I Was A Teenage Porn Star
Here is the original Dutch-language version of the same text (more or less). All original text and translation by Jesse Darling, 2008.
You asked for it:
(deep breath). Here goes.
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
Thesis 1, The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord 1967.
I Was A Teenage Porn Star, just eighteen, spreadeagled and splayed like a flayed bunny-rabbit on a round bed on the toppermost floor of a falling-down house in the cheap end of Amsterdam’s red light district. On every side the wall-eyed wide-angle of a six-cam gaze; and me, staring out at two long screens in which I myself appeared, fucked in every last pink hole. And by a man I hardly knew, too. Although he was my man, or at least, he’d said so; and I - so help me God - was his woman. Not that I was a woman, yet. But I was learning. I was learning fast.
There was a certain technique to it. There were tricks and devices. Coffee creamer for the oral cum-shot; spray-on hair conditioner for the facial and the titty. And all kinds of ways to fake anal, because only the fags were expected to do real anal, and I was just eighteen, and it hurt.
We had fake names that we’d bawl out whenever the moans and sighs would get samey and strange in our mouths. Oh yeah, I'd sing, do it to me, do it to me! Loud as I could, kind of sweetly, just like that; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed on the sticky screen. And I looked to see if I was doing it right. Doing it hard. Doing it like I liked it. And the punters, you know, they loved it.
I was - and am - a professional performer. There’s nothing a performer won’t do to lay down a good show. And they loved the show, my face, that look in my eyes. Perhaps they imagined arousal, or the first-night nerves of a hot, wet virgin; but there was nothing at all in my eyes but boredom, bathos and bewilderment. The whole episode was one big oh-God-let-it-be-over, and I was too young to know that it doesn't have to be like that.
I was good at my job. Not at first, but I learned fast. Like other precocious eighteen year-olds, I assumed I’d seen and done it all. I hadn't, of course; and it was a shame, if not a tragedy, that much of what I was doing in public was for the first time. Worst of all, I was watching myself throughout: watching to see if I was doing it right, doing it hard, doing it like I loved it. I never asked myself if it felt good. I wasn't paid enough; there wasn't time. It was repetitive and banal and mildly horrifying. Tragedy, really, is too damn good a word.
Why did I do it? I needed money, and fast, and got in with the wrong people. I was a runaway and would-be adventurer, with no real sense of self or self-preservation: I was curious. The mechanized sex industry is a parasite, a dragnet, the man your mother warned you about, trawling the bottom-feeding circuits for the children orphaned by circumstance or by design. I wore a cheap g-string and an old black bra of my mother’s. “At least it’s not waitressing,” I said to myself, reflected in the mirrored walls of the changing room where we waited it out between shifts, “and anyway, even if it’s horrible I’ll learn all about sex and I’ll get really good at it and then people will say I’m really good in bed, like in Cosmo.”
I was eighteen. I thought I could survive anything. But it would be years before I could make love without looking over my lover’s shoulder at that imaginary screen in the top left-hand corner of the room. Am I doing it hard? Am I doing it like I love it? Yeah, yeah, do it to me, I sang out, bored and numb: and my body knew just what to do while I’d glide softly out of myself towards that top left-hand corner, far above my lover who lay vague and distant, far-off, elsewhere. And it was working, god help us both, and so I didn't stop (don't stop! Don't stop! Don't stop! Am I doing it right? It sure looked like it). The show, after all, must go on, and so it went on, and on and on, all night.
I didn't learn all about sex, like in Cosmo. I learned the advanced-level execution of the same old confidence tricks that women (both in- and outside the sex industry) teach themselves for use in sex and elsewhere. I didn’t learn how to give a better blowjob, but I learned how to look while doing it, eyes half-closed, all sidelong and sexy: passive and big-eyed, forever on the brink of orgasm simply and solely because someone, anyone, is watching.
The dolls of the sex industry exist to serve. They are there to convince you -- johnny, voyeur, masturbator, consumer -- that they enjoy what they do; that they are doing it for you. The big-budget commericial porn flicks are full of pneumatic, surgically restructured sex-machines - she heavily made-up, sun-bed brown, flat-bellied and bald-cunted, with silicon tits stuck on the bare ribs; he, shaved and musclecut with straight white teeth and a big hard cock. Ken and Barbie, fucking by the swimming pool: the business of sexual artifice exemplified.
When I watch porn now I imagine that I recognize something in the eyes: that boredom, the numbness, a peculiar presence-yet-absence that spells cocaine. The popularity of cocaine in the sex industry is no accident: it’s an emotional anesthetic that makes you feel like a well-oiled machine. My colleagues and I used cocaine locally as well as internally; a dab of coke on your cock and you’ll be hard all night. You won’t feel a damn thing; but that, of course, is the whole point.
Don't get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with sex, or with images of sex - even [images of] dirty sex, violent sex, inappropriate sex, or consensually abusive sex. The problem lies with the consumer culture that has absorbed our desires, repackaged them in plastic and sold them right back to us at a premium, as though they were the real thing.
Commercial pornography is like McDonalds: a monstrous capitalist spectre that consumes resources and money, and monopolises our psycho-cultural aesthetic with merciless ubiquity. Exquisitely cynical, commercial pornography has sold us a popularized pleasure myth which is based in a set of fundamental fabrications, and which detracts from everything that is good and real in the living world. The "McDonaldization" of our longings has led to the emergence of pornography as a symbolic commodity which would replace “real sex” – ugly, beautiful, vile, banal, spiritual, dubious, delicious, and gloriously various -- with a plasticized imitation. “If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff – big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs – then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.” (Ariel Levy, “Female Chauvinist Pigs”.)
When commodities, in this case pornographic images, are taken over by the cancer-bloom of mass capital, the question is no longer one of supply and demand. The supply – churned out relentlessly for a market that was created by the producer – forces the demand. Such an induced demand means that without a decent alternative, millions of men and women all over the world will keep buying and watching and consuming, as though the phony representations of symbolic sex could fill all their holes. But money can’t buy you love: a pornography built on artifice has as little to do with adult sexuality as a Happy Meal with hand-prepared home cooking. Ex-porn actress Sarah-Catherine, in an interview with media studies professor Dr Chyng Sun, is quoted as saying, “The images that we re-enact over and over again have absolutely nothing to do with our personal sexuality. I would say that what's shown not revolutionary, it’s not different; it’s the same-old, same-old; it’s women in uncomfortable positions pretending they feel good. And what's revolutionary about that? What's liberating about that?”
The culture of Queer, whose very name is a semiotic reclamation, has always been about transgressing the performance of gender, which is obligatory in mainstream culture for both men and women. Queer is also about the reclamation and subversion of the gendered body, but shares its roots in the symbolic and aesthetic cultures of camp, of butch, and of drag, all of which provide visual fodder for a reinvented sexual iconography. The most interesting and subversive examples of post-pornography have come out of Queer culture, such as Phineas Slipped (Keri Oakie, 2003), a school-boy romp which would be thoroughly hackneyed except for the fact that the boys are played by trans-men, butch dykes, and women in drag as well as bio-guys (biologically male, used to differentiate transgendered men from non-transgendered men). During the sex scenes – big cocks all round – it’s impossible to tell what’s flesh and what’s silicon. “Dyke art porn magazine” Slit, of Sydney, Australia, publishes self-directed centrefold spreads in which the subjects are active agents, self-styled in their own subversive visual fairytales, borrowing from the canon of symbolic archetypology: from heterosexist caricatures and homosexual iconry to zombies, cowboys, sailors, pigs at the spit or lambs to the slaughter; donkeys, monkeys, mermaids, radioactive princesses on roller-skates. A spate of websites, led by the excellent NoFauxxx, publish homemade porn - “artistic, political and all-inclusive, featuring models of all genders and sizes” - ,made by (and for) a community of “ladies, queers and artists all over the world.” NoFauxxx models do not conform to heteronormative standards of the body beautiful, and the site is not limited either to hetero- or homosexual sex. Queer, in this case, is no longer [solely] about sexual orientation: it is about creating a new visual discourse in which gender roles are seen for what they are: a series of performances which offer the possibility of transformation and transgression. Camp and butch can be seen as theatrical, or otherwise performative reinterpretations of the proscribed gender roles; now these, too, are deconstructed. The fuck-bots of commercial porn grimly and joylessly play out their amplified and mechanical gender-role representations, but in the wonderland of new Queer semiotics, the performance of gender is played for laughs: burlesque, grotesque, and larger-than-life.
When the machine of the music industry became a monster, the counterculture - unwilling to be reduced to a marketing demographic - came up with Punk Rock, whose DIY ethos saw a new revolution in the creation and distribution of music and [con] textual content. In the same spirit of DIY, Queer culture has started a new pornographic revolution: porn with an anti-porn aesthetic, created and distributed within a peer group with little or no marketing budget and no mass production values. Without the incentives (and values) of Big Capital, all participation is voluntary. With no script and no standard, participants are required to create their own scenarios. The exploitative aspects of pornography are gone, replaced by a brave new erotic aesthetic.
We live in a spectacle society, but the spectacle has been exploited to the point of saturation. Everything that was directly lived has faded into a representation; and despite this, there remain – within ourselves and our experience – those mammalian and mysterious aspects that defy commoditization, that cannot be replaced by an image or a representation. Despite everything, I believe that sex is one of these. I believe in its redemptive and life-affirming power. I believe in sex as a deeply human phenomenon which is both sacred and profane, transgressive and instinctual. I believe in the essential rightness of desire, and also in the desire to see images of naked people fucking: the problem lies in the colonization of these by Big Capital and the solution can be found in DIY culture. Let us grow and prepare our own food, distribute our own fanzines and records and weblogs and mp3s, and film and photograph our own plural sexualities.
In seeking to reclaim The Gaze, we turn it back towards ourselves; for within a spectacle society it seems as though we must become that spectacle, to move through it and into it, in order to move beyond it. The female body is so deeply contextualized, so colonialized by hundreds’ of years worth of spectacle-mongering, that it has become the natural foil and canvas for female performers: we struggle to reclaim our naked bodies as our own intellectual property as though reclaiming our own land. It is, and remains, a performance – and a spectacle – but at the same time, we are searching for a way out of the performance, for a way to finally feel something, for real, and off the record. And until we have freed ourselves from the necessity for performance, we'll keep on fighting through the night, doing it hard, but doing it for ourselves: dressing up, strapping on, tying down, playing out, until those images belong to us, and us alone; until our bodies are our own again. Don’t consume; create and participate, and keep the camera running as you go.
Have fun, kids. And stay safe.
Love,
JD x
You asked for it:
(deep breath). Here goes.
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
Thesis 1, The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord 1967.
I Was A Teenage Porn Star, just eighteen, spreadeagled and splayed like a flayed bunny-rabbit on a round bed on the toppermost floor of a falling-down house in the cheap end of Amsterdam’s red light district. On every side the wall-eyed wide-angle of a six-cam gaze; and me, staring out at two long screens in which I myself appeared, fucked in every last pink hole. And by a man I hardly knew, too. Although he was my man, or at least, he’d said so; and I - so help me God - was his woman. Not that I was a woman, yet. But I was learning. I was learning fast.
There was a certain technique to it. There were tricks and devices. Coffee creamer for the oral cum-shot; spray-on hair conditioner for the facial and the titty. And all kinds of ways to fake anal, because only the fags were expected to do real anal, and I was just eighteen, and it hurt.
We had fake names that we’d bawl out whenever the moans and sighs would get samey and strange in our mouths. Oh yeah, I'd sing, do it to me, do it to me! Loud as I could, kind of sweetly, just like that; wide-eyed, wide-mouthed on the sticky screen. And I looked to see if I was doing it right. Doing it hard. Doing it like I liked it. And the punters, you know, they loved it.
I was - and am - a professional performer. There’s nothing a performer won’t do to lay down a good show. And they loved the show, my face, that look in my eyes. Perhaps they imagined arousal, or the first-night nerves of a hot, wet virgin; but there was nothing at all in my eyes but boredom, bathos and bewilderment. The whole episode was one big oh-God-let-it-be-over, and I was too young to know that it doesn't have to be like that.
I was good at my job. Not at first, but I learned fast. Like other precocious eighteen year-olds, I assumed I’d seen and done it all. I hadn't, of course; and it was a shame, if not a tragedy, that much of what I was doing in public was for the first time. Worst of all, I was watching myself throughout: watching to see if I was doing it right, doing it hard, doing it like I loved it. I never asked myself if it felt good. I wasn't paid enough; there wasn't time. It was repetitive and banal and mildly horrifying. Tragedy, really, is too damn good a word.
Why did I do it? I needed money, and fast, and got in with the wrong people. I was a runaway and would-be adventurer, with no real sense of self or self-preservation: I was curious. The mechanized sex industry is a parasite, a dragnet, the man your mother warned you about, trawling the bottom-feeding circuits for the children orphaned by circumstance or by design. I wore a cheap g-string and an old black bra of my mother’s. “At least it’s not waitressing,” I said to myself, reflected in the mirrored walls of the changing room where we waited it out between shifts, “and anyway, even if it’s horrible I’ll learn all about sex and I’ll get really good at it and then people will say I’m really good in bed, like in Cosmo.”
I was eighteen. I thought I could survive anything. But it would be years before I could make love without looking over my lover’s shoulder at that imaginary screen in the top left-hand corner of the room. Am I doing it hard? Am I doing it like I love it? Yeah, yeah, do it to me, I sang out, bored and numb: and my body knew just what to do while I’d glide softly out of myself towards that top left-hand corner, far above my lover who lay vague and distant, far-off, elsewhere. And it was working, god help us both, and so I didn't stop (don't stop! Don't stop! Don't stop! Am I doing it right? It sure looked like it). The show, after all, must go on, and so it went on, and on and on, all night.
I didn't learn all about sex, like in Cosmo. I learned the advanced-level execution of the same old confidence tricks that women (both in- and outside the sex industry) teach themselves for use in sex and elsewhere. I didn’t learn how to give a better blowjob, but I learned how to look while doing it, eyes half-closed, all sidelong and sexy: passive and big-eyed, forever on the brink of orgasm simply and solely because someone, anyone, is watching.
The dolls of the sex industry exist to serve. They are there to convince you -- johnny, voyeur, masturbator, consumer -- that they enjoy what they do; that they are doing it for you. The big-budget commericial porn flicks are full of pneumatic, surgically restructured sex-machines - she heavily made-up, sun-bed brown, flat-bellied and bald-cunted, with silicon tits stuck on the bare ribs; he, shaved and musclecut with straight white teeth and a big hard cock. Ken and Barbie, fucking by the swimming pool: the business of sexual artifice exemplified.
When I watch porn now I imagine that I recognize something in the eyes: that boredom, the numbness, a peculiar presence-yet-absence that spells cocaine. The popularity of cocaine in the sex industry is no accident: it’s an emotional anesthetic that makes you feel like a well-oiled machine. My colleagues and I used cocaine locally as well as internally; a dab of coke on your cock and you’ll be hard all night. You won’t feel a damn thing; but that, of course, is the whole point.
Don't get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with sex, or with images of sex - even [images of] dirty sex, violent sex, inappropriate sex, or consensually abusive sex. The problem lies with the consumer culture that has absorbed our desires, repackaged them in plastic and sold them right back to us at a premium, as though they were the real thing.
Commercial pornography is like McDonalds: a monstrous capitalist spectre that consumes resources and money, and monopolises our psycho-cultural aesthetic with merciless ubiquity. Exquisitely cynical, commercial pornography has sold us a popularized pleasure myth which is based in a set of fundamental fabrications, and which detracts from everything that is good and real in the living world. The "McDonaldization" of our longings has led to the emergence of pornography as a symbolic commodity which would replace “real sex” – ugly, beautiful, vile, banal, spiritual, dubious, delicious, and gloriously various -- with a plasticized imitation. “If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff – big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs – then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.” (Ariel Levy, “Female Chauvinist Pigs”.)
When commodities, in this case pornographic images, are taken over by the cancer-bloom of mass capital, the question is no longer one of supply and demand. The supply – churned out relentlessly for a market that was created by the producer – forces the demand. Such an induced demand means that without a decent alternative, millions of men and women all over the world will keep buying and watching and consuming, as though the phony representations of symbolic sex could fill all their holes. But money can’t buy you love: a pornography built on artifice has as little to do with adult sexuality as a Happy Meal with hand-prepared home cooking. Ex-porn actress Sarah-Catherine, in an interview with media studies professor Dr Chyng Sun, is quoted as saying, “The images that we re-enact over and over again have absolutely nothing to do with our personal sexuality. I would say that what's shown not revolutionary, it’s not different; it’s the same-old, same-old; it’s women in uncomfortable positions pretending they feel good. And what's revolutionary about that? What's liberating about that?”
The culture of Queer, whose very name is a semiotic reclamation, has always been about transgressing the performance of gender, which is obligatory in mainstream culture for both men and women. Queer is also about the reclamation and subversion of the gendered body, but shares its roots in the symbolic and aesthetic cultures of camp, of butch, and of drag, all of which provide visual fodder for a reinvented sexual iconography. The most interesting and subversive examples of post-pornography have come out of Queer culture, such as Phineas Slipped (Keri Oakie, 2003), a school-boy romp which would be thoroughly hackneyed except for the fact that the boys are played by trans-men, butch dykes, and women in drag as well as bio-guys (biologically male, used to differentiate transgendered men from non-transgendered men). During the sex scenes – big cocks all round – it’s impossible to tell what’s flesh and what’s silicon. “Dyke art porn magazine” Slit, of Sydney, Australia, publishes self-directed centrefold spreads in which the subjects are active agents, self-styled in their own subversive visual fairytales, borrowing from the canon of symbolic archetypology: from heterosexist caricatures and homosexual iconry to zombies, cowboys, sailors, pigs at the spit or lambs to the slaughter; donkeys, monkeys, mermaids, radioactive princesses on roller-skates. A spate of websites, led by the excellent NoFauxxx, publish homemade porn - “artistic, political and all-inclusive, featuring models of all genders and sizes” - ,made by (and for) a community of “ladies, queers and artists all over the world.” NoFauxxx models do not conform to heteronormative standards of the body beautiful, and the site is not limited either to hetero- or homosexual sex. Queer, in this case, is no longer [solely] about sexual orientation: it is about creating a new visual discourse in which gender roles are seen for what they are: a series of performances which offer the possibility of transformation and transgression. Camp and butch can be seen as theatrical, or otherwise performative reinterpretations of the proscribed gender roles; now these, too, are deconstructed. The fuck-bots of commercial porn grimly and joylessly play out their amplified and mechanical gender-role representations, but in the wonderland of new Queer semiotics, the performance of gender is played for laughs: burlesque, grotesque, and larger-than-life.
When the machine of the music industry became a monster, the counterculture - unwilling to be reduced to a marketing demographic - came up with Punk Rock, whose DIY ethos saw a new revolution in the creation and distribution of music and [con] textual content. In the same spirit of DIY, Queer culture has started a new pornographic revolution: porn with an anti-porn aesthetic, created and distributed within a peer group with little or no marketing budget and no mass production values. Without the incentives (and values) of Big Capital, all participation is voluntary. With no script and no standard, participants are required to create their own scenarios. The exploitative aspects of pornography are gone, replaced by a brave new erotic aesthetic.
We live in a spectacle society, but the spectacle has been exploited to the point of saturation. Everything that was directly lived has faded into a representation; and despite this, there remain – within ourselves and our experience – those mammalian and mysterious aspects that defy commoditization, that cannot be replaced by an image or a representation. Despite everything, I believe that sex is one of these. I believe in its redemptive and life-affirming power. I believe in sex as a deeply human phenomenon which is both sacred and profane, transgressive and instinctual. I believe in the essential rightness of desire, and also in the desire to see images of naked people fucking: the problem lies in the colonization of these by Big Capital and the solution can be found in DIY culture. Let us grow and prepare our own food, distribute our own fanzines and records and weblogs and mp3s, and film and photograph our own plural sexualities.
In seeking to reclaim The Gaze, we turn it back towards ourselves; for within a spectacle society it seems as though we must become that spectacle, to move through it and into it, in order to move beyond it. The female body is so deeply contextualized, so colonialized by hundreds’ of years worth of spectacle-mongering, that it has become the natural foil and canvas for female performers: we struggle to reclaim our naked bodies as our own intellectual property as though reclaiming our own land. It is, and remains, a performance – and a spectacle – but at the same time, we are searching for a way out of the performance, for a way to finally feel something, for real, and off the record. And until we have freed ourselves from the necessity for performance, we'll keep on fighting through the night, doing it hard, but doing it for ourselves: dressing up, strapping on, tying down, playing out, until those images belong to us, and us alone; until our bodies are our own again. Don’t consume; create and participate, and keep the camera running as you go.
Have fun, kids. And stay safe.
Love,
JD x
posted by JD at
14:46
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