The Long Goodbye (Porn, Part II)

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This is Part II of “The Elephant in the Room: Porn”. Although it is not strictly necessary, you may want to read Part I here: https://thejmatgirls.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-elephant-in-room-porn.html?m=1

This piece is quite long and goes places I never anticipated it would go. But the people who are spending countless hours binge-watching stupid reality shows and marginally good cable series but can’t take a little time to read something important are not a part of my audience. I do not write for the short attention span. 

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There are times when it is hard to be a writer. I didn’t start writing to make money or get famous. I didn’t start writing because I looked at a chart in the guidance counselor’s office and it seemed like a good career. I started writing first as a way of coping with the things I couldn’t understand in life. But later, because I felt there were things that needed to be said that weren’t being said, at least not as loudly or as frequently as I felt they should be. 

But I find in recent years that this approach to writing often leads me to the difficult pass where I know that I should write about something, even though I don’t want to. I had planned a second edition of my commentary on porn, but I did not anticipate that it would take this form. I really don’t want to write this. I would rather lock it away as something private and never speak of it. It is painful to write it. That’s why I know I have to. 

There is a great deal of similarity in my relationship with porn and my relationship with rap music. It’s almost a perfect analogy in fact. It would be wrong to say that I like porn just as it would be wrong to say that I like rap. The vast majority of both, I hate, and find the criticisms of them to be largely true. I mean, the rap songs you hear on the radio are just awful. I barely consider them music. Rap music by far has the lowest artistic standards of any genre. 

While I do listen to some “underground” artists, I’m not one of these guys who only likes rappers nobody’s ever heard of. Nas, Jay-Z, Common, Kanye, Wu-Tang Clan, these guys are really good, and their best stuff you never hear on the radio or in the club. Tupac Shakur was brilliant. There are some younger guys I like too, but this southern booty-shake music, Auto-Tune garbage and LA gangster rap, I can’t stand it. Unlike Tupac, whose acting work I thought was very overrated and pretty bad, I like Ice Cube, Ice-T and LL Cool J more as actors than musicians. 

But with rap, like porn, it was only a small percentage of the genre that I found appealing, and most of it, I found intolerable. And just as I’d spent more time listening to other genres of music, I’d spent way more time watching Hollywood movies than watching porn. 

But as I thought about it more, the similarity was quite remarkable. Both are condemned by nearly all conservatives, plus a lot of goodie-two-shoes liberals. Though this has changed in recent years with rap, both traditionally had overwhelmingly male fan bases. The vast majority of the stars of both are people from a socially marginalized group—openly sexual women in porn and Black men in rap. Both considered vulgar and misogynistic. Both having links, more in the past than the present, to the criminal underworld. Both having a lot of stars die young, though the survival rate of the biggest porn stars seemed to be pretty good. 

There was another great similarity between porn and rap for me. With both, I had wrestled with whether it was wrong to indulge in them, and with both I at one time in my twenties sold off my collection and decided to boycott them because of their misogynistic content. Several years ago, I was about to give up porn again. And a funny thing happened. I started noticing a bunch of porn girls wearing gigantic crucifixes. “Now why would they do that?”, I wondered. 

It got me doing a lot of thinking. Religious people will find this analogy blasphemous, but I realized that porn girls for me were like manna for Israel in the Bible. Now if you’ve actually read the Bible (most so-called Christians really haven’t), you know that most of uses of “manna” in everyday conversation are improper. Manna wasn’t delicious or anything. The children of Israel quickly grow tired of it and complained about it constantly, just as I’ve often grown tired of porn and have gotten bored with it. But it was just enough to get them by, just as porn was just enough to get me by so that I didn’t get SO lonely and sexually frustrated with my inability to get a girl I loved to love me that I would start behaving unscrupulously to get girls into bed. I took the crucifixes as a sign, not just to me personally but to all the viewers from religious backgrounds who wrestled with it, to have a little faith that porn was okay. I decided against giving up porn, and not long after that, they stopped wearing them, and I went on watching. 

A lot of the porn that I’ve watched in recent years are videos akin to what you might call highlight reels, featuring brief clips from different movies of a lot of different girls. A few of these have names captioned but most don’t. It became common that I would see a girl I’d never seen before in one of these and want to see more of her work. So, I’d have to find out her name. Sometimes, it was as easy as scrolling to the comment board attached to every video on the big porn sites, where people would ask, “Who’s the girl at 3:46?” and get answers. But if the girl I was curious about wasn’t there (and she usually wasn’t), I’d have to do lot of creative Googling until eventually, in most cases, I would find them. There were three that I was frustratingly unable to find their names or the entirety of the clip that I saw. Now there are only two. 

There is a video that I’ve watched a lot because its smoking hot and in it there is a clip a minute or so long of a girl and it is maybe the hottest thing I’ve seen in porn. I know my taste in girls and porn is not necessarily mainstream (the girls that the guys on the message boards are going crazy about are rarely the ones that interest me most). But in this case, it seemed odd to me that nobody was asking about this girl on the attached comment boards on any of the four sites where I saw the video posted. 

For about a year, I’d done some searching off and on, and I couldn’t find out who she was. Two weeks ago Wednesday, April 8, I had just received my disability check, giving me brief respite from more than a month mostly living on the street and having to call my mother to ask for money when the COVID-19 panic kicked me out of Balboa Park. I had checked into a hotel, and for some reason, that night, what I wanted to see was the rest of that video of that girl. I was GOING to find her. 

For years, I’d hoped to see a hot girl I knew in porn. When I’d be searching places on the porn sites that I thought I’d be most likely to find a girl I knew if any were there, I’d always hear a line from a Nas song in my head...”Stop trying, before you find what you’re looking for and get to crying...”. I should have listened to him. 

The videoclip in question had the logo of a porn studio in the bottom right corner. I typed into Google a simple three-word query that I’m almost sure I had tried before. This time, however, a list of videos came up on Pornhub that I scrolled through, and there she was. 

It was the entire video of the clip I’d seen, what I was looking for. But the title of the video didn’t say her name. I go to the comment board, and as I almost always do being a good child of the internet, I scroll down and start reading from the bottom up. There are three messages. The second answers my burning question—her name is Kasey Chase. The third reads simply: “RIP”. 

This piece would be dishonest in its entirety if I did not admit that I was devastated by this. I mean, it was one the strongest negative emotional reactions that I’ve had to anything in my life, and as surprising to me as finding out that she was dead was the overwhelming grief I instantly felt about it. Why should I care so much that a pornstar had died?  Well, one of the reasons that the emotion was so powerful is that I was feeling a lot of different things in that moment, and it took me nearly all of these last two weeks thinking about nothing else to dissect them all. 

The first layer was an ominous feeling of doom. When I found out that pornstar Haley Paige died (discussed in Part I), I asked myself, “Did porn kill her?”. But now I had just learned that two young girls who starred in two of the hottest porn scenes I’d ever watched were BOTH dead, so the question I asked myself this time was, “Did I kill them? Am I responsible?”

I get a supernatural feeling at times like these. I start to think, the uptight, white beard judgmental old man God really does exist and he hates porn and this is his way of teaching me the lesson that I shouldn’t be watching it. For the rest of that night, I went back and forth thinking maybe I should never watch porn again, just like I debated never driving again after my near-death experience crashing my CLK. 

I went through a cascade of spooky supernatural thoughts in those first few minutes—contemplating whether her spirit was present with me and she was mad at me for watching her porn, and again contemplating a scary idea that I’d thought of weeks before when trying to figure out why I never see pornstars in public: maybe they are all dead girls; kidnapped, forced to perform for a while and then disposed of. 

I wasn’t thinking about them having died at some point into their careers like Haley Paige and Kasey. I was thinking about an outlandish horror movie scenario where porn was some kind of insidious conspiracy where they were dead before their first movie actually came out, and that’s what porn was, a bunch of dead girls. Now, obviously, that is macabre and irrarional, but it shows how weird I thought it was, and still think it is, that as many people as I know, I don’t know any pornstars, and never ever see them. I had that one sighting of probably Kayla Quinn, but my level of certainty that it was her wasn’t that high. 

But after I posted the first piece on porn, before I found out that Kasey Chase was dead, when I first thought, “Maybe all these girls are dead and that’s why I never see them.”, an interesting thing happened...

I was living in Balboa Park then, before the COVID-19 panic closed it, though after all the restaurants and museums had closed. I was walking through the main plaza in front of the San Diego Museum of Art, and I look to my left and there is a girl sitting there on a bench, fairly close, perhaps six feet away, maybe not even. The thought I had wasn’t “Is that...?” but rather “That IS...Katie St. Ives!”, who I hadn’t mentioned in my first piece but was one of the main girls I was thinking about when I talked about modern pornstars being way hotter than past ones. And she’s also REALLY good at her job...maybe the best. 

But after I’d passed by, I tried to talk myself out of it. I thought the same thing I told myself when for a while I was seeing Scarlett Johansson stunt doubles everywhere: “She wouldn’t dare!”.  I had walked on into the breezeway of the next building, near the Old Globe Theater, and she skateboards past me, laughing, and says to the guy she was with skateboarding in front of her, “They were waving at us!”. Katie’s got a distinctive voice, probably the hottest thing about her, and why would anyone be waving at her if she wasn’t Katie St. Ives? I’d go to the betting window in Vegas—that was her.

I was surprised because, unlike the thing with Hollywood girls, she was bigger than I would have expected. But one of the things about porn in the internet era is that you never know the chronology of the stuff you’re watching. I’m guessing that most of what I’ve seen of her is probably ten years old or more. The internet says she’s 31, and most women are thicker at 30 than 20. I don’t even know if she’s still doing porn. Maybe she hasn’t done it for years and put on a few pounds. I don’t want Katie to think I’m calling her fat. She looked just fine.  And anyway, a lot of fat girls are smoking hot. 

What was interesting, though, is that when I saw her, and even when she skateboarded past me and I noticed that she had a lot more curves than I would have expected her to have, I didn’t have ANY thoughts about her work. And there is this one clip of her in the same video where I first saw Kasey Chase that is nearly as hot. It amazes me now that the image of that didn’t immediately pop in my head when I recognized her. It wasn’t even a thought in my mind that I had seen that girl’s...everything, and had seen her do...what she does. But I thought, “Well, Katie’s alive, and seems happy.”

A few days later, I was walking along by the Japanese Friendship Garden, and I see an obviously smoking hot girl approaching me wearing black leggings and a black tank top, walking a dog.  I have this thing I do. Maybe it’s kind of silly but I do it anyway. I grew up in urban neighborhoods where mostly all you have are mean, poorly trained dogs with bad owners. When this is the experience of the first eighteen years of your life, you’re not going to be comfortable around dogs, much less like them. But after about fifteen years of living in affluent areas of California, I finally grew to like dogs, although owning one is too much of a hassle for me. Owning a dog forces you to keep a schedule, and I don’t like keeping that kind of schedule. It’s like having a kid, but obviously, kids are worth a lot more effort to me than dogs are. 

But what I do is, if I see a cute girl approaching me walking a dog, I’ll pay more attention to her dog than to her, and I’ll only look at her at the last moment before she passes. So I’m looking at this girl’s dog, a medium-sized skinny gray mottled dog of a breed I don’t recognize, and when she gets close I look up and...”Is that Tori Black?  No fucking way! She wouldn’t dare!”. 

As she passes, she gives me this strange cute look and it’s smoking hot. I almost interpret the look as meaning, “Yes, it’s me.” It’s roughly the same little thing Dina Meyer does in Starship Troopers (standing naked in the shower) when the guy asks her if she is the girl Johnny Rico signed up for. Dina Meyer...OMG. There was a minute when I thought Denise Richards was maybe the hottest girl in Hollywood, but I was watching Starship Troopers where I first saw Dina and I was thinking “What’s wrong with Rico? This other girl’s way hotter than Denise Richards! Wait, did I just say that?!?” Is Dina Meyer Jewish?  I don’t know but she’s SMOKING hot anyway!

So Maybe-Tori-Black goes on past me. I take a glance back, and I think “Tori’s skinnier than that girl.”. But then Katie was bigger than I would have expected, and like Katie, most of Tori’s stuff that I’ve seen is old because I don’t watch interracial porn and that’s all she does anymore. Frustratingly, this happens with a lot of my favorite porn girls. I would have asked Tori, “What’s up with that?!?”

I’m walking in a different part of the park a while later, and I see her coming toward me again, and I’m thinking, “Ok, I’m going to get a good look at her and we’re going to settle this!”. Just then it starts raining, moderately hard, and she turns around and jogs the other direction.  Again, I think, “Tori’s skinnier than that and would a Seattle girl run to get out of the rain?”. 

But the other thing is, I talk about how Tori’s porn mostly doesn’t really turn me on, and she makes me laugh. Not because she’s bad at it. She’s SO good. It’s hard to explain, but other than a couple of her solo talkies, I don’t find her SEXUALLY attractive, even though I find her extremely HUMANLY attractive. It’s like she’s my friend and she’s doing porn to try to bother me, but she knows it doesn’t bother me, so its funny to both of us. She almost always looks like she’s about to crack up, like she’s doing porn as some kind of a joke. But this girl I saw, however...Tori couldn’t possibly be that HOT.  I’m still unsure if that was her. I wouldn’t bet on it either way. But coming just a few days after I saw Katie, and given that odd sexy look she gave me, it got me thinking...

WILLEM DAFOE

(To Live And Die in LA)

You know you’re living like an animal in the zoo?

I had been posting about where I was and what was going on in my life. Was it possible that I had become like a carnival attraction for bored rich people in entertainment?  I had noticed what seemed to be an inordinate amount of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Aston Martins with blacked-out windows cruising by me on the street, sometimes the same one passing me by two or three times. Was it possible that some of the people who know me in Hollywood ventured out to see if what I was writing was really for real, or to marvel at the fact that I hadn’t run to TMZ or the National Enquirer with what I know about some of them to get myself off the streets?  Or maybe some people in porn had read what I had written, and Tori and Katie just showed up to let me know they were alright. 

But it also got me thinking another thing. As easily as women can change their appearance with clothes, hair and makeup, was it possible that my not seeing pornstars in public was like the Superman-Clark Kent thing, and they were around me all the time and I just didn’t recognize them?  When I look at Ana Faris’ Klondike commercials and Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland, it makes me rethink the half-dozen or so pornstars that when I first saw them I thought were girls that I know, until I looked carefully and there was SOMETHING different that made me say, “No, that’s not her.”. Maybe there WERE girls I knew in porn, and one day they would stand in front of me, turn around, do a little something to their hair, change their makeup, and “OMG, you’re...”. 

Perhaps porn girls are around me everywhere, but as we all do in emotional moments, learning of Kasey Chase’s death had shut out all those rational reasons I had to dismiss the idea of porn being some sadistic montage of death. I went back to thinking, Katie St. Ives is alive, Tori Black’s alive, Stormy Daniels and Alana Evans are alive, but could a large percentage of the girls I’m watching be dead??!?

I have a discipline that I practice, both in life and in my writing. When I learn something that causes a dramatic negative emotion in me, I always sit with it, and examine it, before doing ANYTHING. I started doing this about ten years ago, after something happened that left me feeling devastated, but a few weeks later, I learned that it hadn’t been what I thought and that there was no cause for concern. As Shakespeare taught us centuries ago, it’s dangerous to act on something you think is true before you know. I wanted to dissect my emotions before I went to try to learn more, but I also wanted to study where my mind went with what I had, as a teaching lesson  if, like that other situation, things turned out not to be as bad as I thought. 

I had quickly entered the bargaining stage of the grief cycle. Maybe she’s not dead. I’ve seen people post “RIP” on porn message boards just meaning that the girl had left the industry, and they were such porn addicts that a girl was dead to them if she wasn’t doing porn. Maybe they were saying “rip” meaning the video was ripped from another site, but they had their Caps Lock on. Maybe its mistaken information. 

But in keeping with my discipline, I didn’t go seeking out more information because I wanted to sort through the feelings that I felt before I learned anymore, so that I could learn from the experience if I discovered something I didn’t expect. The first thing I pointed out to myself was that I was assuming that if she was dead, it was by some means that porn could be blamed for. It says a lot about our culture that my immediate fear was that she’d been killed by a man. For all I knew, she could have been hit by a drunk driver. Or she could have had a childhood disease and never expected to live to be twenty, and that’s why she looked so happy doing porn. 

I sat up until the next morning wrestling with this, asking myself why, with everything going on in my life, and the world, I should be sitting in bed crying over a dead pornstar. But then I thought, why shouldn’t I cry for her? She was a young woman who died before her time, and if she had any other job, we’d all recognize that as a tragedy. Now that she is gone, should I forget about her, and pretend that she deserved my semen when I thought she was alive, but not my tears once I knew she was dead? This is the absurd attitude we have toward people we marginalize and stigmatize. 

I was finally able to go to sleep, and slept until the late afternoon. That evening, I had reached a slightly less emotional state and I felt ready to handle more information, so I went looking. 

I saw she had a number of videos. I went to the message board for one of the others, and there it was confirmed that she had died by someone who appeared to know her, and posted her real name which I would include but for the fact that the internet is not reliable. They said she had been a legendary cam girl on a video chat site called Stickam, and posted supposed evidence of her legendary status in the form of old grainy video of her and two other girls talking which I didn’t have the heart to watch. One day I will. The cause of her death? Overdose. Just like Haley Paige. 

Now, an overdose is the most ambiguous cause of death that a person can have. It could be an accidental overdose by a person who has never used drugs before, or an accidental overdose by someone badly addicted. It could be a bad batch of drugs. Unexpected drug interaction. It could be suicide. And it could be murder—it is a well-known way of killing someone in the underworld to give them a “hot dose”, and murderers usually get away with it scott-free because police and coroners, absent any reason to suspect otherwise, assume that an overdose is just an overdose. It should be standard investigative procedure in every case of an overdose to track down FROM WHOM the drugs that the dead person overdosed on came. 

So I still felt no closer to knowing what had really killed Kasey Chase, but realizing that these two girls had both died of overdoses, and seeing a few seconds of that old grainy video, I knew then that I had to write this. Even the structural similarity of their names—Haley Paige, Kasey Chase—told me there was some significance to this that I needed to explore, had to explore.  

A few more days went by, and I’d slowly started to work myself out of the emotional grief space (a space I still didn’t fully understand why I was in to begin with) and into a more rational state of mind. Young women were dying of overdoses all the time. Pornstars, college students, singers, actresses, pharmacists, nurses, waitresses...Yes, two porn girls I liked had died this way, but it wasn’t necessarily reasonable to blame porn for this based on the limited information I had. 

I also took the longer view perspective that I had been watching porn for over twenty years. Of course, in that span of time, even given that most of them were young, there were going to be pornstars that died for a myriad of reasons. And it was just a totally silly, horror movie nightmare scenario to imagine all the girls in porn being dead. They have the AVN convention in Vegas every year. They give out awards. And I know Stormy Daniels is still alive. And Alana Evans because they had her talking about Trump on CNN (Things You Never Thought You’d See In Life, #69).  And if God wanted to send me a message to stop watching porn, he didn’t have to kill Kasey Chase. All he would have had to do is send me a GIRLFRIEND because I wasn’t interested in watching porn when I had one.

I had been searching for more videos of Kasey when I found out she was dead. I had seen that there were several, and I finally decided to try to watch. In some sense, I felt like I owed it to her to make myself watch. I saw a thirty-minute video of her highlights and started it. And what I saw was exactly what I feared. 

I was only able to watch a few minutes scrolling through it. It was too heartbreaking. What I saw was that Kasey had the same journey through porn that I’d seen a lot of girls have: she started out young and beautiful and it looked like she was having a great time doing it, and it appeared that she was at first only performing with one guy who I would have guessed from his appearance was her boyfriend, and who I could tell really liked her. But then the thing I hate about porn took over...

On the message board where the report of her death was confirmed, some bozo posted that it was too bad that she died before she could get more into porn and “do some harder core scenes”. This is one of the most toxic aspects of porn. A huge percentage of porn fans are misogynists who only get off on seeing girls doing things that are painful or demeaning. So there is this pressure on girls to do more and more extreme stuff—fisting, double penetration, gangbangs, getting slapped around and spit on, having guys shove penises in their mouth until they vomit. It’s the sick, dark side of porn, but its the BIGGER side of the corporate porn industry. And that progression toward more and more toxic work is what happened to her, making it more likely that the trauma of her porn work at least contributed to her drug problem. 

There was a clip of Kasey at what imagine must have been the end of her porn career, and it was tragic. She looked like she’d aged twenty years. She was still beautiful, architecturally at least, maybe moreso given my tendency to think women are usually more attractive at 30 than 20. But she wasn’t beautiful anymore because her smile was gone. She was still trying to force it, but it wasn’t the same joyful smile. She didn’t look like she was on drugs in her earlier videos, but she certainly did there. The light was gone from her eyes. The next thing I saw was a clip of her hogtied and gagged in an uncomfortable position with some guy screwing her aggressively. I turned it off. 

But before I had to quit watching, I saw a few of her other earlier scenes and she was magically, phenomenally good. She wasn’t so much that great at the job of being a pornstar. She didn’t really pay attention to the camera, or her positioning relative to it. She was too into what she was doing and it was obvious that she was magically, phenomenally good at sex, to the point that you could tell the guys could hardly take it. There is a particular quality shared by girls who are the best at porn, and I imagine the best at sex in real life though I haven’t had the chance to find out, and Kasey Chase had as much of it as any girl I’ve ever seen...before porn took it away from her. What is that quality?  I’ll come back to that. But I knew I had to write about Kasey, the experience of learning that she had died, and my struggle to make sense of how strongly I felt about it. Just a short while ago, I’d written “Elephant In the Room” about porn, and I thought I had it all figured out. Maybe the supernatural message was that I didn’t, and that there were more discoveries I needed to make about the industry and myself to answer the question: What is porn?

I talked in my prior post about porn of the emergence of a large crop of Hollywood-beautiful girls in porn when girls that smoking hot rarely did porn in the past, and I mentioned that I had an idea about where they might have come from. Perhaps it is just that the money has gotten so big for the girls at the top, and porn is more mainstream, but I don’t think that alone is enough to explain it. I arrived at another theory...

Several years ago, in the wake of some pro athlete being accused of sexual assault, I heard something in a radio interview that was very interesting. Every year, the NFL holds its rookie symposium in San Diego, an event to teach newly drafted players some basics about handling their new job and their new life as rich, publicly prominent men. There is or was a consultant, a woman, who would come speak to the new NFL players about an extortion scheme that pro athletes were targeted for. They would meet a girl at a club or bar. She would not behave like a groupie or a whore, but would seem to be a respectable girl who really liked them. If the guy took her back to his hotel room or home to have sex, she would sleep with him, and that night or the next morning, leave like it was normal. That following day, the athlete would get a phone call, and someone would tell him that the girl was standing outside a hospital or police station ready to walk in and say he raped her, if the athlete did not wire transfer a specific amount of money somewhere. They had insiders working at banks and they would know what he had readily available in cash accounts that he could access easily. They would typically ask for $25,000-75,000, an amount that a multi-millionaire can afford, and less than his first check to his defense lawyer would be if he were arrested, let alone the millions he could lose if the accusation became public, not to mention the risk of prison. They would usually pay. 

When I was contemplating these stunningly beautiful girls in porn who seemed to have a little real acting ability as well, I thought back to that interview. I wondered, was it possible that these girls were aspiring actresses who had been caught trying to run a scam like that on some man in Hollywood to extort their way into a movie role, and they’d been caught somehow and given the alternative of facing prison (or worse), or doing porn?  When they were saying, “I’m a bad girl” and “I’m a dirty slut”, was this in fact a kind of forced confession?  Could porn, at least in some cases, be an extra-judicial punishment for naughty girls, allowing them to make money, but to a certain extent making them outcasts from society?

I thought, it could easily be a punishment for guys, too. Oh, you’re the big-cock hero who can treat girls however you want?  Fuck over the wrong guy’s daughter, and you’re going to have sex alright. You’re gonna have so much sex, day and night, until you can’t enjoy it anymore and the most beautiful girl in the world can be naked right in front of you willing to do ANYTHING, and you have to furiously jerk yourself off to cum. And perhaps part of the deal for men and women in this situation was that you had to retire from public society, lest your past bad deeds re-emerge. It was an interesting thought, and one that would make a little more sense of some aspects of porn if it were true. 

There was another interesting possibility that would explain some curious things about porn. I’d noticed the transition to a great percentage of porn being POV, shot with the man’s face never shown. Now, this made sense for commercial reasons, because I and many others I’m sure preferred movies shot that way. But there was another reason it would make sense. 

I had long ago thought of the fact that if I was a rich guy, and I wanted to make an end-run around prostitution laws, I’d go to a porn company (or set one up myself), hire the girl I wanted to pay for sex to make a porno with me, and just shelve it just like Hollywood shelves some movies. But it wouldn’t be against the law. I had mentioned in Part I my feeling that when I was seeing videos with a bunch of obviously athletic Black guys whose faces are never shown, and one girl, that I was seeing pro athletes. I never got why dudes would enjoy gangbangs if they weren’t in the closet. But I knew athletes were into it as an extension of locker room bonding. I had noticed that the men in those videos seemed to move in a coordinated way...like they knew each other well. 

I also never quite understood how a girl could seem to be having the time of her life with five guys lining up and ejaculating on her face. But if those five guys are the starting five of an NBA team, it makes a little more sense. I don’t watch that stuff, mind you. I can’t stand it. But part of the porn experience is that you always end up seeing stuff you don’t want to see. And I think that is intentional because I believe that part of what the porn industry is trying to do is slap us in the face with our sexual insecurities and hypocrisies. 

So I started to think, maybe the reason that today’s pornstars seem so much happier in their work is that the faceless guys they are having sex with are athletes, actors, musicians and the like, highly desirable men,  who have finally figured out an almost risk-free way to get all the sex they want, however they want it. These are guys that young hot girls would be excited to fuck, and its to the benefit of the guys because they have a fool-proof alibi against rape allegations—it’s all on tape. They could privately require the girls to get contraceptive injections or implants. Anybody’s name can be on the required government paperwork if the man’s face isn’t shown. And this would explain why some of these porn girls are making so much money when people are BUYING porn less and less. The rich guys are paying them somehow through the porn companies. These guys can get groupies. These guys can hire prostitutes. But what is the value of being able to have sex any way you want it, whenever you want it, with any one (or two or three or five) out of thousands of the most beautiful girls in the world, stress-free and risk-free?  Guys would pay millions a year for a membership to that club, and lots of smoking hot girls would apply for that job, even intelligent educated ones as many of today’s pornstars appear to be. I mean, it’s the Eyes Wide Shut scene without the corny masks, and creepy imagery, and without having to have a bunch of dudes there watching. Millions of guys can watch the tape, but if they can’t see who you are, what do you care?

I felt sure this was going on, because that’s what I felt like I was seeing when I watched porn: lifestyles of rich and famous men. The looks on the girls’ faces are the same looks I’ve seen on girl’s faces in the presence of pro athletes and rich guys. And I’d speculated about who owns the multi-million dollar homes a lot of porn is filmed in. These guys own houses like that. 

But then I thought of another alternative that could be true in combination with these to explain how much better modern porn girls were, and what was going on in porn. Both Haley Paige and Kasey Chase died of drug overdoses. I’d heard from many gay men how a segment of the gay male population today practically does nothing else but do meth and have sex parties. Were all these porn girls drug addicts and was I seeing the female side of meth’s effect on our society?  In the past, a lot of porn girls had looked zonked out on something, which was always a turn-off (literally and figuratively) for me, but the transition to porn girls looking happy and excited in their work, and doing it much better, seemed to loosely coincide with the rise of meth as the street drug of choice. 

“But they look so good! Doesn’t meth destroy your looks?” I learned in jail and prison, where I would say about 90% of inmates are regular meth users, that all those PSAs showing people with rotted teeth looking half-dead are propaganda (the “Ad Council” needs to go!). Most meth users looked normal. It was a rare case that I saw a person really messed up that way, and I never saw ANYONE as bad off as those ads. Not in prison. Not on the streets in these last few months of homelessness. I met people that have been using meth heavily for twenty years who still looked perfectly healthy. 

If this was the case, that modern porn was all meth-fueled, it was a huge turnoff. What I liked about modern porn that I watched was that the girls seemed to be enjoying what they were doing. I’m not anti-drug-guy, but meth really is an insidious drug (what do you expect? The fucking Nazis invented it!) and I’m not turned on by watching a girl do anything if she has to be high to do it. The primary fantasy of porn for me is that most all the girls I know in real life act like they don’t like sex, and pornstars say unrepentantly, “I love it”. That’s what makes them hot, and knowing that they were all just spun out on meth would kill that. Now, if they still love sex, but they are just doing the meth because it makes it MORE fun for them? Well...okay...I guess. But meth is, as a homeless guy I was talking with a few weeks back called it, the Devil’s Dope. 

I’d also contemplated another factor. There were SO many girls doing porn now, and it just didn’t make sense to me that so many girls would freely make that choice given the social consequences of it. But I told myself, maybe I’m thinking 20th century thoughts and the stigma I think exists really doesn’t. I saw an interview with Belladonna and she said her dad is a big Mormon and he supports her doing what she does. Indeed, if girls are bringing home millions from porn as at least a few of them are, suddenly fathers are going to have a new attitude. But why then wasn’t I meeting girls who when asked where they worked said, “I’m a pornstar.”?

As I was thinking about the growth of “revenge porn”, I realized a way that some girls were probably forced into becoming pornstars.  You let some guy tape you having sex, and then he either shares it, or is a dumbass and loses it, or his phone or computer gets stolen, and the tape gets out. But it’s actually hot, so it goes viral and ends up on all the porn websites. As good as modern cell phone cameras are, the “it’s not me” defense is out the window. Your boss finds out, your friends find out. If these multi-millionaire celebrity girls can’t get their sex tapes taken down, you have no chance of doing it. But people like your tape, and even though you hate what’s happened, you’re a little bit flattered by it, and you can’t unring the bell. People are clamoring on message boards, “Where can I find more of this girl????”, so you shrug, pack up, move to a new city, make up a porn name, set up a website and start making more videos. Or go to LA and walk into a porn company and show them how many hits your video has online and get a job. 

I could have answered a lot of my mysterious questions about porn by simply driving out to the San Fernando Valley, or attending the AVN convention and meeting some people in the industry.  I’d thought about trying to get involved with the porn industry in the past, but two things had stopped me. One was the fear I discussed in Part I that I would end up falling into a lifestyle where I had more sex than I wanted to have. But there was another, which I didn’t get over until a few years before I went to prison. 

I didn’t want to be having sex all the time with a whole bunch of partners, but let’s be honest. I wasn’t going to get involved with the porn industry and not have sex with ANY of them.  Years ago, I read an interview with male pornstar Rocco Siffredi. He was asked about a story in the news at the time where a former female pornstar was on the interview circuit saying that porn had ruined her life, and one of her main beefs was that she had gotten herpes.  Rocco said, “We all have it. You work in the business for a while, you get it. It’s just a skin rash.”

I was raised in the Reagan 80s in Kansas, so I was taught to fear drugs and sex.  One of the main reasons I was afraid of sex was all the scare-mongering about STDs (another term that needs rebranding—STIS is not much better). It took me decades to break out of that, and something I plan to write about in the future is the ridiculous stigma attached to sexually transmitted medical problems. Most of these illnesses aren’t serious AT ALL, and the only degree to which they become serious is the shame and stigma that prevents people from getting tested regularly. Even HIV, which people feared was going to end humanity thirty-five years ago, is effectively a beaten disease with Western medical care, no more serious than a number of common chronic ailments if you take your meds. 

If it was the social convention for everyone to get tested once a month, these infections collectively would be a non-issue. And when I thought about it, Rocco was right—herpes WAS just a skin rash, and reading his quote was the inception point for my realizing, STDs collectively are not that medically serious as infectious diseases.

About six months into our relationship, my ex gave me chlamydia. I naively accepted her explanation that she didn’t know how she got it without realizing the obvious fact that she was cheating on me. I’d had what you could call sex with a couple of girls, but in my mind I was still pretty much a virgin. I felt like Chloe Sevigny in The Last Days of Disco where she loses her virginity and gets herpes and gonorrhea in the process. But I remember standing in the bathroom and thinking, “My penis has a cold. That’s really all this is.” I got some antibiotics and I was fine. But yet, I did, and still do, feel dirty because of the strength of the psychological stigma our society places on such things. 

There is a girl I know well who has herpes, who has never been on my dating radar for many reasons, but we’ve talked about it, and she has a positively bizarre approach to dating because of it. I knew her before she got it and she had strange dating habits before, but now the way she is, she can’t find a boyfriend. I didn’t want to be in that situation but it made me wonder something. Statistics claim 25% of people have genital herpes. If that was true, then almost certainly at least one of the girls I had been interested in would have had it. It made me wonder if perhaps some of the inexplicable “advance/retreat/advance/retreat” behavior I had experienced with some of them might have been that they couldn’t bring themselves to talk about it with me. It made me sad to think that, because while I dreaded getting herpes in a casual hookup or in the process of trying to find out how awesome fucking a pornstar is, if a girl I loved had anything, herpes, syphilis, HIV...hell, EBOLA, it wouldn’t have mattered to me. If she really wanted to be with me, for the long haul, I’d have figured out with her how to make it work. 

But with all that said, I never feared HIV because it was relatively rare, and a low risk for a non-drug injecting straight man, but I was terrified of herpes. It was incurable and the photos looked so painful. But were these like the meth addict photos, extreme cases that exaggerated the reality to scare people? Even if that were true, still the social stigma of having it limited your dating options if you weren’t going to be a jerk and not tell people. I was absolutely terrified of catching herpes in a casual sexual encounter, and then having to try to explain that to a girl I loved that I wanted to be with in the future. I figured, being overweight, Black and not rich, I had enough strikes against me. Herpes would make me undateable to the quality of women I liked. And given the persistent barrage of media stories about how high STD rates supposedly were in the Black community, I wondered on the flip side if their reluctance might have been because they were worried that I was infected. That’s how I used to think. 

But regardless, back then, Rocco’s contention that all pornstars had herpes would have prevented me from hooking up with any of them. And I figured some of those girls might be irresistible, if I went around them as a lonely, sex-starved guy. Of course, back then I wasn’t thinking about what is really one of the most important lessons porn teaches us: there are a million things you can do that are out-of-this-world fun that involve zero risk of illness transmission or pregnancy. A handjob from Klixen looks like about the most awesome thing in the world.  But also, that interview with Rocco was probably twenty years ago. Porn has changed. A lot more girls (like Klixen) appear to be performing only with a husband or boyfriend rather than a procession of walk-in studs off the street. And I don’t know how well acyclovir and the other anti-herpes drugs work. Maybe they have stopped it from spreading around amongst people who are sexually responsible, and pornstars are amongst the most sexually responsible people in our society because they get tested regularly and, in their work at least, they are not having sex with anonymous strangers as so many people do. 

But as I got older, and it became harder and harder to reconcile the public narratives about sex with what I saw going on around me, my perceptions shifted. It became my view that society was divided into two groups. One group, like me, had all kinds of hang-ups and anxieties about sex, all kinds of moral or social restrictions they adhered to, and were barely or not-at-all sexually active. The other group had dismissed all social and religious sexual restrictions and had sex whenever they felt like it with whoever they felt like having sex with, however they wanted to have it. They had adopted what you could call “Bonobo Culture”.  It appeared to me that the convention in this culture was to recognize STDs as collectively not that serious and simply stop worrying about them. And they would have learned as I’ve learned through study of data both scientific and anecdotal, that STDs, like the dangers of drugs, are overblown by the Reagan Ad Council culture that just wants to scare people into living their kind of puritanical lives. HIV still kills around a million people a year in poor countries, but in America, the flu kills more people every year than HIV. 

Around 2010, I was looking at the WHO report on HIV for some then-recent year. They had a chart of the cause of every new HIV infection and there were less than one thousand cases of a man getting it from vaginal sex with a woman IN THE WORLD. The evidence was clear from that data that if you aren’t a gay or bisexual man or have sex with gay or bisexual men, if you don’t use needles or have sex with people who use needles, you were more likely to get struck by lightning than to get HIV. I also know a married couple that has been together fifteen years, the man has herpes and the girl still doesn’t have it. I met two girls who said they’d had hundreds of partners, maybe over a thousand, almost never used condoms and had never caught anything. Though I must say, I had noticed that of the handful of women I knew who’d had hysterectomies, they were girls who had told me they’d had a lot of partners. But that could be because a sexually open woman would be more likely to tell me she’d had a hysterectomy, while others would keep that private. 

The overriding point was that there were a host of more serious infections you could get through ordinary casual contact. Hell, antibiotic-resistant staph kills more Americans every year than all STDs put together. I get that death is far from the worst thing that can happen to a person, but even instances of STDs causing sterility or other serious long-term problems were overblown. The sexual infections collectively just weren’t serious enough to deny yourself one of the best things in life over them. And given the stories of those two extremely sexually active girls that I’d met, I started to wonder if all the data on the prevalence of STDs was coming from the Christian Coalition. 

There also started to be a growing list of celebrities reported as having herpes, photos of their acyclovir prescriptions being leaked. This made me think. They say nearly everybody’s got oral herpes. Maybe nearly everybody who is sexually active has genital herpes, too. It is known to be asymptomatic in a large percentage of people and that would explain why doctors try to talk you out of getting tested for it if you aren’t having an outbreak. If nearly everybody’s got it, and there isn’t much they can do about it but give you acyclovir to lessen the symptoms, but you don’t have symptoms, what’s the point in making people feel bad?

While I was still a big believer in sexual responsibility—open and honest discussions, regular testing for active people, and so on—I’d finally gotten over my FEAR of STDs, and I wished I had said something to the girls in my past to let them know that, in terms of pursuing a relationship, it was a non-issue to me if a girl had something. So I guess the point of this whole narrative is to say that to the girls of my future. The pick-up line for the 21st century: “Let’s go get tested, and whatever the results are, I’m still in. We just need to know.”

Anyway, I continued thinking through all of these ideas that were possible pieces to the porn puzzle. But there was one big piece missing until recently, and it relates to the main subjects of this blog: Jewish girls and Hollywood...

A few months ago, I was reading this book “The Finkler Question” by Howard Jacobsen, who is a British Jew. I found it interesting because the novel’s protagonist is a well-meaning but spiritually and intellectually lost London Gentile who, starting with his college best friend, becomes obsessed with Jewish people and Jewish culture. Though brilliant at turns, the book was frustrating for me to read because it paints a very unflattering picture of its main character, which of course I took personally. Would Jewish girls view me as being as ridiculous as Jacobsen viewed his character Julian Treslove, who is largely portrayed as a pathetic loser?  The book also left me feeling, though it is just the view of one author, that British Jews are quite different from American Jews, and that I wouldn’t like them nearly as much. I still love Rachel Weisz, though!  I’m watching The Mummy Returns right now, and I know I said Rose McGowan-Natalie Portman was maybe the hottest girl-fight ever, but Rachel Weisz and Patricia Velasquez in this movie? Really close...

But the relevance of The Finkler Question here is that there is a passage in it where one of the Jewish characters is giving a laundry list of antisemitic tropes, and he says, “They accuse Jews of polluting the world with pornography.”. I thought I’d heard every antisemitic slur in the book, but that was a new one to me. The only thing I knew about Jews and porn was that the most famous male porn star of all time, Ron Jeremy, happened to be Jewish.  

However, the passage particularly caught my attention because of something that had happened not long before I read it. After I came to the realization that Jewish girls were the hottest girls in the world to me, I had nonetheless refused to type in the search string “Jewish girl porn”, mainly for fear that it would lead me to antisemitic stuff demeaning Jewish girls. But I had stumbled upon this collection of clips from one particular porn website where a lot of the girls appeared to be Jewish, making me think that at least some of the ones in the video who didn’t necessarily appear to be probably were also. And the videos were smoking hot. There were no girls referring themselves as sluts or whores. No girls getting manhandled. There were no scenes with more than one guy in them. No huge plastic boobs.  The girls were wearing ordinary, everyday makeup, if any at all.  When they had clothes on, they were regular clothes, not latex lingerie or stripper dresses. There is not one single girl in any of the clips who did not appear to be happy and comfortable doing what she was doing. It wasn’t all wild and frenetic like the stuff that makes me wonder if all the girls are high on meth. It was like girlfriend sex. This was “the good porn”. 

After watching these videos I began to pay closer attention to the stars of other stuff that I watched, and I’d never noticed it before, but I started to realize, well, yeah: there ARE a lot of Jewish girls in porn. That’s just the girls where I can tell. I mean, if Riley Reid’s not Jewish, I’ll eat my hat. 

But as I began to notice more and more probably-Jewish pornstars, I also noticed that a high percentage of the probably-Jewish girls were the ones who were REALLY good at their jobs. There was a certain thing about sex that they seemed to get which correlated with certain subtle things that I had noticed Jewish actresses doing in intimate scenes in Hollywood movies that Gentile actresses as a rule didn’t do. Jewish girls weren’t the only ones who got this thing. I noticed a high percentage of Latina pornstars got it too. And I don’t know if she was Jewish, but Kasey Chase damn sure got it. It was this thing that was really what I was always searching for in porn, and it turns out, in life, but I hadn’t begun to identify it until I stumbled onto that video of mostly Jewish girls. It took me a while, but now I finally know exactly what it is. But first, we have to go back a bit to the issue of Jews and porn...

After noticing that there were a lot of Jewish girls in porn, and reading Howard Jacobsen’s book, I thought to myself, “Duh!”. If Jews have a prominent role in Hollywood and media in general, and making porn requires a lot of the same technical skills that making Hollywood movies or television programming does, and both require smoking hot girls, and both movies and porn are, as was the case in the 20th century, made within a few miles from each other on opposite sides of the big hill that divides Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley where most porn used to be made, OF COURSE there would be a lot of Jews in the porn industry, and the more important corollary, of course there would be a relationship of some kind, formal or informal, secret or SUPER secret, between Hollywood and the porn industry. It was the most obvious thing in the world. 

All of this intensified a question that I’d started pondering nearly a decade ago: What is the social relationship between Hollywood actresses and pornstars?  I used to add “if any” to the end of that, but I’ve dropped it because today, I’m certain there must be one. So many of them live in Southern California. They do a type of work that has one big thing in common—performing in front of a camera, though the nature of what they perform is very different. And they’re GIRLS! Of course, they know each other!  I know Denise Richards knows Bree Olsen, that’s for sure. If you’re a celebrity girl, most likely married to a celebrity yourself, you’d BETTER know who these porn girls are!  Because even if you don’t believe in monogamy, we’ve seen hundreds of times the myriad of ways in which a wealthy man’s sexual indiscretions can hurt an entire family (Hi, Bill Clinton!), and some things I’ve seen a few of these porn girls do, I thought to myself, “The average man just wouldn’t be able to resist that. It’s effectively mind-control.”. 

But yet, whatever the relationship is between what I years ago termed “North of the Hill actresses” and “South of the Hill actresses”, any evidence of it is curiously absent from public discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a photograph of a pornstar and a Hollywood actress together. I’ve seen pornstars with a lot of bit roles in Hollywood movies, but I can’t recall offhand seeing one of them interact at all with a name actress in that situation. They are usually in scenes where everyone else is a man. The smoking hot young girls in entertainment have this elaborate network of friendships, but I’m not aware of any porn girls being on that chart. So what gives?

I’d always assumed that Hollywood actresses would look down on pornstars for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which that girls in entertainment are often accused of selling sex, and as hard as they work at what they do, they don’t want to be linked in any way with women who actually do sell sex.  I figured that a porn girl trying to get into the social circle of Hollywood girls would be like a coal miner trying to get into The Yale Club. And in the past, that might have been true. But given what’s changed about pornstars, and what’s different about this generation’s young crop of female entertainers, I don’t think that would be true anymore. They would socialize. But yet, if they are socializing, they are keeping it more secret than the files at the CIA. Why?

It doesn’t really mean much if a Hollywood guy here or there is linked to a pornstar. That’s just men being men, and it’s no different than pro athletes or, ahem, our PRESIDENT getting caught with one. But if there was a public relationship between ACTRESSES and pornstars, that would be the smoking gun that there is a relationship between HOLLYWOOD and porn. And up to now, Hollywood had existential reasons for keeping that secret. 

Look, during the 80s, the right-wing was waging war on Hollywood. There were many in the Christian right who literally wanted to do away with the industry, or take it over and put out only religious propaganda like Hollywood is putting out superhero movies today. Given the puritanical nature of this society, if Hollywood had been shown to be linked to porn, and given the antisemitic nature of this society, if both could be portrayed as “controlled by the Jews”, this very well might have given the radical right the boost it needed to push Hollywood into the Pacific Ocean. 

But times have changed. Porn is much more mainstream now. A lot more pornstars are publicly visible in society though most are still mysteriously hiding out somewhere (or maybe hiding in plain sight). And Hollywood seems to have made a truce with conservatives, the terms of which would appear to be, Hollywood will put out occasional big-budget religious films and a non-stop stream of pro-military and pro-police propaganda, and conservatives will keep their traps shut when Brown Bunny comes out, and generally keep their grubby regulatory hands off the industry. And though they’ve gotten a little bit louder in the Trump era, Hollywood liberals were pretty quiet as a whole during the George W. Bush administration.  All of this might have to do with the sell-off of Hollywood studios to multi-national corporations, which began in earnest in the late 80s and by the turn of the century was complete. The man on the street may not know that Jewish people own very little in Hollywood anymore, but the antisemitic right-wing leaders who were attacking Hollywood in the 80s know, and that’s a big part of why the attacks have waned. 

As an aside, it is funny to me that in the 80s, right-wingers talked about “sex and violence” in movies. I’ve got a whole essay one day forthcoming about how the prevalence of this term was far more broadly destructive than people realize. But it is notable that there is a lot less sex in movies now (just about every big movie is PG-13), but WAY more violence. But conservatives love it because it is military violence, police violence, and superhero violence. The violence conservatives actually disliked was depictions of the street violence that is a reality in our society in large part due to their oppressive, unjust economic policies. But I digress...

In recent years, there have been a number of events that I’ve viewed as Hollywood floating trial balloons on public views about their industry and porn forming an open partnership. Steven Soderbergh casts Sasha Grey in “The Girlfriend Experience”. Disney invests in porn websites. Bella Thorne produces a movie for Pornhub (I assume Bella’s not IN it, or that would have broken the internet). And even Charlie Sheen’s public relationship with Bree Olsen. Believe me, Charlie could have lived with Bree without you ever finding out about it. Like much of what Hollywood does, I believe that the publicity surrounding their relationship was an orchestrated media event. 

So is Hollywood doing with porn what the government does when it wants to go public about something it has been keeping secret—a series of slow leaks to see if people will accept it?

Probably twenty years ago, I said to myself, “With all these celebrity sex tapes coming out, one of these days, a Hollywood actress is going to do porn. I will really admire that girl for having the courage to do it, and she’s going to make a shit-ton of money and it will change our society’s perceptions about sex for the better.”. I’ve never watched the legendary Penthouse celebrity erotica movie Caligula but I don’t believe it features any of the Hollywood stars actually doing anything pornographic. 

I had a list in my head of girls that I thought were prime candidates to do it. Angelina Jolie was at the top of that list until she became TOO big a star and the risk of trying it would have been too great. Rose McGowan was on that list. For a minute, around the time she was nude on the cover of Vanity Fair and talking about not believing in monogamy, I thought Scarlett Johansson might. But had I known at the time that she was a Jewish girl from New York, I would not have thought that. Not that I didn’t think a Jewish girl from New York could be the one to do it, but I saw the things that Scarlett in particular said and did in a different light once I knew that was her background. But eventually, someone did it, sort of, and it was a girl that I had on the list, too— Chloe Sevigny. 

Now, Brown Bunny is obviously not a porno, but that one scene is what it is. I’ve said before, you can’t act French kissing. You’re either doing it or you’re not, and the same applies to this. I’ve always liked Chloe’s work. She was phenomenal in The Last Days of Disco, which tragically hardly anybody’s seen. But it was probably Palmetto, one of my favorite ways to waste two hours, that made me think she might do something like that. Wow, Chloe, Gina Gershon, Elizabeth Shue...Pretty good few weeks filming there, Woody? Was the bidding for that role that the actor pays the studio?  

Even though there isn’t anything about her that I normally find attractive in girls, for some reason Chloe is smoking hot to me. Is she Jewish? I don’t know. Part of it is that weird little accent she has. But anyway, naturally when the internet exploded about her Brown Bunny scene, I immediately went looking for it. It wasn’t a leaked sex tape, so obviously she didn’t mind me watching it, and I wanted to. I also wanted to see the movie of course...that is until I watched that scene. 

My immediate reaction was that I was SO mad at Vincent Gallo. You’ve got a really talented actress who is willing to do that on screen, and this is what you film?!?  It’s not a surreptitious celebrity sex tape but that’s what it looks like. Now, I haven’t seen the whole movie, I don’t know in context what the point of the scene was. I know about Roger Ebert’s peculiar reversal on his review. Excuses can be made, explanations given, but I’m sorry, you just have to do better than that. Obviously, it wasn’t intended to be erotic, or if it was, that’s an even BIGGER fail. I guess I could give the back-handed compliment that it is a real accomplishment as a director if you can make Chloe Sevigny giving a blowjob NOT hot, especially if you’re her boyfriend and you’re the one she’s blowing!  I mean, no disrespect Vincent (too late?), but I know that you know—you didn’t screw Chloe; you screwed THE POOCH. I have WAY better stuff she could have been doing if she was willing to do that, and Vincent’s a decent actor so I could have even cast him as the guy assuming he was the only one she was willing to do that with. I would have made something people would have been talking about for more reasons than that it contains an explicit sex scene. 

I was so mad. I watched it once, and a few years later went back and watched it again to see if it was still as bad as I remembered. It was. I was mad at Vincent, but I was also mad because it appeared that doing it hurt Chloe’s career, and for NOTHING. But she never got as much work as I thought she should. I tend to want to blame the system rather than the girl, but I don’t know the reasons. I know she’s good in front of the camera, but maybe she’s unprofessional or irresponsible and that’s why she didn’t get more work and her professional options narrowed down to blowing her boyfriend in his B-movie. Maybe she doesn’t really like working, and she’s got enough money, so she only wants to do things here and there. I don’t know. But if people like me were running Hollywood studios, she would have gotten more work after that, not less. The only possible halfway acceptable explanation is that they were “pulling a Drew Barrymore”, which I’ll explain in a minute, but it was still a fail even if that was the goal. 

So what I had expected some Hollywood actress to do—a glossy porno like the sort of stuff Sasha Grey and Tori Black do—was still undone. I had a new list of suspects. But yet, a part of me felt like it kind of had been done, and by a girl who was on my original list of suspects, who along with this young girl Kasey Chase who died, turned out to be the key to my understanding something critically important about myself in relation to love, sex and porn. 

As a rule, I avoided watching celebrity sex tapes out of respect for the privacy of the stars. But some of them became such an ubiquitous part of pop culture, you couldn’t avoid seeing them. There wasn’t a single celebrity sex tape that I thought was actually hot, until the last one I saw...

I was in prison when the #metoo movement started, and Rose McGowan emerged as one of the leaders of it. I sat on my bunk listening to clips from some of her awesome press conferences on the radio and thinking two things: one, “fuck yeah, go get ‘em!”. But two, I was thinking that I really really wanted to talk to her about the reasons why I was listening to her from where I was, and what I felt it indicated that the #metoo movement needed to address to prevent a backlash that would undermine it. 

Now, I always thought Rose was one of the smoking hottest girls in entertainment, a view I think is shared by a lot of people. But I also thought she was a good actress and didn’t get as much work as she should. When Rose, who I had never viewed as that kind of person, suddenly appeared as an activist, at first it seemed a little surprising, but then when I thought about it, it made perfect sense—Rose would have been one of the main girls that Hollywood predators would have been trying to rape all these years. 

It was really disturbing to me when I saw power starting to fight back against her in all the ways that they did. All of a sudden, a sex tape of her hits the internet in this midst of this, and gee, how does that happen? Pure coincidence, I’m sure. Just like an actress having a little bit of cocaine suddenly being illegal in LA. On the one hand, I was mad at the world for this kind of cheap intimidation tactic, but on the other hand...well, I want to see that video...

But because Rose was someone I respected, for two reasons now, I restrained myself from watching it even though if you’d asked me which Hollywood star I’d most like to see do porn, she probably would have been my answer. 

When I got out of prison, amongst my many absurd parole conditions was that I wasn’t supposed to watch porn. I’m a then-41 year-old man who hasn’t had sex in five years at that point, I had this huge electronic device strapped to my leg that I had to spend two hours a day charging, the law requires me to tell any girl I try to date all about my criminal conviction and tell my parole officer and give them her contact information, and I’m NOT supposed to watch porn?? I really wanted to ask Tori Black what she thought about this.  But slave to authority I used to be, I dutifully complied for nearly a month until I saw Alana Evans on CNN talking about Trump’s tryst with Stormy Daniels which was all the news was about at that time. One day, two girls rollerbladed past me at the beach with their labia clearly visible through their spandex shorts and I said, “This is stupid. If girls are walking around like this, and the President is fucking pornstars, I’m gonna watch porn.”. 

I still didn’t watch Rose’s until I read something she said in an interview that I interpreted to mean she didn’t really care if people watched it. Maybe I interpreted it that way because I wanted to watch it, but anyway, I did and...OMG. I only watched it once and no, I didn’t. But I chucked and thought to myself, Rose is like Deion Sanders or Bo Jackson—she’s a pro in two sports and she’s really good at both of them. But afterward, I felt guilty about having watched it, like it was invasive and Rose would be mad at me, and I didn’t watch it again. But then a funny thing happened...

I’d wanted to see Rose’s movie “Jawbreaker” for like twenty years. I love movies like that—cute girls in beautiful costumes, not too serious, not too many dudes. I generally almost always enjoyed anything with Rose in it and for a long time, before I knew her name and when she was just “that Noxema girl”, I thought Rebecca Gayheart was the cutest girl EVER. But somehow, I’d never gotten around to watching Jawbreaker, until last year or maybe at the end of 2018, it appeared on Sony Crackle for free and I finally had the chance to see it. And a few minutes in, during the opening credits...well, isn’t that funny...

So I wrote this movie All-Nighter and started a production company with some then-friends from Stanford with the goal of producing it. I ended up dropping out of my own company, and letting them go forward with it without me, after they refused to sign the personal conduct policy I drafted, which included strong provisions to make sure no actress would ever be subjected to inappropriate behavior while working for or seeking work with my company. I probably could have forced them to sign, but the fact that they didn’t want to told me that I was in business (and in friendships) with the wrong guys. Even though I would call them friends for a few more years, that was the turning point. 

But without my help, they were able to move the project along far further than I ever would have imagined they could. They got a professional casting agent to circulate it, and a lot of good actors were interested. Eventually, they were able to film one scene before the project fell apart for lack of money, and perhaps other reasons they never told me. I’d made them agree to return the rights to the script to me in the event that the project failed, so I own it again and I still would like to make it one day. But a number of good actors had been attached to the project by then, including MAT Girl Tatyana Ali. As I’m watching the opening credits of Jawbreaker I see that I had forgotten, or possibly never knew, that Tatyana Ali was in it too. 

Now consider the thickness of the irony here. I have a gift-wrapped chance to get my break in Hollywood as a producer and screenwriter but I give it up because I won’t compromise my principles on protecting actresses. But I end up going to prison after being accused of a sexual assault while my three co-producers who refused to sign my policy on protecting actresses go forward with the effort to make the film. I could have and should have stopped them—that was my mistake. But even after the film production falters, they go on, respectively,  to work for a billionaire I admire, to hold a sensitive position in the federal government and a high-paying consulting job in corporate America, while I become a homeless ex-convict and convicted sex offender. I then watch a man who confessed on tape to the fact that he enjoys sexually assaulting women get elected president, with tens of millions of WOMEN voting for him, and then he subsequently installs on the Supreme Court a man accused (by a person much more credible) of a crime almost identical to the one I was charged with, and who has a reported history of other bad behavior besides, with female senators voting to confirm him. 

A decade after I set about trying to figure out how to make sure every actress that walks in the doors of my production company feels safe and comfortable, the #metoo movement breaks and this actress I always loved becomes one of the voices of it. And then I’m watching a twenty year old movie of hers only to realize that it co-stars the girl who was going to be in my movie made by my production company that I had to abandon over that very principle. You couldn’t write that. 

I don’t know what relationship, if any, Rose and Tatyana have. Sometimes people are in a movie together, even in the same SCENE together (as it appears to the viewer), and never actually meet. Sometimes they remain friends for years after. I doubt my co-producers told Tatyana the real reason I wasn’t around, but I told enough people that I’m sure the truth is out there, certainly by now. 

Then another curious thing happened. Around that same time I finally saw Jawbreaker, a few days later I’m surfing for time-wasting movies on Tubi TV and I end up watching From Dusk Til Dawn 3, and who’s in it but Rebecca Gayheart who I hadn’t seen anywhere in years. She’s still so cute. 

I was working hot and heavy on my book about my Scarlett Johansson Vegas encounter at that time, and because one of the themes is the curious way in which my life has intersected with people in Hollywood, I started a chapter in it called “Rose, Rebecca & Tatyana”, about my appreciation for Rose McGowan as an actress, my admiration for her activism and my desire to talk to her about the course correction that I feel the #metoo movement desperately needs, and about the reasons relevant to that which prevented me from attempting to get in touch with Tatyana to talk to her about my script even though I wanted to. But as I was working on this, and spending all this time with Rose on my mind, I kept finding myself thinking, “OMG, she’s so smoking hot! I wanna go watch her porno again.”. But I didn’t...

Then last summer, shit really hit the fan in my life, culminating with the loss of my apartment in October, followed by a traumatic if brief return to jail, and then homelessness. But then the Rose-Natalie Portman media exchange happened and I wrote about it here. The news story about that ran with smoking-hot headshots of Rose and Natalie and I found myself thinking again, “I sure do wanna go watch Rose’s porno again.”. But I didn’t...

Not long after I wrote “Girl-Fight!”, I was in a room at the very same hotel I’m in right now, at about 3am, watching porn. Or trying to. But as it happens so often with me these days, I got bored with it and disinterested. I turned off my phone and turned on the TV, and what’s on but an old episode of Charmed. OMG, there she is!  She’s sooooo cute!  

There is a scene that comes on with Rose, Alyssa Milano (herself historically smoking hot), Jenny McCarthy, Holly Marie Combs, and two other smoking hot girls whose names I don’t know, one of whom was hot on the level of Rose and Alyssa. This show was just like 2 Broke Girls—you simply were not going to get cast even to walk past in the background unless you were smoking hot. They’re are all standing around in beautiful outfits, talking about something (I was watching with the sound off), and I thought to myself, “This is really what I want to see more than porn.”. It made me realize, the desire that I was looking to satisfy through porn was not actually primarily sexual. Well, except it made me want to go watch Rose’s porno again...

I held out for a little over a week, but finally I broke down and thought, “If Rose is gonna be mad at me, she’s gonna have to be mad at me.”. So I watched it again. And no, I didn’t. There are limits. But it was even hotter than I remembered but I was like, “Wait, that was all?!?”. I felt like I remembered it being much longer, the beginning part, and I mused that it was amazing that I’d gotten so hot and bothered over less than ten seconds that are juicy before it’s a bunch of still pictures. 

But after watching it, I felt guilty again, and like Rose would be mad. But what I realized in the second watching of it was that Rose’s sex tape had something in common with my Vegas Scarlett sighting. The most interesting thing about my Scarlett encounter to me is that I am still amazed by the fact that I could possibly not recognize her, when I was really paying attention, standing seventeen feet away looking right at her, and her looking at me. I truly didn’t know who she was. So the meaning of the encounter to me had nothing to do with the fact that she was Scarlett Johansson, only with the fact she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. Now, obviously, I knew it was Rose McGowan in the video I saw, but watching it the second time, I realized that it wasn’t just that I was getting some thrill out of seeing a Hollywood actress I’d always thought was hot doing that. If I hadn’t known Rose McGowan as an actress and I’d stumbled onto that clip, I’d have been searching high and low to find more of THAT girl just like I did with Kasey Chase. Thankfully, Rose is still alive. 

It’s funny, Charmed is on my TV again right now, and when I watch it these days, Rose is even way smoking hotter to me than she was when I watched the show years ago. I stop and ask myself why, and I quickly realize the answer: because now I know her future, now I know where her story goes. That young girl is so much cuter now that I know what she is going to become, and that’s why she’s hotter right now as a middle-aged woman than she was at 25. But there’s another factor, too. I’ve never been able to help thinking about sex when I saw her. But now that I’ve seen that tape, I actually know, and OMG. I have to turn this off. I can’t stand it. 

I could not and still can’t get that tape off my mind. But I’ve drawn the line. I refuse to watch it again unless Rose explicitly says it’s okay. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me that it is not beyond the realm of possibly that Rose leaked that tape herself. If I was that hot, I’d want everybody to know about it. But what is different about the Rose McGowan celebrity sex tape from all the others I’ve seen is that she appears to be performing in the way that the girls in porn are: she’s actually trying to make it hot, and, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. 

But even if Rose did leak the tape, it was probably only as preemptive action. If she just wanted us to see how hot she is, she would have leaked it years ago. As I thought about the timing of the leak, I started to examine the history of celebrity porn leaks. I had noticed the frequency with which sexually oriented material from earlier stages of their lives surfaced when actresses became big stars—Cameron Diaz’s bondage video, Demi Moore’s “Oui” photos, and so many more. Then I thought of Mafia gangsters reportedly forcing Marilyn Monroe to make pornos to hold over her head. And then of the awful thing that happened to sports reporter Erin Andrews. 

I never thought about it because I’m not a scumbag, but I realized that there was probably a sex tape of just about every girl out there. The Erin Andrews thing shows how easy it is to secretly tape someone. And reading the tea leaves, I began to think that sex tape extortion was a huge factor in what happens in entertainment, and in the WORLD.

It had long since been apparent to me that the easiest way for a girl to get her career in Hollywood jump-started was to take sexy roles and take her clothes off, but that once she did so, the potential upside of her career was limited. Was it possible that the girls who became the big stars had negotiated in some way to keep this material shelved, but it was subsequently held over their heads to control their careers?  Did predatory men have such control over Hollywood that they were able to make almost every girl do something sexually oriented in order to get her career started? And if a girl had so much talent that they needed her, but wouldn’t do that, that’s alright, just get someone to install a hidden camera in the peephole of her hotel room door and get a sex tape of her, and then hold that over her head? There was something I’d seen in recent years that suggested to me that this was true, and that girls had finally figured out the best way, the only way, to fight back...

I’ve noticed recently a torrent of articles where girls in entertainment either confessed to past sexual dalliances, like Demi Moore’s recent interview about having a threesome with Ashton Kutcher, or have come out publicly in non-traditional relationships, like Miley Cyrus. And even beyond sexual things, lots of entertainers have come out with confessions of the kinds of things people normally try to keep private. 

The only defense against blackmail is to tell the blackmailer “Go ahead, see if I care.”, or better yet to beat them to the punch and release whatever they are threatening you with yourself. Maybe this is how a lot of girls’ porn careers got started. But it seemed to me that stars doing this might have been what swung the pendulum enough to allow victims of powerful Hollywood predators like Harvey Weinstein to speak out. Blackmail and extortion is probably the number one tool in the toolbox of evil people. They build networks of people they have the goods on, in key positions where they can say to that person “You’d better protect me or we go down together.”.  And with someone as powerful and connected as Harvey Weinstein, those networks can be almost impregnable. Almost. 

But I knew there were a lot more Harvey Weinsteins that we hadn’t yet heard about, and as Rose McGowan has been saying, a lot of Hollywood actresses still sitting on the sidelines.  That’s probably because they don’t want their porno, or maybe something worse, released to the public. Or perhaps, and in some ways worse, a friend of theirs has a sex tape and they are being threatened that if they don’t cooperate, their friend’s tape will be leaked. That’s how sick these predators are. They’ll do ANYTHING to protect themselves.  But that’s why what Rose has done is so admirable. She obviously knew that tape was out there, and had to know that the leaking of it would be a probable consequence of her activism, but she went ahead anyway. The more girls who run through that wall, the more meaningless the wall becomes. The fear girls have is that people will respect them less. I respect Rose MORE.  

But I don’t think it’s just Hollywood where sex tape extortion happens.  It would explain a lot of inexplicable things if this was far more prevalent than anybody talks about. There was always a seeming contradiction to me in the women’s rights movement. I felt, I hear these girls talking about how bad things are, but most of the women I know seem happy and free, not at all oppressed. But maybe it wasn’t really an everyday, chronic oppression, but just that nearly every girl had some guy out there with power over her by holding a sex tape over her head, and that was what stopped them from being able to push for fair wages, better working conditions and the promotions they deserved, but they just couldn’t publicly state the reasons. The more closely I observed, the more probable this seemed, and perhaps the apparent explosion in the number of pornstars was related to this, through guys leaking their tapes because girls were fighting back, and girls releasing their own tapes as preemptive action.  

Girls should have a day where millions of them release sex tapes in unison and say to the sexual blackmailers, extortionists and slut-shamers, “Here’s my porno. NOW what are you gonna do?” This would put an end to sexual blackmail, put an end to slut-shaming, and it would tip society’s scales of power in favor of women. Even just a solo video would make the point, if you can’t find a guy willing to go on camera with you, because believe me, in this scenario, men would be running for the rocks trying to figure out what to do next. I doubt there would be much interest in my porn, but if girls were going to do something like that, embarrassing as it is given all my physical insecurities, I would do it with them to show solidarity. 

I’m not suggesting all of this be given away for free. Oh hell no!  I’d establish a website where you have to pay to stream it, but millions of girls would be on there, listed by their real name. Make your video cost $10,000 if you want to. The fact that it is there will make the point. And you’d be surprised. Somebody would buy it—that guy from high school or college that had the biggest crush on you, your ex that still gets horny when he thinks about you, that guy that comes to your restaurant all the time and always sits in your section and leaves you big tips. 

And if you’re an everyday girl, if enough women did it, there wouldn’t be all that much attention on your tape. You think about the people that know you, but everybody would be running to see the celebrity tapes, if they could be convinced to get on board. Even if not, if the tapes of millions, or even hundreds of thousands of girls came out together, the attention would be spread around and not that much attention would fall on you unless, you know, your porno is smoking hot. But then you’ll get rich. There would be only a handful of guys like me most interested in seeing the girls I know. But in this scenario, I wouldn’t be sitting around perusing the Great Sex Tape Dump. I’d be celebrating the fact that girls finally took my advice on something. 

The entire concept of the privacy of sexuality is a prison imposed upon women by men.  In an unpopular movie that I love, “Southland Tales”, MAT Girl Sarah Michelle Gellar says, “Deep down, everybody wants to be a pornstar.”. We all want sexual freedom, but women don’t have it because they must try to assuage absurd male insecurities that make so many guys think only a near-virgin is good enough for them. And men don’t have it because women have to protect themselves from sexual blackmail and extortion, slut-shaming, sexual assault and other predatory behaviors of misogynistic men. But make no mistake: in this dynamic there are men who side with women, AND women who side with men. If women are ever going to be free, they must end the ability of men (and the women who side with them) to manipulate them using the idea that their sexual history says something about their character. 

The public doesn’t give them credit for it, but the women of Hollywood are and always have been leaders. It would make the most difference of all if entertainment women (and men) participated in The Great Sex Tape Dump. The lives they would be saving just might be their own. 

I’d never really thought about it, but after watching Rose McGowan’s tape, it occurred to me that the majority of actresses should be unbelievably awesome lovers. I think the genesis point of thinking about this was when I was reading Nelson DeMille’s pretty good book “The Gold Coast”. The main character is married to a former actress and one of the minor subplots is how great she is in bed (or usually NOT in bed). I read that book in prison, and after getting out, I was watching X-Men and there is that scene where Mystique is trying to seduce Wolverine and she climbs in top of him and morphs into like a dozen different girls. I remember when I first saw that movie in theater and I thought, “That’s so hot. How do you turn that down?!?” But seeing it again years later, after Rose’s tape had blown my mind, it occurred to me that actresses, good ones anyway, can basically do that very thing. It’s not just that they know how to change their appearance. They know how to actually BE someone else, which means, if they don’t object to using their professional skills in that way, your sex life with them—your life period—should never get boring.  So if actresses are great at sex, and Jewish girls are great at sex, then Jewish actresses...OMG. 

But it also occurred to me after watching Rose’s tape the second time, that if Hollywood actresses did porn, they’d be way better at it than pornstars are. From what I can see in those few seconds, Rose looks better than most, and I doubt she put all that much time and effort into it. If a Hollywood actress prepared to try to make a porno hot the way they prepare for their Oscar-bait movies...OMG. Viewers would be dying of heart attacks. 

I’m sure there are actresses that have thought about it. The main factor that I would bet has deterred them is the economic structure of the porn industry. The porn industry has resigned itself to their product being stolen more than it is bought, tolerable because the production costs of porn are extremely low compared to its market value, or perhaps because rich guys are secretly funding it all because they are the male stars. I mean, the glossy Adam & Eve porno “Pirates”, the most expensive porno ever made at the time, cost about $1 million to make. The Blu-ray costs $100!  An Avengers movie costs around $300 million, and the Blu-ray is less than half the price of Pirates. The only reason this is true is because the authorities won’t help the porn industry prevent piracy of their product the way they help Hollywood and music. But what if they did?

I don’t think he’d ever do this sort of thing, but if Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie had made a glossy, professionally produced porno around the time when they first got together, and put all of their considerable acting skills into making it good, they’d have made a BILLION dollars. They might have said they had plenty of money already, but the hungry children of Africa and the dispossessed people of New Orleans could have used it.  There would have needed to be some method for preventing people from seeing it for free on the internet (like Oscar screeners, a unique code linked to the owner encrypted in each copy so if it hits the net, you know who it came from). They could have done the first screening on pay-per-view, and if people will pay $100 to see Floyd Mayweather, master of the art of fighting without fighting, what would they pay for that?!? If piracy concerns could be satisfactory minimized, they could have EASILY moved ten million copies at $100 each. Easy. First week. Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds when they were together?  Would have sold like the Avengers and Deadpool. If you’d come out with a video featuring like five smoking hot celebrity couples, it would have moved the needle of the global economy, and I also believe it would have totally revolutionized our society’s perceptions about sex. Could it be Hollywood is working their way up to doing that very thing?  The prevalence now of streaming over physical media eases the piracy issues. Hollywood studios are getting in bed with porn websites. Hollywood actresses are producing movies for Pornhub. Hmmm...

But it was in the midst of all these ponderings, all the while trying to figure out why I kept finding myself in tears over this girl I never met, that I was able to break through and see the meaning of it all. 

In thinking about Kasey Chase and Rose McGowan, I realized that nearly all the girls I had loved, and nearly all the girls that were both sexually AND emotionally attractive to me, shared two specific physical qualities in their faces, physical qualities which in my experience were almost always linked to certain personality traits that I loved.  Kasey had those traits, and that personality, such that I knew if I’d met her, I would have liked her. I probably never would have crossed paths with her. But I didn’t think I’d ever cross paths with Scarlett Johansson either. There were only a few girls with these rare special qualities that I loved, and one of them was gone. 

After days of thinking about it, I finally figured out why that first clip of Kasey, only about a minute long, was maybe the hottest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve had a fairly sparse sex life, but it  was non-existent when I was young. I never had sex, or significant intimate contact of any kind with a girl in high school or college. I was 23 when I first kissed a girl. I went through my entire youth without those experiences, watching depictions of young love and lust on the screen, and watching other boys around me get all of that type of attention from girls. 

I think this is a big part of the phenomenon of older men being sexually obsessed with young girls. They are guys who, like me, feel they missed out on those experiences, but unlike me, they are unable to be realistic and accept that the past can’t be recaptured in that way. I’ve accepted it, but I still think about it from time to time. 

As a rule, I see young girls who are beautiful but I’m not interested in them sexually. Because I can’t think of a girl sexually without thinking of her total person, the fact that they are in such a different stage of life makes me view them as incompatible with me, sexually or otherwise. Most of the girls in porn that I like watching appear to be in their late 20s or older. Most of my favorite pornstars to watch are “MILFs”.  I recently discovered the website of a woman who has got to be over 50 and she’s so smoking hot.

But that Kasey Chase clip was rare in that normally girls in porn who have that look that they could be only 18 don’t turn me on. But the combination of her having these physical traits that provoke a strong emotional and physical attraction in me, and demonstrating this particular sexual technique that some girls get, and the exact things she said and did, it comes together to give that clip a mystical allure that I didn’t understand until now. 

Even when I’m watching porn, I normally don’t think about having sex with the pornstar. I’m too conditioned to the idea that I don’t want to have sex with girls I don’t know, or without knowing they want to have sex with me. I don’t even feel comfortable fantasizing about it. That probably sounds remarkable and crazy but it’s true.  I should probably rethink that. But the fantasy of porn to me is the fantasy of being a guy that girls, generalized imaginary girls, want to do those things with. I imagine myself feeling the physical sensations, and experiencing the emotions that would come along with it, if those things were happening with the mythical lover I don’t have, and if she was hot like that girl. 

But some girls won’t let me do that. I can’t help imagining sex with them because their attractive energy is so strong. Kasey does what she does so perfectly, that it FEELS like being there with her.  But there is a time-shifting effect for me, because girls that young aren’t as a rule sexually attractive to me now, so watching her, I feel like I know a little bit what it WOULD have felt like, when I was young, to have a girlfriend who was hot like that and for her to say and do those things, and a little piece of the wound of all that I missed is healed.  One of the Jewish MAT Girl Hollywood actresses did a bigger version of a similar thing for me in a movie of hers. It’s too long a story for a piece that is already too long.  But that actress, along with Rose McGowan and a few others, stands out as unique to me, in a way similar to how Kasey does. 

Now, I can feel Hollywood girls getting a little nervous, so let me put your mind at ease. I and this blog may be off the radar at the moment, but I’m smart enough to know that what I say does carry some weight because of my background. Perhaps Hollywood actresses don’t care at all about this blog. But they do care if someone like me draws too many equivalences between them, with all the years of training and countless hours of preparation that go into their work, and girls that suck cock for a living. They may not look down on pornstars as I used to think they would, but they don’t want that said by ANYBODY, let alone me.  So even if they had never cared about anything else I said on this blog, I can imagine them all looking, waiting, arms crossed, in their expensive clothes, tapping the toes of their Louboutin shoes, looking SO hot, caring. Even Meryl Streep would be looking down at me over the rim of her glasses like she always did in The Devil Wears Prada, caring. Even the guys I like, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio , Mark Wahlberg et al, would be pretending to play cards or drink a beer, looking over their shoulder, caring, because they work hard at this, too. 

Relax, guys. As I mentioned in my other piece on porn, I am in no way trying to elevate pornstars to the status of serious actors, and not going to go all sentimental and fall into doing that because a girl whose porn I liked died. But you are all students of the human condition, and what is interesting to explore is WHY it is that a girl in a brief porno clip could affect me so deeply. We aren’t all the way there yet, and it comes back around to you guys in Hollywood and how I’ve been impacted by some of you. 

In examining myself once I discovered that I really liked Jewish girls, and that while I had as an adult always dismissed the notion of ever dating an actress, that they might actually be the right kinds of girls for me, I realized that I had desexualized Hollywood actresses, and it’s all Drew Barrymore’s fault. 

While I talk about all these entertainment girls being smoking hot (and they are), before Scarlett, I only had real-world crushes on a few celebrity girls. The first and the longest was Drew Barrymore. Unlike most of America, I didn’t fall in love with Drew in E.T.  I actually never saw that until I was an adult. For me, it was Firestarter. Back then, I was already interested in the idea of people with unusual abilities, because I was one. I can’t start fires with my mind (well, I’ve never tried), but I could do some things that others around me couldn’t. So though there were no government agents after me, I related to her in that movie, and she was about the same age as me (she’s 45 now and I’m 44), and she was so cute! 

When she got a little older and I began to read more and more media reports alleging wild and crazy behavior, I thought “Maybe she’d be wild and crazy enough to date a Black guy.”. I was in LA frequently in the early 90s because all three of my sisters were already living there, and we generally hung out around West LA venues where you see a lot of celebrities. I thought, if I see Drew Barrymore at the Marina Del Rey Cheesecake Factory or the Century City Mall, I’m gonna talk to that girl!

In maybe 1991, I saw this movie Drew was in called Far From Home. I liked the movie though I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, so maybe I would think less of it now. But I watched it a bunch of times because...I guess I can get away with saying this since I was 15...there is this one scene in it where Drew is so smoking hot. Because of that movie, and increasing reports of her wild behavior, I said to myself, as soon as that girl turns 18, she’s gonna be nude all over the place!  And sure enough, not long after she entered legal adulthood came the news that she was going to pose nude for Playboy. 

Now, I’m going to be graphically honest here. This news was like a holiday to me. My expectation was that this would replace all of my masturbation material. That’s how cute I thought Drew was. It seems gross to say that now (curious if she would think so), but keep in mind I was 16. or 17, living in Kansas and didn’t perceive actresses as being a part of my universe. I thought about talking to Drew if I ran into her, but I had no realistic expectation that I’d ever meet her. 

When the magazine came out, I went to the B. Dalton bookstore on the second floor of the Towne East Square Mall in Wichita, Kansas and grabbed a copy. I mean, I was going to buy it, but the only reason I even opened it was because I couldn’t wait to see, and it was one of the biggest shocks of my life. 

The photos were brutally, shockingly unattractive. And I wouldn’t say that except for the fact that, though it didn’t occur to me at the time, I’m now convinced it was intentional. The first picture I saw was the one where she’s standing outside, naked in high heels, smoking a cigarette. I was shocked by how thin she was, and I don’t know if Drew really smokes, but smoking has always been unattractive to me. Drew looks a little chubby on screen, which is attractive to me, but the still camera adds weight too. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in weeks, and I thought then, knowing how girls obsess about their weight, and having her first nude photoshoot coming up, maybe she really hadn’t eaten in weeks, which made me sad because I thought she was cuter slightly chubby. 

I didn’t buy the magazine. I don’t think I even looked at all the pictures. I put it back, feeling sad and sick, and left the store. I hadn’t yet seen any Hollywood girls in person, and I wondered, was this what Hollywood movie magic was?  Were none of these girls actually cute in real life?  But I was baffled. I knew photos could be airbrushed, soft lighting and body makeup could transform Frankenstein into a centerfold. Why would Playboy publish pictures of Drew Barrymore that didn’t make her look good?!?

This didn’t change my opinion of Drew. I still saw her on TV and thought she was adorable.  And my real-world crush on her had waned before the Playboy spread anyway because I’d met the girl in high school that I loved who would be the center of my romantic thoughts for most of the next fifteen years. 

But the effect of it was that I no longer wanted to see any of my favorite actresses naked. Before that, I’d watch Hollywood sex scenes curious to see what this girl’s boobs looked like or what that girl’s butt looked like, but now I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t just that Drew hadn’t looked attractive in the pictures. There was a harshness to them that suggested she wasn’t SUPPOSED to, and back then I couldn’t understand why that would be. 

Though I still watched softcore Skinemax stuff and racy Hollywood B-movies starring actresses I didn’t know, Hollywood sex scenes starring actresses I did know became uncomfortable to watch. To this day, I sometimes skip past them if I’m watching a movie I’ve already seen. If I was able to have a career as a filmmaker, other than if I could make this one movie in which I want to include Brown Bunny-like material, I’d never want extensive sex scenes actually shown in any of my movies. I’ve noticed that the better directors avoid this, too. There were only a handful of Hollywood actresses, Rose and a few others, that I could still see in a sexual light. 

But every time I saw Drew, I thought about that magazine spread and wondered, “What the fuck?”. Years later, I googled the pictures to look again and see if my perception had changed, but it hadn’t.  I just thought to go look right now and check again, but I don’t want to see. While I was writing this, “50 First Dates” came on TV and she’s so cute. That’s the image I want to remember. It wasn’t until last year when I was watching the trailer for the movie that Drew directed that finally, I think, I figured out what happened...

Drew Barrymore didn’t want to be a sex symbol. It doesn’t appear that she even wanted to be a big movie star. She’d had enough of it. But she did want to be an actress, but how could she do it, if all of us were just waiting to see her naked, and desperate to get her to star in a string of erotic films? You give the people what they want in the exact way they DON’T want it. 

Whether Hugh Hefner cooperated with her in the endeavor, or she hustled him by insisting she be allowed to pick the photographer, I believe now that the purpose of that photo spread was to destroy the public appetite for Drew Barrymore’s sexuality, which would destroy the public appetite to force her to be a sex symbol superstar, so that she could have the career she wanted. For a young girl who became a superstar in Hollywood before she even really had a choice about it, it was the only way out, and it worked. 

But Drew’s plan for self-liberation had the side effect of desexualizing the Hollywood actress for me. This was strengthened when I got to college, and first began to consider the possibility of pursuing work in Hollywood. I’d known since I was a young child that the casting couch and outright rape were huge problems in Hollywood, so I made the decision that if I ever ended up working in a position of any power there, I would make a rule for myself that I simply wouldn’t get involved with actresses at all. I never considered them as candidates for romance. And that was my policy up until about 9:15pm on August 31, 2012 in the lobby of the Aria hotel in Las Vegas...

But you know what’s funny? Even Scarlett Johansson falls under that umbrella of desexualization. For over a year now, I’ve been thinking about wanting to marry this girl, and I’m dead serious. I’ve thought about working for her, making movies with her, doing all kinds of things with her. I thought about cuddling with her. I’ve thought a LOT about cuddling—she looks like she would be so good at it. But I don’t have sexual fantasies about her. 

Scarlett did this movie, Under the Skin (seriously, Scarlett? WTF?). It’s basically an arthouse PORNO, but don’t go run out and get it because of that. It’s not hot, and its not good either. I bought it because I’d never seen it, it was $5 and Scarlett was in it. Scarlett might object to me calling it a porno, to which I retort, it’s the only Hollywood movie I recall seeing a hard cock in. But anyway...

There is this scene in the movie where Scarlett is stark naked standing in front of a mirror. I’m watching this a few days ago for the purposes of this piece, and marveling at the fact that here is this girl I’m so into, standing here naked, and she looks porno-hot. To me, she’s perfect. This is a long, slowly shot scene that gives you plenty of time to examine every little curve on her body and she’s so smoking hot. But yet, I’m not turned on by this at all. It’s like the Drew Barrymore thing taken to the next level—Scarlett can stand there naked looking HOT and my sexual thoughts are still completely off and I can’t turn them on. But yet, a few days later, Avengers: Age of Ultron comes on TV, and I’m watching her in the scene in the woods with the Hulk, and she’s so hot I can’t breathe. She does that little half-smile she does, and she’s just so beautiful I can’t stand it and I have to turn it off. 

So naked, nothing. But in that silly latex suit, she takes my breath away. What gives?  It’s more than my desexualization of actresses. Sometimes I watch Scarlett and there are only two possible explanations for her. Sometimes I think, “Scarlett Johansson doesn’t know how to be sexy and all efforts to teach her have failed.”. But then maybe I think she’s doing a longer, more difficult take on what Drew Barrymore did. She’s being a sex symbol, but she’s good enough to withhold from the audience all the expressions and gestures that constitute sexiness. I dare the rest of these smoking hot girls in Hollywood to stand in front of a camera nude like that, without makeup or camera tricks to make them less hot, and not be sexy. They can’t do it. 

There are two things I’ve seen that suggest to me this latter explanation is what Scarlett is doing. One is an earlier scene in Under the Skin. It’s shot in almost black-and-white, in a featureless white room like in The Matrix. Scarlett is naked stripping the clothes off of a dead girl laying on the floor. In the early part of the scene, Scarlett’s doing what she does—she’s naked and not hot. When she’s done taking the dead girl’s clothes off, she stands up, walks around, turns her back to the camera, and strikes this sexy little pose while she’s putting her bra on, and it is so OH MY GOD hot. If you just showed me a still picture of that shot before I saw the movie and asked me, “Who’s this?”, I would have said, “I don’t know. Brianna Love? But why’s there a dead girl on the floor? Did Brianna fuck her to death?”. But there is another scene in that movie too, where she is luring a guy to his...death? I guess. I dunno. This movie’s so weird. But in that scene, she shows she knows what sexy is. 

And then in the movie Chef, which is a cute indie film, there is this one shot, again just a second long, where Jon Favreau (the titular chef) is cooking for her and she’s laying there in this black dress and...OMG. So she knows how to be sexy. She just won’t do it as matter of routine. Why? I presume because like Drew, she wants to be an actress, not a sex object. But unlike Drew, she doesn’t mind the superstar part, but she’s taken a line from her ex-husband’s ex-girlfriend: I can be so unsexy for someone so beautiful...

But it wasn’t only Hollywood actresses I desexualized. About a decade ago, I realized something very unusual about myself—I never had sexual fantasies about the girls I loved, with one and a half exceptions. The half-exception is a girl from college that I categorize as a half because I debate with myself whether I loved her. Well, I certainly loved her as a friend, but our bond was built in many ways around our shared negative perceptions about the world, in contrast to my relationships with other girls that were built around positive things, so I think that is why the relationship feels different in my memory. But she was not desexualized for me because she was a very sexually open person and I think still to this day, one of only two girls I wasn’t sleeping with who talked to me about her sex life openly and graphically. But even with her, I never had sexual fantasies about her until years after the last time I saw her. 

The certain one was the last girl that I loved, the one who held the title of “most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen” until Scarlett took it from her. But the title Scarlett couldn’t take, not from the distance I saw her, and in the mood she seemed to be in that night, was that this girl was also the sexiest girl I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t stop thinking about wanting to sleep with her. 

It was because of my inability to stop thinking about my sexual desire for this girl that I realized that I’d never had sexual thoughts about the girls I loved before her. I thought about taking them to all the special places in the world that I loved. I thought about traveling with them. I thought about how we would decorate our home together. I thought about meeting all the special people in their life, and introducing them to mine. I thought about projects or causes we would work on together in our lives. In some cases, I even thought about what our kids would be like if we had any. I thought about cuddling with them. I thought A LOT about cuddling. But I didn’t think about sex beyond the abstract fact that if we became a couple, it would happen and that I assumed it would be awesome. In fact, I often told myself, I would have accepted a relationship with no sex if I felt sure that the girl really loved me. 

But I’d realized years ago a common thread that linked most of my favorite pornstars together: they reminded me in some way of girls I knew and liked in real life. They were like my sexual fantasy proxies. I couldn’t let myself have sexual thoughts about the girls I knew who hadn’t given me consent to view them that way, but I could have sexual thoughts about a pornstar, who had given the public general consent to enjoy their sexuality. But the reason why this appealed to me is because my greatest curiosity about sex with girls I knew and liked was what their sexual PERSONALITY was like. I had noticed in life that people who shared a physical resemblance often shared a personality resemblance as well, so I felt that when I was watching these pornstars that reminded me of girls I liked that I was getting a glimpse of what those girls might be like in bed. I just couldn’t let myself think of the girls in my everyday life sexually, apart from those few girls where I couldn’t help it.  

But my desexualization of girls went beyond this. I’ve written extensively here and elsewhere about how I see so many smoking hot girls everywhere when I go out. People talk about changes they see in life as they get older, changes in technology and society. I’m deeply disappointed in our technological progress based on where I would have thought we’d be in 2020 if you’d asked me as a child. And society, in terms of equality, justice, social progress, seems to be one step forward, two steps back. 

By far the most dramatic positive change I have observed is in how beautiful women look. I sit at the beach, or in the park, or go the mall (at least I did before they were all CLOSED), and I watch one perfectly beautiful girl after another pass by me. It’s heaven. Almost. For it to be heaven, I’d have to be able to spend as much time with them as I’ve wasted surrounded by dudes. But, other than an occasional one who gives me a look where I cannot desexualize her, I’m not thinking sexual thoughts about them. I’m admiring their beauty in the same way I admire a Monet painting in a museum, and thinking about how desperately I want to find love, and maybe she’ll talk to me and she’ll be the one I find it with. 

So if my sexual fantasies weren’t about the girls I loved, or famous smoking hot stars, or pornstars other than a few, or the hot girls I saw everyday, what were they about?  Once I’d had sex, the bulk of my sexual fantasies were replaying my past sexual experiences, modified oftentimes with things I wish I’d tried if I’d felt more comfortable emotionally with the girls I was with. The rest were about the small number of girls who had told me explicitly that they wanted to sleep with me, or given me what I considered to be undeniable cues to that effect. More than 90% fell into one of those two categories. The rest were about the small group of women I hadn’t desexualized—some pornstars and some girls that I worked with or knew socially. But the most important question is, why was I this way?  It couldn’t all be blamed on Drew Barrymore. 

I became this way because this is how women taught me to be. Let me repeat that: I became this way because this is how women taught me to be. 

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved girls. I had four goals in my life: to live with honor and integrity, to try to make a positive difference in the world, to try to enjoy life while doing it, and to try to be the best man I could to women. I grew up listening to my mother’s volatile rants directed at my father about his infidelities, real and imagined, and my older sisters’ stories about their troubles with guys. I read my sisters’ women’s magazines religiously as a kid. My father being a pastor, I grew up around church, and the fact that I thought preachers were so full of shit, and they were all men, made me tend to listen to women more in general. And all I heard, from every corner of society was how awfully men treated women. I resolved to be different. 

The first and biggest criticism of men was always that they were perpetually horny sex fiends constantly trying to get sex from women through lying, scheming or, if all else failed, rape. The meme of men making unwanted sexual advances toward women was so powerful that a good man was afraid to EVER make one. It seemed that the only time girls wanted a man’s advances was if he was a mythical perfect Prince Charming character, or a guy pretending to be that, who they would then demonize after they’d slept with him and found out he wasn’t. I saw again and again, girls acting like even a simple polite approach by an interested guy was at best an annoyance, and at worse an assault. 

All I heard growing up and in my young adult years, and STILL, was what guys WEREN’T supposed to do with women. You never touch a girl without permission, you never make sexual comments to her, you never comment on girl’s appearance, you never try to get girls to have sex with you until they want it, you never cheat on her, you never look at other girls. Growing up in a church family, all I heard was preachers saying you should wait until marriage, and it seemed that girls felt this way too. 

Any girl who was openly sexual was a “bad girl”, and I adopted this view as well to a large degree, not because I thought sex was bad, but because I thought undisciplined decisions of any kind were bad and it seemed to me then that the openly sexual girls were more likely to make undisciplined decisions in every area of their life. 

So as someone who believed that your thoughts set the tone for your actions, since I’d been essentially told that it wasn’t okay to seek out sex with women outside of a committed relationship, I didn’t even let myself THINK about it!  And that is how I got to this point today, where I’m watching my perfect dream girl naked on a television screen, and it is difficult for me to imagine having sex with her because I don’t have her permission to THINK about it. I took the concept of consent to the ultimate level where I wasn’t willing to even think sexual thoughts about a woman thousands of miles away without it. And this is really what the message of a certain wing of the feminist movement distills to: they never tell a man when its okay for him to think about sex, and what he should think about, and their message is essentially that a man shouldn’t have any sexual desires of his own, but rather exist to give girls what they want when they want it. 

These ideas that I absorbed came from what I’ll now dub the Ugly Girl Wing of the feminist movement. I never used that word to refer to people’s appearance, but in this case, an exception must be made, because that really is the key issue here. I consider myself a feminist. I have come out on this blog with my belief that we not only need equality for women, but that we need to transition to being a female-led society. But for the last several decades, feminism as a political and academic movement has been led by a group of women who are not attractive  (or don’t feel attractive) and resent beautiful women so much that they have constructed an ideology to attempt to devalue beauty as something superficial and meaningless, and destroy the male desire for it. 

Because beauty and sexual desire are interrelated, the “Ugly Girl Feminists” want to make men feel that the only appropriate context for sexual desire is a committed relationship, and that a man’s criteria for seeking a relationship should not include a woman’s appearance, until men like me actually get so twisted around that we think its better if we date a woman who is UNattaractive! These women resent beautiful girls so much, they want to create a world where beautiful people don’t exist, just like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead wanted a world where creative genius didn’t exist. 

The Ugly Girl Wing of the feminist movement are what Russian intelligence calls “useful idiots”. They don’t know it, but they are working in the service of male power, because they are promoting an ideology that can never work. They are the reason that the vast majority of men, and a large percentage of women, have an intuitive negative gut reaction to the word “feminism” even if they believe in gender equality. They associate the word “feminism” with the Ugly Girl Wing ideology...because that’s the one that powerful MEN make sure gets the most airtime.

The number one tool in the oppression toolbox, since Machiavelli and probably before, has been “Divide and Conquer”. Ugly Girl Feminism keeps women divided because the Ugly Girl Feminists refuse to embrace beautiful young women as their strongest allies because they resent them. So a great many beautiful young women side with men. Why should they join a feminist movement whose ideals are hostile to them?

But this is all changing. The Ugly Girl Wing of feminism is losing. The #metoo movement is a big factor in making that happen as unrepentantly beautiful women are the loudest voices of that feminist cause. And it doesn’t matter what their frumpy women’s studies professor says, young girls see Kylie Jenner a self-made billionaire at 22 and they know what real feminism is. And she still looks super-cute in that PageSix photo. 

But there is greater damage that the Ugly Girl Wing of feminism has done than simply making men like me voluntarily desexualize. It has undermined efforts to end sexual violence against women by denying a basic reality: the world is more dangerous for hot girls. 

Sometimes you have to have a second feeling before an earlier one makes sense. At the devastating moment when I found out that Kasey Chase was dead, I realized the source of a eerie, vague discomfort I’d felt watching that scene before. At first, I thought, was I having a psychic experience? Did I somehow know she was dead, or foresee the moment when I would find out?  But then I realized, no. What it was was a tiny little voice somewhere in my subconscious saying, “She’s so hot it could get her killed.”

It’s something I’d known for a long time. When a girl is hot like Kasey was sexually, it is dangerous for her. Men view such women like commodities as valuable as gold or oil, and they will do extremely pathologic things to try to gain or keep control over them. The girls that have been murdered by men saying “If I can’t have you, no one will” very often are girls who are hot like that, who are able to create a level of sexual desire in some men where they feel like they HAVE to have her. 

But this can kill women in more ways than being murdered. Sometimes it kills their spirit, one man after another fighting for control over them until they take their own lives to end the fight. These are girls more likely to be sex trafficked or forced into prostitution, and despite what the Ugly Girl Feminist will tell you, MORE likely to be raped, even though rape is a danger for all women. 

I also recognized thinking about these two girls from my past that I loved, a sad heartbreaking reality about being hot in a certain way. If a girl has some particular beautiful feature, pathological men will sexualize that feature until she hates her own beauty. If she has beautiful lips, guys will constantly being trying to figure out how to get her to give them blowjobs. If she has a nice butt, guys will constantly be trying to get her to have anal sex. If she is one of these girls out there that has a magical vagina, guys will be constantly trying to stick things in there, to the disregard of the rest of her being, until qualities about themselves that these girls should cherish, and that men should respect and appreciate, become disgusting to the girl and she begins to hate them and herself. These are the kinds of things that might make a girl unable to deal with life without drugs, until drugs are the only respite left. 

This is the worst sin of the Ugly Girl Feminists. They are so selfish that they cannot acknowledge that when it comes to sexual violence, they are privileged in not being the center of constant male attention, and they have abandoned their beautiful sisters to the wolves by pretending that all women are equally vulnerable, or even in some cases making the preposterous self-serving assertion that unattractive women are MORE vulnerable.  

Ugly Girl Feminism is a big part of the reason tens of millions of women voted for Trump, but it was also their Waterloo.  Their time has come to an end. Slowly but surely, the world has stopped listening to them and I think Trump winning was the watershed moment. Now, people have started to listen to women who have a better vision for where we need to go. And a lot of those women...are smoking hot. 

But my Hollywood girls have their part in the guilt, too. The #metoo movement has been accused of being elitist, and it is a fair criticism. Absolutely, Hollywood girls should fight to protect themselves. But they don’t talk at all about the women who are most vulnerable to sexually predatory behavior: prostitutes, pornstars and other women who work in and around the sex trade. That has to change and that is a big part of what I am trying to do here. 

So why did women ever listen to the Ugly Girl Wing of feminism in the first place?  Even a bad idea has to have some reason that it takes root. It is because Ugly Girl Feminism promised a solution to a problem that girls still haven’t figured out how to solve. Women, I contend, have an evolutionary emotional attachment to male aggression. They want a man to have to show effort and run through risk walls to win them, the biological remnants of our primitive days when men had to be aggressive risk-takers. I don’t want any fool to interpret that as me saying women want to be abused or raped. Obviously not. But they want men to be assertive, and the line between assertiveness and aggression is vague and largely semantic, and trying to get one without the other is like trying to balance a drop of water on the tip of a needle. 

So women who understood men knew that the aggressive guys that they liked weren’t going to change. But they were hoping that the Ugly Girl Feminist message would reduce the amount of UNWANTED attention that they got. And it worked. You rarely hear men catcalling girls on the street anymore. Instances of women’s bosses calling them “baby” and touching them inappropriately are less overall than they used to be. I don’t think anyone could deny that it is better and safer to be a woman today than it was in the 1950s where rape still wasn’t even taken seriously as a crime in a lot of places, unless it was a Black or Latino man accused of raping a White girl. So why then does the environment feel so toxic to so many women?

The absorption of the Ugly Girl Feminist ideology into our culture had two unexpected negative side effects for women, one that men of power wanted and intended, and one that wasn’t foreseen. 

When men like me became so fearful that we to a large degree withdrew from the dating scene, this changed the numbers to where there were MORE women and FEWER men on the circuit. What this meant was that the powerful men that were most desirable to women had an even greater advantage because there were even more girls competing for their attention, giving the sexually upper-class men the power to treat women WORSE and view them as even more disposable than they did before.

That’s the source of Trump’s smirking arrogance in the face of all the allegations of misconduct with women that rained down on him. He knew millions of women would still support him, because they’ve got nowhere else to go. Now, I don’t believe Hillary Clinton personally represents Ugly Girl Feminism. She was super-cute at Yale and kind of hot when she was trying to do healthcare. I don’t buy into the rumors she’s gay. That just shows the fear men have of a smart, powerful woman. Hillary’s a GIRL. She wouldn’t have fallen for Bill’s bullshit otherwise. But, the Ugly Girl Feminists do own most of the Democratic Party politically and Hillary is a party loyalist if nothing else. So politically, though maybe not personally, she represents Ugly Girl Feminism. 

Why do you think all those smoking hot girls were working at Fox spouting misogynist propaganda all the while Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were trying to rape them? It wasn’t for money. Megyn Kelly (SMOKING hot!) could have gotten rich anywhere. It’s because liberals, mostly beholden to the Ugly Girl Feminist ideology, don’t fight for beautiful women, so a lot of beautiful women gravitate to the male world where at least they are wanted even if they are mistreated. This is how Ugly Girl Feminism supports male power, and that’s why male power secretly, and sometimes openly, supports it financially. 

The other negative side effect of Ugly Girl Feminism is that, with so many men scared away from saying practically anything to a girl, women are experiencing a dramatic reduction in positive, self-esteem building affirmations from men. This is why you see the rise of this culture of girls constantly telling each other how beautiful they are, because they aren’t hearing it as much from men, and they miss it, even if they don’t miss all the toxic stuff they were hearing along with it that they still see...on the internet. But there are hardly any men saying positive things about girls on the internet, except I guess right here. 

But also, the minority of girls who don’t require assertiveness to be attracted to a man found their lives turned upside down because the number of decent, respectful guys that approached them plummeted. And nearly all girls, STILL, two decades into the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, cannot bring themselves to ask a guy out, or even start a conversation (saying “Hi” is not starting a conversation, girls). And this is the fundamental problem. 

If women want equality, and certainly if women want to take the lead in society, and if they DON’T want unwelcome male attention, the magic bullet to solve both problems girls is, YOU approach US. You ask for our phone numbers. You call us and ask if we want to go out. You come up to us at the bar and tell us we’re cute and ask if you can buy us a drink. And most of the girls I was interested in made more money than me, so when we went out, THEY should have paid.

When you girls are ready to take this responsibility, you’ll get the guys you want, instead of having to choose from amongst the toxic men with the courage to approach you. And it isn’t really courage most of the time. It’s just that they don’t really give a fuck about you, so they don’t care how you respond. My reluctance to approach girls has never been because I can’t handle rejection. It’s always been because I was so sensitive to the concerns women expressed that I never wanted to be the source of unwanted attention to a girl, and I was never able to identify any reliable cue to tell me a girl wanted to talk to me. Either that, or I was never able to figure out how to say the right thing. We as men heard a million things we WEREN’T supposed to do, but women never gave us an (honest) playbook for what we WERE supposed to do. 

But all of this is why I have resolved—and I’m dead serious—that in support of the cause of being a modern man, Scarlett Johansson will be the last girl that I take the first step with. From now on, any girl that is interested in me (if Scarlett’s not) is going to have to be a modern 21st century girl, and explicitly tell me so, and make her proposal for what she wants to do, in the same kind of fashion we as men were expected to do forever. And if no girl does, I’ll die the born-again virgin that I am right now. 

It wasn’t until I was working on this piece that it occurred to me that if I was never thinking sexual thoughts about the girls I loved, was that perhaps why none of them felt sexual feelings toward me? I discovered this cute Australian high school sketch comedy show “You’re Skitting Me!”. There was a sketch in it where a boy asked a girl how to let a girl know you like her. In her list of responses is, “You can send her telepathic messages.”. Girls are certainly more intuitive than men, and I realize now, when I was with the girls I liked, it was a grave mistake to scrub my mind of sexual thoughts. I was literally sending the wrong message, that I must be gay or asexual or something, and that is how they treated me. I always blamed them, but now I see perhaps I was to blame. 

All of this leaves me feeling like I need a sort of sexual rehabilitation. I’ve desexualized women, so I need some hot girl or girls to say to me, “You’re gonna take this sex and you’re gonna like it”, until I get over it and learn to see the all the aspects of these amazing girls: professional, intellectual, emotional, social, aesthetic and sexual. I fell into, or was pushed into the same trap as a lot of men: I couldn’t think about the sexual side of the girls I respected and admired most, so I couldn’t see their complete being. But they shared in this because they hid their sexuality from me thinking I wouldn’t accept it if SHE revealed it to me, which I would have. It was essentially a big misunderstanding. 

But it was my desexualization of women that gave Kasey Chase and other pornstars the ability to make me feel like they were doing something profound when they were doing a totally ordinary, everyday thing. But because as a society we’ve pushed sex into the shadows, the everyday seems profound and we tend to obsess over it and glorify it more than those things which are seen in the light. There are millions of girls who are great in bed, but Scarlett Johansson may have been the only fourteen year old girl in the world who could make The Horse Whisperer as good as it is. 

I spent much time trying to figure out how Rose McGowan could be sexy to me when Scarlett Johansson wasn’t, how Kasey Chase could be sexy to me and the girls I loved weren’t, and how I couldn’t stop thinking about sex with the last girl I loved, but I couldn’t start thinking about it with the first one. In the course of pondering it, I realized that the girls I couldn’t desexualize shared those particular physical traits that were shared by the girls I loved. But if I respected and admired a girl too much, on top of being attracted to her, the idea of sleeping with her was too emotionally powerful, so I self-censored it. 

The sad fact was, I’d never experienced sex with love, not like so many men because I’ve avoided it, but because women seemed to avoid it with me. My ex said she loved me a thousand times, but I knew she was lying. I could tell by the times she said it. She said it when one or the other of us was leaving for work, like we were on some 1950s tv sitcom. She never said it when I did something special for her. She never said it spontaneously in intimate moments. And worse of all, she never said it during sex. 

To understand the degree of my longing for sex with love, so strong that I can’t even let myself freely imagine it, you must understand that it goes back to my earliest memories, and the MAT Girl who imprinted my idea of what sex should be be like when I was six years old: Brooke Shields. 

It wasn’t until I was reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography in jail a few months ago that I learned Brooke Shields went to Princeton. Brooke Shields went to Princeton: How smoking hot is that!  But it was before Princeton, in The Blue Lagoon, that she became one of those early MAT Girls that shaped the course of my life. 

I had no parental oversight to speak of, so as a kid, I watched whatever I wanted. I think this is a good thing and I credit it with my accelerated intellectual and ethical development. I saw The Blue Lagoon when I was six, and I loved it because the scenery was beautiful (I’d not yet seen the ocean) and because the world around me was so loud and crowded with seven of us in a small house, the idea of having all the space on an island alone with only one other person, especially this pretty girl, it was a dream. 

I knew a little about sex already, but I didn’t really know anything about love. But in the scene in that movie where they first kiss, I thought to myself: Ok, that’s how it happens. You get to know someone first. You grow closer with them. You overcome some conflicts. Your togetherness grows until some moment when you both want to get closer to each other than you’ve ever been before, and you’ll know when it comes because SHE will initiate it. That’s what sex is. That’s what love is. I was waiting my whole life for that moment, and it never happened, and eventually I came to believe that the main reason it didn’t, was that I didn’t look like Christopher Atkins. 

But I was also in search of that moment, when a girl I knew would show that she wanted to become intimate with me. I felt this was the way women should be if they were taken seriously in all their assertions that relationships should be based on substantive things, not just physical attraction. But yet, the reality of the world seemed different. 

Aside from my wanting and waiting for intimacies in my life to happen the way Brooke had portrayed it, I’m sure that movie probably also has something to do with the fact that the general physical arrangement that I find most attractive, absent any knowledge of a girl’s character or personality, is dark hair, fair skin and light eyes. 

In keeping with the strange little coincidences that have permeated my life lately, I was thinking about all of this while working on my book last year. I’m haven’t seen Brooke in anything in years. I cue up a movie that looks funny, Furry Vengeance, and there she is.  Curiouser and curiouser.

While it was Brooke in The Blue Lagoon that was one of the earliest influences that made me believe in monogamy, after going to prison, I’d arrived at a crossroads that I’d never faced before: did I really want monogamy?  What did I want?  I felt like my general emotional inclination was toward monogamy, and I’d always believed that in her heart, this was what EVERY woman wanted from her man, but in a comic irony, the girl I liked most now said she didn’t believe in it. 

The girls I’d loved in the past, I had no doubt that I would have been blissfully happy being monogamous with them.  I’d spent five years in a relationship with a girl I didn’t particularly like and didn’t particularly find attractive, and was never even tempted to cheat on her with any of her several smoking hot friends, even though a few of them seemed obviously willing. I fell in love with one of her girlfriends, that smoking hottest girl I’ve ever been around in my life, and still remained faithful to our relationship even though, by that point, my girlfriend was treating me like shit. 

But now, after living five years surrounded by the most toxic of men, and getting into my mid-40s with such a limited sexual history as I had, I wondered if I could accept monogamy. I mean, suppose my Scarlett Johansson dreams came true. If I thought my ex’s friends were smoking hot...But Scarlett doesn’t believe in monogamy. 

But aside from celebrity girls, I saw the infinite variety of smoking hot girls walking by me every day. And not just the smoking hot ones. Sometimes girls that weren’t hot, but for some reason, I felt drawn to them. I saw all the girls in porn who I watched and thought, “That looks like the experience of a lifetime.”. And in the arena of sex, no one girl can do everything. There are certain things certain girls can do because of unique physical qualities they have as individuals. Did I really want to resign myself to never experiencing any qualities that the girl I ended up with was missing?  Would that be an eternal source of irritation in my relationship?  What did I actually want?

I’ve spent a long time thinking about that these past few years, until, while working on this piece, I realized that there is a clear, simple answer. I wanted to find the girl that I want to go all-in with, who wants to go all-in with me, my life partner, soulmate, whatever you want to call it.  And then the two of us can decide TOGETHER what makes us happiest. But I know some things I DON’T want: I never want to sleep with a girl without getting to know her first.   I never want to sleep with a girl who does not remain a part of my life afterward. I never want to sleep with more girls than I can readily remember and name. I never want to have sex behind my partner’s back, and in fact, my preference would be that if any girl wants to have sex with me, she would have to ask her permission.  I wonder how that fits with Scarlett Johansson’s version of not believing in monogamy?

As I thought back over my past with women, I realized that there was a morbid symbolism to Kasey’s death given the timing of my learning about it. It represented my feeling that all the girls I loved from my past were gone from my life forever, as if they had died, or I had, and as the Bible says, that there is a great gulf fixed between us that they cannot pass to get back to me, nor I to get back to them. I was afraid of a future where all my connections to the past were severed, save the negative ones—my legal record, my financial record and my toxic family members who will not completely go away. But there was no point in being afraid of it; it had already happened. It wasn’t the future. It was the present. 

As I digested this, I asked myself again, was I guilty?  Did I bear some degree of responsibility for the deaths of Haley Paige and Kasey Chase? And the answer is, yes, I do. 

It isn’t because porn is bad, or because I was wrong for watching it. It is because I watched it, and was a financial supporter of it, knowing that the industry had serious problems with the way girls were treated, and I didn’t try do anything about it. I told myself it wasn’t my problem because I didn’t do anything to hurt girls. I didn’t watch the “bad porn” that depicted women being abused and demeaned. But even when I saw the girls that I liked doing that stuff, I’d stick my head in the sand and ignore it. I told myself I didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Maybe I even convinced myself that somehow I was helping by buying the “better” porn, but I didn’t even consider that some of the porn studios that I patronized, especially in my early years of watching, were putting out the very toxic stuff I was worried about in other movies that I didn’t watch. I know who runs Apple, and Nike, and Google. They are people that are a part of the same academic and professional world as me. I went to college with the founders of Google. The founder of Nike is a Stanford alum like me. But I had no idea who was running anything in porn.  

It doesn’t make me the worse person in the world. Most of us make these kinds of morally lazy decisions for the sake of convenience. Or because we’re afraid of a fight we fear we can’t win. Like Kevin Costner told Will Patton in The Postman, “I should have killed you then, but you seemed so strong...”

It’s absurd for someone like me to act like they don’t have power. I can try to let myself off the hook by saying I didn’t know what to do. But I never sat down and asked myself seriously, “What can I do?”. If I had, over thirty years ago when I first started putting money into this industry that I KNEW had dark corners that girls disappeared into, what difference could I have made? I don’t know. I don’t know what problems those girls had that contributed to their deaths, but it would be positively naive to deny that all the problems that exist both with the porn industry and our society’s perceptions of the people who work in it didn’t contribute to their demise in some way. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t recognize that if I had put my mind to working on this problem way back then, there is some chance that they would still be here today. 

But what of the girls in Hollywood?  Could I not say the same?  I’ve poured much more money into their industry, knowing that its problems, though perhaps not as bad, destroyed the lives of many girls. But unlike porn, which I didn’t talk about, I spoke out about the problems in Hollywood, but I didn’t do much more than talk. Yes, I quit my company, but that was actually the wrong decision in terms of protecting the welfare of girls. 

I never should have allowed guys who refused to sign a statement on protecting actresses, none of whom have the ability to write a Hollywood-quality screenplay, to go forward with my script alone. It would have been better if I was at least there to watch them. Because they didn’t have any money or power, they probably couldn’t get away with anything too bad, but I don’t know what they did. I know one of them called a girl we know from college who wanted to be an actress but hadn’t really been able to get her career going, and told her he was making a movie and then asked her if she wanted to fly to an island with him and fuck on the beach. He did not make an explicit quid-pro-quo offer but it is obviously implied and is exactly the kind of thing my conduct policy would have prohibited. When I was sent video of this same clown sitting in a room with Tatyana Ali with a silly grin on his face, it made me realize what a huge mistake I’d made by not taking my script away from them. 

The fact is, until now, these last few years, I never stood up for girls as strongly as I should have. I was in favor of promoting equality for women way back in grade school. I never thought I was smarter or better than girls (well, for a while I thought I was smarter than EVERYBODY!). What would the impact have been if in high school, instead of running for class president, I’d endorsed a girl?  What if when I was working for law firms, and witnessed young female associates being overworked (in one case nearly to death), I walked into the office of one of the male partners, shut the door, and told him “This shit better stop”, and then gently reminded him that I went to college with the people who, in ten years, are going to be in charge in corporate America deciding which law firms get the work. Plus a fellow alum from my school is a girl who talks to millions of people on TV every night and she might be VERY interested in what goes on here. What if, rather than just declining to participate in toxic maleness, I had come out publicly for girls thirty years ago? I tell myself that I did, but I know I could have done more. 

Probably my main reason for not doing more was simple and petty: girls wouldn’t satisfy my romantic desires, or failing that at least my sexual desires, so why should I help them when they were constantly attaching themselves to men who didn’t support or care about them?

I can beat myself up for that now, but I shouldn’t. Perhaps in fact, I was deliberately prevented from doing it by some force, because the probable outcome is, if I’d mounted a stronger challenge to male hegemony, I would have been destroyed by powerful men. They would have chopped me up and fed me to the poor...just like they are doing now. Perhaps what I’ve done was the better way. I remained a wildcard.  Men may not have trusted me, but I made sure they needed me. I’ve been behind a lot of curtains. I heard and saw a lot of things. And I’ve got a photographic memory...

You could say that for these last thirty years, I’ve been working under deep cover as a spy for girls. They are TOUGH BOSSES!  But it never occurred to me until recently—all those girls spending so much time with toxic men?  Maybe they were working under deep cover, too. But now its time for the spies to come in from the cold, and begin the hard work of using everything we’ve learned to fight back. I have far too much use to girls for them to let my story end like this. But my nightmare was that there was nothing they could do. 

But I decided I had to do something, for the girls of Hollywood, for the girls of porn, for girls everywhere. For the moment, all I could do was speak truth on this blog. I had a lot more that I wanted to do, but I needed their help. I was beginning to feel like Hollywood girls didn’t want me, the girls around me didn’t want me. The girls from my old life didn’t want me. Perhaps if I saw Katie St. Ives or Maybe-Tori-Black again, I’d ask them for a job in porn (off camera!). But I felt like they would turn me down too. If all else fails, there is a girl who works at the grocery store who might be the cutest girl I’ve ever seen. She started a conversation with me about vegan sausage...like a year ago, but that qualifies as her taking the first step. At least I know she’s got a good job, and when I was there last week, she looked as I passed. She’s so cute, even with a surgical mask on...

I was amazed that with all that is going on in the world, and in my life, that I’d spent two solid weeks working, through intermittent tears, on all of this. It’s past 3am now as I put the finishing touches on it. I haven’t slept and in less than nine hours I have to check out of my hotel. I have less than $100 left and cannot afford to book another one.  So I guess it will be back to  the misery and despair of being on the street, back to my bench in the shadow of the Hilton. Maybe Paris will come down and get me a room. I keep waiting for girls to come help me. I keep thinking of what Tupac said in his classic song Blasphemy: God’s coming, she’s just taking her time. 

I finally made some kind of peace with Kasey’s death, when I finally tried to imagine the world through her eyes. I often tell myself, “Michael, you’re worrying about twentieth century problems.”. I felt bad about the prospect of ever watching her movies again because I was thinking about it from a twentieth century perspective; that she would be ashamed of what she had done, or wouldn’t want people to see it. At the end, if things had gone bad for her, perhaps that was the frame of mind she was in. But suppose someone had said to that smiling young girl immediately after she finished filming that scene, “You’re going to die young. But years after you are gone, people will still be watching this tape and marveling at how good you were, and a man who has seen the most beautiful girls in the world will spend countless hours just trying to find out who you are.”. What would she have said? I think she would have said, “Fuck yeah. That rocks!” But she might have stopped to add, “But you know, this isn’t the most important thing about me.”. I know. 

A big part of why I am the way I am is that I’ve never been able to handle death. It might surprise some people to hear me say that because I never really came apart when anyone close to me died (not that many have). But it is more the general concept of it that bothered me. I was never able to have enough faith in God or karma or anything to accept the tragic deaths I saw happening around me, everywhere, all the time. I felt that someone had to do something, since it seemed clear that God wasn’t going to.  I’ve spent far more time than you would believe engaged in thought about the physics of immortality and how it might be possible to bring back those that are gone so that everyone could have a fair chance at life. 

Perhaps like Scarlett said in Lucy, we never really die. I’ve had experiences in my life where I’m willing to bet on that now. But how can a sensitive, empathetic person go on, when death seems so real, when it seems to destroy so much?

I think our modern technology has a significance we don’t yet appreciate. We get annoyed with it—the often toxic culture of the internet, the fact that the awesome power of the camera is often wasted on foolish things. But what we’re doing is something very important. We’re leaving a record of our civilization, a chronicle of who we are. But so much of it is hurt and pain. We cannot go back, but how do we go on? 

We remember the beautiful things. We preserve all that we can, and we leave the breadcrumbs behind—our videos, our messages, our notes of heartbreak and sadness, our celebrations of joy, our music, our movies, and even our porn, until someday, somehow, everything that was broken can be put back together again. 

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