SO YOU WANT TO BE A MALE PORN STAR

I've got a new piece up on Salon about all the emails I get from men who want to be porn stars.

In 2012, I wrote a post for my Forbes blog about how hard it is to be a male porn star. Since, that post has gotten over 1M views, and every week I receive emails from men who've read it who think I can tell them how to be porn stars.

I post the emails, which I continue to get, here.

"The men who email me do not remind me of male porn stars I have known. I have seen woodsmen work. I have had conversations with men who work in porn during which they were naked, sweaty and dribbling spunk from scenes in which they had just performed. I flirted with them, and I wrote down the things they said in a notebook. I liked them. They were tanned, chiseled, waxed. They were smooth talkers, women worshipers, looking for love. You could describe the feelings I had toward them as a kind of romantic longing, one that is never meant to be realized. They appeared suspended between male adolescence and adulthood, caught in the net of those pubescent days when sex is everything, girls are an obsession, and showing what a stud you are makes you the king of your brethren. As grown-ups, they had enslaved themselves to our collective masculine ideal, forever trying to fulfill it, forever failing to do so. They were at war with themselves, their cocks their weapons, a semen-stained sofa in a rented mansion atop a hill in the San Fernando Valley their chosen battlefield – for reasons that, in the end, escaped me, a woman."

[Salon]