Adult actress in the grass, Los Angeles, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. The title is: When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. More to come soon …
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Recently I’ve been tracking down print copies of my older work and posting the stories online. The latest is the October/November issue of Nerve magazine. You may remember Nerve.com. For a spell, they published a print magazine. This short piece focuses on one of the most extreme things I saw in the adult industry.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
In this week’s newsletter, I share more about my next book—which is part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books series and focuses on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album, The Chronic—including a peek at the proposal and the other contenders.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Thanks to John Wooden, who gave me my first editing job, for these nice words about my memoir, Data Baby. John has a new newsletter on Substack called EPOSTASY, where he rails against the all consuming “ebyss.”
You should subscribe to it.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin was my first DNF (did not finish) of the year. I really tried, but I just could not get through this. There’s a certain type of woman writer who seems pathologically afraid of taking a position, determined to privilege the work of others above her own work, and whose lived experienced appears to be largely based on content she’s absorbed through a screen. Riffing polysyllabically on the contradictory nature of art and literature isn’t the same as art criticism; it’s just making noise. This book — as far as I made it — read like a senior thesis that got a book contract. Maybe it gets better. I’ll never know.
About I Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Gigolos star Nick Hawk, Las Vegas, Nev., 2013 | Image credit: Susannah Breslin
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.
About I Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
On June 22, 2025, at 7:30 pm, I’ll be performing in The Non-Fiction Show, a variety show featuring folks sharing true stories on unexpected topics. The show is at Nico’s Baby Battista in Atwater Village. Tickets.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Earlier this year, I submitted a proposal to do a 33 1/3 book on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. The 33 1/3 book series is published by Bloomsbury and each slim volume is a close study of an album. I proposed doing one on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Recently, the editors shared all the artists that were proposed this year, which you can see here. In any case, I’ll learn if my proposal was accepted in June or July. I’ll share that info on this blog.
About I Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
I decided I was only going to read books with pictures in them this year, but I made an exception for David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. It’s such a special, delightful, inspiring book. Narrative is irrelevant. Making sense is beside the point. What you get out of it is what you bring to it. This assemblage of fragments, stories, and word pictures combine into a coherent consideration of how to think about life, art, and craft. My favorite part is when he talks about Mulholland Drive’s box and key and says, “I don’t have a clue what those are.” The truth is something greater, less tangible. I loved this book.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
On Substack, I reproduced a story I wrote in 1999 about that time I went to The World’s Biggest Gangbang III.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Manuel Ferrara and Kayden Kross | photo credit: Jeff Riedel
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.”
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
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.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
I made this Venn diagram for a book proposal I’m working on to help me visualize the intersection of ideas.
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Over on my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, I’ve launched a new series: “I Went to …” In each installment, I’ll share my latest reporting adventure. First up: "I Went to a Nude Figure Drawing Class.” Make sure to subscribe.
Thank you so much to The New York Public Library for making my memoir, Data Baby, a Book of the Day!
About I My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
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.
About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
If you’re looking to get into the mind of the serial killer BTK, aka Dennis Rader, Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer by Katherine Ramsland is one way to do it. Filled with communications between Rader and Ramsland, this book delivers an avalanche of detail about Rader’s crimes, offers hypotheses about what drove him to murder, and reveals what the layman and law enforcement can learn about people like him so as to better avoid/hunt them. This book is grim! You may have nightmares.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming by Kerry Rawson is not a good book. Written by the daughter of serial killer BTK, its greatest achievement is its title. Beyond that, it’s 135 pages of irrelevant backstory of the author’s life followed by her engagements with her father post-capture. The prison letters between the two are moderately interesting, but it’s like watching two people pretend a terrible thing didn’t happen with a few exceptions. Poorly written, badly edited, and only glancingly illuminating. Hard pass.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
Smutcutter: How I Survived Porn, by longtime adult movie editor Sonny Malone, is the X-rated equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Malone takes readers on a wild ride behind the scenes of the ups and downs of the porn business. It’s not a pretty picture to find out how the smut sausage gets made, but Malone brings to life the heady, addictive nature of being a porn insider.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email
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.”
About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email