The Elephant In The Room: Porn

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I could and might write an entire series entitled “The Elephant in the Room”, as I believe there are so many fundamentally important issues in our society that we don’t really talk about in a meaningful way. A great many of these things are connected to sex. We talk at porn. We talk around porn. But we don’t really talk ABOUT porn. The same is true of sex in general. 

I would argue that we have so many sexual taboos in this society that the net effect is that sex itself is taboo. And porn is mysterious because its something we don’t talk about. I believe that we are a sexually dysfunctional society because so many people don’t feel comfortable really talking about sex publicly OR privately. 

You’ll find plenty of discussion about porn is the public sphere, mostly people condemning it. Porn is an extraordinarily rare thing in this society at this time, because hating porn is something that right-wing evangelicals and left-wing feminists agree on, and I would argue that both are being hypocritical. The right-wingers (the men at least) are hypocritical because they are some of the biggest consumers of porn though they condemn it publicly. The women who condemn it are being hypocritical because, just as I feel with prostitution, legalization and destigmatization would be a massive power transfer from men to women, but it would, quite frankly, be transferring power to women that academic feminist types don’t respect. 

I have a long and I think unique relationship with porn, and while I have far too much to say about it to cover in a single blog post, I’m going to endeavor to open a discussion about it. 

I was introduced to porn far earlier in life than most people in the pre-internet age. I think I was about seven when I saw my first porn magazine, which belonged not to an older man, but to one of my then-teenage sisters. The first ones I saw were  collections of the types of fake (I assume they are fake) erotic story letters printed in Playboy and Penthouse and the like, and  written sex stories.  But the magazines had ads with explicit pictures in the back. 

Some people might wonder, why would I be interested in reading porn at that age. You have to remember what an advanced, nerdy kid I was. I was already reading some college-level books at that point, though I didn’t always thoroughly understand them.  I was so hungry for knowledge, I would read anything I could get my hands on. Also, as the son of an evangelical pastor, I’ve known “the birds and the bees” since before I could remember because Black churches talk so much about sex in the context of forbidding it, and talk so much about pregnancy because unplanned pregnancies were such a huge problem in the Black community in the Eighties when I was growing up. 

I literally cannot remember NOT knowing where babies come from. And I actually knew the mechanics before I found porn because when I was four, maybe five, a girl of about the same age who lived next door tried to get me to have sex with her. We got caught by my sister before we could actually do anything, but it got far enough for me to learn, “Ok, this little thing right here goes in that hole right there.”. I never connected the two, but I wonder now if that experience is why I’ve been attracted to girls since forever and never went through the “girls are gross” phase. That event is one of my earliest memories, so I don’t know how I was before that, but I know that soon afterward, I started having crushes on girls and wanted to have a girlfriend, not to have sex but to talk and hold hands and stuff that would have been appropriate at that age. I was never in a hurry to have sex, which is why I remained a virgin until a startling old age. 

But since my parents never talked to me about sex, I viewed adult books and magazines as educational, though I was sophisticated enough to know that they did not depict a clear picture of reality. I also read my older sisters’ Cosmos and other young women’s magazines to try to learn about girls. I spent way more time looking at those than looking at nudie mags. 

At probably eleven or twelve years old, I started walking into bookstores and buying Playboy and Penthouse magazines and I don’t think anyone ever refused to sell me one. I was clever—I would always buy a couple of car magazines or something else with them, with the nudie mag in the middle, not on top where it caught too much attention, nor on the bottom where it looked like I was trying to hide it. 

I actually hated Playboy and rarely bought it. I had the view that Penthouse was a much better magazine for a lot of reasons. Though I don’t think I ever talked about it publicly or privately, even as a teen, I had big issues with Hugh Hefner and the whole culture of Playboy, which continued to grow stronger as I grew older. I eventually came to feel Hef was a very problematic character who was hurting the cause of sexual progress, perhaps intentionally as an agent provocateur. That is a subject I’ll tackle in detail at another time. 

Goddamit, I can’t work with Kat Dennings on TV. I have to turn this off. But I don’t want to—she’s soooo cute! All the girls on 2 Broke Girls are hot, even the extras. I need a box set of this series in 4k so bad...

But anyway, unlike most young boys, I actually did read the articles (and I thought the articles were better in Penthouse too despite Playboy getting so much credit for its journalistic legitimacy). I still remember in 1989 sitting in my bedroom closet reading a fascinating long article about the then-ongoing First Intifada in Israel, and forgetting that there were pictures of naked girls in there. 

I was probably ten, maybe nine, when I started ordering porn magazines through the mail. I would get a money order, use a fake name, and if I happened to get the mail on the day it came, I got it. If I didn’t, whoever did would assume it was a misdelivery. 

I don’t think I saw any live action porn until I was about sixteen. I responded to one of those ads in the back of a magazine that promised something like “100 videos for $9.99”. Now, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was a National Merit Scholar headed to Stanford. I should have know I wasn’t going to get 100 full length movies for ten bucks. But still I was surprised and disappointed to get one videotape in the mail and learn that it was 100 video CLIPS, each less than a minute long. And out of all of them, there were only about three that did anything for me. My major takeaway was that porn was corny and stupid and that for the most part, the girls weren’t hot like the ones in Penthouse or the hot girls I knew in real life, so I far preferred just seeing still pictures of hot girls in magazines, or watching the softcore movies on “Skinemax” many of which I liked both as entertaining movies and as erotica. 

I didn’t revisit porn until I was nineteen, after I returned back to Wichita following my simultaneously inspiring and disappointing freshman year at Stanford. By this time it was 1995 and porn was just starting to become more mainstream, and it had been a topic of discussion at many points amongst the circle I had fallen into at school. So I was curious and wanted to see if I could find stuff I liked, so I went to an adult video store and got a rental membership.

This was a somewhat bold act, maybe moreso than I realized at the time. Though my father no longer had a church at that point, he, my family and I were well-known around the city, and he was a building contractor who was putting in bids on city projects. And it was deep red KANSAS. I was driving a rare white and gray Chrysler Sebring Coupe with “MRDS10E” on the license plate, so when I parked my car in the parking lot and walked into that store, I was making a public statement in a conservative state at a time when adult video shops were still considered seedy. I did have enough awareness of this to pick a store in a somewhat out of the way location. But still, I’m sure I was noticed. 

I really had no idea what I was looking for or what I wanted to see, so like a lot of people, I just looked around until I saw something on one of those gaudy oversized boxes that looked appealing. I very quickly found myself watching a lot of lesbian porn because the stuff with guys in it was...well...a huge turn-off. If it wasn’t borderline violent, there were too many dudes, and if there was only one, too much of him and not enough of the girl. I didn’t want to hear dudes talking, I didn’t want to see close-ups of dudes faces in the middle of a scene. I didn’t want to see girls getting handled like ragdolls. Almost all of it was just a total turn-off to me and that is still largely the case to this day. 

I did not have the corny obsession with lesbian sex or threesomes that a lot of guys have.  When I would be in clubs and see girls making out to try to get attention from guys, I would roll my eyes. Over the course of my life, I’ve ended up having a lot of female friends who were lesbian or bisexual, and that probably happened precisely because I wasn’t thinking about trying to get them into bed. But I did like talking to them...

No, I liked lesbian porn because lesbians had the kind of sex that I wanted to have: slow, gentle, intimate. So much if what I saw in the world of straight sexuality, both in porn and the real world, seemed borderline violent and I wanted no part of it. 

But I didn’t like most of the lesbian porn either. Half the time it was obvious the girls weren’t really into it. Or their “acting” was so bad that I spent more time laughing than getting turned on, or it was just shot so poorly that it was unwatchable.   I looked at a lot of stuff but found very little that was of interest, and a few years went by where I didn’t watch any video porn at all, though I still bought magazines and watched cable softcore movies. Keep in mind that at this point, twenty years old, I was still absolutely and completely a virgin. It wasn’t until after my first meaningful sexual experience, in 1999 when I was 23, that I would revisit porn. 

This was because that experience left me feeling sexual desire far more than I ever had before, because now I knew for the first time how it felt, at least to kiss a girl, and to see her naked...and a little more. But my first sexual experience was non-orgasmic. I’ve actually never experienced the phenomenon known as “blue balls” but you could say that I had EMOTIONAL blue balls after that. 

But once I’d been intimate with a girl (a girl I loved and would love for a long time after), I found that porn was a lot more interesting once I saw it again. I now knew what I wanted to see because I knew what I had wanted in that encounter where not much actually did happen, and I knew what I had loved about what did happen. 

When I started looking at some newer stuff produced around the turn of the millennium, it was an evolutionary leap forward from what I had seen before. The video quality was way better. The producers had finally figured out, at least in some types of videos: LESS DUDE, MORE GIRL. They had finally learned to cut out the laughable attempts at acting and the silly scenarios that characterized early porn. They stopped pretending to be making the same kinds of movies Hollywood was making, and starting to define their genre of filmmaking on its own terms. 

I constantly wrestled with whether it was right or wrong to watch porn. While religion wasn’t the primary issue since I wasn’t religious, I did think it was worth at least considering the risk, “What if God really does exist and is such an asshole that he will send me to hell for this when I try so hard to be a good person?”. But my bigger concern was that porn as an industry seemed worrisome. I had heard that into the 90s at least, the porn industry was controlled by organized crime. I didn’t know for sure if this was true, or if it was still the case, but I heard some awful stories about girls being abused in horrible ways. There were a handful of ex porn stars who told stories of coercion and violence. 

On top of that, watching porn made me feel like a pathetic loser, which the girls in porn would often tell you outright that you were. But I felt girls in the dating world were not playing fair. They constantly complained about a host of things men did, but here I was a man who didn’t exhibit any of these behaviors girls said they hated, sitting alone on the sidelines watching other guys seemingly get rewarded for being jerks. I understand now why it feels that way to some guys and that it isn’t what it looks like, but that’s how I felt at the time. 

But more than anything else, I was worried about these girls because I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t know their real names, where they were from. For all I knew, they could have all been locked in basements somewhere and being forced to perform. 

But slowly there started to be enough porn girls who were publicly visible and seemed content with their careers—Nina Hartley was the first one I knew, and then Jenna Jameson. I started to see porn stars getting bit parts in Hollywood movies, usually as strippers or prostitutes or random naked girls. I started to see more pornstars getting interviewed in the mainstream press, and so I concluded that while there might be some dark corners to the industry (as there are in just about every industry), that porn was not an enterprise that was globally abusive to women. 

On top of that, I made a decision. I was trying hard to get myself into a committed relationship, but I couldn’t make it work. So which was better: going out to bars and nightclubs and hustling women into bed, which I’ve never done, never-not-once, and hurting girls directly, or watching porn where I might be a small part in contributing to some bad things that are going to happen anyway? I decided to watch porn rather than be a jerk to girls, though I still wrestled with it. 

I finally figured out a couple of porn series’ that I consistently enjoyed, but more than anything else, I identified a relatively small group of girls that I liked and endeavored to see everything they made that was not of a fundamentally objectionable nature.  It wasn’t until years later that I would figure out the reason why I liked those particular girls. 

The emergence of DVD and HDTV was another leap forward. I had purchased a lot of tapes from a mail-order company called Excalibur that had the cool policy that if you didn’t like something, you could return it and get something else (Hi, Amazon!). Then later I signed up for a membership with a company, XRentDVD that ran a Netflix-like service. But their customer service was way better than Netflix. Unlike Netflix which often had long waits, I could queue up a movie on Tuesday afternoon and sometimes it would come in the mail on Wednesday. That was one thing I noticed when I bought porn. I and everyone else saw the industry as shady, but the customer service of porn vendors I dealt with was almost universally excellent. 

When I rented DVDs from them, I would copy them and I started building a collection that way. I didn’t feel too bad about that because I knew most porn consumers didn’t pay for it at all. 

As I collected movies, there was so much in the media about porn addiction that it made me self-conscious and paranoid. But it was absurd. I never watched or thought about porn at work.  They say you know you have a drinking problem if you drink in the daytime. I almost never watched porn except at the end of the day when I was ready to go to bed. I did, however, watch porn alone. I heard about dudes watching porn with their homeboys and...I dunno. Not for me. 

But at no time did I have more porn movies than Hollywood movies and I spent infinitely more time with Brad Pitt movies on my TV than every pornstar put together. 

Now, it is true that I sometimes spent inordinate amounts of time searching for porn, but that’s just my personality.  It’s true that I spent many hours searching the internet to try to find the full version of a scene with a nuclear smoking hot girl that I’d only seen a brief clip of, but I also spent a full decade and I don’t know how many hours searching the internet for the complete version of this one Nas song “The Curse” after I heard a one-minute snippet of it. I never found either. It’s true I once drove all the way from San Mateo to Stockton and Modesto looking for a particular movie with a particular Kiki D’Aire scene in it, but its also true that I’ve gone to literally every Nordstrom Rack in the state looking for a particular pair of shoes in my size and went to probably two dozen Macy’s stores looking for a pair of these iridescent silver-blue Levis that I only ever saw one pair of. Never found either. 

I finally found a girlfriend though, and even though she wasn’t the most attractive girl in the world and our relationship was rife with problems, I never watched porn while we were together. I had a real girl. I wasn’t interested in it at all.

It was some time perhaps around 2005 that I started to notice a profound change in porn. Before that, the bulk of pornstars had not been truly beautiful girls.  A few were, most  notably to me Anais Alexander who was silver-screen beautiful, but like most of the pornstars of that era who were that hot, she didn’t make many movies and quickly disappeared. I read on a porn message board that she had married a rich guy and moved to Santa Barbara. 

But starting about five years into the new millennium, and continuing at an accelerating rate to this day, I started seeing more and more girls in porn who were stunningly, spectacularly beautiful. The epiphany point happened in I think 2011 when I had returned to watching porn after the breakup of my relationship.  I was watching the first scene of Girl Train, Part 1, which is fucking Citizen Kane, and there is this shot of Sasha Grey and Brianna Love kissing and I said to myself, shocked at the realization, “Those are two of the most beautiful women in the WORLD!”. 

That hadn’t really been true of any of the pornstars in the past, but it occurred to me at that moment that any of the frequent discussions about the most beautiful women in entertainment should include those two. I had watched that scene before but it hadn’t really struck me in that way. Perhaps the reason it did on that occasion was that I’d been binge-watching Jennifer’s Body recently, which includes a scene with Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried kissing (no, that scene is not why I love that movie—it’s actually uncomfortable for me to watch) and it occurred to me that Sasha and Brianna were comparable in hotness to that pair with whom they share a superficial physical resemblance. Whatever list that was that had Amanda Seyfried as the sixth most beautiful face in the world, Brianna or Sasha could have easily been number seven on that list, but they would never be included because, although millions of men knew them, and probably a lot of women too, nobody wanted to talk about them because of what they do. 

This was an important moment that started me thinking differently about porn and the girls who make it. I got this idea while I was watching that movie after that moment of realization. There is this shot of Brianna’s face where she looks so incredibly supernaturally beautiful and when I saw it, I imagined that image on a billboard over New York City advertising for a particular luxury fashion brand that I like, and I thought, “That face would move product as well as the faces of these models and actresses do.”

So I asked myself, all the places I’d been, all the things I’d done, all the people I knew, did I have the power to get that billboard put up?  I decided to try. 

I knew this wouldn’t be an easy thing to accomplish, so I started working on a long-term plan. In the course of thinking about it, I started thinking about another problem that I had long been concerned with: pornstars are UNDERPAID. 

I was always a financial supporter of the porn industry. While I watched or downloaded a lot of stuff for free on the internet, I bought movies, rented them through legitimate channels. But still it bothered me that some of these girls were only paid a few thousand dollars for scenes that became legendary.  Like the union deals in pro sports, I thought the girls of porn should have an arrangement where they always got at least 51% of the revenue because they are THE SHOW and there is no industry without them. But they really should get about 90% because they have to sacrifice a lot more than pro athletes do. 

There is the old parable about a pig and a chicken standing around the barnyard talking about having breakfast and the chicken suggests bacon and eggs. One of my preacher cousins gave a great sermon based on this and I had it on cassette and used to listen to it all the time because it is a great moral lesson to always be conscious of whether you are asking others to make a sacrifice that is not fair in a partnership. In porn, the producers were like the chicken and the girls were like the pig. Making porn required a total sacrifice from them while the producers and male actors could remain anonymous. 

I came up with an idea that I thought would help. Porn is an industry that cannot afford corporate competition. What I thought really needed to happen was for all the porn production companies to form a cartel and put up a website where you could download any porn scene. We corporate computer geeks who have gotten so rich off of computer technology and have stolen lots of porn should assist for free in digitizing everything, building an Amazon-quality website, and indexing it all. 

Porn is star-driven, so the ideal way to organize it would be for each girl to have her own page, where you could search to find ALL of her scenes matching a certain description, and download them all for a single fee. So if you want to see every blowjob scene Jenna Jameson’s ever done, it’s a few clicks and you can buy the download for, what Jenna, $300? Or like iTunes, download individual ones for a few bucks. Most of the time, the porn consumer wants to see particular scenes with particular girls, not the whole movie. If this site existed, I think people would pay rather than hunting around on the poorly organized free porn sites for what they want. 

I had started following Brianna Love on Twitter and I sent her a message. I was going to tell her this idea. Why’d I pick her? Because her Twitter said she was in San Diego, and she’s sooo cute!  But I didn’t really expect her to respond and she didn’t. I figured she probably got hundreds of vulgar DMs from guys every day and didn’t bother reading them, so it was really just a shot in the dark. 

But as all my romantic hopes with all the women in my life slowly fell apart, I found myself thinking more and more about pornstars and the significance of the role they had played in my life, and I found myself thinking about one girl more and more. Tori Black. 

Tori was the first pornstar that I got curious enough about to go looking for biographical information about her. I assumed most of the girls in porn wanted to be anonymous, and even though more and more I was seeing that they had Wikipedia pages and was seeing their real names published in news articles, I respected what I perceived to be their desire for anonymity.  But Tori seemed different somehow, and I go looking and what do I find? I see she is from Seattle, and has a degree in journalism from the University of Washington. I think, “I knew there was a reason I liked that girl.”

The best predictor in the world of a woman being awesome is if I like her. True story. The girl I had a crush on in second grade has a master’s degree. The first girl I liked in high school does too, and ironically is a sex offender therapist. The second girl I liked in high school and for many years after has a PhD and is or was a college professor. The first girl I liked in college is a TV actress, and oh by the way she’s got a master’s degree too. The last girl I loved barely graduated high school and worked in a strip club for six years. At 35, she went to college and graduated (from a good school). She now has a good corporate job and I’m so proud of her I could burst. 

So when I like a girl, I just know she’s special and I don’t doubt it anymore. And I liked Tori Black. I actually didn’t even like her porn. Like most of Scarlett Johansson’s movies, the stuff she does is not for me. She’s got this one though...OMG. And she’s just by herself talking. She’s done a lot of those and usually my reaction to them was, “Stop being silly. Put your clothes back on and let’s talk about journalism.”. But this one...I can’t even imagine what would happen if a girl said something like that to me out loud. 

But other than when I watched that particular little video, I didn’t really think about sex when I saw her porn. I thought about talking to her. I thought about taking her around to show her my favorite places in Seattle. I thought about starting a porn company with her run by the girls. I constantly found myself laughing at her porn because while she is SO good at her job, it had no effect on me and she had this little grin like she knew it was ridiculous. And once I found out about her educational background, I wondered, was she doing a long-term journalism project?

But also, Tori does a lot of interracial porn, and it might surprise people to know this (or maybe not), but interracial porn probably bothers me more than it bothers any White supremacist. For a long time, I didn’t know why it bothered me so much, but it always has.  I hit the back button on my browser quicker if I stumble into interracial porn than if I stumble onto gay porn. I finally figured out the simple reason why I hate it: because I know that most Black men are such assholes in their attitudes toward women, and particularly White women, it disgusts me to see them enjoying a privilege that they don’t deserve. Plus, Black guy on White girl porn is noticeably worse in the misogynistic and violent tone that bothers me about so much porn to begin with, suggesting that these particular Black guys are the exact ones who shouldn’t be allowed to have sex at all until they change their attitude. 

But its funny because I don’t even know Tori’s ethnicity. As seems to be the case with a high percentage of girls in porn, I can’t tell what she is. But I absolutely could not stand watching Tori Black get fucked by a Black guy even as I, a Black man myself, was thinking, “I probably wouldn’t mind marrying that girl.”

I’m not sure if Tori is still married, but she did get married...to a Black guy. But for a while, I was giving serious thought to trying to meet her. I felt that I wanted to start forming public social relationships with pornstars to help destigmatize their industry. 

It was also because of Tori that I first noticed a phenomenon that still fascinates me. It is almost universal that the pornstars that I like have porn names that like, and the ones I don’t, don’t. What’s the significance of that?!? It’s funny. The pornstar I found most interesting is Tori Black.  The cologne I’ve worn for the past 15 years is Bulgari Black. Weird. 

In early 2013 when my ego was out of control, I had the idea that I was going to rent a McLaren F1 (the three-passenger supercar with the driver’s seat in the middle) and see if Tori and Brianna Love would go to the Stanford 15 year class reunion in it with me. I was so serious too. I wanted to take those two girls there with the “best and brightest” and force a reaction. I didn’t know where I was going to get a McLaren F1 from. Maybe Jay Leno would have let me borrow his to see that spectacle. Or as much money as Tori’s got (according to the internet, $8 million!), maybe she HAS one. I posted that plan on the internet and got arrested less than a month later. Maybe Stanford got me locked up to stop that from happening LOL

That was shocking to me when I saw Tori was that rich. I remember when there was the big story about Jenna Jameson becoming a millionaire years and years ago, but I wouldn’t have expected Tori to have made that much. But I don’t know where all that came from.

As I thought about it more, it seemed to me that actually every known pornstar should be stupid-rich because they would be constantly getting big money offers to sleep with rich guys. It occurred to me that porn was kind of like advertising. If I were ridiculously rich and didn’t have the penchant for monogamy that I do, I’d see no problem paying six or even seven figures for a roll in the hay with some of my favorite pornstars, or paying like $10,000 if I saw a girl do something in a video and thought, “that looks fun”. If you’re a billionaire, there are worse things you could spend your money on. I remember Britney Spears saying in an interview that a British billionaire had offered her $25 million for sex, so that gives you an idea what the market is like.

I actually started to think that it would be surprising if any known name pornstar WASN’T a millionaire from doing high-end escort work.  I started to think, maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about them, maybe I should be worrying about myself! But I still worried about them for the simple reason that I felt public society did not afford them the respect that they deserved. 

After I got out of prison, I got the idea that I wanted to write a book about porn. Actually, I wanted to write a book TO porn, to be read only by people who worked in the industry, sharing my experiences and relationship with it from a perspective that I thought perhaps they hadn’t heard.  Though mainly it would be addressed to the girls, I thought it would be fine for the guys to read it too. I was very curious who the guys in porn were. Like with the girls, I had noticed a change in the male actors. Gone were the 80s and 90s when the male porn stars mostly looked like creeps, a lot of fat old men, and apparent weirdos. A guy whose porn reviews I used to read referred to the male stars as “parolees” and they looked like it might be true. But most of the guys in porn these days look like the kinds of guys that hot girls would be hooking up with anyway. 

But what still was mysterious to me, and moreso every day, was that though the amount of porn I had watched grew and grew, I still didn’t know a single girl that I knew had done it. I still never saw any pornstars out in public. They were like ghosts. I started to wonder, if no one knows these girls, how do we know that they are even still alive, or not being held prisoner? But as I looked around, there was enough scattered evidence to eliminate these extreme possibilities. Pornstars were around. They appeared at strip clubs, the AVN convention. I saw a growing number of news stories about them having relationships with famous men. And for a while there was an escort site called Body Miracle where you could order an hour or a night with one of a long list of famous pornstars for what I thought were surprisingly cheap prices. I never did it or really considered it because there is nothing more disgusting to me than the idea of having sex with a woman who isn’t attracted to me and is only doing it for money. Eww gross. 

So I guess what was really baffling was that I didn’t ever cross paths with any pornstars when I had crossed paths with countless actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians. 

I would often see girls and feel a flash of recognition, especially at the beaches here in San Diego. A smoking hot girl a little too old for college is lounging on the beach on a Tuesday afternoon and she doesn’t have a ring on. Whenever I saw a smoking hot young girl with large visible tattoos and expensive clothes, I would think she might be a pornstar. But I never saw anyone I recognized for sure. 

I was in a club here in San Diego one night and my friend I was with told me he had just seen Sarah Vandella there. I recognized the name from porn websites, but I didn’t know who she was at that point. Had I known...well, I probably wouldn’t have talked to her, but I probably would have at least tried to get a look at her because she’s so cute, and SO good at her job. 

I was also fascinated by the prospect of seeing a girl I knew in porn, but I never did. There were a couple of moments where a video came on and for a instant I thought it was a girl I knew but it wasn’t. There are two videos where I’m still not sure, it could be, but I would bet against it. 

But I finally saw one pornstar in public and I finally saw one girl I know in porn. I was at the grocery store one afternoon and I looked over and saw Kayla Quinn waiting in the self-checkout lane. There was this weird vibe in the area, like everyone was pretending not to be looking at her but they were and she had this smile on her face like she was enjoying the hell out of it. I actually enjoyed some of her work, and had she been standing right in front of or behind me, I might have told her so, but I don’t know. I always felt like if I saw a pornstar and I talked to her, she would think I was trying to pick her up and assuming she was a slut who just fucked any guy she ran into, and I didn’t want to risk making a girl think I saw her that way. 

The girl I know who I saw in porn, I’m not going to say who it is because it could get her in trouble. It is obviously a privately produced video and though she’s clearly aware that she is being taped, I don’t know if she even knows it is there because I only could find that one video of her. But it’s really funny that this girl did porn and I’ve seen her since I saw the video and was so tempted to say something to her about it, but I held my tongue. 

But more and more, I wanted to go public and talk about the role that porn played in my life and how I felt about the girls that did it. I felt that I owed them that, because so many men watch them in the dark but pretend they don’t know them in the light of day. It’s not fair. 

It is not without an awareness of the implications that I post this on Valentine’s Day. Before I saw that girl in Vegas, I’d found myself thinking I wanted to MARRY a pornstar as a way of throwing down a challenge to a world that had disowned them. 

When I was working on some big business ideas back in 2012, I had the idea that if things went as well as possible, and I became a mega-billionaire, I would give away $1.1 billion dollars to pornstars, $100 million each to my top ten favorites and $1 million to my next hundred favorites, as a way of saying “thank you” to them and a way of saying “fuck you” to each and every one of the girls who said that they cared about me, but had no qualms about my spending all my nights alone, with the only girls willing to keep me company those who had been rejected and condemned by society. Meanwhile, these girls I loved had gone on to prominent public careers, disowning past sexual dalliances that I knew about but didn’t repeat. Hell, I wanted to say to one girl I loved, “Is it your goal to fuck every man in the world EXCEPT me?!?”. So I felt pornstars were carrying an enormous social burden for women who were hypocritical and dishonest about sex. 

But men were no better. While plenty of them spent their nights with these girls too, by day they disowned them as well. And Trump’s Stormy Daniels saga was characteristic of a lot of rich men. They would hook up with pornstars, pay them for sex, but they didn’t want anybody to know. It was like an overweight girl who told me she’d had sex with a guy in high school and afterward he told her, “Go get me a pack of smokes, and don’t tell anyone about this”. I cried. 

I heard through one of my friends from Stanford that a mutual acquaintance of ours from our college days had run into Belladonna at a hotel, scored some weed for her (back before it was legal) and that they had sex. This particular guy went on to hold a faculty position at Harvard. I don’t know if he’s still there or not. 

This guy, we’ll call him Teddy, was a constant source of frustration for me back in school. He was close with one of my best friends, so I inevitably ended up spending more time around him than I wanted to. He was one of those people I couldn’t say was a bad person, and I debated whether my disliking him was just my own insecurities. He was overweight like me, but had a reputation as quite the ladies’ man while I at times felt like girls would rather sleep with the fishes than sleep with me. He talked openly about how much he liked sex and porn, and I wanted to respect him for this, but I didn’t because he talked about it in a way that I didn’t like, a salacious smirking manner that I felt was disrespectful to women and to sex in general. His tone was always like sex WAS dirty and WAS bad but he embraced it anyway.  He seemed to be saying to women, “You know you’re a bad girl, and I’m a bad boy and you know you like it.” And women responded to him as if they agreed. 

I’m a non-violent person, but back in college, Teddy moved me as close to violence as I’ve probably been, certainly outside of jail and prison. During a card game, he had starting saying some insulting things about a girl who is now a professional colleague of Scarlett’s, for whom I had the utmost respect. I was looking at him and thinking that if he said one more word, I was going to throw him out of the (first floor) window of the frat house we were in.  He’s from LA, he might think he’s tough, but whatever nigga, you were going out that window if you’d said another bad word about Ryan Michelle Bathe that night. 

But this Belladonna hook-up story, which was years after the last time I saw Teddy, irked me because I thought it was indicative of the same problem I have with a lot of my fellow Stanford alums, and with a lot of women when it comes to sex. They presented themselves a certain way, lived a certain way in college, but then they got out, got ambitious, and suddenly started acting extremely conservative. Though I didn’t know, I doubted that Teddy was telling his fellow faculty members at Harvard about hooking up with a pornstar. I don’t know, Harvard’s a much more liberal institution than Stanford. Maybe he was talking the same way as he did when I knew him. But somehow, I doubted it. 

So I felt like pornstars were in a sense tragic figures, though in some ways the more famous ones were privileged. Every man wanted to fuck them, but no man wanted to love them. I wondered, were the guys in porn the men who did love and respect and value them?  If so, I was fine with that and that was enough to earn the privilege of being at the center of such spectacular scenes, but I didn’t know. Every time I saw Tori Black or some other girl on her knees with five obviously tall, obviously athletic Black guys standing over her, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at the starting five of some NBA team. 

I had always been baffled and wondered, “Why do so many of these guys in porn wear socks or shoes when they are naked??” And then it hit me. Duh! The feet are one of the most identifiable parts of the body!  And pro athlete’s feet are photographed all the time in locker rooms by sports reporters who, as a group, probably watch a lot of porn. And playing pro sports leads to certain recognizable characteristic changes in the shape of the feet. 

So it made me wonder, were the faceless guys of porn rich guys, pro athletes, musicians, and were the girls of porn like their personal collective harem?  I had started to notice that most of the better pornos were shot in what were obviously very expensive homes, and it didn’t occur to me for years to ask, “Wait, whose house is that?”

It made all the sense in the world. Did I care?  Well, it made me angry to think that because when you’re rich or famous, you have the choice to marry a lot of great girls. But it was as I’d always felt with the guys at the top, whether athletes or successful businessmen or musicians. They were so greedy. They wanted all the female attention. They wanted every girl. All I wanted was one...well, maybe two as I had started to think in recent years about whether a three-person relationship could be made to work because it seemed to me to have certain inherent advantages, more for the two women than for the man. But I was hardly wedded to the idea. I’m sure Scarlett Johansson would never go for any shit like that. But you never know. She did say she doesn’t believe in monogamy years ago. Irreverent character though he may be, I was still surprised when Charlie Sheen said, “Fuck it” and started living openly in a three-way relationship with Bree Olsen and that other girl. I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of men who have the same taste in women that I do. I’m not sure they have the personalities I would go for, but visually, every girl I’ve ever seen in the presence of Charlie Sheen was smoking hot. But anyway, Scarlett by herself might be more girl than I can handle. My being intrigued by the idea of three-person relationships is more theoretical than practical. But if she’s that out there, I’m flexible. 

There is a scene in Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged that perfectly captures an emotion that has defined my life. I’ve felt it professionally. I’ve felt it artistically. But I felt it the most and the strongest with women. It is the scene where John Galt is standing in the rain watching Henry Rearden walk into some swanky event with Dagny Taggart on his arm, and he feels that Rearden has everything that he should have. I felt that for all my achievements, I was being left out of life and that I would never get anything I really wanted no matter how much I lowered or changed my expectations. 

Sometime in the year before I went to prison, I started to lose interest in porn. More and more often, I would find myself laughing at it, or drifting off into thinking about other things, or giving up in my frustration that I couldn’t find things I liked. And then something happened...

There was this porn star named Haley Paige who I liked and I found out that she had died under tragic circumstances, found dead of a drug overdose in a cheap motel room. I’m always sad when young people die, especially if I feel that life had already given them a tough time before that. But her death reinforced a lot of the worries I had about the porn industry, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, directly or indirectly, porn had killed her. Of course, this is not a fair conclusion. She may have been a troubled person before she started doing porn, or her life may have spiraled downward because her porn career had ended for some reason. Or it could have just been an accident. Shit happens. 

But after that, I couldn’t watch her movies any more. It was just too sad, and there was a part of me that felt like they should be taken down. The idea of watching a dead person for enjoyment seemed morbid in the context of porn, but that’s stupid. We didn’t take Marilyn Monroe and River Phoenix’s movies off the shelf, nor should we. 

But she had been in one of my favorite scenes ever and it would have been, I think, one of the last movies she made. Eventually, I watched it again, and I noticed some things that changed the way I feel about porn. While I was watching it, I got an idea for a movie about the porn industry very loosely based on what had happened to her.

P. T. Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers and Boogie Nights is one of my favorite movies. But as good as it is, and for all the tragic events it contained, I always felt that it was a kind of Hollywood whitewash of the porn industry. I always thought it should have a sequel given the dramatic changes both in the industry itself and in porn’s relationship to society in the twenty years after where the film ends. Most of the main stars are all still around, active and available, so I thought it would be not only a good artistic endeavor, but free money. 

At times I gave thought to writing a script for it but didn’t because P. T. is one of those directors who seems to only like filming his own scripts, so I thought, maybe one day he’ll do it himself, as M. Night Shyamalan eventually did a sequel to Unbreakable, which I’d also thought about writing and even did a short outline for. One of these days I’m going to get around to watching Glass as I’m curious to see how much the direction he chose for the story had in common with what I was thinking. 

But anyway, I thought that maybe this Haley Paige-inspired movie might be something that P. T. Anderson would be interested in because the tone I had in mind was very similar to his early work. But then I got a different idea. 

I was watching this porn series that was shot with this particular camera effect that was really artistic and beautiful, but unlike most attempts at artistry in porn did not desexualize it. And then I started thinking about some of the porn movies that are really well-made technically. I thought, it would be cool to make the movie that I had in mind with all porn industry people as the main cast and crew to prove that, with a little help from someone like me, the most talented performers and technicians in porn can make a Hollywood quality movie. There was this one porn studio, Zero Tolerance, that put out really high quality work and seemed to have an ethical grounding about what they were doing as the content of their movies seemed noticeably not misogynistic in the ways most porn seems to me to be.  I was THIS close to contacting them to try to make it happen. And you know, I didn’t think about it until just now, but that Haley Paige scene I was talking about was in a Zero Tolerance movie. 

But I didn’t do it, mainly because I was deterred by my aforementioned fear of falling into a life where I would be “forced” into having sex with a lot of girls. Though I wasn’t sure, I was afraid that pornstars would like me, especially after they read my script, and that I wouldn’t be able to resist—that they wouldn’t let me resist—until I woke up one morning and like Dirk Diggler couldn’t get it up anymore because sex was so played out. 

But as I was thinking about making this movie, I started paying closer attention to the girls in porn to see which ones I thought had real acting ability and I realized that, while in the past pornstars could not be considered credible actresses, there was a group of the modern ones who were and they were doing something that was fundamentally different than what porn was in the past. But I have to go back a bit to explain...

Even back in the 80s before I knew exactly how hard acting is, and started to learn that all these actors are egg-head nerds from elite colleges like me, I still realized that pornstars were not acting in any real sense. They were so bad at it, worse than a high school play. The legend always was that a lot of them had come to LA with dreams of being actresses, but it was obvious that this made about as much sense as me going to New York with dreams of being a Knick. They just didn’t have the ability to even think about it. 

But yet, I did sometimes argue, back then, that the sex-symbol women in entertainment were selling sexual fantasy too, though they were selling other stuff along with it, so the dramatic difference in perception between them and pornstars was not justified. Genius though I may have been, I was a kid. 

But as I watched the crop of 21st century pornstars, I began to see this new thing. So I have written about what I consider to be the absolute highest level of acting, and one of the best examples is in a scene I already mentioned. At the end of that scene in Jennifer’s Body where Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox are making out, Amanda gets mad and points to the door and says, “Leave!”. It’s the strangest thing, no matter how many times I watch that movie, knowing its coming, when she says that, I have a physical reaction to start getting up off my couch and leave my own house. I catch myself before I move, but my brain sends the message to my body, I can’t help it. What Amanda has done there is use her voice and her emotion to elicit a PHYSIOLOGICAL response in the viewer. This is what great actors can do at their best. They can use their precise control of their voice and their body movements to literally make you feel, directly, physically, the emotion of the scene as if you were there. And I started to notice that there were some girls in porn who had learned how to do this. 

Now, sometimes, it is more important to be clear about what you are NOT saying than to be clear about what you are saying. I am NOT saying that Tori Black and Amanda Seyfried are the same. What Amanda does requires infinitely more knowledge, skill, practice, preparation and training, and includes tons of other things she has to know besides how to make me want to leave the room from ten years and a thousand miles away. And aside from the in front of the camera stuff, she has to be involved in the production and business side of the industry, on projects worth tens or hundreds of millions. There’s no comparison. It’s a different sport. Amanda’s probably close to a half-billionaire and she’s still underpaid. 

So it doesn’t mean that pornstars have become equivalent to screen actresses. It means that a lot of them have acquired one of the first and most basic skills required to become a good screen actress. But there is a lot more that they would have to learn. 

But still, what some of these girls are doing now is uncanny. In some things I’ve watched, its almost spooky, where the girl tells me what reaction I’m going to have before I have it and seems to know with incredible precision how what she is doing is going to make the viewer feel and even sometimes think. I was watching this one video, and the girl says, “I know what you’re thinking right now. You want me to...” And it was not an obvious or everyday thing that she somehow knew that she had created the desire for. And I actually laughed and looked around and thought, “Wait, am I on Punk’d? Is Ashton Kutcher gonna walk out of my closet with a cameraman?”

It actually makes porn into something entirely different. Rather than just providing visual stimulation which is what porn traditionally was, some of these girls have learned how to tap directly into the viewer’s physiology and emotions. Its almost like virtual reality sex, except you don’t need a visor. 

It is mostly their voices they use to do this, modulating certain words in particular ways just like actresses do. But they also use certain gestures. They seem to have learned, men are emotional creatures too and if you deliver emotional satisfaction, they’ll keep coming for that more than to see girls getting fucked every which way. 

Because of this, most of the porn that I watch these days are videos of women alone, talking. That’s the best porn if she knows what to say and how to say it. There is a girl, Isabella Valentine who does audio porn and some of her recordings are better than almost all video porn. There is this college radio DJ that I was so tempted to ask her how much it would take for her to make something like that for me. But I decided against it because she would probably refuse and be offended. She’s an ultra-liberal lesbian. But if she did it, I might replace all porn with that because her voice is nuclear smoking hot cute. Anyway...

I say the modern pornstars would have to learn a lot more to be ready for Hollywood, but a few of them, I don’t know. Probably my favorite porn was two series, Women Seeking Women and Lesbian Seductions, put out by a company called Girlfriends Films, which I believe was an entirely female enterprise. The acting in some of these movies is Hollywood-quality. They really are movies. Many of the scenes are close to an hour long and sometimes more than half of it is talking. They have storylines that actually make sense. The girls are wearing regular clothes and talking like regular people. The sex happens in normal organic ways. 

Brianna Love does some really good acting in these movies. That was the first place I ever saw her and I though she was the naive, sexually confused teenage girl that she plays until I saw her in other stuff and realized, she’s not actually like that. I would like to ask Brianna and Autumn Moon, at the end of that one scene when they told each other “I love you”, did they mean it? Because it sure looked like they did. It tells you a lot about me: that is the single hottest thing I’ve ever seen in porn. If I could find movies with a guy and a girl made this way, I’d love it. 

By the way, there is really just one major studio Hollywood movie sex scene that is porno-hot to me. You know what it is?  It’s actually in Jennifer’s Body, but its not the scene with Amanda and Megan. It’s the scene with Amanda and her boyfriend. I did not violate my rule—I have way too much respect for Amanda to do that. But there is a long section in my book about how that scene changed my life, and I hope Amanda and, I think his name is Johnny Simmons, get to read it eventually. You know, there’s a funny thing about that movie. It was kind of marketed as an erotic thriller. And it stars these two smoking hot actresses making out. But I didn’t notice until maybe the tenth time I’d watched it: there’s not a single frame of nudity in that movie. Sex is in the mind. 

And I think it is because of that fact that I’ve slowly but surely lost interest in porn. I want a girl of my own. I want to get married. Fantasy just doesn’t do it for me anymore. But I won’t break my ethical rules. I’ll only sleep with the right girl in the right situation. 

Lately, when I watch porn, I feel like it is a puzzle that I’ve already solved, because after I noticed this new virtual reality technique girls were using, I started watching porn more as a research project than for fulfillment. I wanted to get down to the very root of what I desired and WHY. And through examining these things, with a little help from my virtual girlfriends, I hit upon what may be the most important discovery of my life...

There has always been this part of me that felt like sex was silly. I mean, the feeling is perfectly illustrated by a line in a rap song.  Black men had, and perhaps still have, this weird thing, often expressed in rap, that they think performing oral sex on women is gross. I don’t get it. I love it. But there is this rap crew The Diplomats whose music I occasionally enjoy, mainly because they have great beats and they are FUNNY. Diplomats records make me laugh. The de facto leader of the crew, Cam’ron, is a hilarious natural comedian, and if you doubt me, go to Youtube and watch his classic appearance on Fox News on Bill O’Reilly’s show. 

Anyway, one of the Diplomats, Hell Rell, has a line in a song, referring to women where he says, “They’re not envelopes, picture Rell lickin’ on ‘em...”. It’s stupid but yet it highlights the silliness of it, that as human beings it has become a commonplace ritual for us to lick each other. Some animals do this for hygiene purposes, but we do it for recreation. 

One of things I noticed early on about porn was that pornstars seemed to share an awareness of that feeling I so often felt that sex was, when you started to think of it in the abstract, absurd. Pornstars would often be on the verge of laughter delivering lines that were supposed to be sexy. I mean, in the abstract, even kissing is gross and ridiculous, but we love it.

This feeling that sex was absurd became more and more frequent as I got older and as I became more intimately familiar with the precise things that turned me on. And then there was the discovery that led to the breakthrough. 

So like I think most men, I’m enormously turned on by girls swallowing semen. The first time I saw this in a porno, not yet knowing that it was something people did, my reaction was, “What the fuck?!? That’s gross!  But wait, why was that so hot?”. I thought it was a weird porno thing and so I felt uncomfortable that I liked seeing it until I read an article in Cosmo or somewhere like that saying that this was one of if not the most intimate sexual act to men. But why would that be true, I wondered?

There are some obvious explanations that leap to mind. Various types of ingestion rituals have been a part of human bonding forever. But none seemed a fully satisfactory explanation until a read about a medical study that found that when pregnant women swallow their partner’s semen it significantly reduces the rate of miscarriage. 

The theory of the researchers was that, many miscarriages being effectively an immune response, swallowing semen acculturates the woman to the presence of her partner’s DNA in her body, hence giving her a safer pregnancy. I thought, “Isn’t evolution brilliant!” That really explains it. It explains why we would have an evolutionary drive to do that, why men would love it, and why most women wouldn’t be especially on fire to do it except with their most intimate partners.  Knowing that, it no longer seemed like something weird. It seemed totally normal and natural and beneficial, which, if that research is valid, it would be. But then I started to think, if there is an evolutionary purpose to that, there must be an evolutionary purpose to everything we do in human sexuality. So I started to watch porn in a different way, as sort of a research project, looking for answers.  

Eventually, I arrived at a theory—just a theory—to explain the global purpose of all the strange rituals we do in human sexuality. Like any good theory, it can be tested, thought it would take a large, long and expensive study for which I’ve already begun designing protocols. If I’m right, it would mean a dramatic leap forward for humanity. I haven’t yet done what we call in patent law a “prior art search”, that is, checked to see if anyone else has already proposed this idea. But I feel pretty certain that it is new. 

Normally these days, I just toss my ideas out there, but this one is proprietary, because I paid a high price in years of loneliness and isolation to be able to arrive at this discovery, if its true. If the study that would be necessary to confirm my idea were commissioned, pornstars would be the perfect people to carry it out because all they would need to do is what they are already doing. Which makes me wonder...

I believe that there are lots of groups of people in the world who know things that the world at large doesn’t know, but they keep it private, not for some sinister reason, but because it is so hard to get the world to listen to radical new ideas, and they don’t want to go out like Galileo did. But whenever there is a new discovery, there are always a few people out there who can say, “I knew it!”. This big secret to human sexuality that I think I may have discovered, is it possible that the pornstars are the people who know already?

I gave myself the assignment of finishing this piece today, but for a while I didn’t think I would make it. There was so much that I wanted to say, and I couldn’t figure out how to organize it. I’d planned to finish it this morning before I had to move hotels. I worked on it for a while in the park, but I didn’t get close to finished. 

After I checked into my hotel, I wanted to quit for a lot of reasons that would take me back to being far from done if I tried to explain them. But I keep telling myself these days that if I want to be a writer, I have to be able to work under pressure, I have to be able to meet deadlines, so I keep giving myself these assignments to write for this blog that nobody reads. And I don’t really know why I do it. I guess I just don’t know what else to do. 

There was much more that I wanted say about my curiosity as to what social relationships, if any, exist between Hollywood girls and porn girls, Chloe Sevigny and Rose McGowan’s porn performances, Steven Soderbergh’s casting of Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, and more. Plus, I have a theory on where these stunningly beautiful girls in porn with the real acting talent came from, but I suppose I will save all that for a possible Part II. The girls in Hollywood and the girls in porn are in agreement on one thing: they all love sequels...

I’m exhausted, mentally, physically, but most of all emotionally, as I have been for...well...about the past seven years. Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone, and I’m still looking for the same thing I’ve been searching for for forty years—the girl I love who loves me. She is not here, so as I have so many nights in my life, I will go to sleep in a huge luxurious hotel room, alone.

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