Billions have been spent on the search for the perfect facial exfoliant, but we hardly talk about why we find facial cum shots so compelling. I find this discrepancy strange, so I’ve devoted myself to promoting porn as worthy, even important subject matter.

  As I answered Sharon’s questions with the above sentiments, I sensed her frustration growing. I wondered if she was hoping I’d burst into tears as I recalled a buried childhood trauma. As she kept wearing me down, I grew frustrated, too. My only secret was that I was already worn down. I had little patience for her antics, and I could only offer what I had to give. After about thirty minutes of unsatisfying back and forth, we ended the interview. She shook my hand and brusquely informed me that they’d get the footage to apexart soon.

  I got word a few days later that Sharon’s video was unusable. The minicassette on which the interview had been recorded, at her request, was a mess. Sharon had recorded my interview over something else, and the resulting video quality was low, with those little lines of static fuzz you might remember from VHS days. The audio was completely drowned beneath a low buzzing noise.

  Sharon’s office apologized about the tape, of course, and offered to do another take, but I couldn’t find a time that worked for both of us. Truthfully, I didn’t want to be subjected to her interrogation again, and in our e-mail exchanges she grew more and more curt. She finally ended by telling me that she frankly didn’t understand why I wanted to have myself interviewed, because she couldn’t see how it would contribute to the films anyway. In other words: “You’re not interesting, so leave me alone.”

  I’ve come up against similar dismissals a few times in my career, and I’ve only recently been able to take a deep breath and get over them. I’ll never know what it is about me that puts people off—particularly other women who work in journalistic roles in my porny world.
But I’ve been introduced, sometimes wined and dined, chatted up, befriended, invited to parties, and otherwise made overtures to by women who do similar work, and in the majority of cases, my reception grows cold shortly thereafter.

  I’ve come to believe, after many let-downs, that, like Sharon almost said, I’m just not that interesting. I’m not here to swap stories about porn star make-out sessions, or to brag about my publications, or to indulge in industry gossip. I’m interested in the larger picture … that middle ground. And, though it pains me to admit it, a lot of people find the middle ground dreadfully boring. Sharon was joining a long list of people who found me tedious because I didn’t have anything incendiary to say. She may have also found my dullness something of an intimidation: Was it possible that pornography didn’t need to be a den of sin and degradation, and that my interest in it could be, actually, benign?

  I was pissed that she’d wasted my time, but I didn’t have enough of it left to fret. I instead asked a friend to interview me, and our chat was a great addition to the art show films, if you ask me. So, Sharon, if you’re reading this? Kiss it. I’m plenty interesting for my own needs.

  I KEPT MAKING THE pilgrimage to Queens to sit beside vegas and direct his edits for the next two months. We forged from raw footage four films that explored human experiences with pornography. They weren’t achievements of great finesse, as most of the footage was grainy or blurry or blown-out, but they reached into the minds of their subjects and broached the difficult issue of pornography in our lives. I was proud of our work, particularly given our extremely limited time and resources.