Watching Porn Read online

  With 18 black-and-white images

  LYNSEY G. NEVER IMAGINED that she would ever work in porn, but with a degree in English literature and an empty bank account, the twenty-four-year-old was desperate to launch her writing career in New York City. So when her friend put her up for a unique opportunity—screening and reviewing pornos for an adult entertainment magazine—she jumped at the prospect. One review later and it was official: She was a porn journalist.

  Over time, what was supposed to be a temporary gig transformed into nearly a decade of reportage on the various aspects of the adult entertainment industry. From describing the subtleties of money shots and the effectiveness of sex toys to interviewing porn stars and attending conventions and award shows, Lynsey was hooked. In fact, she found it so fascinating that she co-founded WHACK! Magazine, which became her platform to extemporize on the many nuances of the adult film industry and educate the rest of us about what really goes on behind the scenes. As she delved deeper into the prolific and controversial world of porn, Lynsey learned that one of the most diverse and nebulous—and profitable—industries on the planet isn’t quite as different from the rest of the world as she thought.

  Tantalizing, eye-opening, and witty, Watching Porn is a provocative book about an average girl’s foray into the porn industry and the people who make it what it is, both in front of and behind the camera. Often laugh-out-loud funny and thought provoking, Watching Porn is a wildly entertaining and surprisingly relatable memoir that will spark conversation about the intersectionality of pornography, sex, relationships, consumerism, and what it means to be a feminist today.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2017

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lynsey G.

  This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as the author has remembered them, to the best of her ability. Some names, identities, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the privacy and/or anonymity of the various individuals involved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-1532-5

  “It always amuses me that people talk about watching porn like any other form of entertainment. But nobody’s watching porn—they’re wanking.”

  —CINDY GALLOP

  “I wish more people would take pictures of themselves getting fucked! I feel like it’s good for you. It’s really, really good for you.”

  —ORIANA SMALL, a.k.a. ASHLEY BLUE

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: Before Porn

  CHAPTER 2: Getting In

  CHAPTER 3: East Coast ASSault

  CHAPTER 4: The Early Days

  CHAPTER 5: The Backward Slide

  CHAPTER 6: WHACK! Magazine

  CHAPTER 7: The Conflicted Existence of the Female Porn Writer

  CHAPTER 8: In the Flesh

  CHAPTER 9: The Guys

  CHAPTER 10: Vegas and the Sex Toy Revelation

  CHAPTER 11: Creepazoid Territory

  CHAPTER 12: The New Girl

  CHAPTER 13: Editor in Chief

  CHAPTER 14: Racism in the Industry

  CHAPTER 15: Other “Isms”

  CHAPTER 16: The Gay Divide & the Condom Wars

  CHAPTER 17: The Feminist Porn Awards

  CHAPTER 18: Making It in Miami

  CHAPTER 19: Losing It to the Tubes

  CHAPTER 20: Porn, Art, and Obscenity

  CHAPTER 21: Winner

  A GLOSSARY OF PORN TERMINOLOGY

  RECOMMENDED VIEWING FOR THE FEMINIST-MINDED

  FURTHER READING LIST FOR THE CURIOUS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  IT WAS A HIGH-SUMMER NIGHT in 2007. I was standing on a friend’s rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen, basking in the glare from nearby Times Square, which bounced off the glass-sided skyscrapers and lit up the night around me. I was drunk. There was a similarly intoxicated group of old friends surrounding me, wine flowing and music playing, and the sweaty embrace of an August evening in New York cradled me.

  I was twenty-four years old. I considered myself a writer, but I hadn’t written anything of note except a few poems and some essays that had earned me scholarship money and minor recognition at the undergraduate level. I had a BA in English literature with a minor in philosophy, a year of volunteering experience, and several positions as an administrative assistant under my belt. I had absolutely no plans for the future. Nor did I have a job.

  But with the buzzing energy of New York thrumming through my system, I wanted to grab my ambitions by their necks, squeeze out the drops of talent I’d been squandering, and get into the game somehow. I had just returned to the city after two years, having graduated from one of its several universities in 2005 and then wandered off to collect life experiences elsewhere before crawling back, tail between my legs, about a week earlier. I’d left Chicago in a haze of depression and self-medication and landed in a sweltering apartment in a filthy building in Harlem with my boyfriend and two grad-student roommates. I had no prospects, no plan, and nothing to do other than accept whatever cash might deign to come my way. In short, I was a mess.

  “Samantha,” I slurred to the friend whose shoebox of an apartment downstairs was notable mostly due to its exceptionally well-located roof. “Do you know anybody who’s looking for a writer? I need a job.”

  She cocked her head to one side, evaluating me. We’d known each other since high school, and though we’d never been particularly close, she knew me pretty well: a country girl with a flair for the dramatic, a wide rebellious streak, and a need bordering on compulsion to write.

  “Well …” she replied slowly, considering each word. “I do have a friend who’s looking for writers …”

  I perked up. “Yes! Give them my name!”

  “Well …” she said again, tilting her head to the other side. “It’s at a magazine …”

  “I can do magazines! Hook me up!”

  A pause. She straightened her head and looked me dead in the eye. “It’s at a porn magazine.”

  I blinked and tilted my cup to my mouth. This required more wine. A vision of what writing for a porn magazine would entail formed hazily in my mind: There would be parties, I thought. Elbow rubbing with sophisticated types, and sexy new friends, surely. I would probably be, within a matter of months, the coolest person I knew. Probably the coolest person anyone knew. An exotic, interesting, worldly, very, very cool porn journalist.

  Little did I know that at that very moment, the porn industry wasn’t particularly exotic, worldly, or cool. As a matter of fact, it was just as much of a mess as I was. A hot, sweaty, confused, desperate mess. As I’ve spent years watching it from my particular vantage point, halfway in and halfway out, I’ve come to realize that it has always been a mess, and will likely always be a mess. Not because of the literal messes of bodily fluids, or the ethical ambiguity in which it exists, so much, but because it is a mess
of an industry. I don’t mean that as a put-down, rather as a statement of fact and, really, of wonder that it has clung on as tenaciously and successfully as it has through the near-constant shitstorms that have always plagued it.

  Pornography may not really be that exotic or that cool, but it is just as interesting as I hoped it would be that night. It is as vast and varied as the City of New York, as disorganized as the mind of a twenty-four-year-old writer. It has no agreed-upon leader, no formalized code of conduct, no entrance exam or standard for advancement. The only rule, really, is to follow the money in as safe a way as possible, with the word “safe” being a very malleable term indeed. Perhaps the only trait its denizens have in common is a genius for finding a way forward—toward the money—through technology, media, and the marriage of the two. That, and a very high libido.

  But I knew none of this on that roof in 2007. At the moment in question, with my red Solo cup at my lips, all I saw was unbounded opportunity reflected by the electric skyline.

  “Fine by me,” I said to Samantha at last, trying to sound as if I weren’t mentally foaming at the mouth for the job. “Give him my name! I’m into it.”

  I didn’t want to sound too excited. After all, porn was a shameful kind of thing, in my experience, and I was talking to someone from high school. We’d been raised in the same part of the world, where sex wasn’t talked about and the prospect of hobnobbing with degenerates excited nobody. But I was thrilled. In my fuzzy dream-vision, my future porn-journalist self was hobnobbing with French art film types and drinking much better wine than the cheapest stuff I’d been able to find at the liquor store on my way here. She was someone I wanted to be.

  “Okay,” Samantha said. “His name’s j. vegas. That’s his porn-writing name, but it fits pretty well. I’ll give him your info.”

  “Fantastic! Thank you so much!”

  Samantha fiddled with her phone, maybe sending my number to him right then, and I wandered off to refill my cup, then looped my arm around my boyfriend—whom I’d also known since high school. Life was looking extremely rosy.

  In that moment, porn was an unexpected godsend. It was something that I, like many young adults, had never spent much time thinking about, aside from the few minutes every day or two I spent getting myself off to it. I’d had moments of doubt and guilt over it, like most of us do, but I’d never gone very far down the rabbit hole of considering its implications on my life, or the world, or the people who made it. Porn just was, as unknowable to me as the fashion industry that was currently crowding Bryant Park a half mile away for Fashion Week. As mysterious as whomever lived in the penthouses all around me, looking down on us mortals clustered desperately on a fourth-story rooftop. Impenetrable as the glittering sidewalks.

  I’ve since walked down those sidewalks for ten years longer than I ever planned to, infiltrated the offices of a porn magazine, met a man named j. vegas who would change my life, and though I’ve looked back many times and wondered why I chose this thorny, often dark, and always fascinating path, I’ve never turned around. I’ve learned volumes about the permeability and malleability of one of the most diverse and nebulous—and profitable—industries in the world, about the people who make it what it is, and about what it all means about us as humans. I’m going to try to fit it into this book, if you’re willing to come along for the ride.

  We’re both consenting adults, right?

  CHAPTER 1

  Before Porn

  LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING.

  Like most Americans, I grew up deeply, troublingly sexually repressed. And like many Americans, whether in spite of that background or to spite it, I have always been obsessed with sex. My parents were not religious, but they were old-fashioned, to put it mildly. Strict about things like table manners, bed-making, social expectations, and anything having to do with sexuality. They were, to be frank, terrified of sex. I mean above and beyond the typical discomfort found in most American households. I mean that I was told, as a panicky response to me scratching my crotch when I was six, that I shouldn’t touch myself down there because that’s where chicken pox come from. (I’d already had the chicken pox and knew I wouldn’t get them again, so I kept at it, just privately.)

  In typical sex-fearing fashion, my parents presented me with a “How Babies Are Made” sort of book when I was quite young. And I, in typical sex-obsessed fashion, was captivated by it. I asked my mother to read it to me almost every night, and my undisguised interest in its subject matter frightened both her and my father. They began refusing to read it, capitulating maybe once a week to my persistent requests.

  We moved to a farm in the country when I was six, and after we’d settled into the old, tree-shaded house, I recall asking my mom to read me the “mating” book again. (I called it “mating” because it felt grownup to use what I considered the technical term.) It had gotten lost in the move, she told me. I’d have to pick another book. But some years later, I discovered the mating book tucked away in a little-used bookshelf in a back room. She’d hidden it from me, a six-year-old curious about her body and urges! The subject matter in that book, I deduced, was bad. And that made my unbridled interest in it also bad.

  This conclusion, however, did nothing to cool my interest in sex. I’ve never been one to do what authority figures want.

  Sometime in middle school, I discovered a little-used copy of The Joy of Sex buried in my mother’s pajama drawer. What I was doing digging around in there, I don’t know, but the drawings I discovered within changed my world. I’d done my share of imagining what “mating” might look like, of course, but this was before the Internet, and the closest I’d gotten were a few Renaissance paintings of nudes a friend had shown me in the encyclopedia in the second grade. But these drawings were entirely different. Not only were the people in them fully naked, but they were doing it. In imaginative ways with names. And there was so much hair! I found the book mesmerizing. For a while, every time my mother left the house for more than twenty minutes, I would sneak in for a peek at the book—at the reproductions of old Japanese prints in which the men’s penises were oversized and turgid; at the dark, florid bushes of the women and the confusing squiggles of lines beneath them.

  When I was maybe fifteen, a friend was housesitting, and she invited a few friends over. One of those friends (the same one who’d shown me the nudie pics in the encyclopedia) produced a pilfered VHS tape from her bag. She’d found it on her parents’ shelf, and though the label was cryptic, she knew damn well what it was. The five of us settled down with snacks in front of the homeowners’ big-screen TV, giggling, to watch our first-ever porno.

  The movie was fuzzy (ah, VHS!), confusing, and generally awful. We laughed our way through an hour or so of what we now, decades later, fondly refer to as “Boner Beach.” The scene was supposedly set at a beach house, though the “beach” scenes were clearly filmed in a warehouse against fake-as-hell backdrops. The conceit was that several friends were vacationing together in various stages of horniness and undress. I recall few details, aside from the extreme hairiness of the male star, which inspired howls of laughter and many jokes about Sasquatch. I remember one scene in which a woman was making a salad while overhearing some friends fucking in another room. As she surveyed the vegetables at her disposal, growing more turned on by the second, I shouted, “Use the carrot!” But she went for the celery instead, much to my confusion—at least the carrot was round.

  Sadly, “Boner Beach” was my only experience with outright pornography until college. I went to high school in the days of the Internet’s infancy, when rudimentary porn in the form of photos and dirty stories was available online, but most houses had one desktop computer shared by the entire family. Said desktop inevitably had a dial-up connection, which meant that downloading JPEGs of boobies was excruciatingly slow, and accessing the Internet in the middle of the night to find them was loud and obvious. I learned to occasionally find sexual content online, but I was honestly too scared of getting
caught to risk much more than a passing glance. And, besides, boobies were really all I needed—although I hadn’t yet wrapped my brain around my queerness, my body knew damn well that breasts interested me just as much as, if not more than, penises.

  At any rate, it wasn’t until I learned to masturbate in college in New York City that I came back to pornography. Maybe “learned” isn’t the right word; it might be more accurate to say that I’d tried it in high school, but having never had an orgasm, I didn’t understand exactly what it was that I was trying to accomplish. It wasn’t until one crystal-clear afternoon with my first college boyfriend—a very attractive young man who, in hindsight, would probably have made an excellent submissive if I’d known what that meant—that I had the revelation. I can still remember the shock of it. There I was, enjoying myself as always but, as usual, a tad indifferent to the experience, when BLAM! My field of vision went white for a few seconds and my body exploded with pleasure. When I came to, collapsed face-first into the pillow, my lifelong obsession with sex had finally come home to roost with my first real orgasm. I got it now.

  When I got back to my dorm room that Sunday night, inspired and still aroused, I immediately found porn on my fancy new laptop. With an Internet hookup built into the wall of my dorm and file-sharing sites like Napster and LimeWire exploding, literally nothing could stop me from my exploration of ecstasy. And nothing did. Not even my two roommates, who seemed to always be hovering. But I was sneaky, and determined. I persisted in my devotion to getting off, and by the time I returned to New York six years later, having lived in three different states since I’d graduated, I’d been through a succession of relationships, hookups, and sex toys. I’d earned money as both a go-go dancer and as a nude model. I’d inched closer to understanding my own sexuality, and for the most part I’d enjoyed the process.

  But I’d also been sexually assaulted, an event from which it took me years to claw my way back to a semblance of sexual health. Many of my explorations, both with partners and alone with the porn I’d come to enjoy, were attempts to relocate the pleasure I’d found that day in college when I’d discovered that sex and bliss could go together. But my shame-filled upbringing combined with PTSD to deliver one hell of a blow to my ability to experience ecstasy. Along with the occasional fits of violent terror that accompanied a partner saying or doing the wrong thing during intimacy, I had developed a mental and emotional barrier to reaching orgasm when anyone else was around. This meant that, though I threw myself into sexual situations in attempts to return to my pre-assault orgasmic capabilities, I couldn’t climax with whomever shared my bed for years. Even after my orgasm returned to me, it was hit or miss as to whether it would make an appearance when I was with someone. And, since my libido had gotten more complicated but not less active, I found myself alone with my computer even more often than I had before.