[Disclaimer: As much as I detest genre, this is a piece of creative non-fiction, where the names are not real, but the entities are. Most of them.]
My first exposure to porn was aged 15. I viewed the exploits of a rubber-donged superman called OG Mudbone whose witticisms were matched only by the 14-inch prosthetic he adorned for each naked and mostly hilarious adventure. Soon after, I discovered genuinely large penises and genuinely large breasts.
I have always disliked watching porn where there is no laughter. Given that the majority of porn has little to no laughter, this poses something of a problem, and directs me to several regulars. Jack Napier—out of work since a near-fatal motorbike crash—is always laughing. His affability is infectious, and he comes across as highly professional. Another admirable regular is Gianna Michaels: a Hooter’s waitress-turned-porn-star, whose brassy giggle I find more alluring than her sizeable cleavage and prodigious sex drive. These people are the exceptions.
When a heterosexual man watches pornography, he wants to be the man in the video. Following that logic, I have wished I were black for most of my life. It’s not that there are a disproportionate amount of black men working in the adult entertainment industry; on the contrary there are just as many (if not more) white men working in porn. It’s just that the white guys don’t seem to be having much fun. They never seem to “get into it” in the same way that black men seem to be able to (or are allowed to).
(This is probably a matter of direction. White men are told to tone it down, black men are told to turn it up. The porn industry is a racist one and many have attested to this fact.)
It works in the opposite direction as well, because black women in porn don’t seem to “get into it” in the same way that white women do when they go to work.
(Thus, black women are told to tone it down, white women are told to turn it up.)
I believe the reasons for these performance-related discrepancies come down to the economic phenomenon of supply and demand. After all, Karl Marx taught us that there is not a single thing that comes into being for which there is no want.
If those people who eat junk food adopt the qualities of sustenance without sustenance, then the same must apply to those men and women who watch pornography at their leisure. Indeed, there is something poisonous about pornography in the same way that alcohol and cigarettes, other narcotics, are poison. But as with alcohol, there is no understanding without experience.
My experience with pornography seems to coincide with an up-and-coming group of female performers who, having suffered the mighty bandwidth of misogyny throughout their lives, and in such desperate circumstances as to require a career change of this magnitude, have decided to turn their resentments into cold hard cash. For obvious health-related reasons, actresses in the porn industry tend to earn twice as much as their male counterparts. Of course, better salary does not in any way mean less misogyny, but the women I’m going to outline get paid as little as 130 dollars.
This is where I must raise the example of Sundown Casting videos. These are pornographic casting videos where the woman’s first pornographic experience is filmed and distributed. They operate like a regular casting agency, except their casting process bears more resemblance to a meat market than a conscious interpretation of a dramatic text. (There are some people, I am sure, who would disagree with this comparison; and who find little difference between auditions for “normal” movies and auditions for “dirty” movies.) Sundown Casting is voluntary and confidential. Contracts are signed and signatures underlined. The porn industry is every bit as bureaucratic as the backrooms of your local council building. Several people in the adult entertainment industry, however, have shaken their heads in derision at how police raided the Sundown Casting headquarters and brandished charges that the company had been engaged in human trafficking and rape in order to produce saleable pornographic materials. This is where bureaucracy saves asses, and where facts become distant. Like the realities of local government, the realities of Sundown Casting are utterly opaque; not nearly as professional as they wish to appear.
There is an opportunity here to go into a rant along the lines that whoever would continue watching porn in the knowledge that such charges had been levelled must be evil and perverted. I find this too simplistic. The point is that human beings are complicated creatures, much like those bedraggled circumstances they often work themselves into, and whatever questions there may be surrounding my enjoying a work of videography from without—pornographic or otherwise—are manifold, and lead inexorably in directions that I do not have time to flesh out adequately, or want to. Moreover, it has been over two years since the raid on Sundown Casting, and I have no idea what developments there may (or may not) have been.
For our purposes, though, we’ll be focused on interviews given by “successful applicants” at the beginning of each Sundown Casting “scene”. These women get interviewed by another woman who basks anonymously at their expense. She then hands the reins over to the cameraman who, with the new recruit, performs a variety of sexual stunts. What usually bookends the sex tends to be quite sweet. There are, however, some exceptions…
When I first discovered these videos many years ago, I would often skip the interviews with the women at the beginning. I avoided any personal connection with adult performers and opted for a “quick-release” scenario where I had the maximum amount of sexual stimulation in the least amount of time, so that I could get on with my life and pay my bills and finish my education. On the other hand, there are people who watch pornographic videos from beginning to end. Why spend 90 minutes with Idris Elba when they could do the same with Jack Napier? Why watch Charlize Theron when they could watch Gianna Michaels? The discrepancies and similarities between “normal” thespians and “dirty” thespians are fascinating. What is the difference between what they do and how they do it?
Back to Sundown Casting: Do I regret listening to what these successful applicants had to say at the beginning of each “scene”? There was a time when I skipped their stories. Then something happened which made me want to listen. Was it a kind of morbid curiosity? Was it genuine pity—as a Victorian novelist might feel pity for London’s nightly sex-workers? Whatever the cause, I started listening to these women psychologically undress; and then watch them physically undress and have sex with the cameraman for 20 minutes. This became tiresome and strange.
I have reached the conclusion that porn movies are one-sided foreplay matches where one half does not submit to psychological or physical nudity. The fact that phsyical nudity depends upon a primary psychological nudity is what claws at the pornographic process. The one-sidedness is what really makes perverts perverted.
As I said, some of the interactions which bookend the sex are quite sweet. There is laughter and confirmation, and if my current relationship with a woman is anything to go on, then there is probably a lot of very good acting as well. There are also exceptions; some of the most heartbreaking stories I have ever heard take place in these otherwise chirpy and professionally produced videos which detail the originary pornographic experiences of over two thousand women. What I won’t do is share their real names, but what I will do is try to give a sense of what it is like to be in the presence of a girl through glass.
How on earth do you get into this sort of thing? As far as Lucie is concerned, her pornstar friend suggested it. The friend was slightly worried about Lucie’s boyish haircut and tattoos, and Lucie seems embarassed at the admission. She is 28 years old and constantly rubs the thumb and forefinger on her right hand together in a sort of kneading motion. There is also a deep sense of humiliation as her own friend worried about her not being pretty enough for pornography (not discounting the fact that adult performers are chosen primarily for stamina, not beauty). The cruelty of that friend goes nowhere. It stimulates and destroys.
The interviewer suggests that Lucie is an exhibitionist and she nods her head carelessly. She says she attended art school and has been working in retail her whole life. She would like to learn better German; her plan is to live in Berlin—although she never mentions what she’ll be doing there work-wise. Probably flipping burgers.
The interviewer explains that Lucie can’t sell her personality in this type of business; her body is all that matters. But she needs to maintain a good self-esteem about her body at the same time. (This is far worse than anything my psychiatrist ever said to me during those two laborious sessions, sitting on her pink couch and reading my terrible poetry to her.)
Lucie seems to diminish as an entity as the interview goes on. We learn that she had breast implants because she didn’t think her natural breasts matched her body, which by her own admission is not skinny—not that she takes up any more than a quarter of the sizeable and sticky couch on which she is sitting, her face cocked a few degrees and with a slight smile.
“It’s all just acting,” Lucie says. The interviewer agrees and proceeds to explain that Lucie will make a lot more money if she has sex on camera. Lucie neither smiles nor frowns at this. She wears the same facial expression she’s had the whole time, her mind jumping inexorably at the foreign and the far away.
Most of these “successful applicants” are like Lucie. Nervous, shy and willing. But there are some women who defy investigation altogether. They tread the line between apology and defiance, between brazenness and fear; and I am moved by their resilience.
Martha, for example, is 24 years old. Her pale face a pool of nervous grinning and solitary depression; her emptiness more powerful than photography. She comes from the mountains. Her family have been police for generations. But she regrets studying civil engineering and has enrolled herself on a police course.
Family professions, in my experience, breed hypocrisy and double standards. I don’t see why hers would be much different. Being a member of the police is very dangerous, and it’s hard to say if her family approves.
Then she admits she doesn’t want to join the police. What she really wants is to be a veterinarian and to run her own ambulance service for gerbils and the occasional domesticated chameleon. But whoever is torn between joining the police and running an ambulance service for reptiles hasn’t got a clue what they want. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what you want in life. You’ll find out eventually. But out of all the catalysts for nirvana—some of which include doing another degree and taking pornography seriously—trying out for pornography must rank somewhere between going to law school and joining the civil service.
Relationships. Martha has been in an open relationship for 5 months and is “pretty much in love”. Whether the man feels the same way is up for grabs. The way this doesn’t even register demonstrates how open relationships are bullshit. One of you is going to fall in love. Either with the person you’re fucking or with a different person, who, in all probability, you will end up fucking. Women like trust and being trusted, but men are taught from an early age to fear any expectations or requirements of commitment. What I mean to say is men can’t fucking stand accountability—and that for women accountability is the ultimate turn on.
Sex. Martha claims that sex, for her, is just 40% of the relationship. The token few-times-a-week is enough for her. The longest she went without sex was 9 months, which for many men I know would be the equivalent of working full-time in an Amazon warehouse.
I should like to describe what Martha is doing when she says these things, but she is implacable and motionless. She is like a statue, but never statuesque. In her motionless manner she explains how she likes to experiment; although her lived experience betrays her Oscar-winning words. She has tried—note the word, tried—to have sex in the bathroom and on the bed; and her favourite positions are missionary (normal) and spooning (mostly normal). But her level of experimentation is limited even by “normal” standards. I knew a guy whose girlfriend demanded they have sex in the alleyway next to the Natural History Museum in London. The fact that there is no alleyway next to the Natural History Museum makes this tale all the more harrowing—unbelievable, even.
There is nothing wrong with not experimenting. After all, most experiments are failures—just ask any science major. (The scientists I have met are walking, breathing, fucking disaster areas.)
What is noteworthy is how Martha tried to perform and did not succeed. Seeing how she has failed to make a false impression—the modus operandi of sexual athletes—she remains impassive and plots her next linguistic move, no doubt. I find her unafraid.
Trivia. Martha has had 6 partners in her life and she refuses to fake orgasm. She despises anal sex and refuses to have sex with a another woman, despite the interviewer begging her to do so. In the bedroom, she can be either dominant or submissive, depending on her mood. There is always a moment when the interview breaks down. Whereas Lucie’s personality gets reduced like vegetable stock, Martha’s interview trails off into obscurity—especially when she mentions, rather boldly, how she stopped watching porn in the same way that children grow out of cartoons.
I have difficulty getting behind these claims. I know many adults who like cartoons because they enjoy them—I hasten to add there are forms of animated entertainment you would never show to a child under any circumstances. Nor do I think it possible for anyone to grow out of porn. Rather, porn grows into you—and you into IT.
IT wants to kill you—except its forms of assassination are spiritual, as with alcohol, cigarettes and other narcotics. If, on the other hand, Martha has escaped her pornographic clutches only for her to re-enter earth’s atmosphere as a pornographic performer, then I take my hat off to her. I don’t know many things; but I know I can’t do that.
Martha is adamant about only wanting to do “erotic material”, e.g, photography. Nothing hardcore—that makes her nervous. Then in what appears to be psychological blackmail (something to excite the potential performer), the interviewer asks Martha what her best sexual experience has been to date—excluding what may or may not happen between the cameraman and Martha at a later date.
Martha’s icy exterior melts a little. The sex she had with her current partner, the independent variable in her open-relationship experiment, was the best. It was quite the session apparently, and she recalls it with affection, subdued glee and good taste. Having engineered some progress with this line of interrogation, the interviewer asks Martha what her worst sexual experience has been to date (again, excluding the impending talents of the cameraman). Martha sits quietly; not uncomfortably or painfully, but quietly. Then she admits her worst experience was a non-consensual ,one-night stand.
“Were you raped?” the interviewer asks with a voice that must be cruel.
“Yes, I was,” Martha replies. It is nothing like the outcome she would like, she explains, but she has cut ties with the man in question. He was drunk and could not remember what he had done. “But that’s no excuse,” she adds—then for the very first time, she laughs.
I can only assume that words were exchanged between the interviewer and Martha between the end of the interview and the start of the sex scene. It’s clear that something “convinced” Martha to adbandon her tractable sexual experimentation and embark on her originary pornographic experience. That is not something I like to think about. But in my rejecting these things I am no better than that woman conducting the interview—who must be the Devil. There is no other logical explanation for the disarmed emotional capacities of the capitalistic producers of pornographic materials. It is, in a very Christian sense, a sin.
For a long time, I have debated adding the lived experience of yet another woman, perhaps a more positive one: a woman who is there on her own volition. Lucie is not a million miles away from this, but her experience is still a sad one. Who am I to say, however, where performance ends and volition begins? Who am I to judge the intentions of people who are so far away from me, physically and mentally, that not even the shattering of that glass between us would benefit our mutual understanding? But how necessary it is to describe and document what goes on in human society. It’s sad.
I have not described the way these women look. It is not important—and anything that fucks up the empathy process must be utterly smashed. The easiest way to do that in a piece of writing is to not write about it. In real life, it is somewhat harder.
Men have the most tremendous ability to reduce living things to stimuli absorbed like alcohol in the bloodstream—but never felt.
Women are most adept at condemnation; there is not a man alive who does not fear this—to say nothing of the women who are afraid as they suffer this condemnation most frequently.
Put simply, I do not want male readers trading human suffering for short-term bodily objectification; and nor do I want female readers trading short-term empathy for long-term condemnation and resentment. What I want ultimately does not matter, because people have a habit of doing whatever the hell they want. I do not think people change entirely; they just get to know themselves better and can strive to tamper with the more injurious elements of their character.
More than anything else, I want to be rid of porn. IT stalks my life, minute by minute, hour by hour. IT never leaves me be. IT does not mind it’s own business. IT is evil. IT is real and abstract and fleshly and vague. IT sometimes throngs the air like cigarette smoke whilst other times it rubs off like toothpaste on the cuff of my creased shirt. I despise pornography in all its forms. I have used it extensively to excite myself and define my world.
The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man. As long as I use porn, I will be flying economy—and thinking I’m in first class.
IT is that nameless evil. It’s the worst thing men and women have ever conceived, performed and sold like the very worst commercial fiction in modern supermarkets. It is not a question of will, but a question of love—letting love into my life as I have already done and keeping it there, feeding it and making it loved. This is not a question of will, but a question of action—and if ever there were a dishonest action, it would be masturbating in front of Lucie or Martha on my screen with the curtains shut and the soul shuttered. I hope I have made myself clear.
