Column 5:
Schooled by the Stars, or What I Learned at the Porn Expo

I recently attended my very first adult industry expo and convention, which is exactly what it sounds like: a gathering of porn people, from fans to producers to stars to sellers of sex toys, to even—this time—an anti-porn former porn star on a mission to shut down the adult industry. These days free Internet porn and the economy’s dive into the toilet have driven industry meet-and-greet to stay in business by scraping the bare bottoms of their pockets, just like many other facets of the porn business. As such, my first expo was held in an odd location far from the beaten track, badly publicized, short on exhibitors, and not particularly well-attended by fans or media. Although the spectacle was a little sad, with the exhibitor’s booths, stage, and signing podiums taking up only half the space available in the conference center, I lucked out. As one of relatively few press people there, and even fewer female press people, I found myself in the inner circle. The female performers were more at ease with me than my male counterparts, and since there wasn’t much rabid reporting competition, I was able to hang out with many of the stars after hours, saving interviews and schmoozing for the daylight hours while the ladies juggled fans, stage time, and signings.

To be honest, it’s difficult for me to put together a well-rounded summary of my experience; three days of partying with porn stars took their toll on me, and my recollection of events is a bit hazy. Nevertheless, I walked away from the weekend with a very different impression of the human cogs that form the porn industry than I’d gone in with. I guess you could say that, yeah, I learned a lot at the porn convention.

My work in the XXX industry has put me in touch with other writers, editors, and various hangers-on who have been attached to the biz far longer than I. These jaded folks paint a picture of porn performers as broken-down human beings with deep-seated emotional issues whose only love is for degrading themselves and each other: damaged, degenerate, not right in the head. As I’d watched their films—the performers choking, gagging, spitting, fucking with the single-mindedness of robots—it was easy to agree with my colleagues. Who would do this willingly but broken down delinquents? And I hardly need mention the general public’s view of porn performers: they’re labeled everything from glamorous starlets to barely legal prostitutes to objectified sex toys. I went into the convention expecting a menagerie of barely-tamed beasts bobbling their gigantic fake breasts in my face, swilling booze at all hours, throwing clothing and dignity to the winds of the Jersey suburbs. But instead I discovered a mostly-controlled industry event populated by interesting, articulate people. I began to see a whole new perspective of porn performers that I’d never caught before, even in high-definition close-ups.

First of all, despite some obvious divergences from the mainstream in career, moral compass, and image, porn people are really pretty normal. They get breakfast at the hotel restaurant, get bored with signing autographs, chat, mingle, pick at their fingernails. They drink at after-parties (some of them) and enjoy attention, but not too much.

But then, porn stars are not exactly like most of us. Like high-powered financial types, adult film stars are all business, all the time. As the most visible figures in the biz, the women at the top of the porn pile are always “on”: networking, taking calls, signing everything they can, posing for photos, selling merch, taking interviews, and looking for new faces, new directors, new opportunities, even when lounging in hotel rooms after the after party. They are business-minded women who know the value of the commodity they’re selling. It’s just that what they’re selling isn’t real estate or stocks, but their own sex. Their understanding of their business leads them to compartmentalize their sex very efficiently, into the commodity versus the emotional. Sex on camera and sex at home are very different things for them, and many maintain a strict separation of the two—at least, most do. There are a few loose canons around, for whom sex seems to be the sole form of expression; they invite fans to hotel rooms, sow rumors about after-hours activities, and behave like most fans wish all porn stars would. But most of the women I met were impressively in control of themselves, and of sex.

And yet, despite all the hard work, sex for them is often also a calling. Many of the girls, even off the record, maintained that they love their jobs. One fresh-faced star famous for her anal exploits beamed at me in my hotel room: “I’m getting paid to do what I love—sucking cock! And I’m great at it!” Beneath her exclamation, I thought I detected an undercurrent of sadness: a willingness to go along with the crowd to make herself more likable. But, did I mention that this woman makes at least six figures a year?

I was relieved to realize that these women are not the walking tragedies I’d heard they were, ready to break down into tears or lines of coke at the drop of a hat. I would hate to think (although I had already been doing so) that I was profiting from the exploitation of people who needed therapy more than a camera pointed at their private parts. Meeting some high-powered sex stars assuaged my fears on that count, but it does bear mentioning that there are, indeed, ladies out there like the ones I’d been warned of. They were there, and just as tragic as you like, but not as simple as the stories of the once-abused daughter trying to hurt Daddy. They were as real as anyone, perhaps more troubled than most, and often far more complex, or so I thought in my mid-afternoon post-Bloody-Mary haze. These lost souls, dull-eyed under the expo hall’s fluorescents, were herded around by managers and boyfriends like platform-shod sheep in danger of being snapped up by the wolves if they got away.

But as demeaning as this may sound, there were wolves there: internet startups and fallen porn kingpins. Who knows what they could do to a vulnerable budding starlet who escaped her handlers? The adult industry, so maligned by the masses and labeled even by those inside it as a last desperate pit stop on the way to damnation, is not always the den of atrocities it’s made out to be, but there are those who see no reason not live up to a reputation. There are plenty of imps who would gladly snap up a sweet new smile for an explicitly-named website advertising the abuse of various orifices. The real danger here is not to the orifices, which are mostly willing enough, but to the wallets of these luckless performers’ hangers-on, which stand to slim down if the demons don’t pay well. These are the lesser devils, set up in booths at the convention as if it were a hideout for the shadiest of shadows, feet up on their free goodie tables, grinning like Mephistophelian menaces to the good name of smut.

But, then, many of the tenants of the underworld need no cajoling to fall. At the Friday night after-party, after having spent a few hours in my hotel room relaxing with some of the aforementioned career women, the seedy side of the smut biz showed its face. A fairly new, very nubile starlet I’d met early that afternoon at the hotel bar (she’d been already three or four drinks in at that point; I won’t mention how far in I was) was falling over her own feet and making a grotesque scene, groping at passing men. Another star, a mammoth mammaried matron who’d hit her peak of popularity in the early nineties and who’d been sitting in the bar stool since the party started, was now hanging hornily onto a random fan and telling him about her childhood. He looked uncomfortable.

Really, despite the star power present, it was just like any other Friday night at a well-attended bar in New Jersey.

But I digress. The point is that while there surely are exceptions, and while most of those follow the trajectory and shelf-life of falling stars, many of the female performers I met were truly remarkable, each in their own way. Just like in the rest of the population, women in porn run the gamut from intelligent to… well… not intelligent; beautiful to scary; held-together to coming-apart-at-the-seams. Some of the rumors are true, some of the demonization of this industry warranted. And yet there’s a whole lot of good going on here—or, if not good, in the traditional sense, then at least a lot of money being made legally, willingly, and intelligently. These women are perhaps not your grandmother’s ideal of female propriety, but they could be doing a lot worse, and they are the apex of their powers in the careers they’ve chosen; like long-legged, purebred racehorses as they clopped around the hotel and convention in their sky-high heels, whinnying laughter and tossing their well-kept manes, these were specimens of a rare breed of human being. Sexual athletes, perhaps, or driven career women willing and able to exploit their sex for cash. Their privacy for celebrity. Their beauty for the adoration of their fans. And the fans… Oh, the fans… And the male porn stars… Entirely different breeds. And certainly worthy of their own column.