The latest edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, is out. In this week’s newsletter: a porn star zine featuring Asa Akira, erotic art tapestries, lusting for Luigi “The Adjuster” Mangione, and more. (Subscribe)
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The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight at Sherman Oaks Antique Mall. For more photos, follow me on Instagram.
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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
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This is part 17 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Recently, I wrote a short story. I’ve written short stories before; I even published a collection of short stories. Last year, I had a terrible time working with a big publisher on my memoir. In the wake of that negative experience—a bad editor, incompetent PR and marketing, the inability to control the outcome—I set out to reclaim my relationship to writing. When I wrote under contract with a big publisher, I lost my identity as a writer. What I wanted to do was reclaim who I was as a writer. I decided to start with a short story.
The Idea. Back in June, I visited the set of an adult movie for a story I was writing for Forbes.com. As I drove east to the location, I wondered how this time would be different from the last time. The first time I was on an adult movie set was 1997. Now it was 2024. I was a different person and exactly the same. As I stood on the porn set in a building where one would not expect to find an adult movie being filmed, I thought about how much older I was than I had been nearly 30 years ago on that first porn movie set I’d visited. In a way, I felt self-conscious about that; after all, porn is a business built on surfaces, how things look, the appearances of things. At the same time, I felt like with maturity, I could see what was in front of me more clearly: the players, the scene, the spoken and unspoken dynamics at play.
Sometime after that porn set visit this summer, I got an idea for a short story I wanted to write. While I’ve written a wide range of fiction, I thought this time I would try writing a short story that was about a subject of interest to me (the adult movie industry) and was stylistically something more traditional than, say, some of my other fiction writing. In other words, it would be a short story of the sort you might see published in The New Yorker—that just so happened to be concerned with the porn business.
My short story would about a man who was older, whose back hurt, and who discovered one day that an adult movie was being shot in the house behind his. (In the real San Fernando Valley, houses are occasionally rented for adult movie shoots.) And with that, I was off and running.
Stewart by Meta AI
The Details. The story would be called “Topical Matters.” Or “The Scopophiliac.” Or “Van Nuys.” Ultimately, I settled on “Topical Matters.” It would be around 5,000 words long, which was around how long some of the short stories published in The New Yorker in recent years were (although some were quite a bit longer). It would be inspired in part by “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 short story classic in which a seemingly ordinary man attempts to swim home through backyard swimming pools in a seemingly ordinary suburb. The main character would be named Stewart, and his wife would be named Maureen. He would be retired, and he would be very interested in controlling his environment. The style of the story would be realism with a twist. The entire course of events would take place in a single day.
I estimated it would take me approximately two weeks to write this story. A week, maybe. Of course, it ended up taking longer than that (life got in the way, so it took about two months from start to finish to write). In a manner of speaking, the story itself would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered when I was writing it was: Am I having fun? If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I hadn’t enjoyed writing a memoir under contract, working with a big five editor who did not seem to know how to edit, to attempt to tell the story of my life according to someone else’s idea of what that looked like. This story would be mine.
The Execution. Since I’d had such a shit time writing my memoir, I wasn’t sure if I could do the relatively simple task I’d assigned myself. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t even sure I could enjoy writing again. That said, I identified what I could do. I could write a 100-word paragraph. Couldn’t I? And what was a 5,000-word short story if not a series of, say, 100-word paragraphs? I would write one paragraph, and then I would write another paragraph, and that was how I would get there. The entire story would be comprised of five sections, each section some 1,000-words. That was doable, wasn’t it? Surely, it was.
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.
The Shift. Somewhere along the way, things began to change. I started to feel more confident about my writing. I began to experience writing as play again (as opposed to work). I transformed into someone who wanted to write rather than someone who regretted what she had written. I was writing well, how I wanted to write, about what I wanted to write. Which seemed pretty ideal. The words kept coming, and when I didn’t get something, I waited for the insight to come. I talked to my shrink about the story. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about my story. I wrote more and more, and as the end approached, I realized that writing for myself was where it’s at, not writing for someone else.
This process also enabled me to think more and in different ways about some of what I have experienced on adult movie sets over the years as a journalist. What was it like for the male porn star? How did the pornographer relate to his work? Why did the starlet say the things she said? Most centrally, I sought to capture what it was like to be on a porn set: curious, magical, dark, strange, disorienting, hilarious, perverse. As I neared the end, I felt I had captured that experience as best I could, not by nonfiction but by fiction.
The Product. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I finished editing my short story. Almost immediately, to my surprise, I was sad. Stewart wasn’t the most likable guy—he is stiff, uncompromising, judgemental—but I had liked him. For nearly two months, I had shared the intimacy of his inner-workings. I didn’t want to let that go. It would be the end of our relationship. I had my 5,000 words, give or take, but being done with the story meant letting it go, letting Stewart go, letting a world in which I was god go. But this wasn’t my first time at the short story rodeo, and I knew what I had to do next.
That day, I submitted my short story to about a dozen publications, The New Yorker among them. So far, I’ve heard from one publication, which declined it. In January, if no one has expressed interest in publishing it, I’ll publish it myself and sell it online. Right now, “Topical Matters” is a story looking for a home, some place that will embrace its main character and not reject it for its prurient leanings.
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In this week’s edition of my sex-in-the-news newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries: Pamela Anderson is The Last Showgirl, a sex doll factory tour, new erotic books, FUCK|KILL, and more. Hit the button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe and get all the sex news that’s fit to print in your email inbox every week.
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The Pirelli Calendar 2025 is out and bringing back the sexy. Check out a video sneak peak on YouTube here.
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In this week’s edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, I’ve got a pole dancing mom, a substance that makes you hotter, a male porn star monologue, and more! Hit the button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe and get all the sex news that’s fit to print in your email inbox every week.
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This fictional short story was written by me and published on Exquisite Corpse in Spring/Summer 2002.
Oh, he was a bad man. He had been terrible since the day he was born, before even then perhaps. He had cried constantly as a small baby, masturbated obsessively as a young teen, and become the kind of man as an adult who only truly enjoyed himself when he was hurting other people. Now, he wanted to know, what was so wrong with that?
This badness, after all, had taken him to where he was today, sitting in his car in an empty parking lot with the dog of his brain running in a circle on a chain in the yard of his mind. Because these days, he was King Shit of Turd Hill, a paid propagator of evil, a guy unabashedly enough in touch with his, well, bad, really, self, that he made a living off of it. He thought that perhaps everyone else would do well to go and fuck themselves.
He was a pornographer, and he was not ashamed. In fact, he was terrifically proud. He told those who stood around him while he worked that porn stars were like game pieces, and porn sets were like chessboards, and he was like the god who moved them around. He would add, after a pause, But in this game, somebody always gets fucked in the ass! And then he would laugh, and everyone else would laugh right along with him.
His life was hilarious, actually. Put that in your mouth, put this in your vagina, put the other thing up your butt. The variations were endless. It was their willingness that staggered his mind. The people in front of him were as malleable as freshly pulverized meat. Having been punched by their mothers, screwed by their fathers, and screamed at by their lovers, they stood limply before him and just did whatever he said.
What do you do when you have done it all? This was what he wanted to know today. Because living this life so pornographically, he had, of course, grown bored. He had started to lose that sense of doing something so wrong. He had found himself longing for that feeling of playing the roulette wheel. And that was the point at which he had begun to push at the things that were around him.
First, he had suggested that the men and women choke each other by the throat. Then, he had requested that they go to the bathroom on one another. After that, he had directed them to take more of each other inside of themselves than they were capable of taking. He added a midget, a plastic pig mask, and a shotgun. For a while, it had helped.
But eventually, the new bad would become as bad as the old bad, and that was never good enough for him. Being bad had always been a part of him, but somewhere along the way, it had overflowed the banks of his personality, and seeped throughout all of his private life, and taken over what he saw of mankind. He had got a little numb, really.
He had tried telling himself there were a finite numbers of holes in the human body, that there was a limited degree to which you could shove at someone before they zoned, that there was a maximum level of depravity to be reached where the playing field leveled out at the bottom of the pit. He tried telling a man who worked for him what was going on in his head, but the man only barked at him. Now, where would he go? He had no idea.
Because he had been raised on horror movies and practical jokes in the middle of a rotting house drowning in the racket of horrifyingly loud and overbearing women, and he did not want to go back to that way of life ever again. His mother and his sisters were the kind of morbidly overweight women who spat when they spoke, forever sweaty and smelling, upset in countless kinds of ways, and he still disliked all of them deeply for it.
Growing up in the midst of those females caterwauling around him, he had distracted himself with the newspaper photographs of fatal car accidents and the stories of famous serial killers. He had dreamed longingly of what it felt like when a man's head was torn from his body at 60 miles an hour. He had fantasized fervently about what a stalker saw while snuffing out another expertly bondaged woman beneath him. That was his escape.
He hadn't known his father, didn't care to. He hadn't talked much to his mother or sisters, didn't care to. But drunk in a bar one night at 23, he had overheard someone declare that pornography was the last, true frontier left in the modern world. And when he heard that, for the first time, he had felt a sense of motivation. So, he had moved to Hollywood.
He was married twice, during his decade-long tenure in the world of sex and smut. Both his ex-wives were also ex-porn stars, formerly beautiful women who had crawled out of the garbage bin of pornography and right into his wide-open arms, as if from their point-of-view that appeared to be some type of refuge. Neither marriage had lasted more than a year. He had a son he didn't see, didn't care to. He was alone. He liked that. He did.
Because what people did not understand was that his life had been like a fucking war. His whole long life, he had acted like a fucking general in a fucking war, and now, he thought, he wanted a fucking medal. What the fuck? he thought, slapping at his thigh in the car. Because there was no difference between what he had done and what the guys in 'Nam had done, really. His question: What happens when people do whatever they want? The answer: They kill each other. And the truth of pornography: Porn is hell.
Hadn't he dodged those flying shots, slid in the slime of other people's fluids, gotten close enough to the human body to see into the pink fleshiness of its gaping insides? Hadn't he carried a lucky charm for his own protection, hadn't he seen what most people wouldn't, hadn't it changed him forever and all that crap? I have Post Traumatic Porn Disorder, he said to himself in his car and laughed. Then, he thought, I want to go home.
He wondered if he was turning into the Lord of the Flies, if he should be muttering, The horror, the horror!, if he resembled John Holmes during the Wonderland murders. He felt like the driver in a car accident between a cock and a pussy, sporting a necklace made of human ears, his only award a double-kill. Those things lived in him, care of Porn Valley, USA. Welcome home, Fucker!
The funny part of it was that everything had started out so innocently. He had found a cheap apartment in Hollywood and bought himself a stack of porn magazines. He had made a friend—got to talking to the drug-dealer down the hall, actually, while getting high one day—and that guy had a friend who wrote porn scripts. He had never heard of such a thing before, but he had believed that he could write the greatest porn movie ever made.
He drove to the offices of a man who made adult movies, somewhere out in the San Fernando Valley. The guy looked like a loser, with his comb-over and saying he had been in the porn industry since before it was born. That was a turn-off. But behind the guy's desk, a locker door had hung open, vomiting out old porn scripts. And the guy had said, Hey, you wanna try making one of these fuckers? That was how it had happened.
He was scared shitless, the first day. An actress whose name he couldn't remember showed up two hours late, drunk. A guy sitting on a crate turned out to be the male talent. They started taking their clothes off as soon as he picked up the video-camera. He barely spoke a word. Forgot to focus. Most of the footage was awful. He loved it, regardless.
Because there was nobody telling him what to do—nobody, even, who knew what he couldn't do. And as long as there were two people, or three people—or better yet, four or more people—fucking in front of him, he couldn't hear the past banging around inside of his head at all. It was amazing how distracting real life could be when you were looking at what was in his face every day. This life, he thought at the time, It is very hypnotic.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, he had been dulled. Blunted by his own process, today, he feared, the thrill was gone. Two weeks ago, this great likelihood of this very possibility had sent him crawling back home to his mother's house, the only place where he knew things would be exactly the same as the day that he had left them. The first night there, he slept in his mother's bed with her, lay there listening to her breathing for four nights running. It wasn't sexual, but it had helped him comfort himself.
Sex, by then, held no meaning for him, anyway. Sex, he thought, down under the covers next to his sleeping mother, was the missionary position and doggie-style, and douches and enemas, and reverse-cowgirl and double-penetration, and anal and double-anal, and gangbangs and bukkakes, and take your clothes off, please, and bend over there, dear, and I need a little bit more of that, honey, and can you pop for me now, man?
There was nothing left for him, anyhow. For him, he thought, there was alcoholism, and the shooting gallery, and stuffing everything up his nose, and popping everything else in his mouth, and getting clean only to wind up fat around the gills, and realizing that if a man's first creation was his feces, then it made sense what he created was shit, so this was his manifest destiny, and his self-fulfilling prophecy, and it was, rightly, obscene.
You gotta love me!, he had thought, lying next to his sleeping mother, but he had wanted to cry. His mother always smelled to him of what he, himself, had smelled of for as far back as he could remember, but it was only when he was with her that he knew whatever bad thing he was, or would ever become, it began and ended with her. He had left the very next morning, before his mother woke up, for the first and last time missing her.
A long time ago, for him pornography had been like what he thought falling in love would be like. Girls with tiny ankles honorably armed in monster breasts. Guys with tan muscles bravely wielding huge cocks. They weren't just having sex, either. They were executing acts on his behalf. And it was as if he was right there between them when they did it, pulling them apart as they struggled to give him his shot. He had found it touching that they would let you get in there with them like that while they sweated.
Sometimes, it turned out, a girl would cry. She would be hopped up on meth, her suitcase-pimp would have bitched her out, she would be upset because everybody laughed when she did something embarrassing. (Farting, crapping, quiffing—the accidents of the female body were never-ending.) He would put his arm around her and say something about being sorry, or proud, or tell her everything would be fine in the end.
The guys, it turned out, were just as screwed up. They spent all of their time obsessing about the scars on their bodies, showing off the latest tattoo they had gotten that referred to the latest heartbreaker they had survived, so vain that it made them almost charismatic. (Those guys were ruled by their own penises, left to sit trimming at their own pubic hair.) He steered clear of them, but his heart went out to them over the distance, nevertheless.
For almost a decade, it had been just the three of them, no matter how many people were actually involved. A man, a woman, and him. The location had moved from warehouse, to townhouse, to apartment, but the triangle they formed was always there, in its constant and complete formation. And when the triangle stood up, he was on top. When it fell down, he sat in the corner. Now he couldn't stand in the middle to save his goddamn life.
Yoou've looost thaat loooving feeeling! That was what the radio had been screaming at him one week ago. On that morning, by 11AM, things had been going wrong already. His male porn star was AWOL. His female porn star, meanwhile, was piling on layers of lipstick on her mouth in the mirror, the radio wailing away at him from behind her.
He had gone into the back room, and he had tried to figure out what to do. That was when the P.A. had walked up to him and said, I can do it, his thumb hooked back over his shoulder toward the set. This particular P.A. wasn't one he had worked with before, but it wasn't unheard of that a production guy could turn porn guy in a pinch. The kid was young enough, if not that good-looking enough—a non-descript, longhaired, pocked-face, skinny white guy of the type that populated the Valley's houses around them.
Do you have a test? he said to the P.A. The kid took a piece of paper out of his back pocket and handed it to him. And when he had looked down at the piece of paper in the kid's hand, he had started to say something, but right as he did, the words fell away out of his mouth, and something had shifted, and he had looked back up at the kid and all of a sudden, not like some kind of a flash, but like some kind of something, he just knew, and the kid looked at him, and he looked at the kid, and there was something connecting what was between them, and whatever it was, it made his old bad look good in comparison.
What he had wanted to do was to lean into the kid's ear and whisper, Do it, because he got very dizzy in that moment that the two of them were making to go POW!, and he was scared that if he kept on looking at the kid, the kid's face would start turning around and around like a roulette wheel, and the red and the black numbers there would spin into a blur, and where the ball would stop, he did not yet know. For the first time in a long time, he had thought, This is living. And what he had said to the kid was, Yes.
He damn well knew, sitting in his car, the story that everybody wanted him to tell. And it went, My mother put me in a dress, while my father molested me, right after I had my first seizure, directly before I gutted my first pet, those many years prior to my first crime/torture/kill, which is longhand for saying, the bodies are under the house, I think/in the crawl space, from what I recall/out by the edges of the aqueduct, I do believe, but please!/God!/Lord!, Officer/Sir/Dad, don't send me to the gas chamber, nevertheless!
But the truth of the matter was that, whether you were a porn-maker, or a serial killer, or a gambler, your deepest desire was to control that which could not be controlled, and so other folks could chalk it up to the X-factor, or the XXX-factor, or the XY-factor, but what you were chasing after was all the same, and therefore whether you were looking through the lens of a camera, or down the double-barrels of a shotgun, or across a roulette wheel, you had to be vewy, vewy quiet while you were hunting humans, because the best thing about people was that they weren't easy, and that was what made them great game.
It had just so happened for him that along his life's path, he had discovered the world of pornography. And as it had turned out, this world was a total one, with its own language, population, commerce, and laws. And that made it the ideal playing field for extreme sportsmanship. Because when you work a system, the structures do their best not to fall down.
When he had looked down at the piece of paper that the kid had handed to him, he had thought he had recognized the kid's name. And that had set off a domino-like chain of thoughts inside his brain, and he had thought he had remembered someone leaning into him, months previous, and pointing a finger right at this kid in front of him, in some other place at some other time, and telling him, There is something very bad inside of that kid. And he had thought he remembered exactly what that bad thing was. But in porn, it had always seemed to him like there were a great many things that were better left unsaid.
That was what made it so easy, really, for him to pick up the camera when the girl walked on the set and stood next to the bed. That was what made it so simple, in fact, for the kid to come in behind her and stand waiting in the middle of the room. That was what made it so not hard, actually, for him to ignore whatever written plot-line had supposedly led them there. Because this, for once, was going to be his story now, and no one else's.
He had looked through the viewfinder, and he had found the girl. She was a C-level porn-starlet at best—blonde, and thin, and pale. She would have come into the business only recently, and she would make something like a dozen movies, and then she would be going right back to Fresno or Barstow or whatever dusty, outlying town she had emerged from. And she would never do better than this anyway. And she probably thought this would haunt her only if her stepfather saw her on one of his porno channels one day.
And maybe, he had thought as he turned the camera on her, she will be wrong about that.
Then, the boy and the girl had got it on. And that was how he had set his own ball of chance running through the world of porno. And where it would stop, nobody knew.
And yet, and yet, from that day to this one, he had started to feel, well, bad, really. But it wasn't like he felt guilty, or as if he had done something so wrong, or that all of it was all of his fault, or if he had done this, well, then maybe that, or like he had committed some kind of a crime. And it wasn't like he thought he was sexually strange, or erotically perverse, or romantically sadistic, or utterly without a heart. It was more like how he felt when he smelled garbage while he was driving down the freeway, or was caught masturbating by his mother, or spent too much time looking at himself in the mirror.
What do you do when you have done it all? He held his hands in front of himself, and he thought, If only these hands could talk, maybe they would have something to say. He looked out the windshield to the train tracks in the distance. God, what have I done to me?
Once upon a time, a male porn star had spent all of his time in the adult movie industry with a handmade, falsified HIV-negative test in hand, spreading himself willy-nilly across the eyes, and mouths, and vaginas, and anuses of the girls he had sex with on-camera. Today, who cared? Anybody could rent the video and watch while it happened.
The only thing left in its wake had been the endless, ceaseless roar of supply and demand, more names and titles rattling on into infinity, new guys and gals coming in through the OUT-door, nobody ever stopping to ask anyone else too loudly, Aw, now why'd you wanna go do a thing like that? Nothing, in the end, had proven more profitable than the human brain's ruthlessly industry. And these days, the population's immune-system was wearing down so fast that you slipped in the run-off every time you stepped in the street.
It was this smotheration of other people's desire that he had spent his whole life bearing. It was this arresting compulsion to meet everyone else's most graphic needs that he had found that he could not stop. Had it been so wrong to hope that he would become a better man along the way? It had turned out, though, that being perfectly bad did not bring a man's life full circle around to being perfectly good. Luck, it seemed, eluded him again.
In the car, for the first time, he closed his eyes, and he laid back his head.
All anybody will ever see of me are the flickering scenes of porn videos screening across my eyeballs, and all anybody will ever hear from me is an audio-loop of moans and groans coming out my mouth, and all anybody will ever say to me is, More, as they smack their hand into the windshield of my car as they crawl across the hood right towards me.
Inside his head, it felt like the dog of his brain was breaking off its chain, and now he could feel the dog climbing out of his head, and he could even hear it climbing onto the steering wheel before him, and he could already taste the clickity-clack of its toenails digging into the red and black squared numbers, and he saw when he opened his eyes that the dog was stepping up its pace because the dog was hungry, and what he realized right then and there was that, with or without him, the dog would run on forever, and it would never be sated.
So today, he had to ask himself, finally, You were a bad man, weren't you?, with the dog of his brain running on the wheel of his car, and he had to answer, in all honesty, Why yes, I was.
And then he stepped out of his car, and then he walked down to the train tracks in the distance, and then he stood there waiting for the next train to take him crisscrossing out across America. And he told himself, I will touch every good person I ever meet with my hands. And he wondered, as the rails began to vibrate at his feet, if he was contagious.
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The latest issue of my newsletter is available. Hit the button at the bottom to subscribe and get it every week.
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Some years ago, I posted here and on Instagram about some vans parked around Burbank with signage on the side advertising a TOPLESS HAIRDRESSER. Ever since then, “topless hairdresser” is one of the more popular search terms that brings people to this site. In any case, in response to the above message that I received recently, no, I will not give you a topless haircut. Sorry to break hearts for topless haircut fans.
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Cannot wait to see Babygirl, the upcoming erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman. You can view the trailer here.
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In the early 2000s, I was working on a project I called The Fetish Alphabet. It was a series of flash fictions, all named for the letters of the alphabet, each letter representing a fetish. Over time, I had various of those stories published on various literary platforms. In 2003, Born Magazine published one: “C Is for Conjoined Twins.” I don’t quite recall how it worked, but the idea was the site was coupling texts by writers with multimedia creators, and the text and multimedia were combined into one cool result. My story was turned into a Flash-based (I believe) … I don’t know what to call it but artwork sounds about right … by the French artist Rolito. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can see the interactive, animated original story here. (This interactive work is also cited in Donna Leishman’s “The Flash Community: Implications for Post-Conceptualism.”)
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Crazy Cock by Henry Miller is a crazy, lush, insane, over-the-top, experimental mess of a book. Love it, hate it, it doesn’t matter. This novel is too busy being crazy to care what you think of it. Come for the florid prose, stay for the onanstic subject matter, love the sometimes Joycean stylings. Would I recommend this book? Only if you’re tired of reading crap, and you’re in the mood for something radical, obscene, and, well, crazy.
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
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So awesome to have my story featured in “10 Locals Share Wild ‘Only in L.A.’ Stories” in The Los Angeles Times.
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This fictional short story was written by me and originally published on Bending Genres in February 2020.
Tripp Towers, male porn star, sat on the bench, his penis in his hand. It was late afternoon, and his dick had been hard since that morning, when he’d injected it with the drug so he could get it up and get through the performance that he was about to do in the next room. They were supposed to start shooting hours ago, but things had gotten delayed, and now there was this problem with his equipment. It wasn’t supposed to stay this hard for this long. There was a word for it: priapism. If his boner didn’t go down soon, he would have to go to the hospital, and he didn’t want to think about what the doctor would do to him. Where the hell is Tripp? the director shouted. On the other side of the cinder block wall, there was a soundstage with a set that looked like a suburban living room: a shit-brown leather sofa, a glass-topped table upon which someone had placed a vase of plastic flowers, a worn rug of muddied colors. Tripp’s job was to stand up, go into that room, and have sex with the girl who was waiting for him. He couldn’t remember her name. Alisha. Amber. Ashley. At this point, they were all the same. Expressionless girls with flat eyes that scanned him and moved on to something more interesting: the paycheck that was coming, the tattooed boyfriend that was sulking, the life that they thought working here would buy them, which involved a condo and a couple of kids, a dream that, in all likelihood, would never happen, or at least not in the way that they hoped. A dozen years ago, Tripp Towers had entered the porn business. He had dropped out of a crappy state school in flyover country and boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Los Angeles, his suitcase packed with little more than his big plans of becoming a star. In Hollywood, he’d flashed his winning grin, showed the casting directors his six-pack of steel, and demonstrated his deep desire to please everyone he met. But he hadn’t been able to get a single acting job. Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said. The first time, he was afraid. It was just the three of them in the guest bedroom of a ranch-style house in Sunland, the girl was nice but a little bit older, and he had done what he was supposed to do while the guy with the grey ponytail had filmed them. As it had turned out, Tripp could pop on command. He was the money man. He could deliver. He was respectful to the girls, the work became steady, and over time it had seemed perfectly normal to be screwing girls to pay the rent as a camera that never blinked recorded everything you did. Now that version of himself seemed very far away, and the eye at the end of his member was staring up at him in what looked like judgment. Over time, the job had gotten harder to do with the entire crew watching, the budgets had gotten bigger, and the pressure had gotten greater. At the same time, he had gotten older, the girls had gotten colder, and the competition had gotten younger. So, he had done what every other guy in this business was doing: Recognizing themselves as the racehorses they were, they’d drugged themselves. They called guys like him spikers. That morning, he had sat on the edge of the toilet in his apartment and winced as he’d watched the tip of the needle penetrate his dick. This would keep him hard. This would keep the money coming. This would keep his life afloat. But the erection had stayed and did not want to go away, it had been many hours, and this was not a good thing. Had Tripp made the right life choices? his penis seemed to want to know. Tripp had no idea. He tugged at the throbbing gristle of himself. It was possible that if he did his job, the erection would stop. It was possible that if the boner refused to abate, he would have to go to the emergency room, where they would use a scalpel to let out the blood, possibly permanently damaging him. It was possible that this problem would never end, and he would spend the rest of his life following his erection around like an old man pulled down the sidewalk by a panting dog on a leather leash. Tripp! the director yelled. “Help me,” Tripp whispered to his penis in the chilly room. His dick said nothing. It was show time. He rose to step out of this place, to go into the other world, to transport himself to where the warm glow of the klieg lights would shine on him to see if he could man up while the whole world watched.
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This is part 15 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
I’ve been writing on the internet for a very long time. Since the ‘90s. First, I co-created and co-edited an online literary magazine. Then I had a popular blog. Along the way, I wrote for various publications, digital and print. Today I have my own website with its own blog, and I have various social media channels. Throughout it all, there have been many trends for sharing content online. At one point, you had to have a blog. Then there was that whole pivot to video thing. Somewhere on the route, it was decided that if you weren’t an influencer with clout, you didn’t count. These days, newsletters are the current supposed must-have, and there’s a competitive frenzy over who has the most subscribers, and whether they’re paying subscribers or not, and what said newsletter’s open rate for its emails, and wait how are you monetizing your newsletter in other ways, by the way? In my opinion, newsletters are just one more fad that will boom and bust, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one. In this edition of Fuck You, Pay Me, I share 10 reasons why you should have a newsletter.
It’s an experiment. Should you have a newsletter? Should you not have a newsletter? If you have one, will anyone read it? If you do it, should you monetize it? If you start it, what should you write about? Who cares? Who knows? Everything is an experiment in the beginning, and things only become successful (or not) in hindsight. My first newsletter was called Valleywood, but when that didn’t feel like a fit for me, I started a new one called The Reverse Cowgirl. The latter feels like a better fit. It took some experimenting to figure that out. But the experimenting, the not-knowing, was required to reach the solution.
It’s creative. Before I landed on my current newsletter format, which is kind of written like a personal and professional diary, I tried writing my newsletter in various formats. A listicle. A bunch of photos. An essay. More personal and less professional. More professional and less personal. I even used AI to write one (a fact that I disclosed). More recently, I landed on a format I seem to like the best, which is both personal and professional, which incorporates, among other things, a mini-listicle and what I’m doing writing-wise, and which combines a set of different things that appeal to me. This means I have a basic structure that makes the newsletter easier to do and more consistent, but it also means that I can do a bunch of different things within that format, which basically sums up my entire career.
It’s multimedia. If you’re posting on social media, you’re probably posting content in one or two mediums. On X, that may be text. On Instagram, that may be an image. On TikTok, that may be video. On Substack, which is the newsletter platform I use, you can do all of those things: write, post images, share video. You can embed social media posts. You can use Substack’s stock photos or its AI image generator. You can share live video. This multimedia approach appeals to me, someone who writes and takes photos and spends too much time on social media. I want to do all the things, not just the one thing. This multimedia approach may also be more appealing to your subscribers, some of whom may be more text-oriented and some of whom may be more visually-oriented.
It’s free. On Substack, as long as your newsletter is free to subscribers, there are no costs. You don’t need any special equipment, it’s easy to set up and get started, and there’s no charge for you to send your newsletter to your subscribers. If you enable paid subscriptions—start charging your subscribers to read some or all of your newsletter content—there are fees, which are outlined here. But otherwise, Substack is a free tool, one that you can use to experiment with, create multimedia content with, and share with, and that makes it an attractive option. Of course, Substack isn’t the only newsletter platform, and there are others, which have their own pricing.
It has no editor. 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.
It’s uncensored-ish. This isn’t exactly true and not without complications, but I would argue that Substack takes a mostly hands-off approach to content moderation, within reason. (You can find Substack’s Terms of Use here and Content Guidelines here.) This aspect of Substack is not without complications, but for someone like me, whose newsletter’s subject matter is sex, it makes a difference that I not be creating on a platform that has a hair-trigger approach to content moderation, like, say, Instagram. Substack allows “depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature, however, we have a strict no nudity policy for profile images.” And that’s good enough for me.
It’s personal. There’s something intimate about email, isn’t there? Set aside the spam, the generic newsletters from Big Companies, the annoying notes from your boss wanting to know when that thing you’re supposed to do will be done. When the email is from the right person or strikes the right tone, an email can generate a kind of intimacy that random shit posted across the internet can’t. It seems personal. It seems like it’s for you. It allows the subscriber to feel like they have an intimate relationship with the newsletter writer. And that’s valuable. Because that sense of intimacy, even if it’s an illusion, even if, as in the case of pornography, it’s a known illusion, is what will keep subscribers subscribed.
It’s not content calendar driven. Those who have toiled in the content mines of social media copywriting, as I have, know that content calendars are ravenous beasts. Your words and images become content. Your posts become empty spaces on a digital calendar that must be filled. You start googling the holidays for the month you’re working on in hopes that will inspire you to create something really high performing in honor of National Hot Dog Day. Unless you want it to, newsletters don’t have any of that. And for free newsletters, you can feel free to write whatever you want to write whenever you want to write it. Deadlines? Fuhgeddaboudit. Maybe you like deadlines—in which case, go for it. Maybe you want to have a content calendar. By all means, don’t let me stop you. But the strategic plan for your newsletter is for you to devise and execute as you see fit.
It’s a revenue generator. Your newsletter may make you money, or it may not. It may generate revenue for you directly, through, say, paid subscriptions. Or it may generate revenue for you indirectly, by, for example, getting your name and work in front of someone who likes it, who reaches out to you, and who pays you to do something for them because they saw you do something similar in your newsletter. Or by selling some other product you’re selling, like, say, a book. But one thing is for sure: You will never make money from a newsletter that you never create, that you never publish, that you never write. The only way to find out if your newsletter is a revenue generator is by starting to write it with no guarantee that it will deliver a return on your time and effort investment.
It’s fun. For those who are tired of hustle culture and monetizable stoicism and the self as brand, a newsletter can be a place to return to one’s original state: a state of play. When you can do whatever you want, you start to do interesting things. When you realize there is no fence around the field, you start running beyond the old perimeter. When you allow yourself to not be right, to not care, to forget what you’re doing and just start doing, you begin to change what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and who you are. And that’s worth it, not matter who you are or what you do, how much you have or how much you don’t, whether anyone reads a word of it or if it’s just a thing for the only person that matters: you.
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I took this photo today at Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Welcome to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, a behind-the-scenes look at my life as a sex writer and all the weird shit that entails. From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies. In RCD #5: I get obsessed with inmates who are looking for love, you can read the first paragraph of my porn novel-in-progress, and what happened when a guy offered me thousands of dollars to promote a sex-related company. Read this week’s newsletter here.
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Tattooed mannequin, Hollywood, CA | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.
Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.
Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?
Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.
At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.
All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.
In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.
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This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.
Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.
Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.
I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.
It's the gig economy
For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."
From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.
The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.
Diversify, diversify, diversify
All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.
Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.
Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.
The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls
Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.
As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?
Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."
Cam girls are the new porn stars
"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."
That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."
One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."
Online, the heart is a lonely hunter
When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.
"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."
Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."
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