7 DEADLY SINS

My latest on Forbes takes a look at "The 7 Deadly Sins of Freelancing":  

Sloth 

Your pants are pajama bottoms. Your shirt is spattered with last night’s lo mein. Someone suggests you try dressing like you have a real job, and you laugh hysterically. You aren’t lazy. You’re misunderstood. True, you don’t have enough money to pay the rent that’s due tomorrow, but no one can tell you what to do.

Solution: “An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an external force acts upon it.” Be your own external force.

THE WAY OUT

"The Way Out," Porcelain Raft

Director Q&A on Tits & Sass.

HELLO, CANADA

I'm doing an interview with CBC Radio today. I'll post a link on my blog to the program when it's online.  

Previously on the CBC, I've discussed why men go to strip clubs and the men of porn. 

SUPERBUG

My newest post on Forbes focuses on the latest HIV case in the adult movie industry, "Porn, HIV, and What to Do About It":  

"Some female performers claim working with condoms is hard on their bodies, and I believe them. Some male performers say it makes their job, well, harder, and I can imagine it would. Shooting porn is unforgiving, a near-Herculean task undertaken by X-rated athletes who tolerate being misunderstood by millions of Americans to deliver the sexual fantasies most viewers are too ashamed to realize in their personal lives. To tell performers what to do is to not understand what they do."

LET'S GET DIGITAL

This is my new digital home. Here, you can find out more about me, read my frequently updated blog, check out my work, and read what others are saying about me.

I built this site using Squarespace 6. I had never built a website before and didn't think I could do it. But my friend Clayton Cubitt, who took the photo of me that appears on every page of this site, said I could do it, and he was right.

I picked Aviator because it looked clean, dramatic, and big. The best way to describe how I designed the front page is to say I messed around with it until it looked right. It was the art of subtraction, not addition.

After that, the next big task was putting together the WORK page and its subpages: PROJECTS, JOURNALISM, FICTION, PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, and BOOKS. Previously, everything I'd done had been spread all over the web. This was a way to bring everything I'd done together.

What I'm really excited about is what comes next. This is where you'll find original, self-published long-form journalism from me, and some other surprises. I've got a really interesting story in the works that I'm really excited about sharing with you.

Several years ago, I self-published "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?", and it was a terrific success. I'm more proud of that self-published piece than I am of anything else I've done as a journalist. Everything interesting I've done in my career was done outside of the system. I want to do more of that, and I'll be doing it here.

I've been called an extreme journalist, and that's what you can expect: the stories the glossy magazines turned up their noses at, the stories I want to tell, the stories you want to read.

Fuck the middleman, fuck asking for permission, fuck selling your work for lousy pay because someone with a big name or a big brand gave you the OK.

In the words of Alexis Madrigal:

"I mean, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from spending three months with a subject and writing the definitive 10k word piece proving why they are important and fascinating. Except Homeland, bourbon, and laziness. So, shit, write a profile about a lazy alcoholic who watches too much TV. BOOM. Problem solved."

The biggest thanks I've got to Clayton Cubitt. He shot the photo that led to this site. He helped me put it all together. He inspired me to own my shit instead of giving it away.  

Now let's do this.

THE PROJECTS: HOW TO SHOOT A MOPE

THE PROJECTS is a series focused on reinventing the journalist as an autonomous creator, exploring new avenues for digital self-publishing in a transforming media climate, and inspiring a new generation of creators to redefine how they do business in the digital age. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. The projects section of this site can be found here.

The first time I took photos on the set of a movie was on September 27, 2000. I was doing a story on bukkake movies for a magazine, and the editor asked me to please take photos while I was there. So I did.  

That night was the first time I met Jim Powers, an infamous porn director I would end up writing about for over a decade. Nowadays, he also sells real estate.

I took this photo of one of the mopes.

I was using a Nikon Coolpix that twisted in the middle, so you could hold it at waist-level and stare down at the live shot on the display screen while the lens focused on what was in front of you.

It made it look like you weren't taking photos. That made it easier for me to fade into the wallpaper. 

As a journalist, it's important to do things that push you outside of your comfort zone. Especially if you are a woman.

It is not acceptable to be complacent, no matter your gender. It is not enough to complain that journalism is a boys club and do nothing about it. Every female journalist who hides behind her computer and wails about the lack of female bylines is doing nothing to change the ratio. She is not your sympathizer. She is your paralyzer.

Good journalists, real journalists, live in the world. They take risks. They dare to be afraid. They make a home in discomfort. They show up with extra pens and take photos of what they're not supposed to take photos of and ask questions that make other people uncomfortable because that is the only way you get at the truth: with a pickaxe.

[Related: Porn Valley, USA ]

WHAT PORN IS

"I continue to support and defend pornography, which I believe exposes the deepest, darkest truths about sexuality. As an industry, pornography also helps to rebalance the modern psyche: middle-class workers are trapped with their tyrannical machines at home and office. Pornography, with its surging animal energies and guiltless display of the body, brings the flame of organic nature into that mineral wasteland." -- Camille Paglia

THE LADY WHO LOVED DRONES

I talked to one of the first female Navy fighter pilots and MIT and Duke drone professor Missy Cummings for my latest post on Forbes, "Why Women Don't Support Drone Strikes":  

"This country has engaged in targeted killings for a long time. Whether it’s the manned aircraft, or a sniper, or some other kind of weapon. And a UAV is just yet one more weapon in the arsenal of how we do targeted killings in this country. So I get a little concerned when people start making the technology the focus of the debate when, in fact, it’s not the technology that’s driving this, it’s the policy that’s driving this. And we need to decouple those, so that we don’t start limiting a technology that is otherwise going to revolutionize a lagging aerospace industry."

LE SEX SHOPPE

I took this photo of an adult shop then called Le Sex Shoppe over a decade ago. Recently, I read the building is set to be demolished: "Goodbye Seedy East Hollywood Porn Shop." It's more collateral damage, the city's material evidence of online adult content pirates killing brick-and-mortar adult businesses.

Supposedly, Le Sex Shoppe was once the favorite adult store of Charles Bukowski. A Bukowski fan offered this eloquent homage:

"Apropos of barely nothing at all, I was reminded today that I had the good misfortune of living within a mile of Le Sex Shoppe, and the rest of Bukowski territory, near Hollywood Blvd. and Western Ave., for 19 years, starting in 1974, in Silver Lake, CA.

If you had a pocket full of quarters you could while away the afternoon in a pornographic stupor watching movies at Le Sex. The Big 20 was to the left -- before it was banished into oblivion -- and Pioneer Chicken was nearby to the right... Whores were walking the streets everywhere, and across the blvd. from the Big 20, you could see a cornucopia of available ladies in waiting, sitting at their tall tables with phones, ready to answer the call of nature from their customers -- and all this visible through huge department store windows, so anyone driving down Hollywood Blvd. could gander the merchandise.

In those days, the corruption of prostitution and sexual debauchery pervaded the atmosphere like the smog that usually hung over the city, most everything right out in the open, as a dare to law enforcement, and on easy display -- quite refreshing actually, though I didn't partake, though I thought here was my chance if I wanted to.

Then, suddenly, the Big 20 was gone...the tables across the street were gone...the phones were gone...the girls inside were gone...the music and magic were gone, and only Le Sex Shoppe went on and on in perpetuity, through changes in ownership and paint jobs.

And the girls? They seemed to do just fine, even without advertising their wears in those big department store windows, looking tough and ready for the next big c--k between their legs.

But while it was happening, there was a certain romantic glory to Hollywood Blvd., as it was alive with vice like the dirt of aliveness under your fingernails, even when you were just cruising the street. When you were feeling bad, it felt good to know there were people who didn't give a damn about anything they were supposed to give a damn about, according to the society that condemned them to hell, and I could take in the fumes of this lowlife paradise whenever I felt the urge. It helped get me through, and I was lucky to be there before it vanished like the sudden flare of a match up the flue."

My photo will appear in an upcoming book by Charles Saatchi.  

THE PROJECTS: YOU WERE MY STUDS

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THE PROJECTS is a series focused on reinventing the journalist as an autonomous creator, exploring new avenues for digital self-publishing in a transforming media climate, and inspiring a new generation of creators to redefine how they do business in the digital age. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. The projects section of this site can be found here.

I started The Letters Project on a whim. It was January 3, 2008. At the time, I had no idea the project would last five years, or that it would garner attention from media outlets around the world.  

On that day, I posted a call to my blog, asking readers to send me emails about why they pay for sex. Within a few hours, I had received my first email: "The Night I Drove A Call Girl To Her Next Stop." It began, "I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and maintain my dignity."

That afternoon, I created a blog and named it Letters from Johns. "Why do you pay for sex?" the sidebar queried. I posted my email address, asking for more letters. The authors would remain anonymous.

Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.

"I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week."*

Of course, the letters weren't about sex, or prostitution, or johns. They were about love and loneliness, from guys who just wanted to be touched and men who had gotten dumped, stories in which call girls really had hearts of gold and mercenaries cruised foreign streets in search of bodhisattvas-for-hire.

On January 14, 2008, I launched Letters from Working Girls. I heard from fewer sex workers than I did johns. They were too busy living the life, I assumed. Those I did hear from had a wide range of experiences. Some were in their twenties and used the internet to turn cyber tricks. Some had long since retired and recollected fondly the good old days in which they had sex for money. 

"One guy, in particular, we all loved. We called him 'park bench.' He did not get undressed, he laid face down on the table, and the girl sat on him, naked, reading a magazine, not talking to him. After about 20 minutes he'd say thank-you, and that was it."* 

On March 10, 2008, the New York Times revealed that then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer had been paying escorts for sex. A few days later, Newsweek discovered The Letters Project and asked me to write an essay about why men who have a great deal to lose would risk paying for sex.

"For some men, especially those who are seen as particularly moral or righteous in their public lives (think of all those fallen preachers), part of the appeal is the fact that it is illegal and a moral transgression in their eyes."*

On April 26, 2010, I began Letters from Men Who Watch Pornography. I didn't hear from many men who wanted to examine why they watch porn. Introspection is the enemy of pornography: a literal boner-killer.  

"Am I addicted? Yes, probably. But I would rather say that I'm addicted to the world and to beauty. And while not all porn is beautiful (believe me, I know), sometimes a glimmer shines thru it and that is what I'm looking for."* 

On October 26, 2011, Letters from Men Who Go to Strip Clubs went live. This iteration begat a great deal of media attention. Salon deemed it "bizarrely poetic," CBC Radio concluded, "men go to strip clubs for much more than just naked women," and the Telegraph found it "startling."

Compared to the letters from johns, the letters from men who go to strip clubs were lighter, more playful, less torn. In some cases, strip clubs functioned as a kind of school for socially-awkward males who couldn't navigate the real world of courting women. In the clubs, they were assured a positive response from the dancers -- as long as they were tipping. The nudity was secondary to the connection. 

"The reason I go to places like this is for those moments when they stay and talk.  That's all I wanted.  They don't have to be naked.  They could be wearing a suit of armor for all I care; I just want to talk to someone who cares, and $1 every 3 minutes is a lot less than $250 an hour for a therapist."*

On September 24, 2012, I reached out for Letters from Cheaters. Adulterers didn't want to talk, apparently. Or perhaps the term "cheaters" was too pejorative. Maybe part of the thrill was keeping the secret a secret.

"Sometimes I worry that everything is really just work and performance."*

Every letters project lasted one year. Then I closed it to submissions. Over those five years, rarely did I respond to the letters. I surmised the letters were not for me; they were for their authors.

I did reach out to one john. He was John 21: "I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done." He was ex-military, and he had traveled, and been a john, around the world. He had closed his letter with this assertion:

"One can try to hang a sign on us, the collective john, as perpetuating the global conspiracy of sex/slave traffic, and I'll grant that my Thailand trip may have/probably did contribute to some sort of thuggery. But in the end, I am ashamed of nothing I have done."

I asked him why he had written his letter and if it had made any difference that I was a woman. He responded:

"I read a piece on Slate or maybe MSNBC about the Spitzers of this world that referenced your blog. I found the concept of your blog akin to one of those Avedon-type coffee table books--voyeuristic and interesting enough to keep it in plain view for guests to peruse while the host/ess is at the bar scaring up some more mojitos or martinis or whatever. So I navigated to the blog, read a couple of the letters and decided I had a story to tell.

We create stories to share, and before I navigated to your blog, I had nothing to share. When Studs Terkel shows up at the door, the Average Joe asks, 'Studs who?' Yet he's created an indispensable repository of American history by asking simple questions. You were my Studs, showing up unannounced at my door, like a census-taker, with three simple questions. Although I loathe writing this, I will: 'This is why I sent the letter.

The writing experience was cathartic for so many reasons. The facts of the matter matter to me in such a profound manner. I love(d) the mother of my beautiful daughter, but I had such intense revulsion that she shared our crazy love/sex with someone else that I had nothing other than the 'nuclear' option available to me. While writing the letter to you, I experienced a range of emotions I haven't felt in almost a decade: achingly deep love, disloyalty, loss, freedom, puppy love, freedom... in a sort of linear fashion. I even had a Jenny and Forrest reunion synapse trigger while writing my letter. Although you may have picked up my closet romantic self in the letter, Jenny and Forrest will not be reuniting in an antebellum estate anytime soon.  And, yes, I did find writing about my Czech beauty very titillating. I was able to transport myself to another time, carefree and full of wanderlust. I saw the room, I saw her body, and I felt, f-e-l-t, the excitement I experienced. It was wonderful, and as I sit here writing this reply, I feel nothing of the sort. (Too bad.) This is near-clinical, but not quite.

By that, I mean I never considered that I was writing my letter to a woman. You're Ms. Breslin, with a blog about john experiences. Like my several john experiences, I was reaching out to no one in particular; I was, in hindsight, trying to find some elusive unidentifiable emotion. Although I gave you 'a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books,' you cannot take from me the liberating experience you elucidated from three simple questions. Thank you. And again, thank you, if only for a few brief moments of experiencing ... .... ..."

CHI TOWN SUCKS

He was panhandling with a group of friends at the corner of North and Lincoln in Chicago. The group had been hopping trains since Virginia. They are urban hobos. As I took this photo, several police cars and fire engines rolled up, in response to a gas leak around the corner. Meanwhile, fighter jets from the Chicago Air and Water Show roared overhead. So far, he reported, his sign had netted him $1.

BANG BANG

From my latest on Forbes, "A Peek Inside The World Of Gun Magazines":

"There are artfully shot weapon porn spreads, catchy headlines (a piece on a 'survivor truck' is titled 'APOCALYPSE WOW!'), and feature stories on subjects ranging from aeronautics to attack dogs to a profile of U.S.M.C. scout sniper Collin Raaz, who lost both legs to an IED in Afghanistan and returned home to found a shooting gear startup. A four-page spread on 'BOURBON: AN AMERICAN MAN’S DRINK' advises: 'SHOOT, THEN DRINK. IN THAT ORDER'; an accompanying sidebar tells you 'HOW TO DRINK BOURBON' (an excerpt: 'Drinking a rocks glass of bourbon is your birthright as an American. It is like drinking a glass of freedom. It fuels your inner man.'). Here, the advertisers are more diverse: truck tires, motorcycle gear, a slim ad in the back offering 50% off an adult video from Adam & Eve ('Use code RECOIL5 at checkout' for your discount). As a bonus, every issue of RECOIL comes with a free target for shooting practice. This month’s poster-sized pullout has a sexy blonde in ripped, bust-exposing clothing being attacked by a male zombie. Thankfully, she is armed to the teeth with a Spike’s Tactical Compressor in her right hand and a large knife in her left hand. The zombie, who is losing half his face, appears hellbent on eating her brains, but with that amount of weaponery, my bet is on the blonde. ('There’s nothing hotter than a heavily-armed beautiful woman,' Harrison observes.)"

THE PROJECTS: WHERE THE BOYS AREN'T

THE PROJECTS is a series focused on reinventing the journalist as an autonomous creator, exploring new avenues for digital self-publishing in a transforming media climate, and inspiring a new generation of creators to redefine how they do business in the digital age. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. The projects section of this site can be found here.

In 2009, I created "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" To date, it is the only long-form investigation to reveal how the Great Recession felled the multimillion-dollar adult movie industry. It features text and photos and was self-published.

That April, I was working for a high-profile publication that wanted to become Esquire for women. They were commissioning long-form stories that would enable women journalists to do deep-dive work on a par with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Lawrence Weschler.

For years, I had been covering Porn Valley -- what the natives call the San Fernando Valley, where, historically, most of the world's porn movies have been made. For over a decade, I had stood on the sidelines of this strange, secretive industry, one in which unspoken fantasies are turned into reality on poorly-decorated sets and subconscious desires are parroted by bleached and tanned performers willing to have sex in front of cameras. The Feds had come and gone, leaving obscenity indictments and prison sentences in their wake. Technology and content pirating had taken a toll on everyone's bottom line. I had seen the business rise, and I had seen the business fall. The media would have you believe the adult industry drives technology. My rarefied access into this cloistered culture showed me the opposite was true. In reality, technology had undone porn. I would go to the Valley and expose what this quantum entanglement had spawned.

The editor liked the idea. I headed to Los Angeles to document what Ozymandias the industry had become. 

"The products that Jim produces are videotaped vivisections, studies in which homo sapiens lie upon the operating table, the director is the doctor, the camera is the scalpel, and the only question worth asking is, How far will we go if we are pushed to our limits?"*

I spent a week in L.A., meeting with porn stars, hanging out with porn directors, interviewing porn journalists. I went to the offices of AVN, the industry's trade publication; hiked up a winding, gated driveway to a mansion on a hill with sprawling views of the Valley to see a brunette from Las Vegas have sex with a machine; and discovered a giant papier-mâché vagina costume hidden in the dim rafters of an adult movie production company's Canoga Park warehouse.

I returned home, wrote the piece, and filed it. But the editor wanted changes. She was unsure how it should run. She did not appear to understand it. And it was at that moment that I realized: Why would she understand it? She lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in Washington, D.C. She had young children and a husband. As far as I knew, she had never set foot on a porn set.

So I pulled the piece. I reached out to other publications to see if they wanted it. No one was interested.

"Most people have no experience with the adult industry, and it never made sense to me why I should let an editor, a publication, or the insidious effects of a marketing department dictate the terms of my work."*

Of course, I knew who should publish it: me. I was the best editor for it, I was highly motivated, and doing so would give me complete control over it.

I hired Chris Bishop to design and illustrate the project's standalone site, and I hired Joanne Hinkel to copy edit.

On October 13, 2009, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" went live. It was an immediate success. It was praised as "brilliant" and "bold." One reader noted: "Ms. Breslin has changed the way I think about the business of making pornography."

A year after the project debuted, I wrote "The Numbers On Self-Publishing Long-Form Journalism." By that point, the story had been read by nearly a quarter of a million unique visitors from all over the world. Since then, the "Numbers" essay has been taught in Media, Politics & Power in the Digital Age at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Studio 20 program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

I consider "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" my best work as a journalist. It was included in "Longform.org's Guide To The Porn Industry" on Slate, and in an interview with The Believer, The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal advised journalists:

"The most important thing you can do is write awesome stuff, no matter where it is published. Seriously, when people tell me they want to write profiles for the New Yorker, I'm like, 'THEN GO DO IT. Have you heard of Blogger.tumblr.com?' I mean, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from spending three months with a subject and writing the definitive 10k word piece proving why they are important and fascinating. Except Homeland, bourbon, and laziness. So, shit, write a profile about a lazy alcoholic who watches too much TV. BOOM. Problem solved. (See: Susannah Breslin's They Shoot Porn Stars, http://theyshootstars.com/)"

More importantly, I became a journalist who didn't need permission to tell the stories I wanted to tell.

GOOGLE GLASS FASHION

"The Final Frontier"

Photographed by Steven Klein

Vogue, September 2013

[Fashion Copious]

I GET EMAIL

"Dear Ms. Breslin:

I recently watched a late night news broadcast about the porn industry and decided to search the internet for a different perspective.  That’s where I read your story about your time on the sets in the Valley.  Like a lot of American men I have seen my share of porn.  Your piece about the industry really got me to take a hard look at myself.  I don’t think that I ever gave a second thought  to who the women are and where they come from.  As a father I was moved by your story and just wanted to share that with you.  I have a daughter and it would kill me if she ever felt like porn was all she could do to pay the bills.  I will never look at the actors in the same way again  You are one hell of a writer.  Prior to the internet search I was unaware of who you are. 

Good luck to you in the future.

Sincerely,

[redacted]"

MY NEW BLOG

This is my new blog at my new home on the internet. Check back here daily for behind the scenes scoops on my latest work, info on upcoming events and appearances, and the creative things that are intriguing me.