by Gerrie Lim
Why was this? Because people in porn often forgot that not everyone accepted sport-fucking as a spectator sport, to be slickly packaged for home consumption. But then again, it all depended on your perspective. Those of us old enough to remember the mid-80s can still recall one of the biggest hot-button topics in American publishing—the so-called “pubic wars” being fought between Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. To me, that was the cultural watershed of the American sexual revolution, when lines were suddenly drawn in the sand. Those were the early days of modern print-porn, when genital penetration was verboten but wide-open vaginal close-ups were de rigeur, and people took sides according to their personal views and their visual perception.
One bought Penthouse if one wanted hardcore that (mind the metaphor) straddled the fence. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1984, I was confronted by that cultural divide and constantly amazed by it. One of my graduate-school classmates bought Penthouse openly and she told me she liked it for the “microscopic” pictorials—I suspected she was a lesbian, though she never admitted it, but she enjoyed looking at naked women in spread-eagled splendor—and I realized that one of the great things about America was that, for all its inherent democratic foibles, it did at least offer such freedom of choice. I had grown up in Singapore, where reading material was either overtly or covertly restricted by government edict, so nobody was supposed to think too much about having too many choices.
Ignorance was supposedly bliss, but not to me. I was interested in having questions answered, and living in Singapore was, of course, never going to allow that to happen except in the most vicarious of ways, which was much too obtuse for me. Porn offered me a new window to the outside world, to be pondered anew. At what point, I mused, did an inquiring mind turn into a skeptical one? Why did some people get so worked up over poses and positions, at how photographers specializing in erotica depicted the display of human genitalia? It might’ve all been skin-deep, but what was really going on under the surface?
I remember discussing that very topic with George Kenton, who was the first American art director of Penthouse (he had helped Bob Guccione take his fledging publication from its humble beginnings in London over to its eventual power base in New York), and he told me a fascinating anecdote.
At one point in his career, George was the art director at Playboy’s sister publication, Oui, and had been courted by Larry Flynt’s super-hardcore magazine, Hustler. He instinctively decided against it.“Then, I was talking to a buddy of mine, back in Pennsylvania, when I was visiting there,” George told me. “He was a working as a pipe fitter, and I had known him all my life. I told him about this offer I had to work for Hustler. They were going to pay me twice what I was making at Oui, with a brand-new car, any car I wanted. But I didn’t even interview for it. He said, ‘You asshole!’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘You could be working for the best magazine in America!’ I said, ‘Hustler?’ He says, ‘Yeah. I’m a pipe fitter. I don’t see women like that, like the ones in Playboy or Oui. Women like that don’t even look at me. The women I like are the kind that like me, and they’re the kind that you see in Hustler.’”
George smiled sagely. “Cheap, bad-looking women—those were the kinds of women that he had access to. That was his idea of sex. Whereas people who read Playboy were people like doctors and lawyers.”
He had thought about this kind of thing often, when designing layouts in Penthouse. “More realism in sex,” George chucked, “is kind of interesting, you know.”
The only question, then, was this: How realistic did your pornography have to be? In the course of my own exploration of this most misunderstood of pop-culture genres, I was always confronted with that timeless question, and my own final answer was seriously simple: It only needed to be as realistic as you wanted it to be. Because it had to work in tandem with the kinds of sexual fantasies you most enjoyed.
As Sheryl Crow and Liz Phair sang (in Crow’s song “Soak Up the Sun”): “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.”
What was the point otherwise?
For instance, I enjoyed meeting Juli Ashton back in 1995, and I had met her at an opportune juncture, too—I was working for Spice and had only started exploring the business professionally—but my interest was truly piqued when I started researching her background on the Internet and discovered that she had been a schoolteacher in Colorado before entering porn and that she had begun expressing her sexuality in the most flagrantly carefree of ways while in college—she openly admitted that she had screwed half the guys in her dorm.
Now, that truly excited me: Juli Ashton, the sex-positive slut, doing something usually associated with most frat boys, her bragging rights instantly trangressing social mores. Young women weren’t supposed to be proud of their sexual conquests, but she was. And this immediately elevated her standing in my eyes. I would never look at her autograph the same way again; “Gerrie—Lick me all over!!” she’d signed on the 8 x 10 glossy that proclaimed: “Introducing JULI ASHTON, Starring in New Wave Hookers 4 and Butt Detective from VCA PLATINUM”. Not long after, she became a mainstream celebrity as the host of the Playboy cable channel’s Night Calls program, and then signed a record US$25,000-a-movie contract with VCA Pictures.
Her glamorous sheen aside, though, Juli was a role model of sorts for me, since she reflected my own sexual pedagogy; I was very sympatico with women who enjoyed that kind of psychic gender-bending. I’d once had a girlfriend who liked me to call her “Slut!” while we were in flagrante delicto; she got a real kick out of it, and she also liked receiving “facials.” It wasn’t something one only saw in porn movies—she actually told me she believed that sperm all over her skin was responsible for her good complexion. Small wonder that I took to porn like a duck to water. More realism in sex was, to quote George Kenton, interesting indeed.
However, in any serious contemplation over porn, two overarching issues needed due consideration: prostitution and obscenity. Most people outside the business wondered the same things whenever they encountered porn. Were these real working girls as opposed to merely actresses being paid to enact sex acts? Was there a clear demarcation between the two? And, finally, when was something unequivocally obscene?
Easy answers did not exist and shades of gray abounded. People had fought countless court battles over pandering and obscenity. Philip D. Harvey, the founder and chief executive of Adam & Eve, told the story of his own misadventures with the United States government in his amazing book The Government Vs Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve (published by Prometheus Books, 2001), summarizing the long saga of obscenity prosecutions in the country. How far had we come from the landmark case Miller Vs California, in which pornography was deemed obscene only if it violated certain “community standards”? Or from the time of Supreme Court Judge Donald W. Stevens, who famously said he didn’t know what pornography was but “knew it when he saw it”?
In point of fact, then, how did one know a slut or a whore, or a morally-questionable woman, whenever one saw one? Whatever did that mean? And was it a meaningful distinction anyway? The political philosophy major in me (as was my undergrad field) wrestled with that one gleefully.
Historically, pornography had been defined as “the visual or literary depiction of whores,” and the whole mess should be blamed on the Ancient Greeks, and then the early Christians. As the cognitive scientist Nicholas Kelman pointed out in his fascinating book Girls (one of the most thought-provoking treatises on the male outlook on love and sex today, in my opinion), the Ancient Greeks had no word for romantic love. A man related to a woman only in terms of being “owned” or “valued highly” or “had sex with,” and they would also use “mingle” to mean “copulate.”
Kelman added that Aphrodite was not, as school children were taught in elementary mythology, the goddess of love. She was actually the goddess of sex. And she was also the patron saint of prostitutes. Her son Eros, from whom was derived the word “erotic,” was the god of passion. The
Greeks also created a system of classification for working girls, with the heterae at the top (the ancient world equivalent of today’s escorts and call girls), the peripatetae in the middle (akin to today’s freelance street walkers) and then, at the bottom of the food chain, the porne (the garden-variety, menial-task brothel workers, from which was derived the tellingly debasing word “pornography”).
The Greeks, like some other ancient cultures, also had a system of temple prostitutes. This was not a culture that associated the human body and its natural desires with shame and scoffing (unlike Christianity, which proclaimed exactly that) and sex was deemed a sacred thing that could even be practised in places of worship as ritualized sanctity. And then, as the feminist scholar Riane Eisler first made me become so very shockingly aware (with her trailblazing book The Chalice and the Blade), the self-righteous Christians came along and wiped out all that.
Placing a premium on chastity, naturally, had its undeniable downside—as exemplified by Catholic priests molesting altar boys and, more hilariously, televangelists caught literally with their pants down in places of ill repute—but that still didn’t resolve the problem of why the place of the slut or the whore was socially derided. I never saw that issue in its proper light until I was entrenched in the porn industry, where one encountered it countless unsuspecting ways.
Nobody, for instance, knew for sure how many bona fide porn stars were really part-time hookers (or the other way around, in the case of girls starting out in the business) but everyone told me the numbers were high. I saw the ads for the infamous Moonlite Bunnyranch in Carson City, Nevada, the legal brothel where famous porn stars fled to winter away their post-contract days. The names of some of my own favorites from the days of yore often came up (“Samantha Strong! Wow, so that’s where she ended up!”) but, beyond such surprises, I paid the issue scant heed. Until early 2001, in the midst of a phone conversation, when Andrew Blake told me he wasn’t going to be working with Regina Hall anymore, because she had “visa problems.”
It looked like she was about to be deported back to her homeland, the Czech Republic. Reports circulated on the Internet, in February 2001, that Regina had just been busted for being a madam, for bringing in high-priced hookers into the United States from Eastern Europe. A Fox News special in Los Angeles stated that she was under house arrest and also cited the blond Czech glamour model Teresa Benesova as one of the girls procured by Regina for her American clients.
That was, to me, more heart-stopping than the more famous Heidi Fleiss scandal, simply because I really adored Regina Hall. Her opening solo masturbation rhapsody in Andrew Blake’s Secret Paris, shot in a sensually brooding sepia tone, was one of my all-time favorite scenes. Her pictorial layouts, most notably by Richard Kern (in Cheri) and Robert Gordon (in Penthouse), remained among my favorites in the still photo category. She had been part of my own personal porn ecology, and now she had been arrested for prostitution and pandering.
How was I supposed to respond to that? The American government had chosen to label her an undesirable entity, to be expunged from these shores, but where did that leave her in my own eyes?
I responded in the most direct and obvious of ways, as only I knew how. The diligent, obsessive reporter in me confirmed it with my sources (including my contacts in the Czech Republic) and then the porn fan in me went straight to my archives. I watched Secret Paris again and looked at the Richard Kern and Robert Gordon photographs. And I found Regina as enchanting and enthralling as ever. To me, she had that luminous quality that separated real sex goddesses from mere damsels in undress. None of her lustre had been lost, despite new information wherein real life suddenly intruded on fantasy.
In short, it wasn’t a problem for me. Even if she was a prostitute and a madam, Regina did not lend herself to real-world attachment; I wasn’t even going to seek her out, to try to meet her when I visited Prague for the first time in the summer of 2005, though we were a few degrees of separation apart and I could easily have. (Besides, I was traveling with my girlfriend and wasn’t about to kid myself). I had friends who mixed sex tourism with their porn fantasies, but for me erotic imagery just didn’t work that way. Some things were always best left in the realm of fantasy. It kept any hot-blooded porn fan safe and sane. Masturbation was still the safest sex anyone could have.
I discussed that very subject with porn veteran Nina Hartley, then in her seventeenth year as a porn star, on the set of a Toni English Naked Hollywood episode (aptly enough, shot in a studio in Hollywood, off Santa Monica Boulevard). I told her I enjoyed her scene in Bud Lee’s film La Femme Chameleon, in which she picked up a hitchhiker and seduced him. Nina laughed and said she remembered that scene, even though the film had been made in 1999, a whole two years previously. Picking up a hitchhiker was a popular saxual fantasy, re-enacted ad nauseum in porn, but it was especially fun when the woman wasn’t the one standing by the road with the proverbial thumb out but rather the one in the driver’s seat, initiating the seduction.
“I think a lot of people should understand,” she told me, “that porno movies are live-action sex cartoons. Just because a person likes a certain kind of pornography doesn’t mean he actually lives it out. Also remember that porn is, by nature, very transgressive. It takes society’s norms, like monogamy and heterosexuality, and subverts them. Interracial sex! Toy sex! Anal sex! Group sex! You watch movies to see things you would never do in person.”
The person who didn’t understand that was the person who didn’t understand porn. It was really as simple as that.
And that was also, in essence, why most pandering busts in the porn business usually came to naught. Police harrassment and eventual prosecution took place regularly but defendents were usually acquitted. All good American constitutional lawyers have affirmed the scenario, which in the simplest terms ran something like this: Under the law, prostitution meant person A paying person B to perform sexual acts upon his or her own person. Porn, however, entailed person C paying person A to have sex with person B.
In other words, it involved payment by a third party (usually the movie studio or production company or an agent of some sort), whose representative did not take part at all in the sexual activity so assigned. And so, it followed, porn and prostitution were legally not the same thing.
And that, boys and girls, was why porn remained legal in most of the United States (with the exception of certain states in the Bible-belt south, which regulated mail-order purchase and engaged in other similarly restrictive scare tactics). It was sheltered by a conceptual framework, one so simple that it actually boggled the mind.
It also paved the way for women in the industry to inject some zany humor that pushed the public boundaries, like one of my absolute favorites—from Lauren Phoenix, a feisty twenty-four-year-old Canadian who won the 2005 AVN Awards “Best New Starlet” trophy, who was asked in an AVN interview about a snippet of dialogue from her film Hellcats 2 in which she said, “I am a raging whore!”
“Thanks. I am a raging whore,” she sassily replied. “Yeah, I am. My sex drive is massive. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve always been incredibly sexual. It’s pretty normal for me.”
Such statements once had shock value but, by 2005, porn had become such a commonplace thing in American culture that only the most ignorant could be surprised. Popular porn stars like Brittany Andrews and Olivia Del Rio openly advertised their escorting services (with prices clearly displayed) on their personal websites. And then, there were porn stars like Chloe, the VCA contract girl, who unleashed her sexual energy like a heat-seeking missile in every film she made and minced no words about her profession. “In the end, we’re really all whores,” she told the eminent English novelist Martin Amis, who then quoted her in a Talk magazine article about porn stars, smugly entitled “To Millions of American Men, These Women are Movie Stars.”
Amis had earlier been credited with an observation I’d always liked, about the difference between fashion models and glamour models�
�fashion models looked like you could do whatever you liked to them, but glamour models looked like they could do whatever they liked to you. Most porn stars, of course, worked as glamour models too (posing nude or at least semi-nude), and I also thought it especially intriguing that it would be Chloe who would make such a frank admission, since she was one of the most pro-active performers in the business, a girl known for pushing the edges of all sexual boundaries. I’d seen her enact orgasms so earth-shattering that you knew it was definitely the real thing, and she particularly enjoyed choking and fisting. There was an incipient violence to her kind of porn, truly not stuff for the faint-hearted.
“We’re prostitutes,” Chloe had told Amis. “There are differences. You can choose your partners and they’re tested for AIDS. You won’t get your john to do that. But we’re prostitutes. We exchange sex for money. I looked it up in the dictionary and that’s what it says.”
I’d only met Chloe once, an all-too-brief meeting in a very crowded backstage area, so we’d never really talked. I had no time to tell her how much I admired her scene with Raylene in the elevator and then with the massively endowed Lexington Steele, both in Michael Zen’s film Peckers (about a female photographer who liked shooting the male organ in its turgid state), or that I admired her for her abundantly sex-positive perspective. Being called a whore was actually a perfectly acceptable state of mind? Well, at age twenty-nine, an elder statesperson by American porn standards, Chloe was unrepentently unconventional. She was small-breasted—unlike most porn stars, she’d refused to get a boob job—and she had trained as a ballerina for eleven years before getting hooked on speed and cocaine at seventeen, which explained much of her wild-eyed, wanton sexual frenzy.
Maybe one needed to break on through to the other side, to quote Jim Morrison quoting Aldous Huxley, to pass through the doors of perception. (Chloe’s ongoing ambition by 2005, however, was sobriety; the drugs and drinking had taken their toll, she told reporters, and she wanted to stay alive.) At any rate, she reminded me of porn’s highly democratic nature—it was a very fluid genre, one that accomodated all tastes and broke all barriers (excepting snuff films and kiddie porn, which I found hideous).