The Gigolo

In the process of researching something I started writing for my newsletter but didn’t publish, I came across this 2013 post from Forbes.com that I wrote when was on a “XXX safari” in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the porn Oscars.

*

I learned a few things about journalism doing my series on the porn blitz in Vegas this month, and here they are, in no particular order.

TIP #1: Get the right tools

For the last few years, I've been carrying around those composition books to take notes. That's got to stop. They're too big. If I've got too much stuff going on, I've been known to stick the composition book in the back of my pants. Not my back pocket. Between my back and the inside of my waistband. Not a good look. I need smaller notebooks so I can put them in the pockets of these pants I've been wearing as my "journalist pants" that look like I'm on a safari, only in this case it was like a XXX safari.

I also need to start using the neck strap for my camera. I spent my time in Vegas pulling my camera in and out of my bag. I should probably get over my fear of the neck strap breaking and killing my camera.

Speaking of cameras, I need a new one. Related: If anyone found my lens cap in Vegas, let me know.

I also need a proper bag. I used a bag I think I bought at Payless. It was for shopping at the mall. Not writing stories.

TIP #2: Figure out what you can handle

Before I got to Vegas, I thought I would maybe go back and forth between the convention and the media room and post LIVE FROM THE FRONTLINES. That didn't happen; although, I did walk around that entire first day with my laptop in my bag. Not only did I not post LIVE FROM THE FRONTLINES, I realized that I'm too slow for that. Or in this case I was, at least.

The other big thing was that I was adding taking photographs into the mix. I think I did this because I've been a journalist for 15 years, and I am looking for a new challenge.

At this point, I don't really have any big hangups as a journalist. For example, at one point, I was at the convention, and I was looking for this gigolo. I'd seen him on a panel. He sat at the front of the room with another guy, and the theme of the panel was, "A bunch of people have crossed over from adult to mainstream, but what about people who have crossed over from mainstream to adult?" These guys were supposed to be examples of that. The gigolo is the star of a Showtime show called "Gigolos," and the other guy was a rock star who ended up on "Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew" and then made a celebrity sex tape because "that's what you do."

Anyway, the gigolo's name is Nick Hawk. (That's him in the photo at the top of this post.) He has an entire line of adult products. When Nick was on the panel, he had a bunch of boxes sitting next to him with his products in them, and at one point he said of creating a product that is a reproduction of a part of him, "That was one of the biggest excitements of my life."

After that, I kept looking for Nick, but I couldn't find him. I was standing against a wall because my back was killing me from all the stuff that I didn't need that I was carrying, and then I looked to my left, and there was Nick Hawk, and he was about to walk into the men's room, which was apparently what I was standing right next to.

"HEY," I yelled at Nick, without thinking. For some reason, this was the highlight of my experience as a journalist in Vegas. That I am a person who is willing to shout at a gigolo going into the toilet in order to get an interview. There is no shame in my game. Not at this point.

I hope all young women journalists can learn from my model. That you should always yell at men you want to interview, regardless of their occupation or proximity to the lavatory, because if you don't, you might not get an interview with them, and then you'll be the journalist who went there and got nothing. Which isn't a journalist at all. That's just something else.

"I'm proud to be a gigolo," Nick told me after he came out of the bathroom. "I'm not sure I'd be proud to be a porn star."

TIP #3: Seek help from people who know what they are doing

I really liked going to Vegas because it reminded me who I really am. The hardest part was the taking photographs because my knowledge of photography is limited. Which is an understatement. So the photography stuff I did was time consuming, and sometimes it didn't come out right because I didn't know what I was doing.

When I got home, I made an appointment to hang out with a guy who's a photographer. We sat in a cafe, and he told me how cameras work, and we looked at some of my photos from Vegas that were still on my camera, and we talked about what was right about them and what was wrong about them.

Then we wandered around outside and took some photos. It was cold. The stuff I photographed outside was pretty boring. The stuff in Vegas was way more interesting.

The task he left me with is to do more things like Vegas. And get better. And I think if I can do those things, I'll figure out more who I want to be or whatever I'm becoming.

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The World's Most Exclusive Sex Club, My Mother, and Me

“Nearly three years ago, I attended a private event hosted by what is widely considered to be the most exclusive sex club in the world.” Read the latest edition of The Reverse Cowgirl newsletter and subscribe.

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500 Men. 1 Woman. Get in Line.

On Substack, I reproduced a story I wrote in 1999 about that time I went to The World’s Biggest Gangbang III.

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At Home With the New Superstars of Porn

This story was written by me and originally published in FourTwoNine Magazine in Fall 2017.

Tyler Knight, the porn star, has a dildo modeled on his dick. Billed as “Tyler Knight’s Futurotic Cock,” it is black, has a length of seven inches and a girth of a little over two inches, and features his “famous curve.” The device, which comes with a multi-speed vibrator and promises “an authentic self-pleasure experience,” retails for around $30, but for Knight, it holds the promise of immortality.

“Latex has a half-life of 70,000 years,” he says. In other words, this rubber facsimile of his penis will outlast him and his porn career. “A future civilization might excavate it,” he speculates, “and think this is what life was like in the twenty-first century.”

Welcome to the XXX frontier. Not so long ago, the future of porn looked bleak. After the rise of the Internet took porn mainstream in the late-’90s, Porn Valley, which manufactures its product on sound stages and in rented homes across the San Fernando Valley, became overrun with adult production companies flooding the market with their wares. Seizing the opportunity, digital pirates began uploading stolen content to now ubiquitous “tube sites,” and federal agents started handing out obscenity indictments to pornographers who dared to push the outer limits of sexual congress. The fatal blow arrived in 2008 when the stock market crashed and the porn economy crashed right along with it.

In the years that followed, though, something curious happened: a kind of Darwinian purge made its way through the porn business. With the competition decimated, only the strong—or at least the most ambitiously perverted—survived, and the adult-movie industry began to come back.

After decades of porn leading technology, the hope now is that technology will lead porn back to profitability. Online, the gig economy’s cam boys and girls turned porn stars are delivering custom content to consumers who are willing to pay for bespoke virtual intimacy. In the Valley, a new generation of tech-savvy pornographers is busily turning your freakiest Google searches into high-production projects for which even the most jaded porn watchers are shelling out money. For the first time, women are elbowing their way into the industry’s old boys’ club and creating a new brand of porn that’s sex-positive, feminist, and ethically made. And the once clear division between straight and gay porn is slowly, inexorably disappearing.

“The things we’ve been taught about our sexuality and gender just aren’t accurate in any way whatsoever, which was a massive eye-opener for me,” says Brendan Patrick, a handsomely bearded, 33-year-old porn star who’s the creative director of Icon Male, an adult website that produces what it calls “classy and erotic gay porn.”

Better porn, Patrick believes, is “the saving grace of this industry.” For Icon Male, that means higher production values, narrative-driven content, and a data-driven approach. In the digital age, consumers are the new pornographers. With a single click of your mouse, you’re revealing your secret desires and dictating what porn will get made next. As it turns out, our unspoken sexual proclivities and true porn interests are a bit different than what we might think.

“Since I got into this industry, my eyes have been opened to an awful lot, especially regarding gender and sexuality,” Patrick says. “This myth that men are visual and woman are not is not true. This site in particular has a huge female following, as do a lot of other gay porn sites. We also have a very large male market, and what they pay for is the narrative. Generally, men want context as much as women. So this is one of those myths we’re fed where you can actually look at the reality and it doesn’t ring true at all.”

Kayden Kross, a 31-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed performer, director, and producer is looking to revolutionize the business of making porn by doing it ethically. At the helm of Trenchcoatx, which sells a range of “curated smut,” Kross is producing porn that’s as green as your organic kale.

“Porn is a multilayered thing. It’s not all bad. You can create porn where performers arrive and leave happy,” Kross says, pushing back against the stereotype that porn is inherently misogynist and exploitative, particularly when it comes to women.

“I see how people are treated when it’s not ethical,” she says. “That’s what keeps our industry in the gutter. In our own community, we should at least be together.”

As a producer, Kross aims for sex scenes focusing on female pleasure, diverse body types, and a range of sexual orientations.

Her longtime romantic partner, Manuel Ferrara, a 41-year-old, French-born performer who directs films for another, more traditional company, sees Kross as creating the future of porn. Of his own movies, he says, “They pretty much are what porn is today. But what Kayden does is what porn’s going to be.”

But do people care if their porn is ethically produced? Kross is betting they do, and that if she’s successful, the rest of the porn industry will copy what she’s doing. “As more of these sites succeed, more will follow,” she says.

The latest crop of porn stars are multi-hyphenate millennials who get paid to have sex on camera, but that’s only part of their social-media-driven brands. Take, for example, Jay Austin, a 29-year-old, formally trained chef. You might have seen him competing on the Food Network’s Chopped, or you might have spotted him in the X-rated The Gay Office: Executive Suite. He’s using the money he makes in porn to save for his dream of someday going back to Iowa, where he was born and raised, to homestead on eight acres of land he owns there. It will be a life starring, he says, “me, shirtless, playing with pigs and chopping down trees.” For others his age, he says, doing porn isn’t that big of a deal—it’s just part of the hustle.

“The younger generation doesn’t take it as seriously. We have these apps where you’re supposed to show everything. Our society rewards that beautiful self we’re all trying to sell.”

A long time ago, Carter Cruise, 26, was a typical sorority girl. She left that behind for porn, which is merely a steppingstone for her. “I knew I wanted to use porn to do other things,” she says. She’d seen Sasha Grey, who parlayed a turn in porn into a mainstream acting career with appearances in Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience and HBO’s Entourage, and she thought she could do something similar.

Carter’s nearly 200,000 Twitter followers and almost 300,000 Instagram followers know her as the star of The Empire Strikes Back XXX, and as a DJ who plays music festivals across the country. She has been featured on a few songs, including a track called “Dunnit” in which she tells the story of a girl who acts like a slut but denies it. Still, because she’s straddling porn and the mainstream, she tries to keep her social media PG-13. “It’s definitely hard to get bookings as a DJ,” she says, “if I was posting, like, gaping-asshole pictures.”

Amidst porn’s caricatures of masculinity and femininity, Buck Angel is a unicorn. Angel, who was born a girl in the San Fernando Valley, says, “My dad had Playboy centerfolds plastered all over the inside of our garage door.” From early on, there was an awareness of “a sexualization of women’s bodies.” It wasn’t until, at 28, Angel confessed to a lesbian therapist that he thought he was a man (and the therapist said, “I believe you”) that Angel’s transformation began. Eventually, Angel had top surgery, started taking hormones, and began a relationship with Ilsa Strix, who was then a dominatrix and is now married to The Matrix co-director Lana Wachowski.

Angel, having transitioned, didn’t see anyone like himself in porn: “There was nobody. My intention was to become the man with the pussy.” In 2007, he won Transsexual Performer of the Year at the AVN Awards, the Academy Awards of porn.

“They saw that what I was doing changed adult entertainment,” Angel says. “But ten years later, queer porn is still a very small part of that industry. How do I think we’ll be accepted in porn when we’re not even accepted in regular life? I’m very lucky. I get to use porn as activism.”

Angel is currently working on a memoir that he’s tentatively titled Bucking Gender, and he’s dating American Psycho and The L Word screenwriter Guinevere Turner.

Brent Corrigan started in porn at 17, appearing in scenes shot by Cobra Video. In 2007, Cobra Video owner Bryan Kocis was killed by two porn producers who wanted to use Corrigan, under contract with Kocis, in their movie. The story was dramatized in the 2016 movie King Cobra, starring James Franco.

“It’s a little ridiculous,” Corrigan says when told he’s considered porn royalty. “I didn’t set out to become famous. When I was 17 or 18, I don’t think I thought, ‘What is this going to look like in five years?’ But there are times when it’s a bit of a burden.”

After leaving the industry for several years, Corrigan has since returned and, at 30, is performing, directing, and producing. He’s engaged to another performer, JJ Knight, and studying equine sciences.

“I’ve made a career out of what most people revile, but my heart is somewhere else,” he says. “I want to go back to New Mexico and raise horses.”

Adam Russo got into porn nine years ago, at 41. “The daddy thing became very big,” he explains. Originally from Pennsylvania, he used to do interior design, fashion design, and product design. Working in San Francisco, he found himself opening up sexually.

“I had been asked to do porn many years ago, and I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’” He attributes his longevity in the business to his passionate performances. “I actually enjoy the sex,” he says.

Russo is unusual, in that he’s done both straight and gay porn. “As soon as they see you doing something with a woman,” he says, referring to the gay-porn industry, “they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re gay for pay.’”

But minds are opening up to all kinds of new things. “The whole industry has changed like that,” he says, noting women rimming guys and a proliferation of fetishes. “Because of the Internet, people wanted more, and people are just devouring it.”

Is that a good thing?

“Oh, absolutely. Whatever makes them happy.”

It seems to be working for Lana Rhoades. At 20, the dark-haired, ice-blue-eyed Midwesterner has been in porn for 16 months, and she’s already shot, by her estimation, around 200 scenes. “It’s something I always wanted to do,” she says. She makes a point of connecting with her fans online because she knows her future is in their hands. “It’s really important to think about what they want because they’re the consumers, so I try and incorporate their requests into the movies.”

It’s keeping up with the demand that’s the problem. “To be honest, what I’ve noticed is the consumer always wants, like, more, more, more—they want to be pushing limits. They just want to see what they can get you to do—the craziest stuff. It’s like you kind of have to do anal. Back in the day, no one would do double anal. Now it’s going in a direction where everyone’s trying to do more extreme stuff—like double anal and gaping. That’s really what the fans are requesting these days.”

There are only so many dicks one can put in an ass at a time, I point out to her.

“Yeah, exactly,” she says, then adds, “I really don’t know how I feel about it.”

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The Porn Convention

This story was written by me and originally published on Forbes.com on July 30, 2012.

“You can’t write that,” Seymore Butts says the moment my hand moves to write down the two words he’s said, two words that summarize this story, that say everything there is to say, really, about the state of the adult movie industry, and one of the words is an expletive.

I’m sitting with Butts, born Adam Glasser in the Bronx, New York, 48 years ago, on two black plastic chairs inside of a square. Around the perimeter, porn stars sit on tall chairs at high tables signing glossy photos of themselves for patient men waiting in embarrassing lines.

The last time I saw Butts was for another story, and it was 11 years ago. I interviewed him in the living room of his ranch-style home with a kidney-shaped pool in the yard in the San Fernando Valley. His young son wandered into the room; his porn star girlfriend occupied herself in another part of the house. Back then the gonzo porno pioneer was in trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had decided a movie Butts made, Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1, was obscene.

Now things are different.

In the decade since, the adult movie industry has changed completely, and although Butts has gone off the record as I listen, he is telling me the story of everything that happened in between, and it’s a doozy.

***

Once upon a time, pornographers were kings.

I remember what it was like because I was there. The rise of the Internet was spreading porn across the planet like a virus. There were big budget feature movies, stunt sex videos in which lone women competed with one another to have sex with as many men as possible, and gonzo production studios cropping up like weeds across the Valley. With lightning speed, porn crossed over into the mainstream, and consumers couldn’t get enough. Or so it seemed.

A funny thing happened, though. Over the years that followed, porn became ubiquitous, the market was flooded with product, piracy ate up the porn industry’s profits, the Feds served a series of pornographers with a succession of obscenity indictments, and a recession swept across the globe.

By the time I sit down across from Butts at this porn convention on the second floor of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, over which a steady stream of jetliners descends into Chicago O’Hare International Airport less than a mile away, the adult movie business has transformed totally.

The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.

***

Xaq Fixx is a former Air Force cryptologist and precision-guided munitions specialist. He wears glasses, has a significant scar on his forehead of undetermined origin, and sports a Lenin-esque beard and mustache, the ends of which he twirls into curls.

Fixx is the market research manager for the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, an online adult company that bills itself on its website as “THE #1 ADULT VIDEO ON DEMAND THEATER IN THE WORLD!” Among other properties, AEBN owns PornoTube, an X-rated YouTube, and xPeeps, an adult webcam site that encourages users to “xpose yourself.” It also produces the product Fixx is hawking.

I stick my finger into the rubbery, flesh-colored slit on the side of a plastic grey peanut the size of a very large loaf of bread. This is RealTouch, an “award-winning male masturbator” designed by a former NASA engineer that syncs with adult movies to simulate sex for the male with which it is interacting through your computer's USB port. The device retails for $325, and the package includes 120 RealTouch VOD minutes, anti-bacterial cleaner, and a 90-day limited warranty.

More recently, the company has begun marketing the RealTouch JoyStick, the lingam to the RealTouch’s yoni, which is to say it looks like a dildo. Available only to adult webcam models at this time, the joystick serves as a remote control for the RealTouch device, enabling users in remote locations to have “True Internet Sex™!”

Per Fixx’s instruction, Savannah Steele, a busty blonde porn star in a lab coat, moves the joystick, and the mechanism tightens around my finger and increases speed.

“It feels like having sex with a robot,” I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table.

I ask Fixx if he’s used the device. He hasn’t. “I’m a Linux guy, and it’s a Windows-only device,” he explains.

Fixx calls over Steve Papp, AEBN’s logistics manager. Papp uses the device regularly.

“I was a bit skeptical,” Papp says, but now he thinks, “It’s the coolest thing ever.” Sometimes, when his wife isn’t in the mood, she’ll tell him, “‘Oh, honey, why don’t you…’’’ And off Papp goes to find intimacy with his peanut-shaped lover.

“As a step on the path, this is a major leap forward,” Fixx tells me. The way he foresees it, one day we will live in a world William Gibson may as well have created wherein “you can create virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the real world.”

If this is future sex, I decide, we are not there yet.

***

The name of the panel is “Everything You Want to Know About Porn.”

Nine porn stars are on the stage. Perhaps 50 onlookers are ogling the spectacle, occasionally raising their phones or cameras to take photos.

An audience member asks what their favorite sex positions are.

“It depends on my mood,” Tori Black, who I last saw having sex with James Deen on a porn set in 2009, offers.

“I’ve always wanted to hang upside down from an elevator,” another girl chirps.

“I’m exactly where I want to be,” yet another starlet answers to a question I miss.

Shortly thereafter, the panel ends, and the girls file off the stage, disappearing behind the curtain.

***

Mr. Pete is not a nobody. He is a somebody.

You might think Mr. Pete is a nobody because no one is waiting in line and asking him to autograph a glossy photo of himself like the porn starlets on either side of him, but that’s because Mr. Pete is a male porn star, and when it comes to porn, the female porn star is queen.

Mr. Pete has been an adult performer for over a decade. I ask him how many movies he’s made, and he estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000.

Originally, he’s from Las Vegas, Nevada. “Kind of a womanizing guy” is how he describes himself. After he started working in an adult video store, becoming a professional woodsman was practically his professional destiny.

I ask Mr. Pete how business is.

“Business is great,” Mr. Pete says. “The Internet’s the future and the present.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Pete says, it’s harder for new guys who want to get up, get in, and get off for a living to break into the business in this down economy.

“The doors are closing,” Mr. Pete warns.

I ask Mr. Pete what it takes to do what he does.

He shrugs, surveying the crowd. “As long as you have a functioning organ, things will always work out.”

***

“We don’t believe God created pornography, but we believe He loves the people in it,” opines Rachel Collins, a pastor with XXXchurch.com who's standing in front of a banner that reads Jesus Loves Porn Stars when I ask her if the Devil created porn.

Collins has a halo of golden curls, a cherubic face, and a habit of standing very close to the person with whom she is speaking. I assume Rachel loves God and porn stars because her mission with the church is to stop porn addiction and save porn stars from porn.

“Porn is the oldest business,” Collins says, and I want to correct her, to point out, no, prostitution is the oldest business, but perhaps I am splitting hairs.

More troublingly for Collins, porn is “morphing into something else.”

What is it? Whatever it is, it isn’t good.

“It’s becoming more dangerous,” she tells me, looking worried for humanity. “It sells us something that doesn’t even exist.”

***

I press on through the thickening crowd. There are gangs of men leering at porn stars showing off surgically-enhanced cleavage threatening to escape the confines of low-neck prisons, couples holding hands and inspecting rows of paddles, ball gags, and chocolate lollipops in the shapes of male and female genitalia, and I count four men in wheelchairs whizzing along the floor on missions to meet the sex stars of their dreams. Two scantily clad girls ride a seesaw, and it takes me a minute to realize the handles are dildos. A dancer in over-sized hot pink nerd glasses, a black bob wig, and a pink star on her exposed butt cheek grinds away on a platform. At the concession stand, nachos are $4. The air shakes with the dull thud of heavy bass emanating from the customized car show with which the event is sharing space. A man tries to sell bottles of “male enhancement” pills he swears will make you “longer and harder.” An Asian girl with guns tattooed on her hips sells T-shirts emblazoned with her face. A blonde in a sparkly sailor suit and a Playboy bunny logo for a tramp stamp tries to get passersby to sign up for a lingerie cruise. A shirtless, baby-faced male stripper sits in a chair, waiting for something to happen, a giant Magic Mike poster behind him. In the Dungeon Experience corner, a man secures a woman to a chair, a strap across her forehead, her wrists and ankles bound, her male date watching. Porn star Stormy Daniels is selling a “hands-free lube dispenser,” and the man at the table shows me how it works by pretending to pump lube out with one hand and waving his other hand in the opposite direction as if engaging in sex with the Invisible Woman. I take notes in a booth selling sex toys, and “Making a wish list?” the proprietor inquires. A brunette struggles to stay on a giant pink mechanical penis ride before a crowd of appreciative men. Near the restrooms, a black man working a shoeshine booth gives up and takes a seat on a stool. In the bathroom, it smells like porn stars and strippers: peaches and apricots, sticky body glitter and platform heels with slits for tips, humping unicorns and money shot stardust.

***

Walking around the place, you can almost see the fork in the road. The point at which things split. The exact place where one group of pornographers went one way, one group of pornographers went another way, and things were never the same.

“Everyone will have to evolve or die,” Fixx told me, and he was right.

“We’re in the Now Generation,” asserts Shirley Lara, the “all-around person, so COO,” of Chaturbate, an adult webcam site.

According to Lara, 21st century porn is all about control. The porn consumer no longer wants canned movies shot on video a lifetime ago, directed by someone else, and featuring sex that follows a script. The new porn consumer wants to pick the girl, they want to control what happens, and they want to develop an intimate relationship with her, no matter how fleeting.

Jenna Jameson’s unattainability, her Barbie-on-a-pedestal unknowability, has been replaced by an independent contractor who works from home and is paying off her college debt with your virtual tips by having virtual sex with you. She’s a bombshell or the girl next door, the naughty teacher or the punk rocker, the MILF or whatever it is that your wife isn’t, that you don’t have, that you can’t get, that brought you right here, right now, rather than watching some stale free clip on an X-rated tube site that stole their content from a porn producer who is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy in a Chatsworth, California, office park, thanks to you.

***

“What happened? The Internet came around,” Butts said. “That changed the game. Nobody imagined these tube sites would pop up, giving away this content we fought so hard to create.”

A few feet away, his porn star girlfriend signed another autograph.

“Will recorded sex ever go away?” Butts asked rhetorically. “No. It’s for the collector out there.”

In theory, the porn dilemma is the same as the printed-on-paper book dilemma. Some people like the feel of the pages, the smell when they open a book for the first time. Some people like the new new thing, their porn digital and interactive.

Truth be told, nobody is sure where things are heading. The sexual appetite is a tricky thing to predict, and everyone here believes whomever gets it right will be raking in the dollars.

***

Raylene used to be a porn star. Then she left the porn business. She became a wife, a mom, a real estate agent. Until the housing market tanked. Then she came back to porn. Porn took her in with welcoming arms because that’s how porn is. It takes all comers.

Nowadays, she’s shooting eight scenes a month, and it's a hustle.

“I’m a little bit older, being a porn star at 35,” Raylene tells me near a line of men longing for her to return her attention to them. “In dog years, I’m, like, 100,” she laughs.

Raylene has long brown hair and big brown eyes. She’s smart, articulate, and self-aware. She's a businesswoman, and she's adjusted to the new market. Her rate for a boy-girl scene is $1,500—but that’s negotiable. Her rate for a girl-girl scene is $800—but that’s negotiable, too.

“I wish it was like it used to be for the financial aspects,” Raylene says wistfully. “Porn will never go away, but the money isn’t there anymore. There’s nothing left.”

***

On my way out, I stop and talk to J. Handy, the director of Exxxotica, which, as it turns out, isn’t really a porn convention, per se.

It’s “the largest event in the country dedicated to love and sex,” Handy explains, with stops in Chicago, New Jersey, and Miami. They tried doing it in Los Angeles, but there was too much porn there already, and the show was a bust.

Handy started the event at 26 as “something fun to do” with his friends. This weekend, he’s expecting around 15,000 people to show up and check out the porn, the paddles, and the penis ride. The bulk of the event’s revenue comes from ticket sales, and they make money from sponsors and exhibitors.

“You put a couple porn stars in there and call it whatever you want to, and guys will show up,” Handy confides, more and more people spilling through the doors.

***

I take the escalator to the ground level. Outside, it’s hot. Police officers are directing traffic. Two girls in skintight dresses and sky-high heels trot across the street, heading for the show inside where sex is for sale, and everyone’s trying to figure out what you want so they can make another dollar off it.

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When you’re a porn star and your content gets pirated, who you gonna call? Takedown Piracy. Read it here.

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Black and White

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Fuck You, Pay Me #19: Best of Forbes.com

This is part 19 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

Off and on for a period of many years, I was a contributor to Forbes.com. Earlier this month, I decided to refocus my energies away from someone else’s website and on my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl. Here are some of the best things I posted on Forbes.com, from the Oscars of porn to the biggest strip club in America.

“Porn Blind”

To my right, an older man—maybe 60, or 70—is reading the evening's program with a small yellow flashlight.

To my left, a young Asian woman is studying her program as if cramming for a final.

"WE CAN'T HEAR YOU!" a man behind us screams.

On the stage, a woman whose breasts risk overflowing the neckline of her sparkling dress is at the microphone, but there is a technical difficulty, and we can't hear what she's saying.

It doesn't really matter. This is porn.

“How the Biggest Strip Club in America Grinds”

If you drive north from Miami, Florida, on Interstate 95 to Miami Gardens and make a series of turns, you'll end up at the front door of Tootsie's Cabaret, the biggest strip club in America.

On the late Friday afternoon I was there, the massive parking lot was filling up slowly. A valet directed me to the VIP parking, where I was greeted and led down a maze of hallways to an office past a stack of shelves overflowing with a rainbow of Tootsie's T-shirts to the office of Ed Anakar, the director of operations and president of RCI Management Services Inc. In other words, he works for RCI Hospitality Holdings, a publicly-traded, Houston-based corporation that until last year was known as Rick's Cabaret. Today, RCI operates over 40 establishments in the hospitality space, among them: Rick's Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City, Bombshells in Houston and Down in Texas Saloon in Austin, and Club Onyx in Charlotte and The Seville in Minneapolis. You can find RCI on the NASDAQ under RICK.

“Paul Manafort's Purported $15,000 Ostrich Jacket Is the Talk of the Trial”

Who would spend $15,000 on an ostrich jacket? If you believe Assistant U.S. Attorney Uzo Asonye, Paul Manafort would. The high-priced fashion item was cited today on the first day of the trial of the lobbyist and former President Donald Trump campaign manager. Manafort has been charged with 18 counts of bank and tax fraud. He is being tried in Alexandria, Virginia.

Asonye made the assertion in court in an effort to shed light on Manafort's income and seemingly extravagant spending habits. According to the Washington Post, “the most peculiar new detail [Asonye] offered was on Manafort's spending, explaining how the lobbyist spent so much on menswear. He had a $15,000 jacket, Asonye said, ‘made from an ostrich.’”

“Playboy Is Naked Again and It Is Awesome”

Playboy is back to peddling nudes.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Playboy has announced its 63-year-old magazine will return to publishing naked women.

In 2015, the magazine, faced with competition from the internet where anything goes when it comes to sex, stopped running images of unclothed young ladies.

By all accounts, including my own, the results were terrible.

Now, Playboy Enterprises is back in the skin game with its March/April 2017 issue.

I took the liberty of downloading a copy. (Want one? It's $5.99.)

Here's why I like it.

“The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star”

You might think being a male porn star is easy. Have sex for a living? That's a piece of cake.

So, what can some of the biggest woodsmen in the porn business teach us about work?

As it turns out, guys who get it up for a paycheck have something to offer when it comes to career advice.

I heard from seven of Porn Valley's biggest studs via email and got the secrets to becoming a successful working stiff.

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That Guy ... Who Was in That X-Rated Thing

Daniel Shar is the guy in that porn movie who didn’t have sex with anybody. Read my interview with him here.

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A Sign (She's Hot)

In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl Roundup: a sign from God that Justine Mae Biticon is hot, AI is for falling in love, a woman crushes watermelons with her thighs, bush is back, the Supreme Court weighs in on XXX, and more. Like it, share it, and / or subscribe to it and get all the sex news that’s fit to print.

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I Am Team Charles

Follow me on Threads here.

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The Reverse Cowgirl Interviews the Dick Lazers Guys

In my first installment of The Reverse Cowgirl Interview series, I interviewed the young masterminds behind the penis laser that was purportedly involved in that fight Jamie Foxx and Jackass franchise-related individuals got into at the Beverly Hills restaurant Mr. Chow. Read it here and subscribe.

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The Most Important and Least Important Things That Happened to Me This Year

The Morning News asked me and a gaggle of other journalists, writers, and thinkers: “What were the most important events of 2024, and what were the least?” Read my answers and a host of others at TMN.

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Girls Rule, Boys Drool

In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl: a female photographer exposes the strip club hustle, an elementary comic about drawing boobs, an interview with a woman who wrote a memoir about her career as a porn movie editor, and more. Don’t forget to like, share, and/or subscribe to my newsletter.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #18: 2024 Year in Review

This is part 18 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

For the final Fuck You, Pay Me of 2024, I thought I’d round up some highlights from this year’s FYPM posts.

From Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story:

“And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #16: An Excerpt From My Memoir:

“As I understood it, my life in a psychological experiment began on the day I was born. At 1:38 a.m., on April 10, 1968, I was delivered in the maternity ward of an Oakland, California, hospital. According to my mother, I was a hideous baby. Instead of having two distinct eyebrows, my eyebrows met in the middle to form one long horizontal brow, otherwise known as a mono-brow, which, while flattering on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo or the basketball player Anthony Davis, was unsettling on a newborn. Due to a severe case of jaundice, my skin and the whites of my eyes were a curious shade of yellow, giving me a radioactive glow. And my skull was grossly misshapen, the result of the compression my cranium had undergone as I journeyed down my mother’s vaginal canal. Unsure what to do (as if there was anything to be done) or say (as if there was anything to say) about my unfortunate countenance, the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord and thrust me in the direction of my mother.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter:

“As someone who has been writing forever, I’ve had a lot of editors over the years. Some are great and have improved my writing. Some are so-so and don’t have much of an impact. Some are terrible and shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own shopping lists. With my newsletter, I have no editor. No gatekeeper who gets to green flag or red flag what I want to write about. No person meddling with my prose. No point-of-view I have to take into consideration when trying to decide if I should or shouldn’t write about something of interest to me. If you’re a weak or inexperienced writer, not having an editor may be a downside, but for me, it’s all good when the editor is not only not in my head but doesn’t exist.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #14: Cranking the Flywheel:

“What am I working on these days? A good question. When you’re a writer, you tend to have a lot of pots on the stove. Here are a few things I’m doing, may be doing, am going to be doing, should be doing, want to be doing. The point is to generate momentum and get the proverbial word-based flywheel turning.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #13: How to Be a Consultant:

“When I got divorced, I took my consulting savvy with me. Almost immediately, I started doing consulting work. I only work with a retainer, because that’s the best way to form a relationship with a client. Years ago a former boss of mine compared me to a Swiss Army Knife, which was a way of saying I did a lot of things. This is true for consulting. I advise on branding, communications, social media, PR, marketing, and strategy. Oftentimes, my role is prophylactic. That is, I am advising the client to not do something that wouldn’t be to their advantage. At other times, I help them shape their image. Most of my clients come through word of mouth. I have a reputation for being good at crisis communications. I like the proximity to power, to big-number deals, to real movers and shakers. I have learned how general counsels think; what makes millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires tick; that if you get exposed to enough high-level operators you will find yourself referring to companies with $3 billion valuations as ‘small.’ My clients are almost exclusively men. As a consultant, I am an invisible member of the big boy’s club.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies:

“To be honest, at the beginning I didn’t do a lot of research on what I was ‘supposed’ to do while applying because I kind of wanted to just figure out for myself. Over time, I did think more and do more research about what does and doesn’t work when applying for a writing residency. The big realization I had which is super obvious but wasn’t at the time was that as the writer applying for the thing you hope to get, you’re very me focused. Is my writing sample good enough? Is my bio impressive enough? Will these people think I suck as a writer and / or human being? Why am I doing this? But at some point I read something written by someone who, you know, reviews these types of applications, and I saw it more from their end. In a way, it’s a lot like applying for a job. It’s not just your skills or your resume, it’s also about whether or not you’re a fit — for their cohort, or their ideology, or their brand. So I tried to be a bit more me and a bit less saying what I thought they wanted me to say. Instead of trying to be perfect and impressive, I tried to show that I was creative and inventive and curious. You are going to be around other writers; I mean, they want to know who you are. Not just how you write.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #11: How to Be More Creative:

“How long did it take me to write each approximately 150 to 250 micro-fiction? Not long. I’m pretty sure it was maybe 15 minutes at the most. I mean, it was probably more like 10 minutes maximum. I wrote the story directly on the webpage I had dedicated to the project. I drafted it straight through without stopping or thinking. Then I published it. After that, I went back into the CMS and lightly revised the story, not really changing it so much as cleaning it up. If the story wasn’t perfect or not up to some standard in my head, oh, well! It was done. Finally, I added a photo to accompany the story (each story is paired with one of my photographs). Mission accomplished. With every story, I was one step closer to my goal. This uncensoring-the-self aspect of the project was the most important component and the most additive to what I was doing at the same time: working on my novel. I wasn’t so much exercising my fiction muscle, I was starting to realize, as I was shutting off the critical part of my brain and giving the creative part of my brain room to run around and kick up its heels and get a little wild. Stories 11 through 20 are about an avatar, a robot, a cougar (I was watching the second season of ‘MILF Manor,’ which is totally insane, and which apparently deeply affected me or at least gave me a rabbit hole to go down), that cougar’s cub, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend’s father, that cougar cub’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, that cougar’s son, a vagina, and a penis. Here is a line that I like from #19: The Vagina (After Frank Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’): ‘One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina.’”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #10: The Pornification of My Life:

“I’ve spent a long time waffling around this subject matter. Let’s face it; it’s a little weird for a woman to write about sex and porn, to do it for so long, to be so seemingly obsessed with it. It’s a little embarrassing, a little dirty, a little wrong. Or is it? Well, on the one hand, sometimes I encounter people who think just that. But on the other hand, then I’ll remind myself that three of the most visited websites in the world are porn sites, and those numbers testify to the fact that there is a significant interest in it.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy:

“That same month, my memoir was selected to be the December pick for actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club. This opportunity came through my agent at CAA, who is amazing. Belletrist is a celebrity book club, they promote your book throughout the month, and they have you do various things on their platform, like create a video of your personal library and write about your favorite literary things for their newsletter and also do an Instagram Live interview. It was such a cool experience. I got the chance to connect with readers who had spent a lot of their developing years online and since my book is about, among other things, not having a private life, it was very relatable for them. By this point in the promoting one’s own book process, I was getting a bit more in the flow of things, and I had reached a certain point of resetting the bar, which is to say not everything you do to promote your book may be up to your perfectionist standards, but at least you are out there doing it, dammit.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition):

“Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #7: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Journalism Edition):

“Because if you're going to talk about how far we've come when it comes to porn, if you're going to posit Paul ‘Max Hardcore’ Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you're going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #6: Letters From Johns Revisited:

“In August of 2013, as The Letters Project was winding down, I published an essay about the project: ‘You Were My Studs.’ I wrote about how the whole project had started with a shot in the dark: I had put out a call on my blog, asking readers why they had paid for sex. Within a few hours, I had my first answer: ‘The Night I Drove a Call Girl to Her Next Stop’; it begins: ‘I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and retain my dignity, but since your soliciting I figured I can get it off my chest.’ There were more letters to come. As I wrote in my essay: ‘Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.”

From Fuck you, Pay Me #5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer:

“As I have written on this blog, I got paid $100 an hour pretending to be the personality of Pepto-Bismol on social media. This was a fun job. Sometimes I wish that I could do it again. According to my notes: ‘social media engagement [increased] by 500% and market share [grew] by 11%’ during the time period in which I was pretending to be Pepto.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway):

“My general feeling about memoirs is that I do not like them. The memoirs of which I am thinking are written by women for women, are not concerned with the world at large but with the world of the interior (as if women have nothing to say about the world and must relegate themselves to writing about their interiors), are books of feelings that occupy a literary pink ghetto created by the publishing business that limits women to a silo of what is acceptable to write about and does so in order to mass produce books, regardless of what these books do or do not say or how they say it.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel:

“Last year, I went to an estate sale at a Hollywood art gallery. Some of what was being sold was vintage adult movie posters. I bought a poster for a porn movie called ‘She Did It Her Way.’ In case you can’t read between the lines, I did not feel while writing a memoir while under contract to a major publisher that I was doing it my way, so in a way the writing of this novel is an effort to go back to what I used to do, which is to write what I want to write how I want to write it, not write what I think someone else wants me to write because that is what I feel I am contractually obligated to do. This novel is all about doing it my way. The other way is bullshit.”

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ICYMI

In case you missed it, my interview with “To the Best of Our Knowledge” host Angelo Bautista about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which aired the other day on NPR, is also on Wisconsin Public Radio. You can listen to it or read the transcript here: “Looking for the Story of Her Life.”

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