by Lynsey G
One of the biggest pitfalls of online porn piracy has been, as Cindy Gallop pointed out in the TED Talk that brought us together, the obfuscation of the fantasy element in porn. In a full-length porn film with opening titles and credits at the end, background music, and a title all attached to the main event, it’s difficult to get around the idea that the movie is a fully packaged product, deliberately constructed for your edification. But, like Sinnamon Love said in interview, the millions of consumers who watch pirated material are “losing out on the commercial packaging of the product and the understanding that, you know, I didn’t just go to a bar and pick up three guys and have sex with them.”
With video clips stripped of their trappings, it’s easy to forget that the actors are in fact actors, that their paperwork was signed, consent given, and money exchanged. In some cases, it can be difficult to imagine that all these forms of consent were given, especially if the scene involves hardcore sex, power exchange, depictions of force, or any of a number of other acts that can come across as edgy. A consumer can walk away from a viewing session wondering, “Did I just watch something unethical?”
The most obvious—yet often overlooked—answer to these dilemmas, of course, is to always pay for your porn so that you can see the bells and whistles that establish your smut as the constructed fantasy it’s meant to be. The more porn you purchase, the more people can continue to make, with more consenting actors. But the questions go much deeper for those who are in the business of making porn that they can feel good about, and that their customers can feel comfortable watching—even consumers who might see that content without having paid for it. The more I thought about the implications of consent upon a finished product, the more I realized that although many of the producers whose work looked “mainstream” did not label themselves as “feminist” pornographers, their ethics and on-set strategies lumped them firmly into that category.
Consider, for instance, how consent in a porn scene is complicated when performers don’t know who they’ll be having sex with until they arrive on set. Sure, the abstract idea of a boy/girl scene with some spanking and dirty talk sounds fun, but what if you arrive and discover that your costar, whom you’ve never met, has poor hygiene? (And this is not a hypothetical situation: I’ve heard this complaint from many an acquaintance who makes porn.) It may seem like a no-brainer to instead cast performers who know each other and/or want to work together, thus ensuring fireworks on set, but relatively few producers go to the extra lengths required to make it happen, which puts that kind of thoughtfulness squarely into the consent-driven feminist sphere.
Jenna Haze, for instance—one of the most decorated mainstream porn stars of the late 2000s—told me that for movies she directed for her company, the connection between actors was top priority. “I cast [performers in] my sex scenes based on who they want to have sex with,” she told me in an interview in 2011. “I love passion. I want to see two people really get off on each other.” Though most would classify her productions as mainstream porn, her feminist tactics were on display in the sizzling chemistry between performers. (Further upping her unlabeled feminist cred, Jenna also informed me that she never used Photoshop for any of the content on her website or DVDs: “I think it’s false advertising!”) The same could be said for numerous other filmmakers who operate mainly out of LA and shoot with mainstream aesthetics and talent.
The ideas that nestled into my brain at Cinekink began sending out roots that would occupy my brain for years. Feminism in porn, I began to realize, equated largely with consent. And consent was my new gold standard, whether expressly advertised or quietly worked into the production process. I wanted to find more of it.
SUFFICE IT TO SAY THAT by the time April 2011 rolled around, I was foaming at the mouth in my eagerness to attend the sixth annual Good for Her Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto. I had finagled press passes on the promise that I’d write about the event for WHACK! and my blog, so I grabbed my passport and rented a car for the nine-hour drive north with Matthew in tow, conveniently labeled my “camera guy” to warrant his press pass.
That weekend, I was flabbergasted by the authenticity (yep, I said it!) and accessibility of the humans who made up this community. Over the course of our weekend in Toronto, Matthew and I were welcomed warmly and openly by the people whose work I had been watching breathlessly from afar. I was able to approach the stars whose performances had inspired me, the movers and shakers behind the disruption of pornography … and they were really nice! A lot of them even knew who I was! I couldn’t believe that my little column and blog and magazine were actually being noticed, and by the people I most wanted to notice them! I was in heaven.
At the Feminist Porn Awards ceremony—which, I’d like to point out, was held in the Berkeley Church on Queen Street—there was a sense of inclusion and camaraderie that surpassed anything I had felt at any other porn-related event. After the ceremony, the floor was cleared to allow for a gigantic dance party at which porn stars and commoners mingled freely. Jiz Lee, the star of that fisting and squirting scene that had so confounded me in The Crash Pad—said hello, having remembered me from Cinekink, and actually took me outside so that we could hear each other talk more freely.
I looked back on my time in Vegas a few months prior, when I’d been part of a group—along with Cindy Gallop, whose coolness towed me along in its wake—on board a Burning Angel party bus to an exclusive party where we got to sit in the roped-off section with the porn stars and drink fancy booze. And, though it had been a mostly fun evening, I remembered feeling very distinctly the “you’re not one of the cool kids” vibe that I remembered all too well from middle school. The Burning Angel crew was all perfectly nice, but nobody was interested in talking to me or sitting near me or really doing anything to extend friendship my way. I’d had similar feelings in most other situations I’d found myself in with porn stars. Behind closed doors, I’d established a pretty solid rapport with several performers who also enjoyed, er, herbal remedies in hotel rooms. But I wasn’t allowed on the inside—not in public. And that was okay, but it made me really despise conventions, awards shows, and all that jazz, where my natural introversion made the awkwardness of our public interactions excruciating.
But the Feminist Porn Awards crowd? Engaging. Friendly. Welcoming. The accessible and not-too-expensive bar may have upped my love for the environment, but I’m willing to bet that I was no drunker when I left that night than I’d been when I left the AVNs. And the feeling I took back to the hostel with me was very, very different from the one I’d grumpily borne out into the Vegas night a few months before. No, the FPAs were different. The entertainment was better—drag performances, boylesque dancing (burlesque, but, you know, with men taking off their clothes), and so much glitter. The outfits were weirder. The people were more interesting to look at. The atmosphere was welcoming. There were no cross-armed bouncers in sight. There was no velvet rope. Everyone was smiling and hugging.
Nikki Darling, who performs in both the mainstream and the queer, feminist, kinky sides of the industry, told me that, to her way of thinking, “The adult industry as a whole is kind of like high school, so we all sit at different tables. So I guess a lot of the queer, Bay Area, kinky [people] are kind of like the weird theater geek table … We’re the weird table over in the corner. I like that table! That’s the table I sat at when I was actually in high school!”
You may be unsurprised to discover that I also sat with the weird theater kids in high school, and maybe that’s one reason why I felt so at home at the Feminist Porn Awards. These were my people.
With April Flores on the red carpet at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2013, with our respective awards
(PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
In the arms of my biggest porn crush, Keni Styles, in Miami in 2011—I have no memory of this moment
(PHOTO COURTESY J. VEGAS)
CHAPTER 18
Making It in Miami
THE SPRING OF 2011 PASSED i
n a whirl of porn conventions and conversations with agents and lawyers about media deals. Contract negotiations for my pilot had wrapped up with an even-handed, if not exactly magnanimous, pilot deal, but no co-writer had turned up. The lack of female TV writers in LA was just as profound as it had been the year before. An interesting juxtaposition, I thought, with the porn industry. Although its “boys club” reputation is warranted in many ways, porn is comparatively welcoming for women who want to succeed in business, from writing to directing to producing. (Wicked contract star and award-winning director Stormy Daniels told me that she loves directing—“Come on, you get to yell at boys with their pants down and get paid for it! It doesn’t get any better than that!”)
But not so in Hollywood, where boys still rule the roost. I considered finding a female porn script-writer; the Hollywood folks would have no idea what to do with us. I had a feeling that writing talent from the Valley might have more to teach the big production studio than anyone would expect, but, sadly, I knew the idea would never fly. Any porn talent the TV company would want, I felt certain, would be “starring-as-themselves” novelty items in skimpy outfits, on camera and not behind it. Nobody at the big kids table would go for my idea.
Meanwhile, WHACK! had teamed up with a man we’ll call Moe (if you picture a much younger version of The Simpsons bartender and replace his apron with a goofy T-shirt, you’re not far off), who claimed he could get us advertising revenue if we made him part of our team. We obliged, as we’d so far had no luck earning any money on our venture. The position we’d placed the magazine in—the unoccupied middle ground between the porn industry and consumers—made us a conundrum for online advertisers. We weren’t a porn site, and we were at this point non-explicit (aside from the occasional boob) because we wanted consumers to be able to read interviews and reviews anywhere. But we weren’t not a porn site, either. Many of our analytics implied that WHACK! was frequently an accidental click during a frenzied masturbation session—our top search terms were the names of porn stars we’d interviewed, and although people often did stay to read the articles, we weren’t exactly what many were looking for. So advertisers didn’t know what to do with us. Adult companies couldn’t use explicit ads on our site, but non-adult companies didn’t want to touch us with a ten-foot pole, lest their reputations get besmirched.
In short, we’d been laboring on the magazine for years and had made zero dollars on WHACK! We loved working on it, but we had funded every bit of it thus far by scraping the bottoms of our very shallow pockets. Almost every cent I earned went to WHACK!, minus rent, groceries, and health insurance. I dragged my lovers to strip clubs (not too difficult to manage) and sex industry events instead of taking them on real dates because I didn’t have the time or money to do both. Matthew and Jenn were usually happy to oblige, but my life had been devoted to making my career in porn journalism work rather than, you know, having a life.
In effect, Moe’s promises to find advertisers and other forms of monetization for the website were pretty appealing. But I didn’t trust him. I made my discomfort known to the rest of the WHACK! crew, pointing out that he didn’t seem to have a plan so much as a desire to hang out with porn stars. But the others voted me down, so we started meeting weekly at Moe’s apartment in the East Village. It wasn’t long into this association that I realized that his neighbor was a porn star friend of ours—a sweet lady who I’ll call Alexa—and that they had been sleeping together. Which was all well and good, as far as I was concerned, but I recognized that he had gotten it into his head that, if he and Alexa teamed up with us, we could all turn a profit. And I wasn’t convinced that he actually knew how to facilitate that.
Specificity in planning notwithstanding, Moe was gracious enough to throw in some cash and some smooth-talking that landed us our very own booth at the Exxxotica expo in Miami Beach, Florida, in May of 2011. Moe paid for our booth and promised us spending money if we could get ourselves to Miami and find a place to stay. So I, along with j. vegas and our IT guy, Jordan, bought plane tickets and reserved beds at a hostel near the beach.
I flew to Orlando, then boarded a puddle-jumper to Miami. As I located my economy seat, I glimpsed a very large pair of sunglasses and the sweep of an abundance of dirty-blond hair as it flounced over a small shoulder. A light voice speaking to the large tattooed man with a shaved head in the other seat; I saw neck tattoos. The woman beside him turned her head just enough to show her profile—my favorite performer and a close friend of WHACK!, a prominent porn star who I dubbed “Jennie Hart” in Chapter 8.
I leaned forward and whispered, “Jennie!” between the seats just as the plane taxied onto the runway, unable to get closer because of my seatbelt.
She looked up. “Lynsey? Oh my god!” She leaped up—during takeoff, clearly without her seatbelt on, for all the plane to see—and turned around to get a better look at me. “I’m so glad you’re on this flight! I’m so bored!”
She introduced me to her bodyguard, who I’ll call Graham here because I don’t remember his real name and because Graham seems like an excellent name for a bodyguard. Jennie knelt on her seat, facing backwards, with her arms hanging over the back of it, while we chatted. She’d been signing autographs in Orlando for a few days, and she was now looking forward to Miami, where she was signing at the expo and hosting a few parties over the weekend. After a while, she sat down and checked her phone (which she had clearly not set to Airplane Mode). She was saying something to Graham and scrolling an app when suddenly she went still.
After a beat of silence, she shout-whispered, “SHIT. Shit.”
She sprang back up in the seat, her eyes wide with panic. “Shit. Oh my god. Lynsey. I left my fucking clothes in Orlando. All of my designer clothes. In the dresser at the hotel!”
She turned around and sat down, silent.
Graham turned to me with a not-very-concerned expression, winked, and held up his hand with fingers splayed. Then he did a silent, measured countdown on his fingers: Five … four … three … two … one … And right on cue, Jennie began to chant, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.” She sped up incrementally until she was whispering “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod” like a prayer, her breath coming faster, her pitch climbing several octaves.
What followed was an epic forty-five-minute meltdown that I recall now with fondness. For the remainder of the flight, Jennie told me in detail about the contents of her three-thousand-dollar travel wardrobe. She demanded Graham call someone right away and have the items shipped or driven to Miami. When Graham refused, reminding her that he couldn’t make calls during the flight, she began frantically texting and tweeting. Her emotional state jumped from fear that the housekeeping staff would steal her designer collection to quiet, to stoic calm, back to optimism that somebody in Orlando could bring it to Miami, and then right into rage at Graham for not having checked her drawers because he knew how forgetful she could be. There were tears.
The moment the plane touched down, Jennie was on her phone, taking a moment before the Orlando hotel’s front desk picked up to berate Graham for not already being on his phone, too. The two of them were still in their seats, trying to figure something out, when it was my turn to leave the plane, so I filed out with the other passengers—every last one of whom knew exactly what had happened to poor Jennie, since she had given approximately zero fucks about sharing her misery with the plane. When I made it to the gate, I called Jordan, whose flight landed shortly before mine.
As I hung up, Jennie appeared out of the jetway with a small roller suitcase in tow. She was nibbling on her lower lip, and when she saw me, she ran to me and threw her arms around my shoulders as she broke down into sobs. She had cried on the plane, but this was different. Her grief felt deeper now. She was ugly-crying. Utterly breaking down.
We sat down as she tearfully explained to me, in hushed tones, that she was under a lot of stress in her personal life. Her new boyfriend had approved of her career when they got together, but now that things were ge
tting serious between them, he was feeling jealous. He wanted her to consider quitting porn to settle down with him.
“I love my work,” she told me as I held her hand. “I’ve worked so hard for this career. I don’t want to give it up! And I love what I do! It’s made me who I am!” But she didn’t want to lose her boyfriend, either.
Feeling as if I had suddenly been tossed from the shallow end of Jennie Hart’s acquaintance pool into the deeper waters of confidante territory, I muddled through soothing answers, but the more she talked, the less muddling I needed to do.
I tried to put myself into her (one remaining pair of) designer shoes: Jennie is about a year older than me, which in May of 2011 put her at twenty-nine years old. She had been working in porn for a full decade—most of her adult life. She’d won numerous awards from every industry group that gave them out, become one of the most recognizable porn stars in the world, and started her own production company. She was a walking triumph, having found a job she loved, grown into it, grown up with it, and succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She worked around the clock, maintaining the vessel with which she performed (her small but beautifully proportioned body), perfecting her brand, feature dancing, signing autographs, managing her company, and now writing, directing, producing, and performing in her own films, all while keeping a dynamic social media presence to interact with her millions of fans worldwide. Her star was still, almost impossibly, on the rise a decade into a career that most predicted would last only months.
